“April is the cruelest month,” wrote T. S. Eliot in the opening line of what is regarded as his greatest poem, “The Waste Land.”

For President Joe Biden, the cruelest month is surely August of 2021, which is now mercifully ending.

When has a president had a worse month?

On the last Sunday in August, Biden watched solemnly, hand over heart, as the coffins of the American dead in the Kabul airport terrorist massacre of Thursday were carried off the plane at Dover.

The American dead had been carrying out an evacuation of U.S. citizens and Afghan allies from America’s lost war, a defeat dealt to us by the same Taliban we ejected from power in 2001 for providing sanctuary for the al-Qaida terrorists of 9/11.

We have lost our longest war, and the triumphant Taliban are now back in power and presiding over and assisting our departure from Kabul.

When the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan is complete Tuesday, the fate of the hundreds of U.S. citizens and thousands of Afghan allies we leave behind will be decided by the jihadists we have been fighting for two decades.

Throughout the Biden presidency, we will be reading of, hearing of and being witness to the evidence of their fates.

That same noon hour on Sunday that Biden honored the fallen at Dover, Hurricane Ida was coming ashore. Ida’s 150-mile-an-hour winds were raking the same Louisiana coast that Hurricane Katrina hit 16 years ago.

By nightfall Sunday, a million residents in and around New Orleans had lost all power, for days and perhaps for weeks.

In this same August, the U.S. moved ever deeper into the fourth wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, with new infections, new hospitalizations and new deaths approaching the numbers they had reached at their worst last winter.

August also brought hundreds of thousands more illegal aliens across our southern border in the largest peacetime migrant invasion in memory.

Most of these millions are coming for a better life. Yet, among their numbers are the criminals and rapists who have assaulted women and girls in the exodus, and not a few foreign enemies coming with the intent to bring the war on terror home to these United States.

So it was that, in the first August of the Biden presidency, the U.S. suffered defeat in its longest war, underwent a humiliating evacuation under the guns of its enemies, continued to endure the worst plague in 100 years, and saw an invasion of its southern border by illegal migrants that called into question whether we Americans retain the resolve to preserve our country.

Nor is this all. In this August of 2021, American politics seem at their most poisonous.

Race relations are as raw as they have been since the ’60s. In the wake of George Floyd’s death under the knee of a Minneapolis cop, an outpouring of hostility against police has brought record retirements and resignations by cops across the country. Result: an unprecedented surge in urban shootings and killings, with children prominent among the victims.

When President John F. Kennedy gave his approval for the invasion of Fidel Castro’s Cuba that ended in the Bay of Pigs debacle, Americans rallied behind Kennedy because, though he had blundered badly, he was our president, the personification of America’s nationhood. His support soared to 80%.

We were one nation then, and one people. And today? Demands are being heard for the impeachment or resignation of Biden.

This piling on of the president is surely in part payback for what the Democrats did to former President Donald Trump.

Two weeks before Biden took the oath, a mob had invaded the Capitol to protest his formal certification as president.

For that mob intrusion, Trump was impeached a second time for what was variously described as “inciting insurrection,” “an attempted coup,” “domestic terrorism,” “treason” and mounting a mortal threat to “our democracy.”

“There is a great deal of ruin in a nation,” Adam Smith’s observation after the British lost the decisive Battle of Saratoga, is often invoked these days.

And justifiably so. For how much ruin can a nation endure and remain a nation? How much of this can we sustain and survive — at a time when we are carrying the burden of the defense of our allies in Europe, the Middle East and East Asia against a gathering modern axis of Russia and China, which our own interventionist policies helped to bring into being?

Our media are as partisan as they have been in our lifetimes. Our cultural elites endlessly mock the traditional values and beliefs of Middle America. Our national parties appear ever at sword’s point.

Our goal, it is said, is to ever move “toward a more perfect union.”

Does it seem like that is the direction where we are heading?

Are the divisions between us becoming too great for us to remain one nation and one people?

Part II of my series about the changing face of my native city. Part I can be found here.

When I was young, it was ridiculously easy for Westside homeowners to find a Mexican to do yard work or haul trash or feex spreenklers for ten bucks. The Mexis out here reminded me of the people I encountered in Eastern Europe in the immediate aftermath of the Soviet Union’s fall. They didn’t “get” the value of a dollar, they just knew a dollar was valuable. They’d grab $1 with the same childlike gusto as $100.

Well, that used to be the case with our Beans.

“You fix fence?”

“Sí.”

“Ten dollar?”

“Sí.”

“Go! Trabajo!”

“Sí.”

Not anymore! At some point, our Mexicans learned about median home values, neighborhood income levels, and how the three types of Jew, “Seinfelds” (secular Jews), “saucerheads” (Orthodox), and “loudshirts” (Persians), always have money even when they say they don’t.

So these days, when I need to have something feexed on my property, I have to haggle. More than that, the Mexicans have learned all the bargaining tricks that I imagine the Jewish peddlers of old practiced.

The days of the ten-dollar Mexican are over. And while the niggard in me is angry, the Angeleno in me couldn’t be happier. Because this is a healthy thing for the city. Westsiders now deal with canny Mexican businessmen who know how to negotiate and who then go out and hire the two-dollar Mexis to do the labor as they supervise.

We never got that kind of business savvy when blacks were our main minority (our blacks were so labor-averse, when I was a kid neighborhoods like mine still had Japanese gardeners, because blacks never did that kind of work). Don’t get me wrong—if you spoke to the average 1980s L.A. black, they were all entrepreneurs. Rockefellers! Magnates! Underground Railroad Barons!

Nobody can talk a good game like blacks. They’re every bit as verbal as Jews (hence why both groups make the best comedians). They just tend to talk rather than do.

Back when there was a black L.A., more than a few “black liberation bookstores” dotted the landscape. Because with blacks, it’s never so much about succeeding as it is about preparing to succeed. “Before the black man can thrive, first he gots to git knawlidge! So read Malcolm, Garvey, and Farrakhan! Then you’ll get da mental skills to go out there an’ be successful!”

Before the black man can earn them degrees and cure cancer, he needs diversity officers and black student unions and segregated spaces and affirmative action and cops booted from campus and white voices censored. It’s never enough to just get into college like a regular person; blacks always need something more before they feel “comfortable” enough to start learning (almost as if they’re looking for reasons to shirk the work).

Like how some dogs can’t lie down until they’ve turned around in a dozen circles or stamped on the bedding over and over to comfy it.

Just lay the fuck down! If you’re so damn tired, Rex, stop the preliminaries and lay down!

Mexicans don’t wait for the Anglos to comfy their bed for them. They just do the work, and eventually some learn managerial skills.

My favorite black L.A. anecdote is about how one of the first buildings burned at the start of the 1992 riots was South Central’s oldest black-power bookstore, Aquarian—a frequent gathering point for such luminaries as Maya Angelou, Alex Haley, Alice Walker, and Rosa Parks. As the riots began, the owner saw a horde of blacks charging toward the strip mall where the store was located, and he was like, “Yes, my brothers! Come, get your revolutionary literature so that we may organize and…wait? What the fuck? You stupid niggas is burnin’ my muthafuckin’ store!”

The rioters reduced the bookstore to ashes…just because.

Black L.A. in a nutshell: futile endeavors, self-sabotage, scattered ashes.

Worse still, there’s a new generation of young blacks who don’t even bother with the “comfy the bed before I honor you with my genius” routine. Thanks to the 1619 Project cult, the increasingly popular line is “We don’t have to lift a finger to do anything, now or ever. Our ancestors did the work, and we just wanna sit back and get paid what they’re owed.”

Hence the popularity of the black catchphrase “taking up space.” “We don’t gotta do a damn thing except take up space in a room.”

Irony of ironies; in the 1980s blacks detested the notion of being tokens—people hired just to be there, but never asked to contribute. Today, that’s the black ideal. We just witnessed that dynamic after so many “magic black girls” crapped out during the Olympics. Expecting them to perform is racist; we should be honored enough that they’re in the room.

But increasingly that’s no longer L.A.’s problem. And to those across the country whose cities are absorbing L.A.’s fleeing blacks, I can only quote Ash from Alien: “I can’t lie to you about your chances, but you have my sympathies.”

The Mexicans around here earn their keep. Many of you don’t like to hear that. But (to reprise a theme from last week) I don’t cater to people who want to be lied to. At the moment, there’s an equilibrium of sorts, a kind of burgeoning cosmic balance, that keeps this county running. Gentrified white/Jew/Asian areas serviced by a hardworking brownish underclass that harbors no racial or ideological animosity (Mexicans don’t possess the antiwhite hatred of blacks, or the anti-Christendom religious hatreds of Muslims, or even the sectarian hatreds of the Irish laborers who used to be the “trabajo Mexicans” of England), whose members can move freely between the underclass and the gentry (Mexicans can be short and brown or they can be Wonder Woman and Daisy Duke), and who are not resentful of the work they do (Mexis don’t see themselves as kings and queens who are degraded by having to get their hands dirty).

Sure, there’s Mexican criminality (mainly in their own neighborhoods). But as my colleague Steve Sailer has pointed out, Hispanic criminality might be worse than white, but it’s way better than black (to paraphrase something he wrote several months ago, if blacks could just reduce their criminality to Hispanic levels, this would be a much safer nation).

So for now, what we have in L.A. works. And I predict a trajectory over the next, say, twenty years where it will work better and better as the black population falls to statistically insignificant numbers. Gentrified areas and a labor force made up of (generally) hardworking people who don’t harbor bitter resentment and who actually like their own neighborhoods (thus avoiding the “I hate you but I want to be accepted by you” pathology that plagues black America’s attitude toward whites).

