During the late ’50s I was on the European tennis circuit and was ranked among the lowest. I was No. 3 in Greece but back then Greece was hardly a tennis power, unlike today (No. 4 among men and 6 among women). In 1957 the American Althea Gibson won Wimbledon and became the first black player to win a major. She and I were friends and used to hit together. During the Rome tournament another friend, the great Italian Nicola Pietrangeli, a three-time winner of the French Open, got into a discussion with Althea about how vast the superiority of men versus women was in tennis. “I’ll bet on Taki against you,” said Nicola, and Althea took the friendly bet.
Word got around and I refused. I was 20 years old and had nothing to gain and everything to lose. There was no way I would throw myself around a court against a woman, or even be seen trying hard. Althea and I knew each other’s game and had played endless sets together, and although she’s no longer around to validate my version, I think I had the edge by far.
I thought about Althea recently when the transgender American swimmer Lia Thomas of the University of Pennsylvania broke and set all the swimming records. She won some events by fourteen seconds while blowing away all competition. Ironically, Lia had spent the first three years competing as a man, and a rather average swimmer at that. If any of you wonder why we separate sports by gender, it is because the differences are obvious. For example, male Kieran Smith of Florida set an American record in the 500-yard freestyle of four minutes, six seconds. Lia Thomas later set an Ivy League record for the 500 of four minutes, 34 seconds—28 seconds slower, which easily translates to half a pool length.
So, the point is that for twenty years Lia built muscle and benefited from the testosterone naturally produced by a male body. That strength does not disappear overnight, nor does it with a year of suppressants. In other words, the effects of being born a biological male offer Thomas a clear-cut edge over the biological females she competes against. Needless to say, the transgender mob does not permit anyone to yell foul. Militant transgender advocates are imposing their agenda with uncompromising zeal. Parents who have raged against teachers for allowing very young children to be coached on becoming a different sex have been called Nazis by the transgender lobby. Actually it is very rare indeed for people to feel mismatched with their sexual anatomy; it occurs in about 0.6 percent of the adult population, yet children are encouraged by teachers who put words on the blackboard such as “nonbinary” and “transgender.”
This kind of indoctrination ended in Germany after 1945 and in Soviet Russia in 1989. I never thought it possible here in these United States, but here we are, with the ACLU actually having demoted religious rights below transgender rights. And it gets worse, with the ACLU recently declaring that religious rights are being used as an excuse to discriminate against others. What I’d like to know is whatever happened to common sense and fair play, two things I was taught early on in my American school?
I’ll tell you in a jiffy: Minorities in America have learned that implacability works. No matter how absurd their demands, they tend to be indulged. No opposing argument is tolerated, and their response to anyone opposing them is to scream abuse at them and call them Nazis. It seems to be working at every level. These so-called minority rights advocates are indulged at every level, especially at school and university.
The irony is that someone like myself, who doesn’t think that a man who transitions into a woman actually is a woman, has never felt the slightest hatred or disgust over that person’s new status. I simply feel it is unfair toward other women on the sports field. A few years ago John McEnroe was quoted saying that if he and his brother played the Williams sisters the latter would be lucky to win a game or two in two sets. I agreed and even wrote something about it. Then some lobby got to “outspoken” Johnny Mac, and he reneged quicker than Biden did on his promise to exit with dignity from Afghanistan.
Everyone in America talks nonstop about freedom, yet when it comes down to freedom of speech it is more about freedom of persecution against anyone that dares to take freedom of speech at face value. Where are all those loud voices of #MeToo in favor of saving women’s sports? The wokes are ruining women’s sports by giving universal participation trophies. The Olympic Committee will always fold to the loudest protest, which at this moment is that of the transgender bullies. Women athletes of the world, unite, you have nothing to lose but unfairly competing against men.
The Week’s Most Galling, Appalling, and Stonewalling Headlines
JEWDUNIT
It’s easy to imagine Anne Frank sitting beside Emmett Till in the great beyond, yelling down at the living, “Can’t you morons please let us rest in peace?”
Ah, but what’s the point of murdered teenagers if you can’t turn them into an industry? Teens are lazy and work-shy enough when they’re alive; the dead ones who refuse to earn their keep are even worse.
Fortunately, that’s not a problem for either Frank or Till, the most profitable dead teens since Ritchie Valens. And last week was Frank’s time to shine.
While speaking at an anti-vax mandate rally in D.C., Robert F. Kennedy Jr. declared that Anne Frank had it better than unvaxxed Americans:
Even in Hitler’s Germany, you could cross the Alps into Switzerland, you could hide in the attic like Anne Frank did. Mechanisms are being put in place so that none of us can run and none of us can hide.
Anne Frank lived in the Netherlands, not Germany, but what’s a minor detail like that to a Kennedy heir who seems to be trying to outdo JFK Jr. in the “fatal nosedive” competition?
The Auschwitz Museum denounced RFK 2.0’s comments in a press release, which ended with a plug for the museum’s new Anne Frank Escape Room Adventure: Figure out the coded diary and unlock the secret annex before poison gas fills the room!
Meanwhile, a new book, The Betrayal of Anne Frank, claims to have solved the whodunit regarding the identity of the person who betrayed the Frank family to the Nazis. According to the author, a Jewish notary ratted them out, apparently because Anne wouldn’t let him stamp her diary.
The New York Times condemned the book, because surely no Jew would’ve ever betrayed another Jew during the Holocaust.
Cut to George Soros nervously looking around, eyes darting from side to side, saying, “Yeah, sure, that’s right, see? Jews never betrayed Jews during the Holocaust, see? And don’t you forget it, see?”
MEAT(HEADS) AND POTATOES
There are two types of people: those who like Neil Young’s music and those with good hearing.
Last week, the whiny relic penned an open letter to Spotify demanding that the streamer stop carrying the Joe Rogan podcast. Young threatened to remove his music from the service if his demands weren’t met. According to the jowly has-been, the Rogan podcast (Spotify’s most successful show) is “spreading fake information about vaccines.”
“Please act on this immediately today and keep me informed of the time schedule,” Young dictated to his secretary (a hamster) before storming off into a broom closet and angrily remarking, “This isn’t Massey Hall!”
The irony about Young’s “protest” is that Young himself has a history of spreading medical disinfo. In the 1980s, he went on a bizarre crusade against gays working in public places, because he thought you could get AIDS by touching something a gay person had touched.
“You go to the supermarket and you see a faggot behind the fucking cash register, you don’t want him to handle your potatoes.”
That’s an actual quote.
This summer I hear the drumming,
I’m dead from a poe-tay-toe.
Young was also a booster of Charles Manson, recommending the cult leader to music-industry execs. He even bought the dude a motorcycle! Manson called Young the only person who ever truly believed in him.
So, Neil Young championed Charles Manson and thought you could get AIDS from a potato that’d been “touched by a faggot.”
By all means, trust this guy’s instincts.
And while Spotify responded to Young’s threat by acting like he doesn’t exist (which everyone else had been doing anyway), that surely won’t slow the man’s golden-years activism.
Next stop: his local supermarket. “Get rid of your AIDS potatoes or I won’t let you play my songs on the Muzak.”
ART IMITATES STRIFE
In their quest to make New York even less livable, two state senators, Brad Hoylman and Jamaal Bailey, have proposed a new law that would prevent the use of rap lyrics as evidence against rappers who boast about their crimes in song.
The law would bar prosecutors from bringing up a rapper’s admission of guilt, as long as said admission had been uttered as part of the accused’s “art.”
“The right to free speech is enshrined in our federal and state constitutions,” Bailey told the press. “The admission of art as criminal evidence only serves to erode this fundamental right.”
