Everybody is talking about murders, such as the Atlanta massage parlor massacres, the Muslim terrorist in Boulder, and the Washington, D.C., adolescent girl carjackers.

But tiny sample sizes of spectacular crimes allow polemicists to hype whichever claims they want. What we need are large amounts of data.

For example, everyone finally now admits what I’ve been saying for months: that murders went up a record-breaking percentage in 2020. But most still don’t want to admit it had anything to do with Black Lives Matter. One way to begin analyzing what caused the homicide boom of 2020 is to measure when it ignited. So, later in this column I’ve graphed every firearm murder day by day for 2019 and 2020.

Of course, if you only think about one crime at a time, you can spin each one however you please. For instance, the national press decided that the Atlanta murders were all about White Supremacy and Anti-Asian Hate, which was convenient for reinforcing The Narrative during 2021 when numerous videos have circulated of blacks assaulting Asians on the street.

So, the media agreed to blame the spa shootings on Trump referring to the “Chinese virus” eleven months ago. Granted, back during the George W. Bush era, the press would have instead used the killer’s confession about his religious-sexual motivations as proving the horrors of evangelical Christianity. But fundamentalists are now seen as a defeated, almost powerless enemy, and so the ideological mopping-up operation has moved on from Christians in particular to whites in general.

In contrast, the official story line about the Boulder shooter is Gun Control.

Why didn’t gun control come up much regarding Atlanta? Well, that shooter used a handgun, while the Boulder murderer employed a Ruger that’s officially classified as a pistol, but it looks like one of those scary military-type rifles that feature so prominently in the paranoia porn of liberals.

The Biden Administration is gearing up to crack down on rifles, seeing them as the white man’s weapon. In reality, according to the FBI’s statistics, rifles accounted for only 5 percent of all 2019 homicides in which a particular type of gun was identified, with shotguns adding 3 percent. Handguns, in contrast, were used in 92 percent of known gun homicides.

Of course, handguns are the main weapon with which blacks slaughter blacks in such vast numbers. White Democrats like Joe Biden aren’t terribly interested in reducing the number of blacks murdered by other blacks, especially if they’d have to admit that murder is largely a black problem in the U.S. You aren’t supposed to know this, but in 2019, 55.9 percent of known murder offenders were black. And blacks traditionally are responsible for a slightly larger share of gun murders than of total murders due to their cultural predilection toward shooting into crowds of partyers in the general direction of that guy who dissed them.

The Boulder massacre produced the mirror image of journalism’s Trayvon Martin fiasco back in 2012. As you’ll recall, before seeing the shooter’s picture, the media instantly assumed that anybody named George Zimmerman must be a white supremacist Aryan Nazi. They only discovered later that the tri-racial Peruvian-American looks more like the son Barack Obama never had.

In contrast to Zimmerman, the press had photos of the Boulder killer but not his name. Hence, they salivated over their automatic assumption that he was a white male Trump voter, only to be humiliated when the killer turned out to have the most Arab terrorist-sounding name ever: Ahmad Al Aliwi Alissa.

Soon, America was back to normal with the usual mass shootings at black social events, such as the Virginia Beach shoot-outs that killed two and wounded eight and the Fishtown Golf & Social gunplay that wounded seven. As Sailer’s Law of Mass Shootings predicts:

If there are more killed than wounded, then the shooter is likely not black.

If there are more wounded than killed, then the shooter is likely black.

And then came the amazing carjacking murder of an elderly Pakistani immigrant by 13- and 15-year-old black girls in Washington, D.C., in front of uniformed National Guardsmen standing around to prevent white nationalist domestic terrorism. Did the girls even know how to drive?

There was no politically correct way to spin this one, so The Washington Post has already dropped this local story from its headlines, in contrast to the newspaper’s 198 articles mentioning the words “Atlanta Asian shooting” in the two weeks since the Atlanta murders.

Clearly, a disproportionate fraction of the incidents of anti-Asian violence in 2021 are perpetrated by African-Americans. But then that’s the way it is every year. As I reported in October, the last time the federal government’s National Crime Victimization Survey reported on black vs. Asian violence was 2018:

According to inadequate sample sizes, blacks aggressed against Asians 50,000 times vs. a little over 500 times that Asians attacked blacks, for an 89 to 1 racial ratio of total incidents. Because there are almost twice as many blacks as Asians, on a per capita footing that would be 46 to 1.

Assuming violence against Asians is actually up in the first quarter of 2021 over 2020 (although nobody knows that for sure yet), that raises two follow-up questions:

—Are blacks choosing to make Asians a higher percentage of their victims this year?

—Or have blacks simply been committing more crimes overall during the George Floyd Era, and Asians are just taking their proportionate lumps along with everybody else?

As for why murders shot up last year, we’re now a little closer to the answer. I’ve been hollering since last summer that the Racial Reckoning is unleashing a murder binge, so I’ve now got the complete day-by-day numbers. A reader scraped up for me the last two years of murders from the Gun Violence Archive, a reasonably reliable listing of all the firearm killings in the country since 2013. (Guns aren’t the only way to murder somebody, but they account for a large majority of the killings.) I graphed murders per day, using a seven-day running average, with 2019 in blue and 2020 in red:

As you can see, compared with 2019, 2020 was a bloody year, going all the way back to January and worsening during the first couple of months of the pandemic. Yet, the most extraordinary fact of 2020 is that for the seven-plus months from George Floyd’s death to the end of the year, the United States averaged 50.5 murders per day, up 41% from the 35.7 per day during the same long period in 2019. The consistency of the gap between 2020 and 2019 during the Racial Reckoning is striking.

You are probably as sick as I am of hearing journalists proclaim this or that to be the New Normal. Let’s hope that fifty murders per day during the warmer months is not Anti-Racist America’s new normal.

We don’t yet have an official count of the racial makeup of the incremental murderers, but everything I’ve seen suggests there was an explosion of black-on-black murders in the wake of the “mostly peaceful protests.”

During the French Revolution, Edmund Burke observed: “The Revolution was made, not to make France free, but to make her formidable.”

Similarly, Black Lives Matter has succeeded not in making blacks safe, but in making them exuberant.

This week, I’m goin’ anecdotal. A little less “facts and figures” and a little more “Mark Twain after three whiskeys.”

Here’s the story of Little Robert and the Crip.

Little Robert (so nicknamed because I had another, taller friend named Robert) was a fat kid who lived up the street from me. He was almost three years my junior, and I, as an only child, pretty much made him my honorary little brother, with all the abuse that goes with the title. Little Robert was white. Also Jewish, but you couldn’t tell. Especially as he wasn’t terribly sharp.

I’ve written of this before, so forgive me for repeating myself, but my high school wasn’t supposed to be 85% black. It had been built to draw equally from the white/Jewish Westside, and the (at the time) black areas south and east of me (today those neighborhoods are largely gentrified white/Asian). In theory, the school should’ve been 50/50. But in practice, the Westsiders sent their kids to private schools. Thus, each year the school got blacker leading to more white parents opting out leading to the school getting blacker etc., etc.

Me? I was offered the private school option—my folks had saved up for it—but I turned it down. In part because I never learned a damn thing in school so for me the point of the entire exercise was to fuck off with friends and try to get laid, and that was, simply put, easier to do in a school with lax standards. Also, with so few white boys in the mix, my odds of scoring with the small population of white girls improved dramatically. And finally, in general I prefer an environment in which I can be the one-eyed king of the blind (i.e., where I can excel more with half the effort).

We all got along great. The Crips loved me because every day I’d entertain them with new jokes about “faggots,” “chinks,” and “beaners” (first rule of comedy: Know the room). I was friends with everybody—one of the few whites ever voted “best actor” in the yearbook—and everybody was friends with me.

Little Robert’s divorced parents were not about to spend good money to send their corpulent lump to a private academy. The year I was a senior, Robert started as a freshman. Prior to his first day at Inner City High starring Don Cheadle, I had a talk with him, knowing that he was not the most socially adroit fella on the block. I explained that by and large it’s a good school and everyone gets on well. This was 1985; there was no “critical race theory,” no institutionalized antiwhite hatred. I never saw it in six years of attending majority-black schools.

But there were predators. That’s what I was most worried about in Robert’s case. I warned him that there’ll be a percentage, not huge but not minute, of black students who’ll see him as prey. It’s nothing personal; they see white and they see money. Most of the students mean no harm, but the ones who do mean harm mean more harm to whites because of the perceived profitability in targeting them.

Just don’t put yourself in a position of vulnerability, I told Robert. You give them an opportunity, they’ll take it. Most important, I added, don’t let your Jewish Westside liberalism and a childhood of 1970s “buy the world a Coke” kumbaya bullshit make you feel guilty about being vigilant. There will be a part of you, I cautioned, that will resist suspecting these kids of ill intent. They know that, and they’ll use it as an edge.

My lecture laid an egg. Robert’s fat frowny face contorted into a caricature of disapproval. He called my advice racist, and said he’d hear no more of it.

Three weeks into the school year, Little Robert came running up to me at lunch, his jowls jiggling with excitement. He was gonna buy a scooter! Robert was too young for a car learner’s permit, but under L.A. regs at the time, he could ride a motor scooter. This would allow him the independence of travel, so important in those pre-Uber days. He’d been saving his allowance for just this occasion.

