Joe Biden may not be a radical socialist, but he is doing the best imitation of one this writer has lately seen.
After enacting a COVID-19 relief package of $1.9 trillion in March without a single Republican vote in Congress, Biden proposed a jobs and infrastructure program of $2.2 trillion. He has now added an “American Families Plan” of another $1.8 trillion.
In his speech to the joint session of Congress, Biden laid out its contents. The Washington Times relates:
“Mr. Biden’s latest spending package includes $225 billion for child care, $225 billion for a national paid family and medical leave program, $200 billion to extend bolstered Obamacare subsidies in his $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief package, $200 billion for universal pre-K, and $109 billion for two years of free community college for all Americans.”
While Biden’s $6 trillion in total spending is spread over several years, it represents a claim on the nation’s wealth equal to 30% of GDP — a figure comparable to FDR’s New Deal and LBJ’s Great Society.
One hundred days into his term, our oldest president is seeking to become a transformative progressive president in the FDR mold, and he is betting his presidency he can bring it off.
Where does Biden propose to get the money to pay for this great leap forward for government?
Biden proposes to raise the U.S. corporate tax by one-third to 28%, raise the personal income tax rate to 40%, double the tax on capital gains to 40%, and raise death and inheritance taxes to effect a greater equality of wealth in America.
To accomplish this, without Republican support in either house of Congress, Biden would need a solidly united party in the House and a party in lockstep in the Senate where the Democrats’ margin is the tie-breaking vote of Vice President Kamala Harris.
During the runoff races for the two Senate seats in Georgia last year, Sen. Chuck Schumer blurted, “Now we take Georgia, then we change the world.”
That is an apt description of what is going on. Biden, Schumer and Nancy Pelosi mean to use the window of opportunity their slimmest of margins on Capitol Hill have provided them — to “change the world.”
To enact his infrastructure and families plan, Biden will have to move swiftly. Yet, his timing may be auspicious.
For there is a sense of optimism in the land.
U.S. GDP rose 6.4% in the first quarter of 2021. We are coming out of the economic free fall of 2020 and the pandemic that produced it.
COVID-19 infections, hospitalizations and deaths are fractions of what they were at the height of the pandemic. Vaccinations, while tapering off, continue in the millions daily.
And all those billions of federal dollars sloshing through the economy are going to make tens of millions of Americans feel better.
While the TV audience for Biden’s address tilted Democratic, the 85% approval of his speech in one poll, along with the 75% who said it made them more optimistic about America, suggest that this is Biden’s moment.
And the Republicans?
While there are elements of Biden’s proposed infrastructure spending the GOP might support — funding for roads, bridges, airports, broadband — Democrats are not likely to agree to cuts in the social spending in Biden’s plans to win Republican votes.
And, even given the popularity of some of Biden’s proposals, it is difficult to see how a party that not so long ago preached the gospel of small government and balanced budgets could sign on to much of this.
Jimmy Carter said at Notre Dame in 1977 that we Americans had gotten over our “inordinate fear of Communism.”
Have Republicans of the party of Coolidge and Reagan gotten over their inordinate fear of deficits, debt and inflation?
Democrats have the votes to prevent Republicans from amending, in ways Democrats do not like, the infrastructure and social spending bills.
Republicans, however, would appear to have no choice but to do battle to cut the bills back, and, failing that, kill them.
Events seem to be pointing to an up-or-down vote on Biden’s plans in both houses, and, as of today, Democrats appear to be in the catbird seat.
Yet, one recalls: After LBJ ran up the largest electoral landslide since FDR and launched his Great Society in 1965, he lost 47 House seats in 1966. And, with Johnson’s presidency broken by Vietnam, crime and riots, Republicans won five of the next six presidential elections.
Plus, there is a real risk to the nation in these massive Biden bills.
Deficits exceeding $1 trillion. A national debt larger than the national economy and growing inexorably. A Federal Reserve running the printing press night and day to produce the dollars to push the nation back to full employment.
This is Biden’s hour. The question is how long does it last.
To use the cliche of the moment, these are deeply polarized times. But there are some issues so urgent that we must find common ground. At the top of that list is preventing police-citizen interactions from resulting in the deaths of either innocent civilians or dedicated police officers.
Unsurprisingly, Joe Biden’s Justice Department is now signaling its intent to address this problem in the time-honored Democrat way — by “investigating” local police departments, so it can then announce the foregone conclusion that “systemic racism” abounds.
The next step in that playbook is a “Consent Decree,” where local police departments, under threat of crippling and endless Dickensian litigation, agree to hand over their keys to the feds. And yes, this nifty move is executed under color of law, though it’s not entirely different in spirit from the way Captain Phillips lost control of his container ship on the high seas, if you happened to catch the Tom Hanks movie.
Conservatives are girding for battle. In the past, Consent Decrees have been used to kneecap police departments, compelling them to waste millions of dollars on paperwork, and focus on concerns notable for not being “Keeping the Public Safe.”
Maybe in the interest of comity, we shouldn’t abandon Consent Decrees so fast. So here’s my stab at one. Below, I have enumerated 16 bullet points that I believe we can all agree on.
1) When motorists see flashing police lights behind them, they consent to pull over. (See what I mean? Nothing but common sense!)
2) Upon being asked for their license and registration, drivers will consent to produce those documents and not to fight with the officer, drive off or reach for a gun. (Again: Comity!)
3) As a general rule, it is advisable that drivers not engage in a game of Do I have a gun — or is it a cellphone? with the officers, but when asked to show their hands … well, I guess you’d say, “consent.” (Beginning to see the pattern?)
4) For citizens holding the drug money for a major fentanyl ring in Louisville, Kentucky, if the police knock on your door at midnight, you consent not to shoot at the officers, but to open the door and say, “Yes, may I help you?” (Observation will reveal that this point cannot fail to produce the safe policing that we all desire.)
5) In fact, in any door-knock situation, you consent not to shoot at the police.
6) We may further strike the “in a door-knock situation” from that last point. In all circumstances, anywhere, anytime, citizens consent not to shoot at police officers.
7) While it is preferable that assailants not burst from their homes carrying 8-inch knives and screaming, “I’m gonna stab the f*ck out of you,” when those circumstances arise, and responding officers have requested that the knife be put down just prior to the actual stabbing commencing, the assailant will consent. (This will be music to #BlackLivesMatter’s ears, inasmuch as they believe that, you know, black lives matter.)
8) When sprinting through an alley at 2:30 in the morning holding a recently fired gun, with police in hot pursuit demanding that the suspect stop, the fleeing suspect will consent to stop.
9) If a further request is made that the suspect drop the gun, the fleeing suspect will provide his consent. (Police officers tend to be very strict about this sort of thing.)
10) Consent similarly will be given when a police officer directs pedestrians strolling in the middle of a street to use the sidewalk.
11) Middle-of-the-street pedestrians will consent not to punch the officer or try to steal his gun.
12) Citizens will additionally consent not to turn and charge at the officer.
13) When picking up children from a woman who has a restraining order against you and has just called the police on you, and the responding officers order you to drop a knife, you will consent to drop the knife.
14) If the officers ask you to stop walking around the car, do not keep walking, do not open the car door and do not reach inside for something out of sight of the officers. Instead, you will consent to stop.
15) In parked-car scenarios, when you’ve just passed a counterfeit bill and ingested several speedballs, and a policeman asks to see your hands, consent to show your hands.
16) It is especially important to consent when officers ask you to climb into the back of a police van and not to fight with them.
A Consent Decree for our times! And as you can see, these 16 points are the very definition of unifying, hands-across-the-ocean, common-sense proposals. If we as a country can agree to these simple rules, maybe this will light the way forward on other contentious issues.
But let’s start here, because brave cops deserve to be protected. And because black lives matter.
During America’s current racial crisis, it’s striking how useless and irrelevant has been the intellectual conventional wisdom, which denies that race even exists.