But there’s a wild card in the deck. An X, an unknown. The Mexican mystery, the cucaracha conundrum…we have no idea how these people will vote.

You may think you know, but you don’t. No one does. Because right now, L.A. Hispanics don’t vote. And they don’t vote to an astounding degree. As I wrote in a pseudonymous piece for American Renaissance in 2001, when Antonio Villaraigosa first ran for mayor of L.A. he was opposed by another Democrat who was backed by the city’s blacks. Mexis were told that this was the most important election for L.A.’s Hispanic community ever. Yet out of 600,000 eligible Hispanic voters, only 130,000 cast ballots. It was a wipeout; the black-backed candidate won handily.

Twenty years later, Hispanics still don’t vote. Statewide, Hispanics—California’s largest ethnic group—account for only 21% of “likely” voters. That’s “likely.” In terms of “actual” voters, the figure’s even lower. And the trajectory isn’t a slow upward climb, but the opposite: California Hispanics—including young Hispanics—stayed home in 2020 to an even greater degree than in 2016. The majority of them cast no votes at all.

Polling by the nonprofit Public Policy Institute of California shows that Hispanics in CA mirror the state’s whites in terms of self-declared ideological identification: 37% liberal, 32% moderate, and 31% conservative. That doesn’t mean Cali Hispanics are “natural Republicans”; it just means they’re unpredictable. We have no idea how that Hispanic ideological identification translates to votes because they don’t fucking vote.

So it’s all academic at the moment. Potential energy. And everyone’s on edge regarding what might happen should they suddenly decide to unleash it. And I mean everyone, including Democrats. There’s a reason Hispanic voting fell in California from 2016 to 2020: Democrats didn’t waste resources on outreach (neither did Republicans, but the Republicans in this state are brain-dead anyway; ask them to solve a puzzle on the back of a Lucky Charms box and they’ll have a stroke from the effort).

California Dems are as uneasy as the rest of us about this siesta-ing giant. They know they have the Asians (excepting the Vietnamese), and they know they have the blacks. And they know the blacks are evaporating, which scares the hell out of them. They also know that the Hispanics who did vote in Cali in 2020 voted overwhelmingly against the affirmative-action ballot initiative.

Again, it’s not that California Hispanics are “natural Republicans” or natural anything. It’s that they’re untested. Until they begin voting in numbers that matter, we’re all just guessing.

And for Democrats, who, like the old Soviet guard, prefer their elections predetermined, that’s not cool, hombre.

As The Atlantic noted last month,

In 2020, increased Republican turnout led to victories in four competitive House races with large Latino populations. One of those districts even elected the state’s first Republican Latino congressman since 1873. This is precisely what the 2020 election results revealed. Most notable were shifts away from Democrats in Latino communities, especially in Mexican American precincts in Los Angeles and Orange Counties.

So you can see why the Dems are happy to keep the Hispanic voting percentage low. They have a good thing going that they don’t want to risk (slavish blacks, Asians, and Seinfelds). No need to poke the piñata and unleash Mexican votes that may or may not go their way.

Nobody who makes their living in politics likes uncertainty. Democrats have grown lazy dealing with ethnics who reflexively vote “D,” and the pathetic few remaining Republicans who “work” in the city and county party apparatus use the fatalism of “we can’t win” to excuse their sloth (Mell Flynn, Cali GOP delegate and president of the Hollywood Congress of Republicans, is an actress. Don’t ask her to organize; she’s busy memorizing John Patrick Shanley monologues).

So we have departing blacks, mysterious Mexicans, commie Seinfelds, right-leaning saucerheads and loudshirts, and Asians who mimic the Seinfelds in IQ and voting patterns but lack the personality and humor.

Next week in Part III, I’ll wrap everything up with an overview of our whites.

The Week’s Most Mauling, Enthralling, and Governor-Recalling Headlines

OUR CAREER’S IN JEOPARDY, BABY!
“It’s a thing that leftists swear doesn’t exist, and if you disagree with them, they’ll mercilessly use it against you.”

“What is cancel culture?”

“Correct.”

For some reason, nobody at Sony Television foresaw trouble when they hired a guy named Michael Richards as the new host of Jeopardy!

It’s not like there’d ever been a man with that name blowing his career in a racial imbroglio.

The hiring of Richards as the permanent successor to Alex Trebek was not exactly welcome news to a lot of hardcore Jeopardy! fans. Richards had been in charge of finding Trebek’s replacement, and many fans felt cheated when he decided to pick himself for the job instead of popular guest hosts Ken Jennings, LeVar Burton, and Mayim Bialik’s nose (that’s how she’s usually billed as few people notice that there’s a full person behind the sizable appendage).

So there wasn’t a lot of love in the room for Richards when he took the job.

“In Dante’s Fifth Circle of Hell, the actively wrathful wrestle in a bed of slime pointlessly battling each other for all eternity, while the passively wrathful hide beneath murky waters taking anonymous potshots at those above. This circle has a specific name in modern-day America.”

“What is Twitter?”

“Correct.”

Within days of Richards’ ascension, Twitter sleuths did what they do best: They searched for old dirt. Because for a lot of young people today, that’s as close as they come to having a profession. And voilà, in 2013, while hosting a podcast, Richards had made a few innocuous jokes about Jews, women, and Asians.

So Jeopardy! promptly canned him.

Their job done, the Twitter sleuths returned to their vaping and video games, knowing that once again they’d made the world a better place.

“Lavrentiy Beria, the brutal head of the NKVD under Stalin, was not Jewish. But this organization of American Jews would gladly make him an honorary member, as they carry on his work.”

“What is the ADL?”

“Correct.”

The ADL, not content with Richards’ firing, now wants him “investigated,” even though it’s not even remotely against the law to make jokes about Jews (or anyone else).

Ironically, one of Richards’ “criminal” jokes involved Jews having giant schnozzolas, so you’d think replacing him with Mayim Bialik would be seen as racial justice. But no. Bialik, who’d been named host of Jeopardy! prime-time specials, has been targeted for cancellation too, because back in 2012—when Covid was just a gleam in a rabid Chinese bat’s bleeding eye—she’d supported the right of parents to make decisions about getting their kids vaccinated.

She’s since reversed her stance, but to no avail. The Twitter sleuths have her scent! Another day, another scalp.

HOLE-Y BALLOTS, BATMAN!
For Democrats, it’s time to go to Plan C in the California recall election: “C” as in “cheating.”

When the recall gathered enough signatures to be put on the ballot, the Democrats who control the state with the viselike grip of a serial killer strangling a prostitute had a choice: postpone the special election until November, or have it as soon as possible. And the Stasi Freedom Party decided it would be best to have it as soon as possible. The reasoning was, California fire season is usually in the fall, so best to hold the election before Newsom immolates another bunch of people.

Also, in June it looked like vaxxed and unmasked would be the new new normal. After spending a summer free of Covid restrictions, surely Californians would be grateful to the slicked-hair socialist who saw them through the crisis.

But then two things happened: California’s left-wing professorial arsonists decided to start fire season early, and science decided that the Delta variant was the woist Holocaust evah, so masks back on and gatherings prohibited again.

And now, Cali Dems are regretting that with only two weeks to go, they have an unhappy populace, and a recall that’s a dead heat.

But fear not! Dems always have that Plan C up their sleeves. Turns out, the mail-in recall ballots for Los Angeles County were printed so that a hole in the envelope allows everyone to see if the “yes on recall” circle has been colored in.

Yep, everyone from postmen to election workers will know the yeses from the nos…what could possibly go wrong?

With L.A. County comprising over one quarter of the entire state population, this is kind of a big deal.

The L.A. County registrar-recorder told local news that the envelope hole is necessary for blind people to find the line on the outside of the envelope where they need to sign their names (perhaps one day someone will invent a way for blind people to read something using, say, tiny bumps instead of holes), and the fact that the “yes” circle shows through the hole is just the koo-koo-kookiest koincidence.

Interestingly, certain “conservatives” are so jittery about being associated with claims of vote fraud in the wake of the lunatic ravings of the likes of Lindell, Powell, and Wood, they’re actually dismissing any concerns about the Amazing Transparent Ballot.

Punjabi Republican flack Harmeet Dhillon scolded her Twitter followers about their ballot secrecy concerns:

This is stupid. You control how your ballot is put in and it it isn’t a peephole. It’s a pair of holes designed for the vision impaired to know where to place their signature. Don’t want your mark to show? Don’t put it in so that it shows. Done.

There’s that Indian “how do you use a toilet?” intelligence. Ballot envelopes should be obstacle courses! “What’s wrong with this picture” brain teasers! It’s up to voters to notice the security flaws and fix them; it’s not up to the government to prevent the security flaws in the first place.

And to think otherwise is “stupid.”

Morons like Sydney Powell on one end, morons like Harmeet Dhillon on the other…doesn’t the GOP offer anything in between?

And don’t the Democrats offer anything other than dirty tricks?

Good questions…and rhetorical.

NO LEOTARDS FOR REOTARDS
Tights, leotards…these comprise the official uniform of the ballet dancer. It’s not just about aesthetics; it’s also about aerodynamics. Loose-fitting, flip-floppy apparel does not lend itself well to the art of ballet. There’s a reason Edward James Olmos’ Zoot Suit: The Ballet closed during rehearsals. All of those heavy, flapping pachuco outfits greatly inhibited the ability of the dancers to execute their brisés and cabriolés.

