Last week I examined the phenomenon of MAGA rightists who, in their zeal to advance the Wuhan lab Covid origin theory and vindicate Trump, have embraced the CCP propaganda line that Covid is an American bug and the Chinese are practically innocent bystanders in the whole affair.

In the six days since I penned the piece, that phenomenon has only grown. Last week saw former Trump official Pete Navarro tell Steve Bannon that Anthony Fauci is “the father of the pandemic” and “the biggest mass murderer in history.”

Now, that’s exactly the kind of nuanced subtlety that Trumpism will be remembered for. Fauci’s worse than Mao!

I’m sure the CCP is having a good laugh at that.

Also last week, rightist websites and government officials claimed to have “uncovered” a Wuhan lab “smoking gun”—a book by a Chinese scientist who claims that, yes, Covid was cooked up in a lab, but only as a defensive measure because the U.S. cooked up SARS and unleashed it on China in an act of “biological terrorism.”

So apparently America did SARS, too.

“America first” means “first at fault.” Who knew?

Now, obviously, none of these dimwits consciously want to parrot CCP propaganda. So how does something like this happen? More to the point, why do the MAGA minions eat it up?

It’s a simple principle: Restless unmoored ideologues are just begging to be corralled. People craving forward momentum yet possessing no concrete idea of where they want to end up are very easy to manipulate. A clever enough person or entity can, with minimal effort, channel this pent-up energy for their own benefit.

David Shor is a data scientist and progressive Democrat activist. He’s also one of the most honest analysts working today. Back in January, in a fascinating Twitter thread that continued for several months (though it’s largely barren now, as Twitter prefers redaction to preservation, the antithesis of Joe Gould’s vaunted Oral History of Our Time), Shor stated:

I think the thing that people don’t really get is that what left-wing activists care about is really influenced a lot more by what billionaire philanthropists want than people realize.

Adding later in the thread:

Obviously things are spontaneous to *some* degree, but in practice I think people who don’t work in the industry overrate the extent to which activism is a spontaneous grassroots phenomenon.

His point applies equally to left and right. I was a “Tea Party” organizer during Obama’s first term. Back then, Dems called us “astroturf,” and that was partially correct. It was wrong in that the people at the marches and demonstrations were sincere. Nobody paid them, they weren’t shills. But, without the guiding hand of the verminous Koch brothers and Con Inc. and the GOP establishment, without navigation and support from big-money overseers, the “movement” wouldn’t have had the same level of success.

Of course, the Tea Party reflected the values of those who corralled it. Low taxes! “Mah chahld ain’t yer ATM, Obammer!” It was actually a point of pride among Tea Partiers that we steered away from “social issues” or anything “racial.” Immigration? Black-on-white crime? Certainly not! We aren’t the racists the left claims we are! We’re patriots fighting for low corporate tax rates and we all bleed red and support the troops and hey, did I mention that my child isn’t your ATM, Obama? I did? Shit…I’m outta ammo.

And together we helped deliver the glory that was the Boehner Congress! The man himself flew out to Beverly Hills on Jan. 30, 2011, to personally thank our merry little band of Hollywood Tea Partiers for our efforts.

And America—I mean the Koch brothers—lived happily ever after (well, one of them…).

Until an upstart named Trump began talking about things that weren’t on the Koch agenda. And a new kind of movement sprung up, centered pretty much entirely around one guy…and it’s still a movement centered around one guy. The guy ran on a cause, but then the guy became the cause. And that’s the problem.

Having been neck-deep in Tea Partiers, and knowing a hell of a lot of MAGAs, I can tell you that the main difference is not ideological (not counting the “Groypers” and their incestuous little world of code words and high signs). The difference is that the MAGAs are un-corralled, directionless. That the Jan. 6 riot was not an insurrection is not good news. It’s terrible fucking news. A bunch of morons did something stupid and destructive for no discernible reason. I wish it had been an attempted insurrection; that would’ve been less pathetic. But in truth no one had any idea what the hell they wanted. I don’t think Trump knew what he wanted by calling for the demonstration in the first place.

If you’d asked any 1/6 rioter what they were there for, they’d have said “Trump!”

Okay, but what’s Trump for?

“America!”

But what does that mean? You know, specifically. What are your policy goals?

“Trump! America!”

This is gonna win me no friends, but the cult of Ashli Babbitt drives me nuts. I look at her selfie videos and I see exactly the kind of person who’d show up at one of my Tea Party events and I’d put her in a tricorne and give her a drum and she’d march around in a circle for two hours banging like a mechanical chimp and at the end of the day she’d think she accomplished something. Unlimited enthusiasm, limited smarts. Only as useful as a smarter person makes her, completely hopeless without direction.

This trespassing dumbass broke through a window into a besieged, barricaded room filled with cops pointing guns at her screaming, “Don’t come in here,” and she tried to enter anyway and got her fool ass shot, and I bet if she could’ve used her last breath to answer the question “Why’d you do that?” she wouldn’t have had an answer except “Trump.”

There’s nothing even remotely heroic about that. Yet rightists are Rain Manning all over themselves to lionize her as a hero. Last week, GOP Rep. Paul Gosar tweeted a photo of Babbitt with the caption:

They took her life. They could not take her pride. #onemoreinthenameoflove

Leftists decried the MLK reference, and they’re right. Love MLK or hate him, the sonofabitch died for a clearly defined goal.

Attempts by rightists to make Babbitt their George Floyd (“It doesn’t matter if they were breaking the law, or if they were suicidally stupid; cops shouldn’t a’ used so much force!”) won’t succeed. Floyd-mania was backed by Shor’s “billionaire philanthropists” who spend for their cause rather than fundraise off it. That’s a huge difference. Gosar wants your money. Lin Wood, Sidney Powell (who’s still making the rounds shearing the dolts), and Steve Bannon (who literally defrauded you guys out of millions and got pardoned to avoid trial, and none of you seem to care) want your money. They are bad shepherds. Soros, on the other hand, wants results, and he spends to achieve them.

The left funds and directs its fools. The Koch brothers and Con Inc. do the same (hence the success of the Tea Party). But MAGA? A bunch of aimless saps, hopeless when left to their own devices, under the direction of mercenaries who only want to channel them into writing checks.

But it’s even worse than that. Desultory MAGAs whose kinetic energy is not properly discharged by friends will have that energy discharged by foes. Like the CCP getting so many of you to shift blame for Covid to the West. Or how Babbitt beatification has led some of your leading lights to take staunchly anti-police use-of-force positions. Last week during a Babbitt rant, Tucker Carlson declared that if trespassers are breaking through your window, you shouldn’t be able to shoot them “without explanation.”

Screw that. I’d gladly lose a thousand Ashli Babbitts to preserve my right, and yours, to blast the living shit out of a trespasser busting through a window. There should be no “explanation” needed beyond “The person was crawling through the window uninvited.” There, Tuck. There’s your explanation. Now get a dustpan and scoop up the remains.

Mark Steyn also attacked the Capitol Police for using force against 1/6 rioters. The guy even rehashed the 2013 incident in which a schizophrenic black woman in an Infiniti rammed her vehicle through a White House barrier and into a restricted security zone, striking officers before they justifiably ventilated her. Steyn had the gall to claim that the woman was “defenseless” (his term), because a car can’t possibly be used as a weapon. Tell that to the Capitol officer who was killed in April when a Nation of Islam lunatic rammed his car into a restricted zone.

Supporting use of force against rioters and trespassers should be an inviolable principle of the right. There should be no exceptions. But on the MAGA right, where the only thing even partially resembling a goal is an undefined mandate to “vindicate Trump,” all principles are up for grabs.

And monsters like Soros know that.

The MAGA right, untethered to capable patrons, weighed down by parasites, bound to nothing beyond an allegiance to a rapidly fading and irrelevant egotist who was never the man his followers thought he was and who long ago jettisoned the goals that got him elected, is a drifting oceanic garbage patch floating aimlessly through broken windows in pursuit of pointless ephemeral crusades that help no one and improve nothing.

This aimlessness infects the political process. GOP politicos, risk-averse shirkers by nature, are backing away from attempts to resist Soros’ anarcho-tyranny because they’re getting no signals from the base that it’s an important issue. Why take on Soros when you’ll get more kudos by tweeting “Wuhan lab!” and “Ashley Babbitt is MLK!”