“Great news, fatass,” I replied. “Who’s selling it to you?”

“Captain told me that if I bring $80 to the alley behind Bob’s Market, he’ll give me a scooter!”

“Captain,” as he called himself, was a hardcore Crip soldier. That was no open secret, as it was no secret at all. He was an inveterate criminal. And the “alley behind Bob’s Market” was (at the time) Crip central. Even the LAPD battering ram was scared to venture there.

As an aside, I frequently take out-of-town guests to that alley today, gentrified and as pretty and safe as a Reykjavik suburb, to demonstrate that not all recent California demographic changes have been for the worst.

I put my hand on Little Robert’s shoulder: “Lardass, Captain is not going to sell you a scooter. He simply isn’t. He’s going to take your money and walk away laughing. This is exactly what I was trying to warn you about.”

I’ll never forget the sight…Robert’s doughy cheeks grew red as a baboon’s ass, his pudgy nostrils flared with rage. “You…you RACIST!” he screamed. “You fucking RACIST BASTARD! Just because Captain is black, you think he wants to rob me.”

“Well, that and the fact that he’s a gangbanger, yes,” I replied. “You will be robbed. Captain and I get along fine, but only because I keep him at arm’s length, as should you. Be friendly, sure. But don’t hand him a knife and outstretch your throat.”

“You b-b-b……BASTARD!” Robert shot back.

“Tubbo, you’re walking right into the very trap I cautioned you against.”

Robert was literally hissing, spitting at that point. He backed away, cursing me as he fled: “You RACIST piece of shit! Damn you! Damn you!”

I thought little of it for the rest of the day. After school, my friends and I were gathered at my house as usual when my phone rang. It was Little Robert from a payphone outside Bob’s Market.

“I…I’m dying, Dave. I…I can’t breathe. They killed me. I’m dead.”

Blimpy was being overdramatic, of course. But they had kicked the living snot out of him. Captain, backed by about seven of his lieutenants, had grabbed the cash and said, “Now get the fuck outta here, white boy,” and Robert had dared to protest. So they beat him mercilessly. The poor schmuck not only thought he could deal fairly with those hoods, but that he could lodge a complaint when the deal went south.

Crips weren’t big on complaint departments and suggestion boxes.

My friends and I drove to the market to collect the battered boy. The thugs had mainly worked the ribs. They’d also taken great pleasure in humiliating him by kicking his rear end and privates. The only visible blood was on his ear; they’d torn his earring out, severing the lobe.

We took him to the ER. Thankfully, there was no major internal damage.

Little Robert became a changed man after that. And we became closer friends, which likely had something to do with the fact that instead of feeding him “we all bleed red” bullshit, I’d actually tried to save him from that beating. He dropped out of high school and got his GED, and he started working out with weights like a madman. Soon enough, he’d gone from the fat kid I was ashamed to be seen with to the hunk I was jealous of because when we’d hang out all the women would stare at him, not me.

And he became a cop. In Inglewood (still one of our few remaining black areas). He rose to the rank of detective, and was many times decorated for bravery. He saved the lives of several black miscreants, never for a moment using his badge as an excuse to take revenge for what had been done to him as a child. But—and this is the important part—he did well at the job, he stayed safe and kept others safe, because he never forgot the lesson of that day in 1985: Let not your vision be clouded nor your alertness impeded by the clichés and platitudes of the white-guilt Pied Pipers who’ve sent so many to the grave with their murderous melodies about how situational awareness equals racist oppression.

It’s not by chance that Little Robert’s story is on my mind. Christine Englehardt is the 24-year-old white woman who was drugged, raped, and murdered by two black “spring breakers” in Miami last week. Englehardt apparently met the two men earlier that night at a restaurant. At some point, they gave her a “green pill” and accompanied her back to her hotel. After repeatedly raping her and leaving her for dead, the two noble 1619ers went on a spending spree with her wallet.

As has been noted in the press, Englehardt frequently posted on social media about how women must always be on guard against “predators.” Indeed, her final Facebook post reads, “Always go with your gut. Please be on alert for any suspicious people or cars. This is a dangerous world now unfortunately and you never know what anyone’s true intentions are.”

Yet that lesson was forgotten in the presence of two black guys who, by all photos and video, certainly “present” as thuggish.

In 2016, Englehardt’s heavily white Bucks County high school was embroiled in a scandal over “bathroom swastikas” supposedly scrawled by “MAGAs” to harass black and Latino students. No culprit was ever found (like most swastika sagas, this one was likely a hoax), but the school district forced all students and staff to go through “diversity training” anyway.

Englehardt’s understanding of “stranger danger” was almost certainly mitigated by “black stranger? No danger!” brainwashing. Why she put herself in such peril that night in Miami we may never know, and the press isn’t gonna help us find out (The Daily Beast ignored the story in favor of a lengthy “doxxing” exposé of a white spring breaker who dressed as the Joker and yelled, “Covid is over”). Deep down, Englehardt seemed to instinctively know not to put herself in a position of such vulnerability, and yet something, someone made her ignore those instincts when it mattered.

Little Robert got lucky that day in 1985. And I got lucky that there was no social media where he could vent his anger at my “racist” advice. Today, a kid would be canceled for stating the plain truth as I did.

All the more reason that truth need still be spoken. There are people—uncompromisingly malevolent and hate-filled people—actively working to dull the healthy instincts that exist to keep Little Robert out of that alley and Christine Englehardt out of that restaurant.

Let’s not make it easy for ’em.

“I’ve known Xi Jinping for a long time. … He doesn’t have a democratic — with a small ‘d’ — bone in his body,” said Joe Biden in his first press conference as president, and then he ambled on:

“He’s one of the guys, like (Russian President Vladimir) Putin, who thinks that autocracy is the wave of the future — democracy can’t function in an ever-complex world.

“It is clear, absolutely clear … that this is a battle between the utility of democracies in the 21st century and autocracies. … We have to prove democracy works.”

Thus did Biden frame the conflict between America and China in almost purely ideological terms.

“Look … your children or grandchildren are going to be doing their doctoral thesis on the issue of who succeeded: autocracy or democracy? Because that is what is at stake, not just with China.”

But is this really what the conflict between America and China for economic, military and strategic supremacy is about — a contest between two political systems? And does Xi Jinping see it that way?

Does Xi see himself as the global champion of “autocracy” or as the nationalist leader of the Chinese people and Mao’s successor as The Great Helmsman who heads the party that decides the destiny of the nation?

And are we Americans really the champions of the democracy camp in a great twilight struggle with “autocracy”?

How, then, do we embrace as a NATO ally of 70 years the Republic of Turkey, which is ruled by the autocrat Recep Tayyip Erdogan?

Our Arab allies and partners include President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi of Egypt, who came to power through a military coup that ousted an elected government. Also aligned with us are the king and crown prince of Saudi Arabia, and the monarchies of the Persian Gulf who might fairly be called not only monarchists but autocrats.

Are the king of Bahrain, the emir of Kuwait and the sultan of Oman members in good standing in America’s club of democracies?

Unlike the USSR of Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin, Xi’s China does not appear to seek to impose its political system upon the nations with which it has deep trade and commercial ties such as Australia, Japan and South Korea.

Where Nikita Khrushchev thundered, “Your children shall live under Socialism,” Xi does not.

Indeed, in the ideological struggle defined by Biden, it appears that it’s the United States and Western democracies demanding that China abide by our beliefs and values, not the other way around.

Xi puts China first, and his own people, the Han Chinese majority, also first. As for the tribal and ethnonational minorities inside China — Uighurs, Kazakhs, Tibetans, Mongols, Manchu, Hong Kongese — their rights are subordinated and restricted, as are the beliefs and value systems of Christians in many of the 50 or so Muslim countries.

Unlike America’s liberal elites who celebrate racial, religious and ethnic diversity — the more the better — China’s rulers seem to fear racial, religious, ethnic and ideological diversity as forces threatening the kind of disintegration that befell the Soviet Empire and USSR.

And unlike the Americans who worship at the altar of equality, the Chinese act on the belief that not all religious, racial and ethnic minorities have equal rights.

And while China’s growth in real and relative power and prosperity in the decades since Tiananmen Square in 1989 has been epochal, the politics of the USA seem to have grown more poisonous and the racial divisions more rancorous than they were at the end of the Reagan era.

Nor does Biden’s faith in small “d” democracy appear to have been shared by the men who founded the United States as a “republic, if you can keep it.” They saw democracy not as some object of veneration but as a danger to be avoided

“Remember, democracy never lasts long,” John Adams wrote. “It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There was never a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.”

Perhaps our greatest Chief Justice John Marshall said, “Between a balanced republic and a democracy, the difference is like that between order and chaos.”

“A Democracy is the vilest form of Government there is,” said Tom Paine, who was echoed by the father of the Constitution, Madison himself:

“Democracy is the most vile form of government. Democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention incompatible with personal security or the rights of property.”

By the end of a long life, Thomas Jefferson concluded: “A Democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where 51% of the people may take away the rights of the other 49%.”

Democracy and autocracy — of which monarchies and dictatorships are examples — are forms of government, not objects of worship. It is the country that engages the heart, not the system of government by which the country is governed. And it is the country that is the legitimate object of allegiance, loyalty and love.

