With the NBA Finals coming up, retired black basketball stars are complaining about how racist the NBA is.

On his ESPN show, Jalen Rose denounced the U.S. Olympic basketball team choice of white veteran Kevin Love, the nephew of Beach Boy Mike Love, as its 12th man as “tokenism”: “Don’t be scared to make an all-Black team representing the United States of America.”

In reality, the U.S. Olympic team was all-black in 2000, 2004, 2008, and 2016. The only white players named to the last seven U.S. teams have been Love and John Stockton. Evidently, diversity is not our strength when it comes to basketball.

Granted, Love is 32 and likely washed-up due to injuries, but perhaps the Olympic team wanted the guy LeBron James demanded to help him bring an NBA title to his home city of Cleveland because he would accept his role at the far end of a deep bench rather than sulk?

Speaking of sulking, Scottie Pippen is still denouncing Phil Jackson, the all-time winningest coach, as racist for choosing Croatian Toni Kukoč to take the last shot in a 1994 Chicago Bulls playoff game instead of him.

Pippen sitting out the last two seconds of a playoff game in a snit was the low point of his impressive career. Scottie’s view was that for years he’d subordinated himself to Michael Jordan as the Bulls’ alpha dog, but now that MJ was off on his weird minor-league baseball hiatus, he was rightfully The Man. But Pippen, with his very long arms, was always a better all-around basketball player than pure shooter.

In contrast, Jackson, who coached eleven NBA championship teams by cajoling huge egos like Jordan, Pippen, Dennis Rodman, Shaquille O’Neal, and Kobe Bryant to try being team players, felt he was paid to win titles. He had just watched Pippen heave up two straight bricks, so he called on Kukoč. As usual, Jackson was right: The lanky Croat hit the game-winner.

These incidents bring up a couple of seldom-asked questions: Will the decline in African-American culture since Ferguson in 2014 eventually hurt the quality of play in the NBA, the way the crack era of the early 1990s led to the bad basketball of the late 1990s and early 2000s?

And whatever happened to white American basketball players?

The latter is a hard question to answer because whites very seldom complain publicly about race. So white people with inside information mostly keep their mouth shut, leaving it to ill-informed outsiders like me to speculate.

While white American players are in decline, foreign whites had a good 2021, with Serb center Nikola Jokić winning the NBA’s Most Valuable Player Award in a landslide and Slovenian guard Luka Dončić finishing fifth.

Guys with names that end in “ić” seem cut out for the NBA. In this century, people from the Balkans (who tend to be exceptionally tall and rugged) have been solidifying their claim across a variety of sports to be the finest white athletes in the world. In a recent survey of basketball fans on the best white NBA players right now, five of the top ten were from ex-Yugoslav countries: Dončić, Jokić, Nikola Vučević of Montenegro, Bojan Bogdanović of Bosnia, and Bogdan Bogdanović of Serbia.

Only two Americans made the white top ten, Gordon Hayward and Joe Harris, no better than little Lithuania (Domantas Sabonis and Jonas Valančiūnas—Baltics, like Balkans, tend to be tall), and barely ahead of Australians (Joe Ingles).

What’s the matter with white American basketball players?

One reason is that while U.S. whites are still getting slightly taller each generation, they’ve been overtaken in average height by a number of European countries. On the other hand, many of the tallest countries, such as the Netherlands, don’t much like basketball, while shorter countries like Spain, Italy, and Greece tend to be among the most enthusiastic Europeans.

Also, tall white boys don’t have much confidence anymore that they can succeed over black talent. A couple of generations ago, whites could outwork blacks on the basketball court, especially in the non-glamorous tasks, such as playing defense, or the ones that require repetitious practice, such as outside shooting. Phil Jackson, who won an NBA title as a dorky-looking but effective role player before winning more championships than any other coach in American pro sports history, explained in his 1976 memoir Maverick:

Throughout the years the black players on the Knicks have possessed much better physical ability than the white players, being generally faster and better jumpers…. White players are more often willing to run patterns and to work collectively….

Black kids growing up want to be the superstar of their neighborhood…the best one-on-one basketball players. White kids, on the other hand, usually are raised in a more homogeneous environment, which provides other outlets for personal expression. They’re also constantly being taught the principle of subordinating their own personal glory for the good of the group.

Since 1976, however, blacks have gotten notably better at playing defense. This is heartening. It shows that blacks can improve their culture if it means enough to them. They’re not genetically doomed to helplessness.

It’s why I ask African-Americans to cut their murder rate to the Latino level. Unlike practically every other pundit, I think they could if they tried hard enough. But black basketball players have coaches yelling at them to do better, while everybody in the rest of society is now reassuring blacks that any shortcomings they have in daily life are the fault of whites, who must pay.

And in this century, black hoopsters have improved at long-range shooting, especially the affluent sons of NBA players such as Stephen Curry and Klay Thompson who grew up with their own baskets to practice on for hours per day. Nurture matters as well as nature.

But that leaves whites with fewer opportunities in basketball, especially because white boys physically mature slower than black boys.

Many of the best white North American white basketball players in recent decades have grown up in the very white Pacific Northwest, like Love (Portland), Stockton (Spokane), and Steve Nash (Vancouver Island), far from large numbers of blacks as competition. Stockton’s Gonzaga U. in Spokane became a college basketball powerhouse by recruiting white players willing to stick around for four years. But now it can compete for the best black athletes.

My guess is that tall, athletic white youths now focus more on becoming baseball pitchers, a technical skill that requires a lot of coaching, rather than be funneled into basketball as they used to be.

We hear constantly about how diversity is our strength, but in sports, ethnic specialization tends to have a sizable payoff.

Is the NBA getting better or worse?

Just about the only purely objective measure of skill in basketball is free-throw shooting percentage, which has mostly been improving over the years, although not to the same extent as field goal kicking in the NFL. But with the current emphasis on shooting long-range three-point baskets, the NBA set a new record for free-throw shooting accuracy in 2021 at 77.8 percent.

There were two periods when free-throw accuracy fell well below the trend line for a number of years: the 1960s and the 1990s. The former may have been driven in part by Wilt Chamberlain’s psychodramas at the line: In a small league, Wilt’s personal travails at shooting free throws didn’t help the overall average.

The collapse in the later 1990s as the NBA reached a new peak in wealth is curious. It may have had something to do with the growing emphasis on long-armed players like Pippen. And the effect of steroids on basketball performance remains obscure compared with better-studied sports like baseball and track.

But at the time, it sure looked like players who had grown up listening to gangsta rap during the crack era were getting more thuggish and irresponsible. Whereas Jordan and Pippen conducted postgame press conferences in superb bespoke business suits, by the later 1990s, players like Allen Iverson dressed like Bloods and Crips.

Clothes, evidently, make the man.

Darryl Dawkins, whose showboating Philadelphia 76ers lost to Bill Walton’s Portland Trailblazers in an epic 1977 NBA Finals confrontation between the black and white games, told Charlie Rose in the early 2000s, “The black game by itself is too chaotic and much too selfish…. White culture places more of a premium on winning, and less on self-indulgent preening and chest-beating.” Arguing that the best teams combine both styles, Dawkins pointed out, “In basketball and in civilian life, freedom without structure winds up being chaotic and destructive.”

Finally, after the U.S. Olympic team was beaten at the 2004 Olympics by Argentina, Lithuania, and even Puerto Rico, the NBA front office cracked down on players dressing like gang members.

Interestingly, black players responded positively to this long-overdue upbraiding, adopting an ironic nerd chic, which, weirdly, jibed well with the front offices’ new emphasis on data analytics. General managers became convinced that the long-range three-point shot was under-exploited, so they went looking for better outside shooters, who tended to be black suburbanites who had grown up with their own driveways to practice shooting on by themselves. The NBA became more middle-class in composition and affect.

Will this trend continue?

Unfortunately, black behavior, which had been improving ever since its early-1990s low point as measured by acid test metrics such as the murder rate and traffic safety, started getting worse with the rise of Black Lives Matter at Ferguson in 2014, and then collapsed during last year’s racial reckoning. Will that damage the NBA like it did in the gangsta rap era once young players raised on the once-again fashionable self-destructive attitudes reach their 20s?

I could see it going either way. The NBA could be dragged down by the cultural undertow, or it could increasingly draw from more assimilated whiter blacks, often ones with a white mother, such as LaMelo and Lonzo Ball.

But one thing we can say for sure about the future of the NBA: Millionaires complaining about racism won’t stop.

About that clash between a British destroyer and Russian warplanes and warships in the Black Sea last week there are conflicting versions.

The Kremlin version is the more dramatic.

HMS Defender, says Moscow, entered the Black Sea, made port in Odessa, Ukraine, and then sailed for Batumi on the coast of Georgia.