The idea that a confession can’t be used in court as long as it’s delivered as “art” opens up a whole new opportunity for fellowship between blacks and Jews. Black criminals can hire Jewish gag-writers to teach them how to deliver confessions as a comedy monologue, thus making them inadmissible under the new law.
Suspect: “There’s a joke about a guy named DeMarquis who robbed a bodega at Washington and 178th. Didja hear it?”
Detective: “No.”
Suspect: “Well, that cashier I shot in the face certainly did!”
Wakawakawaka!
Suspect: “You know why I punched that Chink woman at Tremont station?”
Detective: “Why?”
Suspect: “She asked me for some kung-POW!”
Boyoyoyoing!!!
Suspect: “Hey, here’s a hilarious one! I looted an entire Walmart. Cleaned the place out!”
Detective: “I don’t find that funny.”
Suspect: “I guess it loses something in the retailing.”
Ba-dum bum!
Suspect: “Yo, how many dead UberEats drivers do it take to change a light bulb?”
Detective: “I have no idea.”
Suspect: “Definitely not three…found that out last night!”
Wah-wah-waaaaaah!
WHAT XI REALLY WANTS TO DO IS DIRECT
Last week, Chinese basketball fans pelted black player Sonny Weems (who plays for the Guangdong Southern Tigers) with racial insults (Weems, to his credit, resisted the urge to shout back, “Hey, with me on the team it’s the LONGdong Southern Tigers”).
If the Chinese get that worked up about a black basketball player, one can imagine how they feel about the fact that Hollywood these days only seems interested in churning out films with black leads.
As a result, the CCP is rereleasing older American hits, but the problem is that a lot of those films are from a time when movies could at least pretend to be somewhat anarchic and not single-mindedly obsessed with social justice.
The Chinese, ever practical, have decided that the best way to deal with “problematic” American films is to reedit them so that they have pro-authoritarian endings.
Canny film buffs discovered last week that David Fincher’s Fight Club was reedited by Chinese censors so that Tyler Durden’s terrorist attack is thwarted and he’s taken to a gulag.
Funny as that may seem, in 1955 CBS forced Alfred Hitchcock to do the same thing with Alfred Hitchcock Presents. Hitch’s stories often involved the bad guy getting away. The network let the stories be shot as written, but then Hitch would have to appear at the end to reassure the audience that the villains were eventually caught. In the show’s adaptation of Roald Dahl’s short story “Lamb to the Slaughter,” in which a wife bludgeons her husband with a leg of lamb and then serves it to the investigating officers so that they eat the murder weapon, the network made Hitch add a coda where he said, “But soon enough the detectives realized what happened and arrested the widow.”
1955. So the Chinese are only 67 years behind us. Yet, as Hollywood’s most coveted audience, perhaps it’s time for filmmakers to go back to those good old days and start producing the kind of antiseptic content the CCP can be at peace with.
Like, remake Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner.
But lose the black guy.
WILD BLACK YONDER
Last week it was revealed that the U.S. Air Force repeatedly reinstated a female airwoman after she quit time and again during training. The sista was being groomed to be the first female to make it through the USAF’s elite special tactics officer training, but the trainee turned out to be “special” in all the wrong ways. During a land navigation event, she “self-eliminated” (that’s military jargon for “quit”; it’s also Secret Service jargon for why Biden needs a new pair of pants ASAP). The black trainee also quit twice during “water confidence sessions” in a swimming pool and there’s no joke that can be written here that’s any better than the one you just thought of yourself.
It was also revealed that the woman was only in the elite program in the first place because training standards had been lowered just for her.
Normally when a trainee quits they’re removed from the program. The trainee in question, Morgan Mosby, quit thrice, and leadership kept bringing her back, whether she wanted to return or not. Because today the medals aren’t for skill, bravery, or service but affirmative action, social justice, and reading Ibram X. Kendi books. And graduating a black female special tactics officer would earn Air Force brass the coveted “Kamala Cackle,” the highest honor that can be bestowed upon career military pencil-pushers.
Initially, USAF Lieutenant General James Slife praised Mosby and condemned the airman who leaked the story of her preferential treatment. But now that the press, and the GOP, are on the case, Slife is promising an investigation.
Funny enough, none of the media accounts mention Mosby’s race, and the USAF has removed her profile with her photo. That’s counterproductive. Stress that she’s black and the GOP will back off, lest they risk losing Baltimore in the next election.
As for Mosby, she’s blaming the entire thing on men who are “out to get her,” suggesting that she’s far more suited to a career in politics than the military.
GSTAAD—Dinner parties are no longer verboten here, so I posed a question to some youngsters my son had over: Did any of them feel morally entitled to their privilege? The problem with discussing privilege is it turns in circles, original thoughts get lost, and what emerges says more about those conversing than the subject at hand. Ditto when I posed the question. There were no straightforward answers.
Let’s face it: Privilege is so enjoyable the beneficiaries are mostly seen as undeserving, spoiled lightweights. By the underprivileged, that is. Envy has always been around, as has the urge to take away the wealth from those not seen as having earned it. After the defeat of communism, socialism has become the goal, and a war is being waged against the affluent led by the American mainstream media and academia. In this, hacks and academics are aided and abetted by Silicon Valley freaks who pose as humanity’s saviors, not among those reaping the benefits of economic inequality.
My son’s friends did not surprise with their answers. They were all in their late 30s, well-off, educated, and girl-crazy. And they kept it very light: “Privilege means an immense pressure to be incredibly charming and funny. I don’t think the strain is sufficiently recognized,” said one charming Italian. A Frenchman decided that privilege is literally being above the law. A Monaco resident said that “an American once told me he’d be able to perform wonders with my name,” and that was the last time he spoke to Jeffrey Epstein. The one I liked the most came from an Italian, a noble one at that, Raimondo Gaetani, nephew of a great friend of mine no longer with us: “The bottom line is no one does anything worthwhile with their privilege.” The dinner deteriorated as we all got pissed and one youngster proclaimed to “this privileged group that if someone has slept rough for the last six months, he is a bum.” The one that intrigued me was when I rang the Austrian Countess Saint Julien-Wallsee, who happens to be my daughter: “I have two screaming children and a large freezing house and no time for your mind games.”
Okay, enough already, as they say in the Bagel. Personally I don’t care to comment on privilege because I see it as the luck of the draw. Just as some are born ugly and others beautiful, some weak and others strong, some smart and some dumb, Lady Luck is to blame. But is there luck involved as to who among us reaps the benefits of our economic system? The left screams to high heaven that the game is bent on the side of the few. Serious people know otherwise. Enterprise and hard work will almost always win, even under communism or African dictatorships. The trouble is that envious lefties depict enterprise and success as privilege, and when was the last time you saw a movie where the rich character was a goodie?
Never mind. It gets better. Those who are lucky enough to inherit must be listed as the baddies. At least according to a hack writing in the Bagel and slotting them under the “ostentatious bad rich,” as opposed to the “good rich” who earned their moola. From experience I can state that ostentation is a nouveau riche symptom, not the other way round. Economic disparity exists everywhere, nowhere more than in China, Russia, and the United States. Which brings me to the point I’m trying to make.
In the January issue of the best monthly in America, The Spectator World, Freddy Gray and Dominic Green have come up with a real winner. An article by Joel Kotkin signaling the end of democracy really hit home. Unlike the ludicrous Bagel Times that lures readers via envy—by pointing out a fabricated sense of victimhood of the not-so-rich—Kotkin points out how a very few multibillionaires (down to 26 from around 400) own half of the world’s assets. The writer calls it the end of democracy, and I agree. The digital economy is 90 percent controlled by a few overlords and “curates” the news. Small businesses are disappearing, including half of black-owned enterprises. According to the writer, climate-change policies will nurture the new autocracy with huge opportunities for mega-billionaires like Elon Musk and the three witches, Dorsey, Bezos, and Zuckerberg.
