When the British public voted to leave the European Union in 2016, it wasn’t just the result that shocked the liberal establishment; it was also the realization that the voters’ priority was illegal immigration. Now, with “Brexit” supposedly in place, it would be expected that the steady flow of migrants into the U.K. would dry up. Instead it is increasing, and this is due to collusion between Britain’s deep state (it does have one), the organizations tasked with guarding the coastline, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and lawyers.

Border Force, the coast guard with a special remit for illegal immigrants, has been outstanding—as a taxi service for incoming migrants, that is. Their boats regularly take incomers from their dinghies in the English Channel and give them a ride to England. Perhaps their mission statement is the comment made by Paul Lincoln, outgoing head of Border Force: “Bloody borders are just a pain in the arse.”

NGOs, in the case of immigration, work tirelessly to prevent deportations, fiercely dedicated to social justice and with the hatred of their own country that goes with that.

The third set of obstructions to Britain maintaining the integrity of her borders is people who win their battles not with decisive victories but by attrition: lawyers. We will see their role in the U.K.’s immigration fiasco unfold.

There are two categories of troublesome immigrants to the United Kingdom: the ones you can’t keep out, and the ones you can’t deport once they are in and found to be undesirable.

The main entry point is the beaches of Dover, in southeast England, and the migrants pay people-smugglers in France for passage in motorized rubber dinghies. The French could easily detain the travelers. They still have their passports at this point and so could be processed more easily. They will throw these passports into the sea as they cross the English Channel. But French president Emmanuel Macron—and the E.U. in general—is enjoying punishing the U.K. for having the temerity to leave the E.U.

Once they disembark—95 percent of them young, fit Muslim men—some simply disappear into the local towns and villages, medically untested and absolutely untraceable. Some are taken not to foreboding concentration camps but to good-quality hotels. Immigrants often turn down offers of rural hotels and even housing because, they claim, they are worried their families might be split up, or that they will miss out on job opportunities. The actual reason is that they want to live in London with their coreligionists.

The British government has recently realized that voters are becoming restless about the lack of perceived action on immigration, and not just the voters whose weddings have been canceled on short notice because the hotel they had booked is now needed to house migrants. So, there are mutterings about a new Bill of Rights, about breaking away from the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR, and to which Britain is, inexplicably, still beholden in the courts), and about speeding up the application process. To see how that last is going requires inspection of the government’s last big idea to speed up asylum applications. Fly them to Rwanda.

Of course, this turned into a farce. A plane was chartered for half a million pounds, £120 million was given up front to the Rwandan government (who I am sure will invest it wisely), and the flight was set to leave carrying 130 asylum applicants. Then the legal challenges began, and the numbers dwindled until, by the day of the flight, just one passenger was aboard. Then he was taken off the flight too. A legal challenge, I believe.

Apart from the fact that Johnson’s cabinet is stuffed with lawyers who failed to anticipate this blizzard of lawfare, the Rwanda flight exemplifies that there is a well-oiled machine determined to allow no deportations, whether Muslims, Africans, or Caribbeans.

So, a coalition between social justice lawyers and NGOs conspires to prevent deportations, but it doesn’t stop there. The public can now join in. Peckham in south London is a pretty rough area, but for police who arrived to detain a Nigerian man prior to deportation, it got a lot rougher. Locals formed a mob and the police were prevented from apprehending the deportee.

The immigrants themselves also take precautionary measures to prevent or at least stall moves to deport them. Abdul Aziz is a perfect example. Aziz was jailed in 2012 for his role as ringleader of a “grooming gang,” who raped young white girls. Aziz got one 13-year-old pregnant. He got nine years, of which he served three years, seven months. But his British citizenship was revoked and he was scheduled to be deported to his native Pakistan. Five days before the flight, he signed papers renouncing his Pakistani citizenship, rendering him stateless. ECHR laws dictate that someone cannot be deported to a country of which they are not a legal citizen. To top it off, the British were forced to reinstate his British citizenship, and now he walks freely in the town he used to terrorize, no doubt seeing his victims from time to time, and they him.

Another refugee, who claimed he was being persecuted in his native Nigeria, did some persecuting of his own six years ago when he raped a teenage girl. A deportation order was given, and the man was on the plane waiting to taxi onto the runway. Fortunately for social justice, some right-minded fellow passengers prevented the plane from taking off, allowing a formal legal challenge to be made and granting a stay of execution. A few months later, he was on the tarmac again before being taken off the flight as the result of a legal application for case review. Now his case, like so many others, is locked in litigation.

But immigrants have to stay somewhere while their cases are reviewed, and the hotels will soon be full. The public need not worry, however, as government has the answer to that, too.