Meanwhile, leftist “billionaire philanthropists” and Con Inc. “billionaire philanthropists”—who never have a crisis of purpose and who always know exactly what they want and how to get it—will happily go about fulfilling their objectives while GOPs do Kabuki theater for a bunch of easily shorn mouthbreathers who have no idea what they actually want beyond a few childish buzzwords.

You ask the MAGAs what they’re for and they’ll say “Trump.” And you ask them what Trump is for and they’ll say “America.” And that’s as specific an answer as you’ll get. Meanwhile, people with very specific goals—dismantling criminal justice, justifying antiwhite violence, destroying the very notion of male and female, enacting “corrective” apartheid policies, enabling demographic replacement—will be hard at work as the MAGA base furiously masturbates to 2016 memes from the few glorious months before it all went south.

It’s fitting that Ashli Babbitt has become the Patron Saint of MAGA. Her pointless demise personifies what the movement has become. Goalless. Simpletons charging cannons with no clue what they’d do if they surmounted them.

Worse still, simpletons charging cannons oblivious to the possibility that those behind the cannons are beckoning them on purpose.

Back in 1967, during the Six-Day War, I was living in Paris, and such was my pro-Israel ardor, I actually went to some dump and put my name down as a volunteer in case the state of Israel ran out of soldiers. I was asked by the man in charge if I was Jewish, I answered in the negative, and he jumped up and shook my hand. As everyone knows, my services were not needed that June 54 years ago, and the war was over while I was still contemplating which Parisian girl I would invite to go with me while I gallantly defended Israel’s right to exist.

Two years later, as a freelance photographer for Newsweek and Paris Match, I was in Jordan covering the aftermath of that famous victory, and what I saw made me ashamed to have ever contemplated fighting for Israel. I had been shown around the refugee camps by Farris Glubb, son of Sir John Glubb, or Glubb Pasha, as the Arabs called him, the British general who created and headed the Arab Legion when it fought for Arab independence from the Turks during World War I. Farris clued me in on what had been happening since 1948, when Israel expelled 700,000 Palestinians and created its modern state. These 700,000 were living in outdoor camps and in dire conditions and had been there since 1948. After the 1967 war, hundreds of thousands were added, and the number has grown exponentially since.

I covered the Yom Kippur War of 1973 from the Israeli side, and witnessed the Syrian and Egyptian armies giving a good account of themselves during the first week of fighting. The Egyptians used wire-guided hand-carried missiles to attack Israeli armor in the Sinai, while Syrian tanks held the “invincible” Israeli armor to a standstill in the Golan. I spent my nights in Tel Aviv and drove to the front either in the desert or the Golan every morning. Peter Townsend, a famous Battle of Britain pilot and erstwhile lover of Princess Margaret, writing for Paris Match, was my constant companion. He had never seen a dead body before, having done his fighting up in the air. It was an education for him.

Needless to say, Israeli censors disallowed the slightest criticism, even the fact that Peter and I witnessed some totally unnecessary shooting of some Arabs in places far away from the front. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been in the news lately, and the only comment I have to make is, what else is new? More than seven decades ago, Palestinians were expelled to create a Jewish state. This is an indisputable fact. Now the Palestinians are being expelled to make Jerusalem a Jewish city. In between, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians remain in camps, having lost their homes to Israeli settlers. Creeping annexation in the West Bank by Israeli settlers is an undisputed fact.

The irony in my case is that I am a man of the right siding with a pro-leftist cause, that of the Palestinians. Israelis long ago foresaw the conundrum of being occupiers, and the inevitable criticism for it, and declared it anti-Semitism. Anti-Semitism is a very strong defense against Israel’s critics, a charge that extremely dumb anti-Israeli demonstrators in Europe confirm by calling Jewish women whores and Jewish men bloodsuckers.

While core support for Israel remains strong in the United States, especially in Congress where the Israeli lobby is extremely effective, Europe has always been more skeptical about Israel being a bulwark against Arab radicalism. Yet the historical displacement of Palestinians—including the current efforts to remove them from Arab Jerusalem, acts that violate international law—does not seem to bother Bibi and his merry gang. Israel, in fact, is the only country on earth that enjoys a free hand in assassinating its perceived enemies without a peep emanating from the West.

Yet try to condition our $4 billion per annum aid to Israel with a fairer deal for the Palestinians, and the cries of anti-Semitism will be heard all the way to Mecca. During the last clash between Israelis and Hamas in 2014, 551 Palestinian children were killed by Israeli bombings, and as of this writing only 61 children have died, as opposed to one Israeli child killed by the 3,500 rockets launched by Hamas.

Mind you, the Arab states have wearied of corrupt and intransigent Palestinian leaders. And truth be told, Israel is the only democracy—by far—in the Middle East. And Arab Israelis are full participants in Israeli society. There are Arab justices on the Supreme Court, and as somebody recently wrote, “They arguably are the most free Arabs in the Middle East.”

Yes, absolutely true, and yet, the West Bank is under occupation and has been since 1967. Israel proper used to be half Arab, and the descendants of those Arabs are still in camps. Gaza is one big concentration camp, with 2 million people deprived of power and water four days per week. When American media denounce terrorist attacks by Palestinians, I’d like to know what Americans would have done if they had been under a similar occupation since 1948 and 1967. The Howe brothers thought highly of George Washington but still regarded him a terrorist. My problem is that the people who condemn Israel and root for the Palestinians, like myself, stand for everything I loathe in this world. I suppose nothing to do with Israel is easy—even condemning its policies puts one in Satan’s camp.

The Week’s Most Malicious, Flagitious, and Unpropitious Headlines

HAMBURGLARS AND FLIMFLAMBURGLARS
There have been many theories bandied about in recent months to explain the current explosion in violent crime hitting America’s big cities. Some pundits have pointed to the defunding and demoralization of police due to BLM-mania and George Soros-inspired “progressive” crime-enabling policies. Other commentators, specifically those who possess underdeveloped frontal lobes, have pointed to the Covid pandemic as the cause, because it…somehow…made black Americans egregiously murderous.

But there might be a third theory. Perhaps the eruption of unrest in largely black urban centers isn’t so much about the pandemic per se but the restaurant closures. After all, pre-Covid, a favorite black pastime was suing restaurants for poor dining experiences. Denied a reservation? Racial discrimination! Pay up, suckas! Dress code? Jim Crow on supersteroids! A restaurant closed for the evening that won’t open back up because one black man is hungry? Worse than a lynching.

How many media-hyped stories have there been over the past ten years of black waitresses being left racist notes on receipts by white customers? Sure, it always ends up that the waitress wrote the note herself, but that usually only comes out after the aggrieved waitress has cleaned up on GoFundMe.

In Beverly Hills, Korean-American-owned eatery Crustacean was sanctioned by the EEOC because black people claimed they weren’t being seated close enough to the window so that passersby could see black people dining. “Look, honey—a black man ingesting food. They’re just like us after all! I’m going to renounce my KKK membership.”

Given all that, the 2020 shuttering of indoor dining was a major blow to the black American psyche. Takeout only? No reservations, dress code, “check please,” or window seating? Well, no wonder there were riots; the usual outlets for easy reparations cash were closed. What was left except to sack Walgreens?

But now, thankfully, with life returning to normal post-pandemic, black “leaders” have restaurants to kick around again.

Black “comic” Byron Allen (of the late-’70s hit TV show Real People) doesn’t just tell jokes, he is a joke. Other comedians literally use this failed funster as the butt of their own humor. Yet as bad as Byron Allen is at comedy, he’s proven a very shrewd businessman, producing highly successful daytime-TV courtroom shows like “Judge Yomamasoblack” and “Jiveturkey Court.”

Last week, “media mogul” Allen decided to “mogul” a few billion bucks from McDonald’s by suing the company for not advertising on his “digital TV networks” Pets.TV and Cars.TV (not to mention PetsCars.TV, which consists of nonstop videos of dogs impatiently honking horns as their owners run into minimarts for sundries).

Allen claims he’s not trying to enrich himself by suing McDonald’s for ten billion bucks. Rather, he’s merely pressuring McDonald’s into spending at least 5% of its advertising budget on his networks, which for reasons unexplained will benefit all blacks.

Ironically, that’s the only funny thing the guy’s ever said in his life.