And that is the meaning of “America First.”

The Week’s Floppiest, Stroppiest, and Corn-Poppiest Headlines

SWASTIKY WICKET
It is said that as Hans Frank ascended the gallows at Nuremberg, Joseph Kingsbury-Smith, the lone American press representative at the executions, posed a question: “How does it feel, having ruled all of occupied Poland with an iron fist, sending scores of Jews to their graves, to now be condemned to hang after a trial in which Jewish officials held so much power over you?”

Frank paused for a moment before responding, “Well, you win some, you Jew some.”

Everyone on the scaffold had such a good laugh, they almost forgot to kill him.

That story may be apocryphal (if by “may be” one means “absolutely is”), but it still contains a kernel of truth: Ever since April 1945, Nazi victories have been few and far between, so Nazis gotta take ’em where they get ’em.

That goes for Nazi accoutrements, too.

Last week was a surprisingly good one for New York swastikas. It didn’t start off well; a Harlem native was recorded by security cameras writing a swastika in the snow outside a famed Upper East Side synagogue. Bafflingly, Manuel Barrera, who bears a disconcerting resemblance to Gabby Hayes (“yee-haw, gonna rustle me up some grubenführer”), didn’t write in the snow in the “yellow ink” manner, which surely would’ve been more disrespectful than the finger he actually employed. For the three-second act of scrawling the ’stika, Barrera was arrested and charged with aggravated harassment, because in the utopia that is New York City there are no worse crimes on which to focus.

Sadly, the snowstika melted before Sarah Silverman could arrive on-scene to be outraged by it.

That said, the week ended much better for the despised symbol. The New York State legislature was all set to pass a bill mandating that “New York school children be educated regarding the meaning of swastikas and nooses as symbols of hatred and intolerance.”

From the bill:

As many of our youth are not aware of the hateful connotations behind swastikas and nooses, it is necessary for the legislature to mandate compulsory education in all schools across our great state in regard to the meanings of these two symbols of hate.

The measure was sailing through committees unopposed…until New York’s Hindu residents decided to bud-bud-butt in. Hindu leaders (including the Consul General of India in New York) pelted the legislature with demands that their sacred symbol not be portrayed to children as an icon of hate. In a contentious Zoom call, the peeved Punjabis explained that they were dharmad as hell and if the bill was not rescinded, they’d get their ten-armed elephant/cow/lemur deity to curse the state so that it freezes over in the winter and swelters in the summer as its elderly die in rest homes, its tax base flees, and its largest city falls to anarchy and chaos.

“Too late, Jub-Jub,” replied New York State Democratic chair Jay Jacobs, who was then reminded by an aide of how much money the state’s prosperous Indian-American community pumps into the party. In an abrupt about-face, Jacobs yelled “pull” as the bill was launched into the air and blasted with a shotgun.

“I am familiar with Swastik as a positive symbol of peace, prosperity and good tidings among people of many cultures and nationalities. We in this country have a culture of respecting each other. This bill would have been an affront to that basic premise of American democracy,” Jacobs announced to the press as his party killed the measure in committee. The bill “will not move forward, it will not be advanced in the Senate or the Assembly,” he proclaimed as the victorious Vedics lit up the night sky with burning brides.

Funny how that works. In recent months, whites have been penalized and “canceled” for innocently flashing the “OK” sign because the harmless symbol had been co-opted by trolls as a “white-power dog whistle.” “Intent doesn’t matter!” groups like the ADL declared. A white person might be using the symbol in the traditional, benevolent way, but because it might be confused with the evil, 4chan iteration, those whites must be punished.

But all of a sudden, when confronted by brown people with money, the left learned the value of respecting different interpretations of contentious symbols.

Crazy how nuance and context apply in some cases but not others.

Brown privilege, indeed.

“ME SO SOLLY”
Remember that time in 2015 when a lone hate-filled maniac shot up a black church, and because the shooter once posed for a photo holding a Confederate flag, all reruns of The Dukes of Hazzard were banned because the car on the show had a Confederate flag on the roof?

Did you ever think you’d look back on those days as a time of sanity? Well, compared with where things are now, 2015 was a veritable Age of Enlightenment.

Whereas the Charleston shooting was without question a crime motivated by blatant racial hatred, the recent Asian massage-parlor shootings were apparently motivated by the bizarre, idiosyncratic fever dreams so common to mass shooters (from the “I hate Mondays” girl straight through to the “I’m the Joker” guy in Aurora). But the fact that the Atlanta spa shooter was not motivated by racism isn’t going to get in the way of a new round of idiotic cancellations. And with the shooting still fairly fresh in the news cycle, last week’s tally of “things we can’t do anymore because an incel went bonkers” is likely just the beginning.

Hey—did someone say “incel”? Legendary Games is a major player in the exciting world of RPGs (no, not “rocket-propelled grenades.” That would be cool. This is RPG as in “role-playing games,” as in “fat nerds pretending to be cacodemons). In response to the Atlanta spa shootings, Legendary issued an apology for “racist” and “inherently culturally insensitive Asian-inspired magical spells” that had been included in one of its Dungeons & Dragons game supplements.

In the apology statement, Legendary made it clear that the spells should not have been offered to a gaming community with a “predominantly white player base.” Because the last thing society needs is a bunch of dateless fat-assed socially maladroit losers casting imaginary spells that don’t conform to their race in an imaginary game where they’re playing monsters that don’t conform to their species.

Not to be outdone, Topps trading-card company apologized for a satirical card in its “Shammy Award” Garbage Pail Kids series. The “Shammies” mocked Grammy-nominated artists by portraying them as Garbage Pail Kid-style unflattering caricatures. And one of the lampooned musical acts was BTS. No, not BDS the anti-Israel boycott-divest-sanction movement, but BTS, the Korean boy-band comprising fragile androgynous epicenes perfect for the female American pop fan who wants a boy band that screams “for girls almost ready to go lesbian but not quite yet.”

Topps apologized for the possibility that its BTS trading card might have contributed to the “plague” of anti-Asian violence “sweeping” the nation, although one could argue that a larger contributor is BTS’ crappy music. Topps withdrew the card from circulation out of fear that, in the wrong hands, the BTS card combined with the banned D&D “magic spells” could lead to a Hiroshima-level anti-Asian extinction event.

Funny enough, even Asian-owned firms got in on the apology bandwagon last week.

Apparently, there’s an Asian-owned media company called 88rising (a name tailor-made for people looking for hidden racist messages). Founder/owner Sean Miyashiro describes his outfit as a “hybrid management, record label, video production, and marketing company.” Before becoming 88rising, the outfit was known as CXSHXNLY, arguably the only name on earth that makes 88rising seem like a good choice in comparison.

Last week Miyashiro got it in his inscrutable little head that if BLM could commemorate George Floyd’s death last year with a “blackout” day, in which blacks and “allies” on Instagram posted black squares in “solidarity” with the dead fentanyl freak, Asians and allies should do a “yellowout” day of posting yellow squares on Instagram in solidarity with the dead spa workers.

Sadly, all Miyashiro ended up doing was disproving that whole “high Japanese IQ” thing. Everyone hated the idea. Asians hated being called “yellow,” BLM hated seeing their “black square” idea “appropriated,” and “allies” attacked Miyashiro for choosing a publicity stunt over “concrete action.”

88rising issued an apology, pledging that its yellow-square-posting days were through.

It’s surprising that Miyashiro didn’t try to cast one of those banned “Asian spells” to erase all the hostility directed at his company, especially as he’s got the acceptable DNA for it.

Rather selfish of him to sit on all that Asian magic while white D&D incel wizards are forced to go without.

STEVE ROGERED
Captain America’s gone gay! Look out Red Skull—you’re gonna be Red & Raw Skull once the new Captain America penetrates and injects you with his supersoldier serum. Forget HYDRA—this new Cap needs only one head to subdue his foes.

Yep—Captain America’s coming out for Pride Month, with his original triangle-shaped shield now painted pink.

Except not exactly. Technically, the new gay teen character is a Captain America, not the Captain America. In a limited-edition comic-book series debuting during Pride Month (that’s the month when LGBTXYZs really really really express pride in their identity, as opposed to the other months of the year in which they only really really express pride in their identity), Steve Rogers, the “incumbent” Captain, has lost his shield, so he’s forced to travel the country in search of it.

Great premise; a hero quest modeled after a septuagenarian looking for the TV remote.

In the course of his journey, he comes across other Captain Americas, including a gay teen named Aaron Fischer, a local Captain America who “protects” young runaways in a manner that is probably best left to the imagination.

Marvel is playing up the loafer-lightened Cap to great effect, as if it’s the first comics company to pander to gays. Which it isn’t. To this day, nothing matches the magnificent poofery of 2010’s Foreskin Man. California-based artist Matthew Hess created that character because, according to a 2011 Vice profile, “gay men love a good foreskin.”

Foreskin Man traveled the globe fighting doctors, rabbis, African tribal leaders, and Muslim clerics in a never-ending quest to prevent circumcision so that all gays worldwide would have the opportunity to “love a good foreskin.”

