GREECE—Two hundred years ago last March, the Greeks rose up against the hated Turks, who had occupied most of the mainland for 400 years, and with the help of Britain, France, and Russia drove the infidels back where they came from. The war ended with the London Protocol of 1830, which recognized the creation of the independent nation-state called Greece. Hellas, as we call her, became the first independent nation in the Balkans, and the first to break away from the Ottoman Empire. The Society of Friends, which had been founded in 1814 outside Greece and included members of my family, had established the groundwork for the uprising. The seed of the uprising was the American Revolution, followed by the French one. Greece chose to bind herself with free countries, especially Britain, although Germany became the country where Greek elites went to study.
Two hundred years later, the American progenitors of freedom are now viewed by the elite as criminals, their statues brought down, their names besmirched, their sacrifices ridiculed. The British are not far behind in committing historical seppuku, with Soviet-style denunciations being the core of wokeism. Forgetting for a moment the outright falsehoods peddled nowadays by woke creeps, it’s their moral certitude and absence of self-doubt that are so outrageous. Mind you, here in Patmos among my own kind those creeps and their theories become a bad memory, like a severe case of poison ivy from long ago. Although I haven’t exactly conducted a poll, I do not think there is a single Patmian, local or visiting, who believes the modern conception of freedom means men in drag should be reading to children about the joys of being trans.
Never mind. The great Richard Wagner insisted the people are only free when one man rules, not when many rule. The Ancient Greeks understood that very well, as did the British and later on the Americans. Stalin and Hitler put an end to that, but the essence of rule and freedom is still the same. The mobs that terrify and tear down statues pose as rulers in the name of the “people,” but in reality they are annoying insects in the wind. Who would have imagined when the Berlin Wall and the Iron Curtain came down that thirty years later the American national anthem would be anathema to many natives and booed by crowds in football stadiums? Here in Greece it would take a very foolhardy person to boo the flag. We are 90+ percent white and Christian, and have fought for independence and freedom against all odds throughout. We fight like hell among ourselves, but the nation and its symbols are sacrosanct. My uncle, Nikita Varvitsiotis, was a tall, proud Spartan MP elected with Stalin-like numbers throughout his political career. He was known for standing up in Parliament and in a booming voice accusing left-wingers of being Bulgarians, in other words traitors to the mother country. His daughter, my first cousin Fifi, is a true Spartan, both father and mother, and is my favorite. I loved Nikita because he was a Spartan of old—very brave, patriotic, responsible, and most of all, honorable.
Lolling about on the beach gives one plenty of time to think, and swimming in the cleanest and clearest water puts things into perspective. For example, America used to be the answer but now has become the problem. Her past heroes are seen as villains, public intellectuals are now inferiors to fashion influencers, and moronic blowhards blather about pronouns night and day on television. I sure am glad to be far away from all that jazz. Talking to locals and visitors here might not be as rigorously mind-expanding as a debate in the Oxford Union, but what comes through is that diversity of faith and race leads to irreconcilable, clashing opinions. Basically, being woke means obsessing about race, gender, and sexual orientation—maybe climate change, too. Here in Greece if one raised any of these subjects they’d be confronted with the kind of looks Xerxes’ emissary received from the 300 Spartans when he demanded they lay down their arms.
So I ask you, isn’t it better to live among your own kind, as I am now doing here in Patmos? The other night I gave a party attended by the young and then went on to the Piazza, where I held court until 4 a.m. I think I downed about six triple vodkas, having stuck to wine at dinner. The next day, feeling like death, the whole family went sailing on a friend’s boat. We sailed north by northeast until we came to a bay last inhabited by some Italian soldiers who had jumped ship during the war. The good thing about uninhabitable islands, totally deserted and squeaky-clean, is that there are none of those annoying warnings about swimming, stripping, peeing, kissing, what have you. I thought of the suckers on the Long Island Expressway baking in their cars while inching ever so slowly forward in order to reach the gray Atlantic; then, once there, having to take cover while young Wall Street scions race their dune buggies around and sometimes over prostrate humanity. Lifeguards blow whistles and warn people nonstop not to swim out too far. Shore police check license plates and village permits for parking. Cars are towed from 8 a.m. to nightfall. Swimming off my friend’s beautiful boat, I looked around and almost felt sorry for the suckers back in the Hamptons.
A few years ago, I had the bright idea of writing a book about arsenic in the 19th century. In preparation for writing it, I bought scores of books on this fascinating subject, including a very rare bound collection of arsenical wallpapers used in America. I had until then idly supposed that all such wallpapers were green, but no: There were arsenical wallpapers of many colors.
The 19th century was truly the age of arsenic. It was used in the disposal of inconvenient lovers, husbands, and wives who were not the only ones to suffer arsenic poisoning. There were famous cases of peppermints adulterated with white arsenic, and of beer contaminated with it. Bank tellers in the United States suffered arsenic poisoning from licking their fingers after counting greenbacks, the green ink containing arsenic. There was arsenic in flypapers, weed killers, and rodenticides.
Arsenic was the first drug of abuse to be regulated in Britain. After a spate of famous murders by arsenic, an act was passed (without much effect) to limit access to arsenic. Arsenical compounds were used as a stimulant, and the miners in Styria, in Austria, were said to take arsenic much as the Andean Indians chew coca, to give them energy and reduce their hunger. It was claimed that the Styrian miners habituated themselves to ever larger doses, but I have been unable to discover whether this was pure mythology. It sounds like it to me.
Arsenic was mined in Cornwall by the English Arsenic Company. The land around its workings is still sterile a century and a half later.
Arsenic was used medicinally, and Charles Darwin’s famous chronic illness has been ascribed to arsenic poisoning from his repeated use of Fowler’s solution, a patent medicine that contained arsenic. Others have claimed that he suffered from arsenic poisoning from the stuffed birds he received from naturalists around the world: Arsenic was a taxidermist’s staple preservative, and one of the proofs of arsenic poisoning was the comparatively slow decomposition of corpses after burial.
The means of detection of arsenic the Marsh test was the foundation of all forensic science: It was the first true chemical test. One of the signers of the American Declaration of Independence was poisoned to death with arsenic by his wicked nephew, and conspiracy theorists believe that Napoleon was deliberately poisoned with arsenic by his British jailers on St. Helena, though others believe that arsenic impregnated the wallpaper of Longwood House and it was an accident. Others believe that he did not die of arsenic poisoning at all.
An arsenical compound was the first new treatment of syphilis since mercury, and arsenic was not only a cosmetic used to whiten the skin (as it was fashionable to do at the time), but a treatment for psoriasis employed by some dermatologists until the 1970s.
Arsenic was important in literature, in Madame Bovary, for example. Not only was it a favorite tool of murderers and murderesses, but—not surprisingly in the circumstances—of crime writers. Scores of detective novels have been written in which the victim was poisoned by arsenic.
Anyone who examined my library might conclude that I was a poisoner manqué, that I had spent much of my life plotting a murder rather than a book.
Having accumulated an immense arsenical library (I even had a Victorian book with a green cover tested for arsenic in the toxicological laboratory attached to the hospital in which I was working), I was mortified when another author in effect plagiarized me in advance by publishing a book—and a good one, too—on arsenic in the 19th century, before I had even begun mine. I am not bitter, however, and I do not regret my arsenical phase. I might even return to an aspect of the subject one day.
In fact, I retain an interest in criminal poisonings; there is no finer relaxation for me than reading about them. The other day, for example, I picked up a little book titled Poisoners of Women, by Harold Eaton, and read it at a sitting.
The book bears no date, but from internal evidence I should put it in the late 1920s. It is badly printed on rough and yellowing paper, and is obviously directed at a mass market. Its cover has a picture as vulgar as the times permitted, that of a man in evening dress and with irresistibly brilliantined hair dropping poison into a glass of wine while he slips off the white fur coat of a dizzy young woman whom he has evidently seduced before. My guess is that the book was sold in kiosks in suburban stations, to be read by exhausted commuters.