Still, don’t be so quick to laugh. McDonald’s is actually taking the lawsuit seriously. The fast-food giant told the WSJ last week that it would indeed commit 5% of its advertising budget to “black-owned” media entities, although the company stopped short of agreeing to pay for ads on Allen’s WatchingPaintDry.TV, which is billed as “replicating the experience of watching a Byron Allen stand-up set.”

Of course, Allen’s campaign to force McDonald’s to spend more advertising bucks on black consumers comes on the heels of several government and nonprofit reports slamming McDonald’s for being racist for targeting black consumers with too much advertising, thus causing obesity and nutritional deficiencies that led to greater numbers of Covid deaths in black communities.

Damned if you do, damned if you don’t. But most of all, damned if you’re ever going to hear Byron Allen say anything intentionally funny.

Unintentionally, though…the guy’s a real (BLM) riot.

FARMERS’ GALLMANAC
Sticking with the theme of racial scam artists, let’s take a trip to farm country. Ah, America’s rich, hearty farm belt, with its streets of concrete, basketball courts, bums sleeping in alleys, 24-hour check-cashing liquor joints, and crack dens.

Wait, that’s not what you think of when you think of “farm country”?

Racist!

And speaking of “racists,” in March 2020 the ultimate evil racist, Donald Trump, signed the CARES Act, the unprecedentedly large stimulus bill that, in theory, was intended to provide Americans financial relief during the Covid crisis. In reality, it proved itself a gold mine for inner-city hustlers who found ways to bilk the big-money giveaway for all it was worth.

And now it’s been revealed that the part of CARES that was supposed to offer protection to “family farms” was badly, and rather amusingly, abused by those same hucksters.

Weird how so many people of color benefited from handout programs signed into law by a supposed white supremacist.

A core problem with the CARES handouts to “farmers” was that the program made it profitable for “alternative lenders” (sometimes referred to as “fintechs”) to make questionable loans, as those companies were offered a generous government-backed 5% fee on every loan under $350,000. One of those fintechs, “Kabbage,” which later spun off into “K Servicing,” was run by a black angus bossy named Laquisha Milner, and the entire loan program was overseen by the Small Business Administration and its agents, including Eastern Region Special Agent-in-Charge Amaleka McCall-Brathwaite, and SBA inspector general spokesperson Farrah Saint-Surin, who brought all the integrity to her job that one would expect of someone from her native Haiti, a nation known for its clockwork government and lack of graft and corruption (“Haiti: where the rape trains always run on time”).

Anyway, you might be getting an idea of how things went south with CARES’ farm relief bailouts. Last week, a report by ProPublica uncovered millions of dollars in loans to fake farms that were processed, mostly through Laquisha’s Kabbage/K Servicing (which produced a Michael Jackson-themed video to lure black employees and borrowers), and doled out to nonexistent “farms” with names like “Deely Nuts,” “Tomato Cramber,” and “Beefy King.”

One beneficiary of these loans was a Floridian named Latoya Clark, a self-described “African-American woman of Jamaican descent” who received, via Kabbage, over one million dollars for her “farms” named “Squeeze It” (oranges, most likely) and “Tastetunup” (no effing clue). When Clark’s bank, JPMorgan Chase, froze her funds after an internal investigation revealed that the businesses were likely fake, Clark sued Chase for depriving her of her stimmi bucks. Her lawsuit claims that Chase only froze the funds due to “institutional racism” and “racial profiling.”

In its response to the complaint, Chase provided ample documentation to prove that “Squeeze It” and “Tastunup” were shell entities created after the CARES Act was passed as a way of cashing in on the law’s “make it rain” philosophy toward anyone who could fill out a form and hold up a begging bowl.

The Chase vs. Clark case has yet to go to trial, but one hopes that the proceedings will put Ms. Latoya on the spot about what in the living hell “Tastunup” is actually supposed to be.

Not to be outdone by his predecessor, Joe Biden has actually expanded government programs giving money to “black farms,” and as for any loans to fake black farms that were made under CARES during the Trump presidency, Biden’s got that well-covered. On March 17 he appointed as the new head of the Small Business Administration one Isabella Casillas Guzman, who describes herself as (no joke) a “Mexican Chinese Jew.”

Well, surely she’ll clean house! At least the Mexican part of her will.

By the way, what do you get when you cross a Jew with a Chinaman and a Mexican? Someone who cooks their own takeout and pays themselves 50 cents an hour to wash the dishes.

Oh, you can do better? It’s funnier than anything you’ll hear at a Byron Allen show.

GOYTUS INTERRUPTUS
In the classic season 4 Simpsons episode “Mr. Plow,” Homer is driving home from Moe’s Tavern in a blizzard. Drunk, and with his ability to see the road ahead impeded by snow, he recklessly weaves through his neighborhood’s streets. With terrible suddenness, he crashes violently into another vehicle. Exiting his car, he sees that both vehicles have sustained heavy damage from the collision.

“Well, I got him as good as he got me!” Homer proudly declares, content that whatever his repair costs from the crash, the “other guy” will have to pay as much or more.

Then the snow lets up enough for Homer to see that he’s actually crashed into the Simpson family’s parked station wagon in his own driveway. The “other guy” was himself.

D’oh!

That’s kinda been Jews the past year regarding the disruption of outdoor dining by BLM. Encouraged by Jewish journalists, academics, and political moneymen, BLM in 2020 made a cottage industry out of screaming at, threatening, and outright assaulting whites who were dining outside in cities where outdoor dining was the only option due to Covid restrictions. This campaign of harassment produced clip after clip after clip of white diners (often elderly) being harangued, cornered, insulted, and in some cases even losing their food to hungry black reparationists who helped themselves because when Sam Jackson ate that doomed white guy’s tasty burger and washed it down with Sprite, it was, like, the coolest thing ever, right?

Sure, one or two Jews might have been among the besieged diners—after all, the average BLM simpleton can’t tell one whitey from another—but at least leftist Jews could take solace in the fact that for every Finklestein, Schmeckelberg, or Spielenschitz whose dinner was disturbed, ten times as many Andersens, Van Dykes, and O’Houlihans suffered the same fate.

“Well, I got him as good as he got me!”

At least that was the sentiment until a week ago, when a couple of Jews enjoying an outdoor dinner at a pricey West Hollywood restaurant were attacked by a bunch of pro-Palestinian rioters who disrupted their dining experience with insults, threats, and hurled projectiles.

And you know the classic poem…

First they came for the elderly gentiles enjoying the early-bird special at Denny’s, and I did not speak out—
because I am neither old, a gentile, nor a fan of crappy food.

Then they came for the country-club gentiles enjoying fried calamari at a gastropub, and I did not speak out—
because I’m not a country-club gentile, and that calamari isn’t glatt and such tiny portions they give you anyway.

Then they came for me, and—
what the hell? It’s the end of the world! Speak out for me already, why don’t you!

D’oy!

Yes, after voicing unwavering support for BLM as it attacked outdoor diners over and over again, the ADL declared a state of emergency over this one outdoor dining attack by akbars against Jews.

“Interrupting a Jew as he eats dinner? It’s an abomination! A Holocaust! A Chowschwitz! A Beef Stewchenwald! A Burger-Belsen!”

The ADL, aided by its parrots in the press, demanded action! And the LAPD obliged, quickly rounding up the two dining-disruptors—Samer Jayylusi of Anaheim and Xavier Pabon of Riverside. “How fiendish of these men to have traveled so far just to target Jews on L.A.’s Westside,” the ADL croaked, while deleting all the emails it sent a year ago praising BLM activists from South L.A. for coming to the Westside to target whites and Jews with looting and riots.

Because in the end, it’s not about the targetees, but the targeters. The shifty-eyed racial demagogues who run the ADL had no problem with noble blacks attacking Jews, because whites were targeted too. But filthy Ay-rabs attacking only Jews?

That cannot stand!

Indeed, Jason Isaacson, chief policy and political affairs officer with the American Jewish Committee, told The Hill last week that he’s troubled that Palestinian attackers are echoing the “racial justice” rhetoric that groups like his employed in defense of BLM.

How dare they!

Fortunately, with police across the country showing a willingness to arrest the anti-Semitic meal-breakers, hopefully soon enough, with summer on the horizon, the nation’s outdoor dining areas will once again be reserved for disruptions from the right kind of terrorists.

Bomb appétit!

