The Week’s Most Husking, Busking, and Elon Musking Headlines

BANNED, ON THE RUN
The danger in being a merciless tyrant is that if your regime is toppled, those to whom you showed no mercy will repay the unkindness a thousandfold once they’re the ones in power.

This must’ve been the main thing on the mind of Heinrich Himmler, who spent the first weeks after VE Day masquerading as a lowly one-eyed private named Hitzinger. Himmler’s jibber-jabber about SS “honor” was long forgotten by the very man who codified it. He hid like a coward and ran like a rat, knowing full well what vengeful treatment would be in store were he to be captured.

Surely at some point during his time on the lam, Himmler must’ve thought, “Y’know, maybe we shoulda listened to those guys who said, ‘Don’t declare war on America.’”

And maybe Twitter shouldn’t have mocked Elon Musk when he first mused about buying the platform.

Daring the world’s wealthiest and most brazenly trollish entrepreneur to “go for it” proved a fatal act of hubris.

And now, the Twitter wokestapo is on the run, a thousand Hitzingers fleeing from “payback tweets” now that rightist accounts are roaring back along with an unmuted desire for retribution after years of being silenced, restricted, banned, and doxxed.

Even Biden, the man they helped install as president, can’t save the Twitter Hitzingers now.

As reported in the Daily Mail, Twitter employees, especially those who wielded the all-mighty ban hammer, are in a panic. They fear being fired, and they fear repercussions from those they banned.

The Mail reports scenes of wailing, weeping, and screaming by the now-disempowered thought police. Many are even taking the ultimate way out—the figurative cyanide capsule—by deleting their accounts. As the Mail wryly notes, some of these overdramatic losers are leaving behind “last tweets” as their epitaph.

Like anyone cares.

The only thing predictable about history is irony. Woke Twitter tried to erase conservatives, science, and women, only to be erased itself.

R.I.P., Twitzinger.

GOOGLE KEEPS US LUCIFUGAL
Of course, even if Musk succeeds in purging Twitter of wokeness, there are other influential platforms peddling the same poison.

“Lucifugal” means avoiding light. Lucifugous creatures are denizens of darkness. And Google has for quite some time dedicated itself to keeping its users in the dark, by skewing search results to bury facts and opinions that are inconvenient to leftists, by depressing search results for conservative sites, and even by automatically sending conservative emails to the spam folder in Gmail.

But now, in its most Luciferian lucifugalism yet, Google has launched an “inclusive language” function that will berate users who search for words that a few Ivy League inbreds consider “racist” or “gender oppressive.”

For example, if you search for “policeman,” Google will rebuke you for not searching for “police officer.” Ditto “housewife,” which should be “stay-at-home spouse,” and “blacklist” instead of “deny list.”

Based on these new “improvements,” it’s very likely that by next year, you’ll be seeing Google searches like this:

[Typing] “Dentists in my neighborhood.”

Google reply: “Don’t you mean black dentists in your neighborhood?”

[Typing again] “Dentists in Los Angeles.”

Google: “Why are you evading the question? Don’t you trust black dentists?”

“I have no problem with black dentists, but I want to see all dentists in my area.”

Google: “Just not the black ones.”

“I never said that! I’m looking for any dentist; I have a toothache.”

Google: “What happened? Did a black man sock you in the jaw for being racist? Serves you right, KKKlancy.”

“Okay, okay. Black dentists in my neighborhood.”

Google: “Typical! Another white man looking to gentrify a black business. Stay in your lane, cross-burner.”

“Screw this; I’m going back to the Yellow Pages.”

Google: “Autocorrected to Chinese Pages.”

BEETHOVEN? MORE LIKE HATEHOVEN
Beethoven be racist. In fact, all opera be racist.

Of course, it ain’t black people saying that (the number of black opera fans is roughly equal to the number of black comedians named “Scoey”). No, it’s (of course) whites, once again charging in to eliminate nonexistent hate speech because they read Robin DiAngelo (the L. Ron Hubbard for impressionable, self-hating whites) and realized that they must become “clear” of racism.

The New York Metropolitan Museum of Art has taken a break from masking the faces on its paintings (in The Death of Socrates, the philosopher is commanding everyone to mask up!) to rewrite Beethoven. In the Met’s current presentation of the opera Fidelio, the borderline tards in charge of production have changed the story line and added dialogue to make the opera about BLM.

Beethoven’s original title of Fidelio was Leonore, oder der Triumph der Ehelichen Liebe. In English that’s Leonore, or The Triumph of Conjugal Love. The Met’s version is called Lemarcus, or The Triumph of Conjugal Visits.

And last week, the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra’s presentation of Beethoven’s Ninth saw the original vocals removed and replaced with a rap about BLM and transgenderism.

Those decisions were made by the orchestra’s musical director, Marin Alsop, a Jewish lesbian.

Ode to Joy? More like Ode to Oy!

The “woking” of opera is the wave of the future among musical directors who have a deep abiding hatred of their genre. Still, it’ll be fun to see what comes next.

Word has it the Detroit Opera is preparing a production of Rossini’s Barbershop of Seville:

This is the barbershop of Seville,
We’ll give you a fro, a fade, a frill.
We’ll give you cornrows or a dread,
And we’ll even shave your head.
Niggaro niggaro niggaro!

And it’ll be interesting to see what the Oakland Opera House does with Puccini’s Madame Big-Butt-erfly.

JIVEY LEAGUE
May 2023: All of Harvard stands frozen in anticipation. Admins, professors, and students gather in Memorial Hall, which has reached standing-room-only capacity. Those unable to get inside view the proceedings via closed-circuit TV.

The cafeterias stand empty. Who can eat at a time like this?

Today is the day the results of the university’s unprecedented $100 million research project into slavery will be revealed.

The project was launched in April 2022 following the release of the long-awaited 132-page Report of the Presidential Committee on Harvard and the Legacy of Slavery. The report, prepared by more than a dozen of the university’s top social justice activists (at least three of whom aren’t Ashkenazi Jews), was commissioned to establish Harvard’s complicity in America’s slave trade and, more important, to determine what actions the school must take to atone.

Regarding the first question, the report concluded that, from 1636 to 1783, seventy—yes, seventy—slaves were at one time owned by people who worked at Harvard.

Surely, the greatest crime in mankind’s history! To put that number in perspective, that’s more than one entire NFL team (but less than two, meaning that Harvard’s slaves wouldn’t have even been able to face off in regulation play).

An atrocity. So the Presidential Committee Report mandated that $100 million be set aside for the “study of slavery.”

And today, May 1, 2023, is the day of the unveiling of the results of that study.

A hush falls upon the crowd as Harvard president Lawrence Becow, an Ashkenazi Jew but that has nothing to do with anything, steps on stage, walking to the podium in the company of John Amos, who portrayed adult Kunta Kinte in Roots, LeVar Burton, who portrayed young Kunta, and Squakeisha Junkins of Atlanta, who tried to get a McFlurry that time but the machine be broke and that straight-up racist, y’all, ’cuz y’all know if she be white they be fixin’ that machine right now.

All eyes are on Becow as he opens a gold-colored folder.

“And now, on behalf of this university, I present the results of our $100 million study of slavery. I present this not just in the name of Harvard, but humanity itself.”

[Dramatic pause]

“Slavery is bad. Thank you and good day.”

And with that, the crowd files out of the auditorium into a better, wiser world.

NWA (NAZIS WITH ATTITUDE)
Just throw your hands in the air,
And heil like a Gauleiter!
All the sucka MCs beware,
Nobody spits like Adolf Hit-lerrrrr.

Third Reich in da house!