The new policy of “degrowth” will hit the poor and enrich the already mega-rich. Surveillance technology to keep us on the up-and-up will make us Westerners be more like our Chinese cousins in no time. Big Brother is here and he’s staying. While fools like the Bagel Times and the networks are forever chasing nonexistent racists, our digital elites are anointing themselves as our masters, deciding what news we are allowed to read and hear while they cement their power. The green economy that is being shoved down our throats does not have the technology to sustain it. But the Silicon Valley oligarchs are fixing the news in order to achieve their top-down progress.
Although I am what the French call “parti pris,” I think this is the most important article on what is really going on that I’ve read since the Rolling Stones still had their own teeth. The freaks are pulling a number on us while we sit around discussing privilege. We can continue the talk once we’re all resting in the concentration camps the freaks will install us in one day soon.
We live in a society of lies. Our democracy is no longer a democracy, schools are no longer centers of education, the media no longer inform but spout propaganda, health care no longer focuses on curing people but on injecting them with experimental vaccines. Our governments do not protect us but have only one goal: to frighten us into submission so that they can obliterate free markets, individual liberty, and free will.
When I became a member of the Dutch Parliament in 2017 for the Conservative Forum for Democracy, I was optimistic about the future. Until 2019, it looked as if the West was going through a Conservative Spring. Our electorates seemed to have enough of mass immigration, the undermining of national sovereignty, and climate alarmism. We witnessed Brexit, the election of Trump, the electoral triumphs of populist parties such as the Lega Nord in Italy, the Sweden Democrats, the Alternative for Germany, and others, such as my own. And then, all of a sudden, there was corona, which became the perfect alibi to turn the whole world into a totalitarian bio-security state and trample our fundamental liberties.
Since the 1970s, our society has become ever more globalist. This facilitated the growth of giant multinational corporations that are more powerful than national governments. In recent years, we have seen the collusion of Big Business and Big Governance. Since 1971, Big Business has convened with politicians at the World Economic Forum (WEF), working out strategies to increase the power of both Big Business and Big Governance. Their mutual enemy is the nation-state, because national sovereignty and national borders not only safeguard local democracy and self-governance but also protect small and medium-size companies against multinational giants.
Before 2020, we knew that the ruling powers were pushing transnationalism through the promotion of mass immigration, the dismantling of the nation-state, and the invention of so-called looming catastrophes, such as climate change, which allegedly need to be tackled on a supranational level. But then, a new element was added. The so-called pandemic became the perfect alibi for what Klaus Schwab, the chairman of the WEF, calls “the Great Reset.” By 2030, the regime—this conglomerate of Big Business and Big Governance—hopes to introduce a neo-Communist, digitally controlled totalitarian society in the whole world. They try to sell it to us as a utopia in which, to quote the WEF, “you will own nothing and you will be happy.” We, the people, will own nothing, while they, the ruling elite, own everything!
As soon as the threat of the virus will be over, the regime will find another alibi to curb our freedoms. Perhaps by increasing tensions with Russia, perhaps by intensifying climate hysteria and introducing climate lockdowns, perhaps with a cyberattack or some false-flag terrorist attack to shut our internet connections down. They will do whatever it takes to introduce their totalitarian control state by 2030. It is not difficult to see what the next steps will be: the permanent introduction of QR codes, the abolition of cash money, and biometric authentication through which everything we do will be permanently controlled.
This is not a conspiracy theory; the proof is there. Recently, one of my party’s parliamentarians unearthed several documents in which the WEF thanks Dutch government ministers for their “contribution to the Great Reset.” It turns out that the Dutch government has even made legally binding contracts with the WEF, virtually outsourcing certain competences to the WEF. This is truly staggering, because the WEF is a private organization. I am certain that similar contracts have also been made between the WEF and other Western governments, such as Britain’s, and perhaps even America’s.
One of the WEF’s initiatives, supported and cofunded by the Dutch and Canadian governments, is a project called Known Traveller Digital Identity (KTDI), aimed at the identification of travelers with biometric data. The KTDI is presented to the public as a method to make traveling easier by making passports superfluous, but it is likely to be used as a tool to control the movement of citizens. Another WEF project, also funded by the Dutch government, is the Platform for Accelerating the Circular Economy (PACE). It aims to “catalyze leadership from CEOs, government ministers, and heads of civil society organizations who have a clear vision and the power to make things happen.” Everything is top down. Those with “a clear vision and the power to make things happen” are going to decide for us—the hoi polloi, who “own nothing but will be happy.”
A new political alliance is urgently needed. We have recently launched The Movement, a series of videos in English, and Forum for Democracy International. Unfortunately, even some of the member parties of the network of European patriot parties, to which Lega Nord, Marine Le Pen’s party, and others belong, fail to see the danger we are currently in. They fight mass immigration and climate alarmism, they defend national sovereignty. This is great, but it is not enough. Our priority must be to oppose the Great Reset and the dark force behind it, the WEF, with all our might.
Klaus Schwab, hailed by globalist would-be dictators such as Joe Biden, Boris Johnson, Emmanuel Macron, Justin Trudeau, Prince Charles, and Bill Gates, is Europe’s greatest admirer of Chinese Communist Party dictator Xi Jinping. These would-be dictators want to turn hitherto democratic Western states into totalitarian regimes modeled after China.
Instead of handing over the means to control the citizens to the state, we should liberate them from state control. That is the great reset that we need. This is why my party has begun to build parallel structures. We are going to establish our own woke-free schools and universities, our own health care centers, our own housing estates; we want to introduce our own cryptocurrency and perhaps create our own trade unions. We have set up our own publishing company and we are currently creating an app, called Forumland, through which our 60,000 members—we are the largest party in the Netherlands in terms of party membership—will be able to contact each other and set up initiatives from the bottom up. The battle for the sovereignty of our nation, the democratic rights of our people, the freedoms and values of our society, the heart and soul of our civilization, can only be won by moving beyond politics.
My wife and I lingered too long over lunch and missed our train from Nîmes to Paris; not by very much, not by more than thirty seconds in fact, but here really was an illustration of that old saw, that a miss is as good as a mile. How all occasions did inform against us! There were traffic jams, roads closed, and the nearest entrance to the station was under repair so we had to walk a distance to enter by another door. Really, it wasn’t our fault that we missed the train (nothing ever is our fault), though naturally we blamed each other.
Our ticket was non-exchangeable and nonrefundable, of course, so we had to buy another. By the time we got as far as Lyon, we realized that we had left something behind in Nîmes, so we alighted at Lyon Part-Dieu—a station recommendable only to those who wish to see at a glance the true hideousness of modern civilization—and bought a ticket back to Nîmes.
Unfortunately, there are now two stations in that small city, and our ticket was for the one we didn’t want to go to. We had to take a connecting train to the right station, after forty minutes of waiting. By the time we got to Nîmes proper, it was too late to get a train back to Paris, and therefore we had to stay overnight in a hotel. We bought tickets back to Paris the following day, and by the time we had completed our journey we had spent enough to cross the Atlantic and back.
But in retrospect the ludicrous and tiring episode had a positive, even an enjoyable and instructive, side.
The hotel in which we stayed was about a hundred yards from the station, across an empty square in a new and completely characterless modern development. The hotel itself was one of those cheap, entirely prefabricated establishments that are the same from the Arctic to the Atacama. The bathroom was of molded plastic, the window metal framed and immovable, the faint attempt at decoration mass-produced, the color scheme that of a thousand such hostelries.