So I’m going to step back from the daily fray this week and sketch out a stylized history of how we came to have two opposing ways to try to make sense of the realities of human biological diversity: as continuous or discontinuous. Do people mostly just differ slightly from their neighbors in a steady progression of blurry differences around the world? Or is it more helpful in organizing our knowledge of human variation to think of most individuals as belonging to largely separate major races?
These mental frameworks grew out of the differing experiences with the Africa to the south of them of the ancient Greeks in the east and the Renaissance Iberians in the west.
South of Greece in northeastern Africa, the Sahara Desert was less of a barrier to land or sea travel due to the Nile, the green highlands of Ethiopia, and the much-traversed Indian Ocean. In contrast, in northwestern Africa south of Portugal, both the geography and the culture of the Sahara cut off Europeans from sub-Saharans until the 15th-century Portuguese made the great leap around the Muslim monopoly on trade. Hence, the ancient Greeks tended to see race as more a matter of degree, while the worldview that grew out of Portuguese and Spanish explorations saw it more as a matter of kind.
The vague Greek view of race, which envisioned peoples as gradually varying with distance from Athens, has returned to popularity in our deconstructionist age of Foucault, who loathed clear distinctions (such as age of consent laws that distinguished between adults and children).
In contrast, the more hard-edged Enlightenment categories that emerged from the discoveries of the age of exploration, picturing the human race as being reasonably divisible into continental-scale races, are now anathema.
And yet nobody acts like they really believe these highbrow talking points.
White intellectuals constantly reassure themselves that race doesn’t exist because, for example, Africans are, in a technical sense, the most genetically diverse. But in the real world, almost nobody cared that, for example, Barack Obama’s ancestry was geographically remote from almost all American descendants of slaves. It was more than enough that he was half black.
But both the clinal and dichotomous ways of thinking about race have their strengths and weaknesses. So, it’s worth understanding how they emerged.
At the eastern end of the Mediterranean, the classical Greeks saw a geography of gradual racial change, what academics now call clinal variation.
If a Greek journeyed south from Athens through the Near East and on to Egypt, people gradually got tawnier as the sun grew higher in the sky, rather like how the Greek traveler himself might be tanning. As he continued up the Nile, by the time he reached Nubia the inhabitants were browner. And if he made it all the way up the Blue Nile to Abyssinia, they’d be fairly dark.
The Greek model of phenotype variation envisioned steady geographic change. So the Greeks tended to think of race in directional rather than clear-cut terms: Go north to Scythia and people became fairer, go south up the Nile and people grew darker. And it was said that by the time one reached the source of the Nile at the foot of the Mountains of the Moon, where the sun stood straight overhead, the people were black.
But few Greeks ever got that far. While you wouldn’t die of thirst following the White Nile through the eastern desert into sub-Saharan Africa, the vast Sudd swamp in South Sudan remains annoying to cross even today. In A.D. 61, it stopped a Roman legionary expedition sent by the emperor Nero. European powers would not be able to project power south of the Sudd until the later 19th century.
And even then, the tropical diseases were a horrifying roadblock. When John Speke and Richard Burton went looking for the source of the Nile in the 1860s, they spent most of their expeditions flat on their backs for months at a time, shivering from malaria.
When the Greeks went west to the Pillars of Hercules, people only changed a little before the known world ended in the Atlantic. Go east and people slowly changed, but it was all rather vague because the Greeks had little in-person contact with East Asians.
Therefore, the Greek understanding of the intersection of geography and race was woozy. They tended to think in terms of “yonder”: If you go in that direction the people will increasingly look different.
While the Greeks were somewhat aware of racial discontinuities, they mostly saw race as deriving from the height of the sun in the sky, which varies continuously.
Moreover, the Greeks, while seafarers, tended to stick to the Mediterranean and not venture all that far from shore. In general, the Greeks had only limited technological capacity to travel through great empty spaces, and perhaps less appetite. Therefore, they seldom ventured away from inhabited routes.
In turn, that meant that they usually followed those well-populated routes where human biodiversity was clinal rather than sharply distinct. For example, Alexander the Great made it as far east as modern Pakistan, marching a total of 22,000 miles. But the people he conquered tended to only vary progressively in looks.
If Alexander had marched over the Himalayas into Tibet, he would have seen a sharp, sudden distinction in race because the dividing line between South Asians and East Asians runs through Nepal at about one mile of elevation. The East Asian Sherpas don’t like to go lower because they lack tropical disease resistance and the South Asians don’t wish to go higher because they lack altitude resilience. But even Alexander prudently avoided the Himalayas.
The Phoenicians and their Carthaginian offspring may have been more daring voyagers. Herodotus claimed that Phoenicians circumnavigated Africa. A Carthaginian named Hanno explored down the west coast of Africa, probably reaching sub-Saharan Senegal.
But the vindictive Romans destroyed most Carthaginian libraries, so Carthaginian learning was lost.
In Roman times, annual trading fleets setting out from ports on the African side of the Red Sea were blown by the monsoon to India. And Romans traded at least as far south in Africa as the coast of modern Eritrea.
Romans occasionally crossed the central or western Sahara to the Sahel, with one expedition to Lake Chad bringing back a rhinoceros that proved hugely popular in gladiatorial games in the Coliseum. But most of the limited trade between the Mediterranean and the Niger River was carried out via oasis middlemen, so biogeographic knowledge of sub-Saharan Africa was largely secondhand.
Interestingly, as one moves south through the Sahara, the racial admixture shifts from whiter to black from oasis to oasis. In other words, clinal variation exists even in the vast emptiness of the world’s biggest desert. Nonetheless, the Sahara outside of Egypt was largely empty and, on the whole, served as an immense blockade to gene flow, which is why people are so different-looking north and south of it.
And then to penetrate on foot south of the grasslands into the tropical forests was impractical for Mediterranean peoples because of the disease burden. Even Sahelians can find the Congo too much. The narrator of John Updike’s The Coup, the dictator of Kush, a fictional dry African country like Mali or Chad, dismisses Africa south of the Sahel:
To the south, beyond the Grionde, there is forest, nakedness, animals, fever, chaos. It bears no looking into. Whenever a Kushite ventures into this region, he is stricken with mal à l’estomac.
So most of sub-Saharan Africa was long isolated from the Mediterranean by double barriers: the Sahara and then the forests of fever.
In late antiquity, caravans of the newly domesticated camel began crossing the Sahara. But then in the 600s the new Muslim conquerors cut off the south side of the Mediterranean from Christendom with a sort of Muslin Curtain. Thus, European knowledge of Africa didn’t progress much for 800 years.
Finally, in the early 1400s, Prince Henry the Navigator of Portugal established research and development centers to enable systematic exploration by sea down the west coast of Africa, with Portuguese sailors finally rounding the Cape of Good Hope in 1487 and reaching India in 1498.
The Portuguese experience of race was rather different than that of old Greek land travelers in northeast Africa. Rather than see peoples steadily change with travel along highly populated routes, they sailed along the coast of Morocco, where the Berbers didn’t look all that much different from themselves, then sailed past the bleak coast of Western Sahara, and reached the Senegal River, where the people are black and broad-nosed, radically different-looking from Portuguese and Moroccans. Thus, they experienced race more as a discontinuous phenomenon than had the Greeks.
The Portuguese made excellent maps of their discoveries so the old hand-waving fuzziness about geography and race was no longer tenable.
Meanwhile, the Spanish monarchs hired Christopher Columbus to try a different strategy to reach the Indies: sail west across the Atlantic.
The Atlantic Ocean was an even sharper discontinuity than the coast of the Sahara Desert. With the exception of the Canaries, which were populated by a Berber people from the Maghreb, mid-Atlantic islands such as Madeira and the Azores were wholly unpopulated.
As of 1491, nobody, other than the Vikings in the far north, is known to have made a round trip across the Atlantic ever. Before Columbus, to go from Africa to the Americas took tens of thousands of years of migration and evolutionary adaptation to first get Out of Africa about 70,000 years ago and then, ages later, cross from Siberia to Alaska.