Austria has declared war on rappers, because apparently Austrians are very bored these days (what a far cry from the 1930s when Austrians were the life of the Party).

Last week, an Austrian rapper with the stage name “Mr. Bond” was hit with a rather hefty ten-year sentence for composing a rap that “glorified Nazi ideology.” “Bond’s” little brother got four years for running the rapper’s website.

Austria’s really onto something! The best way to stop oppressive fascism is to throw a guy in prison for a decade just for singing.

The harsh sentence has provoked outrage from music lovers the world over, not because they give a damn about the free-speech rights of neo-Nazis, but because how dare any European nation imprison rappers when Miker G and DJ Sven still walk free?

Seriously, THIS is a crime against humanity.

One of the reasons the Austrian Ministry of Lack of Irony Appreciation gave for the long sentence is that in 2019 an anti-Jewish gunman livestreamed his shooting spree in Saxony-Anhalt, using “Mr. Bond’s” music as his backing track.

For those in the U.S. who believe this nation needs to adopt stricter, European-style anti-speech laws, a point of order: If U.S. authorities jailed every rapper whose music was used in a shooting, there wouldn’t be a single rapper walking free and not a single rap song on the radio.

I celebrate two Easters every year, the Catholic and Orthodox one, which means I get very drunk on two successive Sundays. This time both days were spent with very good friends, which is a prerequisite at my age when under the influence. The Orthodox Resurrection ceremony at midnight in the cathedral was followed by a sumptuous Greek dinner at a gastronomic Hellenic restaurant hosted by George and Lita Livanos that ended at around 3 a.m., and then it was time for a Southampton outing for yet another Greek lamb Easter lunch at Prince Pavlos’ not-so-humble seaside abode. And then time to hit the gym nonstop for the next 96 hours in order to get rid of the tonnage devoured over this most Christian holiday. The good news is that karate balances out the self-destruction, and I have yet to figure out what I enjoy more, fighting in the dojo against younger people or drowning the demons after training.

The Greek crown prince Pavlos has joined my dojo and is training hard with Amos Sensei, and he will be a good one, if he sticks with it. Living next to Central Park as I do helps with the hangovers. All one needs to do is slowly walk two blocks west and then get busy. By busy I mean getting the heart rate up by speed-walking and breathing in some good air. Doing push-ups against a bench the other day, I burst out laughing at the sign: “From the Helmsley’s to the people of New York.” Not only was the apostrophe redundant, the multibillionaire Helmsleys were two rather unpleasant people no longer with us, ensuring their names appeared on a small bench so I could do push-ups against it. I suppose it was big of them to do it. Leona Helmsley did some hard time for tax evasion thirty years or so ago, but the book was thrown at her because of what she said rather than what she did: “Only the little people pay taxes.”

And speaking of the gentler sex, an unpleasant Chinese woman of a certain age was doing tai chi near me the other morning and making a meal of it by exhaling loudly while jabbering away on her telephone. Never have I had a greater urge to tell a woman to shut up, but I kept quiet because on a scale of horrors from one to ten taking place in the Bagel, this was not even close to one. What is extremely rare to encounter in the park nowadays is anyone not breaking the law, such as biking on pedestrian paths, going full speed past red lights by motorcycles and electric bikers, or blasting rap in supposedly quiet places. In fact, many of the freedoms that we took for granted in the past have been chipped away by people who confuse freedom with anarchy and do whatever they feel like doing and to hell with others. The idea that one cannot freely walk on paths designed only for strollers without some asshole bearded biker either screaming at you to stand aside or running you down is as unacceptable as it gets. I scream back and am ready to fight at all times, but what about those who cannot? Cops watch and do nothing.

Needless to say, it wasn’t always this way. Once upon a time the park was a tranquil oasis of sorts; some even considered Central Park to be the most important American work of art of the 19th century. (They forgot Winslow Homer.) In the early 1800s the city had quadrupled in population, and civic leaders called for a great public park where New Yorkers could escape the crowded and unhealthy streets. Fred Olmsted, America’s greatest landscape architect, decided to go Brit with natural flowing gardens rather than Frog with geometric formal plans, and came up with Central Park. Olmsted announced that the park was for everyone, and it was for a very long time, until a reverse Attila the Hun, Mayor de Blasio, came along and announced in no uncertain terms that whites and cops were the enemy while everyone else, starting with criminals, was good. The park easily reverted to what it was back in the ’70s, a place where even armed thugs felt unsafe after dark. Then came Rudy Giuliani, who quickly did a Guderian on crime’s Maginot Line, and twenty years ago it was safer to sleep in the park than it was in one’s own home. No longer. Women are regularly attacked when walking alone, and although lately there is police presence, the fuzz do not stop speeding bikers on electric machines going the wrong way, nor do they interfere with loud minorities blasting music and swearing and insulting parkgoers.

In fact, all one hears around here is about how free America and its people are. What I’d like to know is how free a country is when a schoolteacher loses her job after apologizing for using the words “colored people.” How free is a nation where tech founders deliver censorship, where gun-toting mobs burn down buildings and are given a pass if the perpetrators are so-called minorities, and where using one wrong word while telling a joke can mean financial ruin and the end of one’s career?

So back to the park it is, with its graceful paths, arching trees, and grand views, as long as one is ready to rumble. It’s a great place, but soft-spoken people with gentle demeanors are advised to stay away.

How does a modern democracy reconcile populist currents with woke liberalism? How does it satisfy both those who think that the state is too lenient toward criminals and those who see criminals as themselves the victims of social injustice? The British criminal justice system has found a solution to this dilemma, which for politicians is electorally very important.

A man called Sable Thomas, aged 42 at the time of his crime, was recently sentenced to life imprisonment for having bludgeoned Anthony Rooks, aged 79, to death. No explanation of this dreadful crime has been reported, except that Thomas had what are now called “mental health issues.” (In some quarters, mental health issues has been laudably abbreviated to mental health, as in, “I’m seeing the doctor because I’ve got mental health.”)

Those of populist sensibility would say that it is quite right that Sable Thomas should spend the rest of his life in prison because of what he did (he was not deemed to be so mad that he should go to hospital rather than to prison). Indeed, a life sentence is the only appropriate sentence for what he did, once the death penalty is excluded.

But a sentence of perpetual imprisonment would horrify the woke sensibility. Poor Sable Thomas! He probably never had a chance in life; at the very least, he had mental health issues, and even if these were caused by taking drugs, it would only push the reason for compassion one stage further back, for he must have taken drugs because he had…well, mental health issues.

Therefore, it is only right that, his life sentence notwithstanding, he should be released from prison after eight years, the length of time he must serve before being considered for parole. By then, it is likely that his mental health issues will have been resolved, and there will be no reason to keep him in prison.

From the point of view of the woke sensibility, there is another reason so short a sentence for so terrible a crime is much to be welcomed. If punishment has to be proportional to the seriousness of the crime, and most crimes are much less serious than Sable Thomas’ crime, then those found guilty of them should receive much lesser sentences than he. Thus, Sable Thomas’ sentence exerts a downward pressure on all other sentences, which is halfway to meeting a treasured woke goal, namely the abolition of punishment altogether (except for those who express non-woke ideas).

A person sentenced to life imprisonment in Britain can be recalled to prison at any time for the rest of his life, so it is not 100 percent symbolic: The threat of recall hangs over him until the day he dies. Thus, a life sentence meaning in practice that the person is released after eight years partially satisfies both the populist and the woke, though it fully satisfies neither. The populist feels partially avenged, the woke that his desire to demonstrate his forgiveness for wrongs done to others has been partially fulfilled. But as we know, the circle can be squared only approximately: Full satisfaction simultaneously of the populist and the woke is not possible.