“Gays have more experience with different kinds of penises than heterosexual men,” Hess told Vice. “They’ve seen intact penises in an intimate way so they are one step ahead of the next guy.”

Or “behind.” Get it?

Foreskin Man was discontinued after the ADL sounded the alarm over the foreskinverse’s supervillain character “Monster Mohel,” who steals children’s foreskins in a quest to deprive gay Jews of penis pride.

Now, that was a gay comic!

Yet as the mainstream media celebrates Marvel’s “stunning and brave” commitment to readers who are LGBTQ (as opposed to LGBTO, which stands for lesbian, gay, and Bachman Turner Overdrive), veteran DC comics artist Shane Davis, known for his work on the Batman and Superman books, has a slightly more cynical take on the matter. On his Talking and Drawing podcast last week, Davis explained that the “new gay Captain America” is simply Marvel’s way to weasel out of paying for the creation of a new original character. As Davis outlines it, Marvel’s “work for hire” doodlers get jack spit for riffing on a preexisting character; they’d be entitled to far more compensation for creating a character from scratch. As long as Marvel keeps churning out new iterations of old characters, it can get away with paying its artists diddly.

Industry insider Davis points out that this is why these corporate brands keep doing these black or gay or lesbian or Hispanic or feminist or tranny variations of old characters; they don’t have to pay the artists more than cab fare, and they can use the cheaply produced incarnations to pander to an identity group for a few months, while at the same time ensuring additional publicity from fawning woke reporters and outraged conservative commentators.

This dynamic usually occurs close to the release date of a new Marvel movie or TV show featuring the riffed character. And wouldn’t you know it? The Falcon and the Winter Soldier debuted last week on Disney+.

Wotta coincidence!

Davis sees the entire sordid affair as nothing more than a cynical and manipulative ploy by Marvel to extract money from its salivating fan base.

It looks like even though it’s the new Captain America who’s gay, the fans are the ones taking it up the rear.

BREAKIN’ 3: ELECTRIC ANARCHY
What a year for Florida! Remember the days when if somebody mentioned that state, the first thing that came to mind was a naked transient high on bath salts eating the face off an astronaut in a diaper as an alligator wrestled a tiger for dibs on Caylee Anthony’s drugged carcass?

Not every 2021 political seismic shift is bad. Look at the Sunshine State today, growing so red, Democrats have practically written it off. While other states soiled their britches over Covid, Florida remained levelheaded in its balance of public safety versus individual rights and personal freedoms. Governor DeSantis is on the short list of 2024 GOP presidential contenders (second only to Trump), and as winter ends, Florida seems poised for an immediate post-Covid economic comeback.

Good news all around for America’s wang! The only thing missing from Florida’s recipe for success is a throng of intoxicated young black people, because nothing makes a good thing better than a throng of intoxicated young black people.

Back in the old days, “Black Spring Break” was an event held annually in Virginia Beach. Eventually, it was moved to the Mississippi Gulf Coast (a logical choice as East St. Louis doesn’t have a beach). This year, however, the organizers of “Black Beach Weekend” (the official governing body of Black Spring Break) announced that, due to Covid, Mississippi festivities would be postponed until the end of August.

And America’s young black partyers, known for their abstemious levelheadedness and agreeable temperament, responded by saying, “Indeed, we shall postpone our revelry until such time as the properly ordained public health officials do henceforth deem it uninjurious.”

CORRECTION: They actually said the exact opposite: “If Flurda be open, Flurda where we’ll go…and the streets shall run RED with the shed blood, broken press-on nails, and rended weaves of brawlers.”

And just like that the good people of Miami regretted not being under lockdown.

Responding to “exceptionally large and violent crowds” that city leaders admit “involve predominantly young African Americans,” last week Miami officials imposed an 8 p.m. curfew, as police were forced to use “chemical irritants and high-pitched noises to disperse crowds along Miami Beach’s famous entertainment zone on South Beach.”

The specifics of those dispersion techniques were not revealed, but rumor has it that the “chemical irritant” was the condensed and bottled scent of a library, and the “high-pitched noises” were the screams of a baby in need of child support.

Both guaranteed to disperse a certain type of crowd.

The videos from Black Spring Break (Miami edition) are, to be kind, not flattering. Brawls in restaurants, brawls in the street, diners skipping out on checks, cars stopped cold by noble, proud black twerkers, as other twerkers kung-fu-fight in the middle of traffic underneath the stoplights their ancestors invented.

Naturally, black leaders nationwide condemned the lawlessness and called on black spring breakers to display the dignity and decorum befitting the 1619ers who built this country.

CORRECTION: They actually said the exact opposite. Black political leaders and advocacy groups condemned the Miami police for intervening in the anarchy. Indeed, they claimed that attempts to stop the public violence were “racist.”

Remember last year when we were told that BLM violence was good and permissible because it was in the service of a noble cause?

Yeah, that was pretty much a crock. Turns out that such violence is equally good and permissible in the service of drunkenly tearing up a town during spring break.

For its part, Florida—its road to image rehabilitation temporarily impeded—sent an official message to Mississippi:

“How much do we have to pay you to never cancel Black Spring Break again?”

¡AY YI YIKES!
Welcome to Mexico, where the primary cause of death is the primary.

See, in the U.S., when this or that political or ideological advocacy bloc gets pissed off at a politician, they’ll say, “We’re gonna primary you!” Meaning, “We’ll run an opposing candidate to electorally remove you from office under the right and proper guidelines and conditions of our functioning constitutional republic.”

That’s a few too many words for the average disgruntled Mexican, who’s more likely to respond to a similar situation by simply telling the targeted politician, “I KEEL YOU!”

It’s always been understood by Mexican politicians that they either sell out to the drug cartels or they die. It’s the “gotta kiss some babies” principle, with a south-of-the-border twist (“gotta kiss some narcotraficantes”). It’s something the Mexican people have learned to live with. Hernando gets elected mayor of AyChihuahuateca. Hernando either plays ball with the cartels and lives (muy bueno!) or he opposes the cartels and dies (muy not bueno).

But now, the cartels have started killing off politicos before they even win their election. After all, if the nation’s storied fruit-pickers are expendable and disposable, why not the politicians?.

“Politicians Keep Getting Killed in Mexico,” read last week’s AP headline. And the attached article told a messy story of Messicans being murdered after merely filing to run for office. “Analysts said Monday 18 pre-candidates have been killed so far in the run-up to the June mid-term elections. They were killed before they opened formal campaigns.”

According to the report, potential mayors, governors, and local councillors have been blown up (kablooey bueno), riddled with bullets (pew-pew-pewey bueno), and stabbed to death (arterial spewy bueno). The killings are being carried out by a diverse coalition of “drug cartels, political rivals and corrupt police” who view murder as a cheaper alternative to graft.

Because one of the recently iced candidates was female, Mexico’s National Women’s Institute told the AP that “violence against women cannot be allowed or tolerated in a democratic system.” In theory, one would think that murdering male candidates should also not be “allowed or tolerated in a democratic system.”

Political assassinations are not uncommon in Mexico, perhaps the most well-known example being the point-blank execution of presidential candidate Luis Colosio while greeting supporters at an outdoor rally in 1994. Though blamed on a lone gunman by the corrupt political machine that ran Mexico at the time, independent researchers have long pointed to the likelihood of a conspiracy in the murder, which was supposedly orchestrated by then-President Salinas, who viewed Colosio as a threat to the party’s agenda.

Recent investigations have revealed that Salinas had indeed dispatched two backup gunmen to a nearby grassy knoll, but they forgot their mission objective when their Mexican instinct kicked in and they began to mow it.

With fewer and fewer Mexican politicians willing to run for office due to the current spate of assassinations, many worry that a Mexico devoid of political leaders could deteriorate into a lawless, anarchic hellhole of drugs, gangs, murder, kidnapping, pollution, and despair.

Uh, wait…

GSTAAD—I have not experienced such a long, continuous blizzard ever, and I’ve been coming here for 63 years. The ski lifts are closed, as are the hotels, and it’s been dumping for a week nonstop. My Portuguese handyman Fernando now lives on his snow plow, clearing the private road that leads to the house, as useless a task as trying to bail out the Titanic. By now I should be in London, enjoying my new rented house in Glebe Place; instead I’m housebound and snowed in, a modern Prisoner of Zenda without the Ruritanian uniforms.

My only worries are the conditions that cause avalanches, and my son’s insistence to keep skiing every day. That boy now simply ignores everything I say and drives away muttering something about old people being scared. If I could catch him I’d teach him a sharp lesson, the trouble being he’s among the fastest skiers in the region, and I’m now among the slowest. He also has the nasty habit of leaving his dog with me and disappearing for the day, turning me into a walker, or whatever those people are called who walk dogs for money.

This is Mother Nature giving us the middle finger. The lifts have stopped in France, Italy, and Switzerland, the resorts are closed, and she’s dumping as if this were Stalingrad. I don’t blame her. Until 150 years ago she was left alone in the Alps to organize her fauna and wildlife. Birds and furry things were undisturbed, and when there was thunder and lightning the two-legged creatures below thought they were dragons spitting fire at each other. Then some Brits kept going up higher and higher, some Swiss built hospitals and hotels, then came rich tourists; finally the proverbial you-know-what hit the fan. Mass skiing is to alpine nature what speedboats and those ghastly Jet Skis are to once-tranquil sandy beaches.