As to the title, it was obviously intended to attract readers rather than to describe accurately the contents of the book, for it consists of six case studies, the first of which is the poisoning of a young man rather than of a woman.
What is surprising about the book is the high quality of its writing. The author treats the subject of poisoning with the irony with which, for some reason, it has always been treated by the British: As late as 1953, Dylan Thomas has one of his characters in the play Under Milk Wood spend his time reading a book, Lives of the Great Poisoners, as he daydreams of eliminating his henpecking wife. Eaton, though he is writing for a mass market, assumes that his readership is a literate one. He begins his short introduction on the psychology of poisoners as follows:
It has been frequently argued that murder is not a normal act, that the ordinary mind is incapable of compassing it and the ordinary hand of executing it. Those who are responsible for this doctrine also urge that capital punishment should be abolished and that the murderer should be treated as a mental patient—a being to be pitied as the victim of an uncontrollable impulse rather than to be condemned as the author of an offence against God and man.
The argument, important and unresolved, is with us still, indeed I have heard it argued in court that the accused must have been mad to do what he did, and that he must have done what he did because he was mad. But that is not the point I wish to make: I want only to draw attention to the sophistication of the writing with its thread of irony running through it.
In fact, irony runs through the whole book. William Palmer, subsequently known as the Prince of Poisoners, invited his mother-in-law to come to stay:
After much persuasion she agreed, declaring to one of her friends that “she would not live a fortnight”—a prophecy which erred upon the side of optimism. She died ten days after her arrival.
I suspect that nowadays people might be shocked by this irony and believe that it indicated a callousness on the part of the author, as if he really thought that poisoning was fun or funny. We are now terribly literal-minded, too much so for irony. If we are infinitely more technically sophisticated than our near ancestors, mentally we are much less so.
If I weren’t already staunchly pro-vaccination, the vaccine zealots would turn me against the COVID shot. The proof that they’re practicing religion and not science is their refusal to acknowledge the great heaping hunks of immunity a person gets from natural infection.
Obviously, you don’t want to contract COVID just to get all that boffo immunity, but lots of people have already been infected, so why can’t we count them the same as vaccinated?
The current research — and that’s all we have for the vaccines, too — indicates that natural immunity is not as good as vaccine immunity — it’s better! Study after study keeps finding that the previously infected have stronger, broader and longer-lasting immunity than people who’ve received the vaccine.
When the vaccinated, with their pipsqueak immunity, stop browbeating the already-infected, I’ll believe this is something other than a cult.
Why is the only proof of virtue — I mean, “Trusting the Science(TM) — a vaccination card and not a positive COVID test? Why don’t sports teams, concert halls and foreign countries accept proof of prior infection the same way they accept proof of vaccination?
Nope. Your prior infection is no good here! We are accepting ONLY vaccination cards.
Whatever that impulse is based on, it’s not “science.”
Despite earlier reports showing that antibodies declined rapidly after infection, in May of this year, scientists at the Washington University School of Medicine in St Louis, Missouri, released a study showing that “robust” antibodies were still present at least 11 months after infection. (France accepts proof of prior infection not older than six months. If they trust the science, they’ll soon be accepting prior infection for a year.)
Then in June, the Cleveland Clinic produced a gigantic, perfectly controlled study finding that people who’d already had COVID received no benefit from vaccination.
The clinic had tested its 52,238 employees throughout 2020. At one point or another, 2,579 tested positive. By mid-December, 46% of the recovered COVID patients had taken the vaccine, but more than half (54%) had not.
Five months later, none of the previously infected had been re-infected — including the 1,359 who did not take the vaccine. (Among clinic employees who were vaccinated, but not previously infected, 15 got COVID.)
The authors concluded: “Our study … provid[es] direct evidence that vaccination does not add protection to those who were previously infected.”
Great news, right?
NO! This was terrible news for the vaccination Karens! Their position is: Everyone must get the vaccine. Even if you live alone on a mountaintop and eat leaves and beetles to survive, even if you’re a burbling infant, even if you’ve had COVID, YOU MUST GET THE VACCINATION!
In short order, the Cleveland Clinic was bullied into submission. The authors of the report issued what sounded like a retraction, but, on closer examination, was just a lot of airy nonsense.
E.g.: “This is still a new virus and more research is needed. …”
Duh. Same for the studies showing how fantastic the COVID vaccines are.
“It is important to keep in mind that this study was conducted in a population that was younger and healthier than the general population. …”
This study SUCKS. It only applies to the entire working-age population of the U.S.!
“In addition, we do not know how long the immune system will protect itself against re-infection after COVID-19. …”
Ditto for the vaccine.
“It is safe to receive the COVID-19 vaccine even if you have previously tested positive …”
Presumably, it’s also “safe” to use Gwyneth Paltrow’s healing crystals if you have previously tested positive. The question is: Do you need to?
” … and we recommend all those who are eligible receive it.”
Perhaps, someday, there will be a study establishing that the previously infected should get the vaccine, but your study didn’t, Cleveland Clinic. Everyone knows you’re only telling the previously infected to get vaccinated so the loons will leave you alone.
Just this week, a study out of the Emory University Vaccine Center, led by “world renowned immunologist” (as he is known) Rafi Ahmed, found “durable and broad immune memory after SARS-CoV-2 infection.” And get this: The researchers also found that a natural COVID infection protects against a range of other coronaviruses, too.
What’s so impressive about these studies is that they are going against the woke mob. After a year of seeing scientists and scientific journals irredeemably corrupted, any study that won’t be cited in Teen Vogue carries extra credibility. Worse, the results support Sen. Rand Paul! Nobody’s going to lie about that.
This isn’t just a matter of policy not catching up to the science. The vaccine Karens positively disdain the previously infected. Instead of being treated like the superhumans that they are, recovered COVID patients are scorned, treated like smokers or AIDS victims. (No, sorry — the latter were revered as “angels.”) We’re simultaneously told that COVID is WILDLY contagious and … it’s your own damn fault for not wearing a mask, socially distancing or getting a vaccine.
The dismissal of people who’ve developed their own antibodies springs from the same totalitarian mindset of gun control activists: You cannot protect yourself! Your body cannot protect you! Only the government can protect you. Or, as Mussolini said: “Everything in the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State.”
This abject refusal to acknowledge the existence of natural immunity proves that the vaccine Karens don’t care about the health of their fellow human beings. They just want to boss us around.
If racism is the only thing that could possibly account for the problems of blacks in 2021, shouldn’t their troubles be declining steadily? After all, the effects of redlining (outlawed in 1968) and the other usual suspects should logically be steadily vanishing into the mists of time. But instead, nothing much seems to change as the decades roll by.
A landmark new study titled “Task-Based Discrimination” looks into exactly why the white-black wage gap among men declined dramatically from 1960 to 1980, but today it is just as wide as it was at the end of the Carter administration (and has been worsening in this century). It turns out it has to do more with fundamental changes in technology than it does white evilness.
In contrast, Critical Race Theorists point to the various gaps between whites and blacks as proof of the pervasive influence of “structural racism.” For example, pundit David French cites the difference in wealth between races as irrefutable evidence that the unending effects of white racism endure massively today:
Indeed, to this day, the median net worth of a black family ($17,150) is roughly one-tenth the median net worth of a white family ($171,000).
French goes on to argue that whites must therefore pay for the sins of their fathers, citing approvingly an alarming Old Testament story about King David handing over seven descendants of King Saul to be hanged for their late ancestor’s malefactions.
But being the conservative he is, French doesn’t want reparations to be centrally planned; he wants them to be distributed via vouchers and other free-market means:
A conservative like me is suspicious of the effectiveness of central planning to ameliorate systemic injustice. I’m less likely to want to pour money into vast, centralized public school bureaucracies and more likely to empower school choice to grant families options in the short term and to provide competitive incentives for public schools to improve over the long term.