However, the British warship traversed Russia’s territorial waters at the tip of the Crimean peninsula, near Sevastopol, Russia’s principal naval base on the Black Sea.

The destroyer, say the Russians, had to be diverted by shellfire from a patrol boat and bombs dropped in its path by Sukhoi fighters.

London’s version: Defender sailed through waters off Crimea that belong to Ukraine. Russian gunfire was far off and unthreatening. No dropped bombs impeded the destroyer’s passage.

Yet, according to The New York Times, BBC correspondent Jonathan Beale, who was on board Defender, has “published video footage showing as many as 20 Russian warplanes buzzing the ship and a Russian Coast Guard vessel drawing close alongside.”

In brief, this naval encounter was serious business.

Defender’s captain, Cmdr. Vince Owen, made it clear his ship sailed close by Crimea deliberately “to assert the position that Crimea and the waters around it legally belong to Ukraine.”

Added Owen: “The Royal Navy and U.K. will always call out states that do not follow international order.”

Kremlin spokesman Dmitri Peskov described Defender’s actions as a “deliberate and premeditated provocation.” Deputy foreign minister Sergei Ryabkov warned that the next time a provocation like this occurs, Russia “may drop bombs and not just in the path but right on target.”

With the incident over, where do Downing Street and the Kremlin stand now?

Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s government and the Royal Navy have declared it to be their right to use warships to send a message to Moscow that Crimea belongs to Kyiv. Moscow has responded: Send that message again, and you may find your warship at the bottom of the Black Sea.

This is not an unserious matter.

If the Brits repeat this exercise, which they see as a right, a duty and a mission, we could witness a Russian attack on a British warship.

This would trigger Article 5 of the NATO treaty that requires all member nations to treat an attack on one as an attack on all.

Britain’s challenge to Russia, a few kilometers off Crimea, could have resulted in a shooting incident that could have forced a U.S. response against Russia. And that raises some serious questions:

Did Johnson inform us he was about to issue this direct challenge to Moscow? Or were the Americans left in the dark?

Did President Joe Biden or the Pentagon tell Johnson that if Defender were attacked, U.S. forces would have their back?

With this clash off Crimea, a peninsula Russia regards as vital and we have never regarded as vital, we could have been drawn into a conflict by our ally, Britain, which could not prevail against Vladimir Putin’s Russia without the military assistance of the United States.

There is another matter that makes this problematic.

To reach the Black Sea, Defender peeled off from a flotilla centered on the aircraft carrier Queen Elizabeth, which is in the Mediterranean.

That flotilla is headed to the Indo-Pacific region and likely to traverse the South China Sea, whose islets, reefs and rocks are the claimed national territories of China.

Are the British warships going to emulate the U.S. naval challenges to China’s claims to those tiny pieces of land in the South China Sea?

Also, Monday was the first day of the 12-day Exercise Sea Breeze 2021 in the Black Sea, hosted by the U.S. Sixth Fleet and Ukrainian navy.

These exercises have been held yearly since the end of the 20th century, and the 2021 roster of participants is the largest yet.

The exercises will involve 32 nations, 32 ships, 5,000 troops and 40 planes. Among the participants are 17 NATO nations, including all three NATO allies on the Black Sea — Romania, Bulgaria and Turkey — and two aspiring NATO nations on the Black Sea — Ukraine and Georgia.

Are warships from any of these 32 nations going to follow the example of HMS Defender and sail close to the Russian naval base of Sevastopol? Are the Brits going to challenge Putin’s claim to Crimea again? Or will they, chastened, avoid a confrontation?

The U.S. does not recognize Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014, but we have not threatened or used force to alter that reality.

For no vital U.S. interest is imperiled in Russia’s control of Crimea and its 2 million people. After all, czarist and Bolshevik Russia controlled that peninsula from the time of Catherine the Great to the time of Mikhail Gorbachev.

The U.S. should tell Boris Johnson that if he wants to provoke the Russian navy in the Black Sea, he should not assume that, if a collision comes, the U.S. Sixth Fleet will pull his chestnuts out of the fire.

General Mark Milley seems like a guy who’s been able to live a functional life while afflicted with minimal brain damage. Not enough damage to appear retarded; he can do a job, he can be social, he can probably solve basic math equations. But put him on the hot seat, make him answer questions under pressure, and the mental deficiencies reveal themselves.

Last week, during a House Armed Services Committee hearing, the Joint Chiefs chairman was asked about the military’s current obsession with preaching “critical race theory” to its recruits. After checking his watch to make sure he wasn’t missing Wapner, the general replied:

I do think it’s important, actually, for those of us in uniform to be open-minded and be widely read. And the United States Military Academy is a university. And it is important that we train and we understand—and I want to understand white rage. And I’m white. So, what is it that caused thousands of people to assault this building and try to overturn the Constitution of the United States of America? What caused that? I want to find that out.

See, there’s yer retardation. The dude says “What caused it? I want to find out,” after already stating that he knows what caused it: “white rage.” It’s that godawful affectation, which I’ve mocked in previous columns in relation to Holocaust deniers: half-wit ideologues masquerading as seekers of knowledge who are “only asking questions.” It’s a way for people with unreasonable beliefs to present as reasonable, the standard evasion of the incurably dense. Make a baseless claim, then back it up not with facts but with “Hey, I’m only asking qweeeeestions (even though I’m actually making declarations).”

Still, General Kallikak managed to set Twitter afire with the term “white rage.” And as I saw lefties and righties going at it all week over the concept, I wondered how many of them remember, or know about, that time in 1994 when “black rage” was all the rage among pundits and politicos.

I’ll “circle back” to that shortly, but first, let’s take the wayback machine to 1990. That was the year the rap group Public Enemy released its magnum opus Fear of a Black Planet. Full disclosure: I can’t stand rap. There are only two types of music that physically repel me: rap and mariachi. But my rap-loving friends tell me that Fear of a Black Planet is a good album, and these are people I respect so I’ll take their word for it.

The initial copies of the album contained supplemental material tucked inside (for you kids who only know MP3s, back in the days of actual record albums, it was commonplace for LPs to include liner notes and sometimes even small booklets). What Public Enemy chose for Fear of a Black Planet was a fifteen-page essay titled “The Cress Theory of Color-Confrontation and Racism (White Supremacy).”

As explained by the band’s members, the “Cress Theory” was necessary to understand the album’s themes. Lead “singer” Chuck D explicitly stated that the entire album was a musical ode to, and illustration of, the Cress Theory.

So what is the Cress Theory? Well, critical race theory, pure ’n’ simple. It was written in 1970 by Washington psychiatrist Frances Cress Welsing, a certifiable lunatic who today would likely be provost of Harvard or head of Biden’s DOJ.

In Welsing’s own words, here’s her theory in a nutshell:

Racism (white supremacy) is the local and global power system dynamic, structured and maintained by those who classify themselves as white; whether consciously or subconsciously determined; this system consists of patterns of perception, logic, symbol formation, thought, speech, action and emotional response, as conducted simultaneously in all areas of people activity: economics, education, entertainment, labor, law, politics, religion, sex, and war. The ultimate purpose of the system is to ensure white genetic survival and to prevent white genetic annihilation on Earth—a planet in which the overwhelming majority of people are classified as non-white, (black, brown, red, and yellow) by white skinned people.

As I said, CRT.

In later works, Welsing would describe white people as “genetically defective descendants of albino mutants” who’d been expelled from Africa by the noble black pyramid-builders. In retaliation, whites gave blacks AIDS, cancer, and homosexuality. To her dying day, Welsing held fast to her view that whites are subhuman, hence why they create institutions that keep the real humans (blacks) subjugated. As she explained to the L.A. Times while promoting the album’s release,

I define racism as a global system of behavior that exists for the purpose of white genetic survival. I understand that my theory is disturbing. But science can be disturbing…. White people must first acknowledge that something awful has been going on, just as the Germans would have to accept responsibility for what they did in the Holocaust. Unfortunately, in white America, there’s a denial among 99% of the people that anything has happened.

Line for line that quote could’ve come from any academic today defending CRT.

A small (very small) number of people objected to Public Enemy’s promotion of Welsing’s claptrap. Entertainment Weekly music critic Greg Sandow wrote, “It’s understandable to be frustrated and infuriated by racism, but this explanation is really loony. It’s crackpot and offensive. You don’t know whether to laugh or weep.”

But most critics hailed the album and supplemental material as genius. L.A. Times music critic Robert Hilburn called it a “confrontational social commentary” that “questions the integrity of a nation where black blood is considered impure.”

The album was a hit, selling over a million copies in its first week, and Welsing was honored as one of the “Legends in Our Time” by Essence magazine.

