Great news! For the millions of U.S. immigrants who really wanted to immigrate to Haiti, but couldn’t get in … Guess what? The country you’re living in is about to become Haiti.

This will also come as good news to the GOP’s top-dollar donors, whose sole political thought is: HOW DO WE WIN THE BLACK VOTE? (Next goal: Reverse the rotation of the Earth.)

Apparently, it’s absolutely humiliating for people who live in 100% white neighborhoods to belong to a party that appeals to white people.

Consequently, for several decades now, the GOP has slobbered over Colin Powell, Alan Keyes, Condoleezza Rice, Allen West, Michael Steele, Herman Cain, Ben Carson, John James, Tim Scott, Candace Owens, Herschel Walker and so on.

I, too, slobbered over some of these fine black Republicans. But unlike the Masters of the Universe, I noticed, after the first half-dozen or so, that the GOP is never going to win more of the black vote. (The GOP’s donor class is dying of embarrassment right now, horrified that their party appeals to white people, aka “the only swing voters in the country.”)

For the last half-century, African Americans have given approximately 90% of their vote to the Democrats. (Hispanics: 70%; Asians: 70%)

But the Hamptons-Manhattan-Palm Beach Brain Trust is focused like a laser beam on increasing the GOP’s minority vote. Somehow they’ve made billions of dollars, but cannot grasp, if their lives depended on it, that every election outcome is determined by the white vote.

QUIZ: What is the one demographic Trump lost in 2020 compared to 2016? Answer: White men.

[For more on Republican donors’ neurotic obsession with the black vote, see Adios, America!, Chapter 16, I Wrote This Chapter After Noticing How Stupid Rich People Are.]

With hordes of Haitians pouring across our border — because a certain lying conman didn’t build a wall — this weird compulsion of the donors will only get worse. Before Republican geniuses start proposing “enterprise zones” for Haitians, maybe they should take a look at Haiti.

Haitian President Francois “Papa Doc” Duvalier (1957-1971) began his regime by killing off or exiling the educated elite for being too light-skinned, then expropriated the peasants’ small parcels of farmland, leading, like night into day, to mass starvation.

Result: Haitian peasants adored him! Even after a regime of mass murder and widespread starvation, followed by Duvalier maneuvering his teenaged son into the presidency, the Associated Press reported in 1980 that “the Duvalier family’s support comes from the dark-skinned peasants of the countryside.”

Downside: insane execution squads, malnutrition, illiteracy and chaos. Upside: Duvalier persecuted light-skinned Haitians and embraced voodoo.

GOP donors: What if we offer them school vouchers?

George Mason economics professor Garett Jones has a vitally important article posted on the Evonomics website right now titled, “Do Immigrants Import Their Economic Destiny?”

He asks whether immigrants bring cultural attitudes, religious beliefs, a work ethic, etc. that will kill “the golden goose of first-world prosperity.” Phrased otherwise, do immigrants make “the countries they move to a lot like the countries they came from?”

Ann’s answer: Duh.

Jones’ answer: Duh — with a lot more data and analysis.

He cites a study by economists Diego Comin, William Easterly and Erick Gong of Dartmouth, New York University and Middlebury College, respectively, published in the American Economic Journal, showing that the descendants of people who were the most technologically advanced in 1500 A.D. today live in countries vastly richer than countries populated by the descendants of those not as technologically advanced in 1500 A.D.

The New York Times described the results of the study thus: “As it turns out, technology in A.D. 1500 is an extraordinarily reliable predictor of wealth today.”

Forget 1500. How’s Haiti been doing for the last 50 years? A report by the Council on Foreign Relations describes Haiti as “the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere.” And that’s despite more than $13 billion in international aid in the past decade.

Let’s just hope they bring their Satan-worshipping voodoo! As Haitians worldwide descend on our country, it’s worth mentioning that their homeland is often described as “90% Catholic and 100% voodoo.”

While The New York Times (which hates our country and wants it destroyed) burbles giddily about Haitian voodoo — “a healing-based religion,” “an affirmation of national pride,” “a vibrant but gentler faith,” “equal parts happening and psychoanalysis” — other news outlets have produced vivid accounts of the actual ceremonies.

Quote:

“(A) group of men and women dressed in white circled a pole. … A few hours later, the drumbeat had intensified … A few of the women grabbed live chickens and whirled them in the air before ripping the heads off with their teeth. Then, with their hands clenched like claws and their chins dripping with blood, the women jumped up and down, screeching, ‘Ke-ke-ke, Ke-ke-ke.'” — Times-Picayune (New Orleans), 1994

Quote:

“Suddenly, the woman’s body jerks upright. She spins wildly, arms and legs flailing, and her eyes roll back in her head until only the whites show. Two men rush to her side and support her in their arms. A yellow kerchief slips off her head and her shiny, straightened hair tumbles down.

“Body rigid, muscles taut, she stomps the ground with her bare feet. She whips her head from side to side, eyes stretched wide, sweeping the room with a fierce gaze …” — The Ottawa Citizen, 2000

You can read more about these “vibrant” rituals in the book Hostage to the Devil: The Possession and Exorcism of Five Contemporary Americans. Or just wait for them to show up in your neighborhood.

If you thought moving 100,000 Somalians into Minnesota posed challenges to assimilation, that will be a pleasant dream compared to the multitudes of Haitians Biden is letting into the country right now.

Behavioral geneticist Kathryn Paige Harden’s book The Genetic Lottery: Why DNA Matters for Social Equality has been much anticipated by scientists worried that the dumbing down of discourse in the name of diversity might eventually get their funding cut.

After years of trying out on the science conference circuit her arguments for why the Woke shouldn’t be so anti-genetics, The Genetic Lottery is finally here. It turns out to be an elaborately contrived triple-bank-shot attempt to head off growing Ibram X. Kendi-style science denialism by claiming that ignoring the influence of genetics upon human differences just enables the Real Bad Guys, led by archvillain Charles Murray, to easily dunk on the libs:

When social scientists routinely fail to integrate genetics into their models of human development, they leave space for a false narrative that portrays the insights of genetics as a Pandora’s box of “forbidden knowledge.”… Why would we want to hand people opposed to the goals of social equality a powerful rhetorical weapon, in the form of a widely prevalent and easily understood methodological flaw in social research?

You see, extremists like Murray are right about the science—well, except for the part about genetics probably contributing to the IQ gap between whites and blacks. That’s totally wrong. Totally.

Or at least it’s not proven yet.

Or, if Murray is right, that just means white Americans must pay more taxes to compensate for the genetics of blacks:

But, no matter how people differ genetically, no matter how those genetic differences between people are distributed across socially defined racial groups, no matter how strongly those genetic differences influence the development of human characteristics…we are still not absolved of the responsibility to arrange society to the benefit of all people, not just the tiny slice of global genetic diversity that is people of predominantly European ancestry.

Or something. The Genetic Lottery is all over the map. Some people try not to get canceled by adopting an obscure prose style. Harden, instead, artlessly expresses herself, and then goes back and says the opposite later.

In the best part of The Genetic Lottery, Harden argues that leftist social scientists should incorporate the new polygenic scores for predicting performance from DNA into their studies in order to find out what actually works to narrow gaps:

The fact that income, educational attainment, subjective well-being, psychiatric disease, neighborhood advantage, cognitive test performance, executive function, grit, motivation, and curiosity are all heritable…does mean that vast amounts of research in the social sciences…waste time and money…because their research designs depend on correlating some aspects of a person’s behavior or functioning with some aspect of the environment that is provided by a biological relative, such as a parent, without controlling for the fact that biological relatives can be expected to resemble each other just because they share genes.

Harden is likely overly optimistic about how many useful interventions could be discovered if social scientists got realistic about genetic confounding. But her proposal couldn’t hurt.

On the other hand, it’s not as if the lowbrow leftists like Ta-Nehisi Coates are losing politically and economically. We live in a time when Amy Harmon, The New York Times’ reporter in charge of sniffing out crimethinking scientists, got James D. Watson canceled.

My impression from The Genetic Lottery is that Harden follows sophisticated dissident media, such as these columns, more than a true believer is supposed to:

Today, the “race realist” and “human biodiversity” communities post copies of ‘Nature Genetics’ articles that they believe make the case that there are genetic differences between races that cause differences in intelligence scores, impulsive behavior, and economic success.

After all, we are more insightful and interesting than the purveyors of the conventional wisdom, so why wouldn’t an intelligent person want to expose herself to the best in debate?

Thus, much of what’s true in Harden’s fourth chapter, “Ancestry and Race,” appears to be borrowed from me, uncredited. For example:

The largest patterns of genetic similarities and dissimilarities among humans reflect the largest geographical barriers and boundaries—seas and oceans and deserts and continental divides.

Or:

“One-drop” social rules have guaranteed that Americans who identify as being White are very unlikely to have any genetic ancestry that is not European, so in this case self-reported race and genetic ancestry appear to converge.