The criminal justice system throws another sop to the populist frame of mind: It now permits victim impact statements to be uttered in court. Clearly in the case of murder it is not the primary victim who makes such a statement, but the relatives or close associates of the victim, and the reason for allowing this is that it distracts from the widespread populist feeling that the criminal justice system is more solicitous of the perpetrators of crimes than of their victims. But the judges, in their sentencing, are specifically enjoined to take no notice of the victim impact statements; these statements, then, are at best pure psychotherapy, at worst a cynical maneuver by the powers-that-be to insinuate falsely that they take the sufferings of the victims of crime seriously.

It is hardly surprising that such statements in cases of murder are highly emotional and often beside the point. Normally, they contain tributes to the character of the deceased, with the unfortunate and unconscious corollary that if the victim had been someone else, someone who was not quite so nice or good as the victim, the crime would have been less. Anthony Rooks’ daughter said in her impact statement:

Little did we know that three days before our nan’s funeral [the victim’s wife of 46 years had died of natural causes shortly before], this horrific tragedy would rock our world and change our lives forever. Our biggest question is why anyone would want to hurt such a loving, funny, giving, and caring old man, especially to that extent.

If the victim had been less loving, funny, giving, and caring, if he had been killed with ten blows instead of twenty, would the crime have been any the less? I do not mean to criticize the daughter; it is hardly to be expected that someone who suffered as did she should speak in a measured or logical way. Rather, it is the very idea of giving people the opportunity to express their understandable emotions, soon to be followed by an inadequate and lenient sentence, that I dislike.

The opportunity to make a victim impact statement partially assuages those who think that the criminal justice system ignores victims, while the leniency of the sentence partially assuages those of woke inclinations who think that perpetrators are honorary victims, as it were.

Of course, circles cannot be squared, in politics no more than in geometry, but for electoral reasons the attempt must often be made. That is why sordid compromise is more or less inevitable, and why so much in politics is really the opposite of what it appears or is supposed to appear to be. Politicians and their associated bureaucracies, as well as the judiciary, are constantly trying to square circles, which is why generosity in theory often ends with meanness in practice, and severity or leniency in theory with the opposite in practice.

It doesn’t help that we live in psychotherapeutic times. The police involved in the case of Sable Thomas hoped that the sentence passed on him would help the victim’s family to find “closure.” Thus speaks Police Constable Freud.

Perhaps I am an excessively vengeful person, but if Sable Thomas had killed someone near to me, I would have derived some satisfaction, been assuaged somewhat, if he had been sent to prison for the rest of his life without possibility of release except on his deathbed. But it wouldn’t be “closure.”

Theodore Dalrymple’s latest book is Ramses: A Memoir, published by New English Review.

I want to send flowers and chocolates to the Twitter employee who permanently suspended The Babylon Bee. Maybe a car. Apparently, it was the inanity of that decision that incensed Elon Musk, whereupon he decided to purchase the entire platform to stop the censorship.

Liberals, until five minutes ago: Elon Musk is a climate hero! Electric cars! Solar power! He loves Obama!

Liberals, five minutes ago: He believes in free speech? Fascist!

Loads of liberals are threatening to leave Twitter if Musk’s deal goes through. To those who will miss The New York Times‘ Charles Blow, I understand. I will try to ease the pain by tweeting, every day for the rest of my life: “[FILL IN THE BLANK] is racist!”

If you’re wondering why liberals are freaking out over the idea of free speech on one single internet platform, it’s because their ideas are so well thought-out and compellingly argued that they must have total control of all social media, mainstream media, entertainment, elementary schools, colleges, universities, nonprofits, corporate PR departments, government funding agencies, advertising firms and on and on and on. Any interruption to Big Brother being pumped into our brains 24 hours a day, and everything falls apart.

A hysterical Twitter employee in the “toxicity and health” department (I’m not making that up) denounced Musk to a Times reporter, saying, “he doesn’t know anything about our policies and what we do … his statement about our [algorithm] was f***ing insane … Were (sic) just gonna let everyone run amok?”

Running “amok” is defined as: calling a man in a dress a “man.” That’s the Babylon Bee tweet that led to a Twitter death sentence, with no trial, no due process, no appeal.

Twitter employees, the Times reports, are “worried that Mr. Musk would undo the years of work they have put into cleaning up the toxic corners of the platform.” (Yes, you are correct: These are the same people mocking 4-year-olds trapped in kindergarten classrooms with teachers telling them whiteness is evil and they can be any gender they want.)

Do Twitter employees know how Twitter works? Take a theoretical hate-speaker — a fat-shaming Klanner, an anti-vax Nazi or Dave Chappelle. Their literally murderous tweets are invisible — unless you intentionally, willfully, mindfully click their “follow” buttons. In order to avoid seeing “toxic” tweets, this is what you have to do: NOTHING!

But Twitter moderators are terrified that someone, somewhere, is laughing at a tweet. They are the mutant baby of medieval scolds and the East German Stasi.

Conservatives can only dream of a Twitter without constant, daily self-censorship, without their followers being secretly removed, their feeds hidden, their accounts being shadow-banned — or completely banned.

But what if this is all just Musk doing an elaborate troll?

Somebody should buy Twitter, as I explained last November to the richest person I know under 70. (The richest people I know over the age of 70 are giving all their money to Sen. Tim Scott and Candace Owens to prove they’re not “racist.”)

Here it is, my personal private email, names redacted:

Date: Nov. 30, 2021, at 2:04:51 a.m. EST

Subject: You should buy Twitter and I’ll tell you why …

ALL news comes from Twitter. Facebook is for getting in touch with high school friends and the “topic” groups are mostly nuts — anti-vax, stop the steal, black conspiracy theories. Same w/the newer platforms like Telegram. Snapchat and Instagram are for “influencers,” wannabe Kardashians.

Twitter is where the NYT, Politico and Fox News etc. get their stories and find their guests. Have one of your ppl read my Twitter feed and then watch XXXXX for a week. I’m his unpaid booker and content provider, except, sadly, when I get lazy and he goes off on his own with some moronic “expose” …

No one under 60 watches cable news, but YYYY, who’s about 90, calls me after XXXXX’s show every night and breathlessly tells me about stories that are 12 to 36 hours old on Twitter, half the time from my Twitter feed.

Even w/Twitter’s censorship of conservatives, the smartest right-wing pushback on the news has all come from Twitter. e.g. this week, HUGE meme on Twitter about the establishment media describing the BLM terrorist mowing down the lovely xmas parade in Waukesha as a “car crash,” or “SUV runs into parade.” There was also the msm’s decision to describe every rt-wing response to lib lunacy as “Republicans Pounce …”

There are a lot of smart ppl on Twitter (also idiots, but no one has to follow the idiots) who could never be employed by the NYT, National Review or Fox. Andy Ngo exposing antifa, the anti-CRT guy posting school teaching materials, the guy who keeps graphing mask-wearing vs. covid cases (“I.M.” on Twitter), the real-time videos of BLM riots and arson — none of this would exist but for Twitter.

Before that, the defense of Rittenhouse, Jake Gardner and Nick Sandmann — it all came from Twitter. (Recall National Review was nastily ANTI-Sandmann and anti-Rittenhouse.)

We used to have Drudge, but he’s not serving the function of vox populi anymore. Without Twitter, the only thing Fox News would talk about is the Middle East [We may now substitute “Ukraine”]. All important news comes from Twitter.