Two hundred years ago, just as the Greeks rose up against their Turkish oppressors (25 March), the first Gstaad inn also started to rise. It was made out of wood, of course, and the village’s first post office was located there, so the inn was named the Post Hotel. It is my favorite restaurant by far, and I’ve been friendly with three generations of the Widmer family, which has owned it for a century. On Friday evenings carpenters and farmers gather at the communal table and create a nostalgic atmosphere with their yodeling and beer drinking. Papa Hemingway spent some time there when he climbed with skins and slid down the Wasserngrat after emptying a couple of bottles of Swiss white wine, but when years ago I asked for a plaque to be put up, they said Monsieur Hemingway lived in Rougemont and rarely visited. I dropped it. They were thinking of my friend Jack Heminway, without the g, who did live nearby but preferred the Palace. I lunched every Jan. 1 at the Post Hotel with the King of Greece and Aleko Goulandris, a tradition that was decades long and ended with Aleko’s death a few years ago. Those were great lunches because I would arrive with very little sleep, and sometimes with no sleep at all, to the great amusement of my two friends. Champagne was always waiting on ice, and it always revived a weary New Year’s Eve celebrant. Alas, one more tradition down the drain.

With three days to go before my departure for London, I gave a dinner party in honor of Tim Hanbury, who was not present. The Cornet twins were, however, and their mother literally owns Stella Artois, which Timmy drinks a minimum twenty cans per day for the past thirty years and has not added a milligram of weight. The twins want to hire him as the perfect-specimen ad, but I told them that Timmy owns 2 to 3 million acres and hence is independently wealthy. Mark Lloyd, Anthony Bingham, Lara Livanos, Patricia Wallentin, and my son and heir made eight for dinner, but everyone present except my boy had been vaccinated or had had the virus. This is the good news.

The bad is that I’m in trouble yet again with Charlie the driver. You may recall that he and his wife did not appreciate my joke about all the hookers who knew him by his first name when he waited in a tiny hamlet while I went up by mini-train to Wengen. Last week as he was taking me to Bern for my second shot he noticed a pretty French maid in my kitchen and commented that he found her very attractive. “As she does you,” I told him. That got him all agitated and he asked what did I base that on. “She mentioned how attractive you are for a mature man,” I told him. “And what did you say to her?” said Charlie, gulping for air. “Well, I told her that yes, lots of women find you attractive, but you are true to your boyfriend and never stray, as you are 100 percent homosexual.”

Charlie fell for my tale and lost it, and while gesticulating wildly he almost went off the road. “I didn’t want to have any trouble with your wife,” I told him, and then went in and got my second shot, and now I’m on my way to London and the loving arms of my wife. But Charlie is making faces and the French maid thinks I’m a s— stirrer.

I have been in quarantine for the past nine days since my arrival in England from France. I am not sure whether this was a public health or a punitive measure, but if the latter, it certainly failed of its effect: I adore being in quarantine.

In the first place, it gives me a good excuse for my natural physical indolence. I stay in bed working until late in the morning, but when at last I do get up, at least I put on my shoes rather than my slippers, which gives me the impression that I would have gone for a long walk if I had been permitted to do so. And after all, it is the thought that counts, as everyone knows who has ever received a horrible but well-meaning present.

In the second place, it (quarantine) gives me oceans of time for reading, including books that I would not otherwise have read. Although I have now exceeded my biblical span, I still feel that I should improve each shining hour, and therefore read only what is instructive and good for my mind. No trash, nothing for the pleasure pure and simple (though pleasure, like truth, is rarely pure and never simple). I suppose this is what comes from living in a once-Protestant country.

Anyhow, what I really like reading about is British crime between, roughly, 1840 and 1950, with lives of the great judges and the great criminals, as well as the transcripts of the most sensational trials. Until the Second World War, many judges were popular and admired figures in Britain, and were cheered by crowds when they arrived in circuit towns to try a local case of, say, poisoning. The great advocates likewise were popular heroes, and indeed they were often brilliant. As cults of heroes go, this was a good one. I partake a little of it myself.

I therefore settled down comfortably and with a relatively good conscience (that is to say, an absence of feeling that I should have been doing something more constructive) to read a biography of Lord Darling, a famous judge between 1897 and 1923. He was a small and spare man, famed for his witticisms, and the writer of little essays about lawyers and parliamentarians (he sat for a time in Parliament). He presided over some famous trials, including that of Herbert Rowse Armstrong, the only solicitor ever to be hanged, who was accused of poisoning his wife with arsenic and also of having tried to poison another lawyer in the same way by lacing a scone with arsenic, which he handed to him with the memorably laconic words “Excuse fingers.” The fingers were the least of it.

Actually, Darling’s essays and witticisms fall flat today, and the biography reveals him to have been a man of (for the time) very conventional prejudices. During the First World War he was extremely xenophobic toward or about the Germans, displaying no emotional distance whatever from the current national feeling. He was something of a poet, or a versifier, and here are a few lines that he thought right to publish during the war:

Where the plaintive sea-fowls hover and scream
O’er wan faces awash in the brine,
Along the dread frontier of Germany’s dream—
Is that, then, the Hindenburg Line?

No, no! ’Tis a gulf that the Teuton divides
From mankind and from mercy divine,
Deep down in the soul where the Devil presides—
That, that is the Hindenburg Line!

The Germans were scarcely human: and we know what that kind of thought can lead to.

Darling also published (under the pseudonym of X) a letter in The Times of London, to the effect that, when a German ship was sunk, the sailors should be left to drown in the sea. For a reason that is not entirely easy to elucidate (if one believes in the rightness of torpedoing ships at all, that is), this is a deeply shocking proposal. Darling ends his letter by quoting a famous couplet from Arthur Hugh Clough’s poem “The Latest Decalogue”:

Thou shalt not kill, but need’st not strive
Officiously to keep alive.

This is shocking too, for it is in direct contradiction to the obvious original meaning of the lines. Darling, who was a cultivated and clever man, who could quote any number of Latin tags and could use quotations from the English or French poets to illustrate any point he was trying to make (he wrote bad verse in French, too), completely reversed the meaning of Clough’s lines, which were intended to criticize Victorian hypocrisy with bitter irony, as the following two examples of the new Victorian Ten Commandments illustrate beyond any possibility of doubt:

Thou shalt have one God only; who
Would be at the expense of two?

Do not adultery commit:
Advantage rarely comes of it…
And so on and so forth.

In other words, Clough clearly meant that you should do everything you could officiously (which in this case means attentively and with great care) to keep someone alive, and was opposed to what he saw as the hypocrisy of his pharisaic fellow countrymen of the time.

Of course, no discussion of medical ethics is complete without the quotation from Clough. Whether Clough was right or wrong is not the point; the fact is that his words are almost always quoted to mean precisely the opposite of what he intended them to mean. One is reminded of the foundations that very rich men leave behind them, which often are applied to purposes diametrically opposed to those of their founders. But is it not a little shocking that a judge and a literary man should be so careless?

Well, even Homer slept, and in any case there is no suggestion that Darling let his very strong private prejudices interfere with his administration of the law, in which he scrupulously tried to be fair, if (like all human beings) he was not always right. And this is a very important point that goes to the heart of the jury system (in which I believe), and indeed of human life itself, namely that people are able to abstract themselves from their prejudices in certain circumstances and deliver themselves of an opinion—for example, of guilt or innocence—according to the evidence presented. Indeed, if this were not the case, what would be the point of ratiocination at all?

Does anyone else find it odd that so many Asian activists reacted to the mass murder of (mostly) Asian women last week by talking about how smoking hot they are?

I was at law school when I first noticed the phenomenon of liberal women pretending to be outraged as a cover for bragging. Average-to-ugly girls would work up feigned indignation about how a guy had “sexually harassed” them that day, then launch into a 20-minute retelling of some compliment they’d received. A man talked to me! I think he likes me … Let’s see, how do I work this into conversation for the rest of the week?

But it’s a peculiar reaction to mass murder.

Now that a white supremacist mass shooter (check that, turns out he was a radical Islamic Syrian refugee!) has committed a different mass murder in Boulder, Colorado, will we see hippies on TV, denouncing the assumption that Birkenstock-wearers are all sex gods?

No, of course not! Only liberals would think an appropriate response to an infamous crime is to talk about how sexually desirable they are. Liberalism makes everybody stupid.

Thus, for days after the fatal shooting of six Asians and two whites at massage-cum-sex spas in Atlanta, Asian activists and professors blanketed the airwaves to demand that white men STOP treating them like sex objects — whom they fantasize about, they want, they covet. Newspapers were chock-a-block with first-person accounts of Asian women being salivated over by white men.

Christine Liwag Dixon modestly began her tale of oppression for The Washington Post‘s “The Lily”: “When I was 16, a boy I thought was my friend said, ‘I can’t figure you out. Asian girls are either smart or hot. But you’re both.'” She’s older and married now, but still cherishes this comment from high school.

Amid her recitation of other compliments she’d received over the course of a lifetime — some stupid, some vulgar, and some, I’d wager, completely fictional — Liwag Dixon remarked, “It no longer surprises me, but it still hurts.”