I first pointed out two decades ago that the American one-drop rule for delineating blacks and whites has socially constructed the (non-Hispanic) American population in which there are, by Brazilian standards, surprisingly few people who are, say, 60–90 percent white and 10–40 percent black genetically. (But Harden is overstating my observation: In reality, there are millions of Americans who identify as white but who have some tiny amount of black ancestry.)

But then Harden goes off on an incoherent jag about how the concept of race is morally bad while the concept of ancestry is politically egalitarian:

…race (unlike ancestry) is an inherently hierarchical concept that serves to structure who has access to spaces and social power.

Uh…King Louis XIV had social power, such as his access to the palace of Versailles, not because he belonged to the white race, but because of his royal ancestry.

Harden reassures her readers that despite “the unceasing parade of books and articles about ‘innate’ racial differences”—as if New York publishers love nothing more than manuscripts on human biodiversity—“genetic research on social inequalities, both twin research and research with measured DNA, has focused almost entirely on understanding individual differences among people whose recent genetic ancestry is exclusively European and who are overwhelmingly likely to identify as White.”

It’s almost as if there’s little funding for research that might undermine today’s pieties. (She’s also ignoring transracial adoption studies.)

Humiliatingly, Harden also parrots the derisible race-does-not-exist dogma even though she knows better:

A closer look at the science of genetic ancestry makes it clear that “race does not stand up scientifically, period.” Genetic data has not “proved” the biological reality of race. Instead, in an ironic twist, understanding how racially defined racial groups differ in their genetic ancestry helps us to see why modern “race science” is actually pseudoscience.

She admits that because genes have been proven by twin and adoption studies as well as the new Genome-Wide Association Studies (GWAS) to play a role in IQ and educational attainment,

It might seem only rational to infer that this means that one ancestry group has worse educational outcomes because whatever genetic variants cause better outcomes in education are rarer.

But, she thunders:

…in reality, you could have it exactly backwards, and the genes that matter for education could be more common in the ancestry group with worse educational outcomes.

Similarly, it is within the realm of conceivable possibility that pudgy South Asian also-rans actually have better Olympic distance running genes than do lean East African medalists. Still, sportswriter Damon Runyon had the final word on Harden’s argument:

The race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, but that’s the way to bet.

She points out that GWAS work better within races than across races:

Looking across a diverse set of phenotypes ranging from HDL cholesterol to schizophrenia, polygenic scores based on analyses of European ancestry populations are less strongly related to phenotypes measured in other populations, particularly African ancestry groups.

For example, we now have a polygenic score for predicting the highest level of education attained. In the latest iteration announced this month, using a sample size of 3 million, those in the highest decile were nine times more likely to graduate from college than those in the lowest decile. It works pretty well for whites in the U.K., America, and New Zealand. It works less well for East Asians and worst of all for African-Americans.

Why don’t polygenic scores calculated from largely white samples work adequately for blacks? Evidently, racial differences in DNA are so important that geneticists will ultimately have to calculate a separate polygenic score algorithm for each continental-scale race. That’s especially true for sub-Saharans, who are the major race most genetically distinct from the rest of humanity due to their more than 60,000 years of evolving in virtual isolation.

Fortunately, racial admixture studies in which IQ is correlated with percentage of white ancestry would appear to offer a way forward right now. I’m familiar with two admixture studies over the past two years, both of which found small put important positive correlations among African-Americans between white ancestry and cognitive scores. But this type of analysis is still young, so we’ll see what eventually turns up. (Harden doesn’t mention admixture studies.)

Unfortunately, the scientific establishment is attempting to crack down on such research for fear of what it may find.

The Genetic Lottery reminded me that I’ve long been struck by how respectable it is to hate on Charles Murray, when Murray, as Frank Sinatra used to say about Laurence Harvey in The Manchurian Candidate, is the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being I’ve ever known in my life.

Seriously, Murray is obviously a superb individual. If you don’t recognize that and instead continue to think that it must be something wrong about Murray that causes you to be filled with hate toward him, you need to ask yourself: “Are we the baddies?”

In Harden’s case, she at least has a bit of an excuse for her Murray-phobia: She and Murray disagree over the meaning of “virtue.” Harden’s New Testament-inspired egalitarian utopianism, in the tradition of political philosopher John Rawls, sees no virtue or merit in a pilot (such as her father) having excellent pilot traits:

But even as we recognize that it is instrumentally useful to select pilots based on attributes such as good eyesight and spatial rotation skills, we can simultaneously recognize that those attributes, and the financial rewards that follow from having them, are not a sign of the pilot’s moral creditworthiness or virtue. Having those attributes, in combination, with living in a time and place where those skills can be put to economically valuable use in the form of flying planes, is like winning the Powerball.

Harden is proud of her book’s title:

A lottery is a perfect metaphor for describing genetic inheritance: the genome of every person is the outcome of nature’s Powerball.

But, except for the potential big payoff, lotteries are boring. In contrast, how a particular baby gets made is fascinating on multiple levels: scientific, sociological, romantic, and erotic. A less bad metaphor for how humans are conceived would be poker, a game that combines luck, strategy, and psychology. Murray, by the way, plays poker.

Moreover, Murray is an Aristotelian. The Greeks valued excellence not just for what it could do for the poor, but for its own sake.

This can lead to excessive Nietzscheanism. Yet, Harden’s Rawlsian conviction that society must be organized around helping the lowest potential people narrow gaps seems comparably unbalanced. The old Benthamite notion of the greatest good for the greatest number seems more sensible (but is out of fashion for its majoritarianism).

Harden propounds a sophomoric view that intelligence is “socially valued, not inherently valuable,” and follows that up with a conspiracy theory that early-20th-century eugenicists plotted to get us:

…to see intelligence (as measured on standardized IQ tests) and educational success, perhaps more than any other human phenotypes, in terms of a hierarchy of inferior and superior persons is not an accident. It is an idea that was deliberately crafted and disseminated

.

In truth, intelligence has been viewed as valuable for a lot longer than that. For instance, the most famous work of ancient philosophy, Plato’s Republic, is basically about why philosophers deserve to be kings.

More reasonably, the Greeks felt it smart to invest the most in the education of the highest potential students. Thus, it used to be seen as a good thing that Plato had Socrates for a teacher and Aristotle for a pupil. Similarly, society invested heavily in the young Harden’s potential, granting her a full ride to a private college due to her high test scores.

The ideology of The Genetic Lottery seems motivated in sizable measure by Harden’s maternal feelings for her two very different children. One of her children is healthy and bright, while the other, to whom Harden devotes more of her efforts, was born with a congenital defect:

Instead, I invest hours and hours more per week in the speech and language development of the child who struggles, because that additional training and investment is what he needs.

Harden’s is certainly an understandable attitude. For example, twin studies suggest that genes are powerful enough that moderate differences in parenting don’t matter all that much in the long run. Hence, her smart daughter will likely be fine. (On the other hand, those results are from before the arrival of Tiger Mothers made growing up in the West so much more competitive, so the future might not be like the past.)

But not everyone would necessarily agree with Harden’s choice to prioritize her son over her daughter. For example, when Harden’s intelligent young daughter matures into a mouthy adolescent, she may occasionally resent her mother investing more effort in her brother, as siblings often do.

With that in mind, it’s hard not to read The Genetic Lottery less as a work of science or of politics than as Harden’s apologia to her daughter.

Sometimes you wish that a certain group of people were never taught a certain phrase. In 1997, when O.J. Simpson ran afoul of a civil trial, the geniuses in the press decided to teach ghetto L.A. the term “double jeopardy,” because provoking underclass blacks by making them think (falsely) that a civil trial following a criminal acquittal is “double jeopardy” is a great way to foment unrest.

All throughout February ’97 black Angelenos were running around mindlessly parroting “dubba jepaddy dubba jepaddy dubba trubba hubba bubba Bubba Smith!” and journalists sat back hoping for a riot (which fortunately never materialized).

So here’s my wish for the day: I wish no one had ever taught right-wingers the term “cui bono.” How I’ve come to hate that phrase, a favorite of conspiracy-minded rightists and libertarians. In essence, “cui bono” (“who benefits?”) is the main tool in the Lil’ Sherlock detective kits of amateur armchair sleuths who seek to uncover secret plots and nefarious dealings. The idea is, find who benefits from a thing, and you’ve found who caused the thing!

Years ago I wrote about how “cui bono” is one of the main reasons innocent people go to prison. Oftentimes, the “bonoing” is completely incidental to the crime (I cited the case of Sheila Bryan, who was falsely accused of killing her mother and sentenced to life solely because she was the mom’s insurance beneficiary. Turns out she was innocent; the “bono” was unrelated to the death).

Rightists love donning their sleuthin’ caps and using cui bono to trace an event to its evil plotters. “Obammer’s using that school shooting to promote new gun restrictions. Therefore, Obammer planned the school shooting!” “The Democrats are using Covid to take away our liberties. Therefore, the Democrats created Covid!” The latter is Tucker Carlson canon; he can no longer speak of Covid without adding, as if it’s an uncontested fact, that Fauci and “American bureaucrats” cooked up the disease themselves. Because BONO!