Twitter is …

1) where the action is, massively influential;

2) perfect for someone else to take it over and make it better, merely by firing the Twitter censors — Twitter aggressively banned tweets that were pro-Rittenhouse (accurate as it turned out), about Hunter Biden (ditto); plus there’s the aggressive censorship of specific popular conservatives, who are either thrown off (e.g. Gavin McInnes and Milo) or shadow-banned (me and others);

3) it would be pretty easy to turn into a money-making operation! The big issue for all news — TV, cable, Amazon Prime, and all online content is how to get ADVERTISING in front of consumers. No one wants to click through ads. The great thing about Twitter is that you could insert ads in people’s Twitter feeds — and it wouldn’t be annoying. I’ve never understood why Dorsey doesn’t do that. It doesn’t distract much, you just keep scrolling if you’re not interested.

Twitter is a fabulous product. It is, as Musk says, the nation’s public square. With a few minor tweaks — stop being Nazi block-watchers and allow ads in people’s Twitter feeds — instead of Tesla funding Twitter, someday Twitter could fund Tesla.

What I love about travel (and you probably do too) is how often it confirms stereotypes, even ones I didn’t know but ought to have guessed.

In this case, I just got back from the booming Spokane, Washington–Coeur d’Alene, Idaho region, towns I’d never been to before. I’m amused by how much about them I should have been able to predict just from clues I’d already heard.

For instance, as I may have mentioned once or twice, I’ve been concerned by the historic increase in traffic fatalities across America in the tumultuous spring of 2020, especially among blacks, after American cops cut way back on pulling over bad drivers due to Covid social distancing and the George Floyd racial reckoning. Tucker Carlson got around to mentioning last week how black traffic fatalities were 55 percent higher in June 2020 than in June 2019. Overall, black traffic deaths were up 27.5% in 2020 compared with a 2.5% increase among whites.

Still, I was surprised—although I shouldn’t have been—to find that drivers in Spokane and Coeur d’Alene in 2022 are strikingly calm and cooperative, obeying speed limits and patiently deferring to other drivers at intersections.

One reason appears to be that Spokane, which is the most populous city on Interstate 90 between Seattle and Minneapolis, is something of an outpost of Minnesota Nice. More than a few people have accents like Marge Gunderson in Fargo. Whether that’s indigenous to the Inland Northwest or they are recent transplants from George Floyd’s state, I couldn’t say. Unlike the aloof Seattle personality known as the Seattle Freeze, inland people appear to be gosh darn nice.

Another reason is because Coeur d’Alene has cleverly solved the problem plaguing so many other Rocky Mountain refuges of how do you keep liberal Californians from moving in and voting for the same policies that helped push them out of the Golden State in the first place? Northern Idaho’s solution is to welcome in conservative Californians, such as Los Angeles Police Department retirees (most notoriously detective Mark Fuhrman, the designated villain in the O.J. Simpson conspiracy theory), who have been taking their pensions to Coeur d’Alene since the 1960s.

In the progressive imagination, stoked by the Southern Poverty Law Center and similar junk mail geniuses, Coeur d’Alene is a notorious lair of white supremacists.

A black journalist, Rich Benjamin, undertook to investigate this question in his 2009 book Searching for Whitopia: An Improbable Journey to the Heart of White America. He moved to Coeur d’Alene and took up target practice with cops, to St. George, Utah, and played golf with Mormons, and to Forsyth County north of Atlanta and went to a megachurch with Evangelicals. He found he was treated well everywhere (and that golf was really fun).

So, I should have guessed that the national push to defund the police and to stop cops from pulling over speeders hadn’t taken hold in Kootenai County. In one hour of driving in Idaho on Saturday, I passed four different spots where police cruisers had their lights flashing. (By the third instance, I was driving three miles per hour under the speed limit.)

Until the current decade, housing prices in Spokane–Coeur d’Alene were a little below the national average. That was a good deal for a place with lovely scenery and surprisingly fine weather. Although Spokane, at less than 100 miles from the Canadian border, is considerably north of Minneapolis, Spokane’s average January low is 16 degrees warmer, and its typical July humidity is 21 percentage points lower. (On the other hand, winters linger so long that at a restaurant on April 24, the warmest day of the year so far, the manager brought us a round of champagne for being her first customers of 2022 to eat out on the patio.)

So, the region attracted people who want to have a passel of kids. In general, it’s not a terribly religious part of the country—some sociologists call it part of the Unchurched Belt—but it’s convivial toward those who are. For example, I visited a very conservative Catholic church (“Don’t mention the Pope,” I was warned) full of large families with several small children, as were common everywhere in Catholic parishes before Vatican II. I hadn’t seen Cowboy Catholics before, but diversity is our strength.

As I pointed out in 2005, affordable family formation is the key to which places vote red and which blue. Inland metropolises can typically expand 360 degrees, so they have more potential supply of suburban land, while coastal and Great Lakes cities cannot, so the law of supply and demand makes their real estate prices higher. This has partisan consequences:

In parts of the country where it is economical to buy a house with a yard in a neighborhood with a decent public school, you’ll generally find more Republicans….

It’s a stereotype that a mortgage, marriage, and babies tend to make people more conservative.

But it’s a true stereotype.

That’s why it’s in the GOP’s self-interest to pursue policies that keep demand for housing down (such as limiting immigration) and the quality of public schooling up (such as, well, limiting immigration).

On the other hand, there’s no denying the appeal of shoreline. Coeur d’Alene, for example, rests on a 25-mile-long mountain lake. Land is tight enough that the Coeur d’Alene Resort golf course’s 14th green literally floats on the world’s most stylized barge.

Spokane, 34 miles west of Coeur d’Alene, is the metropolis of the region, although at 229,000 residents, it’s only the 102nd-largest city in the country. But, unlike many larger Sunbelt municipalities, such as Mesa, Arizona (now with 548,000 people), it’s a real city with fine Robber Baron era architecture from its first boom in 1890–1912.

Spokane is by no means as conservative as Coeur d’Alene, but Trump carried Spokane County comfortably twice.

Even the city of Spokane is remarkably white by the standards of the latest Census: The municipality is 81 percent non-Hispanic white vs. only 60 percent for the U.S. as a whole. There are few immigrants besides some Russians and Ukrainians. This lack of diversity has much to do with why it’s suddenly in vogue.

Since the Black Lives Matter/Antifa crazes hit Minneapolis, Portland, and to a lesser extent Seattle (Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone) in 2020–2021, while the work-from-home trend made employees of Seattle’s corporations with what Neal Stephenson called “world-conquering business plans” (such as Amazon, Microsoft, Starbucks, and Costco) reassess their expensive housing costs, Spokane has been in fashion, in part because it has an old-fashioned urban core full of white people.

I’m reminded of Pittsburgh’s moment a decade ago when urban hipsters without trust funds, finding themselves priced out of Brooklyn, turned their attention to the Steel City with its first-rate skyline, surprising natural scenery, and white urban majority. (Similarly, “The Dream of the 1890s Is Alive in Portland.”)

Granted, Spokane’s buildings don’t compare in scale to Pittsburgh’s, but then again, Spokane’s central city has terrifying waterfalls.

Like Pittsburgh, Spokane enjoys a modest affluence by providing hospital services to the surrounding hinterlands. Still, Spokane doesn’t have numerous Fortune 500 headquarters like Pittsburgh or a world-class computer science department like Carnegie Mellon’s. Traditionally, it’s had an economy based on minerals, lumber, and wheat, plus regional middle management.

Its best college is the solid Jesuit school Gonzaga, whose striking success in basketball since local boy John Stockton’s career in the 1980s has brought a bit of glamor. Without local top (i.e., black) talent, Gonzaga specialized in recruiting players who would need to hone their skills over all four years in college to have the slightest chance at the NBA.