The tiny North Yorkshire village of Linton-on-Ouse has a population of around 700 and is evocative of a vanishing England. On its outskirts, it is also home to an abandoned Royal Air Force base, and the government proposes to turn this into a migrant holding center. There was no consultation with the local residents, and it wasn’t fifty or sixty fit young Muslim men the government wanted to place there, but up to 1,500. And they won’t be confined to barracks, but free to roam into town to see what the nightlife offers. Linton-on-Ouse has one shop and a church.

It has become faddish for politicians and media pundits to describe an underperforming organization or government department as “unfit for purpose.” This is fine as long as there is agreement on what the purpose is.

If the purpose of the immigration system is to protect Britain’s sovereign borders, it is unfit for purpose. If, on the other hand, its purpose is to abet a hybrid of Samuel T. Francis’ anarcho-tyranny and Yuri Bezmenov’s four stages of destroying a nation from within, the U.K. immigration system is very much fit for purpose.

I gather from the recent hysteria that the Supreme Court has just ordered all 72 million American women of childbearing age to get pregnant and carry the baby to term.

This is big news, if true. I’m not at all surprised that every female journalist, activist and politician is threatening to burn down the Supreme Court over its decision last Friday in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization.

On the other hand, even accepting the abortion cult’s belief that members of the weaker sex are incapable of either keeping their knees together or mastering birth control, I still only count about 100,000 women who won’t have easy access to abortions without Roe v. Wade.

According to the pro-abortion Guttmacher Institute, 930,160 abortions are performed in the U.S. every year. The lion’s share of those abortions occur in states that Biden won. Sixty-eight percent of all abortions are performed in blue states and 32% in red states, according to the CDC.

Far from restricting abortion, the blue states have begun wildly expanding abortion rights in response to Dobbs — to the extent that that’s humanly possible. (Yes, it’s a beating heart, a helpless human being made in God’s image, but I’m not all that grieved about abortions in blue states.)

That means, straight out of the chute, we’re down to only 297,651 abortions per year that are even at risk of being banned after Dobbs.

Flash to thousands of screeching harridans, whose only risk of pregnancy would be if a zoologist inseminated them in a lab, holding signs that say, “GET OUT OF MY UTERUS!”

Also according to Guttmacher, 54% of all abortions already are “medication abortions,” i.e. accomplished with pills given within the first 10 weeks of pregnancy. Good luck trying to ban that: The combined power of federal law enforcement — the FBI, the DEA, Customs and Border Protection and the U.S. military — plus state law enforcement can’t even keep fentanyl out of the country.

So now, we’re down to — at most — 136,919 abortions a year that could theoretically be banned post-Dobbs.

In fact, it will be significantly fewer than that, because a lot of the red state “bans” will still permit abortion in the first trimester. Guess how many abortions take place in the first trimester? Ninety-two percent, according to the CDC. Forty-three percent occur in the first six weeks of pregnancy.

We’ve apparently already won an awful lot of “hearts and minds” on abortion — and I’m happy to explain that term to any pro-abortionists who can’t define “beating heart.”

I didn’t even mention that every abortion ban includes an exception to protect the life or (serious) health of the mother (i.e., NOT I’ll be really depressed if I can’t get this abortion). Always have, and always will. That gives the abortionist a fair bit of wiggle room.

This is the terrifying future that led thousands of abortion hobbyists to rush into the streets last week and scream at us about their uteruses. All because up to 100,000 ladies won’t be able to get drive-thru abortions if they have unprotected sex with men they don’t want to have children with, and they didn’t notice that they live in Louisiana.

Maybe their unaborted kids will be better at math.

The loons have also introduced a new phrase into the abortion debate (already elevated by such precise terminology as “choice”): “Abortion care.” See, if I’d been at the meeting where it was announced, OK, everybody! We’re going to start calling it “abortion care,” I’d have said, “I’m sorry, that’s too preposterous.”

Consistent with liberal psyches, the attack on the Supreme Court last week was completely schizophrenic —

Thursday: HOW DARE YOU TAKE AWAY STATES’ RIGHTS ON GUNS!
Friday: HOW DARE YOU GIVE US STATES’ RIGHTS ON ABORTION!
[ANSWER: One’s in the Constitution, and one isn’t.]

The Dobbs decision also allowed the left to imitate Joe Sobran’s joke version of a New York Times headline: Earthquake Destroys New York; Women and Minorities Hit Hardest.

In one breath, abortion enthusiasts tell us women of color will be hit hardest by the court ruling allowing states to ban abortion. That’s true in a sense: According to the latest figures from the CDC, in 2019, 33% percent of women seeking abortions were white, 38% black and 21% Hispanic. Per capita, that’s more black and Latino babies being aborted than white babies.