This is why the right is always two steps behind the left. And when I speak of “the left,” I don’t mean the moronic foot soldiers of BLM and Antifa. I mean the smart guys, the consultant class. As the right watches an event unfold and asks, “Who benefits?” the left watches that same event and asks, “How can I benefit?”

See the difference? Rightists are purely reactive. Something happens, and they say, “I’ll sleuth out who’s exploiting it.” Leftists are proactive. Something happens, and they say, “I’ll exploit it.” I can find you a thousand rightist bloggers who’ve carefully mapped out the “octopus” of George Soros money; where it goes, the harm it does. But I can’t get a single one of those fuckheads to help in the recall of Soros DA George Gascon, even though there’s so much that could be exploited to actually defeat “Mr. Octopus.”

Breitbart ran a half-dozen outrage pieces about Gascon’s decision to not contest the release of Sirhan Sirhan. Not one of them linked to the recall petition. Rightists complain; leftists effect change.

Soros, of course, is the master of exploiting. Now, sometimes he’ll actually cause a calamity (via, say, currency manipulation), but more often than not he simply watches world events and figures out how to profit from them. Soros didn’t cause the death of George Floyd. But he used it to install murderous pro-crime DAs and policies nationwide.

The left’s “bonoing” is not based on foreknowledge, but rather an instinctive ability to bono from stuff that just randomly happens.

That includes profiting from defeats.

The left did not want Judge Kavanaugh on SCOTUS. The left also did not want Ginsberg to die with just enough time for Republicans to squeeze one more justice onto the court before the election.

The left lost both of those fights, but not without a plan B for benefiting from the loss. Should the Texas abortion law result in a weakening or reversal of Roe—should it result in states having a freedom unseen since 1973 to restrict abortions—the left is gonna bono the shit out of that. Democrats are jizzing at the possibility of swing-state fights over abortion legality. Even though the American public is generally split (and has been for decades) on the abortion issue (roughly, the general consensus is, legal abortions but with restrictions), there’s damn-near unanimity (crossing racial, ethnic, gender, and income lines) regarding the need for an exception in cases of rape or incest.

And the Dems know that the GOP can’t control its newest Dick Mourdocks and Todd Akins—nutbags like Boebert and MTG. The Dems can’t wait for abortion to become a defining issue in 2024 (or even 2022), because they know that one or more members of the GOP straight-jacked squad will make a stupefyingly imbecilic comment about abortion and rape. It’s inevitable; I’d stake my house on it.

Lauren Boebert half-remembers something she read while getting her GED: “When Zeus raped women, the children became demigods! Rape is from God! Never abort demigods!”

Marjorie Taylor Greene consults her most trusted source: “QAnon told me that enough rape babies could’ve stopped the Holocaust.”

As I said, inevitable.

The Dems need to take the focus off, well, everything—from Biden’s declining capacity to Harris’ incompetence to the border invasion, the Afghanistan debacle, inflation, etc. An election in which abortion is central, where the “rape exception” takes the spotlight, is their golden opportunity.

And as the Dems exploit public opinion, the right will do what it did during the Akin and Mourdock fiascos and try to overcome popular sentiment with sleuthing! Rightist blogger: “My investigation reveals that abortions due to rape rarely occur. Therefore, your emotional attachment to the ‘rape exception’ is invalid. Alter your emotional response!”

As always, the Dems will harness sentiment; the right will fight it.

And the Dems will win.

Now, it’s not just Democrats who hope that abortion dominates the next few election cycles. Con Inc. and the GOP establishment know that on this issue, they can win even by losing (i.e., if abortion costs them seats, there’s a greater victory).

One of the worst byproducts of the growth of the Cult of Trump (the MAGAs who worship the man, issues be damned) is that many people have forgotten that in 2016 Trump won on a focused and substantive platform: curb immigration. Stop the importation of low-IQ criminal detritus, and deport the detritus already here.

As Trump continually failed to follow through on his immigration pledges, the cultists who worship the man grew to be the only base he recognized, and the only base the media recognized, and what you had by 2020 was a bunch of acolytes who so loved the man they forgot what actually won him those swing states. Soon enough, the myth emerged that the magic resided in Trump and not his platform.

In fact, it was really quite a miracle that Trump prevailed in 2016. On paper, there was everything wrong with him as a candidate. And the GOP establishment, which of course never expected him to win, was hit with the bone-shattering realization that the issue of immigration restriction is so popular in vast swaths of the country, it could even carry a man like Trump to the White House.

This is a problem because Con Inc. loves unfettered immigration. So it’s vital that immigration not take center stage again (another way in which the MAGA personality cult inadvertently assists the Republican establishment: keep the attention on the man, not the 2016 message).

The GOP wants everyone on the right to forget how immigration won them their last big victory. And the best way to do that? Bring the doggy a beloved familiar chew toy to distract from the shoes you don’t want chomped.

For the GOP, the return of abortion is like an old friend showing up just when you need him.

If Roe’s overturned, in roughly one-third of the states there’ll be no change; either the legislatures are solidly pro-choice or the right to abortion is written into the state constitution. But there will be abortion battles in some of the most vital swing states. Non-college-educated whites—the group that carried Trump in 2016—are largely pro-life (education is a far greater predictor of abortion stance than gender). Abortion is exactly the issue to get those hicks and rednecks and Joe Sixpacks off the immigration scent.

“Here boy, here boy…go save the baby-wabies! Go! Fetch!”

Tossed back to the states, abortion will become a dominant issue in Ohio, Georgia, and Pennsylvania definitely, Michigan, Arizona, and Wisconsin most likely.

That’s exactly what Con Inc. wants: a return to the comfortable dynamics of the 1980s, when a pro-life Republican president could pass blanket amnesty, and where your most extreme party activists, like Operation Rescue, still spoke your language. You could manage them, they were friends. Unlike those vile America Firsters who care about demographics and population replacement. Their tongue is like Sanskrit to an establishment Republican; no familiarity at all.

Remember: These Con Inc. guys share DNA with those clever leftist consultants; they like being able to harness events for their benefit. That’s why 2016 was an earthquake for them. Trump summoned a mighty force—immigration disdain—that frightened them. There’s no détente with that force…it must be stopped. And Con Inc. realizes that if a river’s too strong to be dammed, you have to redirect it, give it a new course.

Abortion’s also a great way to beat back the flirtation with quasi-eugenics that accompanied the Trump 2016 agenda. Con Inc. can’t have people worrying about birth rates and bell curves, low IQs, high criminality, and what an overabundance of both does to a country.

Gotta lead them blue-collar shitkickers away from thinking about the nation’s genetic health. And what better way than to remind them how important it is to save every ghetto fetus with a recidivist criminal absentee dad, every third-world anchor fetus with functionally retarded parents, and every fetus with congenital or hereditary defects? Pro-life is damn near synonymous with dysgenic.

A few weeks ago pro-life darling and 2024 hopeful Kristi Noem was on Fox talking about abortion. Host Rachel Campos-Duffy has a daughter with Down syndrome, and Noem told her that “we need more” children like her daughter in America.

Pushing a message like “We need more Down syndrome babies!” is the perfect way to wean the right off any notions that the biological quality of immigrants matters. If “more Down syndrome!” is your literal rallying cry, if you’re saying that this would actually help the nation, how can you argue against trucking in tons of low-IQ immigrants?

Plus, “more Down syndrome in America” is exactly what the Chinese long to hear (they want us as genetically debilitated as possible). And heaven knows Con Inc. adores the Chinese.

So welcome back, abortion. I always loved the 1980s. I only wish that bringing back my flat stomach and well-defined jawline were as easy as resuscitating the decade’s political dynamics.

For centuries up to and including the 20th, Europe seemed the central pivot of world history.

Then came the Great Civil War of the West, our Thirty Years’ War (1914-1945), where all of the great European powers — Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Russia — along with almost all of the rest, fought some of history’s greatest battles.

Result: Europe’s greatest nations were all bloodied. All of Europe’s empires fell. The colonial peoples were all largely liberated and began the great migration to the mother countries. And Europe was split between a U.S.-led West and a Moscow-dominated Soviet bloc.

Yet, even during that four-decade Cold War, Europe was viewed as the prize in the struggle.

By the time that Cold War ended in triumph for the Free World, a European Union modeled on the American Union was rising, and almost all of Europe’s newly freed nations began to join the NATO alliance.

Yet one senses today that Europe’s role in world history is passing, that the American pivot to China and the Indo-Pacific is both historic and permanent, and that as the past belongs to Europe, the future belongs to Asia.

Asia, after all, is home to the world’s most populous nations, China and India; to six of the world’s nine nuclear powers; and to almost all of its major Muslim nations: Indonesia, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Turkey and Iran, as well as to the world’s largest economies outside the USA: China and Japan.