In contrast, this new in-depth study by Erik Hurst and Kazuatsu Shimizu of the U. of Chicago and Yona Rubinstein of the London School of Economics provides a fascinating framework for analyzing the past sixty years of trends among black and white male workers.
Hurst, who is associated with Chicago’s Becker Friedman Institute, is working in the vein founded by Gary Becker’s 1957 book The Economics of Discrimination, in which the Nobel laureate pointed out that, all else being equal, discrimination obviously would lower employers’ profits. So where there is discrimination, as there was in many businesses in 1957, it demands explanations.
One is “statistical discrimination”: Lacking the ability to distinguish between individual job applicants of potential vs. problem, employers might employ racial rules of thumb. (To reduce the utility of statistical discrimination, a rational society should thus encourage employers to use cognitive tests and facilitate the looking up of the criminal records of job applicants. Of course, our society is now strenuously doing the opposite.)
Another was “taste-based discrimination”: Bosses, other employees, or customers just didn’t like associating with blacks.
For example, ninety years ago Harlem department stores did not employ black sales personnel on the grounds that (their diminishing number of) white customers would be displeased by them. Then a 1934 “Buy-Where-You-Can-Work” boycott by black shoppers forced Blumstein’s on 125th Street to hire 35 black sales workers.
The authors cleverly measure the waning of dislike for blacks by first ranking jobs in terms of how strongly each emphasizes Contact, Abstract, Manual, and Routine tasks.
High human Contact jobs include sales clerks, waiters, health care workers, and some managers.
Specifically, “Contact” measures the extent to which an occupation requires interaction and communication with others within the organization (co-workers) or outside the organization (customers/clients).
These were historically occupations where taste-based discrimination against blacks was often worst.
High Abstract thinking workers include software developers, accountants, engineers, and some managers.
High Manual jobs require dexterity, such as carpenters.
High Routine jobs include bank tellers, meter readers, and assembly-line workers and others whose main job is to not mess up.
(I’d add a fifth category: high Strong Back jobs, which have likely been in relative decline since John Henry vs. the steam drill.)
The authors argue that racial gaps in Contact work over time can be used to measure the extent of taste-based discrimination against blacks.
The authors report:
…there has been a large racial convergence in the Contact task content of jobs between 1960 and 2018. The large racial gap in the extent to which workers sort into jobs that require Contact tasks that existed in 1960 has almost disappeared by 2018.
The authors state that “there are almost no racial gaps in social skills,” which is debatable (social skills are harder to measure than IQ, and they mostly seem to be measuring extroversion) but not all that implausible. Therefore, they see the historic change from the sizable race disparity in human contact jobs in 1960 to practically nothing in 2018 as evidence for taste-based discrimination declining dramatically, just as much other evidence would suggest, such as the immense popularity of black sports and music stars and the increasing black predominance in television commercials.
They find that this kind of discrimination against blacks in non-servile Contact jobs was once higher in the South, but even there has seen large-scale convergence:
Consistent with our conjecture that the racial gap in Contact tasks proxies for taste-based discrimination, the racial gap in Contact tasks was much larger in the South relative to all other regions in 1960, and the subsequent convergence in Contact tasks over the last half century was also greater in the South relative to the other regions.
(In general, Wokeness seems to me, as a Californian, to be a covert South-centrist movement that assumes the South was always the hub of American history, even though it was a depressed backwater from 1865 until the later 20th century.)
One complication I’d point out is that into the 1960s, black men had often been employed in high Contact but servile jobs such as Pullman porters and golf caddies. Yet their modern equivalents are now seen as humiliating to black men.
For example, the famous opening scene of Mad Men reveals that in the bad old days of 1960 black men were sometimes employed as busboys. (Today, of course, compared with 1960, busboys are more often Latino men and black men are more often jobless, but nobody seems to much mind.) Why exactly being a sneaker salesman is more conducive to black male dignity than is being a waiter is a conundrum, but, I guess, tastes change.
And, as Charles Murray pointed out in Facing Reality, the cognitive-skills racial gap has narrowed somewhat since 1980, at least as measured on the federal NAEP school achievement tests.
On the other hand, cognitive gaps are still substantial. The authors report:
…the racial gap in cognitive skills is large and narrows over time (especially for working men), whereas the gaps in non-cognitive and social skills are relatively small and constant over time.
In other words, low-IQ black men have increasingly dropped out of the workforce, and are often in prison or on the street. On the other hand, those black men who do work these days are smarter than back in 1960 when practically all black men had jobs.
Hurst, Rubinstein, and Shimizu report:
…we show that cognitive skills are most predictive of entry into occupations that require Abstract tasks while social skills are most predictive of entry into occupations that require Contact tasks.
They note:
…a White worker with a given wage is more likely to have a skill bundle tilted towards Abstract (cognitive) skills and also more likely to have sorted into occupations with high Abstract task requirement than a Black worker with the same wage.
But, interestingly,
…the wage return to cognitive skills is higher for Black men than for White men with the same occupation and education.
In other words, being a high-IQ black man is a good gig in modern America, presumably due to affirmative action. If you are black and have a 125 IQ, Goldman Sachs wants to talk to you. If you are white and have a 125 IQ, you’d better be the captain of an Ivy League squash team.
Way back in the 1990s, I wrote an article for National Review about how our society is constantly trying, in the name of diversity, to lure black men into jobs, such as computer programming or architecture, that they don’t particularly like. I suggested that more black guys should instead use their people personalities to focus on sales. No doubt they’d worry about racial animus, I said, but it’s now the 1990s, the Michael Jordan Era! Americans now really like black guys.
As this study shows, my advice was pretty sensible. But in my optimism, I was overlooking the long-term trend toward computerizing salesmanship. Our economy in 2021 thus rewards the retail salesclerk relatively less and the Amazon coder more.
The authors sum up:
…we find that the stagnation in the racial wage gap post-1980 is a product of two offsetting forces. On the one hand, a narrowing of racial skill gaps and declining discrimination between 1980 and 2018 caused the racial wage gap to narrow by 8 percentage points during this period, all else equal. On the other hand, the changing returns to tasks since 1980—particularly the increasing return to Abstract tasks—widened the racial wage gap by about 7 percentage points during the same period. A rise in the return to Abstract tasks disadvantages Black workers because they are underrepresented in these tasks due to a combination of racial skill gaps and discrimination.
(The not-very-woke authors protect themselves by attributing lower-average black cognitive skills to discrimination.)
I would also add that feminism and immigration have hurt African-American men outside of Contact jobs. Women have flooded into Routine jobs, Hispanics into Manual jobs, and Asians into Abstract jobs.
This fundamental aspect of the Information Age isn’t likely to change. (Although, who knows? Maybe in the future, computers will only be coded by 160-IQ artificial intelligence wizards, and then their robots will do what 130-IQ coders do today.)
Hence the growing push to use politics to take, in the name of equity, your home equity.
1996. A beautiful night by the beach, cruising PCH with my lady-friend Veronica. She was barely 21 but damn did she do drugs like an aged Deadhead. Me? After seven years in Holocaust revisionism, I was looking for new company. And Veej (my nickname for her based on her initials) was my conduit. You never found revisionists at underground raves.
So we’re listening to “1979” by Smashing Pumpkins, as was the custom at the time. Corgan sings, “Hung down with the freaks and ghouls,” and Veronica turns to me and says, “That’s us, Dave. Surrounded by freaks and ghouls.” And I’m like, “No, Veej. You hang out with freaks and ghouls. You have only two types of friends: those who look like they’re dying of AIDS and those who look like they supplied the tainted needles. I’m a historian! I hang out with intellectuals.”