BLANK SLATE, STANK STATE
It’s the late 1970s again, if you haven’t noticed. The Carter years are back and they’re worser than ever. Rampant inflation, gas prices through the roof, out-of-control government spending. A formidable, adversarial communist nation (about to host the Olympics) allowed to romp free by executive-branch cowards and appeasers who take the position “just be nice to them and they’ll be our friends.” Biden seems so intent on being the new Carter, he’s probably planning a river rafting trip just in the hope that he’ll be able to beat the snot out of a drowning rabbit.

It’s everything bad from that era, and none of the good (like the music, and ABC’s glorious T&A prime-time TV lineup).

But by far the worst aspect of the Carter years that Americans are having to relive at present is the soft-on-crime, screw-the-victim, “violent criminals are cuddly lil’ babies who need love ’n’ compassion” school of thought regarding criminal justice. For people who spent the 1970s in cities like New York, Chicago, and L.A., nothing defined the era more than scumbag repeat offenders being released with a slap on the wrist, as innocent citizens were slammed for being “intolerant” if they didn’t want the “Bronx Babyeater” rooming next door to them in a taxpayer-funded halfway house.

One of the most appalling 1970s criminal injustices that was reversed throughout the Reagan years was the idea that violent criminals should have their past crimes shielded from public view, that it’s “discriminatory” to force serial pedophiles, rapists, and murderers to have to live with a record of their previous acts. Clean slates are human rights! After all, “today is the first day of the rest of your life” (and, in the case of inveterate criminals, the last day of the life of their next victim).

Consider the example of Dominique Dunne, the young actress who hit the big time costarring in the 1982 blockbuster Poltergeist. The 22-year-old Dunne had started dating a hot young Hollywood chef named John Thomas Sweeney, unaware—because in 1982 there really was no way to be aware—that he had a history of strangling his girlfriends. So of course he strangled her to death.

At Sweeney’s trial, Judge Burton “Streicher Stereotype” Katz ruled that it was vital that Sweeney’s past strangulations not be mentioned to the jury. Just because a guy has strangled one, two, three women, doesn’t mean the fourth represents some kind of pattern or anything. And since all facts regarding Sweeney’s previous crimes were ruled inadmissible by Judge Thisiswhypeoplehateus, the jury rendered a verdict of involuntary manslaughter, and Chef Chokey McChickenstock was freed to strangle again.

But Dunne’s death was not in vain. Her father, a noted author and journalist, lobbied tirelessly to make it easier for people—jurors, potential employers, love interests—to learn of a person’s history of violent crime.

Thankfully for career criminals, the Democrats—with the help of big-money donors like George NoTHISiswhypeoplehateus Soros—are rolling back all of those Reagan-era reforms. In New York State, the “Clean Slate Act,” which would “remove publicly available criminal records for most felonies and misdemeanor crimes after people have completed the terms of their punishment,” is all set to pass, with backing from labor unions, big business, and big tech. Advocates for the bill aren’t even trying to disguise it as something that would only help “teens who have a record because they smoked a joint.” No, New York already has a law to expunge those records. This new one is targeted at erasing the records of violent felons, including murderers, kidnappers, arsonists, and domestic abusers.

Worse still, the law would require the “expungement” of “biometric information” like DNA databases (you can’t be a serial rapist if the DNA evidence of your previous rape has been sent to the incinerator!). For some wacky reason, feminist orgs are okay with this.

Amazingly, some state Republicans are on board with it too, more evidence that the RNC’s initiation rite of making new members eat lead paint chips has proven to be less than helpful in the long run.

And that’s the big difference between the Carter years and today. Back then, Republicans were not afflicted with mild-to-severe retardation. Indeed, back then, even some Democrats had integrity and morals. The nation’s come a long way, and the next Dominique Dunne who gets murdered in New York by a guy who should’ve been locked away three strangulations ago will surely use her final breath to curse today’s gutless politicos for ushering in a new, worse Carter era filled with all the murderousness but none of the ELO.

BLACK LIVES MATTER? HOW DARE YOU!
It was bound to happen. Climate-change apocalyptics have talked themselves into a corner. From “no more cow farts” AOC to Al “every time I said the world would end I was wrong except this time” Gore to Greta “HOW DARE YOU!” Thunberg to Bill “the earth is on fire!” Nye the Pseudoscience Guy, the screaming-meemie alarmists have made it clear: If we don’t abandon fossil fuels and start driving electric cars, the world will burn…or freeze…or explode…or implode…or suffocate…or something.

The details are sketchy, but pesky specifics aside, just know that we’re all gonna die! It’s electric cars or the end of the human race. The dinosaurs died out because they didn’t switch to electrics (that and the fact that they never engineered a steering wheel that could be reached by the tiny arms of a T-Rex…so many unnecessary road fatalities).

But what if the cost of saving the planet is black lives? We’ve been told that nothing in the world—hell, nothing in the universe—is as precious as a black life.

But there might be one exception to that rule…one thing that is more important than even a Chicago Southside crackhead.

Cobalt!

With no cobalt, there are no rechargeable lithium batteries. No lithium batteries, no electric cars. No electric cars? No earth!

So where does cobalt come from? Is it conjured by transgender wizards using grrrrl-power magic? Is it a by-product of the good feelings one gets from buying a cup of fair-trade cruelty-free eco-friendly coffee from a Seattle Starbucks where one dime of every purchase goes to burning down an ICE facility? Is it pooped out by Gwyneth Paltrow after she ingests too many organic figs?

No, unfortunately. It’s mined in places like the Congo. And apparently, those mines are taking out black children like Wayne Williams on Viagra.

“Our children are dying like dogs,” one mournful Congolese mother told the press last week, as she and a bunch of other perturbed Congolese parents pressed ahead with a lawsuit aimed at getting companies like Apple, Google, Dell, Microsoft, and Tesla to stop killing their kids for their earth-saving batteries.

“Hundreds, if not thousands, of children have been maimed or killed to produce the cobalt needed for the world’s modern tech gadgets produced by the defendants and other companies,” the lawsuit states.

In response to the suit, Apple declared that it has established a “hotline” where children being worked to death in the mines can call to complain. Sadly, as the grieving mothers pointed out, there are several problems with this strategy. First, the child miners don’t have phones. Second, they can’t read. And third, the complaint line is relayed to a call center in Bangalore where nobody speaks English and every operator tries to redirect the conversation to the malware in the caller’s Windows 10.

Not everyone on the receiving end of the lawsuit is unsympathetic, though. Elon Musk told the AP that he’d be more than happy to look into the complaints of the child laborers if they’d convert their investment portfolios to Dogecoin. After being informed that the children have no portfolios, Musk shrugged and said, “Well, then, call me if they get trapped in a flooded cave.”

For his part, Bill Gates released a statement assuring his investors that “in all my visits to Jeffrey Epstein’s island, I never once abused a black boy. They’re not my type.”

Funny enough, so far not a single young leftist Hollywood celebrity or social media “influencer” has volunteered to go to the Congo to relieve a child miner of his duties, if only for a week. After all, seeing how their beloved electric-car batteries are created might just ruin the smug pleasure of driving a Tesla with a BLM bumper sticker and NPR on autoplay on the radio.

Hollywood can’t afford to be sentimental here; if it takes a few thousand dead black kids to save Mother Earth, so be it.

Perhaps if the advocates of the carbon-friendly Keystone Pipeline could guarantee that the tunnels would be dug by African child slaves, the Democrats would reverse their opposition to the project.

It’s certainly worth a shot.

NEW YORK—The Big Bagel is getting so bad, even the baddies are demanding the fuzz do something. As the body count rises, it is obvious that the victims of violence are predominantly poor and minority. Last week, a woman killed in a drive-by shooting had been attending a vigil for a friend who was shot dead after stepping on a gunman’s shoe. A man mortally slashed on a Manhattan subway platform had recently been paroled for an attack on a Jewish woman and her mother. Brazen gunslingers are shooting the daylights out of each other in the Bagel, and there was a shooting spree in the middle of Times Square that left three innocents, including a 4-year-old girl, among the victims.

And yet, up here where I live, it could be Giuliani time, when crime disappeared and the numbers plunged like never before. One hears and reads about the daily gunplay, and compares the statistics to those of forty years ago. Robbery is up close to 30%, grand larceny 66%, and shootings 166.1%. Murder is up 32% from 2019. One wonders when the useless mayor will declare an emergency as the place is starting to resemble a war zone, and after the Covid crisis more and more New Yorkers believe the city is ungovernable and unlivable. Still, two of the numerous candidates running for mayor rant in their speeches about defunding the police. Violent criminals no longer have any fears, according to Pat Lynch, president of the Police Benevolent Association, and having done away with bail laws, criminals get booked and walk, free to continue shooting and robbing people. Cuomo and de Blasio, architects of these new laws, shamelessly go about their business, which is appearing on television and patting themselves on the back.