And Europe?

In 2016, Great Britain voted to withdraw from the EU. This summer, the British joined the Australians and the U.S. in an AUXUS pact that trashed a cherished French deal to build a dozen diesel-powered submarines — and to replace them with British- and U.S.-built nuclear-power subs.

Paris saw this as a “betrayal,” a “stab in the back” by allies whom Gen. Charles De Gaulle had disparaged as “les Anglo-Saxons.” Yet AUXUS was also an undeniably clear statement as to where the Australians saw their future, and it was not alongside France, but the USA.

Still, this was the worst U.S. affront of our French ally since President Dwight Eisenhower ordered the British and French out of Suez.

But, at least then, Ike could say in 1956 that he had not been alerted to the British-French invasion of Egypt and that our NATO partners had acted without his knowledge or consent.

To protest the treatment of France in the submarine deal, President Emmanuel Macron recalled his ambassador to the U.S., something that had never been done since France recognized the American colonies and came to their aid during our War of Independence.

Indeed, the submarine agreement forced cancellation of a grand party at the French embassy in Washington, D.C., to celebrate the 240th anniversary of the Battle of the Capes.

This was the critical British-French naval battle at the mouth of the Chesapeake in 1781, where a French fleet prevailed, enabling it to provide Gen. George Washington’s army cover as it surrounded, shelled and compelled the surrender of Gen. Lord Cornwallis’ army at Yorktown.

But if the British are out of the EU, and the French are estranged from their NATO allies, Germany yesterday held an election, where, for the first time in its history, the Christian Democratic Union of Konrad Adenauer, Helmut Kohl and Angela Merkel was reduced to a fourth of the national vote.

The new leader of Germany, after months of negotiations, may be the leader of the Social Democrats, in concert with the Greens. But even that government may not be cobbled together by Christmas.

Neither of the prospective chancellors for the Christian Democratic Union or the Social Democratic Party has the stature of Merkel, who has been both leader of Germany for the last decade and a half but also de facto leader of Europe.

And consider the present condition of NATO, once celebrated as the most successful alliance in history for having deterred any Soviet invasion of NATO Europe for the entire Cold War.

In 2001, invoking Article V about an attack on one being an attack on all, NATO joined the Americans in their plunge into Afghanistan to deal with the perpetrators of 9/11.

This August, 20 years later, all our NATO allies pulled out as the Afghan army crumbled and vanished and the Afghan regime collapsed. Our NATO allies thus shared in the ignominy of the American retreat and defeat.

Not only is the center of political gravity shifting from Europe to Asia, European unity seems a thing of the past.

As Britain has left the EU, Scotland is considering secession from England. Catalonia is still thinking of secession from Spain. Sardinia is considering secession from Italy. Poland and Hungary are at odds with the EU over domestic political reforms said to be in conflict with the demands of the bureaucrats in Brussels.

As for the southern-tier EU and NATO nations, Spain, Italy and Greece, their main concern is less an invasion by Russia than the ongoing invasion from across the Mediterranean from Africa and the Middle East.

The Week’s Most Taxed, Waxed, and Vaxxed Headlines

THE CHILDREN ARE OUR FUTURE (GOD HELP US)
This year’s 20th-anniversary 9/11 commemoration wasn’t exactly the patriotic pridefest it was supposed to be. Coupled with Covid, inflation, skyrocketing violent crime, and massed invaders at the border, for many Americans 9/11-20th probably felt like a family celebrating Thanksgiving following a nuclear holocaust.

“We have no food, shelter, or safety, and we’re slowly dying of radiation poisoning, but let’s still give thanks because…uh…well…because at least giant mutated rats aren’t eating our eyes.”

“Dad, giant mutated rats are eating Bobby’s eyes.”

“Crap.”

Under President LifeAlert Bracelet, the U.S. staged a rushed, humiliating withdrawal from Afghanistan following a two-decade unsuccessful war against the cavemen from Quest for Fire, and now the Taliban and al-Qaeda are right back where they were the day the towers fell.

And Muslims everywhere have learned that the most important takeaway from 9/11 is not “Don’t mass-murder Americans,” but rather “Just yell ‘Islamophobia’ and you can get away with anything.”

Take the case of Fadel Alkilani, a Muslim student at Washington University in St. Louis. He spent the 9/11 anniversary defacing a memorial of 3,000 American flags dedicated to those who perished. Alkilani was caught on video stuffing the flags into trash bags (rather hypocritical behavior for a guy whose faith calls for the death penalty for anyone who farts while holding a Koran); he responded that he was destroying the monument because honoring the victims was “imperialist.”

And when the university’s chancellor initially condemned the memorial’s desecration, the garbage-bag ghazi screamed “Islamophobia,” and the Washington University Muslim Students Association screamed “Islamophobia,” and the school’s Students for Black and Palestinian Liberation and Middle Eastern and North African Association screamed “Islamophobia,” and the chancellor backed down. Alkilani will face no disciplinary action.

Which brings us to the rascally antics of the kids at St. Thomas Aquinas High School in Fort Lauderdale. St. Thomas Aquinas is only 8% black, so of course the administration takes every opportunity to “elevate” the black students (as in, sending out a celebratory tweet after a black sophomore wrote an essay titled “Growing Up While Black”…wow, how many hours in the library did it take to cram for that one?).

On 9/11, the school’s little black darlings demolished a memorial set up by students and parents to honor victims and first responders. Turns out the cancer-curers-in-training made an oopsie: They had no idea what 9/11 was; they thought it was a Blue Lives Matter memorial.

St. Thomas Aquinas sounds like a fine institution indeed; teaching kids to write about “growing up black,” but failing to teach them what happened on 9/11.

Principal Denise Aloma, who may very well be functionally retarded, thanked the vandals for “expressing their feelings” and invited them “to speak to our school’s Diversity, Inclusion, and Sensitivity Committee to provide further understanding.”

Meanwhile, the students who objected to the vandalism were condemned as “insensitive” to BLM and George Floyd.

Terrorists can take down a plane or a building, but only people on the inside like Denise Aloma can take down an entire country.

CRAZY RICH HAITIANS
Back in 1994, during an appearance on the Charlie Rose show, then senator Joe Biden uttered this rather candid assessment: “If Haiti, a god-awful thing to say, if Haiti just quietly sunk into the Caribbean or rose up 300 feet, it wouldn’t matter a whole lot in terms of our interest.” At the time, blacks were pressuring President Clinton to intervene militarily in Haiti, where the guy who’d assumed power by beheading his foes and eating their livers had just been toppled by men who planned to behead him and eat his liver (in Haiti, this is called “the circle of life”). Biden was making the point that blacks don’t understand that the U.S. needs to pick and choose where in the world it directs its attention, and Haiti, a non-nuclear economically irrelevant dungheap, just doesn’t warrant any focus.

Boy, too bad we didn’t get that Joe Biden as president! It’s kind of like waiting for McMurphy in Cuckoo’s Nest to get lobotomized before making him head of the ward. We should’ve gotten the guy with the clear vision and healthy instincts. Instead we got the guy ready to be mercy-suffocated by an Indian.

Needless to say, conservatives on Twitter have been playing that ’94 Biden clip to dunk on the president for being “racist,” because conservatives—many of whom also deserve mercy suffocation—are dead set on dunking the nation straight to third-world-hellhole status.

Now that President Lobotomized McMurphy is flooding the U.S. with the very people he once dismissed as so irrelevant they could sink into the ocean and nobody would care, it’s up to the press to sell the American people on why this is a good idea. Because Biden certainly can’t, and Harris hasn’t been seen since she met Cory Booker at that glory hole last week.

Haitians are perceived as backwards, impoverished, superstitious drags on any nation in which they live. Of course, such racist perceptions are only fueled by the fact that they’re true. So The New York Times got the brilliant idea to slap a coat of paint over these slumdogs and present them as prosperous folks simply coming here to share their wealth:

The Haitian migrants had done well for themselves. Since leaving their country, many more than a decade ago, they had built lives in Chile, Brazil, Panama. They had homes and cars. They had stable jobs as bank tellers, welders, mine supervisors, gas station attendants. But they longed for the possibility of a better a life in the United States.

Thus began a lengthy exercise in verbal guano that never answers the key question of why such prosperous gents would have to trek across rivers, trudge through mud, and sleep under bridges instead of simply buying a plane ticket like, say, a Norwegian or Dane (what with all their wealth and such).

Unfortunately for the Times, their spin sputtered out. Between the actual images of the Haitian “camps” (tents made of palm fronds and the bones of devoured foes) and the inability of high-level Dems like AOC and Maxine Waters to stop calling the Haitians “impoverished refugees” fleeing “persecution,” the Times’ attempt at image makeover was a bust.

Still, NYT, points for trying. Now if only you would sink into the ocean.

Americans would notice that…and cheer.

TRIUMPH OF THE WON’T
Germany does Covid rage exactly as you’d expect: in a thorough, competent, and orderly fashion.