And Veronica, who was not smart but perceptive (there’s a difference), said, “Dave, I’ve been to your Holocaust meetings. You know lots of Hitler lovers. I’m not saying you wanna know them, but you do. And they’re freaks and ghouls.”
I glared at her in faux anger until we broke out laughing because of course she was right. In the 1980s and ’90s it was simply not possible to be involved in Holocaust revisionism without rubbing shoulders with Hitler fanboys. They were part of the scene. Back then, before the internet, you could somewhat control them, keep them in the background, prevent them from becoming the face of revisionism. But hoo Nelly, were they ever there.
There were two levels of Hitler fanboyism: “moderate” and “extreme.” Moderate Hitler fanboys (and according to Google I’m the first person to ever string those three words together) saw in der Führer a missed opportunity: Christendom in the 1930s could’ve used a good, strong bulwark against communism and degeneracy. Hitler could’ve been that dude, but dangit the guy ended up goin’ plumb loco, because the U.S. and U.K. kept goading the poor sod until he fell into their trap. And then he made some truly awful calls and did some messed-up shit.
Ah, but the extremist Hitler fanboys, to them their guy could do no wrong. Every decision he made was golden. What some describe as “bad calls” were actually genius chess moves and strategic necessities; you just don’t know it because the media lies about him at every opportunity. He never killed nobody, though he should’ve, and sure he lost the war but it would’ve been lost worse if not for his brilliant maneuvering (this part is never explained, because it was literally not possible for Germany to have lost worse).
I’m making this point for a reason. It’s been 76 years since Hitler sieged his last heil, and there are still fringe dumbasses out there protecting his honor. I know this not just because I mixed with them thirty years ago, but also because to this day, if I write a column or do a podcast in which I mention Hitler’s declaration of war against America, I’ll hear from dipshits whining, “AKSHULLY, Hitler DIDN’T declare war on America, if you read the declaration carefully enough!” And if I mention the fatal error that was Barbarossa, I’ll hear from dipshits whining, “AKSHULLY, Hitler had no choice but to invade Russia because Stalin was about to invade Germany!”
Now, both of those claims are completely untrue, but that doesn’t matter to the fanboys. Seventy-six years on, they’re still excusing his mistakes, still blaming everything on media bias, still accusing his enemies of “setting him up,” still robbing him of agency while simultaneously attributing to him preternatural instincts. This pathological drive has rendered these cretins of no use to anyone but their ideological foes, who employ them as bogeymen to trot out as reasons to censor the internet or pass hate-speech laws.
Yes, you can still be pining for a failed God-king three-quarters of a century after he died, and in so doing, you can make yourself not just irrelevant to current events, not just a detriment to your supposed cause, but a royal pain in the ass to those around you.
Maybe you see where I’m going with this cautionary tale.
This is the bitter legacy of the Judas Savior. The guy who was supposed to be “the one” who would deliver you from evil, but who, in the end, delivered evil right to your front door. Hitler is a prime example of a Judas Savior. While Hitler was not even remotely a champion of “whites” (as I’ve previously pointed out, he despised Slavs and hoped to eventually erase them as a people), he was certainly the champion of native Germans and Austrians. And yet his poor decisions—not the machinations of Roosevelt and Churchill nor the “fake news” from the “lamestream media”—ended up bringing the Russians straight to the heart of his beloved fatherland.
Researchers have estimated that two-thirds of all women in Berlin were raped by Soviet soldiers following the city’s fall. “Red Army soldiers don’t believe in ‘individual liaisons’ with German women,” Russian soldier Zakhar Agranenko wrote in his diary. “Nine, ten, twelve men at a time—they rape them on a collective basis.” “The Russian soldiers were raping every German female from eight to eighty,” Soviet war correspondent Natalya Gesse noted.
And as those German women were being violated, as they were crying out in pain, begging for relief from the torment, it’s too bad that someone couldn’t have slapped some sense into their stupid heads by pointing out, “Oh, so you’d rather HILLARY had won?”
I’m not making a Trump/Hitler analogy. I’m talking about human nature, and I’m trying to present a gentle warning to MAGAs about what they risk becoming if they don’t let go of the man. And the first step to letting go of the man is realizing that the man isn’t all he’s cracked up to be. That “this is what they took from us” meme is deadly. Trump was a windbag who never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity. Yes, everyone was against him. But also yes, he was ineffectual and malleable and the ones who “took him down” were not NYT editors or FBI spooks but rather the people he chose to surround himself with in his inner circle.
You know the Twitter thread that Tucker Carlson read on air a few weeks ago? The one we’re all supposed to believe is so devastatingly insightful? The one about how the 1/6ers were totally normal until the media and the FBI and the election thieves “radicalized” them with their lies and deceit? Bullshit. In every political party and ideological movement, there are nutcases. And the nutcases have a role to play. But you can’t pander to them too much; they can feel empowered, but they must never be empowered.
A not-insubstantial percentage of Republicans believed that Obama “stole” the 2008 election (just as a huge percentage of Democrats believe that Bush “stole” 2000 and Trump “stole” 2016). The loons, the stupid, and the gullible are always there; it just comes down to how much a politician wants to engage them.
Trump’s presidential aspirations launched with an unsuccessful attempt to activate the loons. In 2011, he thought he could ride Obama birtherism to the White House. It was a miscalculation, and it failed. And remember who was front and center dissuading Trump from such stupidity? Ann Coulter. The same Ann Coulter whose book ¡Adios, America! would—by Trump’s own admission—inspire the platform that won him the White House.
Ann’s a friend, so I’ll muster the temerity to paraphrase her: She basically told Trump, “Stay away from the crazy stuff. Embrace a real issue (immigration) that is central to this nation’s very survival, an issue that resonates with ordinary Americans, from cattlemen to steelworkers to minimum wagers.” And it worked. But after getting elected, Trump did damn near everything wrong—from straying from (or completely ignoring) his platform and promises, to surrounding himself with swampy neocon quislings, to mistaking tweets for legislation, to openly denouncing Ann when she tried (again) to bring him back to reality. And when white 2016 voters abandoned Trump in 2020 (a simple truth backed up by all available data) and he lost to a fossilized resident of a dementia ward’s terminal wing, Trump reverted back to 2011: Activate the loons! Except this time, the loons listened, because Trump, by his “miraculous” victory in 2016 (not miraculous at all—he just appealed to white working-class voters with an issue they cared about), had now developed a cult-like following.
So when he called up the crazies, the crazies answered. Krakens! Execute Pence! Venezuelan ballot-stealing robots! Don’t vote in Georgia—it’s rigged! And hey—let’s march on the Capitol with absolutely no endgame!
I have several friends who were Capitol stormers. Me being who I am, we frequently discuss WWII history. And to a man they believe that the Reichstag fire was a false flag engineered by Hitler to accelerate the abrogation of the rights of Germans who opposed him. Imagine that—believing that an attack on a capitol building after the election of a despot can be used by that despot as an excuse to crush dissent, and then attacking a capitol building after the election of someone you believe to be a despot and expecting a different result. “Hitler planned the Reichstag fire, man, because he knew he could use an attack on the capitol building as an excuse to take away people’s rights! Hey, I’ve got a great idea—let’s go attack the capitol building!”
Now, the Reichstag fire was not a false flag; a commie really did start it because he didn’t like the election results. And indeed, Hitler used the incident to suppress rights and punish opponents. And a bunch of Trump fanboys who knew that history Reichstagged themselves right into prison, in the aftermath undoing decades of macho Second Amendment posturing about how “the government should fear the people” by using as their defense, “Hey, we’re just mentally ill eccentrics and losers and nerds who couldn’t hurt a fly.”
Trump is a bell curve. Appealing to birthers in 2011 (losing). Appealing to the heart of foundational America in 2016 (winning). And then appealing to retards again in 2021 (losing and salting the earth for all who come after).