Although Columbus mistakenly referred to the locals he found as “Indians,” within a few decades it was clear that he had discovered a New World and a new race previously unknown to the Old: “O brave new world, That has such people in ’t!”
Eventually, the vast new knowledge generated by European explorers was conceptualized by great 18th-century scientists such as Linnaeus and Blumenbach into models in which human variety is summarized in a limited number of large-scale races.
For example, Blumenbach came up with five big races: Caucasians (white, but including both sides of the Mediterranean and extending as far east as Bengal); Mongolians (yellow); Ethiopians (black); Americans (red); and Malayans (brown, islanders sprawling from Madagascar to Easter Island).
We know far more today, especially since the introduction of DNA scans. Still, Blumenbach’s five-race model, despite its deficiencies, is not a bad way to organize a vast amount of complex information about human biodiversity into something comprehensible. Blumenbach leaned heavily toward the lumper end of the lumper-splitter debate (for example, his huge Caucasian race strikes many as too expansive), but that helped his model avoid getting tangled up in excessive German pedantry.
On the other hand, the old Greek haziness has its advantages as well, such as undermining excessive confidence in a simplifying model.
Yet, the Enlightenment’s way of thinking about race was based on a tremendous advance in knowledge over what was known to the ancients. Hence, today’s demand that the Enlightenment’s way of thinking about race as discontinuous be utterly abandoned and forgotten is another example of the growing science denialism of our times.
Last week marked the 78th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, a sacred moment in Jewish history. The anniversary brought the expected flood of commentaries and social media posts. But one piece that was not widely circulated, though it deserved to be, is a 2013 Haaretz essay by Holocaust survivor and author Eli Gat. Gat’s thesis is that the roughly 56,000 remaining inhabitants of the ghetto, who were alive specifically because they’d proven their worth (as outlined by Goebbels in his diary, the plan from the get-go was to liquidate the useless eaters but keep the productive), were needlessly sacrificed by a small coalition of militants who purposely initiated a suicidal armed conflict with the Nazis—which ended with the ghetto’s destruction and as many as 13,000 Jews killed—in the belief that dying while fighting back against the oppressors was preferable to living in servitude to them.
Gat’s beef is one of ethics, not historiography: Did the 400 fighters who decided to burn it all down have the right to make that decision for the 56,000 who clung to hope?
A small number of ghetto militants rebelled because they believed they were living in an oppressive hellhole in which freedom, equality, and the chance to live would never be granted by the racist oppressors who’d killed their parents and children, and who now wished to kill them. The oppressors could not be reasoned with or lived with. In the absence of hope, what remained but to fight back? And if fighting back meant sacrificing the lives of other ghetto residents—so be it. Better they die because of the actions of their brothers than at the hands of their persecutors.
To be clear, the ghetto fighters were correct in their assessment. They were living under an oppressive power that would never have granted them freedom or equality. This oppressive power had killed their parents and children. There was no reasoning with this oppressive power. And even though the remaining ghetto inhabitants had indeed bought themselves some time via their productivity, the militants were not unreasonable in their belief that the reprieve was temporary (Gat echoes my thesis that in 1943 the Nazis ended their extermination program, but that’s beside the point as the ghetto fighters wouldn’t have known this and thus had every reason to believe the exterminations would be ongoing).
So a small number of people decided that burning the whole thing down was the only reasonable option.
Now, what if the righteous fury felt by those ghetto fighters could be reproduced artificially? Inorganically. Not justified by circumstances, but lab-created.
We know for a fact that humans quite often feel unjustified righteous fury. Were that not the case, there’d be no crimes of passion, only crimes of self-defense. People become homicidally enraged for irrational and invalid reasons every day. To harness that human flaw and turn it into a mass movement is to marshal atomic-bomb-level destructive power.
1619 is not the year that defines the present moment; 1943 is. Artificially re-creating that April 1943 ghetto fighter fanaticism in the minds of American blacks is the goal of a small but committed group of zealots in politics, academia, Hollywood, and the press. The endgame is to get blacks to feel exactly as those Jewish fighters did. “You’re being crushed by an oppressive power; freedom, equality, and the chance to live will never be granted. The racist oppressor seeks your death at every turn. This oppressor killed your ancestors and kills your children. This oppressor cannot be reasoned with or lived with. In the absence of hope, what remains but to fight back? And if fighting back means sacrificing your own ‘people’—so be it.”
It’s not necessary for this message to penetrate the entire black community. Remember Gat’s arithmetic: 400 made the fatal choice for 56,000.
An additional twist is that the 1943 mentality is being drummed into whites, too. As blacks are being convinced that they’re a bunch of ghetto fighters facing an oppressor of such malevolence and power that resistance is preferable to a détente that can never be, whites are being convinced that they are oppressors of such malevolence and power that blacks are correct to seek conflict rather than a détente that can never be.
It’s April 1943 Warsaw if the looming specter of death had been imaginary and the oppression completely fabricated and if as the ghetto fighters yelled, “Death to the Nazis!” the Nazis yelled back, “Yes, death to us!”
Every minute, the average American is bombarded with messaging from the news media, from Hollywood, from D.C., that’s specifically geared toward cultivating and promoting this Warsaw 1943 mindset. Blacks are being murdered by whites daily! Blacks have no freedom, no options, no chance! You cannot reason with a white. They’re born hateful and the hate is baked into their DNA and visible in their every action. Where too many whites are present, it’s only because blacks have been forcibly kept out. Every “space” occupied by a white is a space stolen from a black. And wherever blacks live in large numbers, uniformed whites hunt them down like animals.
So of course blacks don’t give a damn that one ghetto gilt was about to stab another. What matters is that a uniformed gestapo entered the ghetto to genocide an inhabitant. A thousand Ma’Khia Bryants are justified if their deaths can lead to the personal destruction of just one white cop, one “oppressor.” Jews commemorate the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising for the fact that a small number of German soldiers were killed by the resistance. That’s the important number, not the 13,000 Jews who died in the process or as a result. It’s the German casualties that make the event worth remembering.
Blacks and whites sporting a wholly unjustified Warsaw Ghetto mindset (blacks seeing themselves as martyrs fighting evil and whites seeing themselves as evil that deserves to fall to martyrs) cannot be reasoned with. We live in a time of peace, but in their minds, they’re at war. And ironically it’s exactly that imaginary war that genuinely disturbs the peace via unchecked black crime.
In an unusually honest paper in last fall’s Journal of Criminal Law & Criminology, George Soros minion Daniel Fryer of the University of Michigan Law School straight-out admitted that the “progressive prosecution” movement he helps front will cost the lives of many blacks. Fryer—who is black—wrote that his “reforms” will not only “negatively affect black individuals” but will harm “black communities” as well. Fryer concedes that criminal justice “leniency is sometimes regarded as the common way in which a state expresses that black lives don’t matter.” “Under-enforcement,” as Fryer phrases it, leads to the death of blacks at the hands of black criminals.
Fryer has no problem accepting that incarceration saves black lives and under-incarceration takes them.
“The protection of black victims does not make a single appearance in (Stanford University Professor David) Sklansky’s Progressive Prosecution Handbook,” Fryer notes. Progressive prosecution policies “have the potential to do more harm than good” in the black community.
Yet even after acknowledging this truth, Fryer concludes his paper by giving credence to the idea that “to imagine a more humane and just society, then, perhaps we need to stop worrying about correcting the system and work to destroy it.”
“I don’t think we’re there yet,” Fryer ruefully declares. The “abolition” of incarceration and the “dismantling” of the criminal justice system must be “gradual.” But it must nevertheless be the goal.
Fryer knows that dismantling law enforcement and criminal prosecution harms blacks. And yet he says do it anyway because the system must burn.
Last summer I profiled a BLM rioter who told the L.A. Times, “You’re either going to get killed by a police officer or you’re going to get killed by COVID, and it’s your decision to make which one you choose.”