Last week in the town of Idar-Oberstein in Rhineland-Palatinate, a 49-year-old deutscher entered a mini-mart to buy beer. The 20-year-old clerk asked him to wear a mask, but Oktoberfest Otto didn’t have one. There was a brief argument, and the clerk asked the man to leave, because if there’s one thing Germans hate it’s conflict. The customer stormed out, went home, got a mask, and returned to the store wearing the mask as requested. Then he shot the clerk dead…and turned himself in to the police.

Credit where it’s due: It’s nice to see a murderer who’s law-abiding (well, except for the murder part).

In the U.S., the Covid ragers are hardly as disciplined.

About a week ago, you might’ve read about a group of “Texans” who attacked the hostess at a New York City eatery for no other reason than she asked for proof of vaccination, which is required for indoor dining under NYC law. Oh, how leftist Twitter loved that one! “Those damn Texans! Just more Trump MAGA QAnon loons trying to kill us all.”

The “Texas” anti-vaxxers were denounced as “rednecks,” “cowboys,” and “white supremacists.” “This enrages me. Keep your ignorant MAGA bullshit in Texas. Those diners are lucky I wasn’t there. Hitting a woman? What a bunch of limp dicked cowards” tweeted Kareem Harper, VP at Cronin advertising agency.

And then Gabby Johnson from Blazing Saddles got a look at the security camera footage of the incident, and he shouted (as church bells rang out nearby):

“Hey! The Texans are a GONG!”

“What did he say?”

“He said the Texans are near.”

“No, gon blammit dang blammit! The Texans are a GONG!”

Yes, it turns out the “Texans” were actually a bunch of black ghetto girls who, as the video clearly shows, swarmed and beat the hostess as she was standing outside the restaurant minding her business. Making things worse, the hostess was Asian (are there so few Asians in Texas that blacks have to come to NYC to assault them? Or has assaulting Asians simply become a standard black New York City tourism thing?).

And now BLM has started protesting the restaurant, at one point barging in maskless, no proof of vaxx, violating every city health reg.

But this time it’s for “social justice,” and we all know it’s scientifically impossible to spread Covid at a BLM protest.

Assaulted Asians, disrupted dining, BLM violating vaxx policy. De Blasio must be eating it up. He won’t be mayor for much longer, so he’s gotta get his few remaining kicks where he can.

IT’S MY PARTY AND I’LL DIE IF I WANT TO
Speaking of going maskless…

You know what the elites of the world—the politicians, celebrities, billionaires—never do? They never eat spoiled fish. If they’re at, say, NYC sushi restaurant Masa (average cost: $600 per plate) and a piece of sashimi doesn’t smell quite right, they send it back and expect the chef to perform seppuku.

You’ll never catch an elite knowingly eating rancid fish. Granted there might be one or two freaky elites who get turned on by the smell of decaying fish (smart money says it’s Michael Bloomberg), but as a general rule, elites don’t eat spoiled fish.

And why?

Because elites don’t do things that they know could make them deathly ill.

Every time the public sees one of the “better ’n thems” partying indoors in violation of mask mandates, the elite in question will always explain it away as a mistake, a momentary lowering of the guard, a “getting caught up in the moment” slip-up.

But those excuses never wash because everyone knows that these supercilious, self-important d-bags simply would not do anything that they truly believed might sicken or kill them. It’s instinctive; you don’t “momentarily forget” to not eat rotting fish.

So two weeks ago when San Francisco mayor London Breed was caught on camera gettin’ down maskless at a BLM dance party—in violation of her own indoor masking policy—and she told the press that she “got caught up in the spirit” and didn’t want to be brought down by the “fun police,” did anyone really buy that?

You never need the “fun police” to tell you not to drink Lysol or bathe in raw sewage (again, Michael Bloomberg’s fetishes aside). If you genuinely believe that something might kill you, you don’t do it. London Breed does not believe that going maskless in a nightclub might kill her.

And a week ago when Hollywood’s shining stars, who never fail to lecture the troglodytes about “masking up,” turned out for the Emmys—three straight hours of being unmasked indoors—does anyone really believe they would’ve done so had they thought being maskless indoors might be fatal? Yet still—they made sure the event staff was masked. Because the fear’s a tool. If the fear were real, the stars would’ve been “masked up” too.

And just a few days ago, Covid fearmongering Democrat congresswoman Pramila Jayapal was caught celebrating her birthday indoors and maskless.

Okay, that one doesn’t count. As an Indian, Jayapal probably does eat rancid fish and bathe in sewage.

Also, Jayapal had already recovered from Covid. And while in the U.S. that plus a dollar buys you a McNugget, Israel—arguably the most vaxxed nation on earth—recognizes the immunity of the Covid-recovered as equal to that of the vaccinated. Even in the face of a recent uptick in cases, Israel is following the science regarding natural immunity, which is a refreshing change from the hypocritical fearmongering here at home, where the only recognized “natural immunity” is that of your betters.

NIANGPAO CHICKEN
“Niangpao” is a Chinese word that means “sissy man.” And Chinese president Xi is on a crusade to exterminate niangpaos.

Xi is a savvy guy. He’s watching like a hawk as the U.S. falls to tranny culture and all manner of gender-bending and gender denial. And Xi ain’t gonna allow that disease to cripple his nation. When it comes time to “reclaim” Taiwan, Xi wants an army of manly men to counter a U.S. force made up of pregnant women, drag queens, schizos, fentanyl freaks, and fat neckbeards whose war cry is “CALL ME MA’AM!”

Still, Xi realizes that he can flood the U.S. with as much fentanyl as possible, but there’ll always be a certain number of healthy Midwestern boys who’ll join the military, so he can’t completely rely on the U.S. to take itself out of commission, at least not fully.

Hence his desire to forge his own nation of he-men. Yes, it’s the final solution to the niangpao question. Xi has ordered that only the most masculine of Chinese men be allowed on TV, in advertisements, and in movies. This is a tall order, considering that the Chinese are barely dimorphic as it is. In terms of differences among their men, well…they’re all pretty dainty. Finding the masculine ones is rather like trying to identify an alpha male panda.

But from Xi’s perspective, it’s all a matter of attitude. Whereas the U.S. military trains its soldiers to go into battle distracted by the question of whether they were assigned the wrong gender at birth, Xi wants Chinese soldiers to charge the battlefield with the raw machismo and masculinity of great American leading men like Rock Hudson, Montgomery Clift, Tab Hunter, Richard Chamberlain, and Dack Rambo.

Xi’s not exactly up to speed on Hollywood gossip. But his heart’s in the right place.

Still, his task is not exactly herculean. Not only is America weak in the knees, so are Xi’s more immediate neighbors. Soon enough the median age in Japan will be 80, and South Korea has soundly fallen to androgynous boy bands.

Perhaps the only people in the region who might be able to stand up to China are the Australians. Though previously regarded as happy-go-lucky beer-drinking goofballs, this year the Aussies have truly shined as a particularly brutal bunch of sadists, beating and shooting and stomping their own people—including women and children—for violating lockdowns and mask requirements.

Thanks to Covid, the Australians may very well have bred a generation of sociopathic, conscienceless cops and soldiers, who might just be up to the challenge of taking on the Chinese reds.

Irony of ironies: Xi undone by the very disease he gave the West. Curses!

Nice to be back in London, and Glebe Place is a delight. Mind you, it’s not the mansion I was expecting, just a very nice mews house on a very quiet part of the street away from the King’s Road. The noise of the city gets on my nerves, which means I’ve lived on an island and among cows for too long. Alexandra seems to like London more than I do nowadays, and that’s a switch if there ever was one. Knightsbridge was home for forty-odd years, but the wife hated it. Writing about one’s wife is a bit like kissing your sister and all that, but ensconced at home the other night I asked her why London all of a sudden.

“You were playing Don Giovanni all those years, and I found it humiliating to be near those women,” was her answer. I got her point. Now that I’m a toothless shark it’s safe to swim in London waters. Oy vey, as they say in Saudi Arabia. At present Alexandra hates New York and refuses to set foot in the Bagel. “So how come you loved it back then?” asked the toothless one. “Well, just look at the friends we had, and what fun it was.” She hit the you-know-what right on its noggin.

Clay Felker, a great editor who discovered Tom Wolfe, first asked me to come to the Bagel and write for him in Esquire magazine. He and Tom decided the poor little Greek boy was going to be the next Céline. Honestly. We used to give grand dinners in my New York house for all sorts of up-and-coming tycoons, with Tom and Clay always present. The few who had ever heard of Céline among our guests knew only of his virulent anti-Semitism. “It will never work,” said Norman Mailer, a new friend who became a regular. (I have since inherited Michael Mailer, who has become my closest friend in the Bagel.) And then there was Larry McMurtry of Lonesome Dove fame, and Jay McInerney of Bright Lights, Big City renown. “We thought you’d be the one who could finish Answered Prayers,” Jay said to me once. If only. But life was fun: dinner with brainy friends, followed by Studio, Xenon, and the Palladium.