Let go of the man. Realize that you’re not actually pining for a man but for a lost opportunity, and then realize that it was the man who blew the opportunity.
And BTW, regarding Holocaust revisionism, we lost that battle. Once the internet decentralized the “movement,” the Hitler fanboys took over, and now it’s all them, and rational historical revisionism is dead. That’s important to me, as that was my life’s work. But in the big picture, it ain’t no thing.
Losing America would be a thing. So lose Trump, and lose the fanboys, before we lose something actually irreplaceable.
To understand what House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s select committee investigation of the Capitol Hill events of Jan. 6 is all about, a good place to begin is with the sentencing hearing last week of Paul Hodgkins.
A crane operator from Tampa, Florida, Hodgkins, 38, pleaded guilty to a single count of obstructing a joint session of Congress called to confirm Joe Biden as the next president.
Hodgkins entered the Senate chamber carrying a Trump 2020 flag. He committed no assault, no act of destruction, no act of violence. Yet, he was sentenced to eight months in prison by U.S. Judge Randolph Moss.
Special Assistant U.S. Attorney Mona Sedky argued for a sentence of twice that length, a year and a half, because, as she told the judge, “Jan. 6 was genuinely an act of terrorism.”
But is that true? Was Jan. 6 “an act of terrorism” — of the character if not the magnitude, say, of the Oklahoma City bombing?
Hodgkins’ attorney vigorously rejected that depiction. To call Jan. 6 “domestic terrorism,” said Patrick Leduc, is “offensive and gaslighting the country … It was a protest that became a riot, period, full stop.”
Leduc is correct: Jan. 6th was a riot. Had it truly been “domestic terrorism,” as the U.S. attorney claimed, why would she have accepted a guilty plea for a single nonviolent offense?
Why did she not throw the book at the terrorist?
Looking back, what was Jan. 6 in reality?
A huge pro-Trump demonstration of tens of thousands, out of which a mob of hundreds moved on the Capitol, broke police lines, assaulted cops, rampaged and disrupted an official proceeding.
All in all, a shameful disgrace. But 1/6 was not 9/11 or Oklahoma City or Pearl Harbor or the Pulse nightclub or the Las Vegas massacre.
Why is it being hyped like this? Why will the establishment not let go of Jan. 6? Why, half a year on, does it remain an obsession of regime media?
The hype never ends. Daily, we hear establishment politicians and press paint it up as the most awful day in America’s history.
It was, we are told, an “armed insurrection,” “domestic terrorism,” an attempted “coup,” “an act of treason,” “the worst attack on American democracy since the British burned the Capitol in 1814.”
Why did Pelosi recoil from and reject two of House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy’s picks for her select committee — Reps. Jim Banks of Indiana and Jim Jordan of Ohio?
Because the deck is stacked, the fix is in. Pelosi’s committee has been crafted to bring in a third impeachment of Donald Trump and the GOP for posing the greatest threat to American democracy since Fort Sumter.
Issues, arguments and questions Banks and Jordan would have raised would have been off-script and interrupted the agreed-upon narrative.
Indeed, of whom does the select committee consist as it opens its hearings today?
Every Democrat of the committee has voted to impeach Trump for Jan. 6. Both of the Republicans Pelosi put on the committee to provide bipartisan balance — Wyoming’s Liz Cheney and Illinois’ Adam Kinzinger — voted to impeach Trump last January and are the two ranking anti-Trump Republicans on Capitol Hill.
Pelosi has impaneled a jury to try Trump and the GOP for insurrection, every one of whose members has already indicated they believe that Jan. 6 is a historic crime and Trump is guilty.
Why are Pelosi and the regime media doing everything to keep Jan. 6 alive? What are the stakes involved?
As of today, Jan. 6 is the biggest and last best stick the Democrats have for retaining control of Congress in 2022.
For if that election is not about the worst day for the GOP of the Trump years, it is going to be about the successes and failures of the first two Biden years.
And what, as of today, look to be the issues of 2022?
That election will be about the worst outbreak of inflation in a quarter-century to hit the U.S. economy. It will be about Biden’s having presided over a fourth wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, after having declared on July 4, 2021, our independence of the virus.
It will be about the largest invasion of illegals across America’s southern border in the history of the republic — 2 million a year in 2021 and again in 2022, with 300,000 of these “gotaways” who evaded any contact with the Border Patrol.
Among the 4 million anticipated illegals in Biden’s first two years are child molesters, drug dealers and unvaccinated carriers of COVID-19.
The election of 2022 will also be about a wave of shootings, woundings, killings and gun crimes in our greatest cities that have long been governed by liberal Democrats.
The Democratic establishment and its media arm have a vital interest in hyping Jan. 6 and not letting go of it. For Jan. 6, 2021, is their last best hope for holding power after Nov. 8, 2022.
The Week’s Most Peddling, Treadling, and Gold-Medaling Headlines
ONE SMALL STEP FOR MAAAAAAAAAAN!
It was the most blessedly brief “mismatched roommates” sitcom in history: a trillionaire book-burner, his ne’er-do-well sponge of a little brother, a Dutch teenager, and an old lady from Texas. And together they blasted off into space…for a few minutes, barely long enough for a good sitcom gag:
Big Bezos: Hey, who took the spare change from my wallet?
Lil’ Bezos: Sorry, bro. I needed some walking-around money.
Big Bezos: But there was 50 million bucks in there!
Lil’ Bezos: It was gonna be a long walk.
[Laugh track]
Dutch Boy: Boop boop meep meep boom boom eep eep.
Old Lady: Ya damn kid! Quit playin’ yer videa games so loud!
Dutch Boy: Video games? I was speaking Dutch.
[Laugh track]
The Bezos Far Out Space Nuts reboot went off without a hitch…well, not in the air, at least. On the ground, there was a hitch or two.
CBS News hosted a special guest to witness the “historic” launch: Charles Bolden, a black retired astronaut and NASA administrator who flew on four space-shuttle missions. What a “get” for CBS! Let ABC try to dig up one o’ them Hidden Figures ho’s; CBS had a real live legend on board!
But things went south faster than the Challenger. Following the New Shepard’s successful landing, a beaming Bolden decided to put his own unique spin on why the mission is important for today’s black youth. After CBS cameras caught sight of a young black boy beaming with joy as the capsule returned to earth, Bolden began a rant about how the launch “inspires kids to not sit on a corner and shoot people.” Reporter Gayle King (who’s black) hurriedly interrupted Astronaut Jones, frantically trying to change the subject. But to no avail. Once Bolden got the mic again, he seamlessly picked up his train of thought (news flash: The elderly are stubborn): “People will criticize what I’m about to say, but…the young man sitting there, excited as he was, that’s one less black kid on a corner somewhere getting ready to use a weapon.”
And with that, the entire studio filled with the unpleasant odor of about a hundred people simultaneously soiling their pants.
Fearing that the old coot had just gotten the entire network canceled, King immediately jumped in to save the day: “I don’t want anybody to think or believe that all black kids are just hanging out on a corner. I just really wanted to clean that up because I’m sitting here going, No, Charlie, no! I know what you were trying to say, but I don’t want that left hanging on the air as I’m sitting here listening to it.”
“I said before I said it that people were going to be critical,” Bolden shot back, unbowed and smiling.
Watching King’s pained expression was a joy; a network that (like all the others) pretends that black crime is a myth invites a legendary black man on the show, only to get a harsh lesson in how old black men ain’t got no truck with the PC.
And it must be said, the idea of shooting young gangbangers into space has definite appeal. Rather reminiscent of an old 1970s-era joke from the British comedy duo Morecambe and Wise:
Ernie: [Reading a newspaper] Bad news…the Chinese are on the moon.
Eric: Good news…all of ’em.
MOST DISHONORABLE ORYMPICS
If last week had a theme, it’s that life loves ethnic stereotype humor. Indeed, much of the week seemed like a Don Rickles routine playing out in real time.