But then in the next breath, they say opposition to abortion is rooted in white supremacy! Yes, that’s a big rallying cry at the white supremacist rallies: DON’T KILL BLACK BABIES!

As I noted after the freakout over the leaked abortion opinion a couple of months ago, no matter what people think of abortion, unleashing these shrews on the public is not helping Democrats.

Democratic consultants’ midterm strategy: more shrews!

Oh, wait — the Democrats agree with me. After allowing the ladies a three-day struggle session over the weekend, on Monday, the Jan. 6 committee suddenly announced an immediate return to the hearings. It was an emergency! They had a surprise witness. This could not wait.

MAJOR UPDATE FROM SHOCK WITNESS AT TUESDAY’S HEARINGS: Trump is still a douchebag.

In three days, we went from It’s a Christian cult on the Supreme Court! My Body, My Choice! This is like slavery! to … What abortion decision? Let’s talk about Trump!

You’d think saving babies would be enough. Dobbs saved the babies. What more does the right need? “We won; pop the bubbly.”

But that’s not how the right’s wired at the moment. Sure, saving babies is great and all, but the MAGA right’s too distracted to appreciate the victory. They’ll never admit it, but MAGAs have let the 1/6 hearing get under their skin. So in the days following Dobbs, when rightists should’ve been doing a victory dance about babies, most high-profile rightists were instead focused on spinning equivalencies about how the left’s reaction to Dobbs proves that the Democrats are “the real insurrectionists.”

Rightists score a major victory regarding something they’ve been bitching about for fifty years, but they can’t enjoy it because of 1/6 defensiveness.

“Congrats, buddy—the babies are saved!”

“Yeah, sure, whatever. Look at what AOC just said! Didja see? Didja see? They’re the insurrectionists, not us!”

“But the fetuses…”

“Fuck ’em. Look at Maxine Waters! That’s what an insurrectionist looks like! They called 1/6 an insurrection, but they’re worse! But they won’t get investigated. Unfair, huh? That settles it; I’m vindicated.”

When AOC stood outside SCOTUS and told her followers to go “into the streets,” everyone from MTG and Boebert to Mollie Hemingway, Sara Carter, Stephen Miller, Dan Bongino, Benny Johnson, and 1/6 subpoena recipient Alex Bruesewitz screamed, “Aha! She’s the real real insurrectionist! 1/6 is exonerated!”

(Even though telling activists to “take to the streets” to protest has been a standard leftist cliché since before most of us were born.)

When the DOJ promised to “protect reproductive freedom,” Matt Walsh wailed, “This is an insurrection far more dangerous than anything that happened on January 6.”

(Even though disagreeing with judicial rulings and promising to find workarounds is par for the partisan course and something Trump should’ve done occasionally.)

When Rep. Jackie Speier told followers to “armor up” because “there’s a war out there,” Ezra Levant screamed “insurrection!” And when a handful of Antifa types marched in Downtown L.A., Fox’s Dan Gainor tweeted “Hey #J6Committee want to see insurrection?”

(Even though that Downtown shindig was dispersed before 11 p.m., and by L.A. standards, it didn’t even match, in terms of numbers or destructiveness, the Depeche Mode record store riot of 1990.)

Rightist rising star Rogan O’Handley predicted that Friday night, Democrat cities would be burned to the ground by pro-abortion mobs. Bad call; no cities were burned. And here in L.A., the LAPD’s refreshingly brutal handling of freeway-blocking protesters Saturday afternoon suggests that rightists banking on abortion mobs alienating voters by sacking cities will be greatly disappointed (abortion protesters are predominantly white; they don’t have racial immunity from rough treatment by cops).

Tucker Carlson (of course) devoted his entire Friday opening segment to how AOC and Biden are the real insurrectionists for protesting Dobbs (Tuck also waxed conspiratorial about why Roe supporters were so “ready to protest” with “ready-made signs,” as if Dobbs hadn’t been leaked nearly two months ago).

So the talking point for the summer is, “Abortion protesters are the real insurrectionists.”

And my question is, who’s that talking point aimed at? Who’s it for?

Almost half of independent voters say they’d be less likely to vote for a candidate who spouts Trump’s election-theft claims (only 11 percent say they’d be more likely). Sixty-eight percent of independents consider the work of the 1/6 committee important (47 percent “very important,” 21 percent “somewhat important”). 1/6 is not a winning issue for the right among swing voters. And yet Friday, when SCOTUS gave the left a reason to push 1/6 to the back burner, rightists decided to respond by reminding everyone of 1/6.