It all began, methinks, with the spiritual and moral bankruptcy of woke, an idea that establishes bad as good, legal as illegal, and unfair as fair. A false consciousness that sees criminals as good and cops as criminals prevails, especially among minorities, the trouble being minorities are now the majority in cities like New York, Chicago, Detroit, and Minneapolis. Narcissism is now as American as apple pie, with the media and Hollywood feeding it and genuflecting to violent criminals while blaming society and white supremacy for the condition. Every message one hears nowadays, either in advertisements or by politicians, is geared to one’s ego, how great, how beautiful, how wonderful everyone is. Adverts on TV show extremely obese people announcing how happy they are in their skin while swallowing triple-decker hamburgers. And yet everything one reads or listens to nowadays is a complaint—life has become a battlefield; everything, especially work, leads to burnout; the government needs to step in and stop the slaughter. If one read or listened to online complaints—which I don’t, and wouldn’t even if I knew how to—one would be confronted only with despair, unfairness, and grief.

Reading Daniel McCarthy in the Spectator U.S. about Sohrab Ahmari, I was struck by the subject’s introduction to Americans “of the spiritual patrimony of which they have been deprived.” Yes, again and again, “Americans have been deprived of their moral and philosophical inheritance by a shallow educational establishment.” Woke does not only dominate the press, television, and Hollywood, its supreme mandate is where education is concerned. But I’m getting away from my main subject: the present dystopia of what used to be the fun Bagel. Pro- and anti-Israel demos were taking place last week, with BLM and anti-cop mobs on the side of the Palestinians, as if the latter didn’t have enough problems being blasted by Israeli jets. On Saturday morning I went for my exercises in the park and on my way home stopped for the papers. On 68th Street between Park and Lexington, a street that is one-way and goes east, a young black thug on a motorcycle was going west at full speed and on the sidewalk to boot. I yelled at him to get off as he missed me by a foot or two. He sort of stopped and pointed at a knife in his belt. I’m no hero but I do have a temper. So I pretended to have something of my own in my rear pocket. He then gunned his motor and left. I spotted a cop car on the corner of Park and told the cops what had transpired. They almost laughed at me, then drove off. Since the mayor and his police commissioner dismantled the city’s successful anti-gun street-crime units, the fuzz refuses to get involved with anything but the most blatant of crimes.

I don’t blame them. Any witness against the cops is given the kind of trust Princess Di gave Martin Bashir. And the fuzz has given up on petty crime, the benchmark of Giuliani’s anti-crime success of forty years ago. Bikers who race up the wrong streets and on the sidewalks are an everyday and constant occurrence, and the cops are totally indifferent to the public’s complaints. As well they should be. The anti-cop zeitgeist by the media and BLM has succeeded in turning the police into the bad guys, and those who flaunt the law into the good ones. See what I mean about what woke has done? And no one is more woke than media people. What Bashir did to Diana, his kind, the majority of journalists are doing to the rest of us. I’m off to London soon, and won’t miss the Bagel one bit.

What appalled the American deep state and its media courtiers about Donald Trump’s election victory in 2016 may have been dressed up as an ad hominem attack, but it had more to do with the fact that he did not come up through channels approved by America’s political class. Now France’s état profond is equally disturbed that another blond maverick—albeit blonde—has a good shot at the French presidential elections next year, but for different reasons. Politically, she makes Trump look tame.

Marion Anne Perrine Le Pen’s name is easier on the ear than “Donald John Trump,” although the feisty 52-year-old from the fashionable Neuilly-sur-Seine district of Paris is known as “Marine.” Her background as a lawyer suggests a standard-issue European politician, but European lawyers rarely join (although they often represent) organizations such as the Front National, as Marine Le Pen did at age 18. At that time her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, was party leader, and was on record as saying that HIV sufferers should be segregated from society, President Chirac was being bankrolled by B’nai B’rith, and the French soccer team didn’t represent the nation as it contained too many black players. In offense terms, and to borrow a term from the French card game baccarat, this was une maison pleine. Full house. He left out only Muslims, and his daughter would more than make up for that oversight.

In 2011 daughter replaced father as party leader, and moved with sharp political expediency to temper Jean-Marie’s more two-fisted comments. Whereas he called the Holocaust’s gas chambers “a detail of World War II history,” she described the same as “the height of barbarism.” Her sleek remodel of the party performed better than tipsters predicted in the 2012 election, and the establishment took notice. Madame Le Pen discovered that the French judiciary is just as politically weaponized as elsewhere.

In 2015 Marine Le Pen was tried and acquitted for incitement to racial hatred after comparing Muslims praying in the streets of Paris to the Nazi occupation. The same year, she retweeted videos of executions carried out by ISIS as a comment about the brutality of that regime. For this faux pas she was in court again in 2018 with a recommendation that she be admitted for psychiatric testing. “This regime,” she said, “is really starting to scare me.”

The French run presidential elections using a knockout system, with a first round of voting followed by a runoff between the two remaining candidates. The rebranded Front National performed well enough in the 2017 election—winning 21.3% of the first-round vote against current president Emmanuel Macron’s 24%—to make the French chattering classes choke over their salade de géziers.

Le Pen is being taken very seriously by a nervous establishment before the 2022 election, and her popularity is a litmus test for European politics. She is a genuine conservative, and for all their history of radical revolutions and Paris Communes, a solid swathe of France remains both conservative and fiercely nationalistic.

France is famously an agricultural nation, and its produce has a dual role. Wine accounts for 15% of agricultural revenue but is also an emblem of France, part of national mythology, and its producers want to keep it that way. When I last spent time in France, in Vaucluse, a southern region and home to Côtes du Rhône and Châteauneuf-du-Pape wines, my father knew several of the local vignerons, who shared not just a profession, but also a mutual set of traditions and genealogy. These are people whose daughters marry their neighbors’ sons. They appreciate immigrants, but seasonally, to pick grapes at harvest before returning to Bulgaria. These wine-growers also vote for Le Pen.

Now, with the next presidential election just a year away, Le Pen’s next tilt at the top job in the world’s seventh-largest economy has had a familiar effect on political opposition everywhere, as her opponents triangulate and try to ascertain which of her ideas can be adapted for their own use without scaring the horses. President Macron, for example, recently withdrew his support for a Muslim politician pictured in a hijab on local election flyers. But this is low scoring, and Le Pen has support from bigger hitters.

The first of a brace of letters to the Macron administration, and warning of impending civil war, came from retired army generals. They were dismissed by both government and media as yesterday’s men, but when a letter from serving French military personnel followed, Le Pen wasted no time extending a welcome to the armed forces as a potential voting bloc.

Next, when a poll showed the majority of French police following suit and expressing support for Le Pen, France’s political fixers began to realize that the next election might not revolve around convincing some péquenades (sort of French for “hicks”) that Muslim immigration is just what France needs, but whose side the forces of law and order would take in any civil conflict. Those same forces have spoken with Gallic bluntness about their main concern: Islam.

France has around a 9% Muslim population, but small numbers can do big things. In Europe, Muslims tend to ghettoize an urban area, bolster it with immigrants, impose sharia law slowly but surely, take local council seats, form their own parties, and so add another jigsaw piece to the caliphate. Retired head civil servant Philippe Lazar did suggest changing the timing of elections to prevent undesirable results. But that was not to stop the Islamists. That was to stop Le Pen. The E.U. is petrified at the thought of Madame Présidente.

Marine Le Pen has to be very careful. She knows the threat of Islamism, but has learned from her father’s rhetorical rough stuff, the almost total media hatred for her, and her appearance before the French politburo, that you have to speak softly but carry a big stick. She has also been vocal about the French equivalent to the Trumpian “swamp,” and 2022 could see the return of Madame Guillotine.

I have tried all my life to understand my fellow humans but have failed. If I understood them better, perhaps I would share more of their interests.

Take reality TV, for example. Returning to France recently, I discovered by chance that a family called the Gayats had become famous. For what, exactly? Mainly for their number—two parents and nine children. As far as I can tell, they were not in any other way remarkable. A television chain had found them and turned them into stars. One can, if one feels so inclined, follow their daily lives; there are web pages devoted to them that answer such important questions as “Which member of the Gayat family is pregnant?” Hundreds of thousands of people “follow” them.