Example No. 1: Larry Elder, the black conservative author and radio host, nearly missed his chance to run in the California gubernatorial recall election because some of his paperwork was late. Yes, even rightist blacks go by CPT. California Secretary of State Shirley Weber, an obese 72-year-old black woman who probably holds a few grudges against all the tardy black men who left her hanging throughout the course of her life, tried to penalize Elder for his un-punctuality, but a court overruled her, and Late Larry will be on the ballot after all.
Example No. 2: The Polish government had to recall six members of its Olympic swimming team, because the team should’ve numbered seventeen, but the Poles couldn’t count properly and sent six too many. A genuine tragedy, but not as bad as the Polish sprinter who left his polka albums at home because someone told him he might break a record, or the Polish wrestler who got hit by a car because he was jogging backwards (he was trying to gain weight), or the Polish track-and-field competitor who refused to do the broad jump…he was afraid he might hurt her.
Example No. 3 is certainly the saddest: The Japanese, arguably the most shame-averse people on earth, find themselves in the position of hosting the most shameful Olympics in history. From athletes pledging to openly disrespect their nation should they win a medal, to dudes in dresses getting ready to clobber actual women, to the cardboard beds the athletes have to sleep on (they never should’ve trusted the design of Olympic Village to Gus the back-alley transient), the Games are shaping up to be a most dishonorable mess.
Of course, front and center in that mess is Covid. Almost a hundred athletes, trainers, coaches, and staffers have tested positive. Many of the infected were “fully vaxxed,” and as far as anyone knows, there are no “brave Texas Democrats” hiding in Olympic Village superspreading to residents.
Spectators have been banned from all events, because if there’s one thing sports isn’t about, it’s spectators. Organizers believe it’s only appropriate for the Pandemic Games to look like the opening scenes from 28 Days Later, with athletes in empty stadiums wandering around screaming, “Helloooo! Anyone theeeeeeere?”
Japanese enthusiasm for the Games is at the level of “I’d rather relive Nagasaki.” Toyota, one of the event’s prime sponsors, has declined to run any Olympics-themed ads (the poor bastard who okayed that sponsorship deal is preparing his seppuku sword), and the CEOs of a dozen Japanese corporations skipped the opening ceremonies out of respect for the fans who couldn’t attend.
South Korean diplomats are boycotting the Games after a Japanese diplomat infuriated the delegation with a masturbation joke (which almost certainly included the pinched finger-and-thumb “tiny penis” meme), and the composer of the opening-ceremony music was forced to resign after he admitted that while in school he forced classmates with disabilities to masturbate (again with the masturbation theme?), and he ridiculed the looks of students with Down syndrome (kinda redundant for an Asian).
To top it all off, a heat wave is making this the hottest Olympics on record, and the director of the opening ceremonies was fired for having made a Holocaust joke in 1998.
Tokyo 2021: the first Olympics in history where an appearance from Daniel Lee Young would be a relief.
OFFENSIVE BLACKFIELD
At this point the NFL is pretty much like, “To hell with it.” It’s the old “If you find yourself in a hole, dig deeper” strategy. The 2020/2021 season was a ratings disaster, as was Super Bowl LV. And while it’s easy to attribute the ratings implosion to an awkward season truncated by Covid, in fact the viewer exodus started pre-Covid when a bunch of black millionaire athletes decided to “take a knee” to protest their modern-day enslavement (are black athletes truly free if they can’t occasionally slap they bitches without cops buttin’ in?).
The really bad news is that the biggest viewer loss last season was in the all-important 18–49 demographic. There’s the irony: “Boomers” aren’t the ones leaving. It’s the TikTokers and video gamers, the morons who are supposed to be all into the woke BS.
To remedy this situation, the NFL is introducing more woke BS. During the upcoming 2021/2022 season, the “black national anthem”—“Lift Every Voice and Sing”—will be played before each game.
It was either that or Cardi B’s “Wet-Ass Pussy,” the preferred choice among players.
The anthem addition is part of the NFL’s new “Inspire Change Initiative,” launched in partnership with rapper Jay-Z, whose “Niggas in Paris” was also considered for the new anthem:
So I ball so hard muthafuckas wanna fine me
But first niggas gotta find me
What’s 50 grand to a muthafucka like me
Can you please remind me?
Got my niggas in Paris
And they goin’ gorillas,
I got that hot bitch in my home
You know how many hot bitches I own?
Now, that’s inspirational!
Another irony about the anthem switch is that “Lift Every Voice and Sing” was written in 1900 in honor of Abraham Lincoln, a “white savior” of the kind whose statues are being pulled down by folks “goin’ gorilla.” Writer-composers James Weldon Johnson and J. Rosamond Johnson wanted the song to be a message of optimism, of how much better things were getting for American blacks.
An odd choice to appeal to a generation of blacks who literally think they’re being genocided every hour of every day.
Sing a song full of the hope that the present has brought us;
Facing the rising sun of our new day begun.
Hardly an anthem for a group of CRT/BLM thugs who believe that America hasn’t improved since slavery.
Funny enough, the Johnson brothers also wrote the popular tune “Dem Bones,” which might make a better NFL anthem, as it offers a guide to the areas of a football player’s body that will be crippled by intense pain as he gets older.
I SCREAM, JEW SCREAM, WE ALL SCREAM FOR ICE CREAM
Of course, it’s not just pampered athletes who engage in social justice posturing. Conservatives do it pretty well too.
Last week, far-left manufacturer of overpriced ice cream Ben & Jerry’s announced that it would no longer do business in the “Israeli occupied” West Bank and East Jerusalem. The company will continue to do business in Israel proper, though. Apparently, keeping ice cream from Palestinians while still selling it in the country whose leaders “oppress” Palestinians is somehow a pro-Palestinian/anti-Israel position.
Wouldn’t pro-socialism Ben & Jerry’s make a stronger statement by continuing to sell its product in Israel while making it free in Palestinian territories? Jews must pay! But the poor oppressed Ay-rabs get guaranteed universal ice cream!
Well, socialism has its limits.
Predictably, Republican politicos and conservative pundits reacted with outrage at this Holocustard, pledging boycotts and even state action against the company. Odd that none of the other positions taken by the outrageously leftist enterprise have prompted such passionate responses. In years past Ben & Jerry’s has supported the BLM riots, police defunding, illegal immigration, tranny rights, and even cop killers. But hey, free speech, man!
But making an anti-Israel statement? This. Means. War!
A month ago, GOP senator James Lankford of Oklahoma tweeted his outrage over Joe Biden’s defense of speech suppression on social media:
Biden thinks free speech is dangerous. Oklahomans don’t need the Biden thought police telling us how to think & feel. We can understand information w/o their help. I’m more concerned w/ DC controlling speech than I am of some people passing wrong information. Let people speak!
Amen! Huzzah!
Oh, wait…now Israel’s angry? Last week Lankford tweeted this:
#Benandjerrys has now decided they know more about Jerusalem than the Israelis. If Ben & Jerry’s wants to have a meltdown & boycott Israel, OK is ready to respond. Oklahoma has an anti-boycott of Israel law in place. We should immediately block the sale of all #Benandjerrys in the state and in any state-operated facility to align with our law.
Oy gevalt!
And speaking of Jews, little Benny Shapiro (did you know he’s Jewish? He never mentions it) tweeted this back in 2012:
I think the owners of Ben & Jerry’s are awful politically. But they make great ice cream, so I eat there. B/c I’m not a vindictive a-hole.
Alright! Boo, cancel culture! Conservatives don’t boycott!
Until last week when he tweeted, “@benandjerrys Oh well. Guess I won’t be eating any more of your ice cream.”
The neocon version of “America First” always ends with a question mark.