That ain’t sane.

Dobbs was a gift to the right by taking the focus off 1/6, and rightists responded by putting the focus back on 1/6. It’s like rightists farted at the dinner table, leftists laughed at them, and just when everybody has reason to forget about the fart, rightists hear a leftist hiccup and scream, “Aha, see? They make rude noises too! They’re the gaseous ones, not us!”

Which of course only reminds everyone about the initial fart.

1/6 was a stinker, and you should feel humiliated by it. You farted, they laughed. But, eventually the room will tire of the jokes. Don’t make it worse by constantly defending the fart or nervously accusing others of farting just to repair your bruised ego.

Let 1/6 go. Let the excuses go. No, it wasn’t an FBI op. No, it wasn’t “the same as BLM.” No, it isn’t “unfair” for 1/6 to draw scrutiny that BLM riots don’t. America’s had race riots for 200 years; there’s no novelty to them. Blacks riot; it’s what they do. No need for an investigating commission. It’s like, conservatives can bellyache after each high-profile mass shooting, “Why all the outrage over these kinds of shootings but nobody cares about black kids killing each other on the streets of Chicago?” but just because we pretend to not know the answer doesn’t mean we don’t. Blacks shooting blacks is the world working as expected, as is blacks throwing tantrums and looting.

1/6 was most definitely not the world (of politics) working as expected. It was unique and jarring. Don’t be a child and weep, “Waah, people are paying too much attention to the attention-grabbing thing we did.”

Disgruntled supporters of a defeated president beating cops and smashing their way into the Capitol with some impractical unformed notion of overturning an election was novel, and the mere possibility that Trump considered martial law and fake electors, or that he encouraged or tolerated threats to the VP, deserves investigation. Extraordinary events provoke extraordinary responses. That’s reality, whether you like it or not.

Pro-abortion protests don’t equal insurrection. Pro-abortion protests are legal and familiar. Protest signs saying “burn it down” don’t equal beating cops and busting through Capitol windows and doors. Criticizing SCOTUS doesn’t equal that either. No words, no hyperbole, equal the actions of 1/6.

If you want the memory of 1/6 to fade, you’ve got to move on. That means not using every opportunity to make strained, defensive equivalencies. But since I know many of you are going to stick with the “Democrats are the real insurrectionists” talking point anyway, again I’ll ask—who’s it for? 1/6 was carried out by the “screw your optics, I’m going in” crowd. 1/6 equivalence comes courtesy of those humiliated by the former’s failure and how it’s been used as a cudgel by the left. Like 1/6 itself, 1/6 equivalence is not aimed at those outside the group. “Screw your optics” by definition means “I don’t care how this looks to others.” The 1/6ers didn’t care (they were neck-deep in their own cultish mania), and 1/6 apologists don’t either. The blathering about “See, they do it too!” might appear orchestrated to convince bystanders, but it’s 100 percent about the humiliated trying to convince themselves.

It’s balm to soothe the base’s sore ass. And in fact there’s a heated debate going on right now among political pollsters regarding whether soothing the base is all that’s needed in an election year.

Far-far-far leftist pollster Rachel Bitecofer has riled the pollster community by claiming that the very notion of the “swing voter” is a myth. Yes, “optics” don’t matter, because it’s the already ideologically hardened who decide elections. Base turnout is all that counts, and base turnout is dependent upon base energization. So energize the base by any means necessary, to hell with how “unaffiliateds” react.

Countering Bitecofer are pollsters who stand by the importance of the swing voter and the necessity of targeting the persuadable. These pollsters point to studies that show 75 percent of “election to election swing” is due to “swing voters changing their minds,” while only 25 percent is due to “base turnout.”

I’m not gonna litigate that matter here (it’s not my field), but one look at Bitecofer’s Twitter makes it clear that she’s the leftist version of a “screw your optics” MAGA. Everything’s “smash smash kill kill.” Trump’s a “Nazi,” DeSantis a “murderer.” Bitecofer’s “myth of swing voters” thesis exists to rationalize her own preference for over-the-top name-calling and her simpleminded, black-and-white worldview. If the swing voter is irrelevant, if the middle-grounder doesn’t exist, then Bitecofer’s extremist ideological self-indulgence becomes conveniently smart as well as emotionally satisfying.

Same for MAGAs. If the swing voter is irrelevant, if all that matters is firing up the base, then indeed, optics be screwed. Base-energizing lies become beneficial: Abortion advocates are fomenting insurrection! 1/6 was an FBI plot! No cops were assaulted; the MAGAs entered the Capitol peacefully! Eliminating the abortion rape exception isn’t political suicide!