So you have law professors like Fryer admitting that black collateral damage is a worthwhile price to pay for burning down the system, and delusional street soldiers convinced that they’re gonna die anyway so they might as well go out fighting.
And a bunch of whites who play into the “Warsaw 1943” fantasy, cheering it on at their own expense.
The response by mainstream conservatives to this lunacy has been lacking. Jesse Watters and Tucker Carlson recently led off with separate monologues about how these racial delusions are fostered because “Democrats want more votes.” That’s just dumb (to be fair, I don’t think Carlson’s dumb; I just think he understands that there’s a line he can approach but not cross). None of this is about “votes.” If it were, there’d be no reason to continually sow racial discord in a solidly blue state like California. There’d be no reason to push decarceration and progressive prosecution here. California’s remaining blacks are solidly Dem (as is most of the state). So how does loosing anarchy “win votes” for Democrats? They already have the votes.
How does failing to prosecute violent criminals make Baltimore more Democrat? Baltimore can’t get more Democrat.
“Democrats want votes” is an asinine explanation for the “burn it down” pathology. But it’s a safe explanation. A less sanitized one is that a small number of people want to murder-suicide the West. Civilization destroyers like Soros…people who, in more cases than not, share DNA with those Warsaw fighters. These people set in motion a mass psychosis and a system of reward/punishment for believers/skeptics that soon enough won over the stupid, angry, and opportunistic.
Ironically, the likely winner in this scenario will be America’s growing Hispanic population. Whites who still have their wits about them are surrounded by blacks who think they’re being genocided and who’ll burn down their city and yours to stop it, whites who are convinced they’re genociders who must be stopped even at the cost of their lives or yours, Jews who may have baked up this meth but who’ve started smoking it too, throwing their own to the criminal savages in cities like New York and decrying neighborhoods and school districts for being “too Jewish,” and Asians who can’t bring themselves to criticize blacks no matter how many of them get beaten and killed by blacks.
Hispanics seem to be the only group that’s not down with the whole suicide thing. The only group with a focus on growth rather than self-destruction. And while that growth is surely a mixed blessing (and that’s putting it mildly) for the nation, pragmatic whites might just come to realize that throwing in with a non-suicidal population is a better deal than trying to deprogram those lost to 1943 ghetto fighter dementia.
Those unafflicted with that dementia will need to stand up to those hell-bent on self- and community immolation. In actual 1943 such fanaticism was justifiable. In faux ’43, the fanaticism is not a response to danger…it is the danger. And the 56,000 have a duty to stamp out the 400 before they turn everything to ash and rubble.
“How many legs does a dog have if you call his tail a leg?” asked President Abraham Lincoln, who answered his own question:
“Four. Saying that a tail is a leg doesn’t make it a leg.”
And Congress’ saying that D.C. is a state would equally contradict truth and reality, as our nation’s capital lacks all of the attributes of a 51st state of the Union.
Whence came our capital of Washington, D.C.?
The city was carved out of Maryland and Virginia in 1790, which voted to cede 100 square miles on the Potomac for a capital city of the United States to become the domicile of the federal government.
In 1846, Virginia’s share of the land, some 32 square miles, was ceded back. What was left was today’s Washington, D.C., of 68 square miles.
Is that sufficient for a state of the Union? Only if one wishes to change the character and composition of that Union.
Consider. The smallest state for 230 years has been Rhode Island. At 1,214 square miles, it is still 18 times as large as D.C. If D.C. were to become a state, it would be a microstate, smaller than every one of the 24 remaining counties of the state, Maryland, from which it was carved.
The Maryland counties that border D.C., Montgomery and Prince George’s, are eight times the size of Washington, D.C., and each has a million people, dwarfing the 700,000 residents of D.C.
Directly across the Potomac in Virginia is Fairfax County, also eight times as large as D.C., and with hundreds of thousands more people.
Supporters of statehood say D.C. has more people than Wyoming.
True, but Wyoming is also roughly the size of the United Kingdom, and more than 1,000 times the size of Washington, D.C.
Even by the standards of American cities, Washington ranks no higher than 20th in population.
Texas — with Houston, Dallas, San Antonio and Fort Worth — and California — with Los Angeles, San Jose, San Diego and San Francisco — both have four cities larger and more populous than our aspiring city-state of D.C.
By the terms of its admission to the United States as a state, the Republic of Texas was ceded a right to split into as many as five states of the Union, which it was joining. FDR’s future vice president, the Texan John Nance “Cactus Jack” Garner, was all for it.
“An area twice as large and rapidly becoming as populous as New England should have at least ten Senators,” Garner told The New York Times in April 1921, “and the only way we can get them is to make five States, not five small States, mind you, but five great States.”
Statehood for little D.C. could start a trend where mega-cities like Chicago and New York, with five and 10 times the size and population of D.C., secede from their respective states and seek full statehood as well.
What is at the root of this drive to make D.C. a state?
The answer may be found in the political character of our capital city.
Since the 23rd Amendment was ratified, 60 years ago, D.C. residents have voted in 15 presidential elections. In all 15 elections, D.C.’s three electoral votes have gone to the Democratic nominee.
Even in the 49-state Nixon and Reagan landslides of 1972 and 1984, D.C. went four- and five-to-one Democratic. In eight presidential elections since 1990, the GOP nominee has failed to win 10% of the D.C. vote.
Since the mid-1970s, D.C. has had home rule and, in every election since, has chosen a Democratic mayor and a Democratic city council.
How irredeemably Democratic is D.C.?
Voter registration statistics in the city as of last December was 403,000 Democrats and 30,000 Republicans, a ratio of 13-1.
Which brings the question: What is D.C.’s grievance that America must somehow rectify by making it a state?
Answer: Democrats want D.C. to have two senators to cement their control of the U.S. Senate, as they pack the Supreme Court by expanding the number of justices from nine to 13.
This is a naked national power grab — pure and simple.
If the real concern were the inability of the D.C. electorate to vote for members of Congress, that could be remedied — by returning the residential portions of D.C. to Maryland, whence they came, or by allowing D.C. residents to vote in Maryland’s congressional elections.
Making D.C. a state would send two Democrats to the Senate indefinitely. But it would violate the constitution and compact under which the nation was founded. And it would start a stampede for other disfiguring alterations, like packing the Supreme Court by adding four new justices.
Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, the Northern Mariana Islands, Guam and American Samoa could soon follow and enter claims to become states of the American Union.
And a second unraveling of the republic would begin.
Writing in the London Spectator quite a long time ago—I’ve been a columnist there since 1977—I listed some great Americans, among them General Robert E. Lee, Charles Lindbergh, and Ernest Hemingway. Needless to say, if one were to mention some of these names today in an American publication, or dare bring them up on a news program, all hell would break loose and the writer would instantly become a nonperson. The left-dominated, nihilist pop culture of today and the academic establishment, supported by the laughable “mainstream media,” have turned this once-great nation into one of identity politics and grievances. Common sense has been replaced by crazed theories about subconscious prejudices, and promoting social justice is the frenzied order of the day.
Hence I was pleasantly surprised when PBS announced that it was showing a six-hour Ken Burns and Lynn Novick documentary on Papa Hemingway over three nights, an event that predictably the degenerate New York Times called “subversive.” Burns and Novick have done in-depth series on baseball and Vietnam, not to mention the Civil War, so I wasn’t worried even after the degenerate old bag had asked, “Why now?” I say why not now, when masculinity, patriotism, courage, and beautiful, graceful writing are all under attack by effete, nerdy, asexual freaks posing as gamekeepers of political correctness.
Hemingway was to American stripped-down prose what he claimed Mark Twain was to the American novel: the father of it. Not even the degenerates of today can deny that he invented the style of clean, lucid prose, to go along with his creation of a virile swagger, one that first drew me to him. His macho bluster is looked down upon in today’s feminized world, but he was as brave as they come, having been seriously wounded at age 18 and come under fire time and again in both world wars and during the Spanish civil conflict.