Of course, along with the aerodynamic advantages of formfitting clothes, the attire has helped advance the popularity of ballet in less commonly spoken-about ways. Men who’d been dragged to the ballet by their wives could busy themselves by playing “spot the camel toe,” and gay men could marvel at the jiggling junk of the ballerinos as they twirl and jump like West Hollywood clubgoers when the DJ starts playing Cher. Indeed, La Scala used to hand out scorecards to its gay patrons in which the hanging beauties of the male dancers could be ranked from “blueberry” to “jackfruit.”

But in the immortal words of the AIDS virus, “party’s over, queers.” The days of tight-fitting ballet clothes are finished.

And why? Well, 50% of all modern annoyances are race-based, and 50% are gender-based. And this one’s the latter. Turns out, tranny men who want to dance ballet don’t like it when the audience can see their biological equipment. The illusion that tranny men falsely think they’re pulling off by donning a wig and lipstick (“No one will ever know!”) is threatened when tight-fitting clothes highlight the Balzac and Dirlywanger. Yet even though the tranny illusion fools no one except the reporters at Vice and Bill Nye, we all have to act like the pubgoers in the Invisible Man sketch and play along.

So tranny ballet guys complained to their respective companies that the tights and leotards were “destroying the illusion,” and as a result, ballet companies are banning the apparel. As reported in The Sunday Times:

A group of ballet schools is to abolish leotards and tights to make transgender performers more comfortable. Loose-fitting clothing will instead be promoted to accommodate transgender dancers who may be self-conscious about their bodies. New guidelines have been adopted by the Conservatoire for Dance and Drama, whose member schools include the London Contemporary Dance School, Northern School of Contemporary Dance, the Rambert School and the Central School of Ballet.

The guidelines lament that tight clothing forces men in drag to engage in “binding and tucking” in order to obscure their sausage ’n’ eggs.

Of course, the easiest solution for not having to worry about your prima ballerina’s rod and testes jiggling during a performance is to hire actual women. But the West is long past such primitive thinking. Now that men are officially women and it’s up to the rest of us to obscure their genitalia and humor their fantasy, get ready for productions of The Nutcracker in which even the ballerinas are dressed as toy soldiers, to keep their nuts from not just cracking, but showing.

THE CURIOUS CASE OF THE COUGHING CHINAMAN (A MIKE STAMMER MYSTERY)
For fans of classic TV, there’s no better detective character than Columbo. Indeed, Columbo might very well be the greatest fictional American detective in history (forget Batman; Columbo would’ve deduced the Bruce Wayne/Batman connection within the first minute of meeting him).

Part of Columbo’s charm was his act—and the audience always knew it was an act—of pretending to be forgetful, clumsy, and scatterbrained. Columbo craftily used this facade as a ruse to put the villains at ease, to make them think they were dealing with a senile moron.

At the moment, the U.S. is being led by Columbo, but an iteration in which the distracted, doltish, amnemonic routine is totally real.

We’d do better with Inspector Clouseau.

Ninety days ago, President Biden ordered a full, comprehensive report on the origins of the pandemic that has quite literally disrupted the entire world. Thanks to Covid, today’s Australians get to experience what it was like on the prison ships from the U.K., and New Zealand managed to turn overnight into a nation of Edith Beales, cowering in a corner every time there’s a knock on the door or mail dropped in the slot.

And here in the U.S., child-suffocating is now the most important goal of the public education system.

But not to fear—Detective Demento is on the case! He’ll find the answers to the source of this global plague! After all, Covid either came from a Chinese lab or through the Chinese exotic animal food trade. And either way, China’s at fault (although the official Chinese government position is that the disease was imported in a bad batch of Mrs. Paul’s frozen fish sticks. As Chinese State Department spokesman Hoo Flung Pu told the AP, “Why we no ever see MR. Paul? I think old lady kill him. She no good; she start Covid”).

Maybe it’s because all Covid roads lead to China that Biden’s much-heralded origins report has the official conclusion of “I dunno.” Released last week, the report was greeted with skepticism based on its cover alone, which depicts Lenny from Of Mice and Men staring blankly ahead saying, “Lookit the rabbits, George.”

Simply put, the report concluded that, in the words of a U.S. official quoted in The Wall Street Journal, “If China’s not going to give access to certain data sets, you’re never really going to know.”

Well, Biden certainly got to the bottom of that one, didn’t he?

Literally, “we’re never going to know” is the report’s conclusion.

Columbo Biden: “So you’re saying, sir, that even though China has a history of both naturally occurring zoonotic diseases and zoonotic bioweapon experiments, neither has anything to do with the emergence of a deadly zoonotic pandemic in your country?”

Xi Jinping: “Precisely, detective. And I’d appreciate it if you’d leave now; you’re becoming a nuisance.”

Columbo Biden: “Of course, sir. My apologies.”

[Pause]

Columbo Biden: “Oh, just one more thing…am I wearing pants?”

Xi Jinping: “NO! And it is most offensive.”

Columbo Biden: “I thought I felt a draft. Good day to you, sir.”

AND SPEAKING OF THE DODDERER IN CHIEF…
In March 1991, following the stunningly swift Gulf War victory in which the U.S. soundly beat an army of spear-chucking Tusken Raiders, George H.W. Bush was riding high with an approval rating of over 90%—one of the highest ratings in U.S. history, and the highest since that time FDR socked a Hitler look-alike in the nads at a Madison Square Garden war bonds rally.

Yet the very next year, Bush lost to a country-bumpkin rapist married to an anthropomorphic cymothoa exigua. And the main reason was that Bush had pledged, “Read my lips: no new taxes,” only to later reverse himself.

Of course, times were different in 1992. It was not yet illegal to be white, gays were promising that if we let them marry it wouldn’t mean the end of gender as we know it, toddlers didn’t have their faces wrapped like mummies, and wars were undertaken by Big Oil and Big Neocon with the understanding that they should be concluded swiftly and decisively instead of slowly and for perpetuity.

Funny to think of a time when a broken tax pledge was the worst of our problems.

Biden’s already blown his Gulf War moment, handling the Afghanistan pullout with all the grace and skill of the Three Stooges fixing a faucet. And now, barely a half-year into his presidency, he’s blown his “read my lips” moment, too.

As reported by Americans for Tax Reform, Biden has blatantly violated his election pledge “No. Taxes on small businesses won’t go up.” Turns out, taxes on small businesses will go up under his tax plan…but the hike will “only” affect about a million small businesses.

Well, hooray for that.

The big question is, does anybody even care anymore? As Reason pointed out last week, because of Covid closures and lockdowns, most Americans don’t even owe any taxes at the moment. So why worry about tax hikes when you can lobby for more stimi dough and unemployment largesse?

And as the nation’s layabouts lay about spending the money given them via taxes collected from those small businesses that foolishly try to stay afloat, one has to wonder if Biden can survive a bungled war and a broken tax pledge when thirty years ago a different president couldn’t survive a hugely successful war and a broken tax pledge.

Maybe the old coot had one final moment of lucidity when he chose a cackling ten-dollar escort as his vice president.

Even with Biden’s bungling, a majority of Americans are envisioning the possibility of a Kamala presidency and declaring Read our lips: no shrew blackses.

GSTAAD—When Gerald Murphy and Cole Porter discovered the French Riviera as a summer resort during the early ’20s, the swells and avant-gardes still spent the warm months in cool places like Deauville and Baden-Baden. I thought of the deserted summer Riviera and how marvelous the place must have been when people like Picasso and Hemingway joined forces with Cole and Gerald and launched the resort to end all resorts. No longer. The place is now an overcrowded hellhole, expensive, dirty, and dangerous, but not to worry. If the recent heat waves continue and the temperatures keep climbing, soon we’ll be right back where we started from, except this time it will be Sylt in northern Germany for the have-a-lot elites, and the boiling Riviera, southern Italy, and Spain for the have-a-lot-less peons. (Orkney instead of Mykonos.)

This has to be good news for my Swiss friends here in Gstaad, who always worry about the lack of snow and lack of height of their winter wonderland, only 3,300 feet. “You will be known as a summer resort,” I tell the perennial worriers, “all it takes is a bit of role reversal.” And they’ll have a longer season, too, four months as opposed to two in the old days. They’re funny, the Swiss, known as dullards because they lack Italian fire and Spanish passion, but what would we do without them? They are models of good deportment where racial matters are concerned, and their manners are impeccable, formal but polite to strangers, whatever their creed or color may be. Europe may be a sitting duck for an Islamic attack after Kabul’s demise, but walking down Gstaad’s main street last week, it was anything but. A Gulf Arab was window-shopping accompanied by five totally covered females, if they were of that sex. They could have been anyone, Hamid Karzai, Ashraf Ghani, perhaps even Imran Khan, yet no one paid any attention.

There are no “Kill Cops” spray-paints as there are in America here, no fraying social fabric, no rioting for riot’s sake, no extinction rebellion bulls—. There is no animosity toward one another, yet the Swiss speak four different languages, German, French, Italian, and Romansch. The tribalism that exasperates and fuels mistrust in other countries does not exist here, and most of the crimes committed are by foreigners.

Mind you, the Swiss practice direct democracy and are not led by feckless central elites who shrug their shoulders as their borders are overrun. The unelected mini-Napoleons in Brussels, who long ago pulled a fast one on Europe, have tried everything to force the Swiss to give up their independence, but to no avail. In France, Italy, and Germany, race has created a chasm that only obese screen addicts who have been housebound for years have failed to notice. Not so over here. Woke virtue-signaling masquerading as morality holds no ground up here in the mountains. Gruff peasants like their own kind, yet the veneer of conventional sociability endures. This should be a breeding ground for fighting among races and creeds, yet it is not. Moola is the great pacifier. In fact, all Swiss are implicitly enlisted in a common cause: that of making money.