Looking back, one of the things I recall quite vividly is how my white friends who dug the album dismissed the Cress Theory as silly and inconsequential. “Oh those wacky black musicians! Guuud fer them voicing their opinions! I don’t have to agree to allow them the right to have their say.”

And now those whiteys have kids who are forced to learn the Cress Theory in school, or at work, or in the armed forces, and hey guess what morons, you’re no longer allowed the right to disagree.

Shoulda nipped that cancer in the bud in 1990. But that’s the irony: The Cress Theory, which denied white tolerance, grew and metastasized because of white tolerance. If whites were as evil as Welsing claimed, Fear of a Black Planet would’ve been mass-burned like a Judas Priest album at an evangelical BBQ. But no, it was embraced by whites.

And here’s the corker: As whites were tolerating—even dancing to—Welsing’s race hatred, Welsing herself was being denied tenure at Howard University, where she’d been properly pegged as a maniac. She told the L.A. Times that the tenure rejection “was definitely because of my political theories. I spoke with the head of the medical school who told me he felt my ideas did not make sense.”

While whites were beatboxing to what would become the theme song of their twilight, commonsense black academics were calling a psycho a psycho.

In 1990, whites could afford to Pied Piper to their own exit music. After all, few would’ve believed that the Cress Theory would eventually become state religion. And black (actual) intellectuals still had a place in the black intelligentsia. Those days are long over. Today, whites are paying the price for taking antiwhite racism too lightly, and sane blacks in academia and the media are muzzled as batshit-insane blacks are amplified.

The Public Enemy/Cress Theory episode was a leftist Manhattan Project. It was a weapons test. It demonstrated that whites will joyfully sing along to their own destruction, and it pinpointed the need to excommunicate high-functioning blacks who are willing to call bullshit on their own people.

But not everything that was workshopped in the 1990s went so smoothly. Sometimes the focus grouping led the left to conclude that an idea needed tweaking.

Such was the case with “black rage.”

On Dec. 7, 1993, Colin Ferguson, a Jamaican immigrant and Cress Theory true believer, gunned down 25 people on the Long Island Railroad, killing six. Ferguson targeted whites primarily, and Asians for good measure. During his trial in 1994, Ferguson, assisted by the “legendary” Jewish lawyers William Kunstler and Ron Kuby (two vile caricatures born of a Julius Streicher wet dream), decided to plead “black rage” as his defense. The gist of the argument was that blacks are so terribly oppressed in modern-day America that of course it’s only reasonable for a black man to gun down every white and Asian in sight.

As the Chicago Tribune reported in June ’94,

A trial that once seemed open-and-shut has suddenly become a test case. Kunstler and Kuby are not merely hoping they have come up with a theory that will save their client. They are hoping to introduce a legal concept that will serve other black defendants and transform black-white relations in America. Any black defendant can now use it to excuse the violence he commits. One doesn’t, as with battered woman syndrome, have to prove that one was uniquely victimized. Skin color alone is enough. “Nobody is saying Colin Ferguson did a good thing,” Kuby asserts. “We’re just saying that he was not responsible for his own conduct. White racism is to blame.” For Kunstler and Kuby, using a defense that strikes fear in whites is deliberate. It’s a way, Kunstler insists, of making whites “come to terms with racism.” Kuby is even more outspoken. “The more the white community fears African-Americans, the better,” he says.

The Tribune warned that this was a poor strategy: “Fear doesn’t inspire investment [in the black community]. It is easier to think of hiring more police than putting money into areas where nobody feels safe.”

And indeed, the years following the Colin Ferguson trial saw an unprecedented explosion of tough-on-crime policies…commonsense, lifesaving laws that even pre-dementia Joe Biden championed. “Black rage” backfired, but the civilization-destroying monsters behind it learned a lesson. Ascribe “racial rage” not to the heroes but the villains. If you wish to turn society against a particular people, accuse them of racial rage.

The Ferguson defense was most certainly a “test case.” And while it continues to be blacks who are filled with rage, the elites and their drones (like General Milley) have learned from the failed trial balloon. Screaming “black rage” inspired fear of blacks. It led to more policing and stiffer sentences for criminals. So reverse the process. Scream “white rage” and hope for the opposite results: fear of whitey, less policing, and decarceration of black thugs.

The left learns from its successes and failures.

But hey, the Cress Theory’s got a good beat and you can dance to it. And if white Americans are slowly waking up to the menace of CRT, great. It’s just unfortunate that thirty years ago whites were too busy gettin’ down to stop the spread of that cancer before it became inoperable.

You want to write a piece about the threat from white supremacists, remembering that Attorney General Merrick Garland told Congress that violence incited by white supremacists poses “the most dangerous threat to our democracy.” Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas agreed. According to Biden administration officials, the threat is greater than from any foreign nation, including—and this is frightening—Donald Trump’s longstanding co-conspirator, Russia!

So you go to Google and type in “The Oath Keepers” because you’ve discovered it is one of the three major white supremacist groups in the country. Nothing comes up.

So you click on the second page of the Google search even though you know—because, well, you’re quite sophisticated—that the percentage of searchers who bother to click the second search page is in the single digits, and you’ve heard the joke that the second page of a search is the best place to hide a dead body.

But you don’t find “The Oath Keepers” on the second page, either. Neither do you find it on the third page, a land where few people have ever ventured.

Finally, but with some trepidation (because you don’t like dark, damp places that might teem with snakes, bugs, and confidants of Hillary Clinton), you go to the fourth page. There you find a relaxed Jimmy Hoffa, not the least concerned about being apprehended, and, also, finally, “https://oathkeepers.org,” the URL for The Oath Keepers.

However, when you search for “The Oath Keepers” on DuckDuckGo, it’s the first entry that comes up on the first page. Finally, you can start investigating this most dangerous organization.

The first tab is the “Home” section. That’s where you might expect to find the most important message, knowing—and knowing that the Oath Keepers probably know too—that many people won’t bother to click below it.

And on that first tab you find The Oath Keepers’ most important message:

MAKE A COMMIE CRY!—JOIN OATH KEEPERS!
Due to all the malicious leftist attacks, our ability to take new memberships online is temporarily interrupted, but if you want to join Oath Keepers, you can mail in your application and dues. Mail to…

That’s it. That’s the No. 1 message of one of the most dangerous groups in America: Send money. (NB: Don’t fail to admire the subtle dig at America’s professoriat: “Make a Commie Cry.” These white supremacists sure know how to stick it in.)

You figure there just has to be more to an organization that has attracted so much attention, so you click on the third box, “About” (the second one is “Log In”). The text begins: “Oath Keepers is a non-partisan association of current and formerly serving military, police, and first responders, who pledge to fulfill the oath all military and police take to ‘defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic.’ That oath, mandated by Article VI of the Constitution itself, is to the Constitution, not to the politicians….”

That message doesn’t exactly tell you where and when to plant the bombs and light the fuses, but you can understand why the pols and the Deep State bureaucrats don’t like it: They want you to obey them. As in: Get vaccinated. And keep your hands off the hydroxychloroquine.

The next box down is “Donate.” Again? You don’t want to be told again to give; you want to know at what wee hour of the morning and under which bridge to assemble. And how much…stuff to bring along. Maybe that will be revealed in the next conspiratorial box down, cleverly camouflaged as “News.”

Nope. It has only clippings, tweets, and a few short videos. Where are they hiding “The Plan”?

Probably in the next box, “The Gear Store.” That has to be it, because when you click on it your browser tells you: “This site can’t provide a secure connection. oathkeepersgearstore.com sent an invalid response.” I wonder why! These guys are clever!

The last box is “Contact Us,” but it seemed to require logging in first, perhaps by using a secret password and a special hand gesture signaling you’re okay. It must be for members only.

That’s it. That’s all the info you get on one of the most dangerous threats to our democracy.

We had expected to find racist, antiblack rantings as well as antiblack policy positions on the site—it is a white supremacist organization, after all—something like:

With our fellow white supremacist organizations, Proud Boys, the Three Percenters, and the Texas Freedom Force, we enthusiastically support:

A $27 minimum wage
Open borders, and
An end to charter schools, and particularly the DC Opportunity Scholarship Program.

You can’t get more racist and antiblack than that, policy-wise. But there wasn’t a hint of those positions, at least not on the pages that a stranger can visit. These fellows are crafty (it’s rumored they’ve tapped directly into the White House policy shop), and they are clearly dangerous. So you can understand why Attorney General Merrick Garland and the other gumshoes in FedLand are scared witless of them.

But you can sleep easy now because we’re onto them. And we’re watching them—from a supersecret location (shhh): a rented room in Roger Stone’s new house located on the fifth page of a Google search, where few have ever been, where Robert Mueller and his CNN goons will never find him again, and I only am escaped alone to tell thee.