I first saw him swaggering down Fifth Avenue when home for the holidays from boarding school in 1954. I followed him and to my delight he entered El Borracho, a restaurant off Fifth Avenue that my parents used to regularly take me to. It was nearly empty and he sat at the bar. I approached, introduced myself as a great fan of his, named my prep school, and was offered drinks by him. I had three whiskey sours and got completely soused. The barman hadn’t dared deny him despite me being underage. We discussed “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” and The Sun Also Rises. Then he suddenly asked for the bill, tapped me on the shoulder, and was gone. I walked up Fifth Avenue where I lived, and I remember my mother’s shock at me being drunk at three in the afternoon. She was no fan of America, its familiarities, and its manners. The next day I went to Dunhill Tailors and ordered a brown tweed suit just like the one Papa was wearing. (It was very itchy.) Three days later it was all over. The New York Post exposed my NBF as a total phony. The real Papa was in Venice. To say I was crestfallen would be a gross understatement.
The new documentary has no gauzy, nostalgic patina tinting the text. But it deftly illustrates to the viewer how literature was and is still shaped by Hemingway’s ideas of clarity and brevity. He stripped away the florid style of, say, Henry James and Edith Wharton, and instilled his macho manliness with the power of his pen. His drumbeat rhythms and lyric beauty of his style turned millions of readers into little Hemingways, copying his style in conversation and in writing. Lastly, it established the enduring myth of the man.
Reading last month’s Chronicles, I noticed the objections of certain readers over true versus false conservatism, and the editors’ response. Papa was no conservative in its present form, but manliness, truth, courage, grace in the face of danger, patriotism, and love of country are conservative traits, and he had them all. Reevaluating icons is now the order of the day, and Papa Hemingway is everything the left hates and fears. That alone in my book makes him a great conservative. Like Norman Mailer, Irwin Shaw, and James Jones, Papa had seen action in war, and that separates him from the effete creatures who now pass as writers. He was brainy yet brawny, a far cry from, say, Proust.
Charles Scribner III, the grandson of Papa’s publisher, said F. Scott Fitzgerald was Strauss. Hemingway, by contrast, was Stravinsky. His stark, staccato prose, its tonality, was modernity itself. I remember well sitting in my aunt’s Athenian garden reading his obituaries back in 1961. Never have I wanted anything more in life than to become a writer like him—an unfulfilled wish by a mile, but a goal that shaped my life. Papa never flinched in the face of danger, chased beautiful women, drank like a Karamazov, and took his lumps with complaint. His head traumas after numerous accidents are what did him in. I couldn’t watch the end, but I did. I hope that our present lot also watched and will try to stay safe from now on in their nappies.
The Week’s Most Gleaning, Preening, and Overweening Headlines
THE PRINCES OF DARKNESS
Spin Doctors reimagined:
One, two, princes kneel before you
That’s what I said, now
Princes, princes who adore you
Just go ahead, now
One has diamonds in his pockets
That’s some bread, now
This one, said he wants to break into your house and beat you to death
Man why ya shoot me? I wasn’t even doin’ nuthin’
Last week was a very bad one for African princes. Not that African princes often have good weeks. At least not according to the emails they send out, detailing their many difficulties retrieving family fortunes or conducting international bank withdrawals.
Uneasy lies the head that wears an African crown.
The first tale of princely woe comes from Southwest Ranches, Florida. When Shenita Jones and Courtney Wilson decided to tie the knot, they also decided to refer to themselves as “royals.” Exactly what royal bloodline the two black monarchs were descended from was not an issue. Apparently, “God” (or crack) told them they were a prince and princess, and that was good enough.
Obviously, this “royal couple” would never deign to marry like commoners at some registry office or storefront church. No, they wanted a wedding befitting their status. Lacking the funds for such an extravaganza (their money problems being further proof of African nobility), they hatched a plan: Scouring real estate notices, they came across a 16,313-square-foot nine-bedroom estate that was on the market for $5.7 million. Posing as potential buyers, the majestic couple repeatedly cased the home, which they thought was vacant. After familiarizing themselves with the layout, they sent invites to their friends promising the world’s finest “royal wedding” at the “royal estate” they’d just purchased.
What the imperial imbeciles failed to realize was that the owner of the estate was still living on the property, in a guesthouse. Nathan Finkel, heir to the IHOP fortune of his father, Abe Finkel, woke up last week to see the citizens of Wakanda amassing on his lawn (you might not know that IHOP’s founders were Jewish, but that’s only because years ago they retired the chain’s original slogan, “Enough With the Pancakes, Already”).
Finkel called the cops and the couple had to spend the rest of the day in a barred setting slightly more familiar to black folks than a million-dollar estate.
But these sovereign scammers got off lightly compared with “Zulu prince” Lindani Myeni. Unlike the previous couple, Myeni is an actual prince of sorts—he’s the nephew of a Zulu king in South Africa (that plus six bucks will buy you a half-dozen items from the McDonald’s dollar menu).
After marrying an American Christian missionary, Myeni moved with his bride to Hawaii, where he traded his tribal attire for Hawaiian shirts, becoming a real Mandingo P.I. Last week, the good prince broke into a random couple’s house in the Nuuanu district, took off his shoes, and started speaking gibberish to the owners (actual gibberish, not isiZulu). Panicked, the couple called the cops, and when arriving officers dared to ask Shaka to leave the premises, he began violently beating them. According to Nanunanu police chief Mork, the exceptionally well-built Myeni, a former rugby player and South African Idol contestant, shrugged off a tasing and inflicted “multiple facial fractures, concussions, and injuries to the arms and legs” of the cops.
Cops who then proceeded to royally blow him away like an Austrian Archduke.
Myeni’s wife, who is white not Asian even though her last name really should be “Chin,” told the local papers that “In Zulu culture you can go to anyone’s house. You can knock on anyone’s door. It doesn’t matter if it’s 8 o’clock, it’s not a big deal. Neighbor are neighbors.”
All the more reason to not live close to Zulus.
South African Zulu political party Economic Freedom Fighters Kwazulu-Natal released a statement blaming the shooting on “white extremists.”
The Zulus possess much ancient knowledge, but they’re a little shaky when it comes to understanding the demographic makeup of Hawaii.
Still, the next time you get an email from an African prince, before discarding it, think of the hardships faced by the African royals who are barred from entering or claiming someone else’s house as their own, and send the poor bastard a few bucks. For just a dollar a day, you can keep an African prince from ruining some innocent homeowner’s afternoon.
HIGH INFIDEL-ITY
And while we’re at it, Afroman reimagined:
I was gonna immigrate to Nice, but then I got high,
Was gonna practice my religion of peace, but then I got high,
Now I’m arguin’ for my release, and I know why;
Because I got high, because I got high, because I got high
I wasn’t gonna kill no Jews, but then I got high,
Didn’t plan on makin’ the news, but then I got high,
Now I’m singin’ the jailhouse blues, and I know why;
Because I got high, because I got high, because I got high
Threw a Jew off a balcony, because I was high,
Told her Muhammad commanded me, because I was high,
Now I’m gettin’ off scot-free, and I’ll tell you why;
Because I got high, because I got high, because I got high
Welcome to France, where the Muslims stone themselves.
Kobili Traoré wanted so little from life. The Malian immigrant to France was like a Muslim version of Bontshe the Silent, the famed literary character created by Yiddish-language playwright I.L. Peretz. After a life of hardship and modesty, Bontshe enters the kingdom of heaven. He’s told that, as a reward for his good life and all the suffering he endured with such nobility, he may ask for anything he desires. Anything at all.
Meekly, Bontshe, knowing that all heavenly riches are at his fingertips, asks only that every morning he be allowed to have a hot roll with a schmear of butter.
Well, move aside, Bontshe the Silent, and meet Kobili the Boisterous. Kobili Traoré defines humble. After immigrating to France and getting all the riches due him by the suicidal indigenous whites—welfare apartment, monthly checks, freedom of worship—Kobili asked for only two things: some pot to smoke every day, and the right to toss a Jew out a window.