Shapiro has promised to start his own ice cream chain, Yummm Kippur. The bowls will be shaped like yarmulkes (if you don’t want a bowl you can get a cohen), and free ice cream for life for the 6 millionth customer. Oh, and for Palestinians, if they’re displeased with their purchase, absolutely no right of return.
THE BONE RANGER RIDES BLACK BOOTY
Get ready for the urban contemporary version of Equus.
During America’s frontier days, there were many legendary black horsemen. Bose Ikard, Bass Reeves, John Ware, and most of all Nat Love, a.k.a. Deadwood Dick.
Jackson Kelley of Norfolk County, Massachusetts, wanted to be the next Deadwood Dick. In the worst way. Like, the very worst way. Like literally the worst way humanly possible. The 19-year-old black championship high school wrestler loves him some horses. He grew up next to the Turner Hills Equestrian Stables, where he was an avid rider and groomer.
But it was one horse in particular, a mare aptly named Bellissima, that really caught Kelley’s attention. In fact, one might say the young gentleman became smitten.
But not in the wholesome “Roy Rogers and Trigger” way.
Last week Kelley crept into the stables late at night. Familiar with the layout, he unplugged the security cameras…all but one, which he forgot. And you can’t blame him for being careless; he had love on his mind. Approaching Bellissima’s stable, he haltered the animal with a crosstie to secure it, and he put out some feed to keep it occupied.
Kelley then found a step stool, which he placed behind the horse, and, well, suffice to say he gave new meaning to the equestrian term “rearing.”
Hey, at least he bought her dinner first.
A woman who keeps a horse at the stable couldn’t sleep, so she decided to randomly check the security camera feed (which all owners have access to). To put it mildly, her insomnia was not mollified by the Pornhub Premium content she encountered on her screen.
When Roy was done Rogering, he put the mare back in her stable and ran off. Police arrived soon after, having been alerted by the horse owner (who still hasn’t been able to blink since that night). Based on the footage, Kelley was arrested. He faces multiple charges of animal cruelty, sexual intercourse with an animal, and breaking and entering with intent to commit a felony. At his arraignment several days ago, local media described him as “blank and expressionless,” which is probably the default for any young man aware that everyone on his block now knows that he fornicates fillies.
Jackson Kelley, a.k.a. My Friend Fligga, get ready for life as a figurative gelding.
GREECE—I’m in Patmos with four grandchildren, two children, and a wife. I know, I know, it sounds very lower-middle-class and is, only Bournemouth and some sun beds are missing, but who cares? Children have friends, and grandchildren even younger friends, so it’s not all gloom and doom. At dinner the other night up at the piazza, which holds about forty tables, there was not a single Philip Green type among the guests, and looking back I cannot remember having had a more pleasant dinner setting ever, perhaps once in Sienna long ago. Chora, the section of the island where the piazza is located, I’ll match against any town or village as far as beauty is concerned. IRTs, or international rich trash, go to Mykonos, the South of France, now even the Hamptons. Sensitive souls go to Patmos. My son’s boy Taki is 15 and his daughter Maria, 13. My daughter’s boy Antonius is two and a half, her girl Theodora a 1-year-old. The last two are so blond, back in the bad old ’30s Hitler would have decorated the family for their looks.
Commanding and imperious, the Monastery of St. John the Divine stands at the island’s highest point, trumpeting the Greek Orthodox faith. The Greeks call Patmos the Jerusalem of the Aegean because within a cave John, the disciple of Christ, envisioned the Apocalypse while banished by the Roman emperor Domitian in 95 AD. The Monastery was founded in 1088, and it continued to function as a Christian beacon throughout Venetian, Turkish, and Italian invasions. I first came here on Bushido No. 1 long ago. The place was empty and wonderful, the locals friendly and softer than in other islands.
I had a very young Swedish girl on board, one we christened Lolita for obvious reasons, and on the first day she stripped away her top, as Swedes tended to do before the world’s other females followed. A grizzly old fisherman told me to sail west, to Mykonos, “where all the whores are.” The grizzly one got one thing right: Mykonos did become a whorehouse eventually, but that’s a different story altogether. Patmos has remained a family-oriented island, although my boy J.T. seems to get lucky nonstop, and in a family setting to boot. Go figure, as a Persian first said in Marathon while running for his life.
Patmos is dotted with small settlements, bays, and beaches, and has a population of about 3,000 during the offseason. The architecture of the island is Byzantine—all whitewashed perhaps, but Byzantine nevertheless as the nucleus of the place was created at the beginning of the 12th century when Byzantium and Hellenism ruled supreme. The Venetian takeover and eventually the Italian one beautified the place, and with its distinct Greek features the island is perfection itself. Upper-class Greeks like Prince Michael of Greece discovered the place and bought houses while more nouveaux Hellenes invaded Spetses and Mykonos. Perhaps because I am from the Ionian Islands— which have never felt the Turkish yoke, just the Venetian and British ones—I feel closer to a civilized place like Patmos than the whorehouses some of our islands have turned into. Paxos, Antipaxos, and Cephalonia are the Ionian isles that have kept scum out. The most civilized of all, Zante, where the Greek aristocracy and her greatest poets come from, as well as the Taki family, has been totally ruined by the very same English gentlemen that ran riot in London during the European Cup Final. These malodorous freaks are viewed as typical Brits nowadays, and it is a losing battle to try to explain otherwise.
Never mind. I’ve rented the most wonderful house outside the main town overlooking a beach, one owned by the lady chairman of Anderson & Sheppard. I’ve been a client of theirs for fifty years and still wear the suits I had made there when I was in my 30s. This has been the first summer not sailing since I was in my 20s, and this is because the family put their foot down. Tiny children in a large, heeling sailing boat are as vulnerable as “democratically elected” African strongmen, and need just as many bodies around them to ensure their safety.
Last week my daughter and Alexander Schwarzenberg gave a riotous dinner at a taverna downtown, followed by some heroic drinking up at the piazza. A woman approached me as I was starting to feel comatose and told me I had been rude in print about her father. His name, she said, was Chalabi, the very con man who talked the half-wit Bush and mendacious Blair into attacking Iraq. After one million dead, Chalabi had the grace to drop dead himself. I said that it was the column I was most proud of. Tamara Chalabi accepted it with grace.
Given the news that a Dutch investigative journalist specializing in crime had been shot dead by a drug cartel keen to stop his reportage, you could be forgiven for asking what a Dutch journalist was doing in Mexico in the first place. In the great age of European multiculturalism, however, it was not necessary for Peter R. de Vries to leave his native Amsterdam to take a bullet in the head. Now the E.U. brings the drug cartels to you. And they are not from Mexico but Morocco.
Amsterdam is famous for many things, including legalized marijuana, licensed prostitution, and diamonds, which makes for quite a weekend. But its main growth industry would seem to be cocaine. As for the wholesalers and retailers, never let it be said that Moroccan Muslim migrants to Amsterdam lack enterprise or initiative. For it is Moroccans who run the Amsterdam cocaine business, Moroccans who shot a lawyer working on a case against them, and almost certainly Moroccans who shot Peter R. de Vries, or arranged the hit. The BBC joyously included the detail that one of the arrested suspects is “a Polish national,” as though Muslims are only allowed to hire hitmen who know their cousin.
Islam operates with impunity in the Netherlands, as Vincent van Gogh’s descendant Theo (the same name as the artist’s brother) would attest, if he hadn’t been decapitated in an Amsterdam alleyway in 2004 by a Muslim who took exception to a film critical of Islam and directed by van Gogh (and written by Ayaan Hirsi Ali).
So, Moroccans are running the cocaine business in one of Europe’s most famous cities, and the local equivalent to General Motors is known colloquially as the “Mocro Mafia,” headed by gang boss Ridouan Taghi, a man whose capture in Dubai in 2019 and extradition to the Netherlands means that although he is inconvenienced by imprisonment, jail is simply a rent-free office from which to run his business affairs. Taghi also faces trial for other alleged contract killings. He and his henchmen are not precisely the positive social capital the Dutch government claims they are, and one major Dutch politician has said so.