Daniel Oliver is Chairman of the Board of the Education and Research Institute and a Director of Pacific Research Institute for Public Policy in San Francisco. In addition to serving as Chairman of the Federal Trade Commission under President Reagan, he was Executive Editor and subsequently Chairman of the Board of William F. Buckley Jr.’s National Review.

Email Daniel Oliver at Daniel.Oliver@TheCandidAmerican.com.

The Week’s Most Flummering, Mummering, and Summering Headlines

DARK SIDE OF THE GOON
The leftist war on sunlight continues! Last year, lefties in politics, the media, and (pseudo)science scoffed at the idea that sunshine was good for people under lockdown, and possibly even beneficial against Covid itself. “Bah,” the know-it-alls proclaimed, “the idea that the human body can benefit from sunlight is New Age Trumpian alchemy!”

Then it turned out that both claims were correct: People should’ve gone outdoors during lockdown, and sunlight is helpful against Covid. And the know-it-alls donned sombreros to hide their faces so they wouldn’t have to answer for their error. “Bill Nye no está aquí. ¡Lo siento señor!”

Last week, the war on sunlight took an even darker turn.

Vox cofounder Matthew Yglesias is a man on a mission to import enough Third World detritus for the U.S. population to reach one billion (that’s the actual title of his most recent book: One Billion Americans). To help prep America for its new role as India West, Yglesias tirelessly battles against housing density regulations and single-family residence zoning. In Matty’s future America, every neighborhood will be a slum comprised of towering ghetto tenements, with green belts a thing of the past.

When Yglesias saw the original Death Wish, he was untroubled by the scenes of violence and carnage. But the part where Arizona real estate developer Jainchill talks about the value of open spaces made him recoil in revulsion:

Jainchill: “I won’t doze those hills. What I build conforms to the land. And you can’t hear the toilets flush next door.”

Yglesias: “That’s horrific! It’s only by hearing my neighbor’s toilet flush that I know I’m alive! Neighbor toilets are the babbling brooks of city life.”

In his quest to turn the U.S. into a nation of a billion people keenly aware of when their neighbors have the runs, last week Yglesias latched onto a new talking point: shade! In a lengthy (and now deleted) Twitter thread, Matty and his dense pro-density acolytes sang the praises of tall buildings that block the sun, saving city dwellers from exposure to the deadly rays.

“I feel like more tall apartment buildings in my neighborhood would = more shade in DC’s long hot summers and actually make everyone happier,” Matty declared. “In the age of climate change, shade from tall buildings is good. Cities should prioritize high-rise construction,” one of his comrades added. “More urban shade from tall buildings is good,” another agreed, suggesting that with enough tenement projects, kids could be protected 24/7 from that demon sun.

Yglesias is of Cuban and Jewish heritage, but he’d have made a fine Aztec, what with his crippling fear of Huitzilopochtli the sun god.

Sadly for Yglesias, one of his science-minded followers just had to go and rain on the shade parade, posting a Gizmodo piece by the site’s urbanism editor Alissa Walker. Seems that tall buildings actually make neighborhoods hotter by absorbing and reflecting heat onto the surrounding areas, well into the evening (even after the sun has set). This is called the “heat island” effect, and it’s actually quite well-known…to everyone but Matty.

Sun 1, Yglesias 0.

Time to start working on that Mr. Burns sun-blocking machine, Matt. As long as that damn star still shines, your dream of one billion Americans sitting in darkness listening to their neighbors poop will remain unrealized.

MUSLIM FUNDAMENTALIST? MORE LIKE MUSLIM FUNDA-BOYS-TALIST
Based on the name, you’d expect a mufti to be attracted to women. But not Aziz-ur-Rehman, mufti of an esteemed seminary in Lahore, Pakistan. Rehman is a well-known Muslim miscreant; he’s been a major player in worldwide protests against “blasphemous” cartoons, and his agitation has led to Western cartoonists, publishers, and teachers falling prey to incidents of largely peaceful beheadings.

But now it seems that the chief of Jamia Manzoor-ul-Islamia has been jamming his “manzoor” where it doesn’t belong. The sixtysomething cleric has a taste for boys, and he’s been indulging it for many years.

Frankly, considering the seminary’s motto, this really shouldn’t have come as a surprise: “Jamia Manzoor-ul-Islamia: The Semen-ary Where Every Day Is Ram-adan.”

They weren’t even trying to be subtle.

Last week the mufti—who’s long been hailed as a champion of moral purity—was jailed after graphic video surfaced in which he’s shown giving some dhikr to a 20-year-old student, who told police he’d been routinely raped by Rehman since he was 13, so he decided that the only way to end the abuse was to secretly record one of the encounters and put it online.

The video swiftly led to Rehman’s arrest, while also skyrocketing to No. 1 on Pornhub’s “Caliphs ’n’ Kids” subdomain.

In fact, last week saw a spate of holier-than-thou types caught in the exact behavior they condemn. In NYC, a Nobel Prize-nominated humanitarian activist named Joel Davis, recognized the world over for his work to prevent the molestation of boys, was sentenced to thirteen years in prison for his molestation of boys. The 25-year-old Davis ran the Youth to End Sexual Violence nonprofit, which upon reflection probably should’ve been called Sexual Violence to Youths’ Ends.

Much like Rehman, Davis was caught on tape buggering a schoolboy. In accepting the judge’s sentence, the remorseful activist admitted to “engaging in the very abhorrent behavior I had pledged to fight,” a rather weak statement better suited to a vegan caught eating a cheeseburger than a child rapist.

Yet even that was not the pinnacle of last week’s cavalcade of hypocrisy. Over in that utopian oasis known as Chicago, there’s an organization called UCAN—a government-funded social service agency that purports to combat gang violence among the city’s black teens by offering counseling, job training, and free copies of Mr. T’s 1984 music video “Don’t Be No Fool: Gangs Ain’t Cool.”

Marty Murff was one of the higher-ups at UCAN, raking in taxpayer dollars to keep kids out of gangs. And last week Murff was indicted for being the head of the notorious black Chicago gang the Vice Lords. The federal racketeering indictment accuses Murff of crimes ranging from murder to heroin and fentanyl trafficking, all while he maintained his benevolent alter ego as UCAN’s chief of “violence intervention and prevention programs.” A taxpayer-funded anti-gang counselor who was the secret leader of the very gang he claimed to be opposing.

Murff has yet to be booked because officials can’t find a prison jumpsuit that can accommodate balls that big.

DORKTOWN STRUTTER’S BALL
Did someone mention balls? If novelty songs are to be believed—and surely there are few more accurate sources regarding historical events—Hitler had only one of ’em. Most likely, he took good care of it, as one is wont to do when something is in short supply.

Sadly, the same cannot be said for a present-day Austrian—a 29-year-old soldier in the Austrian army who, though blessed with two fine balls, decided that one of them needed a little redecorating. So he elected to get an amateur tattoo “down there” because “what really attracts me to a man is crudely painted testicles” said absolutely no woman in human history.

After downing two bottles of whiskey, because schnapps doesn’t have a high enough alcohol content, the soldier enlisted his brother to tattoo one of his nads with a symbol forever associated with that guy Austrians never like to claim as their own.

And voilà, by morning the young fellow had a swastika on his nut.

Considering the discomfort the young soldier must’ve endured while receiving the tea-bag tat, it makes perfect sense that he wouldn’t want to keep the accomplishment to himself. The man suffered for his art; surely he had a right to display it to the world. So, while on a military exercise several weeks after coloring his Easter egg, the doughty young gent decided to show his hangin’ beauty to his squadmates…again after downing large quantities of liquor.

Unfortunately for the Illustrated Mann, the other members of his unit didn’t take kindly to seeing his unit, so they reported the poor bastard to the top brass. And last week the Klagenfurt Regional Court sentenced the soldier (whose name was not released) to nineteen months imprisonment. Public display of Nazi symbols is illegal in Austria (flashing unpainted genitals is just fine, though…even welcomed in certain cities like Hard and Wiener), although it can be argued that it might’ve been more appropriate to charge the guy for being drunk and pantsless while on a military exercise.

According to the Kleine Zeitung newspaper, the soldier had previously spent two years in the pen for causing grievous bodily injury during a drunken brawl…so maybe the problem here is the Austrian army’s recruitment standards. Convicted felons who get drunk, get scrotum swastikas, get more drunk, and flash them during military exercises don’t exactly seem like the cream of the crop.

The ultimate irony: Today’s Austrian soldiers are people who would’ve been the first ones taken out by Hitler’s policy of euthanizing the feeble-minded.

Übermensch? More like goobermensch.

DR. DEMENTIA
Ever hear the one about the elderly man who goes to the doctor for a checkup? The doctor sits him down and puts a gentle hand on the old guy’s shoulder.

“The news isn’t good. You’ve got cancer. Also, you’ve got dementia.”