The nearest restaurant, at the far end of the square a hundred yards away, was large and cavernous, the tables dotted about like islets in a Pacific archipelago, and on the walls (silent, thank God) were huge liquid crystal screens relaying a contest in a sport with which I was unfamiliar but which I surmised to be handball, the socially distanced crowd waving Croatian flags and behaving as if highly enthused by the spectacle. The dinner, I am glad to say, was better than I had expected, or perhaps I should say feared.
From our hotel bedroom, insulated, cocooned from all intrusions such as noise and changes in temperature that might enter from the outside world, we could observe a few people below walking across the square, almost all of them singly. They seemed to be as isolated as if they had been in solitary confinement. The lights of the square towered above them on metal poles, spreading triangles of bright yellowish illumination below. The only attempt at giving character to the space was a few hundred-year-old olive trees, replanted at regular intervals. But it takes more than a few such adornments to give such a place (modernist architecture being, after all, ideologically opposed to adornment) any kind of character except anonymity.
Rather strangely, however, we found this anonymity came as a relief after the travails and frustrations of our day. The lack of social contact—the lack of possibility of social contact—was relaxing (our brief and instrumental interactions with the hotel receptionist and waiter in the restaurant hardly counted). We had to make no effort to present ourselves to others, we had no roles to play, no need to be polite or mannerly, no compulsion to search our minds for something to say or to appear interesting. It was all so effortlessly and wonderfully impersonal.
Looking onto the square were two large apartment buildings where people lived as if in cells—comfortable cells, no doubt, but cells nonetheless. Although they lived in close proximity to one another, I doubt that there was much social interaction between them. They went to work in the morning and came home in the evening, as exhausted as we had been, not wanting to make any further effort that day. Assuming that they had little option but to work hard, not necessarily in jobs that engaged their interest (to be busy but bored is surely a terrible fate). I could see the attraction of this cellular life, no doubt interspersed by episodes of wild socializing and holidaymaking.
I have experienced before the attraction of an anonymous cellular, almost monastic, existence at least for a time. Once, for example, I arrived at London Airport two days before my flight and decided to stay in an airport hotel rather than go home. (My finest achievement in extreme punctuality was my arrival at the Royal Society of Medicine where I was due to give a talk. The time, the day of the month, and the month of the year were right, only the year was wrong. My talk was for the following year, and in this instance I did not elect to stay in a hotel until it was due.)
Not to have to talk to anybody for two days, what a luxury! An even greater luxury was not having to listen to what anyone said. Silence, blessed silence! Most talk, after all, is pure bilge, verbiage to fill the gaps in time. This applies as much to ourselves as to others, if only we stopped to listen to ourselves. A couple of days of silence is like a detoxification of the mind, much as hypochondriacs undergo detoxification of their bodies by enemas and starvation diets—except that detoxification of the mind is much more necessary than that of the bowel.
What would we have done with the day we “wasted” by going back and forth to Nîmes? No doubt we should have filled it with the unnecessary clutter of our lives. Thank goodness we missed our train, then! At least I was able to read a book by an author about whom I am soon to give a talk—this year, I think.
Theodore Dalrymple’s latest book is Around the World in the Cinemas of Paris, Mirabeau Press.
Gov. Ron DeSantis is pushing a bill through the Florida legislature to put a stop to the modern pedagogy of making little girls cry because they’re white. The bill, called “Stop the Wrongs to Our Kids and Employees Act (WOKE),” prohibits classroom instruction that contradicts these concepts:
“No race is inherently superior to another race”;
“An individual, by virtue of his or her race or sex, does not bear responsibility for actions committed in the past by other members of the same race or sex”;
“An individual should not be made to feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress on account of his or her race.”
The left has been having a sneer-fest over the proposed law, howling that it protects “white people” from feeling “uncomfortable.” SNOWFLAKES!
E.g.:
“A bill pushed by Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis that would prohibit public schools and private businesses from making white people feel ‘discomfort’ when they teach students or train employees about discrimination in the nation’s past …” — The Associated Press (emphasis added)
“The right likes to talk so much about, you know, snowflakes. It seems like they may be raising snowflakes because if they think people are going to be uncomfortable by the actual facts — facts are uncomfortable.” — CNN’s Don Lemon
“Ron DeSantis and his GOP allies are pushing a bill … that would prohibit public schools [from making] white people squirm. Those poor, wittle babies.
“Their feelings are hurting. Some poor, wittle white people are uncomfortable about the hundreds of years of racism and hate that built this nation.” — Laura Washington, Chicago Sun-Times
(Saving the best for last …)
“[H]e’s trying to make it illegal, Governor Ron DeSantis, to teach history that would make white people uncomfortable. Does that law include saying you can’t make black people feel uncomfortable or indigenous people? The history of indigenous and African Americans could make one uncomfortable? Is that illegal too, or is it just white people?” — MSNBC’s Joy Ann Reid
To know the answer to Joy Ann’s question, you’d have to actually read the bill. Or an article about the bill. Or commentary on an article about the bill. Joy Ann Reid: highly literate and well-informed Harvard graduate.
But, duh: A bill prohibiting the teaching of race hatred will primarily prevent the teaching of white hatred for the simple reason that it’s the only race we’re allowed to hate. Not merely allowed to hate, but taught to hate, encouraged to hate, paid to hate.
We’re now entering the sixth decade of open, widespread, official discrimination against white people on the basis of their race. Even the Asians suing Harvard dare not stress the humungous advantage given to blacks and Hispanics. No, their beef is about white applicants getting preferential treatment over Asians.
This is odd, to say the least. According to the plaintiffs’ own expert witness, an Asian with a 25% chance of admission to Harvard would increase his chances to 36% if he were white — but to 77% if Hispanic, and to 95% if black.
Asians sure have assimilated to our culture!
Everybody’s copacetic with the idea that universities discriminate against white people — in abject defiance of the clear language of our civil rights laws. They have done so, loud and proud, at least since 1973, when Allan Bakke was rejected from the University of California, Davis, School of Medicine, because he was white.
In fact, no one under the age of 50 has ever lived in an America where universities and other elite institutions have not discriminated against whites. Three generations of hating whites are enough.
School districts around the country teach white children that they were born racist and assign books like, “Not My Idea: A Book About Whiteness,” that portrays “whiteness” as a contract with Satan.
So yes, a race-neutral law that prohibits teaching race hatred will, in practice, prohibit teaching hatred of whites because that’s the only race-hate that’s taught.
Liberals jeer at whites who object to this constant disparagement, calling them “poor, wittle babies.” Does the left have any self-awareness at all?
A 6-year-old girl is a total pussy if she can’t take a little abuse for being white — at a school her parents are paying for. But our entire country has been turned upside down for the past half-century to prevent any other race from experiencing a fleeting moment of discomfort.
Historic Confederate statues are torn down and melted; newspapers refuse to identify the race of criminals — or even show photos of the arrestees; the Oscars will not consider a movie for Best Picture that does not have 30% non-whites.
Otherwise, black people might feel uncomfortable.
Professor Amy Wax of the University of Pennsylvania Law School is routinely threatened with suspension or firing from her tenured position for stating facts about black students’ performance. Her remarks make black people feel uncomfortable.
Hey, where’s the rush to review Charles Murray’s recent book Facing Reality about black crime and I.Q.? Nope, might make black people uncomfortable.