Even more inexplicable to me is the fact that they are now regarded, and generously paid, as “influencers”; that is to say, when they mention a brand of some commodity—soap or mustard, for example—they receive a payment.

Can such a mention really influence people to copy them? Since the world of commerce is hardheaded and would not part with money unless to some commercial advantage, I have to suppose that there is reliable, or at least plausible, evidence that influencers do really influence.

Let us grant, then, that when the Gayat family (whose income per month as influencers is greater than its income in a year from other sources) is shown using a certain brand of something, the sales of that brand rise. Whether the demand for that something is elastic or inelastic hardly matters. From the point of view of the owners of the brand, what counts is the total sale; whether the increase is at the expense of other brands or the result of increased demand for the brand’s commodity, whatever it might be, is irrelevant.

But what kind of person is influenced to purchase a certain brand of something simply because he has seen on television a member of the Gayat family use or consume that brand? Can shallowness go deeper?

Equally mysterious to me is the attention given to the opinions of celebrities on subjects such as global warming or the situation in Burma. Of course, like everyone else they are entitled to an opinion of their own, but not to anyone’s attention to it. That attention is in fact given to it is dispiriting. What they say consists mainly of cliché, but when, as happens rarely, they step out of line with the party line, the party being that of the reigning orthodox liberals, they are turned upon with a ferocity reminiscent of that of lynchers. This prospect alone is enough to make most celebrities cleave closely to the preordained orthodoxy. Many of them know that their celebrity is founded on shifting sands.

The cult of celebrity, as a quality in itself irrespective of the value of what it attaches to, is likewise mysterious to me. Many are those who seek celebrity detached from anything else of discernible worth. Fame for its own sake is sufficient for them. But what does it mean that people can be famous for being famous? As the late Marshal Mobutu Sese Seko pointed out, it takes two to be corrupt, and likewise fame that attaches to a person for no reason in particular requires someone—by definition, many people—to confer it upon him.

Celebrities who are famous for being famous must have some slight quality that marks them out from others; so that, for example, it is nowadays very unusual for families to consist of nine children (though when I visited Rwanda in 1986, women had nine children on average, and with the advances in medical care, which to some degree had reached even those parts, most of them survived). But the quality that marks out such celebrities must not be of a kind that it is completely beyond the range of possibilities for the audience—as, for example, quantum physics is beyond mine. The celebrity must be such that, fundamentally, he is one of us, the great mass of mediocrities. In fact, a celebrity could have been me if things had been only a little different. Modern celebrity is thus the screen on which mass daydreams are projected.

When did the cult begin? As with most social or cultural phenomena, it is impossible to give a precise date of origin. Clearly, celebrity beyond a narrow circle of personal acquaintance requires means of communication at a distance. It also requires a concentration of population. These conditions develop gradually, not all at once, but now they are met as never before in history.

Who was the first celebrity? There is no correct answer to this question, but whenever I ask it of myself, I think of the playwright George Bernard Shaw, who always or very often (so it seems to me) preferred notoriety—a form of celebrity—to truth. He was a very talented man, of course; one could not say of him that he was famous just for being famous. He was witty and some of his plays are still worth performing, which cannot be said of the work of many playwrights of his epoch. He was certainly not a mediocrity in the manner of many contemporary celebrities. But he was more than averagely aware of the benefits of self-promotion, in which pursuit he was very thorough. It led him to oppose received opinion because it was received, not because it was wrong.

Where celebrity is both more desired and more prevalent, it will attach to people of less and less accomplishment. To be completely unknown becomes a wound, a humiliation, a sign of failure; celebrity is the sole guarantor of personal worth. To be known for nothing of any importance is infinitely better than not being known at all. The economist John Maynard Keynes was once asked what Lloyd George (the British prime minister) thought about when he was on his own. “When Lloyd George is on his own,” he replied, “there is nobody there.”

Since that time, at the end of the First World War, the number of people who cease to exist for themselves in the absence of an audience, and who value themselves by the size of their audience, has increased exponentially. And they hope, by means of false logic, that by imitating the famous, they will become famous themselves, and thus more real and important.

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

After nine people were shot to death by a public transit worker, who then killed himself in San Jose, the latest mass murder in America, California Governor Gavin Newsom spoke for many on the eve of this Memorial Day weekend.

“What the hell is going on in the United States of America? What the hell is wrong with us?”

Good question. Indeed, it seems that the country is coming apart.

In May, Congress, to address a spate of criminal assaults on Asian Americans, enacted a new hate crimes law to protect them.

May also witnessed a rash of assaults on Jewish Americans to show the attackers’ hatred of Israel and support for the Palestinians in the Gaza war.

The terms “racist” and “racism” are now commonplace accusations in political discourse and a public square where whites are expected to ritually denounce the “white privilege” into which they were born.

In the year since the death of George Floyd and the rise of the Black Lives Matter “Defund the Police!” campaign, the shootings and killings of cops and citizens in our great cities have skyrocketed.

In March, and again in April, 167,000 immigrants were caught crossing our southern border illegally. The invaders are now coming not only from Central and South America but also from Africa, the Islamic world and the largest and most populous continent, Asia. And their destiny may be to replace us.

For as the endless invasion proceeds, native-born Americans have ceased to reproduce themselves. Not since the birth dearth of the Great Depression and WWII, when the Silent Generation was born, has the U.S. population experienced such a birth decline as today.

At the same time, a war of all against all in America seems to raise the question, to which recitation of the cliche — “Our diversity is our greatest strength” — no longer seems an adequate response:

Is there no limit to the racial, religious, ideological, political, cultural and ethnic diversity the nation can accommodate before it splinters into its component parts?

In professions of religious belief, atheists, agnostics and secularists have become our largest “congregation,” followed by Catholics and Protestants, both of which are in numerical decline.

Diversity of faiths leads to irreconcilable, clashing opinions about morality on the most divisive social issues of our era: abortion, homosexuality, same-sex marriage, etc.

Racial diversity, too, is bringing back problems unseen since the 1960s.

America was almost 90% white in 1960, but that figure is down to 60% and falling. In 25 years, we will all belong to racial minorities.

Are we Americans still united in our love of country? Do we still take pride in what we have done for our own people and what America has done for the world in the 400 years since Jamestown?

Hardly. Part of the nation buys into the academic and intellectual elites’ version of history, tracing America’s birth as a nation to the arrival of the first slave ship in Virginia in 1619.

We not only disagree about our history; some actually hate our history.

That hate can be seen in the statues and monuments destroyed, not just of Confederate military heroes but of the European explorers who discovered America, the Founding Fathers who created the nation, and the leaders, from Thomas Jefferson to Andrew Jackson to Teddy Roosevelt, who built the America we became.

Yet, tens of millions from all over the world still see coming to America as the realization of a life’s dream.

Some look at Western civilization as 500 years of colonialism, imperialism, genocide, slavery and segregation — practiced against people of color. This is the source of the West’s wealth and power, it is said, and that wealth and power should be redistributed to the descendants of the victims of Western rapacity.

For many, equality of opportunity is no longer enough. We must make restitution, deliver reparations and guarantee a future where an equality of rewards replaces an equality of rights.

Meritocracy must yield to equity. Elite high schools, such as Thomas Jefferson in Virginia, Stuyvesant in New York and Lowell in San Francisco, must abandon their emphasis on grades, tests and exams to gain admissions and prove progress.

And these schools must be remade to mirror the racial and ethnic composition of the communities where they reside.

And a new cancel culture has taken root in America.

Former U.S. Senator Rick Santorum, a CNN commentator, was fired for suggesting that Native American institutions and culture played no significant role in the foundation and formation of the American Republic.

“We birthed a nation from nothing. I mean, there was nothing here. I mean, yes, we have Native Americans,” Santorum said, adding: “There isn’t much Native American culture in American culture.”

Impolitic though this rendition was, was it wholly false?

Something is seriously wrong with a country that professes to be great but whose elite cannot abide the mildest of heresies to its established truth.

Last week, we discussed Rebekah Jones, the crazy lady who wrote a 342-page telenovela about her ex-lover, Garrett Sweeterman, then went on to fame and fortune by claiming Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis was faking his state’s spectacularly low COVID numbers.