Well, naturally. Who wouldn’t be hurt to be called both smart AND hot?

Among the distressing compliments detailed by Liwag Dixon, she reports that she was often called “exotic.” (I will NOT link to the scene in “NewsRadio,” where Beth explains the meaning of words like “cute,” “beautiful” and “exotic.”

Professors of color were prepared with scholarly opinions about how tantalizing Asian women are. Elaine Kim, professor emeritus in Asian American studies at the University of California, Berkeley, told the Associated Press that the Atlanta shooter probably had “an addiction to fantasies about Asian women as sex objects.”

However that may be, these particular spas were known as fronts for prostitution, which may also have put the idea of sex in the shooter’s head.

Another Berkeley professor, Catherine Ceniza Choy (Ethnic Studies), conveyed that the shooting “echoes a long-running stereotype that Asian women are immoral and hypersexual.” Ellen Wu, a history professor at Indiana University, confirmed that “from the moment Asian women began to migrate to the U.S., they were targets of hypersexualization.”

It all had a familiar ring …

HEY! Anybody remember the Duke lacrosse rape hoax?

Before the gang rape of a black stripper was exposed as a complete fraud — though well after three white families had their pockets emptied and their names dragged through the mud — an enormous amount of the commentary centered on white men’s lascivious interest in black women. (So of course the gang rape had to be true!)

The Duke lacrosse case “fed the stereotype that black women are hypersexual and readily available,” as the Associated Press put it. The article quoted a number of black coeds on how white guys just can’t keep their hands off African American ladies:

“The young black women can almost finish each other’s stories.

“They go to a party, a concert, a nightclub. Twenty-somethings of all colors are flirting and dancing. And then it happens.

“Inevitably, a woman says, a white man asks her to dance erotically while he watches. Or he grabs her rear end. Or asks for sex, in graphic detail, without bothering to ask her name.”

A black Duke coed, Audrey Christopher, complained to the Durham Indy that “at one of the quad parties, it was me and another black female friend, and these white guys immediately told us how they liked hanging out with black girls because white girls are sheltered and we’re more free …”

Again, the professors of color weighed in. Rebecca Hall (Surprise! Also Berkeley) said of the Duke gang-rape charges, a “black woman is somebody who has excess sexuality … it’s excess sexuality that white men are entitled to.” Duke professor Mark Anthony Neal said: “The message that men get about black women is these are women that are available to them, that they have easy access and their sole purpose is to serve their pleasure.”

To the extent that their argument isn’t simply that black women are hot, hot, hot, but that white men feel entitled to pillage black bodies, that’s not borne out by the data. According to FBI crime statistics, approximately 15,000 to 30,000 white women are raped by black men every year, while, on average, zero black women are raped by white men. (The department uses “0” to denote fewer than 10 victims.)

Nor, of course, was the rapacious white male theory supported by the facts of the very case they were discussing.

We don’t have a lot of women mass shooters, so it’s hard to flip the script. But maybe, in the future, whenever a white man is falsely accused of rape (Steven Pagones, the Duke lacrosse players, a fraternity at the University of Virginia) or murder (Darren Wilson, Jake Gardner, Staten Island police officers), white men should fan out across the airwaves to talk about how damn sexy they are.

Until then, I’m begging you, white men, please, for the love of God, STOP turning liberal women into your sexual fantasies!!!

Walter Isaacson, the respected biographer of Steve Jobs, has turned his talents to Jennifer Doudna, who won last year’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry for coinventing the CRISPR gene editing technique.

In his The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race, the scientist emerges as competent and competitive. But this best-seller’s most compelling personality turns out to be her canceled but unrepentant inspiration, James D. Watson, whom Isaacson and Doudna visit in his internal exile in 2019.

Along with her CRISPR co-Laureate, the elegant and very French Emmanuelle Charpentier, Doudna (pronounced DOWD-nuh) exemplifies the huge surge over the last two generations of talented women into the life sciences. As I have been known to joke, there are few women in the premier death science, physics, because no girl ever felt that Robert Oppenheimer’s reaction to his atomic bomb test—“I am become Death, destroyer of worlds”—sounded awesome. (But lots of boys have.)

Instead, women have flocked to the biological sciences, with beneficial effects for humanity during the current health crisis.

In Isaacson’s 2011 biography of Jobs, little Steve forced his parents to move to a better school district after he was subjected to antiwhite bullying. Similarly, Doudna as a schoolgirl was subjected to Hawaii’s antiwhite racism. Isaacson begins his biography:

Had she grown up in any other part of America, Jennifer Doudna might have felt like a regular kid. But in Hilo…the fact that she was blond, blue-eyed, and lanky made her feel, she later said, “like I was a complete freak.” She was teased by the other kids, especially the boys, because unlike them she had hair on her arms. They called her a “haole,” a term that, though not quite as bad as it sounds, was often used as a pejorative for non-natives.

As with Jobs, Doudna was rescued by her family’s White Flight to a nice suburb with a better school where she was happier.

In sixth grade, her father, a literature professor at the U. of Hawaii in Hilo (who later died of melanoma), gave her the book that most influenced her life: Watson’s cheeky memoir The Double Helix: A Personal Account of the Discovery of the Structure of DNA. (Indeed, The Code Breaker appears intended to serve as a Double Helix 2.0 to document what has changed in biology over the past seventy years.)

After that, she was only mildly inconvenienced by Hilo’s anti-intellectual culture and was soon off to Pomona College, Harvard, and eventually UC Berkeley, where she is today a professor of biochemistry. One of her earliest public lectures was in front of Watson in 1987, after which he came up to congratulate her, boosting her confidence. She continued throughout her career to attend his annual seminars at Cold Springs Harbor Laboratory.

Isaacson is a highbrow man who writes mostly about men of genius (his other subjects include Einstein, Franklin, and Leonardo), so he doesn’t dig deep for personal details about Doudna’s brief first marriage or how, as a young professor, she then came to marry one of her grad students. In this lavishly illustrated book, there’s a picture of her at Harvard looking fetching with black hair, but Isaacson isn’t going to ask a distinguished scientist why she decided to go back to blond, even if readers would like to know.

Isaacson has bigger fish to fry. For example, he wants to show how Doudna’s type of basic science pays off in practical applications. As Vannevar Bush reported to Harry Truman in 1945, “Basic research is the pacemaker of technological process.”

On the other hand, Isaacson notes, the contemporary culture of academics getting rich off of their lab discoveries inspires a huge amount of constructive competition. Within a half year of Doudna and Charpentier’s 2012 paper announcing they had figured out how to program CRISPR RNA to edit DNA in a test tube, five labs reported, almost simultaneously, that they could now do this trick in living cells. (In contrast, my main recollection from reading The Double Helix in high school was that back in less competitive 1953 Watson and Crick seemed to have plenty of time on their hands to play tennis while still racing Linus Pauling and Rosalind Franklin to be the first to figure out the structure of DNA.)

But the billions now at stake can divert successful scientific talent into distracting patent battles. The Broad Institute under Joe Biden’s wily science adviser Eric Lander outhustled Doudna’s more naive team to be issued the first U.S. patent for CRISPR, setting off a massive struggle in courts around the world that may still be going on.

Lander is more or the less the antagonist in The Code Breaker, with one friend of Doudna’s calling the Biden Administration official an “evil genius,” and the ever-diplomatic Isaacson deftly declaring himself one of Lander’s “alloyed admirers.”

Even the normally indefatigable Isaacson wearies of the convolutions of the patent brouhaha and winds up reminding the contestants that silicon chip coinventors Jack Kilby of Texas Instruments and Robert Noyce of Intel eventually came to an equitable and productive out-of-court settlement:

Noyce and Kilby obeyed an all-important business maxim: Don’t fight over divvying up the proceeds until you finish robbing the stagecoach.

CRISPR is now in clinical trials attempting to treat some hereditary diseases. An African-American woman’s sickle cell anemia apparently has been cured by it. But these “somatic” treatments that try to alter most of the existing genes in bodies are wildly expensive so far.

For most potential purposes, it would seem more economical to use CRISPR to fix genes in embryos and then let natural development proliferate them. But editing the human germline in ways that would be inherited by future generations raises disturbing Gattaca-style questions about Francis Galton’s dream of eugenics.

For example, Isaacson says it would clearly be good to get rid of Huntington’s disease, a hereditary ailment that kills adults, often soon after they have passed their deadly defect on to their orphans. Huntington’s is caused by a bad mutation in a single gene, so it could well be proofread by CRISPR.

What about germline treatment of schizophrenia, which, for instance, besets Watson’s son Rufus? Watson says that of course we should abolish schizophrenia if we can, it’s horrible. Still, Isaacson wonders if schizophrenia might be related to genes that code for artistic creativity. If we get rid of schizophrenia, might we also diminish its aesthetic cousins?

And what about germline enhancements, especially the big one: IQ? Do we want a world in which celebrities don’t have to engage in comic “Varsity Blues” conspiracies to slip their dim children into fancy colleges but can simply pay to have them genetically engineered to be actually smarter than the masses?