A few years ago, Kansas City officials were advised not to impose a curfew in response to the violent mobs of black teenagers descending on a shopping plaza because, as the black mayor said, it would “make a lot of black kids angry.” His remark inspired the title of Colin Flaherty’s book about black crime, Don’t Make the Black Kids Angry — a book that is currently banned from Amazon. It might make black people uncomfortable.
Anti-whiteness books are flooding the grade schools, but you aren’t allowed to spend your own money to purchase books on Amazon that make some people “uncomfortable.” Not only Flaherty’s book, but:
— Ryan Anderson’s When Harry Became Sally: Responding to the Transgender Moment — might make transgenders uncomfortable.
— Jared Taylor’s If We Do Nothing, as well as two books he contributed to: Race Against Time and Face to Face With Race — might make black people uncomfortable.
— The Kindle edition of the widely praised 1973 dystopian novel by French author Jean Raspail, Camp of the Saints — might make third worlders uncomfortable.
— David Cole’s rollicking autobiography, Republican Party Animal — makes Debra Messing uncomfortable.
The FBI allowed the 9/11 attack to happen by blowing off an Arizona agent’s warning that a lot of Arabs were enrolled in flight school. Three thousand Americans had to die because noticing Arabs in flight school might make some people uncomfortable.
Last week, a Muslim terrorist, Malik Faisal Akram, seized a Texas synagogue and held four hostages for 10 hours. The media universally identified Akram as: “British man.” He didn’t even call himself “British”! A week later, the Anti-Defamation League’s Jonathan Greenblatt went on MSNBC and tried to suggest “Republicans” were responsible for the attack. The truth might make Muslims uncomfortable.
A virus that originated in China cannot be called anything with “China” in the name. That might make Asians uncomfortable.
Before we go, here’s another “actual fact,” as Don Lemon put it, and “facts are uncomfortable” (especially for the black Harvard grad on MSNBC who can’t read a bill): By Harvard’s own admission, nearly 60% of the black students it admits are there only because they are black.
It’s so great that liberals have finally turned against snowflakes so we can discuss “actual facts” again!
A curious example of the power of social trends on thought is that two years into the Covid pandemic, nobody of any influence has yet bothered to launch a campaign to persuade Americans to do the one obvious non-pharmaceutical intervention that would make Americans healthier whether the virus stays or goes: lose some weight.
Instead, 2022 has seen new gains in the long, grinding campaign to make the fat another of those privileged classes whose self-image cannot be affronted.
For example, Nike, with its $3.6 billion ad budget, tweeted out under the title “Styles for Self Love” a picture of a 250-pound black woman dressed head to toe in Nike garb and looking mighty pleased with herself.
Similarly, Self magazine devoted its “Future of Fitness” issue to Maoist-style self-criticism, with articles like “The Relentless Reality of Anti-Fatness in Fitness.” (Well, yeah, that’s kind of the point of all that exercising: to not be fat.) Not surprisingly, that article was also illustrated with a photo of another smug 250-pound black woman.
Yet, it’s not a secret that heaviness is a major risk factor for both Covid and a host of other ailments. The Centers for Disease Control advises:
Having obesity may triple the risk of hospitalization due to a COVID-19 infection.
But the idea of making yourself more resilient against Covid (not to mention heart attack, stroke, diabetes, and so forth) by dropping ten or twenty pounds has not caught on.
Why not? Unlike the unvaccinated, who are widely seen as worthy of hate and unlikely to ever be powerful enough to get revenge, the fat are increasingly to be feared.
It’s not that the fat rank terribly high on the pyramid of intersectionality…yet. But you can imagine that they might someday, and thus you can foresee yourself having your career canceled in, say, 2029 over some fat jokes you told in 2022.
You never know. I mean, did you foresee in 2013 that dudes in dresses would soon be sacred? Granted, the average fat person isn’t as tirelessly diligent in forcing the rest of us to acknowledge and submit to his or her preferred self-image as is a heterosexual man in a frock with one tasteful strand of pearls. But there are a lot more fat folks than there are ex-men.
So, better not to say anything for your permanent record.
Of course, it’s by no means assured that the overweight will ever garner one of those much-coveted spots high on the totem pole of wokeness.
One factor that is likely to retard the rise of fat power is that few members of the American Establishment are personally fat. Indeed, they haven’t been for a long time. I can recall finding it puzzling around 1980 when my father (born 1917) would launch into a populist diatribe against the “fat cats” since few of the rich were overweight then, or now. I believe he was thinking of J.P. Morgan (1837–1913).
That helps account for the paradox of how few famous people still in the prime of their careers have died of Covid. (See this Wikipedia list of people who are notable enough to have a Wikipedia page and who expired of Covid. Count how many you’ve heard of in the past decade.)
One cluster of still-active minor celebrities who died of Covid are several anti-vaccine talk-radio hosts. Perhaps that’s because radio is one of the few performing careers where you don’t have to watch your weight.
Among whites, blue states like California tend to be skinnier than red states like Texas. For example, the state with the fittest residents is likely to be high-altitude Colorado, which at the beginning of the century was the pride of the Republican-leaning states but has since trended Democratic.
So, the fat set off alarms in the media that in a rematch they might vote for Trump rather than Biden (who, for all his flaws, has managed to stay practically the same weight his entire half-century in the national eye).
On the other hand, black women rank very near the top of the intersectional heap, and they are the heaviest of them all.
Even among American women these days, African-American women are particularly obese. In the most recent federal NHANES study from 2017 to 2018 (NHANES periodically measures the girth of Americans so the clothing industry can know how much to inflate their sizes), 57 percent of black women were classified as obese (BMI of 30 or greater), compared to 44 percent of Hispanic women, 40 percent of whites, and 17 percent of Asians.
In the previous NHANES report for 2015–2016, the average weight of black women was 186 pounds versus white women at 171. This is age-adjusted to take into account that whites are older on average. White women (averaging 5′ 4.3″) are 0.3″ taller than black women, so it’s fair to compare weights.
Among the shorter races, Latinas average 169 pounds and Asians only 132.
Black men, however, may be in better shape than white men, weighing 198 pounds compared to 202 for whites (who are, however, a fraction of an inch taller on average.)
While the average white woman is 31 pounds lighter than the average white man, the average black woman is only twelve pounds lighter than the average black man.
This quantifies a general problem that black women face in the modern marriage market in which interracial marriage is not only accepted, but is increasingly promoted in television commercials.
Black men don’t tend to be the marrying type, but among the more middle-class black men who are, they tend to attract more interest from women of other races than middle-class black women elicit from men of other races.
As I pointed out 25 years ago in my “Is Love Colorblind?” article, in the 1990 Census black men were about 2.5 times as likely to be married to a white woman as black women were to be wed to a white man. So, black women tend to be the biggest losers from the growth of interracial relationships.
A fair amount of the current craziness in American life is due to black women feeling threatened by women of other races, which, according to the custom of the time, they must blame on our society’s all-purpose whipping boys, white men.
Black women might be happiest under the old antimiscegenation laws outlawed by the Supreme Court in 1967, but that’s inconceivable to the contemporary mind. So, educated black women have tended to ardently adopt Foucaultian social constructionism because it seems to assure them that black men can be badgered into changing their tastes away from skinnier white (not to mention Asian) women. Hence, during the Racial Reckoning, black women demand to be admired for their fatness, as they would be in some African countries.
(It’s hard to know what M. Foucault himself would say about the widespread belief in 2022 that he proved that, come the revolution, fat women will attract handsome men: Personally, he never bothered to deconstruct his own sexual proclivities, which killed him via AIDS.)
Still, black women’s desire to have their body shape and hair type be more appreciated isn’t a wholly ridiculous hope. Different looks have gone in and out of fashion: After WWI, for instance, flat-chested flappers were all the rage, while after WWII, voluptuous Italian movie goddesses were the ideal.