Before the media turned Jones into their next Erin Brockovich, they might have done 10 seconds of Googling to find out that Jones’ past includes stalking, battery on a police officer, repeated incarcerations, an institutionalization, an ankle monitor, a restraining order and court-ordered medication. And that’s long before the DeSantis administration hired her as a web designer.

These infractions are contained not only in police reports and court filings, but in her prolix manifesto about her ex-lover that she herself posted all over the internet.

Jones seems to think it’s a point in her favor that during Florida State University’s investigation of her obsessive behavior toward her former student, “Garrett didn’t even bother bringing any evidence — no copies of texts or calls … I brought more than 200 pages worth.”

That sounds normal.

Even after multiple demands that she stay away from Sweeterman, the still-married Jones writes:

Did you know that I would have given anything, truly anything to make things right between us?

Did it matter to you at all that I loved you?

Did it, Garrett?

If the genders were reversed, Jones’ obsession with a former student would be a movie on “Lifetime: TV for Women.”

Instead, she attacked DeSantis and became magazine’s “Technology Person of the Year,” Fortune magazine’s “40-Under-40” in health care, and cable news’s go-to source for dirt on the DeSantis administration.

No TV personality lavished more attention on Jones than MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell, featuring her on his show on Dec. 8, Dec. 9, Dec. 16 and Dec. 22, 2020. As is common at MSNBC, O’Donnell jumped on the horse and rode off into the sunset without a map, directions or a compass.

In the first of his blockbuster reports, O’Donnell used a law enforcement raid on Jones’ home for one of his anti-police screeds, informing viewers that they were about to see a video of “outrageous conduct by American police officers” — and I have this hot MILF on my show to talk about it. If she wants, I’ll take her on my sailboat.

The MSNBC host scoffed at the basis for the raid, saying: “They were going after the person who sent what they considered, I suppose, some criminally dangerous text.” Ho ho ho. Jones — or at least her lawyer — knows damn well that the charge is serious, which is why, to this day, she stoutly denies sending the text.

According to the search warrant affidavit, six months after Jones was fired by the Florida Department of Health, she hacked into the state’s medical emergency notification system from her home computer, obtained the private information of thousands of people, and sent out a mass text, pleading: “it’s time to speak up before another 17,000 people are dead. You know this is wrong,” and so on. She signed the deranged missive as if it were an official communique from Florida Department of Health.

Comcast determined that the text came from Jones’ Tallahassee home. Perhaps in addition to cuckolding him, she plans to pin the hacking felony on her husband. (Then she could run off with Garrett!)

On the day of the raid, as infinitely patient law enforcement officers banged on Jones’ front door for 22 minutes, she was inside, setting up a video camera. Donations to her GoFundMe page must have been flagging.

O’Donnell introduced her video, saying: “What you’re about to see is almost as bad as American policing gets.”

What we see is Jones (finally) opening the door and exiting the house. An officer enters, unholsters his gun, and calls out for anyone else in the house to come downstairs. In other words, standard operating procedure for executing a search warrant.

Although no one is pointing a gun at anyone, Jones can be heard in the background screaming, “He just pointed a gun at my children!”

This is classic hysterical woman behavior.

YOU’RE HURTING ME! STOP HITTING ME!

I’m not touching you. I’m 7 feet away.

But O’Donnell and the rest of the media repeatedly played Jones’ video while informing viewers that it showed something it plainly did not: officers “pointing” guns at Jones and her children.

“The only thing that could have made this worse,” O’Donnell said, “is if one of those recklessly aimed guns killed someone in that house. If one of those guns aimed at Rebekah Jones’ children fired.”

O’Donnell on the Zapruder film: As you can see in frame 187, President Kennedy is firing at Lee Harvey Oswald from the convertible.

Jones is like the white woman captured on video in Central Park, calling 911 on a black male birdwatcher. As he calmly speaks to her from 20 yards away, she shrieks to the dispatcher, “An African American man … [is] threatening myself and my dog.”

O’Donnell voiceover: The only thing that could have made this worse is if the birdwatcher had killed the woman.

My voiceover for the entire American media: As you can see, they are liars.

The British Browbeating Corporation (BBC) is on the back foot this week. It has belatedly fessed up to how its flagship investigative (“truth about the stories that matter”) documentary program Panorama was guilty of a campaign of dirty tricks in obtaining its “scoop of the decade” interview with Princess Diana in 1995. Also that there has been a 25-year-long senior management cover-up of these dirty tricks. Critics of the BBC, of a certain kind, will have a bit of fun with this; there are already calls for an urgent review of the corporation’s terms of engagement. Not so long ago—at the time of the appointment of a new director general—there briefly was excitable media talk of a radical shakedown of excessive BBC wokeness (somewhat disingenuous, though, coming from journalists only too well aware of an intractable obstacle to this fantasy; namely that the vast majority of the BBC’s 35,000 staff will be left-wingers of some sort). BBC insiders themselves will briefly do some hand-wringing about “bad apples.” Equally briefly we will be told that things must change—must change in order to protect the integrity of this great national institution.

The Dyson Report is, as far as it goes, a forensic investigation in its exposure of these lies and cover-ups. But the really big lie is the one about how all this “fell short of the high standards and integrity that are [the BBC’s] hallmark.” For the truth is that the BBC (in common with all other big media brands) manipulates reality every week, every hour, every minute.

The range of “information” and opinion in which we are almost completely reliant on Big Media is frightening. And yet notice how whenever it touches on something about which you have direct personal experience, how wide off the mark it invariably proves to be. The sheer quantity of “information” coming at you in the modern world takes a great deal of intellectual effort to process properly. It is easier to just let it wash over you. Eventually it becomes a quicksand and it sucks you in. In times past people may have known only what was going on in their own neck of the woods, but at least they knew it intimately, which provided a reality check.

Not anymore; now, thanks to the likes of the BBC, you know so much more—and have an opinion on so much more. Now you know that some brutal murders merit grief on a national scale whilst others deserve barely a passing mention. Your attention is kept continually focused on the activities and agendas of political activists of all sorts of Progressive causes—which is important because these people “care more” about their fellow man than the rest of us. A light is shone for you into the dark shadows of sexual oppression…of celebrities. You know that man-made global warming is threatening to destroy the planet and it’s all the fault of capitalism. Just like you know that capitalism was virtually brought down at the stroke of midnight in 2000 by something called the Millennium Bug. Best of all, you know what the most important thing going on in the world at any one time is because it is the thing that headlines the news. Thus is our consciousness deluged with trashy certainties.

It is not even that the BBC and its like are—for the most part anyway—deliberately trying to present a distorted perspective on current affairs or anything else. It is worse than that; the distortion is so embedded in media culture that it collectively fails to comprehend that there are other perspectives. The BBC and its hinterland of favored contributors teem with champagne lefties, celebrity poseurs, and assorted other have-your-cake-and-eat-it fellow travelers of the liberal establishment elite.

And it is a veritable honey pot for the not so big wide world of the arts and academia. The joke is that they all think of themselves as radicals and guardians of freedom. Funny business radicalism; the word suggests boldness, independent-mindedness, freethinking. The reality is the opposite. It is a me-too mentality of fitting in with the prevailing ethos, often first absorbed during student days. I remember when I was at university in the 1970s, one or two lonely guys in tweeds and sports jackets flitting furtively across the psychedelic-bead-strewn quadrangle clutching their briefcases. I remember thinking, Those guys are the real radicals here. The thoroughly predictable “radical” offerings from the BBC in-crowd are invariably dripping with media establishment mythology, and the depressing fact that the BBC is often hailed as a great bastion of intellectual independence merely demonstrates the overwhelming brainwashing power that the little box in the corner now has on our intellectual horizons.

George Orwell partly saw the future that we now inhabit—but with one crucial difference. In his nightmare 1984, a political elite controlled the television in the corner of the room and used it to brainwash the citizenry. Whereas in the real post-1984 nightmare, a pervasive mass media—a cancerous organism out of the control of anyone, even its own media elite—brainwashes everyone, politicians included. It is not that anyone is actively trying to brainwash you; it is more that a powerful tendency to groupthink is the very nature of mass broadcasting. And of course this has been going on irrespective of which political party has been supposedly in power. Almost all Western politicians run scared of media power.

