The Week’s Chunkiest, Clunkiest, and Slam-Dunkiest Headlines

WAIT, TRUMP FAILED TO LOCK SOMEONE UP? NO!
If there’s a single story that encapsulates the unrealized promise of the Trump administration and the dashed dreams of its supporters, it’s the odd saga of Mexico’s former defense minister Gen. Salvador Cienfuegos. In October, El General was arrested at LAX by the DEA. Cienfuegos had come to L.A. for a family vacation (hard to believe that a Mexican would consider L.A. to be a “vacation,” as the city has more Mexicans than Mexico), and the DEA was waiting for him. As explained by The Sunday Times, “after years of painstaking investigation the DEA had established that he was a shadowy figure drug traffickers referred to as El Padrino (the Godfather).”

Yep, those plucky DEA agents caught “the Godfather.” But apparently none of them had seen any of the eponymous films. If they had, they’d have known that Godfathers are kinda hard to prosecute; there’s always a corrupt or pliable politico in the mix willing to help them out.

Hey, did somebody mention William Barr?

Yep, last week “a US federal judge acting on the orders of the attorney-general abruptly dropped the case against Cienfuegos, and put him on a plane home to Mexico.”

According to The Times, “speculation is rife” as to why Barr let the Godfather hightail it back to his Meh-hee-co mansion. The general’s release was a major concession to Mexico’s leftist president Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who’d been bitching nonstop about the arrest and what it meant to “Mexican sovereignty.” So of course folks are wondering why Trump and Barr “released the crack-en” to please a Hugo Chavez-loving Mexican commiecrat. One unsubstantiated claim is that Obrador had threatened to remove his troops from the border, where they’ve essentially been playing the part of Trump’s “wall” for the past few years, keeping out the various migrant caravans that have made their way up from Central America. Another is that Cienfuegos’ release was a gift to the Mexican president for not recognizing Biden’s election victory.

Trump administration officials told The Times that “they had returned Cienfuegos as a sign of their confidence in Mexico’s justice system and to preserve good relations.”

The reason is probably irrelevant; the arrest and subsequent release of “Godfather” Cienfuegos was the inevitable final southern border act that the Trump saga needed and deserved. Anyone who expected this movie to end without heavy-handed bad-screenwriter irony hasn’t been paying attention.

Trump leaves the international stage with a literal “catch and release” of a criminal Mexican whose arrest might have threatened a human “wall” that Mexico technically built and therefore could withdraw at any time for any reason, as Bill Barr once again failed to lock up any wrongdoers while proving that he can provide cover for swamp creatures in two nations simultaneously.

A perfect ending. Roll credits, cue “Speak Softly, Love.”

BAD DAY FOR BLACK ROCK
Pity the black American…if he’s not being pursued by a racist piece of string, he’s being tormented by a racist…uh…rock?

Yes, racist rocks. Blacks have a difficult relationship with bigoted boulders.

Back in 2011, when then Texas governor Rick Perry was competing in the GOP primary, he was condemned by racial justice advocates because a long time ago Perry’s father had leased a parcel of land and on that land was a rock that years earlier (long before the Perrys leased the land) had been painted with the word “niggerhead.”

When the Perrys leased the land, they painted over the slur.

Here’s where any normal human would expect to see the words “end of story.” But no, ’twas not the end of story. Black activists were furious that the rock had not been destroyed, as the word painted by that anonymous vandal decades earlier had rendered it evil—cursed, if you will—and therefore the rock had to be physically annihilated in order to break the spell and rid the land of the wickedness it had summoned. Removing the word, as the Perry family did, was not enough. The stone itself had to “die.”

The Washington Post devoted 3,000 words to a story about how racist Rick Perry was for not having demolished the boulder. The New York Times declared that the rock should have been reduced to gravel; only then could blacks have been freed from its malevolent influence.

BTW, these are the same news orgs that claim to be in favor of science and against superstition.

Nine years after black Americans fought so bravely against an inanimate slab, yet another racist rock is forcing them to once again lock arms and sing “We Shall Overcrumble.” On the campus of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, sits a seventy-ton boulder known as Chamberlin Rock, in honor of geologist Thomas Chamberlin, a former president of the university. This rock was once referred to as “niggerhead” in a 1925 article in the Wisconsin State Journal. So black students have demanded that the rock be demolished, and the university has agreed.

Even the blacks protesting the stone admit that the 1925 Journal article is the only known time the “nickname” was used. But still, that one instance almost 100 years ago was enough to imbue the boulder with demonic properties.

The rock is “a painful reminder of the history of racism on campus,” claimed the Wisconsin State Journal, even though the slur was spoken not “on campus” but in the pages of…the Wisconsin State Journal. Odd that the stone is being destroyed and not the newspaper. Seems a bit unfair.

Wisconsin Black Student Union President Nalah McWhorter claimed that the boulder is “a constant reminder that we don’t belong here.” One could counter that it’s the desire to destroy a rock because someone called it a name 95 years ago that’s the “reminder” of why McWhorter “doesn’t belong on campus.”

After the rock is either “buried or broken up,” the Black Student Union plans to place “a monument to Black students and the contributions of the Black community” where the boulder once sat.

Hopefully the monument will acknowledge the heroic “contributions” of American blacks in the never-ending war against racist stones.

ALL-ABOARD THE SS UNITY (ACCENT ON THE “SS”)
Well, like they say, “we’re all in this together.”

As Joe Biden mumbles insincerities about “unity” in America, over in Germany, the “unity” is real. The lockdowns and other repressive measures taken by that government in the name of controlling the COVID pandemic have managed to make new allies of old enemies.

True solidarity is here, and the Germans have it!

An anti-lockdown, anti-mask protest in Berlin last week brought out a genuine rogues’ gallery of demonstrators who set aside their longstanding differences for the sake of a greater good. As reported by the AFP, LGBT lightenloaferers waving rainbow flags marched and cavorted alongside hardcore sieg-heiling neo-Nazis, as topless women danced among Evangelical Christians, and Green Party supporters mixed with AfD activists.

Thank you, COVID alarmists and restrictionists, for doing the impossible: bringing together the far left and the far right, the queers and the Nazis, the hippies and the Hitlers, the preachers and the strippers, all joined together in shared anger over the destruction of their freedoms by COVID-exploiting dictocrats.

Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Furor.

According to the AFP, the massive Berlin protest consisting of “10,000 demonstrators united by a crumbling faith in institutions and representative democracy” had been organized under the umbrella of an ad hoc movement that refers to itself as “Querdenken,” which means “lateral thinking” (although it also sounds like a gay-themed Kraftwerk tribute band). Querdenken is dedicated to fighting back against the “Corona dictatorship.”

And fighting back against state-mouthpiece “journalists,” too. The organization Reporters Without Borders claims that at least 43 reporters for print and television news organizations were “jostled, harassed, and threatened” by Querdenkeners during the protests last week.

So that’s why the members of the White House press corps were so angered by Trump’s refusal to take questions at last week’s truncated presser…they were robbed of the opportunity to ask him a dozen times in a row if he denounces Querdenken.

Simon Teune, a sociologist and “protest specialist” at Technische Universität Berlin, condemned Querdenken for “turning governments and the media into objects of protest and hatred.”

With all due respect to Herr Professor, it’s a bit more accurate to say that those institutions did that to themselves.

CONFERENCING ON ZOOM PETERS OUT
Sorry, that title should read “Conferencing on Zoom? Peters OUT!”

COVID lockdown Zoom participants just can’t seem to avoid dangling dirlywangers. Apparently, CNN’s Jeffrey “lubin’” Toobin, who’s never had an original idea in his life, also copycatted that whole “wave your willy on Zoom” thing. According to an “in-depth” report on Vice.com, dick flashers and related pervs have become a pervasive, and international, problem for Zoom users:

An Argentinian politician was caught sucking a woman’s breasts on a Zoom call broadcast to the country’s congress. In the UK, a college lecture was flooded with extreme pornography links by the students. Incidents have also been reported in India, where bosses allegedly conducted meetings with their employees in vests and boxers.

Speaking of India, Navin Noronha, the author of the Vice article, is a stand-up comedian from Mumbai. You may have heard some of his classic bits, like the one about the dyslexic Indian man who burned his poop and dumped his bride on the street, or that timeless knock-knock joke:

“Knock knock.”
“Who’s there?”
“This is Microsoft Windows tech support, sir. There’s a problem with your computer’s security.”