More radically, in Mauritania on the southern edge of the Sahara, extreme fatness is the feminine ideal, with girls being force-fed up to 16,000 calories per day by professional “fatteners” to make them more attractive to suitors.
Perhaps much of many white women’s current enthusiasm for all things black and antiwhite is motivated by their hoping black women will serve as the cutting edge of Fat Liberation? Maybe white women are enthusiastic about black women being presently idealized as the epitome of beauty because they sense that if the media can force us to adore large-and-in-charge black women, then they can ease off on the dieting themselves, without having to worry about competition from Asian women?
One of my favorite YouTube channels is called Fascinating Horror. It’s a British dude who narrates tales of little-known mass-casualty events over the centuries. I like the channel because occasionally he’ll dredge up an incident I’ve never heard of (and I’m pretty well-versed in historical mass-casualty events). Like, I never knew about the douchebag circus clown whose idiotic antics inadvertently led to 59 kids drowning in Yarmouth in 1845.
Now I know, and it gives me yet another reason to find clowns unfunny.
But the maddening thing about the channel is that the guy always has to end on an optimistic note. “Although 22 children were burned alive in the Sacramento Farrell’s, because of this incident mankind learned to never again fly a vintage Canadian jet fighter into a crowded ice cream parlor. Those children did not die in vain.”
Sometimes there’s no happy ending, and it’s patronizing to tack one on.
I try to never do that in this column. If the news is grim, I feel no urge to paint a smiley face on it.
Like kids enjoying ice cream, we’re at our weakest when we’re lost in optimism and oblivious to the threats nearby (like “There’s a dumbass clumsily trying to fly a vintage Canadian jet fighter right across the street—this might end poorly”).
At present, the right’s feeling confident. Biden’s approval rating is so low, he’d lose in a matchup with a cancerous tumor, and everyone, right and left, just kinda accepts that in November a RED WAVE is comin’! The GOP will reclaim Congress and all the clouds that lour’d upon our house, in the deep bosom of the ocean buried.
Just like the midterm “red wave” of 2010 that “shellacked” Obammer. At the time, I was a big swingin’ dick with Friends of Abe (FOA), the moneyed Hollywood GOP org. Oh, how we partied the night of the “shellacking.” John Boehner himself flew out to Bel Air to thank us personally for our support.
And with the GOP back in control of Congress, America lived happily ever after.
Except…the Boehner Congress turned out to be a giant turd of neocon nothingness. And eight years later, Nancy Pelosi once again held the gavel, the Boehner “triumph” long dissipated like a dog fart in the wind.
Yes, the GOP will almost certainly retake the House in November. But it will do so because of Biden’s foul-ups, not the GOP’s “vision.” Like in 2010, Republican victory will be based on voters rejecting a disliked president. The GOP will win because it’s “the other guy,” not necessarily “the better guy.”
And the cycle from 2010 will repeat.
I bring up FOA for a reason: It’s a microcosm of the right in general. To begin with, FOA existed and functioned for one reason only—a rich dude and his money. Gary Sinise, at the time making huge bucks on CSI: NY, funded everything. There was a lame attempt circa 2011 to institute a “dues” system, but it didn’t last. One guy, one funder, made everything happen, from the banquets to the bars to flying the likes of Antonin Scalia, Condi Rice, and Dick Cheney to L.A. and putting them up in the finest hotels.
As such, our focus reflected that of our funder: FOA was first and foremost a neocon enterprise. “Support the troops, bomb the villages, drive over the IEDs, and give pretty ribbons to the limbless vets who lumber back.”
There were pro-lifers, and the occasional Ron Paul guy (closeted, because FOA was nothing if not Israel First!). But FOA was above all else an “invade the world/invite the world” org.
In July 2015 Donald Trump addressed the group just a few weeks after he’d announced his presidential run and uttered his infamous “rapists and criminals” comments. The timing was pure chance; the appearance had been scheduled months in advance. But, as it turned out, Trump’s FOA talk became the first big event—besieged by the first mass protest—following his entry into the race.
It was almost unheard of for FOA to host a non-amnesty politician. We were all about bleeding red and melting pots. Yet now, any Abes willing to brave the protests on Sunset Boulevard and the police lockdown of the entire hotel where the event took place due to the threat posed by violent anti-Trumpers would be treated to an FOA first: a candidate saying, “Shut the border and deport every illegal.”
Ann Coulter was in attendance that night, as she had a proprietary interest. Trump had taken what would become his winning platform directly from her, and there she was, like George Martin trying to keep the Beatles focused on music and not distracted by drugs or Yokos (and like Martin, she’d eventually lose that battle).
The best moment of the evening came when Trump declared that the U.S. should’ve invaded Mexico instead of Iraq. That was a direct face-shot to the group’s neocons, and in the aftermath of that speech, Sinise walked away from the org and took his money with him. With no controlling millionaire at the helm, the group fractured. Because whereas Boehner had asked nothing more of us than “be happy for our victory and don’t demand specifics,” Trump (again, based on Coulter’s platform) directly challenged the group to take a specific stand on an existential threat.
The neocons fled, and FOA dissolved. But to blame it entirely on “neoconism” is too simplistic. FOA was always comprised of people with no vision beyond a desire to have beer blasts (we were the literal Stonecutters) and brag about “wins” that were of no real value. Every new celebrity, major or minor, who became a member would be cause for celebration (especially if they were black). “Oh wow, we got the guy who played Theo’s friend in the Rudy Spills Grape Juice episode of The Cosby Show? We’re winning! Conservatives are the cool club!”
Trump dared the group to take up an actual cause, and many rejected the call to action. And of those who accepted the challenge, most would eventually forget about it the moment Trump did, mindlessly finding themselves once again championing irrelevant “coolness” over specific policies (“Trump just hired John Bolton and put Jared in charge of the border, but hey—look at this amazing meme of Trump pissing on weeping leftists! We’re winning!”).
When Sinise vamoosed, he handed the reins to a failed filmmaker (who’d never actually filmed anything) named Jeremy Boreing. Boreing didn’t possess the vision to make a movie, let alone steer a political org. He was a teat-suckler, and when Sinise closed his shirt, Boreing went searching for a new bare bosom, which he found in billionaire petroleum barons the Wilks brothers and their Daily Wire. Boreing shuttered FOA and joined Ben Shapiro as sucklings for new patrons with a narrow focus (for the Wilks, it’s fracking).
There are two takeaways here. The first is a point I’ve made many times in this column: Grassroots activists are of limited value. It’s always the money guys. The Tea Party was the Koch brothers, and it reflected their Con Inc. values (flag pins, low taxes, cheap foreign labor). FOA was Gary Sinise, and it reflected his “support the troops” obsession. When Trump showed up, a billionaire fronting a platform that dared conservatives to leave their comfort zone and support something that truly mattered in terms of staving off national decline, many longtime activists fled. And those who didn’t fell back into mediocrity when the billionaire did.
The second takeaway is, beware meaningless wins. Yes, the Boehner Congress slightly stifled Obama’s agenda. But it advanced nothing of value. It was pure defense. Demand more from the politicians, billionaires, and teat-sucklers. Don’t be so easily mollified by illusory victories that play to your weaknesses.
Think you’re up for that? Here’s your first test. In the weeks to come, you’ll be hearing a lot about a film titled Shut In. Jeremy Boreing still hasn’t made an actual movie, but he and Shapiro squirted some teat milk at a few other guys who did make a film that Boreing can finally put his name on. And Boreing is doing exactly what he did at FOA: celebrating a “win” because some celebrity turned out to be “one of us.”