The old man pauses and replies, “Well, it could be worse; I could also have cancer.”

That joke used to be funny before Joe Biden became president.

Last week, New York Democrat Rep. Mondaire Jones met with Biden to thank him for making Juneteenth a national holiday. Deciding to go off script for a moment, Jones brought up the stalled voting “rights” legislation making the rounds in Congress. According to the AP, the unexpected question apparently short-circuited the president’s brain. He “just sort of stared at me,” Jones said. There was “an awkward silence” that seemed to last forever as the president gazed blankly ahead.

After what seemed like an eternity of quiet, Biden finally replied, “Thank you for your time, Dr. Juneteenth,” and Jones slowly backed out of the Oval Office like the sanitarium keeper in Dracula.

Former White House physician Ronny Jackson has publicly called for Biden to take a cognitive test (you remember those—they were all the rage when Democrats were claiming that Trump was mentally unfit). In a letter cosigned by thirteen GOP lawmakers, Jackson cites a number of recent instances in which Biden seemed to loose focus, concentration, and train of thought in public places, plus a number of other times the president forgot basic facts and simple names.

And that letter was drafted before last Thursday’s speech in which Biden claimed that the “Tuskegee Airmen” had been “experimented on” by mad scientists. Another senility blooper? Or was Biden finally copping to the secret government genetic engineering program aimed at creating a race of mutant black birdmen (sadly, the program was dissolved after the birdmen tried to raid a convenience store and were shot down by rooftop Koreans).

While the Jackson/GOP letter is (of course) being dismissed as partisan chicanery, the story related by Mondaire Jones—a progressive black—is being taken far more seriously in Democrat circles. This might account for why Kamala Harris was finally dispatched to the southern border…after all, if the Dems are gonna sell her as a replacement president, she needs to start doing more as VP than laughing at her own jokes.

While at the border, Harris is expected to ease concerns that the Biden/Harris administration is too soft on illegal immigration. Her plan is to stand facing Mexico and cackle like a banshee in the hope that potential border crossers will think she’s La Llorona and turn back in fear.

¡Ay, bruja! Vamanos!

JUNETEENTH BLACK-AND-BLUENTEENTH
Speaking of Juneteenth, another one has come and gone, and for those of you suffering the inevitable post-Juneteenth depression, take heart because, as with all holidays, it’s the memories that matter.

Since this was the first Juneteenth to be officially observed as a federal holiday, the celebrations were especially meaningful…if by “meaningful” one means insanely violent and anarchic. Over three dozen Juneteenth celebrants were shot, and almost a dozen killed, in at least eight states. Cities in Colorado, California, Michigan, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Indiana, Illinois, and South Carolina reported incidents of mass Juneteenth mayhem.

There’s no official Juneteenth carol yet, but a decent suggestion would be Grand Daddy I.U.’s 1994 rap classic “We Got Da Gats” (“I’m firm, my gun bust off like sperm/Plus my hobby and job is buckin’ niggaz full-term…HAPPY JUNETEENTH, EVERYONE!”).

One man was killed and six others injured during a Juneteenth celebration that turned into a mass brawl at Lake Merritt, Calif., in Oakland (a.k.a. the place in CA that would most benefit from a North Korean missile). In footage that quickly went viral on social media, as paramedics attempted to treat the victims, partygoers blocked the ambulances with twerking and doggy-style sex acts (that video is to Juneteenth what a Hallmark Channel movie is to Christmas).

Even worse than the human toll was the environmental damage to the lake: California Fish and Wildlife officials report that there’s been a mass die-off of fish that became trapped in the hundreds of torn-out weaves cast into the water during the fight.

In Long Beach, N.J., another mass brawl caught on video resulted in multiple injuries as honors students battled gentle giants for the title of King of Juneteenth. In Philly, a mass shooting killed two men and riddled a 3-year-old boy’s legs with bullets, because it’s always important to remember that these holidays are first and foremost about the children. In Aurora, Colo., a Juneteenth celebration venue that reached capacity began turning away attendees. So of course the rejected participants opened fire, killing one and injuring four. And in Baton Rouge, a Juneteenth bash at the Capital Park Bar & Grill resulted in two deaths and four injuries after patrons got into a heated dispute over whether Juneteenth has become too commercialized (“Look, it ain’t about the presents; it’s about the murderin’!”).

Sure, other “ethnic” holidays lead to violence…every year dozens of dwarfs working for tips as leprechauns on St. Paddy’s Day are injured after being tossed across bars, and at 2 a.m. on Cinco de Mayo, Mexican revelers rev up their engines for the annual “run over everything in our path” drunk-drive-a-thon. But Juneteenth is on track to become the only U.S. holiday that, each year, is guaranteed to take the lives of those it supposedly honors, at the hands of those it supposedly honors.

And that’s the greatest irony of all: As every Juneteenth from now on will inevitably decrease the U.S. black population Purge-style, it seems appropriate to ask whether this is truly a “black” holiday at all, or the new most sacred day on the KKK calendar.

NEW YORK—I hope this is my last week in the Bagel. I plan to fly first to Switzerland and then on to London. There’s the annual Pugs’ Club lunch I cannot afford to miss, but now that Boris is married I don’t suppose he gives a damn about the poor little Greek boy and his club lunches. Incidentally, all my London friends tell me they’re partying like mad, but when I open the papers it’s all about lockdown. Somebody is speaking with forked tongue, as Crazy Horse once said.

Oh boy, it’s getting very confusing, and I for one have lost the trust I once had for science. My unsolicited advice to Boris Johnson is that he should listen more to his instincts and less to scientific types. I’ve never met the third wife and know nothing about her, but my instinct tells me she’s got Boris wrapped tight around her little finger, but not half as tight as Meghan has the Half-wit wrapped up. Never mind. There are other things to worry about than henpecked hubbies. For example, a freak by the name of Guy Trebay writing in the degenerate New York Times pejoratively refers to the great Irwin Shaw short story “The Girls in Their Summer Dresses.” Actually only a depraved maggot could write that the marvelous short story was “sexist and dated.” (Probably under orders from some hairy female lesbian superior, or trying to please the Hebrew owners who have declared war on the white race, Christianity, and America.) More to the point, this garbage was about “gender fluidity” entering its next phase, which means men wearing dresses instead of men wearing trousers. So it’s skirts and frocks for the boys from now on, at least if you want to be with it in New York.

For some strange reason I knew it would come to this. Heterosexuality is kaput, and definitely under attack. Unless you’re gay or trans you’re old hat, which makes me very old hat. They call it “waning dress codes,” women wearing dresses and men wearing trousers, that is. The waning dress code makes a lot of straight male wannabes put on their summer dresses and glide around like Titania, queen of the fairies. And it gets better. The fashion industry is as venal and corrupt as, say, the art world, and fashion’s gilded cesspool will now be enhanced by lots of snowflakes in drag. Yippee!

This descent of values is nothing compared with what is going on in London, however, where celebrity hysteria has reached a point where a pair of dirty sneakers once worn by some foulmouthed celebrity are valued more than a Matisse. Yes, you read that correctly, an exhibition at the Design Museum features the sneakers Kanye West, ex-husband of Kim Kardashian, once wore that sold for $1.8 million at Sotheby’s last April. Fame acquired through talent or courage has now given way to fame earned via publicity. Bravo, London, you are as obsessed with trivial celebrity as New York, and I hope you don’t soon become as unlivable as the Bagel has become. Personally, I wouldn’t touch those sneakers with the proverbial ten-foot pole, but it only shows how out of touch I am with reality: I would prefer to pay 1.8 million greenbacks for a (microscopic) Matisse than for a pair of foul-smelling trainers by West. The filthy sneakers are now called tools for cultural expression, and pretty soon jockstraps of basketball freaks will probably become even more expensive tools for cultural expression. I can see the headline, $10 million for a LeBron James jockstrap made available still wet immediately following his overtime victory over the Nuggets.

Once upon a time art was defined by its beauty and creativity. Can you imagine the depths to which we’ve descended when sneakers are elevated by know-nothings to the level of artistic expression? On aesthetic grounds alone this is garbage, it is psychological warfare against beauty by the mob of know-nothings. Next will be an old bra of Dolly Parton’s going for double what an Edward Hopper is worth. It reminds me a lot of Mao’s Cultural Revolution of the ’60s, which attempted to change history and reality by force.

Well, it’s not all bad news. Mx. Avory, who is described by the degenerates who write for the Times as transgender and nonbinary, is calling for solidarity and action to support Black trans and gender-nonconforming youth at a rally intended to promote their voices and concerns. Socrates was condemned to death by the ancient Greeks for corrupting youth with his teachings on fairness. Mx. Avory is written up in The New York Times, causing even rotting fish to refuse to be wrapped up in its pages. Better yet, the death of one of America’s greatest heroes—far greater than George Washington, Patrick Henry, or George Patton—George Floyd, is now used to push a vast array of racial policies such as defunding the police and the teaching of left-wing critical race theory, which blames every ill in society on white supremacy. Oh yes, I almost forgot, this is “Pride Month” and our gay brothers and sisters are complaining that one month ain’t enough.