According to Noronha, it’s become practically impossible for stand-up comedians in India—particularly female ones—to perform Zoom comedy sets without being “Zoombombed” by dicks. Why this is an especially egregious problem in India, Noronha doesn’t attempt to address. One possible explanation is that the unwanted dong-swingers are just trying to show off their comedic impressions of Ganesha. When you’re an impressionist in a country where the native accent is one that everyone else in the world loves to spoof, you really have to step up your game.

Noronha laments the fact that after several of his female stand-up friends were flashed on Zoom, the company behind the app refused to take action to identify and punish the offenders. That might not be such a bad thing, though. Even China, with its massive electronic security state, has yet to create software that can identify a person via video footage of his exposed member.

And frankly, that’s probably for the best.

One of Noronha’s fellow comedians claims that a Zoom flasher interrupted her you-go-girl feminist comedy set.

That was probably for the best, as well.

The punchline of the story is that Noronha is gay, billing himself as “India’s only openly queer comedian.”

A gay man angry about seeing too many dicks?

Now, that’s funny.

MINNEAPOLSCHWITZ: THE WOIST CAMP EVAH!
Make that 6 million and one from now on, thank you very much.

George Floyd, America’s favorite black martyr, is being retroactively added to the list of Holocaust victims. And why not? Nobody rioted when Elie Wiesel or Simon Wiesenthal died. What losers! A man like Floyd, filled as he was with pride, integrity, and lethal doses of fentanyl, absolutely deserves to be added to the holy scroll of Holocaust casualties (the fact that Floyd wasn’t born until almost thirty years after World War II notwithstanding). At least that’s the view of the Holocaust Memorial and Education Resource Center of Florida, which last week opened a new exhibit dedicated to Minneapolis’ favorite dyspneic son.

“We have produced this so that people can come and look these individuals in the eye. So you come face to face with people, so you can really experience the feelings that they were feeling,” the center’s assistant director Lisa Bachman told the Jewish News. And indeed, who can argue with the notion that only by looking into the eyes of a 21st-century black American drug addict and petty criminal from Minnesota can one truly experience the feelings of Polish Jews in the Łódź Ghetto in 1943?

That really does make perfect sense, at least to people suffering from oxygen deprivation. Hence the museum will offer visitors the option of having their necks knelt upon, to better experience the new exhibit’s commentary, which is best appreciated with mild brain damage.

The exhibition features 45 photos of black people looking sad because George Floyd died. That’s literally it. That’s literally the totality of the exhibit. The Center hopes to give each visitor the feeling of what it’s like to be a casting director cycling through headshots while assembling a crowd scene for the next Jordan Peele film.

Critics on social media have slammed the new exhibit for distorting the meaning of the Holocaust, insulting the memory of Hitler’s victims, and tacitly comparing American law enforcement officers to Nazis. To which assistant director Bachman excitedly replied, “Bingo!”

Fortunately, the exhibit is free to the public, because it might be asking a bit much to expect folks to pay money to see a roomful of sad black faces when they can see the same thing at no cost by visiting any Popeye’s at closing time.

NEW YORK—There are times while living in this here dump of New York when I doubt if anyone’s heard of the word magnanimity. By the looks of it, no one among the left-wing media circles has. That egregious Amanpour woman called Trump a Hitler on CNN after the election, which reminds me: During my dinner’s drunken aftermath, I noticed a man in my house who hardly bothered to greet me as host, one James Rubin, a vulgar American who is or was married to that rather unattractive Iranian Amanpour. If Trump is Hitler, those two are Bonnie and Clyde. And I never did find out who invited that bum to my house, but someone obviously did.

But back to magnanimity, or lack of, after Biden’s extremely narrow win. The idea put forth by the Bagel Times, The Washington Post, and CNN—the three major sinners—that nothing has changed in this country since the 1960s as far as race is concerned is so patently absurd, it rivals the left’s claims that the 73 million who voted for The Donald are all white supremacists. Although Biden to his credit has made the right noises, the Trump-hating media seeks revenge, which in turn splits the country further than it already is. I don’t wish to soil these here elegant pages by naming the American hacks who write such rubbish; suffice it to say they’re one and the same as the wanker who got caught wanking during an editorial meeting of the New Yorker magazine. One such lowlife writes that the long-running class and cultural wars in America are between the coastal elites and the aggrieved who resent and despise them. Not surprisingly, it is exactly right, but the other way round. It is the bicoastal elites who look down upon, condescend to, and detest those working-class suckers who believe in their country and their church and their traditions.

Furthermore, although it is now clear that voting by post did for Biden what Chicago’s Mayor Daley did for JFK back in 1960, a clown who used to review plays for the Bagel Times writes in a quasi-porn magazine that discrimination on the basis of race helped Florida go for Trump. (How do they think these things up?) They have no shame and the last thing on their mind is to unite the country.

All this follows a pattern, starting with what’s taught in America nowadays—that speech the lefties dislike is itself violence, but when violence is directed against those speakers it is free expression. Where in hell is Kafka now that we need him? The left-wing media follows in goose step when it insists that left-wing riots are peaceful protests, as when a Bagel Times columnist went to Portland during a bloody riot and demanded to know “what riot?”

And yet magnanimity in victory is very important, and we have Versailles in 1919 to thank for it. Imagine the millions who would not have died and even more millions who would not have suffered if that buffoon Woodrow Wilson and the fat Clemenceau had not insisted on cruelly punishing the Germans. Never mind, we’ll just have to get used to the fact that we are bigoted, greedy, and somewhat stupid white people and get on with it as the Bidenites take over and reinvent America and the world.

History is always being rewritten by those who figure to benefit from the rewrite, and the American Founding Fathers are the latest cancellations. In a way these cancelers remind me of the most violent English Puritans who desecrated the churches and smashed the carved faces of saints. The rage against the Founders of the Republic leads me to believe there is money to be made by somebody, and it’s called reparations. The French used to say “Cherchez la femme,” after a mysterious disappearance. In America today it’s “Look for the moola.”

At yet another dinner on Saturday in Brooklyn, I found myself surrounded by five virulent anti-Trumpists. My only asset was that I had brought the wine, and threatened to leave with it unless they quieted down. But if friends can be as intolerant as they were that night, it is not surprising how Team Trump was stymied from the start by the deep state. There were obstructive probes, manufactured scandals, and the Russian collusion hoax that dominated the news from day one. We backwoods yahoos who backed The Donald never had a chance. I remember sitting on my sailing boat and being harangued to death by Bob Geldof because I liked Trump and thought Galtieri’s uniforms were excelsior. (I didn’t dare mention that Wehrmacht uniforms were even better.)

So what is to be done? Smile and take it, I guess, although it’s not my style. These leftists are destroying this country by rewriting history, just like Lenin did in Russia and Mao in China. You rewrite the past, brainwash the young, and demonize religion and faith, and presto. Not that Uncle Sam is about to become another Russia or China. Not right away, anyway. But when institutions such as the mainstream media, entertainment, higher education, and major corporations go along with Bernie Sanders’ type of crap, sooner rather than later the country will go that way. The culture war is total war, and we on the right are doing nothing to win it. The only good news this week is the appointment of Jeffrey Toobin, the man caught masturbating on Zoom during a New Yorker magazine editorial meeting, who has been hired by The New York Times as a special assistant to the owner.

Two friends in Paris invited us to dinner recently and then thought better of it. The problem was not that it would have been an illegal gathering, but that the woman in the flat between theirs was the kind of person who would delight in denouncing her neighbors. What greater pleasure in life, at least for some people, than that of causing difficulties for others in the name of the public good?

Denunciation, especially when made a habit, is unpleasant, but I would not go so far as to say that it is never justified. In my career as a doctor, I denounced two patients, both of them in prison. One said that he intended to kill his girlfriend on his release (which was in a few days), and I had the distinct impression that he was not speaking metaphorically. I therefore informed the police, who informed his girlfriend. He was charged with uttering a threat to kill and received a further prison sentence.

To my surprise, he was extremely glad to have done so. There are quite a number of prisoners who prefer life in prison to life outside: Prison obviates the need to make decisions, and choice for some people is distinctly discomfiting. They want others to make all the decisions for them, even in the smallest matters.

Perhaps, then, I had been manipulated. This man hadn’t wanted to kill his girlfriend, he’d wanted me to denounce him. Far from being in control, I was his pawn. I shall never know.