This time it’s the blowjob guy.
Actor and indie filmmaker Vincent Gallo is primarily known for insisting that actress Chloë Sevigny go down on him—for real and on camera—in his widely panned 2003 film Brown Bunny (he also made the papers for trying to “hook up” with underage girls). It turns out Gallo is totally a “conservative,” and Boreing and Shapiro are proudly touting him as the star of Shut In.
“We got the blowjob guy! He’s one of us! Conservatives are kewl!!!”
“Daily Wire Lures Vincent Gallo Out of Retirement for ‘Shut In’ Thriller,” screamed the conservative entertainment site Hollywood in Toto. Journalist Christian Toto excitedly crowed about how the “unabashed Republican” will “flash his darker side” in the movie.
Uh, Christian…he’s flashed way worse.
The film debuts Feb. 10 as an exclusive paywalled Daily Wire production. Between now and then, expect tons of “Vincent Gallo’s one of us!” hype.
To be clear, I’m no prude. I lived with a porn star for two years; on-camera BJs between adults don’t bother me (though Gallo’s underage girls thing absolutely does). Also, billionaires can spend their money any way they like; again, not my business. Fracking’s all about injecting high-pressure liquid into a gaping hole; the BJ guy fits right in with the Wilks brothers’ fetish.
And lastly, if you wanna give Ben Shapiro your money to see the BJ guy because you think somehow that makes you one of the “cool kids,” knock yourself out. As a bad-movie aficionado, I’m not one to lecture (I’ve never seen Casablanca but I know every line of dialogue in Nightmare City by heart).
But my suggestion, as a veteran of Friends of Abe trying to help rightists learn from our failures, is—resist. Don’t respond like a Pavlov-pup. Make this kind of thing unprofitable. Demand that deep-pocketed publicity-seeking rightists who flash their money put it to actual good use, exactly what we didn’t do in FOA.
Billionaire George Soros continues to buy up DA’s offices across the country in order to flood our streets with violent criminals. His money goes toward the murder of Americans. You’d think this would be a priority for those on “our side” to oppose. But no. There’s no rightist anti-Soros. See, that’s the bad news I mentioned at the top of the piece. We have no one, nothing to counter Soros, whose policies take innocent American lives daily.
And yet you’re all going to get terribly excited that hey, we have the blowjob guy!
We’re winning!
All I can do is suggest that you rethink those priorities.
But I don’t foresee a happy ending…at least not for anyone but Gallo, who seems to only take roles that guarantee them.
Before he appeared at his first solo news conference of 2022, President Joe Biden knew he had a communications problem he had to deal with.
Namely, how to get off the defensive.
How to avoid spending his time with the White House press corps defending his decisions and explaining his actions as allegations of failure, one after another, were tossed up at him?
Biden entered knowing what issues would be paramount and what questions would be raised:
Why had he been unable to control a coronavirus pandemic now killing 2,000 Americans a day? Why was he unable to contain an inflation eating up the wages, salaries and savings of American families at a yearly rate of 7%? Why was he unable to secure a southern border that 150,000 illegal immigrants were crossing every month?
To get off the defensive and onto offense, Biden brought his own questions for his GOP inquisitors and conservative critics:
“What are Republicans for? What are they for? Name me one thing they’re for,” Biden demanded to know.
Turning the tables, Biden charged his Republican critics with having no policy goals, other than the willful obstruction of his goals.
“The fundamental question is: What’s Mitch (McConnell) for? … What’s he for on immigration? What’s he for? What’s he proposing to make anything better? … What’s he for on these things? What are they for?”
Biden was making the case that while the Democratic Party has an agenda of declared goals, providing benefits to millions, the GOP is the party of “No.”
Why not fight our battles on this terrain for a change? Biden was demanding. And, behind his exasperation, he has a point.
Democrats do have an agenda. They do have things they want to accomplish. And the party of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy is basically an opposition party whose goal is to prevent them from succeeding.
There is another reason Biden would like to force Republicans to identify their goals. Naming them would reveal the divisions inside the GOP on priorities and open Republicans up to the kind of attacks the GOP is mounting against Biden’s agenda.
In short, behind Biden’s demand that the GOP identify its goals was an attempt to shift the debate onto terrain more familiar and favorable for the Democratic Party.
For the truth is that Democrats are the party of government, and Republicans are the party of the private sector. These are their historic roles. Biden is seeking to re-elevate that critical difference.
Democrats, for example, are almost unanimous in their support of federally funded universal pre-K, child care, the child tax credit, student loan forgiveness and federal standards for voting in federal elections.
Historically, Democrats led the fight for Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, civil rights, voting rights, welfare and most of the rest of a federal monolith that now consumes perhaps a fourth of our GDP.
Republicans have been the party that resisted the expansion of government over our lifetimes, and its role has often been to conduct an orderly retreat to a new defense perimeter after the most recent defeat.
The most celebrated Republican of the last century was Ronald Reagan, who famously declared that the nine most terrifying words in the English language were, “I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.”
Republicans have emphasized, as a major role of government, providing the security that citizens cannot provide for themselves.
Security against crime and violence, security against an invasion of the country, security against hostile foreign powers.
Biden’s problem is that while millions might agree on aspects of his Build Back Better plan, the present primary concerns of the electorate are those government duties that his party is visibly failing to perform: controlling the pandemic, stopping the shootings and killings of cops, halting the invasion across our southern border, preventing the loss of incomes and savings to inflation.
Yet, despite the imperiled position of Biden’s party today, it has relative strengths and long-term trends in its favor.
America’s white majority, home to the base of the GOP, is a diminishing majority, on average older than the core constituencies of the Democratic Party — the young, the migrants and people of color.
Second, the Democratic mega-states in presidential elections — California, New York, Illinois — seem solidly blue, while Republican mega-states like Texas and Florida seem less solidly red.
Third, America’s major media centered in New York and Washington, D.C., is liberal and Democratic, as are our cultural institutions — museums, Hollywood, higher education, the entertainment industry.
Fourth, the trend for democracies is toward transferring more and more power to central governments, not less. Under President Calvin Coolidge, the U.S. government share of GDP was 3%.
As for the culture wars, traditionalism has been in retreat since the 1950s.
Biden appears to be a failing president who believes in the inevitable victory of the ideology toward which he himself has been moving over his half-century career since arriving in Washington as a 30-year-old centrist Democrat.
Unfortunately, he may not be wrong.
The Week’s Most Hibernal, Nocturnal, and Sempiternal Headlines
WAKE-OB’S LADDER
In the wokeness ecosystem, one corrupt race-hustler springs forth from another, which sprung forth from another, which itself sprung forth from another. It’s like the fly-egg-larva-pupa-fly cycle on dog poop, but far more putrid.
Last week, Marilyn Mosby, state’s attorney for Baltimore, was indicted on federal perjury and fraud charges. Mosby, a strong black woman, was especially strong when it came to bilking the system. She conned $100,000 in Covid relief money by falsely claiming “financial hardship” (her annual salary is $248,000), and she made false statements in mortgage applications for a $490,500 home and a $428,400 condo.
Now that’s some good old-fashioned “hardship.”
I’m gon’ lay down my burden,
Down by my riverside condo.
Mosby, who got where she is because of race, was helped to that position by Kamala Harris, who also got where she is because of race—half-black, half-Indian. And on the same day that black race-hustler Mosby was indicted, Indian race-hustler Charles Edwards pleaded guilty to federal fraud charges. Edwards had been Inspector General for Homeland Security under Obama (another race hustler), who appointed Edwards IG because who better than an Indian to investigate government waste? (Indians know all about “waste”…just look at any sidewalk in Mumbai.)