It’s funny how female thoughts hit home, as they never said in Sparta. Alexandra is dead right. The Bagel was fun because of the people we hung out with, and now that most of them are gone, the Bagel feels empty. William and Pat Buckley lived on the next block, and their parties each week were attended by the great and the good. Their son Christopher Buckley was a close friend, as was Bob Tyrrell and the humorist P.J. O’Rourke. The last time I saw P.J. he told me a funny story. He had just met Tina, his future wife, and he had the hots for her but she was reluctant. Tina yearned for a quiet life and avoided flash people. P.J. had just bought a used Porsche, and when he picked Tina up on their first date, she took a look at his car and almost moaned. She was absolutely shocked when he took her to the Jockey Club for dinner, the place packed with hedge funders, loose women, and rich lobbyists. “It got even worse when I spotted you,” said P.J., “drunk, dressed in your expensive European suit, and coming straight for my table. You plunked yourself down, ignored me, and asked Tina to come on your boat and cruise the Greek islands.” Well, it didn’t work and Tina and P.J. have been married for a long time and have lots of children and all that, so my brief stop at their table did no harm. Incidentally, there are no finer people than P.J. and Tina, their only failing being that they live in faraway New Hampshire or someplace remote like it, and only see the Greek boy in a blue moon. But back to the business of living in London.

“So why the sudden love for this place?” I ask the wife. “Because people are so polite and nice; if only you knew how sweet people are when I walk my dogs. And when I shop, the lengths people go to help, and always with a smile.” I know it sounds corny, but I understand her. In a world captivated by crude, publicity-crazed freaks with attitude, a normal kindness from one to another suddenly counts a lot. So there we have it—London is good because people smile and say hello to a lady walking her dogs (three of them). This week I had drinks with my friend Simon Reader in Holborn and it took me one hour and fifteen minutes by taxi to get there at around six o’clock in the evening. Uber is to blame. London is flooded with cars because of Uber. The best taxi service in the world, the London one, was stabbed in the back by the American version that has filthy cars and dangerous drivers and could not find Buckingham Palace on a Sunday morning during a coronation. The next day I walked 35 minutes in the rain and had a delicious lunch chez the Bismarcks. London is a perfect place for walking, with the only dangers being bearded types on bikes and Uber drivers looking up in the sky for divine inspiration to find the palace.

I have noticed that, in all the acres of commentary (most of it respectful or even laudatory) on the wrapping of the Arc de Triomphe in Paris with 25,000 square meters of polypropylene fabric, none has claimed that the beauty of the city has been thereby enhanced. It has been called “remarkable,” “amazing,” “bold,” and even “artistic”—O Art, as Marie Antoinette would now exclaim, what crimes are committed in thy name! But no one—at least, no one whose cowardly dithyrambs to this costly, pointless exercise I have read—has called it beautiful. It is a case of the Arc de Triomphe’s new clothes.

The artist posthumously responsible for this absurdity, Christo, said that the whole point of it was its pointlessness. But if the pointlessness of something is its point, it has a point and is therefore not pointless (a version of the Cretan liar paradox). Of course, the mere fact that something has a point does not make it worthwhile; many points are not worth making.

The evasion of aesthetic judgment on the whole enterprise is both significant and by now customary. The word beauty and its cognates have been all but expunged from the vocabulary of critics, almost as completely as a certain word referring to a race of human beings has in literature and the title of an Agatha Christie novel.

In the case of architectural writers, this is perhaps not surprising: There is so little to which the word, rather than its opposite, could be applied. But in fact the whole category of aesthetic judgment has been sidelined by those whom one would most expect, and who one would think were most qualified, to make it.

This is not principally because there is a paucity of objects on which to make it. The world is as full of such objects as ever. Indeed, it is my contention that, at least in the privacy of one’s own minds, it is inevitable that we should make such judgments, just as we inevitably make judgments about the morally good and bad. It is part of what being human is.

However, we can conceal our judgments from others, and that is precisely what writers about art and architecture now do. The reason for this is not merely that, there being so little produced that is worthy of positive aesthetic judgment, they wish not to sound like disgruntled dinosaurs, unable to keep up with the latest developments. It goes deeper than that.

To reveal your taste, to say what you find beautiful, is to expose yourself to others—to their ridicule and contempt more often than to their admiration. The fact is that we live in an age in which people like endlessly to talk about themselves, but without revelation, without making themselves vulnerable. If I say that I find x beautiful, I risk the disdainful reply, “Oh, really?” I have thereby exposed myself as someone of poor or worse judgment. I have demonstrated that I am an unsophisticated, reactionary, ignorant, or conventional person. And it is a convention that to be conventional is the worst thing a person can be, at least worst in certain circles.

Little reveals more about us than our aesthetic tastes, which is why so many people herd together for safety when it comes to making judgments. The safest procedure, of course, is to make no judgments at all, the technique of most writers on artistic and architectural subjects today. They are like those gnus that move in vast compact herds in search of new grazing. If they break from the herd, they are in danger of being picked off by the prowling lion.

The unwillingness to express aesthetic judgment does not, of course, reduce them to silence, any more than the resort to mere psychobabble means that people cease to talk about themselves; on the contrary, it leads to an inflation of verbiage.

If you overhear people talking about themselves—the one subject about which you might have expected them to be expert—they often, or usually, do so in a strangely objectified way, almost as if they were not themselves but some other person, a third party. As art critics talk without making aesthetic judgments, so people talk of such things as their brain chemistry, though they have no idea of what it is and have not the faintest idea of how it may be investigated. Needless to say, when they objectify themselves in this fashion it is to explain something bad, unpleasant, or unwanted about themselves. Nobody speaks about his brain chemistry in describing a generous or charitable act, or why he helped an old lady across the road.

In other words, we have a tendency to put a theoretical filter or lens between ourselves and real self-reflection or self-examination. This filter or lens is usually some silly or ill-understood theory that prevents seeing ourselves in an undistorted fashion. One of the functions of the filter or lens is automatic self-exculpation. While it supposedly helps us to understand ourselves, in fact it does the opposite: It prevents us from knowing ourselves, for self-knowledge is always disturbing. This is why psychology has contributed so little to human self-understanding since it first became a subject, or object, of separate study, and why the vast increase in the number of psychologists has not led—to put it mildly—to a reduction in the level of psychological distress. Psychology, other than the self-reflective kind, is the enemy of truth, even if it discovers some truths.

The blathering that has accompanied the wrapping of the Arc de Triomphe reminds me of psychological blathering: Its object is to disguise the unpleasant truth, in this case that the Western artistic tradition, at least that part of it that attracts media attention, is dead. The resort to the pointless wrapping of the Arc de Triomphe is proof of it. And yet, without claiming that we live in an artistic golden age, I know of artists whose work is certainly meritorious. It is the bane of hyper-publicity that is so destructive, that turns stuntmen into supposed artists. The Arc de Triomphe will emerge from its wrapping as Houdini emerged from his chains.

As with Robert Frost’s two paths diverging in the woods, the COVID pandemic has hit a fork in the road.

Back in 2020, when the virus first presented itself, anything could be forgiven. Trump could shoot hydroxychloroquine up his butt; Fauci could sneer at masks, then a week later demand that we wear 17 masks; governors could order everyone to stay home, while they cavorted at parties, restaurants, hair salons and protests.

The lies, hypocrisies and idiocies were all stuffed in our burlap bag, as we bounced along Coronavirus Road.

Then, in a triumph of Western medicine, A VACCINE APPEARED! That’s when our path in the woods diverged into the sane and insane.

It’s pretty clear now that the vaccines work, with few side effects — although our public health experts would really do us a solid if they’d stop lying about there being no side effects. At a minimum, the vaccines prevent serious illness and death. They’re even more effective than the flu vaccine, and that’s pretty good.

Between widespread natural infection — something else it would be nice if authorities would stop lying about — and mass vaccination, COVID IS NOW OVER. It wasn’t “the flu” in 2020, but it is in 2021.

Liberals sulked as people began getting vaccinated and living their lives again, but then seized on the delta variant to announce: Let’s lock down again!

The very people demanding that everyone get vaccinated are the same ones telling us vaccines don’t work all that well, so maybe we’d better just keep wearing masks, quarantining, working remotely and staying home from school.

Do the vaccines work or don’t they? If they work, we’ll thank you to stop bossing us around now.

Going further into crazy town, liberals decided to pretend that Anthony Fauci was not an escaped mental patient.

Our most visible “public health” authority continues to issue lunatic pronouncements like a third world despot: The vaccinated must wear masks! Children should be vaccinated! Even 2-year-olds need to be masked! Everybody has to get a third vaccine shot! (That last bright idea led a couple of experts from the Food and Drug Administration advisory panel to resign in protest, followed by the panel unanimously voting to recommend booster shots only in certain cases.)