The second man I denounced was a violent criminal of Yemeni descent. He hovered between sanity and madness, probably because of drugs, but he was equally unpleasant sane or mad. He said that his ambition was to be a suicide bomber, and again I did not think that he was speaking other than literally. He wanted to die, but to take as many with him as he could.

I telephoned my medicolegal advisers on the question of whether I should go to the police. This case was slightly different from the first, insofar as there was not a named or specific intended victim. I received advice that was bad bordering on idiotic.

I should tell the police, the adviser said, but I also had a duty to tell my patient what I had done. I was astonished by what I heard. There were three reasons, I said, for not telling the patient what I had done: First, he remained my patient; second, he might have the opportunity in the future to attack me; and third, perhaps most important from the public-safety point of view, the police would hardly be very pleased that I had informed him that he would now be under police surveillance.

It so happened that I knew someone who worked for the secret police (let us call things by their proper name). He put me in touch with them and I told them of my fears. They thanked me, and I thought no more of it until they called me again in three weeks’ time. They informed me that he had already been on what they called their radar.

I was very impressed (I assumed that they were speaking the truth). The secret police—so my friend tells me—love their work, unlike the ordinary police, who are mostly hoping for early retirement on a full pension, and they eat, drink, and sleep it. They are a self-conscious elite who believe that they are what stands between the country and violent chaos.

Whenever there is a terrorist outrage, however, they are criticized for not having prevented it. It often emerges that the perpetrator was known to them beforehand, and the cry goes up that they were negligent in failing to foresee the attack.

No doubt incompetence exists in the secret police as in every other human organization; for where there are people, there is incompetence. But once it is revealed that the perpetrator of an outrage was known to the secret police, I have never heard a commentator pause to wonder how many such potential perpetrators are known to them, very few of whom will never commit an atrocity. Some atrocities are committed by people of whose existence the secret police are completely unaware; but there are thousands of people similar in many respects to perpetrators except that they do not take the final steps.

This raises the question of how far we tolerate the intolerant, that is to say those whose desire, sometimes elevated into a goal, is to destroy the very tolerance that they enjoy, and who would use their freedom to destroy our freedom. The rule of law demands that we should act against only those who have committed a crime, and not against those whom we suspect of being liable to commit a crime. As the great English judge of the 18th century, Lord Mansfield, said, “As long as an act remains in bare intention alone, it is not punishable by our law.”

We have faced the dilemma before, with communist and fascist movements. Now we have Islamic movements and, as yet in embryo, fascist anti-fascism. If we overreact, we destroy our own freedom; if we underreact, we allow others to destroy our freedom for us.

This suggests to me (not a very original thought) that a free society can exist only where there is some cultural, and not merely a legalistic, understanding of a constitutional order: an acceptance of limits of outrage, for example, if you happen to be fortunate enough to live in a tolerably tolerant society, even when that society is not perfectly just or fair (as no society yet known to man is).

This cultural understanding is easily lost, and indeed seems to be in the process of decline in Western countries, most dangerously among the very class—the intelligentsia—in whom one might have expected or hoped it to be strongest. Our universities are becoming bastions of unfreedom, if my few young academic friends are to be believed, and we are raising up a generation of secular ayatollahs.

Theodore Dalrymple’s latest book is Around the World in the Cinemas of Paris, Mirabeau Press.

As every public school child knows, the first Thanksgiving took place in 1621, when our Pilgrim forefathers took a break from slaughtering Peaceful, Environmentally Friendly, Indigenous Peoples to invite them to dinner in order to infect them with smallpox, before embarking on their mission to fry the planet so that the world would end on Jan. 22, 2031. (Copyright: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez)

Consider this description of the Pilgrims’ treatment of the Indigenous peoples:

“They were the worst of conquerors. Inordinate pride, the lust of blood and dominion, were the mainsprings of their warfare; and their victories were strained with every excess of savage passion.”

Except that’s not a description of the Pilgrims’ treatment of Indigenous peoples. It’s a description of some Indigenous people’s treatment of other Indigenous peoples, written by the late Francis Parkman, Harvard professor and the world’s foremost Indian scholar.

The Wampanoag, who joined the Pilgrims at the first Thanksgiving, had a lot to celebrate. Contrary to Hollywood’s American-hating rendition of “Pocahontas,” in which the Indians feared the “White Demons,” the Wampanoag were thrilled with their well-armed white allies, who helped them repel the hated Iroquois and Narragansett.

The whole reason the Wampanoag were clustered so close to the coast where the Pilgrims encountered them was that the Iroquois had “pursued them with an inveterate enmity. Some (Wampanoag) paid yearly tribute to their tyrants, while others were still subject to their inroads, flying in terror at the sound of the Mohawk war-cry.”

Parkman describes a typical Iroquois celebration following one of their attacks on their fellow “Native Americans” (an absurd term, inasmuch as no Indians were “native” to America because there was no “America” until white Europeans got here and created it):

“(M)en, women and children, yelling like fiends let loose, swarmed out of the narrow portal, to visit upon the captives a foretaste of the deadlier torments in store for them … (W)ith brandished torch and firebrand, the frenzied multitude closed around their victim. The pen shrinks to write, the heart sickens to conceive, the fierceness of (the captive’s) agony … The work was done, the blackened trunk was flung to the dogs, and, with clamorous shouts and hootings, the murderers sought to drive away the spirit of their victim.”

The Iroquois “reckoned these barbarities among their most exquisite enjoyments.”

Here’s another charming Iroquois practice:

After killing “a sufficient number of captives,” Parkman says, the Iroquois “spared the lives of the remainder, and adopted them as members of their confederated tribes, separating wives from husbands, and children from parents, and distributing them among different villages, in order that old ties and associations might be more completely broken up.”

And for the feminists: The Iroquois humiliated conquered tribes by making the men take women’s names.

Because of the Iroquois’ barbaric attacks, by the time the Pilgrims arrived, “Northern New Hampshire, the whole of Vermont, and Western Massachusetts had no human tenants but the roving hunter or prowling warrior.”

Hollywood’s “White Demons” were “White Saviors” to the Wampanoag.

The Pilgrims also had much to be thankful for on that first Thanksgiving. Of the approximately 100 passengers on the Mayflower, only half survived the first winter, felled by scurvy, malnutrition and the bitter cold. And the ones who made it did so largely thanks to the friendly Wampanoag, who shared their food with the Europeans and taught them how to till the land.

The woke version of American Indians makes them just another victim group, like the transgenders. Their honor and bravery is drained from the PC stories. To better smear our country, Indians have to be made big, fat losers.

The truth told by Parkman shows the savagery and superstition, but also the courage and honor of American Indians. The Hurons, for example, “held it disgraceful to turn from the face of an enemy,” and even when being tortured alive, a Huron would raise his voice in “scorn and defiance.”

Doesn’t anyone wonder why we name our sports teams and military armaments after Indians? We don’t name them after weaklings or whiners. Americans love to boast of having Indian blood, real or imagined — and not just to score a professorship at Harvard like Elizabeth Warren.

Real Americans honor Indians and also honor the courageous European settlers who brought Christian civilization to a continent, a miraculous union that we celebrate on this wonderful holiday.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Six months into the Racial Reckoning, it’s timely to review A Peculiar Indifference: The Neglected Toll of Violence on Black America by a conventional liberal criminologist named Elliott Currie of the U. of California at Irvine:

Much of the country has been understandably outraged by the continuing plague of police killings of black Americans; after the death of George Floyd at the hands of the Minneapolis police in May 2020, that anger exploded into some of the most widespread and sustained protests against police violence in US history. There has been far less outrage over the ongoing emergency of everyday interpersonal violence in black communities.

Many conservatives credulously believe progressives’ claims that the social sciences vindicate liberal ideology. But, when read carefully, social scientific works can be a trove of politically incorrect data. Here are some striking facts gleaned from A Peculiar Indifference:

Between 2000 and 2018…more than 162,000 black Americans lost their lives to violence…the population of a substantial midsize American city—say Jackson, Mississippi….

As Currie admits, the vast majority of black murder victims are unquestionably killed by other blacks. The criminologist offers a lengthy historical explanation of why that is still, in 2020, the fault of whites (as you no doubt would anticipate, FDR’s redlining plays a role), but the 21st-century empirical data in the book is eye-opening:

In the United States today, a young black man has fifteen times the chance of dying from violence as his white counterpart.

Why do murderous blacks and their victims skew so young? Among whites, “hardened criminals” tend to be considerably older than they are among blacks. Does the violence gap between the races decline with age? It’s an unanswered question whether the racial disparity in homicidal tendencies actually diminishes with increasing age, or whether blacks of criminal inclinations simply tend to wind up dead or in prison earlier than whites do.