Granted!
In 2017 Silly Billy Kobili broke into his neighbor’s apartment. The neighbor, 65-year-old retired physician Dr. Sarah Attal-Halimi, a Jew, probably thought the man had entered to get his hot roll and butter. But no—he was there to beat her senseless and toss her from the window of her third-story apartment. And he did so while yelling, “Allahu akbar!” and “I killed Satan!”
Because this is France we’re talking about here, Milli Kobili was not charged with a hate crime, and no religious motive was attached to the murder by prosecutors. Throughout the trial, occasionally this or that Frenchman would ask, “Zees seems stupeed of us, no?” And then he’d be reminded of his nationality and be like, “Ah-ha-haaa, we are French! Stupeed is what we do best!”
Kobili’s defense team argued that their client only committed the unfortunate act because he was high on the Mary Jane, the wacky weed, the sassy grass. And of course, it worked. He was declared “not criminally responsible” because he smoked pot. After all, pot makes you do loopy things, like eating an entire pizza at 4 a.m. or sleeping through a job interview or defenestrating a bubbe.
Leftists: Pot is harmless and should be legalized everywhere.
Also leftists: Pot will make you Himmler.
Cheech and Chong in Up in Smoke II: Sobibor Stoners.
France’s Jews, unhappy with the court’s decision for some odd reason, bitched all the way up to the nation’s top legal body, La Cour des Imbéciles Suprêmes, and last week that esteemed institution ruled with finality that yes, being high is totally an excuse to javelin an old yenta through a window like Keshorn Walcott.
Following the verdict, France’s top Muslim cleric, Ali Sheidy, was asked by reporters if the decision presents a conundrum for believers. After all, Muslims are not supposed to do drugs. How will France’s jihad-happy Muhammadans deal with the fact that smoking pot has now become a license to kill Jews?
The cleric didn’t hear the question, as he was too preoccupied smoking a giant doobie while sharpening his beheading tools.
SCRAMADAN
While we’re in the Islamic Caliphate of France, let’s stay for one more story.
And speaking of stories…there’s an oft-told, possibly apocryphal tale about beloved song-and-dance man Jimmy Durante. As the story goes, Durante had been arm-twisted by a friend to join him on an early-morning fishing trip, which meant the ol’ Schnozzola would have to wake up before dawn. At 4:30 a.m., the sky still dark, Durante got dressed as his friend came by to pick him up. Grumpy and irascible, as they walked to the friend’s car, Durante shook a tree, disturbing the birds nesting above.
“Why’d you do that?” asked the friend.
The reply: “If Durante ain’t sleepin’, da boids ain’t sleepin’.”
Whether true or not, it’s a funny anecdote about a much-loved entertainer. A less funny and totally true anecdote about a very not-loved group of arrogant barbarous alien invaders goes something like this: Since Muslims are not supposed to drink water on Ramadan, they’ve decided that you can’t either.
“If Muhammad ain’t drinkin’, da woild ain’t drinkin’.”
Evian is a French company that made its name hawking overpriced bottled water. Being in the water-selling biz, Evian’s tweets often highlight the benefits of drinking water.
That sorta makes sense. You know, in a normal world.
But in Woke World, it’s a genocidal atrocity. Last Tuesday, the company tweeted the very innocuous message, “Retweet if you have already drunk a litre of water today.”
Pretty innocent?
No, pretty Islamophobic!
See, last Tuesday happened to fall during the Muslim “holy month” of Ramadan. And during Ramadan, Muslims are not allowed to eat or drink anything during the daytime. What they’re not forbidden from doing, however, is being a major pain in the ass to the rest of the world (if only there were a prohibition on that, a lot more people might get behind this “Ramadan” thing). So when Evian tweeted about drinking water, France’s Muslims, the beheadingest Muslims in Europe, declared a jihad against the company.
Gilles Verdez, a TV journalist and homme de pluie extraordinaire, called the tweet “commercial Islamophobia.” And within hours Evian melted faster than a snowcap turning into a mountain stream. The company apologized for being a water company that advocated drinking water on a day when a religious minority was only drinking water at night.
Surprisingly, this sparked a backlash from Frenchies who are sick and tired of seeing “woke Americanism” imported into their country. When a Frenchman is so craven and cowardly that other Frenchmen call him out on it, well…that really says something. And the CEO of Evian got an earful from French conservatives over his dhimmi truckling. Conservative MP Éric Ciotti declared “let’s stop this madness. How far will this everyday intellectual terrorism go?” Robert Ménard, mayor of Béziers, condemned Evian’s “total surrender” in the face of “increasingly paranoid and intolerant Muslims.” And a commentary in Le Figaro claimed that U.S.-style “woke religion” is subverting French culture and history.
Perhaps in the end, if the French are able to fight the woke wave washing over the West, they’ll do so by marshaling their legendary snobbery and arrogance against what they view (correctly, this time) as an inferior American import.
The French may very well be saved by the thing the rest of the world has long most detested about them. An irony devoutly to be wished.
THIS NATION’S A RACIST HELLHOLE! LET ME IN!
You know how you could tell the attitude toward Jews in 1938 New York from the attitude toward Jews in 1938 Germany? Jews were trying to flee Germany, and Jews were trying to enter New York.
It’s pretty much as simple as that. Universities could draft studies, governments could form working groups, but in the end, airplane and passenger ship ticket sales told the story better than any academic paper.
To New York, Jews were like, “Let us in!”
To Germany, Jews were like, “Let us out!”
Ah, simpler times! These days, “refugees” seem to have the algorithm backwards. Somehow it’s become all about wanting to enter First World nations that are supposedly racist genocidal hellholes while fleeing Third World nations of love and tolerance.
Damnedest thing. It’s almost like it’s not really about which nations are actually “racist,” but which ones can be browbeaten and bullied by accusations of racism.
And speaking of damned things, the United Nations—that rarest of orgs that manages to be both ineffectual and destructive at the same time (as in, sending in “peacekeepers” who don’t keep the peace but do rape locals)—has officially denounced the U.K. for not properly denouncing itself as racist. The melee started last year when, after a fentanyl freak got de-breathed in Minneapolis, the Boris Johnson government decided to form a commission to study the U.K.’s role in the death of a respiratorily challenged bad-check passer in the U.S.
The final report of the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities, formally presented to Parliament last week, arrived at two conclusions:
(1) George Floyd’s heart did not give out because BBC America reruns made him addicted to running in fast motion like Benny Hill as “Yakety Sax” played in the background.
England was in the clear!
(2) England, while somewhat racist, is not as racist as some believe. Indeed, the report concluded:
While disparities between ethnic groups exist across numerous areas, many factors other than racism are often the root cause. Among these are geography, deprivation, and family structure. For example, a Black Caribbean child is ten times more likely than an Indian child to grow up in a lone parent household. And disparities exist in different directions. People from South Asian and Chinese ethnic groups have better outcomes than the white population in more than half of the top 25 causes of premature death. Most ethnic minority groups [are] now outperforming their white British peers at GCSE level.
The report does not deny that institutional racism exists in the UK. Rather, the report did not find conclusive evidence of it in the specific areas it examined. It reaffirms the Macpherson report’s definition of the term but argues it should be applied more carefully and always based on evidence.
Well, it’s a good thing the U.N. is too inept to build rockets, or England would once again be facing a Blitzkrieg. How dare the British not condemn themselves as the evil racists they are!
The U.N. Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent (made up of five white guys who’ve seen every Tyler Perry film and a Chinaman who once ate grits by accident) decried the report for “normalizing white supremacy” and “repeating racist tropes.”
The leaders of the U.N. Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner took time out from helping Iran execute gays to denounce the report as “an ad hominem attack on people of African descent.”
U.N. commissioners called on the Johnson government to reject the report and disband the commission.