The latest mini-war between those of us who own property, and new arrivals who wish to obtain properties, is not exactly the type of conflict that would move Leo Tolstoy to write about it, nevertheless the war is on and it’s bound to get warmer. The reason is size; we old-timers, like hookers, prefer small. The nouveaux think bigger is better. Russians want big chalets with swimming pools and many floors. (And bulletproof windows.) We believe in recently passed laws that say only primary residence permits for new buildings are allowed. Smart-aleck local real estate sharks have found ways to avoid such restrictions. Nothing is a fight to the finish in good old Helvetia, and time marches on and all that, but greed sprints and most of the time it wins. I predict big new buildings will be built because—as Groucho Marx never said—the smaller the willy, the bigger the chalet.

Otherwise everything is hunky-dory. Last week I went to the Olden for a dinner given by Philip Cornet, who—along with his twin brother and his mother—owns Stella Artois. We sat outdoors during a cool evening, the dinner in honor of Peter and Lara Livanos. I sat next to Philip and filled him in about Stella’s greatest booster. He has drunk twenty cans a day for forty years and has not put on an ounce, and even his granddaughter is named Stella. He posts pictures of his Christmas tree decorated with Stellas. “Mon Dieu,” said Philip, “we must meet this man, is there anything we can do for him?” The name is Tim Hanbury, he owns 3 million acres near Plymouth, and he was born in a house that makes Buckingham Palace look like a doghouse, I told him, and Philip took it down and said he will keep me abreast of things. Later on, and after a few very stiff drinks, I muttered about the brilliant marriages of Timmy’s daughters, and Philip got even more excited. Perhaps a shoot at one of the great houses with the father-in-law sipping Stella? I see it as a winner, although I know nothing about such matters.

If I were a Marxist, I might be tempted to say that the obligatory switch to electric cars is a conspiracy of the rich against the poor to enslave them yet further. (By the poor, I mean of course the relatively poor, not the absolutely destitute.)

Many of the relatively poor have old, cheap, and no doubt polluting vehicles. Many of these poor need such vehicles to go wherever they need to go. Tradesmen and craftsmen in a small way of business often have old diesel vans that will soon be prohibited; they will have to replace them with far more expensive electric types. This will have the great advantage of forcing them either to indebt themselves in order to buy them, or to go out of business altogether, thus leaving the field to larger businesses. This would be but a small step in the march to monopoly that the Marxists predict.

Of course, the justification for the transition to electric cars is that they are more environmentally “friendly,” as if the environment were a lonely person in need of being befriended (there is a lot of paganism in the environmentalist movement). And no one can deny that electric vehicles have certain advantages: In their individual capacity, they spew out less noxious gas and make less noise, so much so in fact that unfortunate pedestrians sometimes cannot hear them coming.

But the polluting effects of these vehicles are exported or transferred elsewhere, to such places as the mines to obtain the necessary metals for the batteries, the dumps for defunct batteries (surely to be located sooner or later somewhere in Africa), and the electricity-generating plants necessary to supply electricity for tens of millions of vehicles, the least polluting of all electricity generation—nuclear power—having been largely abandoned on the precautionary principle.

This is all happening at a time when new vehicles of the traditional type have never been less polluting; and the older, more polluting models were destined to disappear in any case by natural attrition. Moreover, the construction of the infrastructure necessary to ensure a sufficient electricity supply will necessitate untold billions in subsidies, with all the corruption that such subsidies usually bring in their wake. I hope I shall not be considered unduly cynical when I say that I suspect that money, or at least promises of money, may have changed hands when the headlong rush to promote or even mandate electric cars started. I have no proof of this in the forensic sense; I could not stand in a court and say I know for a fact that there has been corruption involved. But the whole thing smells to me worse than the exhaust of any ancient diesel vehicle.

There seems to be a strange alliance developing between the urban environmentalists on the one hand and huge financial interests on the other. The environmentalists want “green” technology not so much to preserve the environment, for whose aesthetic aspects they care little, but as evidence that they “care.” A 600-foot white windmill in a beauty spot does not offend them, on the contrary, they rejoice at it; they see not a bird-slaying eyesore, but an almost religious symbol of salvation, much as crosses used to be placed in the countryside in once-Christian countries. As to the actual effect on the environment, whether the windmill saves or expends energy overall is something that very few of them would be able to compute, but is beside the point, which is to demonstrate compassion toward the biosphere. Meanwhile, subsidies make millionaires. No subsidies, no windmills.

Intention these days is nine-tenths of virtue, and intention is measured mainly by what people say that their intentions are. After all, each of us is expert on his own intentions, perhaps the only subject on which he is really expert; and therefore if I say I want more 600-feet windmills because that is the only by which the planet be saved, who can gainsay it?

Again, I suspect that something much darker is at play in the environmentalists’ psyches than the desire for lucre that actuates the entrepreneurs of subsidy. After all, practically all of us like money, and if offered a way to make bucketloads of it, most of us would seize the chance. But the environmentalists have a strange attitude to beauty: They are intimidated by it, which is why they so often wish to destroy it by their schemes, urban and rural, for saving the planet. Beauty (as the late and very great writer Simon Leys pointed out) confronts us with our own incapacity to create it, in short with our own mediocrity. We therefore desire to bring everything down to our own, not very high level. Ugliness, to which so many of us perforce have been accustomed all our lives, domesticates and makes us feel comfortable.

I should point out that I have no shares in car manufacturers and am no great admirer of the automobile. It has had the effect of speeding up our lives but at the same time of making us waste untold hours of our lives stuck in traffic jams in frustrating and miserable journeys. It has also had a terrible effect on the aesthetics of cities, all the worse since we have disobeyed Henry Ford’s great dictum, that you can have any color you like so long as it’s black. A street along which are parked apple-green, scarlet, sky-blue, white, custard-yellow, and golden-colored cars cannot retain its beauty (if it had any).

Happy is the man, not who has no car, but who has no need of a car, or needs one only very occasionally and then takes a taxi. One of my publishers was just such a man, now deceased alas, and his life was immeasurably enriched by never having had a car and never having learned to drive. He lived in the center of London and went everywhere by public transport. He was a productive art historian and critic, and would have achieved much less had he chosen to drive himself around, park his car, worry about its maintenance, etc. He was never tempted to take pointless trips, so that if he went anywhere, it was always for a good reason.

I concede, however, that many people feel differently, and regard their car as a symbol of their freedom to be mobile. Voluntary servitude is a well-known condition, but let it not be electrified into the bargain.

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

I’ve spent most of the summer sailing around the Greek Isles and reading up on the Spartans. Why the Spartans? Well, both of my mother’s parents were Spartans, and their parents and grandparents also; in fact the line goes back a very long way. Our house in Sparta I visited 25 years ago, but it was closed, like many museums tend to be in Greece when the temperature rises. (Everyone heads for the beach.) I think it was my grandfather who left it to the state, and it’s a beautiful museum right in the heart of Sparta.

When the Italians invaded Greece on Oct. 28, 1940, four of my mother’s brothers immediately volunteered for frontline duty. Their father had spent years as a cavalry officer in the Balkan wars, had been repeatedly wounded but lived to a ripe old age. I remember him suffering from old wounds but never, ever complaining. That was then, but this is now. Now is “We are incredibly proud of her and inspired by her actions and leadership.” This was issued by Visa, the sponsor of Simone Biles, after she threw in the towel and pulled out of several Olympic events. The Spartans might have come up with a rather different analysis.

Sports people outing themselves as suffering from mental health problems is turning from a trickle into a steady flow, and criticizing them might lead to cancellation, something I welcome in view of the fact that those who cancel me were canceled long ago by history and common sense. But before I go on about the Spartans and athletes like Naomi Osaka and Simone Biles, who are now considered by the media to be superheroes for quitting, a word about what the average American who does not adhere to the lefty-trendy New York Times–Washington Post–CNN garbage thinks: Kneeling, gesturing, and turning their backs on the flag is seen as moronic, self-indulgent, and a kick in the teeth for those whose loved ones died defending that very flag. The average American does not want to see American athletes who hate America represent Uncle Sam. But try telling that to the flimflam men who run the media and professional sports. Politics are run by sound bites and focus groups, as are sports. Advertisers developed sound bite techniques about everything and anything: “You wonder where the yellow went, when you brush your teeth with Pepsodent.”

There was no yellow to wonder about 2,500 years before because there were no yellowbellies among the 300 Spartans who faced 100,000 to 300,000 Persians in Thermopylae in 480 BC. That summer, when King Leonidas led out his tiny army of 300 to fight against the Persian invasion, none of them could have imagined that some 2,500 years later people around the globe would be writing books and making movies about them. That summer they felt they were merely doing their duty. Spartan mothers simply told their departing sons to either bring their shields with them or be lying on them. (I tan I epi tas.) “Black women backing out is powerful,” texted an American politician after Biles dropped out.

The Persian kingdom was so large at the time that Herodotus described it as stretching from sunrise to sunset, and legend had it that Xerxes’ army was 3 million strong. The ancient historian Taki has it as 300,000 to half a million, but the 300 Spartans were hardly daunted by the numbers. When King Xerxes was informed of the disparity, he offered the Spartans free passage back home. They refused. Then he demanded they at least put down their arms. “Molon labe,” came the answer, “come and get them.” Finally he threatened that there were so many archers in his army that their arrows would darken the sky. “Good,” came the answer, “we like to fight in the shade.”