Currie goes on:

What makes these disparities even more sobering is that the rates of violent death for white men in the United States are themselves quite high by comparison with those of men in other advanced industrial societies…. The current annual homicide death rate for non-Hispanic white men in the United States, at nearly four per 100,000, is more than five times the rate for all German men, and close to twenty times the rate for men in Japan.

Contrary to the usual assumptions that racial gaps are driven by white bigotry, they tend to be smallest in Southern and old Wild West states, and largest where whites are best-behaved, such as in North-Central blue states:

In the state of Illinois, for instance, the homicide death rate for young African-American men (ages fifteen to twenty-nine) has averaged 143 per 100,000 over the course of the twenty-first century, thirty-seven times the rate for white men the same age.

Surely, though, race is less important than sex when it comes to murder rates?

But so strong is the effect of race that a black woman has half again as much chance of dying by homicide as a white man…. Black women lose far more years of life to homicide than to diabetes—a notorious killer of African-American women.

Moreover, among male victims of domestic murders:

What may be more surprising, though, is that intimate partner violence also contributes to the excess risk faced by black men. Among the male victims…the racial imbalance was even more striking than among female ones: nearly half of the men who died in these incidents of intimate partner violence were black.

America’s large quantities of guns and blacks mix poorly:

Gun homicides are a much bigger proportion of overall violent deaths among blacks than among whites—roughly 83 percent and 60 percent, respectively…. The figure climbs to 86 percent for black men specifically, and to an astonishing 94 percent for black men aged fifteen to twenty-nine. And these proportions have been increasing in recent years.

Among African-American men who haven’t been to college, the chance of being shot to death:

…was not only fourteen times the rate for similarly educated American white men but was also triple the rate for comparably educated black men in Brazil.

But guns don’t explain The Gap. Even though only 14 percent of black men’s murders don’t involve guns:

…violent death is so prevalent among black men that their rate of death from non-firearm homicides is double whites’ rate of death by firearm homicide.

Currie also reports findings from hospital emergency rooms:

From 2001 through 2017, well over 400,000 African Americans were treated in an emergency room for a non-fatal firearm assault, versus roughly 122,000 whites…despite the fact that the white population as a whole was nearly five times larger.

That blacks are sixteen times as likely as whites to be wounded by gunfire but only nine times as likely to be murdered is related in part to black shooters’ tendency to open fire at block parties and funerals, wounding multiple bystanders in hopes of killing the one or two guys they are really mad at.

Why do some blacks behave this way? Currie quotes one young Atlanta black man with a memorable facility for expressing his alarming worldview:

There’s only a short time in this world for everybody. I’m going to make yours shorter than mine. Believe that. I don’t think about nobody but me and mines, you hear? No sympathy, no way.

Currie, on the other hand, more or less subscribes to the “Gee, Officer Krupke” theory that “Hey, I’m depraved on account I’m deprived.” But he keeps digging up evidence to the contrary. In a 2013–14 study of gun violence in Philadelphia:

Strikingly, however, the racial disparity steadily increased along with rising neighborhood income. In the poorest neighborhoods, with a median household income below $20,000, blacks were shot at a rate roughly one and a half times that of whites…. The result was that in communities with average household incomes over $60,000, blacks faced a nearly sixteenfold greater chance of being shot than whites.

Atlanta makes a good test case of whether poverty alone explains the worse rates of shooting among blacks because it attracts middle-class college-educated blacks:

In relatively low-disadvantage areas in Atlanta that were mostly black, homicide rates were roughly four times higher than in comparable white areas…. Broad economic and social circumstances explain much of the disparity in violence between the races, but they don’t explain all of it.

Currie’s theoretical explanation for why all these eye-opening empirical realities are the fault of white folks is less interesting. He follows Jim Crow-era writers such as W.E.B. Du Bois, Gunnar Myrdal, and Kenneth B. Clark in arguing that blacks take their aggressions out on each other because white supremacy prevents them from getting at their rightful victims, whites.

But Jim Crow was a long time ago. In fact, we live in an era, especially since the emergence of Black Lives Matter in 2014, when flattering blacks and demonizing whites is de rigueur.

How’s that working out for blacks, anyway?

Not well. After a long decline, the total number of murders nationally rose 23 percent from 2014–2016, while the black share of all murder offenders rose from 52.5 percent in 1980–2008 to 55.9 percent in 2019. Following George Floyd’s death on Memorial Day, murders across the U.S. are up the most dramatically since national tracking began around 1960. Princeton sociologist Patrick Sharkey tweeted on Nov. 20:

After a deep dive into multiple sources of data from the 100 largest cities, my conclusion is that 2020 has been an extremely violent year. The murder rate will rise substantially this year….

On Nov. 21, The Washington Post reported:

Homicides across America rose more than 28 percent in the first nine months of this year….

The Major Cities Chiefs Association of top cops reported that across 67 cities, the number of homicides grew from 4,759 in the first nine months of 2019 to 6,124 this year.

While the Post’s headline blames the pandemic, most of the increase over 2019 came after Memorial Day. Murders were up especially in Black Lives Matter cities, such as a 110 percent increase in Milwaukee (nearby Kenosha is home to Jacob Blake), 85 percent in Minneapolis (George Floyd), and 79 percent in Louisville (Breonna Taylor).

What was The Establishment thinking in promoting this predictable slaughter?

My theory has long been, going back to Chicago’s demolition of near-Loop housing projects, that, because poor black people are America’s perpetual hot potato that everybody hopes to hand off to somebody else, white urban elites wish to shove inner-city blacks onto the hinterlands.

But how can they justify such a self-interested strategy? Easy: They aren’t doing it to rid themselves of troublesome elements; instead, they are sharing their precious Diversity with you in the name of fighting (your) segregation, racism, hate, white privilege, and other bad things.

The 1990s Chicago Democrats (such as Rahm Emanuel, the Pritzkers, the Daleys, Valerie Jarrett, etc.) even had a fully thought-through three-point plan:

(1) Recruit high-class blacks to distract from tearing down low-class black housing projects in high-potential locations like Cabrini-Green.

(2) Build condos for yuppies on the land.

(3) Profit!

Weirdly, this Democratic conspiracy to recruit classy blacks to help push underclass blacks out of the good parts of Chicago had so much momentum that it wound up taking over the White House in 2009.

On the other hand, even in Chicago this plot has somewhat backfired, with the displaced persons from the projects moving into other black neighborhoods, setting off murderous gang wars that seem to have driven many respectable blacks out of the city, setting off an ominous cycle of decline.

So it’s not as if elites know exactly what they are doing.

With a Biden administration looking to be the third coming of the Obama administration, and Biden threatening to revive Obama’s Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing initiative to unload unwanted blacks on suburbs and small towns, it’s important that everybody has access to the facts, a job the mainstream media has largely given up on. Social science books like A Peculiar Indifference are useful for equipping citizens with the numbers needed for the coming debates.

I have several close friends who moved from California to Arizona to live in “redder” territory. This has not been a good month for them. AZ’s turning bluer than the balls on an Elder Scrolls neckbeard. And even if you want to scream “voter fraud” regarding the Biden win, the fact is that Arizonans haven’t had two Democrat senators since the days when The Democrats Were the Real Racists™, and now that they do, the entire country has to pretend for the next six weeks that Georgia matters.

Thanks, “pardners.”

The irony is, my own Beverly Hills went even more solidly for Trump this year than in 2016. When Rodeo’s redder than the rodeo, you know you’re living in screwy times.

And on the subject of Californians and electoral surprises, commentators left and right have been puzzling over the fact that we defeated an attempt to bring affirmative action back to a state that banished it in 1996. Proposition 16, which would have allowed for favoritism of nonwhites in public employment, education, and contracting, lost by a wide margin. Yet the backers of Prop. 16 outspent the opposition $30 million to $2 million. And what a list of backers it was! The California Democrat Party and every Democrat officeholder in the state championed Prop. 16, as did every major newspaper. Every leftist “social justice” organization—the ACLU, NAACP, NOW, the ADL, BLM, even the Sierra Club and the PTA—backed Prop. 16. So did the Chamber of Commerce, Twitter, Facebook, Netflix, Microsoft, Uber, Dropbox, Reddit, Lyft, Yelp, AirBnB, Instacart, Gap, Levi’s, United Airlines, Wells Fargo, the 49ers, the Giants, and the Oakland A’s.