Everybody is interested in (or horrified by) the potential of genetic engineering in large part because it might eventually raise IQs, which in turn could lead to more discoveries to further raise IQs, driving humanity into a genetically engineered brave new world that no one can quite foresee. Are we ready to decide if that’s what we want, Isaacson repeatedly asks?

While Lander has called for a moratorium on human germline editing experiments, Doudna wants to “proceed prudently.”

Personally, I’m unenthusiastic about eugenics. So I was surprised that Isaacson, after giving both sides of the argument, decides on the next-to-last page:

I now see the promise of CRISPR more clearly than the peril.

I suspect, though, that CRISPR will be less likely to soon be used for enhancements of major features such as IQ than we would have assumed back in 2000 because our understanding of the complexity of IQ genetics has grown. In the 2000s, scientists focused on finding single genes of large effect. But in the 2010s it was determined that most of the big traits such as height or intelligence appear to be influenced by hundreds or even thousands of genes of small effect.

Will it ever be safe or economical to use CRISPR to tinker with huge numbers of genes? Preimplantation genetic screening seems more practical than gene editing if you aren’t willing to make your baby the old-fashioned way.

But all this raises a question of current interest that Isaacson dances close to but tries to avoid. Isaacson’s assumption that genetics plays a role in IQ treads perilously close to the crimethink about the world’s most intractable IQ reality, the gap on average between sub-Saharan Africans versus East Asians and Caucasians that got James D. Watson, America’s most distinguished man of science, canceled in 2007. Watson told The Times of London:

He says that he is “inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa” because “all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours—whereas all the testing says not really.”

The cadre of high-caliber intellects who are profiled in The Code Breakers know a lot more about the realities of IQ, race, and genetics than do the midwits who canceled Watson. So for the great man’s 90th birthday a benefit celebration was organized at which Lander made a gracious toast to Watson. But when the usual Twitter dopes went nuts with hate, Lander cravenly condemned Watson for his realism and even implied that Watson was anti-Semitic.

Isaacson, who frequently interviews Watson, reports:

Watson was infuriated by Lander’s assertion that it was wrong to be “recognizing him in any way” and the insinuations that he was anti-Semitic. “Lander is regarded as a joke,” Watson exploded. “My life has been dominated by, first, my father’s love for Jews, and all my good friends in America have been Jewish.” He went on to emphasize to me, in a way that would not have mollified his critics, his view that Ashkenazi Jews, who lived for centuries in Northern Europe, were genetically more intelligent than other ethnic groups, a point he supported by rattling off those who had won Nobel Prizes.

When PBS made an American Masters documentary about Watson in 2018, they gave him the chance to renounce his observations about race and IQ. Heroically, he told the truth as he sees it:

“I would like for them to have changed, that there be new knowledge that says that your nurture is much more important than nature,” he said as the cameras rolled. “But I haven’t seen any knowledge. And there’s a difference on the average between blacks and whites on I.Q. tests. I would say the difference is, it’s genetic…. It should be no surprise that someone who won the race to find the double helix should think that genes are important.”

My view is that intelligence, race, and genetics make a very complex subject, and that it has yet to be proven that the sizable average IQ gap between, say, sub-Saharans and Ashkenazis is driven in part by a genetic component. But at present, that seems to be the way to bet.

In any case, we will know for sure soon enough.

I don’t know why stupid people are so intent at the moment on doubling down on their hateful behavior toward smart people like Watson, when the odds are they will be proven very wrong in the not-too-distant future…

Other than that they are stupid and hate-filled.

Speaking of such, The New York Times’ lowbrow science denialist Amy Harmon then had Watson put on Double Secret Cancellation. Amusingly, the snitch later revealed that she is peeved that every time she does another touchdown dance on Twitter over having the nonagenarian great man canceled, nobodies tweet back at her what Galileo is thought to have stubbornly muttered after his conviction for asserting that Earth goes around the sun: “And yet, it moves.”

Isaacson philosophizes:

One question raised by the [Watson] conundrum relates, at least metaphorically, to gene editing. Cutting out a gene for an unwanted trait (sickle cell anemia or HIV receptivity) might change some existing desirable trait (resistance to malaria or the West Nile virus).

Likewise, is Watson’s inability to mislead for political reasons related to his scientific accomplishments?

Watson thinks so.

In 2019, Watson was banned from setting foot in the seminar series he’d founded at Cold Harbor, so Isaacson and Doudna went to see him. Although he’d recently been hospitalized after a car crash, his mind was sharp. When asked about his legendary rival Linus Pauling:

“What matters now are his perfections, not his past imperfections.” Perhaps people may say that of Watson someday, but in 2019 he was an outcast.

Watson went on about himself:

“I think my blunt and contrary nature helps my science, because I don’t simply accept things just because other people believe it,” he says. “My strength is not that I’m smarter, it’s that I’m more willing to offend the crowd.”…

Was that the case I ask, with his comments on race and intelligence?…

“I couldn’t deny what I believed,” he tells me…. “I always follow my father’s advice of saying the truth,” he replies. “Somebody has to say the truth.”

They’re not making them like they used to.

Operation Slippery Slope has hit a snag: too many casualties from friendly fire.

From its official launch in January, Slippery Slope was an ill-conceived aktion with a smoky objective. The plan was fairly simple: Scour local news for all instances in which an Asian person was assaulted by a stranger. Present those incidents with no control sample (i.e., how many whites were assaulted by strangers in those cities during the same period) so that, absent perspective, an illusion is created, a mirage of an epidemic of anti-Asian mayhem carried out by white supremacists because of Covid, Trump, and “China virus” hate speech.

When a white person is savagely attacked by a black, the default official position is always “not hate crime” unless there’s extraordinary evidence to the contrary. Conversely, Slippery Slope’s handbook mandates that all assaults against Asians are default “hate crimes” regardless of the circumstances.

The timing of the operation is odd. Trump’s been out of office for months. Peak lockdown rage has passed; cities are opening up again. Plus, there’s no correlation between the cities where residents are still being tormented by lockdowns (like L.A.) and the location of the assaults. And if the timing is peculiar, so’s the objective—in that it’s hard to figure out exactly what it is. There’s no election coming up, no Trump to defeat, no Democrat in a tight race in a heavily Asian district.

Worse still, most of the assault perpetrators have been black. That really put a dent in the “white supremacist” thing. Until last week, when a repressed neurotic white Bible-boy who lives in fear that every time he jerks it Jesus takes a spear to the pericardium gave an unhappy ending to eight massage-parlor temptresses, six of whom were Asian. This would be Slippery Slope’s Gulf of Tonkin! Now the “epidemic” had drawn mass blood (sure, two of the victims were white, but details, details…). Time for an all-out offensive against racist whites whose anti-Asian words and thoughts had “contributed” to a “climate” that “caused” the mass shooting. The fact that the killer didn’t have a racist motive or a track record of racist comments was irrelevant; the media quickly declared that the police can’t be trusted to accurately investigate the crime. Journalists and Hollywood celebrities simply “knew” that racism was the motive, and their psychic hunches beat actual investigative work and facts (so much for “trusting the science”).

This Chinese chicken salad of stupidity became such a big deal, President Biden and Co-President Harris journeyed to Atlanta to “mourn” the victims (just the Asian ones). History books will forever record that the very first Biden/Harris joint trip was a pilgrimage to grieve for six massage-parlor employees.

Praising the trip, the AP pointed out that Harris is “the first person of South Asian descent to hold national office” (wait, wasn’t she “black” just a month ago?).

Still, this massive operation was steaming ahead with no obvious goal. And any military exercise launched without a fixed goal can only go south because there’s no clearly defined north. Arguably, the endgame might be passage of Biden’s “COVID-19 Hate Crimes Act,” described by the AP as “a bill that would strengthen the government’s reporting and response to hate crimes and provide resources to Asian American communities.” But the books are already crammed with so many “hate crime” statutes, manufacturing a phony epidemic to pass one more seems a waste of energy.

Worse still, Slippery Slope’s first skirmishes have been catastrophic. The initial casualties haven’t been evil white dudes, but noble nonwhites.

Media darling Alexi McCammond, a woman with literally zero skills beyond having been born black, and it’s an open question if that’s actually a “skill,” was hired away from her position as proud black reporter at Axios and MSNBC to be the proud black editor of Teen Vogue. Earlier this year, the magazine’s diapered zoomers balked at McCammond because back when she herself was a teen, she tweeted a few hurty things about Asians. But Condé Nast, owner of Teen Vogue, pledged to stand by the new hire. That is, until Rod Flanders shot up those massage parlors. Within days, McCammond got her proud black walking papers.

Following McCammond’s departure, Teen Vogue senior staffer Christine Davitt, a Filipino “fat queer femme” who led the fight to get McCammond McCanned, was herself “canceled” after angry black McCammond supporters dug up old tweets in which she called people “nigga.”

Slippery Slope’s casualty count so far? One leftist black, one leftist Asian.

And another black is in critical condition, not expected to pull through. Alison Collins is the vice president of the San Francisco Board of Education. Back in 2016, she went on a tweetstorm calling Asians “house niggers” who “use white supremacist thinking to assimilate and get ahead.” She also claimed that Asian students routinely taunt and bully black and brown ones as Asian teachers look on. And she condemned merit-based admissions standards for letting in too many Asians.