When Xerxes sent spies to see what the Spartans were doing he was stunned to learn some were wrestling, others were grooming and combing their long hair. The confidence the Spartans showed was not as foolhardy as it seemed. The mountain pass at Thermopylae was a natural bottleneck where the numerical strength of the Persians was negated. The narrowest part was 150 feet wide. The fighting began and it was constant and relentless. A repeated maneuver whereby the Spartans would turn their backs feigning flight, then reform their ranks and cut down their pursuers, worked time and again. After two days of nonstop combat the Spartans were almost at full strength whereas the Persians had lost thousands. Then came Ephialtes, the modern name in Greek for a nightmare. Ephialtes was a local who knew of a secret path behind the Spartan line and sold it to Xerxes. Although his troops begged Leonidas to leave and fight another day, he chose to die with them. Glory is everlasting, he said.

After three days, the remaining Spartans headed by their king emerged and took the fight to the Persians. Herodotus describes the Spartans as frenzied, and they achieved a glorious death. Even unarmed, the Spartans fought on with bare hands and the Persians chose to kill them with arrows from afar. Twenty thousand Persians died, according to Herodotus. A simple monument celebrates their sacrifice: “Passerby, tell the Greeks that here we lie having done our duty.” Perhaps the purple-and-green-haired black lesbian Raven Saunders who demonstrated while receiving her silver medal should read up on the Spartans. But then, better not.

The universal panning of President Biden’s decision to finally leave Afghanistan is the mirror image of the one time the media loved Trump. Remember that joyous occasion?

It was when he bombed Syria two months after taking office.

Here’s a sampling of the mash-notes to Trump for sending 59 Tomahawk cruise missiles to strike a country 6,000 miles away from us.

The New York Post: “A New Sheriff in Town: Trump’s Strike on Syria”

New York Daily News: “KICK IN THE ASSAD! U.S. blitzes Syria with missiles to avenge atrocity.”

The New York Times‘ Nicholas Kristof: “Trump Was Right to Strike Syria.”

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York: “[It was] the right thing to do.”

And of course, MSNBC’s Brian Williams famously soliloquized the attack on his TV show that night, saying: “We see these beautiful pictures at night from the decks of these two U.S. Navy vessels in the eastern Mediterranean,” adding “I am tempted to quote the great Leonard Cohen: ‘I am guided by the beauty of our weapons.'”

The very Europeans who are so testy right now about Biden’s decision to end a war, were thrilled with Trump for bombing a country that posed no conceivable threat to us. France, Italy, Israel and the U.K. all sent their hearty support!

That’s quite a contrast from the remarks this week from former prime minister Tony Blair about Biden’s ending a war: “tragic, dangerous and unnecessary.”

I was, and remain, more pro-Afghanistan war and Iraq war than Donald Rumsfeld, but not so we could hang out for 20 years and teach them to respect transgenders.

Unfortunately, once we’d accomplished everything that could possibly be accomplished in Afghanistan, the war became a joint venture of the neocons and the feminists. Instead of punishing anyone who’d had a pleasant countenance upon seeing the World Trade Center collapse, our new mission became: Bring gender studies and gay rights to a Stone Age culture!

Now the media has put Biden on notice: If one Afghan girl gets below B+ in women’s studies, we’re going back in!

How did Afghans become our special charity case? Why not Burkina Faso? Twelve-year-old girls are regularly married off to men 65 or 70 years old in that paragon of modern living. Also in Niger, Sudan, Tanzania, Zambia and any number of barbaric societies around the globe.

No one weeps for those little girls.

(It may not be favoritism: The prodigious amount of child rape around the world is barely mentioned by the various international organizations on women’s rights because the fanatics writing the reports see no meaningful difference between official, widespread child-rape and men disrespecting their wives’ professions.)

There are loads of primitive hellholes we could make our 51st state. We’ve picked Afghanistan because that’s the country that harbored Osama bin Laden. CONGRATULATIONS, AFGHANISTAN! YOU WON THE LOTTO!

Now, all of America is supposed to be torn up about what one warring tribe will do to another warring tribe, in a country that’s been at war, more or less, for centuries.

They like it that way! Afghanistan consists of a medieval tribal society resistant to change. That’s their raison d’etre. Even under the helpful tutelage of American troops, our dear Afghan allies would not stop raping little boys. Naturally, given our obsession with cultural diversity, U.S. servicemen who objected to the buggery were cashiered out of the military.

More than a year before the 9/11 attacks, an article in The New Yorker quoted Afghans boasting, “In the nineteenth century, we beat the British more than once. In the twentieth century, we beat the Russians. In the twenty-first, if we have to, we’ll beat the Americans!”

They just want to be left alone (something a lot of Americans dearly wish our leaders would let us do).

We’re hearing horror stories about women having to be covered when they leave their homes now that the Taliban is back in charge. Yeah, that’s Sharia law. According to a Pew poll a few years ago, 99% of Afghans — including women — say they want to live under Sharia law.

Afghans were totally down with women’s lib as long as we were bringing them cool stuff, like airplanes, buildings, toilets and electricity, which we did — or you did, taxpayer, to the tune of about a trillion dollars. Now we’ve left and they’ve happily gone back to their old ways.

In all other contexts, we sacralize ancient cultures. We blush to our toes recalling our ancestors’ earlier attempts at “civilizing” American Indians by bringing them clothes, schools and Christianity. Today, we exhort them: Be yourselves!

As long as we’re not forcing something icky on primitive cultures, like Christianity, but, rather, something healthy, like gender-feminism, well, then … “We don’t want to fight but by Jingo if we do, / We’ve got the ships, we’ve got the men, we’ve got the money too!”

Can racial gaps in cognitive skills narrow?

Possibly. After all, we have seen a number of historic examples of ethnicities pulling ahead of their neighbors by doing things smarter after they came to enthusiastically acknowledge the superiority of Western European modes of thought. Two famous examples of colonial collaborators were the Parsis of Bombay and the Igbo of southern Nigeria, who now score vastly higher on Nigerian college admissions tests than do the Muslims of northern Nigeria.

The most famous example is Japan’s sudden acquisition of the advantages of Western thinking after 1853. But perhaps the most historically significant is the Ashkenazi enlightenment that began in the second half of the 18th century. After centuries of being richer and more sophisticated than European Christians, Jewish philosophers like Moses Mendelssohn found their people falling behind, and thus advocated imitation of gentile breakthroughs.

On the other hand, despite its proven track record, in 2021 there isn’t much momentum toward adopting what once worked for the West. Dogmatism is gaining in favor over empiricism. Great European intellectual accomplishments, such as the bell curve, worked out by geniuses like Laplace, Gauss, and Galton, are in disrepute because of what they can teach us.

Thus we are losing our former ability to grasp that statistical differences are not absolute differences. For instance, about 8 million African-Americans have higher IQs than the average white. But the fact that on average blacks have lower IQs is now considered unspeakable.

For example, in the ten weeks since the publication of Charles Murray’s Facing Reality: Two Truths About Race in America, The New York Times has not deigned to mention its existence, even though it succinctly offers an Occam’s Razor explanation of America’s main racial disparity: Blacks have higher average levels of violent crime and lower average levels of intelligence.

Those who have responded to Murray’s book have typically argued that these gaps couldn’t possibly be innate.

Perhaps.

Indeed, Facing Reality doesn’t take a stand on this question. In determining whether the policies advocated by Black Lives Matter are prudent right now, the academic question of whether, say, narrowing the IQ gap would take a few generations of rigorous training or many generations of evolution is not terribly relevant.

Yet, it’s crucial to understand that if these disparities are not due to genes, then American society since 2013 has been going about trying to close them in the dumbest, most self-destructive way possible.

Assume that the problems of African-Americans today are due to blacks having largely missed out on the Western cognitive revolution that historian Alfred W. Crosby traces back to the 1200s. This slowly converted Europeans from peasants to burghers by making them more quantitative, more bourgeois, more thoughtful, and more self-disciplined.

If so, then the purported solutions for black underachievement promoted by elites during the Great Awokening—blacks should be encouraged to resist arrest, to act out in school, to blame their failings on whites, to work less and nap more, and to demand cash without having to labor for it—are 180 degrees off target.

Our Establishment—rather than telling blacks that to avoid disciplining by the law they must self-discipline, that they need to inculcate their Weberian Protestant work ethic—has been egging on blacks’ worst lumpenproletariat inclinations, with predictable results, such as the black murder rate being up by approaching 50 percent since Ferguson in 2014.

Indeed, black traffic fatalities soared 36 percent in the first seven months of the racial reckoning, June to December 2020, compared with the same period in 2019, as exultant blacks celebrated their liberation from the law by driving recklessly (and therefore wreckfully).

On the other hand, the recent creation of spectacularly detailed longitudinal studies that include both cognitive test scores and DNA data for very large samples of individuals has allowed testing of the long-standing question of whether intelligence varies with racial admixture.

In the U.S., race is determined largely by self-identification. You (or your parents if you are a child) choose which boxes to check.

This sounds highly unscientific, so twenty years ago I set out to show how ridiculous the system was. But I eventually concluded that it was good enough for government work. Since then, DNA studies of ancestry have found a reasonable correlation among non-Hispanics between self-identification and racial genetics.

If race were purely a social construct, and the social designation of race is all that drives IQ score gaps, then the IQs of people within one race should be randomly distributed. In other words, among everybody who self-identifies as black, how much white ancestry they have should have little influence on their IQ scores.

On the other hand, if IQ differences between races are partly genetic, then people with more white genes from more white ancestors should score higher.