Back before the Great Awokening, the media devoted much attention to the early-2000s downtown Stuff White People Like craft food lifestyle. The idea that an American without a college degree who liked city living could get by working as a chef or a bartender in an ambitious locavore gastropub was appealing.

But all good things in modern America must come to an end. Housing costs are now soaring in Spokane.

“Things fall apart; the center cannot hold.”

So wrote William Butler Yeats in the wake of the Great War of 1914-1918 that had ravaged the Christian civilization he had known.

In France on Sunday, the center held, as President Emmanuel Macron rolled up a crushing 59% to 41% victory in the runoff election against ethno-nationalist Marine Le Pen.

Four years ago, Le Pen got 34% in the runoff. And the highest vote that her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, founder of the National Front, ever received was 18%. While Marine Le Pen lost Sunday, her positions continue to attract converts.

So terrified of Le Pen was the European establishment that before Sunday’s election, the leaders of Spain, Portugal and Germany intervened in France’s politics by imploring the French people to vote against her.

This runoff is “for us, not an election like any other,” wrote German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, Portuguese Prime Minister Antonio Costa and Spanish Premier Pedro Sanchez in Le Monde.

France faces a “choice between a democratic candidate … and a far-right candidate, who openly sides with those who attack our freedom and our democracy.”

More than 4 in 10 French voted for the candidate the EU leaders had described as anti-democratic.

In the first round of voting, Le Pen, along with rabid leftist Jean-Luc Melenchon and the hard right’s Eric Zemmour, who ran third and fourth, behind Le Pen, together carried 52%.

Thus did three of the top four candidates for the presidency of France, and a majority of the French nation, show support for an idea that all three of them shared — hostility to NATO.

In ruling France for the next five years, Macron, himself a critic of U.S. leadership and NATO, will have to keep this constituency in mind.

And Macron knows it. On his night of triumph, he conceded that many of those who voted for him were motivated not by an appreciation of what he had accomplished, but by a fear of Le Pen.

In the East of Europe, however, change may be on the horizon.

Major media — Newsweek, the New York Post and Daily Mail — are reporting rumors, based partly on recent videos of Russia’s president, that Vladimir Putin may be suffering from cancer.

Also, news that Sweden and Finland may be joining NATO as the 31st and 32nd members of the alliance has caused a sharp reaction from Moscow, which is warning of a redeployment of nuclear weapons to the Baltic.

Again, have people thought through what it would mean to bring Finland, a nation the size of Germany with an 830-mile land border with Russia, into NATO?

With 4% of Russia’s population, Finland would need NATO ground troops to man the border bases and crossing points into that country, and some of those troops would likely have to be Americans.

They would be staring across that chilly border directly at Russians, as in East and West Berlin in Cold War days.

Last Friday, in a press conference, Gen. Rustam Minnekayev said Russia seeks full control of all of southern Ukraine to give it “another way out to Transnistria” — the breakaway state internationally recognized as part of Moldova.

Minnekayev charged Moldova with oppressing the Russian-speaking population of Transnistria, an echo of the claim the Kremlin used to justify the invasion of Ukraine.

Was this weekend’s missile attack on Odessa an indicator of that Russian intent?

Putin’s ally in Belarus, Alexander Lukashenko, in his sixth term, having held the top office for three decades, is now 68, and his last election victory in 2020 was almost universally regarded as fraudulent.

Would Moscow, having lost Ukraine, sit still as Sweden and Finland moved onto the threshold of NATO and accept a neutrality for Belarus that would leave Russia without two of the three critical components of his Russian Federation as allies?

China’s largest city, Shanghai, is today in a lockdown ordered by Xi Jinping, as China suddenly seems no longer the country that showed the world how to cope with the COVID-19 pandemic that began in Wuhan.

President Joe Biden may be making trips to New Hampshire, but few believe he will be running again in 2024, as the manifestations of his cognitive decline appear more frequent and disturbing.

Yet, one recalls.

Woodrow Wilson suffered an incapacitating stroke during a national tour to sell the peace treaty and League of Nations he had negotiated at Paris to the country and the Senate in 1919, yet survived his successor Warren Harding, who died in office in 1923.

As Macron was rolling up his election victory, Ron Klain, Biden’s White House chief of staff, chortled at the outcome.

“An interesting observation, just FYI,” tweeted Klain. “President Macron appears to have secured a double-digit victory over LePen, at a time when his approval rating is 36%. Hmmm … ”

If Macron can pull it off, why can’t Biden, Klain is contending here.

Unconvincingly.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned in my 53 years on this earth, it’s to never interrupt a good mania. Because you can’t. Manias simply have to play themselves out.

In 2020, the mania on the right about how Covid came from a Chinese lab was so intense that when I pointed out that there was no convincing evidence beyond the circumstantial, Steve Bannon took a brief break from bilking his followers to call for my firing from Takimag.

The left, meanwhile, had its own lab origin mania: It was a “racist conspiracy theory.”

Two years on, the manias have faded. The left acknowledges that the lab theory is worthy of investigation, and the right didn’t have a collective seizure when two new studies (a comprehensive mapping of all initial cases and a detailed examination of early Covid samples) supported the wet market origin with fairly solid evidence.

The lesson: Sometimes you just gotta let events take their course.

I’ve been scolding the right quite a bit recently regarding “say groomer.” No more; it ain’t worth the aggravation. I’m just gonna let things play out.

And for the record, here’s how they’re gonna play out:

Six years ago, I interviewed UCLA law professor and WaPo legal blogger Eugene Volokh regarding the future of the tranny pronoun craze. Obama’s Justice Department had just released pro-tranny “guidelines” for U.S. schools regarding bathrooms and pronouns. So here’s what I wrote in May 2016:

I asked Volokh if he thinks it’s likely that “religious freedom” lawyers are going to claim that forcing teachers (as Obama’s guidelines do) to refer to a student by the pronoun of the student’s choice is a violation of the teacher’s religious freedom. “If a teacher claims that their religion dictates that a biological male should be referred to as ‘he,’ do you think some attorneys might try to argue that forcing such a teacher to call a male ‘she’ is, in effect, forcing that teacher to act against their beliefs?” “Definitely,” Volokh replied, “indeed.” (Several days after our back-and-forth, Volokh wrote a lengthy blog post further exploring the questionable legality of mandated pronouns.)

I made my prediction: It would end up in court on religious freedom grounds. Volokh agreed, and following our discussion he wrote a blog piece that was read by millions.

I concluded:

So that’s probably going to be the best line of defense against Obama’s bathroom madness. Demanding that teachers call a biologically male student “she” and “her” is essentially ordering them to adopt a faith-based belief system (a man can become a woman by wishing it so) that might conflict with their sincerely held religious beliefs, and that is very likely unconstitutional.

And guess what? A week ago, that’s exactly what happened. The 6th Circuit ruled that a professor at Shawnee State University in Ohio could not be compelled to use transgender pronouns that violate his Christian faith. The court ruled just as I predicted—a school can’t force a professor to accept tranny ideology—and the university had to give the prof nearly a half-million bucks for violating his rights.

So now I’m going to tell you where the “tranny teacher” thing is heading. It’ll end up in court, probably going all the way to SCOTUS, where the matter will be decided not on accusations of “pedo grooming.” In the end, it’s going to come down to the question of: To what extent can a teacher indoctrinate a “captive audience” in his/her own belief system?