Geert Wilders is often described as “flamboyant,” but the reference is really to his extraordinary hair, a bottle-blond coiffure that makes him look like a member of a 1980s British synthesizer band on a comeback tour. The curious thing is, he is probably the most recognizable man in Holland, which may be less than advisable for a politician who receives death threats, due to his perceived racism, the way you and I receive spam email. Wilders is so unrepentantly racist he married a Hungarian Jew. However, he is “Islamophobic,” and that is to Europe what “racist” is to the USA.
Wilders’ decision to form his own party in 2005—the PVV or Partij vor de Vrijheid (Party of Freedom)—was based on his objection to the Dutch center right’s approval of Turkish entry into the E.U. It is clear that any such admission would flood the E.U. with even more Islamic immigrants, all moving freely under the Schengen Agreement, which allows free passage across Europe until the arrivistes find the country with the best welfare system.
Turkish prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan—you will know him as the man who gets angry every time a country accepts the reality of the Turkish massacre of Armenians during WWI—has threatened mainland Europe several times by weaponizing Muslim migrants. If Turkey is not granted E.U. membership—and Europeans should pray that they are not—Erdoğan was surprisingly straightforward for a politician talking about immigration. He said simply, “I will turn on the taps.”
So, Geert Wilders has always been clear about his distaste for Islam. European politicians who are anti–mass immigration are automatically tagged as “Islamophobic” (itself a tacit admission of where Europe’s new enrichers are coming from). The difference with Wilders is that he really is. He quite simply wants no Islam in the Netherlands, and would ban the Koran if in power. He has said so, many times, and is now under permanent police protection, changing addresses regularly, along with his family. This is Europe.
To the delight of the sneer-and-smear European media, Wilders has also just been re-convicted, on appeal, of “insulting Moroccans” at a rally in 2014. What did Wilders say to his followers on that fateful day, which shall live in Dutch infamy? Was it:
(a) We must see more weighted Moroccan bodies in the canals of Amsterdam, my clog-wearing friends.
(b) We will round up all Moroccans and put them to work in our famous windmills.
(c) Do you want more or fewer Moroccans in your country?
Well done if you ticked (c). Seven years after this Hitlerian tirade, a second trial has come to an end and Wilders has been found guilty, again. But he will serve no jail time and pay no fine. That wasn’t the point of the case. Wilders was forced to appeal in 2016 (the date of the first trial) or tacitly admit guilt. But the courts spanned out the appeal trial for half a decade, with all the financial drain and Kafkaesque bureaucracy that brought with it. When a deep state wants someone to shut up, it doesn’t usually resort to a head shot (unlike its immigrant population), it just uses up their time and money.
What the E.U. is doing with Islam—and Wilders recognizes this—is much the same as the Democrat demographic plan in the USA, which is to import blocs of voters in the manner suggested by Bertolt Brecht, that of electing a new people to replace the old one. It is a distant cousin of the British political ploy of “gerrymandering,” whereby electoral lines were changed in order to include or exclude a demographic advantageous or otherwise to the party in power.
The Dutch problem is that, as a certain D. Trump noted with regard to Mexicans, Morocco—and other countries in the Maghreb—is not exactly sending its best to the country that inexplicably changed its name from the cheery “Holland” to the dreary “Netherlands.” That is, unless you applaud the obvious Moroccan talent for selling drugs and shooting people in the head. The bereaved family of the courageous but now late Peter R. de Vries would agree. With the Netherlands famous for being probably the most liberal country in Europe, it may not be long before the gangs run things. Unless Geert Wilders can get there first.
August is called the silly season by English hacks, as the Brits like to call journalists. Most people are on vacation; the days are lazy, sunny, and long; and “stop the presses” stories are rare and far between. Silly stories are awarded front-page coverage for lack of earth-shattering news items. I don’t use social media, hence I rely on good old-fashioned newspapers for keeping up with the news. I read Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post, and London’s Daily Telegraph and Daily Mail. I stopped reading The New York Times when the paper ceased objectively covering news and began reporting only on black culture.
What follows is a silly story, with its tragic denouement on the last day of the month of August—24 years ago, to be exact. Yes, you guessed it, it has to do with the death of the icon of our times, Princess Diana, mother of half-wit Harry, Meghan’s hubby, now living the Hollywood good life and hanging out with the likes of Oprah. And no, I will not bother to repeat the story of her death, one that has been covered ad nauseam by every hack who ever scribbled down two words on a typewriter or word processor. What I will recount, however, is how an unethical hack—is there any other kind nowadays?—helped bring about the awful events that took place at a Parisian underpass on that fateful August night long ago.
As I’ve already name-dropped in these here pages, I was a friend of Diana’s, but hardly a close one. I had given a couple of dinners in her honor, basically in order for her to meet gentlemen journalists like Charles Moore, now Lord Moore, editor of The Daily Telegraph at the time, and others of his ilk like Alexander Chancellor and Dominic Lawson. She had sent me handwritten thank-you notes as a result, letters that were intercepted by my wife and daughter suspecting they were love notes, eventually returned to me when they turned out to be innocent. I checked the handwriting recently when another handwritten note publicly appeared, and they were identical.
The note I compared mine to was written by Diana to her faithful butler Paul Burrell, and in that one she predicts her early death in a car accident orchestrated by her estranged husband, Prince Charles, in order for him to marry her children’s nanny, Tiggy Legge-Burke, also stating that Camilla’s role was that of a decoy. Pretty strong stuff, and that note to her butler eventually ended up in the hands of Lord Stevens, head of Scotland Yard, who then interviewed Prince Charles concerning Diana’s assertions.
I happen not to be a fan of Prince Charles, but Diana’s epistle got everything wrong except that she did die in a car accident. Let’s take it from the top: Diana wrote to her butler in October 1995 that she would be killed on her hubby’s orders. One month later she gave the famous interview to Martin Bashir of the BBC where she claimed that her marriage was on the rocks due to his infidelity. Bashir was until then an unknown BBC hack, one I had met a few times and thought of as grubby and shifty-eyed. How could a person like him land a prize subject like Diana spilling the beans was a mystery to us all. And it would have remained as such if Di’s brother, Charles Spencer, had not gotten involved after her death.
Lord Spencer was as intrigued as the rest as to how a lowly BBC hack had landed the prized interview. So he began digging and—eureka—he discovered all sorts of bogus documents and phony checks Bashir had shown his sister while gaining her confidence. To wit, he showed the princess checks paid for by Buckingham Palace to persons unknown to harass her and drive her off the road if possible. Also papers supposedly by the secret service guarding Prince Charles about Diana’s children’s nanny. In other words, there was a plot to get rid of her by the Palace, and here was her chance to give her side of the story before the you-know-what hit the fan. Diana fell for it and embarrassed herself and the royal family in that infamous interview. Hence also the note to her butler that she would most likely end up dead in a car crash.
But it was all based on lies invented by the BBC hack, lies that Diana believed until the end. Once found out by Charles Spencer, Bashir admitted that he had made it all up. The BBC “punished” him by naming him as the corporation’s religious correspondent. After recent protests Bashir has taken a leave of absence due to “ill health.” Diana went to her death thinking the royals were out to get her. They were not. She ended up with a sleazy type like Dodi Fayed partly as revenge against the Palace. Prince Charles married Camilla and never had an affair with nanny Tiggy. Handwriting experts confirmed the note Diana sent her butler was genuine. It all goes to prove that hacks are not to be trusted, even when they produce bank statements to prove facts. But don’t worry about Martin Bashir. I am sure he is a perfect fit for The Washington Post or The New York Times, papers that will go to further lengths than the BBC to prove a falsehood true.