Unfortunately for them, Johnson happens to be in need of something that can make him look like he still has a spine, having so badly bollixed his Covid response over the past year. Johnson rejected the U.N.’s demand, reclaiming just enough of his dignity to see his poll numbers rise to a level they’d not reached since he actually contracted Covid last year.
The lesson: There are two ways for a world leader to look strong: survive Covid or spit in the face of the U.N.
Now, spitting Covid in the face of the U.N.? Well, that’s a guaranteed reelection-getter right there.
OY! OY! I’M EXTOIMINATING MYSELF!
Picking up on the Jews and Nazis theme, how sad that Joseph Goebbels never lived to see these wondrous times. All the marvels he missed out on: He could’ve written his infamous diary on a MacBook Pro. Custom-designed Nikes could’ve made that clubfoot problem a thing of the past, and Botox would’ve really fleshed out that Skeletor face.
But of all the wonders that a 2021 Goebbels might’ve beheld, nothing would have thrilled the man more than a new innovation from New York City: the self-expelling Jew. From the moment the Nazis came to power, Goebbels’ singular obsession was to make Germany and its territories “Judenfrei.” All the poor guy wanted was an empire in which bagels were a relic of the past and “Yidl Mitn Fidl” was permanently retired from radio airplay. But getting rid of so many Jews was a tiring task. He’d scare ’em away, he’d offer them incentives to leave, he’d even pogrom them into submission, but as hundreds of thousands fled, some just would not go. Goebbels was especially frustrated by his inability to totally clear Jews from his beloved Berlin. Even after forced expulsions and “resettlements” began, there’d always be one or two damn Jews sticking around, mocking him with their presence.
Oh, the headache! 1941 Goebbels really could’ve used some Advil.
Conversely, 2021 Goebbels would be overcome with joy to meet Quinn Mootz, a New York City Jewess with a vision…a vision of a Judenfrei Upper West Side! Mootz is campaign manager for city council candidate Sara Lind, and last week she unleashed a tweetstorm about how the Upper West Side is “too Jewish.”
As of 2018: 10.8% of the population is Asian, 4.1% black, 14.1% hispanic [sic], and 68.4% white. So yeah ima go ahead and say the UWS has a diversity problem. Of your 191,000 residents…. 130,795 are white.”
“Jews are not POC for just being jewish [sic]. sorry,” she added; they gotta go too (more than half of Upper West Side “whites” are Jews).
Time for Jews to begin resettling themselves! Sending themselves to the east! Expulsions are needed, because apparently Goebbels was right: Once a city gets “too Jewish,” it becomes an oppressive Hebraic duchy in which other races and cultures are overpowered, disenfranchised, and neglected. That was Goebbels’ exact point, and it’s Mootz’s as well.
One suspects this would’ve been enough for Hitler to have awarded Mootz “honorary Aryan status” were she leading the charge to de-Jewify Berlin back in the day. But since it’s 2021, she’ll probably have to settle for a Vox or Atlantic column when her candidate loses (NYC pundits have pointed out that it’s unlikely that Lind will win a heavily Jewish district with a campaign manager whose platform is “no more Jews”).
Needless to say, Mootz has received a tremendous amount of blowback on social media and in the press. In response, Mootz has whined that the negative comments are “nasty” and “cruel” and “hurtful.” All she did was say that she wanted fewer Jews in her city, and look at how mean everyone’s being to her!
Quinn Mootz cries in pain as she strikes you.
Honorary Aryan or not, she’s certainly got that stereotypical Jew thing down pat.
NEW YORK—The high life has gone with the wind due to you-know-what—the last time I went to a glittering ball Marie Antoinette still had a head on her shoulders, or so it seems—while sweats and leggings are now ubiquitous during intimate dinner parties. Here in the Bagel, fashion has followed the street for a long time, making high fashion seem as irrelevant and obscene as Anna Wintour being paid millions to kiss the asses of celebrities.
No sweats, no leggings was my only rule for the intimate dinner for Prince Pavlos, expertly cooked by Michael Mailer and attended by Arki Busson and three youngsters of the female persuasion. A very interesting conversation took place in the middle of dinner, one that had one lady guest threatening to denounce me as a male chauvinist, until I assured her not to bother threatening as I’m rather proud of the fact that I am one. The Bagel now resembles Moscow circa 1935, with fear and loathing of the midnight knock by the PC police.
The blood-pressure high-rise was due to a documentary I had watched about Woody and Mia, one filmed with Mia’s approval and Woody’s noncooperation. It was long and quite boring, with extended period shots of numerous children hanging around a lake and garden, with Mia Farrow dominating the proceedings followed by the “victim” Dylan. What I said and was almost decapitated for as a result was that I suspected Dylan had been coached because of the way she focused wide-eyed whenever she needed to make a point. It was very good acting, I thought, if it was acting in the first place. The reason I was on Woody Allen’s side when the brouhaha began was very simple: I could not envision how any normal person could seek sexual gratification by touching an innocent child. And Woody Allen was a normal person, talented as hell but normal. That is when my wife suggested I live in a dreamworld, and that the place was full of perverts and child molesters. Yes, granted, but Woody Allen?
The other important factor was the woman-scorned scenario. Woody Allen had refused to marry Mia and had run off with her adopted daughter, so what was more natural than a Medea-like revenge? While adjectives rained down on me, I defended myself by quoting Voltaire’s maxim that better a thousand guilty men go free than an innocent man be convicted. No good. Who the hell is Walter?
I do not recommend the documentary because it’s very boring and one-sided, and Woody Allen comes out as a terrible creep. The problem is that if he’s guilty he belongs behind bars, but a documentary is not a court of law. And then there’s the memories, which are reconstructed, not replayed. Memories can be planted, especially childhood ones. They can also be distorted by leading questions. Language can also change the way we remember things, making it easy to manipulate children’s memories. All in all, I know nothing more about the case after watching for hours except that she accused and he denied.
The one man who emerges with honor and compassion is the Connecticut district attorney who at the time of the alleged molestation refused to hold a trial because he would have been forced to put a 4-year-old on the stand. Woody’s lawyers would have made mincemeat out of her, and that the DA refused to do. He’s now retired and met the alleged victim on camera, and Dylan told him she wished he had held a trial and had put her on the stand. I guess we will never know, but one thing is for sure: Woody Allen’s name will not be remembered for Manhattan, Radio Days, Hannah and her Sisters, and Annie Hall, among some forty wonderful movies, but for having sexually abused his 4-year-old daughter Dylan.
So I ask you, what if Woody Allen never touched the child, and all this mess was invented by a jealous Mia Farrow who decided to go for broke and kill his career and reputation once and for all? If this were so, la Farrow deserves to go up on the board with other female avengers such as the previously mentioned Medea, Agrippina, Catherine the Great, Clytemnestra, and, of course, Lizzie Borden.
But I also ask you, what if Woody did do the dirty deed? And got away with it because of the decency of a district attorney, Woody’s undeniable fame and talent, and the all-around lovable schnook he portrays so well in his films? Actions entail certain risks, costs, and rewards. Calculated properly, Mia’s decision to go public seems to have worked. Personally, I had thought right off the bat that the whole thing was made up. Now I’m not so sure, in fact I’m 50/50. Was it lack of self-control and the inability to control his impulses that brought Woody down? Even if one had the sick, sick, sick desire to sexually touch a child, surely emotional intelligence needed to play a role. Woody has denied it, and we only have the words of Mia and her daughter, neither of whom I trust after watching the bore for four hours. We need the Delphic Oracle, but Pythia is out having a joint, now legal in this dump. In the meantime we’ve got to stick with Voltaire. And who the hell is Walter anyway?
As everyone knows, or by now ought to know, the only possible explanation of differing outcomes between groups is prejudice, privilege, and oppression by those groups with more favorable outcomes. It follows that the only solution to the anomaly of differential outcomes, and the restoration of the primordial equality that is natural to mankind, is restitution, compensation, expropriation, positive discrimination, etc.
One of the most startling differentials, of course, is that between men and women. It is surely time for it to be redressed.