America’s famous First Amendment may be under threat de facto, but it does at least exist de jure, and one of its major modern protectorates is the media. Britain has no such safeguard, however, and its legal requirement for media impartiality (a memorandum apparently unread at the BBC) means there is not an equivalent provision for freedom of expression which allows Fox News to act as at least a notional counterweight to the left-wing enterprise America’s media have largely become.

Enter GB News. The first new televisual news channel in the U.K. for 24 years is the brainchild of media kingpin Andrew Neil. Having founded Sky TV, worked for both the BBC and Rupert Murdoch—including editing The Sunday Times—and become a regular figurehead on British political TV, Neil is a wily and veteran media pugilist whose latest venture was sure to attract both attention and opposition.

GB News is regulated by British broadcasting standards commission the Office of Communications (OFCOM—Orwell was right about truncated acronyms), putting it on a par with the BBC and others, so this is no maverick pirate station. But Neil’s first enemy has proved to be not just the leftist media or the regulators, but advertisers and their self-appointed watchdog, an activist organization called Stop Funding Hate (SFH).

Americans will be familiar with the methods of these preemptive ideological troubleshooters from, among others, the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Anti-Defamation League. These agitators are both cultural commissars and a convenient method for the deep state to outsource censorship. The same principle makes Big Tech the linemen of the new “woke” culture. Even banks have been co-opted to do the work of the current politburo, the most recent example familiar to Americans being the decision of Wells Fargo to close the account of GOP candidate and America First activist Lauren Witzke, leaving her penniless and telling her that the check was in the post. But SFH has a dedicated target: advertisers.

SFH was set up five years ago with a mission statement that claims they are “making hate unprofitable by persuading advertisers to pull their support from publications that spread hate and division.” These are not street-placard amateurs, but have a dedicated team of industry-savvy researchers who were looking at GB News’ potential advertisers long before the channel launched.

Swedish furniture giant IKEA was the first big name to pull out of advertising on GB News after its June 13 launch, stating that the channel’s output did not match their own “humanistic values.” As we are all aware, from humanism’s roots in the European Renaissance to the present day, flat-packed, self-assembly bookshelves have always played a key role in those values. IKEA’s own values include having stores in Saudi Arabia, that oasis of humanistic values, and employing private investigators to spy on their French employees, for which they were fined €1 million.

Skin-care company Nivea and purveyors of flavored cider Kopparberg followed suit, as did Britain’s famous Open University and others. Morality plays little part in their decisions, however. The resultant controversy gets their brand out there, and they are also playing a standard waiting game. There is a lot of harrumphing about reviewing positions, meaning that if GB News continues with its opening-week viewing figures—which beat BBC and Sky News channels—then they will follow the money. But when advertisers can decide news content, we should feel uneasy.

Neil made the kind of countermove you would expect from a media vet, challenging his critics to come onto the station with examples of the “hate” they claim to oppose. He realizes, of course, that “hate” fulfills the role of the word “fascism” in Orwell’s prescient statement that the word would one day abdicate its technical definition to become simply anything that an opponent doesn’t like. “Hate,” like “racism” and “white,” is a word that has been supersized by the hysterical and power-hungry cultural left and now just means even a fractional deviation from the party line.

Neil is also wise to the tactics of companies that wish to wait and see what happens to other advertisers before committing. In a social media sparring match, Neil told reneging advertisers Octopus Energy that in the future it would be GB News that would be monitoring potential advertisers before deciding if they were fit to appear on the channel.

Some companies are starting either to stick to genuinely held free-speech principles, or to double-bluff as a wager on the potential success of GB News. The CEO of London gold dealers Direct Bullion may have read the runes correctly in announcing that the company will now increase its advertising revenue with GB News, describing the channel as “a breath of fresh air.” Britain’s famous Co-Op has also publicly defended free speech and committed to their advertising. The Co-Op, incidentally, is well-known for providing Britain’s cheapest funeral service, and so may be able to afford more ad space not because of COVID, but due to the suicide rate that the resultant and absurd laws and lockdowns have caused to rise. GB News, among other topics, has questioned the rationale of lockdowns.

And this is the heart of the matter. Far from being “hateful,” GB News in its first week simply dedicated shows and commentary to free speech, “woke” culture, Brexit, immigration, and a host of other topics around which the left and its media water-carriers have strewn crime-scene tape. This is guaranteed to cause convulsions in an increasingly psychopathological leftist task force that is using not Britain’s old office of Lord Chancellor—scourge of Joe Orton and Oscar Wilde—as its role model, but rather Mao and Stalin.

Despite the fact that most U.K. media deny that anything like “cancel” or “woke” culture exists outside the fever dreams of the political right, ordinary television viewers may yet believe their lying eyes and force a reversal of fortune for that portion of the advertising industry that has chosen to go woke.

Happy Juneteenth! I hope you all had a lovely week celebrating the nation’s newest federal holiday, which commemorates the end of slavery throughout the Confederacy.

How could you not? The media was chock-a-block with commentators telling us what a fantastic, transformative event for our nation this was. But the media ignored the best part of all!

What Juneteenth commemorates is not technically the abolition of slavery, but the notification thereof to a particular group of slaves.

Although President Lincoln officially ended slavery with the Emancipation Proclamation on Jan. 1, 1863, it wasn’t until two years later, on June 19, 1865, that the slaves of Galveston, Texas, got the news, when Maj. Gen. Gordon Granger rode into town and issued a series of proclamations announcing that the hideous institution had been abolished and, henceforth, slaves would be considered hired labor.

This takes Juneteenth to a whole new level. Think of all the new federal holidays we could create using Juneteenth as our template! (Anyone who’s dealt with the federal government knows that those workers well deserve another paid day off.) We just need horsemen to ride around the country, correcting the errors of those who falsely believe something bad about America.

Thus, for example, next month we should have some bright young fellow gallop up to a BLM rally, Gen. Granger-style, dismount and announce:

I come with good news! Systemic racism no longer exists! It was done away with by the 1964 Civil Rights Act and parts of the 1965 Voting Rights Act! Any victims of racism today can demand remedies in federal court!

And with a hardy “Hi-De-Ho,” our hero would ride off to the next BLM rally, as the march participants disband and hold a celebratory brunch. The date would be remembered each year as the Julyteenth holiday.

Then in August, we’ll send men on horseback to MSNBC with this proclamation:

Trump isn’t going to run for president again! Republicans aren’t afraid of him! They don’t kiss his ring half as much as Democrats kiss Al Sharpton’s ring and parts posterior. As soon as you guys denounce Sharpton, they’ll denounce Trump. Please calm down.

It’s not the fault of MSNBC that they operate on this glaring misconception. Not unlike the slaves, they’ve been kept in the dark, fed lies by people in whom they placed their trust: reporters. The day they learn the truth should live forever in history as Augusteenth — and, of course, federal workers would get that day off, too.

Next, we’ll need some volunteers to saddle up and head over to The New York Times building to proclaim:

Good news, New York Times! Your repeated claim that 1 in 5 women will be the victim of rape is FALSE!

First, my friends, all “in their lifetimes” statistics are a scam. They make any crime sound rampant. More than 8 out of 10 Americans will be the victim of a violent crime “in their lifetimes,” and 9.9 of 10 will be a victim of personal theft “in their lifetimes.”

Second: Even by this ridiculous measure, it’s not “1 in 5.” According to an extensive study by Obama’s Department of Justice examining 18 years of data, 1 in 10 women will be raped “in their lifetimes.” About 2 in 10 will be robbed and 4 in 10 will be injured during a robbery.

Third: The annual rate of rape victimization isn’t close to “1 in 5.” Instead, it’s 1.75 per thousand raped each year.

Fourth: This is including rapes that never happened, but are threatened or attempted.

Isn’t that terrific news, New York Times? Instead of 1 in 5 women succumbing to the awful crime of rape this year, fewer than 1.75 per thousand will be!

Let’s call this holiday Septemberteenth, to commemorate the joyful day Times reporters realized they are not living in a dystopian world of sexual predators. Cheers will erupt! (Some from federal workers.)