Apart from just coming out and telling us he doesn’t believe the vaccines work, Fauci is telling us he doesn’t believe the vaccines work.

This is the nut, you will recall, who knowingly lied to the public at the outset of the pandemic for what he, Anthony Fauci, in his sole discretion, decided was a higher cause. Without a scintilla of scientific evidence one way or the other, he condescendingly announced that masks don’t work against COVID — simply for the greater good of preventing a mask shortage.

What if he considers it a greater good for Anthony Fauci to keep appearing on TV? Like an aging football star who dreams of being back in high school, Fauci longs to be in the spotlight.

Except we have vaccines now! So thanks, but we’ve heard enough from you, Fauci.

Also, we know things that we didn’t in 2020.

We now know, for example, that COVID is bad, but it’s not Ebola. Eighty-year-olds have survived it. Trump survived it. The 800-pound Chris Christie survived it. And that was before we had all the therapies we have now. Or, come to think of it, any idea what we were doing at all. (Remember the mad rush for ventilators?)

We know that cases are good; deaths are bad. The media frantically report “cases” only because their panic porn attracts readers, so who cares if it’s irrelevant?

As long as you don’t die, which would be bad, a COVID infection is nature’s vaccination shot! As multiple studies have shown, immunity from prior infection is stronger and more durable than that from vaccination.

Infections are especially good if you’re already vaccinated. Then you’ll have super-immunity. You won’t die of COVID — although you might die with COVID, especially if you’re old or sick or have just taken a massive dose of fentanyl.

Like George Floyd. Remember? He had COVID when he died. But unlike Floyd, the media will broadcast your death as a cautionary tale to again harangue us to wear masks and get vaccinated. How dare you not get a vaccine and put the vaccinated at risk!

But the vaccinated aren’t at risk. You know why? Because the vaccines work.

We also know that COVID poses virtually no risk to young people. We knew this early on, and for some reason ignored it, but by now the evidence is overwhelming.

Since COVID landed on our shores, 95% of the dead people in the U.S. have been 50 or older. Nearly 80% of the dead were 65 or older — and not only are they heavily vaccinated, but they make up only 16% of the population. The 64.5% of the population under age 50 — in its entirety — has a 0.5% chance of dying from COVID.

Combine the minimal risk of death to young people — less than the flu during a normal flu season — with what we now know about the strong immunity from prior COVID infection, and, throughout 2020, we should have been putting little kids into giant, Japanese-size classrooms and encouraging young people to blow beer foam in one another’s faces, get drunk and make out with strangers. Our entire under-30 population would be immune.

Remember the college kid on spring break when COVID first hit the news in February 2020, who had his life destroyed for nonchalantly telling a TV interviewer, “If I get corona, I get corona”? If only we’d listened to him instead of Fauci!

The sudden crossing of the Rio Grande river at Del Rio, Texas, by 15,000 Haitians is a reminder that the most prophetic novel of the last half century was the late Jean Raspail’s 1973 book The Camp of the Saints about a million third-worlders landing on the beaches of France, and whites being unable to summon the will to be so racist as to turn them away.

Do American leaders still believe that they have the moral right to protect the territory of the American people by force? Or will we unilaterally disarm in the Scramble for America?

Few recent incidents better sum up elites’ lack of spine than this Reuters headline on Monday evening:

White House condemns border guard use of whip-like cord against Haitian migrants

Of course, the bridle reins held by the mounted patrolman weren’t actually a whip, as the press initially reported, but, still…they were whip-like.

The media meltdown over Border Patrol agents rotating their reins to keep the mob out from under their hooves ranks up there with Jussie Smollett and the Covington kid smirking at the tribal elder for pure idiocy. But it’s also indicative of a massively dangerous ideological trend for the security of the USA.

The Washington Post made its top-center headline on Monday:

Homeland security officials will investigate after images show agents on horseback grabbing migrants, Mayorkas says

How dare law enforcement try to grab migrants! Don’t they know migrants are who we are (except that they are also better than us)?

And the outmoded concept of “law enforcement” needs a rethinking, what with the Racial Reckoning, as the Post explained:

Nor is it possible to ignore the historical echoes suggested by a White officer of the law apprehending a fleeing Black man.

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi credulously tweeted:

Reports of the mistreatment of Haitian migrants fleeing violence and devastation from natural disasters are deeply troubling, including the inappropriate use of what appear to be whips by Border Patrol officers on horseback to intimidate migrants.

As Chris Cuomo said on CNN:

We really are in the throes in this country of figuring out who we are and what we are about.

And who is more American than Haitian pre-Americans trying to sneak into America?

Also, the border guards were on horseback, which makes them, basically, Cossacks.

And, worst of all, the Border Patrol was impeding migrants who are black. That makes them better than you. As Cuomo said:

To me, it does smack of a bygone era of slavery.

After all, what is more like slavery than blacks trying to slip into the United States while nonblacks try to keep them out?

Seriously, as I’ve been pointing out for many years, the most obvious massive threat in the foreseeable future is that the population of sub-Saharan Africa is exploding at a time when the will to defend the territories of the white world is cratering.

The U.N. projected in 2019 that the population of sub-Saharan Africa will grow from 504,000,000 in 1991 to 2,118,000,000 in 2050 and to 3,775,000,000 in 2100.

Are sub-Saharans really going to stick around in their own lousy countries, when white people have built themselves much nicer countries?

White-run countries in Europe, North America, and the Antipodes are the best places in the world, so the rest of the world wants to take them away from whites. Wokeism is simply the ideological rationalization of white dispossession.

While Europe has already begun to experience the onrushing onslaught from south of the Sahara, America has mostly been shielded by the Atlantic Ocean. But Haiti, an offshoot of West Africa, provides a small-scale test of what is eventually in store for the U.S. as well.

Haiti is 2,000 miles from Del Rio, and most of the Haitians have taken much longer routes, often through South America. If Haitians can get from Port-au-Prince to Del Rio, how long until a surge of West Africans show up in Camp of the Saints numbers in the U.S.?

In the past, Africans have preferred to go to Northern Europe with its generous welfare states. But now the Biden administration is greatly boosting handouts, so America is becoming ever more attractive.

In 2018, Donald Trump notoriously compared Haiti unfavorably to Norway as a source of potential immigrants, driving the Establishment insane with rage because…well, because it’s obviously true that Norwegians have done a better job of nation-building than have Haitians. After all, that’s the point of all the Democrats who say it’s cruel and unusual punishment to send Haitians back to Haiti. But pointing out the truth is an unforgivable offense in the 21st century.

Why Haiti is so much worse than other Caribbean countries is a long-debated question. One possible answer was suggested by Jared Diamond, author of Guns, Germs, and Steel. Like a more frank Trump, Diamond noted that Haiti’s neighbor on Hispaniola, the Dominican Republic, is a better place to live than Haiti because, in part, the DR imported whiter immigrants:

A second social and political factor is that the Dominican Republic—with its Spanish-speaking population of predominantly European ancestry—was both more receptive and more attractive to European immigrants and investors than was Haiti with its Creole-speaking population composed overwhelmingly of black former slaves…. Hence European immigration and investment were negligible and restricted by the constitution in Haiti after 1804 but eventually became important in the Dominican Republic. Those Dominican immigrants included many middle-class businesspeople and skilled professionals who contributed to the country’s development.

The dominant Dominican dictator of the 20th century, the megalomaniacal mulatto Rafael Trujillo, tried to whiten its population by inviting in European immigrants. During the 1930s, the DR was perhaps the only country in the world to actively recruit Nazi-persecuted German Jews.

In contrast, Haiti carried out a genocide of whites in 1804. And its most important politician of the 20th century, Papa Doc Duvalier (1957–1971), ruled on a black-power platform. He cultivated his resemblance to the voodoo deity Baron Samedi to convince the black masses that he was a sinister sorcerer.

Why the sudden rush to Del Rio? The Mexican government had been holding the Haitians in Chiapas far to the south, but suddenly let them surge north on Sept. 12.

Mexico has not explained why, but apparently it fears Joe Biden less than Donald Trump, whose most impressive foreign policy achievement was enlisting Mexico’s leftist president Andrés Manuel López Obrador in slowing the flow of the rest of the world through Mexico.

Obviously, Del Rio is yet another embarrassing screwup by the Biden administration.

But have some sympathy: Think how hard it is to be a Democratic president in 2021 when millions of your voters have gone nuts over the past eight years and adopted a religion of anti-whiteism. Even if you aren’t as old now and as mentally mediocre as Joe has always been, maneuvering the Democrats’ coalition of the margins without running the ship of state onto the rocks would be a staggering challenge.

So what went wrong with the California recall?

Oh, not much. Just everything.

In last week’s column I predicted that a Newsom victory was assured. And I explained why a contest that was polling neck and neck a month ago was now a certain Democrat win.

Turns out “win” was an understatement. The “no on recall” margin of victory was in the millions (far more than voter fraud could account for).