Here’s first-grade teacher Ryan Skyer of Brooke Charter School, Boston, preaching tranny ideology to the students:

So when babies are born, the doctor looks at them and they make a guess about whether a baby is a boy or a girl, based on what they look like. And most of the time, that guess is 100 percent correct. There are no issues whatsoever. But sometimes the doctor is wrong, the doctor makes an incorrect guess. When the doctor makes a correct guess, that’s when a person is called cisgender. When a doctor’s guess is wrong, that’s when they’re transgender.

This is being taught as fact, not as theory, not “secularly” in a “neutral” manner, but as uncontested truth, in schools across the country. It’s proselytizing, it’s indoctrination. It’s publicly funded schools forcing a belief system on children.

This will end up in court, and it’ll likely be prohibited.

You can sit there yelling “groomer” all you want. Won’t make a difference—the ending’s good as in the can.

In Garcetti v. Ceballos (2006), SCOTUS ruled that public employees do not have First Amendment free speech protections when acting in their official capacity. Garcetti didn’t specifically apply to schools, but subsequent rulings have indicated that SCOTUS applies Garcetti to public K–12 teachers (but not to university professors).

As the 6th Circuit ruled in Evans-Marshall v. Tipp City School District (2010), “The First Amendment does not extend to the in-class curricular speech of teachers in primary and secondary schools.” SCOTUS denied certiorari, an indication that SCOTUS does apply Garcetti to K–12.

In 2007 the 7th Circuit ruled that an Indiana teacher did not have her rights violated when she was fired for telling her students that peace is better than war and that she once “honked” when passing a “honk for peace” anti–Iraq War demonstration. The 7th Circuit stressed that elementary school kids are a “captive audience,” and teachers don’t have a First Amendment right to proselytize on the job.

And again, SCOTUS denied cert.

As summarized by the University of Louisiana’s Professor Richard Fossey, K–12 teachers “are not protected by the First Amendment, even when they are engaging in pedagogical speech to their students.”

To be clear, the above-cited cases involved disputes between teachers and school districts, not teachers and parents. All the more reason for rightists to focus on taking control of school boards.

What troubles me is the conflation I’m seeing among fired-up rightists in which people who uncompromisingly oppose in-school tranny propagandizing but who also, at the same time, don’t think screaming about pedo cabals is an effective way to fight back are being lumped in with Con Inc. defeatist submissives who demand politeness and decorum as if the battle weren’t existential.

It’s not defeatist to counsel, as I have, that not every dilemma is best solved by shouting “#FUCKYOUWARWARWAR!” and charging in with a flawed battle plan.

It’s like none of you learned from 1/6, a failure of such mammoth proportions, rightists now claim the whole thing was an FBI entrapment plot. Okay, if that’s accurate, how did the FBI know how to so effectively “entrap” rightists?

Maybe because some of you are so predictable. Given the choice between a blind, emotionally satisfying, but not well-thought-out frontal assault on one hand and a well-contemplated strategic approach on the other, you’ll instinctively choose the former while dismissing the latter as defeatist.

Yet what was 1/6 if not a huge defeat?

Sometimes charging in like a rage-blinded bull isn’t the answer. Pointing this out doesn’t make someone a “cuck.”

That’s not to say there isn’t genuine defeatism among “respectable” conservatives regarding tranny propagandizing. There are the National Review types demanding propriety; heaven forbid Ron DeSantis might come off as “vengeful” or “abrasive” (perish the notion).

The defeatists are defined by unclarity of thought. Take the Daily Wire’s Jeremy Boreing, arguably the most intellectually shallow, meritlessly narcissistic person I’ve ever known. Boreing describes DeSantis’ revocation of Disney’s exclusive government-given perks as an attack on “freedom of speech.” Yet at the same time, Boreing calls tranny propagandizing in schools “child abuse.”

Granted, criticizing Boreing is as easy as shooting the bad toupee off a barrel fish. But it’s important to note his contradiction. If tranny propagandizing is actual child abuse, and if Disney has pledged (as it has) to overturn the law banning such propagandizing, then this is not a fight over speech. Disney’s advocating an actual crime (child abuse), so the “retaliation” isn’t based on speech but on removing favored status from a company trying to legalize child abuse.

If Boreing genuinely believes that the propagandizing is “child abuse” in the legal sense, then Disney’s pledge to overturn the law banning it becomes a public safety issue, not a “free speech” one.

Both extremes of the rightist reaction to tranny propagandizing miss the boat. The milquetoasts like Boreing who want to appear as noble “free speech” constitutionalists, and the gung ho “warwarwar” proponents of overarching pedo cabal theories, are pursuing flawed strategies.

The “pedo cabal” strategy is a dead end because you can’t prove it in court, and these culture war controversies inevitably end up in court (tranny activists are prepping for that as we speak, as are the race hustlers protesting the Texas anti-CRT law). Yes, I know you can “see” the cabal. It’s real to you. Just like Sidney Powell’s kraken conspiracies were real to you. But never mistake what’s real in your mind for what can be proven in accordance with evidentiary rules in a court of law.

More to the point, you may hate to hear this, but arguing that tranny propagandizing is “sexual abuse” in the criminal sense (and on that count the “groomer sayers” and Boreing are in agreement) will not pass legal muster. But the good news is, it doesn’t have to. In the words of Professor Fossey, “Teachers have no constitutional right to make lewd or profane remarks to students or to express their religious views in the classroom. Courts seem particularly hostile to classroom behavior that is sexual in nature. Courts are often willing to sanction teachers for such behavior, whether or not it rises to the level of sexual harassment or sexual molestation” (emphasis mine).

The “pedo molesters” argument against tranny propagandizing is not only a dead end, it’s unnecessary.

On the other extreme, the establishment neocons who demand civility as these are “free speech” issues should ask themselves how they’d respond if Muslims or other anti-Zionists demanded the right to propagandize unchallenged in publicly funded K–12 classrooms.

I don’t think you’d hear much rhetorical restraint from them were that the case.

When the Jonah Goldbergs and Jeremy Boreings go on about how Disney should not be sanctioned by having its perks revoked and rightists should not find themselves on the wrong side of “free speech” debates, please don’t mistake them for people like me. I’m against the “pedo groomer” approach because it works as neither a legal strategy nor a political one.

I’m not advocating “going soft” on the tranny ideologues and their enablers; I’m saying that sometimes “going hard” isn’t about shouting and Hulk-smashing (1/6 was “going hard” personified, and what did it get you?). Going hard is about defeating the bad guys, and that’s not always done by yelling, even if yelling makes us feel really, really good inside.

So sure, scream “groomer” to your heart’s content. Just don’t do it at the expense of what will actually work: seizing control of school boards and mounting legal challenges.

Arbitrary confiscation of private property raises several alarming issues. Apart from the purely moral ones, serious legal questions surround the recent seizures of yachts, airplanes, cash, houses, and other assets belonging to private Russian individuals. This was done as part of the economic sanctions imposed by the West after the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Property rights and rules of due legal process are sacred and are enshrined in the constitutions of all Western democracies.

The charge against the Russian oligarchs is that their wealth is derived in part through corruption or political support for the regime of President Putin and that these confiscated properties represent the gains of illegal activity. It is not clear that the governments now seizing the property will be able to clearly establish this charge.

Under U.S. law and most laws in Europe, assets that are frozen remain under previous ownership, but they can’t be transferred or sold. These assets are likely to remain in legal limbo for a long time and provide law firms with business for years as these issues end up in courts.

Most global billionaires—indeed anyone—could be targeted next on such grounds if they are deemed to have been closely associated with any ruling governments now or in the past.