In October, our ersatz Gen. Granger and his trusty steed will ride south to the Capitol and proclaim:

I come bearing good news: No one’s vote is being “suppressed”! It’s a bait and switch! Last year’s preposterous voting rules were instituted because of COVID-19! Remember? They told us: IT’S A WORLDWIDE PANDEMIC! WE MUST ALLOW UNIVERSAL EARLY VOTING, NO IDENTIFICATION AND MAIL-IN BALLOTS! DO YOU WANT PEOPLE TO DIE? We can go back to pre-pandemic voting rules without fear of returning to the dark days of Jim Crow! Now, if some of you would be kind enough to give my trusty steed some water?

The late-breaking discovery that Republicans aren’t “suppressing the vote” might be called Octoberteenth.

The slaves of Galveston were understandably ecstatic to be freed of the yoke of slavery — as no doubt will be the misinformed BLM protesters, New York Times reporters and other recipients of our horsemen’s good news. Think of their unbridled joy to be free of these false notions about America! They will shout to the heavens, giving thanks to the bounty of this land, their joy surpassed only by that of federal workers.

It’s widely assumed today that, due to systemic sexism, women were so culturally oppressed until roughly last week that, of course, there were few famous women writers.

In truth, however, women have made up a sizable fraction of professional novelists for centuries. But why then aren’t these old-time women writers more renowned today among anybody not trying to get tenure?

For example, in the comments at Scott Alexander’s Substack for smart nerds, one commenter, irate that sixteen of the seventeen reviews that Scott had published by his readers were of books authored by men, scoffed:

So you discount the structural forces that lead to vastly more men than women appearing on our proverbial bookshelves?

But, of course, if you look at actual bookshelves, a large fraction of books are written by women. And it’s been that way for a long time.

One obvious reason that readers of a website that grew out of the Rationalist cult are more likely to be interested in books by men than by women is that nerds don’t much like fiction, especially fiction about people and their relationships. They’re Rationalists, not Emotionalists! So, all the books reviewed were nonfiction.

The novels of men and women aren’t hugely different, but a computer that has studied 67 million words of fiction can guess the sex of the author with 72 percent accuracy.

In the study, Dr Luoto says that compared with straight men, women used more social words, personal pronouns, positive emotion words and words related to sadness and anxiety. “Heterosexual men, by contrast, used more articles, numbers, spatial words, death and anger-related words, swear words, and words that reflect analytical thinking.”

Women have been highly successful fiction writers for several centuries.

By way of illustration, consider how colossally influential was Daniel Defoe’s 1719 adventure novel Robinson Crusoe, which inaugurated its own genre of shipwreck fiction, Robinsonade, as reflected in Swiss Family Robinson, Lord of the Flies, and The Martian. Yet, Defoe’s book went through fewer printings in the 18th century than Elizabeth Singer Rowe’s 1728 work of epistolary fiction, Friendship in Death, in Twenty Letters From the Dead to the Living.

In James Boswell’s famous 1791 biography The Life of Samuel Johnson, the critic Dr. Johnson is always complaining about how much money lady novelists make, but then confessing that he had just stayed up all night reading the latest page-turner by a woman writer. (Dr. Johnson and Edmund Burke were frequent guests at the Bluestockings salon organized by wealthy women literary intellectuals.) But people still occasionally read Boswell (just open his Life at random and see if you find it amusing), although virtually no books by women written before Jane Austen (1775–1817) are read.

We can graph the percentage of women on the Publisher’s Weekly annual list of the top ten best-selling novels in the U.S. from 1895 onward:

It’s striking that there were more top-of-the-charts women novelists in the first four decades of the 20th century than in more recent times. (Note that for some reason, Harry Potter books were excluded from these lists, depressing the 2000s’ female percentage.)

For example, the top-selling novel of 1900 was Mary Johnston’s To Have and to Hold:

‘To Have and to Hold’ is the story of an English soldier, Ralph Percy, turned Virginian explorer in colonial Jamestown. Ralph buys a wife for himself—a girl named Jocelyn Leigh—little knowing that she is the escaping ward of King James I, fleeing a forced marriage to Lord Carnal…. Lord Carnal attempts to kidnap Jocelyn several times…. The boat they are in, however, crashes on a desert island, but they are accosted by pirates, who, after a short struggle, agree to take Ralph as their captain…

And then a whole bunch of other stuff happens…

A few of the best-selling women writers of the early 20th century are still read today, most notably Edith Wharton.

But in general, all but a few well-paid authors, male or female, will fade into obscurity. For instance, perhaps the dominant commercial author of the first decade of the last century was a young American naval officer–turned–historical novelist named Winston Churchill.

Oddly, this Winston Churchill was not the future prime minister, a former British army officer who wrote only one novel. To lessen public confusion, the two Churchills came to an agreement that the more famous American would remain “Winston Churchill” while the Englishman would publish under the name “Winston S. Churchill.”

Why did women novelists fall in popularity from the 1940s through the 1970s? There are no doubt many reasons, but an important one that has been almost completely forgotten because it doesn’t fit into Woke mythologizing of the past is that the bohemian artists who would become the cultural elite of mid-century America turned sharply against bluestocking feminism after its year of triumph, 1919, when women were given both Suffrage and Prohibition.

Wilfrid Sheed wrote of the mid-century New Yorker:

Thurber’s world cannot remotely be understood without understanding Prohibition, or the locker-room version of it: a plot brewed up by women and Protestant ministers while our soldiers were overseas, in order to end America’s men-only culture and bring the boys all the way home, not just as far as the nearest saloon.

Prohibition was the mistake that made feminism uncool until 1969.

When feminism came back a half century ago, there was much academic emphasis on rediscovering lost books by female writers. But…they turned out largely to be best-sellers, such as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and (until race came to rule over all) Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind (which, by the way, is an outstanding read).

There weren’t really many esoteric art books by ignored women novelists to be rediscovered by feminist scholars. The small number of avant-garde female stylists were already famous: e.g., Elizabeth Taylor won the 1966 Best Actress Oscar for Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

Charles Murray’s 2003 book Human Accomplishment compiles objective rankings of the most eminent individuals ever in the arts and sciences by counting how many times they are mentioned in leading reference works. Women make up only 2 percent of the eminences.

Is this a fair methodology? Mostly. Scholars need to create plausible narratives of who influenced whom, so they must base their opinions largely on those of their subjects. For example, Brahms was awestruck by Beethoven, so, yes, Beethoven really is good, just like he sounds.

But this approach may be somewhat unfair to female artists because they are less likely to have genius followers. For instance, poet Ezra Pound outranks novelist Jane Austen in Human Accomplishment, in part because Pound employed Ernest Hemingway and edited T.S. Eliot, so his name comes up whenever the history of literary modernism is recounted. In contrast, Jane Austen’s indisputability as the greatest woman writer of all time on the subject of husband-hunting works against her fitting into a satisfying narrative of influence. Pound benefits from Hemingway and Eliot being better than him, while it’s all downhill after Pride and Prejudice.

In general, men tend to be more interested than women in greatness. You’ll notice that guys are always making up top ten lists. In contrast, how often do women get into arguments about who was the GOAT (Greatest Of All Time)? Women tend to want to be better than other women around them, but they seldom see themselves as competing with the dead greats.

This sex divergence is partly because men are more interested in personally irrelevant stuff than women are, but it’s also because men have bigger top-of-the-pyramid payoffs than women do: Genghis Khan (who ranks way up there on my top ten list of contenders for the GOAT of conquerors) fathered a lot more children than any woman ever gave birth to.

Also, men tend to be more nostalgic and loyal to their old favorites and thus keep their heroes’ names alive, while women tend to be more interested in new fashions.

This raises questions about Disney’s strategy with their Star Wars property to assume that its male audience will always remain loyal, just because every guy remembers when he first saw Star Wars (for me, a 10 a.m. showing in May 1977), but they can recruit the female Harry Potter audience by going Woke.

But is Star Wars really the hot new thing that the female sex wants to associate themselves with?

And is anybody inside Disney allowed to even ask that question these days?

Lemme tell ya a story ’bout a guy named Irv Rubin. Ran a little something called the Jewish Defense League. The JDL was dedicated to battling the “enemies of the Jewish people,” which sometimes meant Ay-rabs, sometimes “neo-Nazis,” sometimes anti-Zionist Jews, and sometimes Holocaust revisionists.

Rubin was the original “bear Jew.” Tall, strong, with a face resembling a rock quarry, he was an imposing fellow. Fearless, too. Unafraid to fight, happy to take a punch if it meant he could dole out twenty in response. Yet for his imposing bulk, the guy could “skate” with the grace of a Disney on Ice fairy. Dude “skated” every legal threat he ever faced. Murder charge? Dropped. Solicitation to commit murder? Tried and acquitted. Car bombings? House bombings? Extortion? Arson? Nothing stuck.

In 1991 Rubin set his sights on me. He and his goons beat me up a bunch of times (no biggie; chicks dig scars). In ’98 Rubin put a $25,000 bounty on my head, so I paid him off to leave me alone and I abandoned my profession and changed my name (no biggie; chicks dig cowardice).