The basic logic of this question was laid out in a clever 1977 Saturday Night Live skit in which dark-skinned Garrett Morris interviews light-skinned Julian Bond, head of the NAACP (which darker blacks tended to call the National Association for the Advancement of Certain People because so many of its leaders from Walter White through Ben Jealous have been surprisingly fair in appearance), about the racial IQ gap:

Garrett Morris: How did the idea of white intellectual superiority originate?

Julian Bond: That’s an interesting point. My theory is that it’s based on the fact that light-skinned blacks are smarter than dark-skinned blacks.

Garrett Morris: [Not sure he heard that right] Say what?…

Julian Bond: It’s got nothing to do with having white blood. It’s just that descendants of the lighter-skinned African tribes are more intelligent than the descendants of the darker-skinned tribes. Everybody knows that.

Me being me, I wanted to know if Bond’s punchline is factual. Looking at pictures online, I’d say no: The higher-scoring Igbo of southern Nigeria are blacker than the slightly North African-looking Fulani herders of northern Nigeria.

What about Bond’s initial assertion that light-skinned blacks are smarter?

My impression is that Americans’ perceptions honestly differ on this question.

One complexity that leads to disagreement is that more than a few of the smartest blacks in the U.S. in 2021 are all-black African immigrants selected for their academic potential.

A further complication is while there are of course strong positive correlations among racial genes, genealogy, and looks, they don’t trend together 100 percent, so there is some randomness. For instance, Barack Obama is half white, but looks more like he’s perhaps one-quarter white.

And a major source of complexity that’s not well understood is that while virtually all descendants of American slaves have some white ancestors, not many people who have two parents who identify as black trace more than half their family tree from Europe. In most genetic studies of African-Americans, about four-fifths of their ancestry is sub-Saharan, with a fairly narrow variance.

For instance, in the latest admixture study, “Genetic Ancestry and General Cognitive Ability in a Sample of American Youths” by John Fuerst and Gregory Connor, less than 3 percent of the children in the nationally representative Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) cohort whose parents identify them as black have over 50 percent white DNA.

(Lavishly funded, the ABCD is a giant study of 11,750 children that has generated 140 terabytes of data. The ABCD includes an elaborate series of cognitive tests from which IQ scores can be calculated, while racial ancestry can be determined from the genome data in the manner of Ancestry.com. The findings are available in anonymized form to expert outside researchers for their own analyses.)

Note that the authors break out a separate Other group for non-Hispanic and non-Asian subjects whose parents consider them more than one of the following: white, black, and American Indian. So, the black group in this report consists of kids considered only black by their parents. (The analysts aren’t trying to trick anybody by their methodology; they are clarifying their subjects down to the ones whom Americans are most likely to think of when they talk about white and black: e.g., Michael Jordan rather than Tiger Woods.)

In Fuerst and Connor’s sample of 1,690 black-only kids ages 9 to 10, the average genetic ancestry is 16 percent white (a little lower than most such studies) with a standard deviation of 11 percent. So, the great majority of African-Americans are under, say, 3/8ths white.

In contrast, among the more than 5,000 children whose parents list them as non-Hispanic white-only, their average white ancestry is 98 percent (e.g., one black and one Native American ancestor seven generations ago), with an even narrower variance.

This means that there is very little overlap in admixture percentage between self-identifying non-Hispanic whites and self-identifying non-Hispanic blacks.

Why? The Anglo-Saxon concept of the “color line” restricting intermarriage between the races meant that part-black lineages tended to regress over the generations toward the black mean for admixture percentage, unless an ancestor made the arduous leap into “passing” as white, after which the lineage would regress toward the white mean. For example, there emerged over time black Hemmings and white Hemmings, but not many distinctly in-between.

Outside of Louisiana—where the Latin concept of the “color continuum” reigned and thus there were born quite a few prominent people who were mostly but not overwhelmingly white, such as pianist Jelly Roll Morton, literary critic Anatole Broyard, and drag racer Don Prudhomme—there just weren’t, until recently, all that many Americans who were visibly part-black but less than half-black by DNA.

Within the restricted range of admixture found among self-identified black-only children, the new report found a positive but small correlation between white ancestry percentage and cognitive test scores for the general factor of intelligence of .10 for all blacks and .13 excluding immigrant stock.

An African-American who has 27 percent white admixture (one standard deviation above the black mean, about the 84th percentile) would average about three IQ points higher than one who is 5 percent white (one standard deviation below the black mean in admixture, about the 16th percentile).

Three IQ points is not negligible, but neither is it highly noticeable either. I’d say it’s around the edge of perceptibility, which is why people tend to honestly disagree on the Bond-Morris question.

But the gap in white admixture between the average self-identifying black (16 percent) and the average self-identifying white (98 percent) is over seven standard deviations. And the white-black gap in the g factor of IQ on the ABCD cognitive tests is around a standard deviation of fifteen points.

Fuerst explains:

In the Lasker paper, we explained a simple way of thinking about this, which [Arthur] Jensen had pointed out in a reply to Sandra Scarr.

Take a look at our Table 1. Black Americans have a mean 16% European ancestry with a standard deviation of 11%, while Whites have 98% European ancestry.

So, a hypothetical Black American with 98% European ancestry (and there actually was one in the sample) would be (98% – 16%) / 11% = 7.45 standard deviations above the Black mean in terms of European ancestry. The advantage in g would then be this times the correlation between g and European ancestry among Blacks, which was between .10 and .13, depending on how you wanted to handle recent African immigrants. And so the g advantage would be .75 SD to .97 SD above the Black mean. The latter number is practically the entire difference.

Interestingly, this 2021 analysis of the ABCD database more or less replicates a 2019 study of the Philadelphia Neurodevelopmental Cohort of nearly 10,000 youngsters.

Now, these two papers don’t prove that genetics explain a sizable portion of the race gap in intelligence. It could be, for example, that bias against darker African-Americans depresses their IQ scores.

And yet, as a white American, I have a hard time remembering moderate differences in skin tone among black celebrities: Michael Jordan, I recall, is dark, Obama middling, and Beyoncé light. But what about the precise coloration of LeBron, Oprah, O.J., Eddie Murphy, Bill Cosby, Stevie Wonder, Denzel Washington, Will Smith, Prince, Jesse Jackson, and Al Sharpton? (To simplify things, we’ll leave Michael Jackson out.)

Truth be told, I have most of them categorized in my mind simply as “black,” and I don’t devote a lot of brainpower to remembering subtler tonal distinctions than that.

If anybody is discriminating much on degrees of color, it is likely other blacks.

So, while these studies of two extraordinarily sophisticated new databases haven’t established definitively that the racial gap in IQ is substantially genetic in origin, they have certainly failed to falsify that theory.

Considering the vast acclaim that would be bestowed upon any researcher who did falsify this most feared and loathed of all scientific hypotheses, it’s curious that most pundits assume it has already been utterly disproven…but they just can’t quite remember the name of the guy who did it.

In honor of my upcoming 53rd birthday, I’m launching a two-part (or three…haven’t decided yet) series on the changing face of my native city.

I’ve never understood why some people want to be lied to. It’s why so many opinion journalists just make stuff up. If you speak comforts to your readers, they’ll never question your veracity, because for most people the definition of “true” is “conforms to my biases.”

I heard from a reader a few months ago who was incensed that I’d written so affectionately about my childhood experiences at majority-black public schools in the early ’80s. He wanted to hear that I got beat up every day by thugs. “Quit sentimentalizing blacks,” the dimwit barked.

To quote Norm Macdonald, “if something’s true, it’s not sentimental.” And the truth is I was happy and popular in school (to the point of being insufferably arrogant). No black kid ever laid a hand on me, and I never witnessed a single incident of antiwhite hostility. We were all friends. And the reason I wrote a column about it was to demonstrate how things can change. Because if I had kids of my own (which thankfully I don’t), I would not put them in an all-black school today. A conscious campaign to make antiwhiteness an essential element of being black, combined with another conscious campaign to promote “progressive prosecution” and decarceration, has encouraged antiwhite racial hatred while at the same time removing consequences for black criminality, a dangerous mix for a community with impulse control and resentment issues.

Now, that “don’t sentimentalize ’em” moron, by not wanting to hear about how things were, and by extension not wanting to understand how things have changed, is the type of person who’s incapable of comprehending current events, because for him time is a two-dimensional plane: no history, no future, just one flat through-line (which coincidentally pleases his biases) that never aberrates.

If you refuse to understand how realities have evolved, you’ll be unable to understand how they can evolve (or devolve).

A few months ago some Ukrainian pundit I’m apparently supposed to have heard of named “Michael Malice” gloatingly tweeted that L.A. “has become the second Detroit” (Malice lives in Brooklyn where he was raised). It’s exactly what his followers wanted to hear. “L.A.’s a black ghetto,” they chortled, “gyuck gyuck gyuck” (or whatever Kallikak grunts such mouth breathers make).

Yep, it’s still 1965 and the Watts Riots are goin’ strong!

As I said, dullards who can’t comprehend time passage.

In fact, L.A. County, which is down to about 7% black, lost nearly 150,000 blacks over the past two decades. To put that in perspective, that’s more than the entire population of Savannah, Georgia. A literal Savannah of blacks picked up and left (most heading either for the Section 8 havens on the outskirts of the county or back to the Deep South. And to that I say, good. Dance with the ones who brung ya).

But people who revel in comforting untruths don’t want to hear that.

Like the readers of New York Post conservative hack Miranda Devine, who loves to straight-out lie about how Beverly Hills is “blue” and “Democrat” (in reality, we’re the opposite). That’s what her audience wants to hear, so that’s what she gives ’em. “Beverly Hills is leftist Democrats, so they deserve BLM riots, gyuck gyuck gyuckawagawoolaramaroomarong!” (Devine’s Australian, so her Kallikak grunts have an Aussie flair.)