Soros backed it. The Chan/Zuckerberg Initiative backed it. Ava DuVernay backed it. Kaiser, Blue Shield, and PG&E backed it.

All those heavy hitters. All that money, and in a “blue state” no less. And yet…it wasn’t even close. The big bucks, the big endorsements, the push from big business and big tech, came to nothing. And the pundits are baffled.

Several rightist colleagues have told me they believe that voters were confused by the wording of Prop. 16. The 1996 affirmative action ban stated that public institutions cannot “discriminate,” and since Prop. 16 would have overturned that ban, voters mistakenly thought that by defeating 16, they were doing the thing the racial justice lobby wanted them to do. In other words (according to my colleagues), 16 lost because Cali voters are so brainwashed by the diversity cult, they mistakenly acted against it thinking they were doing the converse.

That’s a nihilistic, “we’re so screwed even our victories are defeats” way to view the situation, and it plays into the right’s general disdain for California. But in fact many leftists also went with the “voters were confused” angle. “Unclear ballot language explains affirmative action loss,” lamented EdSource, a California education analysis site. The San Francisco Chronicle pointed to “voter confusion” and a “ballot summary that voters found difficult to understand,” and Inside Higher Ed blamed “confusing wording” for the defeat.

The L.A. Times editorial board blamed the loss on “confused Latinos” who were too stupid to understand what the proposition was about. The board also slammed “the electorate” for being “conservative when it comes to confronting racial inequity.”

“So much for California’s racial reckoning,” the editors mournfully wept.

Meanwhile, establishment conservatives at National Review, Hot Air, and elsewhere took the defeat of Prop. 16 as proof that “minority voters reject identity politics,” because inside every Ibram Kendi is a Thomas Sowell crying to be freed. “Demography is not destiny,” wrote John Sexton at Hot Air; nonwhites are “opting out” of the Democrat identity-politics machine.

Reading these analyses is like watching a barnyard of decapitated chickens. Leftists simply can’t believe that in a year of “racial reckoning,” a minority-majority state like Cali would turn its back on “justice.” So of course, voters must have been “confused.” Conservatives, meanwhile, are torn. The ones who can’t bring themselves to see any good in this state also blame “confusion,” while the flags ’n’ Jesus optimists claim Prop. 16 went down because “nonwhites are natural Republicans we all bleed red” whatever whatever.

Dimwits fellating their confirmation bias.

As the imbeciles on both sides succumb to their intracranial stenosis, let’s indulge in some clearheaded thinkin’.

No, the wording of the proposition was not confusing. The ballot summary was crystal clear: “Proposition 16 permits government decision-making policies to consider race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin to address diversity.” That’s hardly Aramaic. And knowing what Prop. 16 was, whites, Asians, and Latinos in California voted against it. Only blacks overwhelmingly supported it. And at a paltry 5.8% of the state population, black “overwhelming support” plus two bucks buys you a McNugget and Coke.

Yes, Asians were the strongest in opposition, and they led the field with individual donations to fund the No on 16 campaign. But Asian voters alone cannot decide a statewide initiative; at 15% of the population, they don’t have the numerical strength. It was actually the Latinos wot dun in Prop. 16. All fourteen of California’s Latino-majority counties voted against it.

But no, Prager U grads, Latinos and Asians did not rebuff Prop. 16 because they “rejected identity politics.” Something was indeed “rejected,” but no one wants to acknowledge what it was. Here’s a simple truth that none of the analysts left or right are willing to admit: Prop. 16 was a referendum on blacks. Not “diversity,” not “identity politics,” but blacks. Everyone with half a brain understood that Prop. 16 was there to help blacks, and blacks alone. Asians and Latinos are doing exceptionally well in the UC system (Asians are overrepresented, and Latinos, represented at roughly their percentage of the population, outnumber non-Hispanic whites). Blacks are the ones who need the “special help.” They’re the ones who feel like they can’t compete without being given extra points for melanin.

Proposition 16 posed a question to the people of California: Wanna help a brother out?

And Californians said no.

Asians said no for reasons of simple self-interest. For the average California Asian, this wasn’t dim sum but zero sum: A “leg up” for blacks means a kick up the ass for Asians. For every unqualified black who’s affirmative-actioned into college, a qualified Asian is denied.

For Latinos, affirmative action isn’t really their thing…because they don’t need it. Not due to academic excellence (à la Asians), but because Latinos get their way through numerical superiority, not begging, guilt-tripping, and bullying (à la blacks). Give Latinos an open border, and they’ll do the rest. It doesn’t profit them to give blacks special perks that come at the expense of the majority because in many California cities, Latinos are the majority (and they’re the largest plurality statewide).

Latinos see themselves as the future of the state. Blacks are the past (as I’ve covered in previous columns). For Latinos, every current black neighborhood is a future Latino neighborhood. The sooner blacks move out, the better. So there’s no motivation to make it easier for them to stay. You wanna go to college, Ja’Marquis? Move your black ass back to the Deep South and your beloved HBCUs.

Bottom line: California Latinos don’t need no stinkin’ affirmative action. Hispanics might use it when it’s there, because why not? But to them it’s a strategy, not the strategy. Whereas for blacks, it’s all they’ve got.

Now, with whites, one could argue that passing Prop. 16 would’ve been a logical progression of 2020. This has been a year of strong-arming whitey into sacrificing in the name of “racial justice.” Police protection, safety and security, peace and quiet, personal property; whites in cities across the nation have surrendered these things in the name of the “debt” they supposedly owe to blacks. Prop. 16 asked whites to give up even more. And a lot of whites (primarily in L.A. and the Bay Area) did vote yes. But more voted no, and—combined with the Asian and Latino votes—that was enough to beat the bejesus out of the measure…even in the face of an imposing coalition of billionaires, corporations, tech giants, advocacy groups, and top politicos pushing for its passage.

The defeat of Prop. 16 was a black defeat, but not at the hands of conservative whites. That’s what makes this story instructive; it’s an illustration of how the demographics of “new America” will inevitably contribute to a waning of black influence. Nonblack minority-majority California just said “no” not only to blacks, but to every leftist “opinion leader” in the state who interceded on their behalf. It’s thoroughly grim news for black Americans, and it bodes poorly for the future, especially as most of the tricks black advocates have up their sleeve involve getting other demographic groups to act against their own best interests (not just regarding hiring and admissions preferences, but on issues like criminal justice “reform”).

In California, whites who care about their own best interests, combined with and emboldened by Latinos and Asians who do the same, were able to say no to the people to whom you’re never supposed to say no. And they dared to say “no” in this, the Year of Our Lord George Floyd’s martyrdom. When a numerically small community amasses outsize influence via temper tantrums, guilting, violence, and threats of violence, the tactic only works when everyone else buckles before it. On affirmative action, California found its sea legs. If this state contained any intelligent and capable GOP leaders—and it doesn’t—the same coalition that defeated Prop. 16 could in theory be assembled again to reverse some of the most damaging concessions the state has made to blacks in the past two decades (namely, the weakening of law enforcement).

That Asians and Latinos voted against Prop. 16 doesn’t mean they’re “natural Republicans” (sorry, Con Inc.). What it does mean is that in this of all years, white, Asian, and Latino Californians voted self-interest when blacks and their powerful allies told them not to. That’s seismic. A favor was asked by a rapidly declining population that rarely sees fit to prove worthy of those favors, and never returns them. And the favor was denied. Lord help blacks if this catches on. Next thing you know, Californians will realize they don’t have to let their shit get stolen.

Mind you, Prop. 16 lost on its own; the GOP didn’t lift a finger to defeat it. And today’s GOP, which would rather win a few black votes than an actual election, is unlikely to learn any of the lessons that 16’s ignominious end might teach.

Still, a man can dream.

Black Americans and their leftist overseers won a lot of victories this year via intimidation and terrorism. But they lost this one, and it was a key battle in a key state. Whether it’s a one-off or a trend, no one can say. But at least it’s not bad news, and in 2020, “not bad news” is the best we can hope for.

Dismissing President Donald Trump’s claim that the 2020 election remains undecided, Joe Biden has begun to name his national security team.

Right now, it looks Democratic establishment all the way.

Antony Blinken, a longtime foreign policy aide, is Biden’s choice for secretary of state. Jake Sullivan, one of Hillary Clinton’s closest aides, is said to be his choice for national security adviser.

Biden’s urgency in naming his foreign policy team is understandable.