Turns out the pilfering Punjabi “used, possessed, and transferred stolen DHS-OIG and USPS-OIG documents and information to software developers in India.”
He also kept calling people claiming to be from Windows tech support.
The irony is, while Edwards was IG, he prosecuted a race-hustling Hispanic woman, Dawn Hamilton, for falsely claiming to be a small-business owner in order to receive benefits from the Small Business Administration’s Section 8(a) program, which throws cash at minority businesses like an NBA player at a strip club.
Rungs on a race-hustling ladder. Obama, Hamilton, Edwards, Harris, Mosby: each running their own game, each proving daily that diversity is our stench.
SAD SACKER
Naissus, 443 AD
The army of Attila the Hun relaxes in its encampment, the city thoroughly crushed.
Faint weeping is heard from Attila’s tent. Curious, one of his generals enters.
General: “What troubles you, my leader?”
Attila: “Why people gotta be so mean?”
General: “Sir?”
Attila: “People bein’ mean to me for sacking they towns. They givin’ me dirty looks ’n’ yellin’ at me. They be sayin’ I’m makin’ mahself rich an’ takin’ they stuff, like I don’t care or nuthin’.”
General: “But sir, you don’t care. You’re a heartless warlord.”
Attila (smiling): “Oh snap, I fo’got!”
Human callousness has never more vulgarly expressed itself throughout history than when selfish peons have shown hostility to ruthless pillagers without considering the feelings of those pillagers. Attila, Genghis, Timur…these were human beings. And shame on us for not taking that into account.
At least that’s how the L.A. Times sees it. Last week the paper ran a twelve-hankie portrait of BLM cofounder Patrisse Cullors, who is “healing” from having “PTSD” because the “little people” got angry at her after BLM sacked their cities while she nabbed multimillion-dollar book deals and splurged on fancy houses.
Yes, Cullors is claiming she got “PTSD” from those she gave PTSD (the people beaten and robbed by BLM, the families of those killed, and the store owners who lost their livelihoods).
According to the Times, the woebegone woke warlord “checked herself into treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder.” Cullors, the ultimate objectifier and attacker, told the Times she felt “objectified and attacked.” She explained that she couldn’t find a PTSD clinic that could treat her “racial trauma,” so she assembled a team of high-priced therapists and booked a country estate as her exclusive clinic.
Such a victim! Cullors should join Marilyn Mosby in a spiritual:
Swing low, golden chariot,
Comin’ for to carry me to my million-dollar home!
A MURDER OF CORNROWS
For its February cover, British Vogue hired the blackiest collection of African fashion models ever assembled. The dark-skinned lady noires posed next to each other, dressed in black, sporting the “noble woman-of-color face” that’s the template these days for all black female media photos.
Models Adut Akech (gesundheit), Janet Jumbo (only $1 more than Janet Large), Anok Yai (antibiotics can cure that), Nyagua Fall (slowly I turned…), Akon Changkou (you’re welcome), and four others carried off the cover in grand style. British Vogue editor-in-chief Edward Enninful, a Ghanaian, kvelled, “I love that we’re finally giving more space to African beauty.”
Unfortunately, that love was not shared by “black Twitter,” where malcontents complained that the cover is “too black” and the lighting makes the girls look “too dark. “They put these models in terrible lighting, they dressed them all in black like a funeral,” one tweeter fumed.
“This isn’t #BlackGirlMagic, it’s Black Girls Tragic,” another wrote.
“Why blacks gotta be so black?” might seem like an odd beef in the BLM age, but such complaints aren’t unique to blacks. Two weeks ago, Mercedes-Benz was pelted with criticism in China for an advertisement that used Chinese models with “slanted eyes.” Weibo users slammed the automaker for perpetuating “harmful stereotypes about Asians” by showing Asian women with Asian features.
At which point the highly rational Germans at Mercedes self-destructed like in that Star Trek episode where Kirk uses illogic to short-circuit some androids.
In response to the criticism, Chinese model Cai Niangniang (oh, a wise guy, eh?) told the Daily Mail, “Just because my eyes are small, I’m not good enough to be a Chinese person?”
Then she self-destructed as well.
It’s getting impossible to tell the difference between “racial pride” and “self-loathing.”
RETURN OF THE MACRON
The French always get things just a little…wrong. Like screaming “liberty, fraternity, and equality” during a “revolution” of terror and bloodshed.
Or declaring war on a more powerful nation in the name of liberating a nation they can’t possibly liberate, while trusting the British to stand by them in the aftermath.
“Sacré bleu, mes frères, why are you all heading to ze beach? Should we not be fighting ze Nazis?”
“Right…uh…well…we’re goin’ fer a dip we is we is. Just a right quick swim ’round the channel to ’arden the nerves, me old fruit, and then we’ll be back to ’elp you run off them bloody krauts.”
“D’accord. Enjoy your swim, mes amies!”
(The above was taken from the wartime diary of Charles de Gaullible.)
President Macron has decreed that in order to teach French children how to discern accurate information from untruths, to “educate our children with the critical ‘spirit of method,’” the government must ban all internet posts it considers “disinformation.”
Yes, that’s exactly how you teach critical thinking! Let the government decide what’s true and ban everything else.
Like how the best way to lose weight is to have someone else exercise for you.
Macron wants to prosecute social media posters for the crime of “diffusion by digital means of news which is known to be inexact and which damages others.”
Putting people in prison for being “inexact” will sure help teach those “critical thinking” skills!
Macron assured the media that these new speech regulations are in no way connected to the fact that he’s mere months away from an election in which he’ll be facing three rightist candidates, one of whom has already accrued several “hate speech” charges for daring to point out that violent Muslim immigrants are violent.
Macron insisted that he’s not attempting to use the new speech regs to silence his opposition. “This is France,” he told reporters. “When we want to silence opposition, we use a guillotine.”
He then laughed and added, “I’m kidding, of course. We just have our violent Muslims behead them.”
“POLITICS IS LITERALLY MURDERING ME”
Consider for a moment the mindset of the average Zoomer. Consider the world as they see it. Covid is killing young people by the score. Schools are unsafe. Three vaxxes and ten boosters will not protect you, even though you still need to get them because if you must die, die for science! Police shoot about a thousand unarmed people daily (2,000 in black areas), as Donald Trump mounts a Nazi army that will invade the Capitol (under the command of Obersturmbannführer DeathSantis), as Klansmen lynch the gender-fluid (a.k.a. every Zoomer) while climate change depletes the planet’s oxygen and people of color die agonizing deaths due to racism-rays emanating from old VHS tapes of 1990s stand-up comedy.
It should come as no surprise that young people who claim to be “news-savvy” are suffering debilitating health effects from the anxiety caused by their VR-nightmare America.
A new study from the University of Nebraska found that Democrat-leaning young people are experiencing “a serious toll on their physical health” due to their political beliefs. While the study found that this phenomenon is not confined to young liberals, that’s the group “most likely” to be literally murdered by their worldview.
Indeed, the study found that a large percentage of these face-tat fetuses have actually contemplated suicide because of politics. And why not? If you think death awaits you around every corner, via Covid, police, Trump, Nazis, KKK, racism, or global catastrophe, best to take the easy way out before you realize you’re trans and Dave Chappelle strangles you as you sleep.
The author of the study worries that if young liberals continue to suffer physically because of their politics, they might check out of the entire process: “If people view politics as so conflictual, and potentially a threat to their own well-being, they’ll say ‘heck with it, I don’t want to get involved.’”
It’s nice, for once, to end The Week on an optimistic note.