If there’s one thing the right doesn’t need at the moment, it’s more unreality.

To understand L.A. (and why it’s a place that matters, even to those who don’t live here), rightists must discard their illusions and fantasies.

To begin with, our Mexicans aren’t going anywhere. You could build a wall, you could have an immigration moratorium, or a complete ban. Doesn’t matter. Mexicans were foundational to L.A., and thanks to Reagan’s amnesty, all immigration policies since, and simple geography, they’re here for good.

Second, most of us are glad Mexicans displaced blacks. I don’t know of anyone who pines for that community except blacks themselves. With the antiwhite pathology currently coursing through so many blacks, and with the license granted to them regarding crime (due to Soros progressivism, but also due to the fact that whites who stand up to black criminals get their lives ruined by the media), I can’t imagine the nightmare this place would be if we still had our 1980-sized black population.

Also, for those of you who think the nation’s most populous county is defined by those Twitter images of tent cities: Downtown L.A. has been trash since the 1960s and Hollywood Boulevard has proved ungentrifiable for fifty years (at least there are no more porn theaters like in the 1970s, a minor improvement but we take the win).

But the trash areas are small compared with the livable ones; if a war can be gauged by territorial gains, by land claimed vs. lost, gentrification has absolutely won against blight.

The recently released census race and ethnicity figures provide a lesson in why it’s better to look at L.A. with a clear head instead of a desire to dunk: What we’re dealing with now, many of you will soon be dealing with too. This is a county to study, because the lessons have widespread relevance.

There was a lot of chicanery in the way those census figures were portrayed in the press. The media grabbed onto the talking point of “the national white population declined for the first time evah!” Meanwhile, we were told, the black population held “steady” (the word used by almost every media organ from USA Today to Yahoo News to Ebony).

The “chicanery” lies in the fact that to paint this portrait, journalists had to use the figure of monoracial non-Hispanic whites (“white alone”), while with the stats for blacks, they did the opposite, using the figures of “black alone” and black in combination with anything else.

If you reverse that methodology, you get a very different picture. White alone plus those who identify as white “in combination” with something else rose in real numbers from 231,040,398 in 2010 to 235,400,000 in 2020. Whites who checked “white plus something else” rose a whopping 316% since 2010. So while “white alone” did indeed fall to under 60% of the population for the first time in census history, white alone plus white combo came in at 71%.

Considering that a large percentage of “white combos” are Hispanic, counting them as part of the entire figure for “white” has historical precedent, as in olden days Mexicans were automatically counted as white on the census.

Blacks, far from “steady,” showed a downward trend in real numbers and a drop in percentage. Black alone, a category that grew by 4.3 million from 2000 to 2010, grew by only about one-quarter that amount from 2010 to 2020. Black “in combination” grew at a better rate, but a lot of that growth was due to Hispanic blacks (Caribbeans mainly).

The “black alone” population fell to a mere 12.1% nationally (from 12.6% in 2010). In a few years, it’ll likely fall below 12%.

The point being, the news is not good for blacks. The Hispanic population ballooned to 18.7%, meaning that it will very soon be 20%, a full fifth of the nation.

Interestingly, 52% fewer Hispanics chose to identify as “white alone” compared with 2010, preferring to simply check “more than one race,” a massive drop caused not by immigration but by a large number of Hispanics from 2010 changing their checked boxes in 2020. As Pew noted, many Hispanics wrote in “Hispanic” as a race, as it’s not an option provided on the form (because it’s not a race). That so many Hispanics shifted from “Hispanic ethnicity and white race” to “Hispanic more than one race” is likely due to the fact that they see white as a race and Hispanic as a race and they’re saying, “I’m both.”

But I’d suggest another reason for the drop in “white alone” among non-Hispanic whites and Hispanic whites: It’s not good to be white right now. From the private sector to the government, it’s the smart move to say you’re not “just” white. I’d argue that these box-checking shifts reflect not so much a changing national complexion, but people responding Pavlov-style to a system that’s made it burdensome to be white.

There’s the daily barrage of antiwhite propaganda from the media, government, academia, and corporations. But there are also practical reasons for checking “white plus something else.” These days, whites are last hired first fired. Private industry has antiwhite quotas, and governments federal and local are instituting antiwhite race-based policies. Add to that the fact that the census was being taken at the exact moment BLM was targeting whites for violence and whites were being told to “shut up and sit down,” and the “bet-hedging” of checking more than “white alone” starts to make more sense.

Indeed, the Census Bureau’s celebratory “whites are declining” press release contains an admission that the white “decline” is “largely due” to “improved self-identification” as opposed to “demographic changes.” Leftists want to push the “whites are vanishing” line because by creating the illusion of a burgeoning nonwhite majority they can continue to push whites out of the public sphere in the name of “proportional representation.” Don’t take the bait.

A few weeks ago in Quillette, the University of Winnipeg’s Dr. Marilyn Simon discussed how it’s become so unfashionable for teens to identify as “cis” (a term that’s been in wide use for barely a decade), straight teens are finding creative ways to not call themselves straight:

The trend for self-identifying with a sexual identity other than “cis-” has even led some seventh graders to identify as a new sexual category “semi-bisexual,” which means “bi-sexual but attracted to only one gender.” In other words, straight.

Teens aren’t necessarily getting less straight; they’re just responding to social pressure to not identify as straight. So they check boxes to prove they’re not “the bad thing.” Keep telling people “this thing is bad” and they’ll stop identifying as that thing even if they are that thing.

So I suggest caution with those census numbers. More than likely, that 71% “white alone and in combo” figure is quite white, and the 52% of Hispanics who stopped being “white alone” and switched to “combo” didn’t actually get darker, just more situationally aware.

I’d posit that the group with the most legitimate reason to dread the census numbers is “black alone.” And I’d likewise posit that those of you who see L.A. as only a meme might do well to study how things shake out here. Because the national trends are following ours: blacks increasingly marginalized, and a fluid coalition of whites and Hispanics growing in size.

Many cities are on the way there. We’re there already. So enough with the dunking and maybe try to listen to a guy who’s been in this place over half a century, witnessing these demographic changes firsthand.

To be continued next week.

The Week’s Most Canny, Branny, and Talibany Headlines

DJINN LIZZY
Guess who just got back today?
Them wild-eyed boys that’d been away
Haven’t changed, had much to say
But man, I still think them cats are crazy

You know that chick that used to dance a lot
Every night she’d be on the floor, shakin’ what she’s got
Man, when I tell you she was cool, she was red-hot
I mean we set her on fire and her family was shot!

The boys are back in town! Twenty years after they pushed things a little too far by hosting bin Laden and his al-Qaeda training camps in the run-up to 9/11, the Taliban, that desert-dwelling pack of he-man woman-hating goat fornicators, is firmly in charge of Afghanistan again.

And if the boys wanna fight you better let ’em!

Which is exactly what semi-vegetative shadow president Joe Biden is doing. After promising that Kabul would not fall and that the U.S.-trained Afghan army—the “best army in the world”—would keep the Taliban at bay, Biden was forced to do an abrupt about-face after Kabul fell quicker than a Robert E. Lee statue on Malcolm X Blvd.

Afghanistan collapsed so fast, when the Taliban began its assault Biden had just taken his daily MiraLax, and by the time Kabul fell, he wasn’t even off the toilet yet.

But this ain’t yer daddy’s Taliban. These aren’t the joyless Luddites from the 1990s who banned dancing and music and confiscated (as Biden would say) “phonographs.” No, this is a new T-Ban with a 2020s ’tude.

Turns out the Taliban spent most of its time in exile studying 4chan. Because damn, these guys can troll! At a press conference held after the seizure of Kabul, the Taliban’s spokesmuslim was asked if people in Afghanistan would retain “free speech rights” under the new regime. He responded by attacking Facebook for taking away the “free speech rights” of Americans!

Zing!

The Taliban leader also joked that he’d taken more questions from the press than Biden, who took none following his brief public remarks on the fall of Afghanistan. This was topped by the best troll of all: Taliban fighters taking selfies eating ice cream cones to directly mock the much-ridiculed images that led to the popular “Biden eats ice cream as the nation dies” memes.

Forget Ahlul Bayt. These Muslims are Ah-LULZ Bayt. It’s nice to see Afghans becoming more technologically savvy. Finally they can take advantage of being the first nation listed on every online order-form drop-down menu.

The Washington Post described the Taliban’s use of social media as “strikingly sophisticated,” writing that the extremists have been meming with “such a high degree of skill,” it’s likely they hired American experts to direct their efforts.

Well, those MAGA guys who used to do the “Trump makes cutesy faces” GIFs need to find work somewhere, right?

“ONE OF THESE DAYS, AALIMAH—POW, RIGHT IN THE KISSER!”
Of course, the big question facing the Afghan people and those in the U.S. who virtue-signal for them (a motley crew of neocons, liberals, and the odd “any chance to take a shot at Biden” rightist) involves women. The Taliban is the Ralph Kramden of extremists, if Kramden had actually followed up on every threat to beat the crap out of his wife.