In December 2001, Rubin and his main JDL cohort Earl Krugel were arrested by the FBI for plotting to blow up a Saudi-backed Culver City mosque as revenge for 9/11. Krugel was no stranger to me; he once threatened to murder me during a TV interview. The point being, I knew both of those men. The bomb plot was not out of character for either of them. It was unrealistic to think that an event like 9/11 wouldn’t drive Rubin to seek revenge; he’d been accused of killing people over far more trivial matters. But this time, there’d be no skating. The government had an informant: a Jewish kid named Danny Gillis, a U.S. Navy vet who’d been Rubin’s protégé.

Why’d Gillis become an informant? According to him, beating up David Cole was one thing, but blowing up a Westside mosque OKC-style was too much. Kids would die, and the blowback would sink the JDL for good. Rubin’s defense team countered that Gillis wanted to oust Rubin and take control of the JDL for himself, so when Rubin and Krugel suggested blowing up the mosque, Gillis ran to the feds out of self-interest.

The FBI wired Gillis for a number of meetings, most with Krugel, some with Rubin. Rubin died in jail before his case could go to trial. Krugel took a plea, as the audiotapes proved that he was an active instigator of the plot.

Yes, Gillis was an informant. No, that doesn’t mean Rubin and Krugel were innocent. No, the FBI didn’t “orchestrate” the plot. Yes, Gillis’ motives might’ve been impure, but Rubin and Krugel were not forced to say or do anything they didn’t organically want to say or do.

As news of Rubin and Krugel’s arrest spread, I heard from hundreds of friends and well-wishers on the far right with comments like “Yay! The FBI finally got ’em! Hooray for informants!”

The definition of an informant who’s a hero: “He informed on someone I hate.” The definition of an informant who entraps: “He informed on someone I like.” Sure, there’ve been instances in which informants or undercover operatives have been accused of unduly influencing weak-willed or vacillating targets, but that was not the case with Rubin and Krugel. No one could “lead” them to jack shit. They were stubborn and strong-willed.

Unlike MAGAs, apparently. Tucker Carlson’s new defense of the 1/6 rioters is that these weak-minded little man-children were “made” to storm the Capitol by a mere “almost two dozen” (Tuck’s figure) “FBI operatives” who forced a crowd of as many as 800 MAGAs—who possessed no will of their own—to do something they otherwise wouldn’t have done. The MAGAs were not to blame—a few FBI infiltrators made ’em do it!

There’s so much wrong with that, I don’t even know where to start.

First, let’s say Tuck’s right, and the Capitol stormers were so feeble-minded, so easily led, so incapable of independent thought or action, that roughly twenty operatives could manipulate 800 of them into marching as one into a trap. Good God, those imbeciles are liabilities! Why act like they have anything of value to contribute? You really want such manipulable simpletons as allies?

MAGA: chasing a laser pointer off a cliff like a brain-damaged cat!

But Tuck’s not right. He bases his “FBI did 1/6” trutherism on a report by the Trumpist site Revolver, but being Tuck, he can’t even bring himself to faithfully relay what that report actually says, which is fishy enough without embellishment. In a nutshell, the Revolver piece starts with one unproven assumption—that people listed in various 1/6 indictments as “unindicted co-conspirators” (UCC) are FBI operatives—adds an even worse one—that parties listed in the indictments as “persons” are also FBI operatives—and tops it off with a third assumption—that those UCCs and “persons” influenced the course of events on 1/6 to the extent that without them, the MAGA angels would’ve never entered that silly ol’ building.

At least Revolver admits that these are unproven assumptions. The UCCs and “persons” might be cooperating witnesses or unknown parties or true believers–turned–informants (like Danny Gillis) or simply people not yet charged. But that didn’t stop Tuck from claiming that the Revolver report proves that “FBI operatives were organizing the attack on the Capitol on January 6” and “the insurrection was, by the government’s own admission in these documents, organized, at least in part, by government agents.”

That’s an outright lie. A double-decker lie: Tuck’s lying about 1/6 and he’s lying about what the Revolver report says about 1/6. There’s zero proof that the unnamed “persons” in the indictments are “FBI operatives,” and as the WaPo pointed out, even the most cursory research shows that one of the “persons” Tuck claims was an “FBI operative” is in fact the wife of one of the Capitol defendants…and damn Tuck to hell for giving the WaPo a legitimate dunk.

Indeed, everyone on the left has been successfully dunking on Tuck for his bullshit sandwich. Which begs the question, why has he gone so far out on a limb over this particular demonstrable falsehood?

You might as well ask why the left spent 2020 making excuses for its rioters, for the Antifa terrorists and BLM thugs (FUN FACT: In September 2020, Tuck’s beloved Revolver claimed that police have a “moral duty” to shoot BLM and Antifa rioters dead. Rioters must never be “coddled,” the site said…unless they claim “the FBI made me do it!”).

Tucker Carlson is Al Sharpton with a Howdy Doody haircut. It’s not the rioters’ fault; whitey made ’em do it! The FBI made ’em do it! Blacks have no agency, and neither do MAGAs. I personally know, and Tuck personally knows, die-hard MAGAs who openly brag about how storming the Capitol was their idea and their goal, just as Sharpton knows plenty of blacks who riot, loot, and create mayhem because they wanna, not because whitey forced ’em to. But to deceivers like Tuck ’n’ Al, it’s never about what’s real. These hucksters make their fortune by appealing to the tribe. And when the tribe does something stupid, you excuse it. And should a member of the tribe fall while doing something stupid (Michael Brown, George Floyd, Ashli Babbitt), you hail them as a martyr.

Now, I can hear one or two of you saying, “Well, shit, we’re just doin’ what they do. The left dun started this tribal war, we gonna finish it.” Because that’s how some of you think; you envy the left’s license. But you’re missing a key point: The left’s defense of riots and lawlessness is in the service of its long-term goals. There’s a plan backed by the billionaire philanthropists like George Soros who silently control the grassroots. Normalizing riots, excusing rioters, demonizing law enforcement…when leftists do that, it’s either because they’re purposely advancing an agenda, or they’re tools of those who are purposely advancing an agenda. But the bottom line is, there’s an agenda.

When rightists try to ape the left’s defense of riots and lawlessness (using the exact same clichés: “We have no other means to express our grievances!” “Riot is the language of the unheard!”), the outcome is self-defeating. It does not help the right, it only helps the left. The Soros agenda of anarcho-tyranny needs opposition, not opportunists like Carlson echoing its talking points (“the peaceful rioters were misled by a few bad apples”). Soros deceives because he has a grand vision. Carlson deceives because a bunch of his viewers who’ve developed an imaginary personal relationship with an egotistical failed ex-president like having their dicks stroked.

Eight hundred blacks riot? The left will say, “It was a peaceful protest. The violence was caused by agitators!” And that’s Tuck’s exact excuse for 1/6; he spews BLM propaganda repurposed for the right. And who could possibly be more pleased with Tuck’s apologia than Soros? At a time when the single greatest need in America’s cities is a unified opposition to riots, lawlessness, and the excusing of criminal behavior because “it’s not their fault,” the continued and obsessive desire to defend 1/6 has backed rightists into a corner where they’re now the ones defending riots and lawlessness and they’re the ones excusing criminal behavior because “it wasn’t their fault.”

The GOP needs to resurrect its image as the no-nonsense no-crime party, but people like Carlson are manipulating the right so that it defends what it should be opposing.

And no one’s grinning wider than Soros. You wanna talk about “inside jobs,” Tuck? “Undercover operatives”? What’s more realistic: that 800 MAGAs were “forced” to storm the Capitol by twenty scattered “unnamed persons,” or that Soros has a guy on your staff writing your copy?

Maybe you’re the mole, Tuck. As you love to say on your show, “I don’t hear you denying it!”

It’s time to cut the 1/6ers loose. By all means, fight against the cruel and unfair treatment meted out to them (like perpetual solitary confinement). But stop defending their actions. A bunch of dummies did a dumb thing; accept it and move on. Stop catering to those walking liabilities. Not just the Capitol stormers, but the several thousand mouthbreathers who, along with Rep. Louie Gohmert, gathered in Dallas on Memorial Day Weekend to drool over Lin Wood and Sidney Powell, two criminal frauds who shoulda been run out of town on a rail eight months ago.

Cut the cord. 2016 MAGA wasn’t about performative cosplay idiots. It was about steelworkers, auto workers, crime victims, and ordinary folks who don’t want to see America become a Third World shithole. The flamboyant attention-seeking self-destructive tards of 2021 MAGA have made it all about themselves, and the entire right seems willing to sink with that millstone around its neck.

Sink if you must, but know that you’ll likely be taking the nation with you.

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