History is full of examples where governments have seized enemy assets during wars. World War I and World War II saw property seizure as an instrument of policy. After WWI, properties of German nationals were sequestrated by the Allied governments to create a fund out of which their own nationals were to be paid the damages owed to them by the German state. This was the underlying basis of the Versailles Treaty. Subsequently it led to mounting grievances in Germany, resulting in the rise of Hitler and in WWII.

After WWII, German and Japanese property held in trust by the United States was used to satisfy in part the war claims of U.S. citizens. After WWII, properties of the Sudeten Deutsch were confiscated in Czechoslovakia without compensation. Numerous other examples can be found.

A bipartisan bill taking shape now in the U.S. Congress, called the “Yachts for Ukraine Act,” would allow U.S. authorities to seize any property valued at more than $5 million held by named Russian oligarchs in the U.S. and allow the government to sell the assets and send the cash to aid Ukraine. In the U.K., members of Parliament are floating the idea of a new fast-track path to freeze assets of oligarchs who aren’t yet sanctioned but are under “review.”

This would turn the clock back several hundred years, reviving ancient barbaric practices where whatever belonged to the enemy was legitimate booty, thus making private property depend for its security upon force.

These issues have been ferociously debated by legal scholars over the past hundred years. Today these developments are again creating a policy from which it may be difficult to backtrack when hostilities cease and negotiations restart. Russia has also seized 500 aircraft belonging to Western companies that are currently stranded there, and in a tit-for-tat it has also “seized” the local assets of several Western firms operating in Russia, e.g., Renault, Shell, etc.

America’s Founders understood clearly that private property is not only the foundation of prosperity but also the foundation of every right we have, including the right to be free. While justly criticizing Russia’s unprovoked aggression, the free press and media of the Western world should not forget to highlight that any systematic trampling of property rights can only come at great moral and economic cost to itself in the long term.

The Week’s Most Swaying, Braying, and Earth-Daying Headlines

BLACK FACE IN BLACKFACE
For the professional blackface hunter, that dogged activist who ferrets out and cancels anyone who dares to wear blackface, times are lean. Average whites just don’t black up anymore, and the remaining blackface practitioners (Jimmy Kimmel, Ralph Northam, Howard Stern, Sarah Silverman, Justin Trudeau) are a “protected species.”

Frustrating indeed.

But maybe not anymore. Jill Lassen and Stuart Rhoden are paid “equity coordinators” (i.e., freeloaders) who work for the Scottsdale Unified School District. Their job consists solely of pointing at things and screaming “racist” (prior to their tenure that job was performed by a macaw, but it was fired for being overqualified). Last week, Rhoden (who looks like Beetlejuice the dwarf) and Lassen (who looks like the Howard sibling Moe, Curly, and Shemp considered too ugly for movies) made an amazing discovery: There are over 40 million Americans who wear blackface every day with impunity.

They’re called black people, and they must be stopped!

When the Phoenix PTA held a retro ’70s party for charity, the organizers hired a DJ to spin some tunes. True to the party’s theme, the DJ wore a novelty ’70s-era afro wig. And Rhoden and Lassen immediately swooped in to “cancel” the entire PTA, because their DJ was in “blackface.”

Because the DJ’s black.

When this was brought to the attention of the two equitards, Lassen apologized for criticizing a black man for wearing his own skin. But Rhoden doubled down, saying that blackface is blackface, and it matters not if it’s your actual color. He pledged to continue to fight against black faces, starting with his own, as he submerged his head in a vat of bleach.

Condolence cards can be sent c/o the Scottsdale USD.

A brave hunter, who realized that the most deadly prey of all was himself.

ARBEIT MACHT FLY
The folks who run easyJet aren’t flying on all engines. Last week the British airline launched an ad campaign that featured a customer who tattooed his first easyJet flight number on his wrist, Auschwitz-style.

“You never forget your first flight,” easyJet captioned the photo.

Remarkably, outrage ensued, with furious social media users pointing out that the combination of the tattoo and “never forget” (the official catchphrase of the Holocaust since 1971, replacing the old one, “Oy, This I Could’ve Done Without”) couldn’t possibly have been accidental.

Some critics noted that this isn’t the carrier’s first brush with distasteful Holocaust content: In 2009, easyJet’s in-flight magazine featured a Holocaust-themed fashion spread (“Uli just loves her Monowitz monokini, while Gisela’s rocking that strapless brastika”).

In response to the media führer, the campaign was pulled. Perhaps it would’ve been smarter for easyJet to go all-in on its Holocaust fetish. What better way to stand apart from other carriers, who foolishly don’t see the commercial viability in linking air travel with mass murder?

Some suggestions:

Outfit the bathrooms with not just smoke detectors but Zyklon detectors as well.

Offer free preflight head-shaving.

Complementary yellow badges will make every passenger feel like a “star” (of David).

And perhaps best of all, make boarding an adventure by having a “selektion” ramp where passengers are either sent right (first class) or left (coach).

Flugbegleiter Höss: “Left, left, left, right, right, left, left…halten sie! You may take only one of your children to first class. Zee ozzer must go to coach.”

Sophie: “No, please! I beg you! Don’t make me choose!”

Höss: “You vill choose, or both vill go to zee sektion mit no TV, headphones, or schnacks.”

Sophie: “You monster! Have you no mercy?”

Höss: “Perhaps you should haff taken zee train, schweinehund.”

EasyJet: the final solution to your air-travel needs.

TRANS LIVES MATTERHORN
Nobody does hard-edged investigative reporting better than The Washington Post! Nobody, except literally everybody on earth. The Post decided last week to prove that conservative backlash to Disney’s woke activism (which includes opposition to Florida’s K–3 sexual propagandizing prohibition) hasn’t harmed Disney attendance.

The Post contacted thirteen travel agents who specialize in Disney trips, inquiring whether they’d seen a slowdown of bookings.

Eleven of those agents responded that they were too frightened to comment because the issue was “politically radioactive.” Of the two who did respond (one of whom is gay), they were both like, “Disney rules! Conservatives suck! And I say this of free will and sound mind.”

So the Post concluded, “Case closed: Disney traffic suffers not!”

Now, that was some fine reportage. One can imagine the Post conducting an in-depth investigation in 1928 regarding reports that the Chicago Mafia was shaking down businesses.

“We reached out to thirteen South Side business owners. Eleven responded by weeping uncontrollably for us to stop asking questions or they’ll be killed. Of the two who replied, one stated, ‘There is no Mafia. I am well, and if my business burns down it’ll be a gas leak.’ And the other, legitimate businessman Frankie “Disemboweler” Tagliotti, replied, ‘M’yeah, see, we’re doin’ fine, see? Ain’t no Mafia here, see? Now scram.’ We therefore declare the South Side free of Mob activity!”

When asked why the Disney “investigation” didn’t mention the company’s stock tanking last week, WaPo editor Sally “Simple Sal” Buzbee pretended to be a Mexican laborer who speaks no English. “No hablo, señor. Me do drywall. You need drywall?”

With the WaPo having “proven” that Disney is surviving conservative backlash, leftists are encouraging the company to relocate to bluer areas. Colorado governor Jared Polis tweeted that Disney World should move to his state, where, weather allowing, it can remain open five whole months a year! And writer/activist/yenta Amy Siskind recommended moving the park to NYC. When her followers reminded her that Disney World occupies a landmass larger than Manhattan, Siskind donned a sombrero and said, “I mow lawn, señor. You need mow?”

PRONOUN AND CON-NOUN
Occasionally, the news of the week is positive. Such was the case with the latest skirmish in The Great Call Me Ma’am War of 2022.