The BBC’s great trump card has always been the widespread perception that it is a cut above the media pack; the essential guarantor of that British “sense of fair play.” In this way its enormous soft-left power has gone unchallenged for many decades now—almost unnoticed. It has schooled us in the ways of attacking everyone else—everyone but itself. We have become schooled into the idea that it does the challenging on our behalf; surely it is our defender against the power of politicians and big business, etc., isn’t it?

But the most insidious brainwashing happens at a more subtle level than this; it lies in the power of storytelling. It is at this subliminal level that the great soft-left crusades—moral relativism and the cult of victimhood—have been won. More than anywhere it is in radio and television film, drama and soap opera. Try these tests next time you are watching some BBC drama on PBS. If the characters happen to include, say, a white middle-class guy and a nonwhite working-class guy, who is going to turn out to have surprising hidden qualities and who is going to turn out to have a surprising hidden dark side? Or compare the proportion of homosexual characters on your TV screen with that in your own real life. Try and find the drama where the “right-wing” character turns out to be full of compassion and the “left-wing” character full of bile, or where the successful business executive turns out to be rather a nice chap.

Gun murders are up 34.4 percent in the 365 days since George Floyd’s death.

According to data scraped from Gun Violence Archive, in the Year One B.F. (Before Floyd) from May 25, 2019, to May 24, 2020, there were 13,024 murders committed with a firearm in the U.S.

In contrast, in the Year One A.F. (After Floyd) from May 25, 2020, to May 24, 2021, there were 17,499 gun murders, an increase of 4,475 corpses. (In contrast, the NAACP reports that 3,446 blacks were lynched in all of U.S. history.)

That’s a lot of blood that our new state religion, the worship of the holy martyr George Floyd and his racial brethren, has on its hands.

Normally, murders are a rather stochastic phenomenon and thus are fairly stable from year to year. People kill other people for idiosyncratically personal reasons, so even major social trends like The Sixties can take years to raise murder rates. Thus, the calendar years with the biggest percentage increases in murders since 1960—1968 and 2015—saw rises of only about one-third as bad as the first year of the Age of Floyd.

Technical note: Murder statistics are never quite final because coma victims expire, presumed runaways are discovered in shallow graves, suicide notes are found, and the like. But whatever the ultimate numbers for the first 365 days of the Racial Reckoning will turn out to be, they reflect a massive increase in mayhem, the majority of it perpetrated by blacks. The latest FBI statistics report that blacks were 55.9 percent of the known murder offenders in 2019, and all the evidence suggests that the black fraction for the past twelve months, which will be released next September, will have been even more staggering.

Unsurprisingly, nobody in The Establishment is stepping forward to forthrightly apologize and admit that, yeah, the bad people (like, say, me) were right: America’s biggest criminal justice problem is not police brutality, it’s black brutality.

As Woke Stalin might say, the death of one George Floyd is a tragedy, but the deaths of thousands of subsequent incremental murder victims are a divisive white supremacist hatestat.

So, that’s what the first year of the Floyd Era was like: mayhem on the streets of black America.

What will the future of Floydism be?

It’s hard to predict because it’s so novel in human history for a culture to extol as its moral master race a group exalted for their ineptitude. Consider the strangeness of Americans worshipping George Floyd, an ugly brute who lived an ugly life of major and minor crime that brought him to an ugly end. Then, think about the other BLM martyrs.

When the Germans started worshipping themselves as the master race, it was alarming for the rest of the world because they were known to be competent enough that they just might conquer Europe from London to the Urals.

But now that the citizens of the world’s superpower are being raised to worship blackness as our ideal of beauty and merit, how is that supposed to work?

It’s reassuring to hypothesize that perhaps nobody who matters really takes Floydism—“Black is best and white is worst”—seriously. It’s just a vast practical joke with which to humiliate political enemies. As Taki Magazine columnist Theodore Dalrymple famously observed:

Political correctness is communist propaganda writ small. In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, not to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better.

Perhaps the people who know how to run large organizations realize, deep down, despite all their press releases to the contrary, that there are not vast pools of untapped African-American talent out there ready to take over after a little training. American institutions have been hungry for adept blacks since the 1960s, with numerous diversity pushes having failed already.

Therefore, white elites presume that black frontmen will always need nonblack éminences grises behind the scenes. So, how bad could it get?

But maybe nobody actually has a Plan that they’ve carefully thought through. Recall that wealthy whites have bet tens of billions on the further gentrification of urban frontiers in places like Brooklyn, Washington, D.C., and Oakland. So far, the impact of the post-Floyd murder surge on property values in big-city neighborhoods that could tip either way has been masked by the pandemic disruption and the general housing bubble. But, a few gentrifying liberals like Matthew Yglesias and, lately, Ezra Klein have started to worry about rising crime.

Granted, the post-Floyd crime wave was all very foreseeable. I predicted “The End of Gentrification” three weeks into the 2020 Black Lives Matter riots. But few other pundits seemed to notice that encouraging blacks to feel both racially aggrieved and above the law wouldn’t be good for either black lives or white property values.

As reassuring as it is to imagine that when disasters befall America they must be the work of an all-knowing conspiratorial deep state out to get you, it seems more likely that there is no Inner Party. Nobody knows how things really work because, like the courtiers in The Emperor’s New Clothes, anybody who expresses doubts about Floydism is, as Hans Christian Andersen said, “unfit for his office.”

Instead, truths that you can’t say in public become ever harder to say in private, and, ultimately, even difficult to conceive of in your own mind.

Charles Murray is coming out of semi-retirement to publish a book next month, Facing Reality, to remind the reading public that the two most exhaustively documented findings of the American social sciences are that blacks are, on average, more violent and less intelligent.

But why does he have to? Why have we wound up with a culture where so many are oblivious to the obvious?

Moreover, every year, less influence in our society is in the hands of semi-well-informed family men like Yglesias and Klein. The younger generation has been marinated in doctrines of black moral, aesthetic, and sexual supremacy, and young women are persuasive at getting whatever the latest fad tells them to want.

How long can the black superiority vogue last?

Not forever, obviously.

Yet, to paraphrase John Maynard Keynes, “The culture can remain irrational longer than you can remain uncanceled.”

The one rational step that American elites could take to meet the demand that they’ve stoked for black leaders is to increase immigration from the educated elites of Africa, who tend to have less dysfunctional cultures than those of African-Americans. Sure, African-Africans have their weaknesses, such as Medicare fraud, but at least their upbringing didn’t convince them that the only manly response to a diss is to open fire in the disser’s general direction even if you might wing bystanders eating ribs and twerking in the background.

How importing the heirs of African slave sellers will benefit the descendants of American slaves is almost as mysterious as how brain-draining Africa of what talent it has will be good for the burgeoning masses of that continent. But that’s not the point; the point is that many Americans at present dream of being ruled by Obama-like blacks, of which America is in drastically short supply.

But American elites are constitutionally incapable of explaining the cynical but at least not wholly stupid reasoning behind their desires. Okay, I could imagine old Joe Biden saying, “Yeah, now that we’re expanding affirmative action, we need more Igbos because American blacks sure aren’t cutting it.” But if he did, CNN would only ever mention it when complaining that Fox News had broadcast Biden’s clip.

Instead, corporations are likely to promote importing Africans with three-digit IQs as a moral necessity owing to, oh, say, climate change, slavery, redlining, Emmett Till, or whatever.

But that would then heighten perhaps the single greatest threat to the Western world: that whites won’t find the moral backbone to keep out the booming billions of rapidly growing Africans. The 2019 United Nations Population Prospects forecasted that Sub-Saharan Africa will reach 3,775,000,000 people by 2100.

This migration process has already started in the U.S.: As of five years ago, almost one in ten blacks in America had been born abroad. Fortunately, most got in through old-fashioned selective legal immigration.

In upcoming years, opening the floodgates to excess Africans will be pitched to the public by Woke Capital as an economic necessity since whites aren’t reproducing fast enough to keep toilet paper sales growing.

Of course, the more non-elite Africans are allowed into the U.S., the more that white fertility will fall even further as family formation becomes ever more unaffordable due to the growing need to escape crime and bad schools. (It’s not a complete coincidence that the baby boom ended in the year of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, as white families were increasingly driven out of convenient neighborhoods.)

So, we are likely to be plunged into a vicious cycle in which African immigration drives down white reproduction, which is then taken as requiring importing more tens of millions of Africans.

The alternative is that American elites will have to learn to say out loud what sounds utterly unthinkable in the George Floyd Age: We don’t need or want more Africans; we have enough already.

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