Collins is now being pelted with calls for her resignation. A recall effort has already been initiated.

Even a deceitful attempt to “cancel” a white police captain in Cherokee County for “diminishing” and “excusing” the Atlanta shooter and his motives didn’t go as planned. Asian activists were more outraged over the actual diminishing and excusing done by Jewish Marxist San Francisco DA Chesa Boudin, who dismissed the 19-year-old black murderer of 84-year-old Thai man Vicha Ratanapkadee as a frustrated youth who merely had a little “temper tantrum.”

A white was targeted, but a Jew got hit.

Why is Slippery Slope so awash in misfires?

Well, for starters, any scheme that involves trying to elevate Asians or any group to the position of victimhood currently occupied by blacks is destined to fail. Jews have tried that themselves (“oy, we’re just as oppressed as blacks!”) with equally disastrous results. As I explained a few weeks ago, blacks aren’t even keen on sharing victim status with Hispanics, but at least in that case both groups can claim similarly low socioeconomic and academic achievements. But when Asians and Jews try to muscle in on the victim action, blacks balk, because those two groups have been able to achieve a level of success most blacks can only dream of.

Also, and I say this as a guy who spent his youth in majority-black public schools, blacks love a good “chinky chinky Chinaman” joke. Scratch any black Twitterer and you’ll find at least a few past tweets making fun of Asian speech, looks, or behavior. To the blacks in my school, Asians represented either the high-scoring geniuses who show them up in class, or the liquor-store owners who dare demand they not shoplift.

In more recent years, the spread of “white privilege” theology has widened the black/Asian rift. If one accepts as gospel that success in America comes only via white privilege, then by logical extension one must believe that any group that succeeds is part of that privilege. That’s the only way to view the situation while still adhering to the faith. Asian success “proves” that Asians are part of the privilege power dynamic that exists to oppress blacks. Therefore, Asians are part of the problem (and as such can’t be “allies”).

That’s the irony in trying to frame the “anti-Asian violence plague” as a “white racism” problem. Blacks are far more likely to be anti-Asian than whites, even right-wing whites. Sure, many white rightists justifiably view China as the prime threat to the U.S., but conservative opposition to China is not opposition to the Chinese as a people. In fact, anti-CCP Chinese are beloved. Steve Bannon, for example, is squarely in the pocket of anti-CCP Chins. The inveterate fawning fraudster claims that the Chinese people are “the single biggest victims” of Covid, so fuck off Americans with your whining. Bannon was even lounging on a Chinese billionaire’s yacht when he was arrested last year. Indeed, back when prison seemed Bannon’s certain destination, I worried that he’s so used to fellating Chinamen, the poor guy might dislocate his jaw on a black cellmate.

The war against anti-Asian hurty words is not gonna net guys like Bannon. It’s gonna ensnare folks named DaQuantico and J’Meretrishus. Friendly fire, like #MeToo, which took down more allies than foes (from Al Franken and John Conyers to major Dem fundraisers Harvey Weinstein and Russell Simmons to Clinton pal Kevin Spacey and now, the murderous thug Cuomo).

Losing blacks in the name of the new Asian “untouchability” will be disastrous for leftists. Yes, Asians are reliably Democrat voters (Vietnamese possibly excepted), but blacks are the heart of the party. Blacks give the Democrat Party “moral” justification for its actions, and black thugs serve as the party’s strikebreakers, its Pinkertons. If black suffering doesn’t guilt you into assent, black fists will make you a less refusable offer.

Politically inclined Asians are surely enjoying their newfound importance. The smart ones—and there are lots of those—understand that if you can get a Democrat to sacrifice a black in your name, you have clout. It’s a tenet religiously adhered to by both Asians and Jews: Always exploit an edge. Since the Atlanta shootings, the steady stream of crocodile tears dampening the inscrutable faces of Asian media elites has been impressive. I half expect them to cry “nevah again.”

The cynicism’s so thick you can cut it with a scythe. And here’s where Jews and Asians part company. Asians—the Chinese specifically—are strikingly unsentimental. Jews, on the other hand, are hobbled by sentimentality. These Hollywood storytellers, these nebbishy authors of Tin Pan Alley torch songs, have a vulnerability. They’re genuinely hurt, emotionally lanced, when blacks turn against them. “We’re brothers in the struggle! Can’t the schvartzes see what we’ve done for them?” The storied history of social justice Jewry is intertwined with the history of blacks. “Oy, we cofounded the NAACP! We funded the civil rights movement! Chaney, Goodman, Schwerner!”

Asians are far less inclined to be emotionally scarred if blacks don’t like them. They know they’re not “in it together” with blacks; they don’t share that lie the Jews tell themselves. If Democrats want to make it a crime to speak ill of Asians, Asians will work that edge expertly, black collateral damage be damned.

The question becomes, will Democrats be comfortable with that damage? My gut says no. A few more canceled high-profile blacks, a few more brutish black assailants, and we’ll likely see the winding down of Slippery Slope, a hastily assembled unfocused Bay of Pigs-style fiasco that will soon fade from memory, especially as the Chauvin trial and the one-year anniversary of the martyrdom of Saint Floyd approach, and blacks get to reassert themselves as the only group that truly matters (or else!).

I just hope that during the next riot blacks don’t hold too much of a grudge against Asians for briefly stealing their spotlight. And I’m sure the Asian owners of convenience stores in black neighborhoods share that hope…to a much greater degree.

Our mainstream media largely ignored it, the world media did not.

Ascending the stairs of Air Force One on Friday, to fly to Georgia, President Joe Biden slipped and stumbled. Getting up, he slipped again and then fell. The scene was jolting and disquieting.

Adversaries abroad will use it as a metaphor for the decline of the last superpower to emerge from the Cold War.

And while our major media may scoff at it, there is talk all over this town about what appears to be the visibly declining physical and mental capacity of this oldest of American presidents at 78.

Biden’s press conference this coming Thursday — after the longest delay before a first full presidential press conference since Cal Coolidge — will be as closely monitored as Ronald Reagan’s second debate in 1984, after he seemed to suffer a mental lapse in his first debate with Fritz Mondale.

But now, after his legislative triumph with the enactment of his $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan, Joe Biden has some new problems, all of his own making.

The COVID-19 pandemic he inherited, as Nixon inherited Vietnam in 1969. But Biden and the nation were fortunate in that, by the time he took the oath, two vaccines had been approved and the shots were being given to Americans at a rate of a million doses a day.

The new crisis on America’s border, however, with record numbers of children, teenagers and families arriving and asking for asylum, is almost entirely Biden’s doing.

By trashing Donald Trump’s border controls as inhumane and promising a more compassionate policy, Biden sent word to Central and South America and the world that the U.S. borders were open again. The result is what we see nightly on TV: Migrants crossing over into the USA in record numbers, with no end in sight.

What Gov. Andrew Cuomo did to the nursing homes of New York — send COVID-positive patients back into them — Biden is doing to the USA.

Of the thousands of illegal immigrants entering our country daily, few are tested for COVID-19 before being moved into the American heartland, carrying the infection with them.

How do you control a pandemic when our 2,000-mile southern border is a crossing corridor for thousands of infected every single day?

Biden’s people call this a “challenge.” But for the country, which seemed to be pulling out of the pandemic, it is a medical and security emergency and a national crisis.

Yet, it is not only on the domestic front that Biden and his people have created for themselves new and unnecessary crises.

Biden is only two months into his presidency but already has brought U.S.-China relations to the lowest level since the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989. And he has brought U.S.-Russian relations to the lowest level since Nikita Khrushchev blew up the Paris summit of May 1960 over President Eisenhower’s refusal to apologize for the U-2 spy flight over Russia that the Soviets had shot down.

Biden is himself responsible for the poisoned relations with Russia, after telling ABC that, yes, Vladimir Putin is “a killer” whom he once told to his face that he had no “soul.”

In chilling relations with China, Secretary of State Antony Blinken has played the lead role.

Before taking office, Blinken publicly charged the Chinese government with “genocide” in its treatment of the Uighurs. He then opened the two-day Anchorage meeting with a two-minute indictment of China for its actions in Xinjiang, Hong Kong and Taiwan — and got back a blistering 20-minute Chinese counterattack. The thrust of Beijing’s response:

Xinjiang, Tibet and Hong Kong are Chinese national territories, and how we rule there is none of America’s business. Nor do you Americans have any superior moral claim or right to sit in judgment on us, given your own record with indigenous peoples and Black Americans.

Nor do you have any right to impose your democracy or values on us, when we prefer our system and our values. As for your claim to define for the world the so-called rules-based international order, we reject that, too, and intend to erect an order based upon our interests and our values.

So, stop trying to impose your democracy on us or the rest of the world which may not want it. The U.S. delegation can speak for the United States. It does not speak for the world, much of which openly rejects it.

By calling Vladimir Putin a “killer,” Biden seems to have aborted the kind of summitry with Moscow in which Presidents Eisenhower, Nixon, Reagan and Bush I engaged during the Cold War when the Soviet Union was a far more menacing and hostile power than Putin’s Russia is today.

From Biden’s behavior in his first 60 days, we already seem fated to endure years more of deepening Cold War with Russia and China.

To what end this Biden-Blinken in-your-face diplomacy?

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