For if his election is confirmed by the Electoral College, then he will find himself on Jan. 20 with a lineup of foreign policy crises.

First is Afghanistan. While a Beltway battle has erupted over the wisdom of Trump’s decision to cut in half, to 2,500, the number of U.S. troops in Afghanistan by Jan. 15, no one denies the risk this entails for the besieged pro-American government in Kabul.

Ex-Ambassador to Afghanistan and Pakistan Ryan Crocker summed it up Friday before the House Armed Services Committee: “The worst thing we can do is what we are doing. … Basically telling the Taliban, ‘You win. We lose. Let’s dress this up as best we can.'”

America “is waving the white flag” of surrender, said Crocker.

Saturday, a barrage of rockets slammed into the Green Zone of Kabul where many embassies are located, killing eight and wounding two dozen. The Islamic State claimed responsibility.

As President Biden is not going to send fresh regiments of U.S. troops back to Afghanistan, he could, in his first year, face a collapse of the Kabul regime and a triumph of the Taliban, whom we expelled from power 19 years ago for hosting the al-Qaida terrorists who perpetrated 9/11.

Biden could, in his first days in office, preside over the first U.S. defeat in a major war since Vietnam.

A second situation confronting the new president is China. For the China of 2021 is not the China with which Barack Obama and Biden had to deal. The China of today revels in its Communist ideology.

It openly crushes democratic dissent in Hong Kong and defends “reeducation camps” for Muslim Uighurs in Xinjiang, uses air and naval forces and missile threats to assert and to defend its claims to the Paracel and Spratly Islands in the South China Sea, to Taiwan, and to the Senkaku Islands that Japan controls and claims.

U.S. planes and ships flying close to Chinese territorial claims are intercepted and treated as hostile.

This is not a China that is going to back down before American power. If the U.S. imposes sanctions on Beijing, then Beijing will reciprocate with sanctions on the U.S. And if the U.S. decides to use force, the U.S. should not be surprised if China reciprocates in kind.

President Biden, it is said, will find a way to rejoin the Iran nuclear deal from which Trump rudely exited.

And how will this sit with Israel?

Sunday, at a memorial service for Founding Father David Ben-Gurion, Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu sent a message, clearly for Biden: “We must stick to an uncompromising policy to ensure that Iran does not develop nuclear weapons. … There must be no return to the previous nuclear agreement.”

How will Biden deal with the now-regular Israeli attacks on Iran and Iranian-backed militias in Syria, Iraq and Lebanon? What would Biden do if Iran responded with attacks on Israel?

This is not an academic question. Sunday, the Israelis launched new attacks on Iranian-backed militia in Syria, and Trump has said that if an Iranian hand is found behind an attack that kills an American, then the U.S. will retaliate against Iran.

While his foreign policy advisers argued successfully against a Trump proposal for a preemptive strike on Iran’s nuclear enrichment plant at Natanz, Israeli strikes on Iranian-backed militia in Syria could produce retaliation, and a sudden larger and wider war.

Worst-case scenario: Iran responds to an Israeli attack; Americans are killed; Trump retaliates; and Biden inherits a war with Iran he must fight or seek to end.

Then, there are the human rights backsliders that are U.S. partners and allies — Turkey, Egypt, Saudi Arabia. How does Biden deal with the party’s progressives who demand he sanction such partner-nations — without risking the loss of these countries’ cooperation on our policy agenda?

And the question with regard to Afghanistan is also true of Syria and Iraq. How do we extract our military from these endless conflicts without losing any leverage we have, and with it losing our influence over the composition and character of the regime and its direction?

“America First” has an answer to these questions:

If there are no vital U.S. interests imperiled, keep U.S. troops out. And ashcan the utopian nonsense of trying to plant democracy in the sandy soil of a Middle East that has shown itself unreceptive to that particular crop.

The interventionalists got us into the sandbox. Let’s see if they can get us out.

The Week’s Most Colicky, Frolicky, and Bollocky Headlines

MS. CREOSOTE DEMANDS A RECOUNT
Last week, officials finally finished counting the votes in the Sumter, S.C., mayor’s race. And what a barn burner it was! Sumter has had the same mayor for twenty years—the ancient Joe McElveen, who announced earlier this year that he’d finally be leaving office on account of advanced fossilization. The first competitive mayoral race in two decades brought out some of Sumter’s heavy hitters, including its heaviest: 29-year-old Sabrina Belcher, a morbidly obese (and honestly, that term isn’t strong enough) BLM supporter, who ran in the name of bringing “racial justice” to her nearly 50% black city.

Belcher is known around town for two things: her homemade “rap” videos, and her gravitational pull, which plays havoc with the tides at nearby Myrtle Beach. She was inspired to enter the race by the politician who had the greatest impact on her life—Mayor McCheese. She ran on a platform of keeping all-you-can-eat buffets open during COVID.

She also had the benefit of being the only candidate based on a novel by Sapphire.

Sadly, by August, polling showed that Belcher was trailing far behind local real estate agent Foxy Rae Campbell. Poor Belcher had not anticipated the presence of an even sassier black woman in the race. Now she’d have to get creative in her campaigning. But how? Must think, must think. Two hours and ten gallons of Dreyer’s later, Belcher hatched a plan: She’d fake her own kidnapping at the hands of MAGA racists acting on behalf of an opposing candidate! After all, Bubba Wallace’s silly string garnered national headlines for weeks, and a NASCAR parade in his honor. If Belcher could carry off a hate hoax, surely she’d get a parade as well (plus, she could act as her own float). She enlisted the help of her friend Christopher James Eaddy, who would play the part of the kidnapper.

Belcher livestreamed her kidnapping because of course she did, and police wondered why she was livestreaming an “unexpected” kidnapping, because of course they did. After several days of the kind of grilling she doesn’t like, Belcher confessed to the ruse. She was charged with filing a false police report of a felony, and conspiracy. Eaddy was charged with conspiracy (his mug shot screams, “What was I supposed to do? She’d a’ sat on me if I refused to go along with the plan”).

Yet Belcher stayed in the mayor’s race, hoping she could win the support of the people who still think Jussie Smollett was telling the truth. But with the votes now counted, it appears that “Bossie” Smollett came in dead last, with just 2.74% of the vote. Although the fact that anyone voted for her at all is rather astounding.

In a final blow to her campaign, mere days before the election, Mayor McCheese withdrew his endorsement. It had nothing to do with the kidnapping hoax; turns out all this time he’d mistakenly thought she was the Grimace.

KATRINA AND THE COVID WAVES
With COVID wave number three (or is it two? Four?) sweeping over the world like a murderous tsunami (if by “murderous” one means “not inordinately lethal”), world leaders are doing their best to control the spread of the China-born pathogen.

One brilliant idea adopted by dozens of civilized (and a few decidedly uncivilized) nations is that cross-border traffic will be limited to travelers who can produce proof of a negative COVID test. This scheme is truly ironclad. There’s absolutely no way that anybody could possibly cheat that system. After all, there’s never been an instance in history of foreigners faking IDs or travel documents. It’s almost ludicrous to think about!

“Fake papers”? Absurd.

Except apparently not. A thriving Third World black market trading in phony negative COVID tests has become a global menace, much to the surprise of absolutely no one except the imbecilic leftists who see noble nonwhites as incapable of deception. Hey, did somebody mention imbéciles? Ah, the French. Last week, dozens of Ethiopian “refugees” were caught selling fake COVID test results at de Gaulle.

A Brazilian ring of COVID test forgers has been working the Southern Hemisphere, and untold numbers of enterprising Pakistanis have been covering the U.K., offering fake test results for around $200. Bangladesh, meanwhile, is home to an assembly line of phony COVID test results, which are being sold to migrant workers “for $59 a pop,” according to The New York Times.

Some conscientious Third Worlders who don’t want their money to go to faceless, impersonal COVID-test factory farms are seeking out people in their own community who’ve been tested and found to be negative, and “borrowing” their results for international travel. According to one Pakistani gentleman who spoke to the Lancashire Telegraph about an arrangement he made with his COVID-free buddy, “You can simply get their negative test and change the name and birthdate to your own. You also put a test date on which is within the time limit required.”

In the face of the growing international trade in fake negative results, governments are struggling to come up with a strategy to prevent Third World immigrants from spreading the infection in the West. “Not letting them in” isn’t on the table, almost certainly on account of that “imbecilic leftist” thing, which tends to reject the conception and acceptance of simple, commonsense solutions.