This has always posed a dilemma for leftists. After all, a Taliban-ruled Afghanistan is the literal Handmaid’s Tale, but unfortunately with brown men and Islam instead of Christianity. Worse still for the left and its efforts to make the U.S. military “woke,” a small band of neolithic hunter-gatherers just kicked the ass of what used to be the most fearsome army on earth until it was turned into a social experiment comprising pregnant infantrywomen (“Go ahead and shoot at me; it’s only a nonliving tumor!”), affirmative-actioned navigators who don’t know cartography (“How kin I tell which way is norf when ever’ time I turn da map da arrow changes direction?”), and tranny paratroopers who begin a jump as one gender and land as another (war cry: “Call me MAAAAA’AAAAAM!”).

It’s also hard to dispute the Taliban’s logic in dissolving the U.S.-mandated “gender studies programs” forced upon Afghan schools. The U.S. is a nation of bitter, whining slackers stuck with crushing student debt thanks to useless degrees in exactly the subjects we told the Afghans they “needed” to learn. One visit to TikTok (“I have a master’s degree in Pansexual Genderfluid Transracial Early Nilo-Saharan Proto-Feminist Body-Positive Poetry, and I’m unemployed! How can this be?”), and any Taliban fighter will realize that the only decent thing to do to that gender studies department is take a flamethrower to it.

Taliban leaders have promised to respect the rights of women “within the limits of Islam,” which means “not at all,” and already social media is buzzing with video clips of women being shot, beaten, and otherwise abused, so the future doesn’t exactly look rosy for these riveters.

President Biden, who more and more resembles a baby in a high chair struggling to stay awake as he’s eating his strained carrots (“Zzzzzzzzz…no, one more bite…zzzzzzzzzzzzzz…..wait, just one more bite”), issued a warning to the Taliban that was so weak, the ghost of Neville Chamberlain materialized to punch the old fool’s dentures out.

“Look, FATWA, you better not hurt any women,” the president scolded, adding, “C’mon, Imam.”

Of course, it’s hard to back up that threat when you just pulled out of a twenty-year failed attempt at nation-building a primitive patch of cursed earth that’s already been forgotten by time so best if it’s forgotten by the rest of the world. What exact leverage does Biden have regarding the rights of women in Afghanistan? “If you don’t make 50% of your opium holding company CEOs female, we’ll ban your imports and stick with Chinese fentanyl?”

A toothless threat from a gummy president.

Of course, not all is lost for those Afghan women with useless gender studies degrees. If they can make it to the U.S. (which shouldn’t be too hard as Biden’s already chartering the flights), Google is always looking for new online gestapos to censor the likes of Katie Hopkins and J.K. Rowling, in enlightened Western nations that truly allow women to have their say…unless their say is offensive to men in wigs.

MISTER INCELLOPHANE
In his YouTube videos, Jake Davison looked like a young Rolf Harris. Davison was the 22-year-old self-proclaimed “incel” who went on a shooting rampage in Plymouth, England, last week, killing five, including a 3-year-old girl. Davison’s reason for the murders? He couldn’t get laid because women found him unattractive.

Which brings us back to Rolf Harris. Harris, the hugely successful (in his prime) Australian singer, songwriter, comedian, actor, and inventor of the wobble board (this guy was so big, the Beatles once sang backup for him), looked like a goon. Stupid red afro, stupid red neckbeard, stupid red mustache. But hot damn the guy got laid like crazy, by singing stupid songs about kangaroos, abos, and men with an extra leg (you had to be there…it wasn’t funny then, either). Harris got so much tail they literally imprisoned him for it.

But there was Jake Davison, stupid red afro, stupid red neckbeard, and stupid red mustache, bitching endlessly on YouTube that women didn’t like him and he was too ugly to get a girl. So he killed five innocent people.

This is the central problem with incels: It’s never the way you look (as demonstrated by Harris). It’s the way you act (as demonstrated by Harris). Of course, like so many incels, Davison, who was too frightened to approach women in a bar, wasn’t at all frightened to shoot them. Which brings up perhaps the key mental disconnect that plagues incels: Women like bad boys. Women don’t like psychos. But incels can only do psycho.

They need to learn the difference.

So, as a public service, here’s a handy guide for incels everywhere—the difference between “bad boy” and “psycho”:

Taking the girl for a ride on your chopper (bad boy). Shoving her face into the rotating blades of a chopper (psycho).

Wearing a leather jacket (bad boy). Wearing a leather jacket made from the tanned hide of a murdered prostitute (psycho).

Grunting and speaking in monosyllabic words (bad boy). Shrieking like a banshee and screaming, “Weeble-geeble-geeble-woo-woooooo!” (psycho).

Staring down a guy in a bar who’s trying to hit on your date (bad boy). Staring down a guy in a bar who’s politely asking you to take your penis off the pool table (psycho).

Being indifferent to the fact that she likes you (bad boy). Being indifferent to the fact that you’re standing completely naked in the middle of Target (psycho).

Walking with the confidence of knowing that you’re the coolest man on earth (bad boy). Walking with the confidence of knowing that the talking emu that lives in your brain is keeping you safe from the evil gibbon robots that surround your bed every night (psycho).

Starting an illegal campfire on a beach while telling your date, “The laws don’t apply to us, babe” (bad boy). Grabbing your date and hurling the both of you off a cliff while telling her, “The laws of gravity don’t apply to us, babe” (psycho).

While it’s too late for Jake Davison, who went down on the barrel of his shotgun as police arrived, hopefully other incels will learn from this guide and become, if not better people, at least not as much of a societal ass-wart as they currently are.

SUFFOCATIN’ SUCCOTASH!
Worship the spirit of criticism. If reduced to itself it is not an awakener of ideas or a stimulant to great things, but, without it, everything is fallible; it always has the last word.
Louis Pasteur
Actual scientist

Science science science science science science science.
Nancy Pelosi
Old hag

The “spirit of criticism” regarding science has not only not been worshipped by politicians, health institutes, unions, corrupt government doctors, and Big Tech, it hasn’t even been respected. Indeed, it’s been launched into the air and blasted like a clay pigeon.

Worse still, it’s literally been banned. “The spirit of criticism,” when it comes to official Covid-related decrees, had its Twitter account permanently suspended and all its Facebook pages pulled.

But of course, Pasteur was correct. Without criticism, science becomes unreliable. Hence the never-ending flow of stories about how previously “sound” Covid claims and policies have turned out to be unsound, and jeez why’d it take so long to find out? It’s almost like people shoulda been allowed to question this stuff when it was first presented to the public as holy writ.

And now we learn that all those stifling pods and cubicles and shields we’ve had to live with in schools, retail establishments, grocery stores, government buildings, and offices—the things we were told were necessary to keep “Covid death breath” from being inhaled—were actually helping spread the disease the whole time!

Who woulda thought that forcing people to live every day like they’re Eichmann in Jerusalem would be a bad thing?

From The New York Times:

Covid precautions have turned many parts of our world into a giant salad bar, with plastic barriers separating sales clerks from shoppers, dividing customers at nail salons and shielding students from their classmates…. Sometimes the barriers can make things worse. Research suggests that in some instances, a barrier protecting a clerk behind a checkout counter may redirect the germs to another worker or customer. Rows of clear plastic shields, like those you might find in a nail salon or classroom, can also impede normal air flow and ventilation.

You don’t say!

“Erecting plastic barriers can change air flow in a room, disrupt normal ventilation and create ‘dead zones,’ where viral aerosol particles can build up and become highly concentrated.” What’s truly astonishing is that, according to the Times, the scientific community has had full knowledge of this cause-and-effect since a landmark 2013 U.K. study of the use of partitions in hospitals.

So our leaders knew from the get-go that these barriers would make things worse. But they also knew that the barriers would frighten, disorient, intimidate, and panic.

After all, what symbolizes crowd “control” better than a barrier?

Which is why even in the face of the NYT piece, the teachers’ unions are still pushing for classroom barriers.

Pasteur is passé. Pelosi’s the way to go-si.

Just keep repeating “science” mindlessly on your way through that plastic maze at the supermarket, like a good little hamster.

YENTA TELLS WHITES TO GET BENTA
The Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin has the face of a blobfish, and nothing else that can be said about her comes even close to being that complimentary. The shrill, grotesque columnist who was initially hired by the Post to bring “rightist balance,” but who officially announced in September 2020 that she no longer identifies as a conservative (although she still identifies as a land-dwelling mammal, a puzzlement to all the lovesick gelatinous sea creatures that follow her around whenever she walks by the seashore), decided last week that what the world really needs is another homely screeching Jewish harpy who confirms every single ugly stereotype about her people.

So when the U.S. Census town criers announced, “Hear ye, hear ye, the white population of the U.S. has shrunk for the first time in recorded Census history,” Rubin raced to Twitter to cheer the reduction of a people she despises:

“A more diverse, more inclusive society. this is fabulous news. now we need to prevent minority White rule.”

Uh, what you mean “we,” kemo sabra? Rubin speaks as though she isn’t squarely in that “minority rule” circle of elites. Like “‘we’ gotta make sure a group that’s not in the numerical majority doesn’t have outsize influence. Oy, heaven forbid that ever happens!”

This is a farbissina who routinely wields her Judaism as a shield against all legitimate criticism, once going so far as to claim that she shouldn’t have been expected to correct a blatant and serious error in one of her columns because it was Sabbath, and Jews don’t have to answer to goyim on the Sabbath. This is a paskudnyak who attacked Trump for not moving the U.S. Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, only to attack Trump when he did. Because Trump’s white, and “we” have to stop those people no matter how many unleavened pretzels of contradiction we twist ourselves into.

Were Jennifer Rubin a Streicher caricature, she’d be one that ended up in the trash bin for being too over-the-top.

No word on whether Rubin has agreed to surrender her column to a more deserving person of color, certainly an act that would bring joy to newspaper readers everywhere, and hope to pining blobfish that their queen might return to the sea.

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