How did things end so badly? Well, there’s not just one reason.

To begin with, the recall was born as a headless chicken, a bunch of activists collecting signatures with no game plan beyond “Let’s get this on the ballot.” Republican congressman (and wealthy businessman) Darrell Issa funded the 2003 recall drive because he planned to be the guy running against Governor Davis, so from the get-go there was a plan in place for where to take things after the recall got on the ballot (Issa dropped out when Schwarzenegger entered, as did L.A.’s Republican mayor—and wealthy businessman—Richard Riordan, who’d also supported the recall with an eye toward running).

So with the 2003 recall, there were always men of means at the top. And as I’ve repeatedly pointed out in previous columns, as much as ground-level activists hate hearing this, the “wee the peeple” grassroots marchers and demonstrators are almost always directionless, inept, and self-defeating without a moneyed mastermind at the top to channel their childlike energy.

Not to get all “Hitler vs. Strasser” on you, but in that particular debate, Hitler got it right in that a political idea alone is worthless without structured leadership, because “the peeple” left to their own devices usually fuck things up.

So the Newsom recall began life as backwards-Bane (“What doesn’t matter is our plan”).

Once it became clear that no “superstar” candidate was going to load in on the GOP side, Larry Elder (who waited until the last minute to announce, specifically to ensure that nobody more viable entered) jumped in. But Larry can only be Larry (at almost 70, there’s no changing that black leopard’s spots). As I wrote weeks ago, the focus of the recall needed to be on the “recall yes/no” question. No words should’ve come out of the mouth of any of the opposing candidates that didn’t directly address why Newsom needed to go.

But Larry’s a showman, and he made the recall the Larry Elder show, blasting explosive word-farts about off-topic things like abortion and slavery. Larry’s “incendiary soundbite” strategy worked great back when he was trying to garner ratings for his radio show. It worked poorly as an election strategy.

Now, I don’t want to beat a dead horse regarding MAGAs—I’ve already written about how L.A.’s most vocal rightist activists eschewed canvassing and voter information drives for brawls and grotesque public displays. But it needs to be emphasized that a symbiotic relationship has developed between the MAGAs and the GOP establishment guys they supposedly despise. In California for the most part, and in L.A. entirely, our GOPs never want to actually do anything. The fatalism, the belief that “we’re never gonna win so screw it,” is not a negative to them. They’re lazy, stupid, ineffectual people who embrace the rationalization that justifies their lack of effort, lest they be forced to confront the sheer magnitude of their sloth and ineptitude.

So when MAGAs become fatalistic, when they lose themselves in fantasies about Venezuelan vote-stealing killbots, when they join the chorus of “we’re never gonna win so screw it,” they’re actually playing right into the hands of the party establishment.

MAGAs cannot help but get played. By the feds, by the left, by the establishment, by their own vaunted God King. They’re the Elmer Fudd of politics…forever hunting wabbits that best them.

For example, when the MAGAs pestered and cajoled Larry until he bowed to their demand to publicly reverse himself on 2020 election fraud and embrace the Powell/Wood/Lindell “kraken” nonsense, the GOP establishment breathed a sigh of relief. Because—and Ann Coulter has pointed this out numerous times—whatever vote shenanigans occurred in November occurred due to “pandemic emergency” changes in voting rules that the GOP establishment didn’t bother to fight prior to the election. And that same GOP establishment now wants nothing more than to avoid responsibility for its inaction.

The lunatic vote-fraud theories of MAGA fantasists are exactly what the establishment needs. These people want you to blame evil robots and satanic pedophiles. Gets them right off the hook!

Look, you probably ain’t gonna take advice from me, but as a guy who’s mixed with the fringe for 33 years, I can tell you that the most easily misled and manipulated people on the planet are the ones who think they’ve figured out the “grand conspiracy.” That’s what endeared me to King of the Hill in its earliest episodes: the fact that Dale, the “conspiracy sleuth,” was the only one on the block unaware of his wife’s affair and his son’s real father. It was a funny bit, but it also touched upon a much deeper truth.

So the Dale Gribbles of MAGA and the “working can wait” bears of the GOP establishment play off of each other, furthering an inertia that leftists take advantage of. Again, I return to the theme of the need for a man of means, a “brain,” at the top. This not only corrals and channels the nutcases, it can also circumvent a work-shy party establishment. Like when the aforementioned Richard Riordan personally bankrolled a slate of L.A. school board candidates to oppose the preternaturally evil UTLA (L.A. teachers’ union). Riordan did it for the good of his city. Not for profit (like the wealthy donors whose only interests are low taxes and cheap labor), not for partisan politics (our local GOP couldn’t care less about opposing the UTLA), not to put on a show of sound and fury that accomplishes nothing (that’s MAGA’s specialty). In that way, Riordan was like a Soros on our side.

But he’s 91 now and no one’s taken his place. So with no “brain,” we got an anencephalic recall, an unchanneled base, and an apathetic party machine.

Now, while Larry Elder was fated to fail when it came to remaining low-key and sober in an election that wasn’t about two guys going head-to-head but one governor vs. his own public approval, the MAGAs didn’t help by forcing Elder to speak public comforts to them about krazy krakens and abortion. Contrast that with Newsom’s base. Newsom had two bills in front of him, passed by the Dem legislature, awaiting his signature. SB9 and SB10 would end the very concept of single-family residence zoning, allowing the construction of multi-unit dwellings anywhere and everywhere. Passed by the senate and assembly ostensibly as solutions to California’s “housing crisis,” the bills are pure leftist racial/social engineering claptrap, intended to destroy middle- and upper-middle-class neighborhoods by abrogating zoning regulations that prohibit the construction of tenements and Section 8 slums.

Newsom went the entire recall without saying one word about whether he’d sign or veto the bills. And his supporters—who love the bills—never forced him to make a statement, because expressing support for the bills would’ve cost him votes in affluent and middle-class areas. The supporters knew where he stood; they didn’t need to hear him speak it aloud when doing so might cost him a victory.

Get the point, MAGAs and pro-lifers? Let your man win first, then pressure him. Christ, that’s so commonsense, only people like you could fail to grasp it.

And exactly one day—one fucking day—after Newsom beat the recall by a landslide, he signed both bills. He didn’t even wait a token week to make it seem like he took time to think it over.

Something that used to annoy the hell out of me during my years as a GOP organizer is that if you ask rightist activists to downplay a particular beloved but unpopular issue for the sake of helping a friendly candidate win an election, they’ll take it as a personal slight, an insult. They want to charge into battle, giant flag flying. “Balls-out! Double-down! All ’er nuthin’! You don’t like it, ta hell with ya.”

Unlike Newsom’s base, rightists would’ve never allowed one of their politicians in a life-or-death election to soft-pedal a potentially damaging issue. And they’d be satisfied with the loss. “We lost, but at least we lost loud and proud. And in the end, ain’t that the real victory?”

No it isn’t.

This is why MAGAs continue to cling to Trump. He was always willing to be loud and proud about saying the right things…he just never followed through with actions that matched the rhetoric. But his base didn’t care.

Again, this is how MAGAs make themselves so manipulatable. They’ll help tank their own candidate just to hear him say the things that make ’em feel good inside, and they’ll ignore a politician’s inaction as long as he says the things that make ’em feel good inside.

Meanwhile, Democrats continue to win on messages engineered to sound moderate and reasonable, only to do exactly what they said they wouldn’t do once elected: “I’m not for defunding the police” (proceeds to defund the police). “I’m not for decriminalizing property crimes” (decriminalizes property crimes). “Critical race theory is a myth; I have no idea what it is” (knows exactly what it is and mandates it after taking office). “I’m not for open borders” (opens border).

Etc.

If there was one bright spot in the recall debacle, it’s this: Exit polling showed that while college-educated whites were the most adamantly pro-Newsom demographic, non-college-educated whites and Hispanic men were the first and second most adamant groups in favor of the recall. Based on exit polls and election results from Hispanic-majority cities that have low numbers of college-educated residents, it appears that just as with Anglo whites, Hispanic males (not females) without degrees (laborers mainly, one can assume) were most likely to want to boot Newsom.

Following the election, the WaPo was forced to admit that “Latino men have been moving steadily to the right,” describing a “tornado of voting drifts” in Hispanic-heavy counties. Strikingly, this shift is due in part to participation from “low propensity” Hispanic voters (“voters who didn’t usually turn out to vote”). WaPo also grudgingly ceded that these Hispanic voters are less likely to be pro-immigration.

Gosh, who was that guy several weeks ago who wrote about how nobody really knows how that community will vote until they actually start voting?

The notion of an alliance of sorts between California’s working-class Anglo and Hispanic males is a tantalizing one.

If only we had a GOP machine willing to explore it (we don’t), and activists willing to do voting and registration scutwork instead of parading around like flag-draped drag queens at burlesque-hall rallies and brawls (we don’t).

We just have the fatalistic alliance.

United for the common bad.

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