HIS FODDER’S A MUDDER
Costello: I just bought me a racehorse.
Abbott: Well, if you’re gonna run him in a race, if the track is wet will he run well?
Costello: I think so…
Abbott: What I’m asking is, is he a mudder?
Costello: How can a he be a mudder? Ain’t a she always a mudder?
Abbott: Certainly not. Sometimes a he makes a better mudder than a she.
Costello: Look, suppose the mama horse has little horses, does that make her a mudder?
Abbott: Well, that depends on her feet.
Costello: Ya learn sumpin’ every day, don’t cha?

Major League Baseball may not yet have players named Who, What, and I Don’t Know, but at least one revered Abbott & Costello routine has become 100% nonfiction. Fodders can now be mudders, or, in some cases, a mudder can become a fodder only to decide to become a mudder again.

Freddy McConnell is a journalist for The Guardian. But that’s not the worst thing about her. See, “Freddy” was born a woman, and with a few screws loose to boot. In 2013 she began hormone therapy in order to “transition” to manhood, and in 2014 she had her breasts lopped off because that’s not even remotely insane. Her passport and National Health Service records were changed to reflect her “new gender,” and she prepared to get her final ladybits ripped out because, again, there’s nothing even slightly lunatic going on here.

However, in 2018, before losing her babymaking tools, “Freddy” decided to conceive. She went off the hormone therapy, which allowed her to menstruate again (actual women tend to do that), then she got knocked up, got pregnant (totally in line with what actual women do when knocked up), and had a baby.

Following the birth of a child who will surely prove a cash cow to therapists, “Freddy” finally completed her transition. She’s now fully a man under British law (look it up, it’s in the Fagna Carta). So, as a newly minted “man,” she decided to have herself declared her baby’s “father,” even though she birthed the child through a biological process that tends to be associated with mothers. This proved too much even for the progressive Brits, and last week a panel of wig-wearing High Court justices decided that since “Freddy” was a woman when she gave birth, that fact must be reflected on the birth certificate of the baby. The justices argued “in favour of the right of a child born to a transgender parent to know the biological reality of its birth.”

In other words, delude yerself all ya want, pseudobloke, but the law won’t take part in helping you delude your kid.

Needless to say, British alphabet-soupers are up in arms over the decision, because what’s the fun of going trans if you can’t mislead children? Might as well just go back to cross-dressing like those wig-donning m’luds. On the other hand, British “TERFs” applauded the court’s confirmation that giving birth is a uniquely female endeavor. And people from outside the U.K. expressed surprise that there was still an ounce of sanity left on the Sphinctered Isle.

For “his” part, McConnell, having reached the end of her legal appeals, has now decided to devote herself full-time to a new career—professional “Jameson Parker in Prince of Darkness” impersonator.

She traded breasts for that mustache. Arguably the most appalling aspect of this story.

JUST DON’T CALL HER “DRUMPF”
And while we’re in the U.K…

The BBC is doing a victory lap over its newest win in the war against free speech. The calcified pretend-journalists at the state-funded reminder of why Britain’s no longer great were bored one evening, and after a few hours of mincing and fopping, as effete Britishers tend to do, they decided to scan Facebook for posts that were “insulting” toward VP-elect Kamala Harris. They examined individual pages, and they scanned entire groups. And after they compiled their blacklist, they sent it straight over to Mark Zuckerberg’s mansion, where the list was brought to Zuck by his inscrutable, feet-bound consort as he sat on his beanbag filled with thousand-dollar bills and extracted baby hearts, playing Minecraft with one hand and plotting global genocide with the other.

By the next day, every post the Beeb had flagged was gone, much to the delight of the giddy Goebbelers at the broadcasting giant, who joyfully added prancing to their nightly mince and fop fest.

And what type of posts had the journos targeted for banning? In the words of a BBC report trumpeting the triumph, they specifically went after “memes where Harris’ name is mocked.”

Yep, there’ll be no mocking of Kamala Harris’ name. From Tricky Dick to Ronnie Raygun to Billary Clinton to Barack O-bomb-ya to, of course, DRUMPF, that name-punning shit stops right here.

The British have spoken. And Zuck listened.

Of course, one can assume that the mocking ban only applies to the names of Democrats. In fact, a cursory examination of Facebook reveals plenty of posts mocking the names of GOP senators and representatives, and quite a few about Florida governor “Ron DeSaster” and “Ron DeSatan.” But I’m certain Facebook’s gonna be right on top of those any minute now!

Interestingly, the BBC also flagged posts that complain about the fact that Harris is not a “foundational black American,” and thus not entitled to the “victimhood cred” claimed by blacks who trace their U.S. roots to slavery. The BBC boasted that they were able to get Zuckerberg to eradicate posts that claim Harris “is not ‘black enough’ for the Democrats.”

So apparently telling a black person “you ain’t black” is now verboten on Facebook…unless you’re a certain dementia-addled mumble-mouthed figurehead president-elect.

In which case it’s fine.

Media Matters cheered the BBC’s flag-fest, while complaining that Zuck needs to step up his game and remove more anti-Harris speech on his own, so that the British don’t have to do it for him.

Yet another case of foreigners doing the work that Americans—or in this case one beady-eyed, expressionless American Jew—won’t do themselves.

SING US A SONG, YOU’RE THE PIANO MANGLER
In the 1960s, the University of California, Berkeley, became ground zero in the fight to empower the people. Have something to say, friend? Speak it aloud at the free-speech zone in Sproul Plaza, the freest place on earth! Be heard, my brother. The Man won’t hassle you here. Tired after a long day of fighting the system, comrade? Want to rest your weary feet? Rest them at People’s Park across from the campus. The Man won’t roust you there; sleep in peace!

Soon enough, Berkeley became a mecca of soup kitchens and loitering, growing to become one of the biggest hubs of welfare cases, SSI recipients, and homeless bums in the nation. And it turned out that a lot of those SSI hobos have severe mental-health issues. By the dawn of the 21st century, People’s Park had become a most unwelcome space for people, taken over by a permanent class of homeless squatters who would occasionally stab or shoot interlopers, and sometimes each other. Local eateries became places where patrons would be set on fire by roving “unhoused” pyros. And Sproul Plaza’s free-speech zone was appropriated by thugs as the staging area for Antifa rallies organized to keep conservative speakers off campus. Soon enough, that area became arguably the least free and welcoming place on earth for speaking one’s mind.

Several years ago, two UC Berkeley juniors, Daniel Geng and Josh Yurtsever, decided that what the campus needed in order to restore that feeling of communal camaraderie and ’60s-era idealism was music! The two plucky youths raised funds from the people (via GoFundMe) to put a piano in Sproul Plaza, so that all day long, any random passerby could plink out a tune, sing a song, or, as the Doobies say, just “listen to the music.”

Music would soothe the schizos. Music would calm the thugs.

The “social experiment” worked for about six months, until a 2018 video titled “The Racist Keyboard” went viral. In that video, a piano had its black keys removed to “prove the point” that when something becomes solely white, it sucks. Removing black keys from a piano became a way to strike a blow for “racial justice” (see, the piano is worthless now because the black is gone. Get it? Get it?).

So, a late-night vandal forcibly removed the black keys from the Sproul piano in December 2018, completely ruining it.

But Berkeley students vowed to bring the piano back. More money was raised, and another, better piano was installed at Sproul.

The people spoke! And the people, united, will never be divi…

…oh, wait. Last week the new piano was hacked to pieces in yet another late-night raid. It was literally reduced to kindling. Another “racist keyboard” demolished like a Confederate monument. Sproul Plaza has finally been liberated from music.

That’s the problem with doing things in the name of empowering “the people.” More often than not, “the people” are dicks who should probably not be empowered, ever.

R.I.P. Sproul piano.

NEW YORK—Who was it who first coined the expression “It ain’t over until the fat lady sings?” The great Yogi Berra got credit for it, but what he really said was “It ain’t over till it’s over.” Well, I think it is all over, although it’s going to be dragged out by The Donald, who never knows when to stop. But as Roger Kimball writes in American Greatness, the fix was in; that’s why the man who lived in a basement remained in the basement while Trump flew maniacally all over the country rallying the troops. Apparently the cheating was industrial-scale, and we’ll know the final outcome most likely in December. Still, The Donald’s chances of remaining in the Big White Place “no look so good no more,” as they say here in the Bagel.