For example, I was reading in Le Figaro only yesterday that nearly 58 percent of deaths from Covid in France were of men, and only 42 percent of women. This only brings into sharp relief a fundamental injustice that has gone unaddressed for decades, indeed has been largely unnoticed, namely the fact that women live, on average, several years longer than men. For example, women live just over three and a half years longer in Britain than men; in the U.S., the difference is five years; in France, six; in Russia, ten. Overall in the world, men were the victims of 73 percent of fatal road accidents and 78 percent of homicides.
What is to be done about these truly shocking statistics? As we all agree, equality is one of the most precious, if not the most precious, of all political values, for there can be no justice without it.
Let us take homicide as an example. In only two countries, Switzerland and Hong Kong, is the desirable goal of equality of victimhood reached. How have they reached this elevated level of civilization, that is to say a just, fair, and equal distribution of the murdered? I confess that I do not have the answer, and I doubt that anyone else has it either. Could there be a more appropriate subject for an international commission of inquiry? Once it had reached its conclusions, other countries could institute homicide awareness training, to ensure that murderers, or potential murderers, were aware of the social justice implications of their acts.
Of course, achieving equality will not be easy: We shall have to guard against overcorrection, which would be equally unjust. But it must be frankly admitted that it is easier to increase the numbers of homicides than to reduce them, so that, regrettably, if the ultimate goal of equality is to be reached, it may be necessary… Well, I leave it to the reader to draw the conclusion.
But even if the numbers of deaths by homicide and road accidents could be equalized, it would only go a very small way to equalizing the life expectancy of men and women. This is because, regrettable as every fatal road accident and homicide is, such deaths account for only a very small proportion of all deaths, for example in Britain about 2,400 a year in total, whereas the annual number of deaths from cardiovascular diseases is approximately 170,000. A drop, so to speak, in the kicking of the bucket.
Clearly something more drastic needs to be done. Again, it is easier, or would take less effort and expense, to reduce life expectancy than to increase it. The causes of death are cheap, the means to save life expensive, at least in these times when, notwithstanding the Covid epidemic, widespread infectious disease—the main killer of the past—has been largely overcome.
There is, I think, a simple solution to the problem. It has been estimated that a high proportion of the relatively reduced life expectancy of the poorer sections of British society is attributable to their much higher rates of smoking. A good part of the difference (ten years for men and eight for women) would disappear if the proportions of people smoking were equalized.
But it is notoriously difficult to get the lower social classes to change their habits. Therefore, in the name of equality (for could there be any equality more important than in the number of years lived?), men of high social class, and women of all social classes, should be encouraged to smoke more, to smoke for the sake of social justice. This would have enormous economic advantages also, for the great majority of the price of cigarettes in most countries is excise tax. Not only would taxes be raised, but expenditure reduced, for the elderly are expensive and consume unproductively a disproportionate and growing percentage of the economic product of all advanced countries.
But how do you get people to smoke more, especially when you want some people to smoke more than others?
Rome wasn’t built in a day, and so we must plan ahead and think in the long-term. As Saint Ignatius Loyola said, give me a child for the first seven years and I will give you the man—or in this case woman. Smoking classes in primary school, especially for little girls, could be the answer. If you have them hooked by the age of 7, surely many of them will continue for life.
There will have to be fine-tuning, of course, to ensure equality of outcome. Part of the fine-tuning could be achieved via the price mechanism because the amount people smoke is sensitive to price. Given the intersectionality of life expectancy, we need to find a way of encouraging richer women to smoke more than the poor, and women more than men. But I am sure that, in these days of big data and artificial intelligence, such a desirable end could be reached.
Once equality of life expectancy is achieved, thus putting an end to centuries of oppression of men by women who have used their power to lengthen their lives at the expense of men, our societies will be much happier: For, as we know, the majority of all human unhappiness derives from inequality. This happiness will result, whether we have achieved equality by lengthening the lives of men or by shortening the lives of women. A golden age will have been ushered in and social conflict resolved. It is time, then, to approach the crisis of the sexual-inequality life expectancy with new thinking to overcome age-old prejudices that have so disadvantaged men.
Theodore Dalrymple’s latest book is Around the World in the Cinemas of Paris,
Mirabeau Press.
To watch the hours of celebratory fist-pumping from government officials and black activists after the guilty verdicts against police officer Derek Chauvin this week, you’d think Minnesota had just won the NCAA tournament.
One man is dead and another will be spending up to 40 years in prison. How about Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison show a little dignity, with something like: “We had the trial; we’ve got a verdict; I’m not taking any questions”?
Nope! We got a one-hour spirit rally for the championship team. The key was teamwork. Our guys practiced every night — staying even after the gym had closed! We couldn’t have done it without the fans.
There wasn’t this much triumphalism when Ted Bundy was convicted! He murdered 30 women, escaped from jail twice, and killed again before finally being brought to trial. We didn’t have hours of gloating after they got the Green River Killer, and it took 20 years to catch him.
Maybe we’ve gotten less decorous in the past few decades. But how about celebrating the conviction of a gangbanger who killed an 8-year-old girl in a drive-by? Would the media be as giddy about that?
Not likely. Wild celebrations are in order only for the railroading of a cop.
The prosecutors must feel great! All it took was threatening the jurors with riots and personal destruction to get the verdict they wanted. Real Ciceros, these guys.
Chauvin was forced to flee his home last year, which naturally had been vandalized, requiring constant police presence. Barricades have recently been erected around the home of officer Kim Potter, who accidentally shot escaping violent gun offender Daunte Wright last week.
The day before Chauvin’s case went to the jury, a defense witness — a witness! — had his former home in California vandalized with pigs’ blood and a pig’s head.
So I’m sure the jurors reached their verdict purely based on the evidence, after a careful weighing of both sides in the Anglo-Saxon tradition.
We’re told that this is only the beginning, big changes are in the air. Does that mean every case against a cop will come with threats of mob violence?
Here’s one big change in policing that will come out of the Chauvin trial: No longer will police use the least amount of force on vulnerable individuals, like George Floyd. From here on out, the safety of the perp will take a back seat to avoiding unflattering cellphone videos.
A key point brought out at trial was this: As soon as Chauvin arrived on the scene, he would have been within his rights to use a Taser or stun gun on Floyd. The prosecution’s use-of-force experts agreed!
Chauvin employed a less aggressive restraint that looked worse to bystanders. Big mistake.
By now, surely, all law enforcement officers realize that their one overriding concern must always be the optics, not the reality. Unlike other public servants, police have to do their jobs while under the watchful eye of cellphone cameras. What matters is how things appear to idiot onlookers.
Heart disease is rampant in the African American community. Combine that with drug use and behavioral problems — and there are a lot more George Floyds out there waiting to happen.
According to the medical examiner, it was the stress of being restrained — combined with Floyd’s heart condition and massive amount of fentanyl in his system — that killed him. If lying on the ground was too much stress on Floyd’s heart, how about 50,000 volts of electricity?
Again, according to the state’s use-of-force experts, that would have been A-OK.
Got a resisting arrestee? Zap him with the stun gun and heave him in the back of the police van. Whatever happens after that, at least you won’t have a chubby EMT screaming at you and taking videos.
True, Floyd stood a better chance of going on living by NOT being zapped with a stun gun. On the other hand, Chauvin stood a better chance of staying out of prison if he’d just gotten Floyd in the police van, pronto.
Nice work, Minnesota!
The other big change coming down the pike is that we are headed back to the 1960s in terms of crime. Already, 2020 marked the largest year-to-year increase in murders in the history of the country. In Minneapolis alone, the murder rate doubled. Get ready for a lot more violent crime, emboldened criminals and less aggressive police.
To the unwitting citizens of Minnesota who will soon have their lives snuffed out, just remember: The jurors were worried about their own personal security. It was your life or theirs, and they decided the better part of valor was to sacrifice yours.
Their motto: I regret that I have only dozens of other people’s lives to give for my virtue.