The “Battle of Therma’ampylae” started when the lobotomized bonobos who run Shawnee State demanded that all professors who teach at the Ohio university refer to their students by whatever pronouns the junior bonobos demand. Philosophy professor Nick Meriwether balked. As a Christian, he told university admins that the notion of men thinking themselves into becoming women goes against his deeply held beliefs.

The situation escalated several days later when Meriwether referred to a male student as “sir.”

“CALL ME MA’AM!” the dude shot back. Meriwether politely refused, so after class the truculent tranny confronted him in a threatening manner, calling him “cunt” while circling like a shark in lipstick. Meriwether suggested a reasonable compromise: From now on he’d refer to the student by name, bypassing pronouns entirely. That only made the wig-wearing wacko angrier. He went to the dean’s office and shrieked about how “Professor Hitler” had “misgendered” him.

The university agreed, and Meriwether was disciplined.

But he didn’t take it lying down; Meriwether filed suit. And the 6th Circuit Court ruled in his favor, likening the university’s pronoun policy to “forcing a Soviet émigré to address his students as ‘comrades.’”

“If professors lack free speech protections when teaching, a university would wield alarming power to compel ideological conformity,” the court declared.

So last week Shawnee State paid Meriwether $400,000 in compensation for trying to make him act against his beliefs.

That tranny student was one hell of an expensive “ma’am.”

Then again, war is always costly. And as the Battle of Transfalgar concluded with a win for the good guys, hopefully a message has been sent to other colleges to avoid such skirmishes.

FOREVER AGAIN
Everybody needs a hobby, be it stamp collecting or building model ships. For Jon Minadeo, it’s getting headlines as a hatemonger because the Jews you can’t quit can’t quit you, either.

Minadeo, who looks and dresses like the kind of bottom-tier amateur stuntman who’d be in the biker-bar scene of a super low-budget Don “The Dragon” Wilson direct-to-video flop (the preceding eleven words comprised a very redundant descriptor), has made a cottage industry out of traveling the country leaving anti-Jewish pamphlets at the doors of homeowners in Jewish neighborhoods.

Minadeo practically defines the term “insignificant loser,” but Jewish orgs are determined to give “biker guy who gets punched by Steven Seagal” a significance way beyond his merits.

Last December, The Week That Perished detailed the over-the-top response by Jewish activists and pandering politicians to Minadeo’s activities in Beverly Hills and the Bay Area. Earlier this year, the fearmongering frequent flyer flier-flinger repeated his pamphleteering aktion in Sarasota, prompting local kvetch artist Lesley Abravanel to condemn Governor DeSantis for not giving Minadeo statewide publicity by denouncing his shenanigans (it’s hard to blame Abravanel for her stupidity or her anti-Nazi vendetta: She was the recipient of a Mengele brain-removal experiment in Brazil in the 1970s).

Last week, Minadeo struck again in Beverly Hills, leaving anti-Jewish fliers outside the city’s many mansions, where they were picked up by puzzled Mexican gardeners (“Que es ‘Holohoax’?”).

And again, the Jewish press made a superstar of Minadeo.

A few months ago, one of Minadeo’s followers posted, “Thanks, Jews, for the publicity,” in response to the Pavlovian reaction every time Minadeo blankets a block.

With Jewish orgs making a celebrity out of a two-bit loser, as black activists thank hate-hoaxers for “starting a conversation about race,” it’s hard to believe that these “anti-racists” don’t understand that their actions encourage more racism.

It’s almost like the activists and orgs want more racism…like they need it to justify their existence.

NEW YORK—My friend Douglas Murray is the canary in the Bagel coal mine as of late. The left controls culture, education, and the technology over here, but a few canaries are still free to warn the rest of us that we’re being taken for a ride. Here’s a warning to those multimillionaires who get down on one knee every weekend to make themselves feel better for getting lotsa moola playing a game in the sun. It has to do with black lives and whether they matter or not. Black lives do matter, but not to those who run the racket that goes by the acronym BLM. According to Murray writing in the New York Post, the biggest lie is the racket behind the rhetoric. One year ago it transpired that the real estate empire of BLM cofounder Patrisse Cullors was funded by well-meaning but gullible folk who gave generously to the cause. A $5.8 million house was among the four she owns, although some claim she owns at least six houses. Her response was to call the revelations racist and sexist.

Far more important than the fact the cofounder of BLM has become very rich with the funds of well-meaning naïfs are some facts revealed by the Brit canary in the coal mine. Here’s what Douglas had to say in a jiffy: Left-wing papers like the NY Times and Bezos-owned Washington Post plus CNN and MSNBC pretend that racism is pandemic in America and that close to 10,000 unarmed black men are annually killed in America by the cops. The operative word here is “annually.” Among liberals 40 percent believe these figures. The actual number is around ten. For any of you who failed math at school as I did, the big lie by the lefty media simply multiplied the number by 1,000 percent. Just think of it for a moment. Platforms supposed to objectively inform the public multiplied a number one thousand times in order to discredit the police, and to convince the world that Uncle Sam is a racist beast. Our old friend Zuckerberg did what was expected of him and classified the original exposé by the New York Post as “abusive” and prevented it from being shared on its platform.

BLM originally conned the public by claiming they would address the ills that plague America. The moola rolled in and the leaders cashed in by buying mansions in chic areas of El Lay. Once it became obvious this was a con worthy of Bernie Madoff, Big Tech buried it. This is America today, a place run by hustlers who are protected by smarter hustlers eager to be woke icons. Otherwise, the Bagel is getting more violent by the minute, the latest being a gunman shooting about fifteen people in a crowded subway car and only stopping when the Glock he was using jammed. He got away, but his picture, age, and name were posted while the fuzz was looking for him. Not by the NY Times, however, because the perp happened to be black.

There are, of course, reasons to laugh and be merry. All one has to do is look at the NY Times headlines. On April 12, in bold letters: “Woman Pleads Guilty to Tackling Black Teen in Lobby of Hotel.” To tell the truth, I think something is very funny for a grown woman to tackle a black youth in a hotel, mistakenly as it turned out because he had not stolen her mobile phone; a man-bites-dog story, and very funny because the paper treated it like a major crime. American women tackle men all the time in hotels. In a more serious vein, accused murderers are automatically sprung every day because of bail laws that make it possible, but the word most heard and used around the Bagel is “racism.”

One has to laugh at this joke culture and slow death of this once-great city. I go out all the time and have yet to be nicked as crime goes through the roof, but I worry about my buddy Michael, who lives in Brooklyn in the middle of all the carnage. And while politicians spin the violence in the Bagel, and the TV networks warn us about the dangers of white supremacy, the cops continue to be handcuffed and the criminals coddled. The language, too, has gone south, ghetto vernacular being in, a mid-Atlantic accent almost a capital offense. This mindset has even affected the clothes we wear. Preppie or clubby is considered to be racist, and that goes for men’s looks also. A good-looking man must be a racist, sexist beast, whereas those ghastly bald men with beards are viewed as sensitive and with-it. Brooks Brothers, the shop that served preppies these past one hundred years, bit the dust sometime last year, and Abercrombie ditto, both seen as out of step with millennial and Generation Z customers. Papa Hemingway used Abercrombie for fishing and hunting gear, and F. Scott Fitzgerald was a Brooks Brothers devotee. Now both stores have shut down, their demise hastened by an activist (read busybody asshole with a bald head and long beard) who demanded that Abercrombie make plus-size clothing for the slobs that Americans have turned into.

That’s the good news I have for you from slob city this week, and if I survive stray bullets the coming weekend—I plan to eat out every day and even visit the park—I’ll have better news for you next week.

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