Over on the Upper East Side, where the poor little Greek boy resides, the dearth of preternaturally smooth-complexioned babes is as obvious as the masks worn by women who have stayed behind because they cannot afford a house in the Hamptons. The so-called beautiful people who first fled the town last March have stayed away, surrendering the Bagel to those huddled masses the Statue of Liberty plaque welcomes. Dining outdoors at a chic restaurant last week, the crowd looked almost glamorous. I said almost. Darkness does wonders, obscuring age lines, blemishes, and crappy unfeminine clothes, but then there are the voices. Some American women’s voices are to femininity what gangsta rap is to Mozart. It’s a high-pitched shriek, like a hyena being strangled, although I’ve never heard such a sound in Africa, but have heard it time and again right here in America. The #MeToo movement has exacerbated the problem. Something needs to be done and quick, and it’s no surprise so many American men need shrinks and are overweight. Living with such women takes its toll.

It was never like this in the past. As a student I remember enchanting young women like Bonnie Richardson in Palm Beach, Mary-Blair Scott and Ellen Hurst in Charlottesville, and tens of others in Paris—oh how I suffer, how I suffer. Job wouldn’t trade places with me. Les Girls back then were feminine, and there’s nothing that makes a woman more attractive than femininity. There are still plenty of feminine lassies around, and one of them I’m particularly sweet on works on the bookish side of the Telegraph newspaper. She’s named after an ancient Greek priestess whom Zeus fell in love with and turned into a heifer to protect her from Hera’s jealousy. That old lecher Zeus had great taste in women, and Io was eventually restored into a woman and even got to visit Prometheus. Aeschylus wrote a play about her, Tim Hanbury drinks Stella Artois nonstop as he lusts after her, as do I, and the last thing she sounds like is a hyena being strangled.

Feminine women can be feisty, indomitable, and tomboyish, the latter adding to, not detracting from, their allure. Spouting frothy verbiage, swear words, and bombast is not feminine, and a voice that grates ruins an otherwise beautiful face. One of the horrors of modern life is hearing an attractive young woman “effing” this and “effing” that and saying “like” before every word. I remember once in Paris long ago having followed a beautiful young girl who was dressed to the nines to a Place Vendôme jewelry shop. She looked at a bracelet but couldn’t decide. I approached and offered to buy it for her. She gave me the sweetest almost angelic smile but refused. Her voice was to die for. A couple of weeks later I met her at a party. She remembered. Her name was Veronique de Pardieu. Later on she got sick and had a sad end.

Beautiful feminine women are always ladies, whether to the manor born or not. The simple emotion of longing surges through one with memories of girls in their summer dresses, as Irwin Shaw’s beautiful short story called them. Now romance is dead because “straightness is the most misunderstood sexual orientation of all.” Yes, you guessed right, this crap was published in the Bagel Times under the heading Sexuality and Romance. (I knew it would come to this, it was only a matter of time before they came after us.) One Jane Ward has written an opus on the “Tragedy of Heterosexuality”; another, Angela Chen, writes that “asexuality as a sexual orientation is rarely properly acknowledged in society” (I should hope not); finally, yet another lady, by the name of Francesca Beauman, wrote a whole book that tells us that “reading has always been the safer form of sex,” and “desire is often wanting what you shouldn’t; hoping for more than you can get.”

I’ll say! I’ve always wanted more than I could get, and I do find reading less of a struggle than sex. (Books don’t knee one in the groin.) And I’ll let you in on a little secret: As Ward suggests, heterosexuality is about to be rescued from its unearned hegemony in our shared cultural imagination. It’s eggheads and female eggheads who will accomplish this. I am not at all sophisticated in such matters, so I suppose that means no more missionary position. I’m sure that Francesca, Angela, and Jane are nice women who perhaps overthink sex. And the way we’re going, Francesca’s prediction that “we all end up having a relationship with the computer itself” will probably come true.

Traveling between England and France recently was a profoundly depressing experience.

First I had to get to Euston Station and then walk the few hundred yards to St. Pancras Station. The Euston Road, which runs between them, is not a beautiful thoroughfare at the best of times, and this was certainly not the best of times. I never thought, however, that I would miss the suffocating traffic that normally clogs and chokes it, but this unpleasing phenomenon had been replaced by another, namely a dispiriting emptiness except for numbers of homeless people wandering intoxicated in the road or camping in urine-soaked sleeping bags propped up against walls, surrounded by the detritus of their appalling lives—bottles, packaging of junk food, needles, flattened cardboard cartons.

As a liberal who is only too aware of his own good fortune, I was slightly ashamed of the visceral disgust that they aroused in me. My wife said that these people had the appearance of true degenerates: malnourished, dirty, with rotten teeth and feral expressions. When they spoke—often shouting at each other from great distances—their language was only barely recognizable as English, indeed as language at all, though they were English and almost certainly spoke no other language.

Had they always been there in the Euston Road in such numbers, and had I failed to notice their presence because, before the great confinement of the rest of the population, it had been diluted by that of thousands of normal people passing by? Or had they emerged from somewhere underground, like the Morlocks in H.G. Wells’ story The Time Machine? To reach such a state of degradation, however, was not the work of a moment; rather, it was that of a lifetime. They must have been somewhere.

Nothing would have been easier than to dismiss them from my mind as degenerates, such as there have always been and probably will always be. But each of them must have had an individual history, most likely a tragic one, or at any rate not one of great privilege. Their every decision would almost certainly have been the worst possible, taken without forethought and always in pursuit of the gratification of the moment. Surely they should be swept up and forced to live better? But how, by whom, and by what right?

One thing that I have noticed about such people in England (though not in France) is that they are almost all white. If such degradation were the result of poverty alone, as if by a kind of mechanical operation, there ought to have been among them a disproportion of people from those ethnic minorities that (we are informed almost ad nauseam) are economically downtrodden and discriminated against. But there were none; hence I concluded that the degradation that I saw was not purely economic in origin, but had some kind of cultural source. I have encountered many alcoholic Sikhs, for example, who were among the most refractory with regard to abstinence of all my patients; I have encountered almost every kind of social pathology among Muslims, from incest to drug addiction—but I have never seen any Sikh or Muslim living the kind of life that I witnessed on the Euston Road.

In my childhood there were still tramps, or gentlemen of the road, as they were sometimes called. They were not well-dressed, of course, and they were dirty—often they smelled. But they were not degenerates; they were genuine eccentrics who preferred a life of freedom if discomfort to one of comfort but constraint. They wandered from place to place, from farm to farm and town to town, obtaining whatever charity or casual employment they might. No doubt they were destined to disappear in any case, but the increase in traffic, the transformation of roads into highways, the industrialization of the countryside, made their way of life impossible. I remember them not with disgust but with admiration, no doubt tinged with that rose color that distance in time is inclined to lend.

I suspect that the homeless whom I saw in the Euston Road by contrast were, in the last analysis, the victims of the lumpen-hedonistic sex–drugs–and–rock ’n’ roll culture that, in Britain at least, devastated the white lower orders of society in the middle of the 20th century, and to whose baleful consequences those with few economic resources or educational attainments were most vulnerable, all the more so in times of economic dislocation, having been left with nothing to fall back on.

Once arrived in Paris (where there are also scenes of degradation, but differently peopled), we were at once pursued by a taxi tout outside the station who was as irritating as a horsefly. Again, I tried to imagine what it must be like to earn a living in this way; with difficulty, I maintained a politeness that by no means came naturally, rather than attempting merely to swat him.

He took us for idiots, this tout, as if we could not see for ourselves that there was a line of taxis a mile long waiting for a fare. We took the first in the line, and the driver told us a tale of woe, perhaps exaggerated but no doubt true in essence.

He had been waiting six hours for a fare, he said; such trains as arrived had very few passengers, none of whom wanted a taxi. He was a salaried drive; that is to say, he was paid about $700 a month and a proportion of any of the fares that he earned. In normal times, he just about got by; since the confinement he had earned almost nothing, and he was precisely the kind of person who was not eligible for government assistance. He would be better off formally unemployed.

Change jobs, do something else, some people might say; but he was in his 50s, and though he was intelligent, I doubt that he was trained for anything else. But he was a Muslim, and at least among Muslims there is a social solidarity that does not pass through the state (whatever else its horrors and disadvantages).

The streets were dark; all the shops other than the groceries and pharmacies were shuttered with aluminum shutters, every inch of which was covered with hideous tagging. Is our future in the West to be an endless cycle of confinement and isolation punctuated by brief and febrile periods of release?

Theodore Dalrymple’s latest book is Around the World in the Cinemas of Paris, Mirabeau Press.

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