Convince yourself that every election is just the base and not the swing and, left or right, you can guiltlessly indulge your every ideological excess and pleasing untruth.

Ironically, Bitecofer defends her thesis by saying, “This is what the right does! Offense! Hardball!” And the “screw your optics” MAGAs excuse what they do by saying, “This is what the left does! Offense! Hardball!”

Bitecofer and MAGA are symbiotic, mirror-image twins. Over-the-top vitriol, comforting lies, simplemindedness, and a pathological contempt for anyone who says, “But wait, how might Joe Swingvote react to this?”

If Bitecofer’s correct, from now through November the right should stick to defending and lying about 1/6 and tarring their opponents as commies and groomers, while attacking anyone who dares counsel moderation regarding abortion prohibition as a “baby killer,” and the left should stick to defending and lying about the economy and crime (“The economy’s doing great and crime fears are just white paranoia”) while tarring their opponents as Nazis or Russian stooges while attacking anyone who dares counsel moderation regarding abortion-on-demand as a “woman killer.”

If Bitecofer’s on target, all of that is justified. Every grotesque, off-putting thing about American politics is justified.

Of course, if she’s wrong, then the midterms will go to the side that appeals to swing voters.

Rightists who continue to defend 1/6 because it pleases the base to hell with what independents think…rightists who’ll react to Dobbs by demanding total abortion prohibition, a federal ban, and no rape exception because it pleases the base to hell with what independents think, are wagering a lot on a far-left, historically illiterate Trigglypuff loon being correct.

They’re wagering the nation’s future.

Problem is, Dobbs has energized the Dem base to an insane degree. Dobbs has turned leftists from defenders of a failed regime to insurgents, and insurgents are always more energized. If Bitecofer’s thesis is accurate, Dems have the advantage now. Abortion’s set the Dem base afire, while GOPs are already starting to sour on some of their own candidates (and count on Trump to dampen base enthusiasm for primary winners he didn’t endorse).

Rightists should proceed as though Bitecofer’s wrong, because, as they won’t be able to match the left in terms of base energization post-Dobbs, they have little choice but to acknowledge and engage the swingers.

So lose the self-indulgence and false equivalencies.

Lose 1/6.

Doing so may not be the emotionally satisfying move, but it’s the smart one.

The Week’s Most Mummering, Bummering, and Summering Headlines

JUNETEENTH PICNIC: FREE KNUCKLE SAMMICHES!
In the U.K., the day after Christmas is Boxing Day. In the U.S., the day after Juneteenth is Bagging Day, in which the gunfire casualties from the previous day’s celebrations are body-bagged.

Juneteenth 2022 saw a relatively low mortality rate (double digits, a regular 1914 Christmas Truce level of peacefulness when grading on a black curve). There’s no immediate explanation for why there were fewer shootings this year, but one guess is that with Juneteenth falling on Father’s Day, many black men avoided the festivities, for fear of running into support-seeking baby mamas.

That said, it wouldn’t be Juneteenth without at least one headline-worthy act of gratuitous violence.

Louisville mayor Greg Fischer is a straight-down-the-line leftist white Democrat. He supports BLM, considers racism a “public health crisis,” and endlessly apologizes for his city’s past and present “oppression” of blacks.

If he thinks that buys him “white guy cred,” he’s quite mistaken. Last weekend, while mingling with Juneteenth celebrants at the city’s Fourth Street Live shopping complex, Fischer was sucker punched by a black dude who decked the mayor to the ground and then calmly walked away, as if in America a black man can punch an elected official and leave the scene.

NARRATOR: In America a black man can punch an elected official and leave the scene. Nobody, not even the mayor’s security detail, pursued the attacker.

A Louisville slugger turned the mayor into Kentucky Fried Fischer. Happy Juneteenth, Charlie Brown!

No word on whether Fischer will resign, because obviously he must’ve racismed that poor black guy to provoke such righteous fury.

As for Fischer’s do-nothing security staff, they already have multiple job offers from Uvalde (that joke is in observance of TooSoonteenth).

GIVING UP THE GHOST FOR LENTIL
The thing about alcoholics dying of liver disease is, at least they enjoyed getting there. It was a fun ride to organ failure.

Dying of liver disease due to lentils is another story entirely. Lentils are to vegans what Blade Runner is to movie buffs: Nobody actually likes it, but they have to pretend to in order to look cool to their friends.

Daily Harvest is a vegan meal-delivery service backed by Gwyneth Paltrow and Serena Williams, two of the greatest medical minds in nutritional health, a regular Bimbocrates and Albert Schwartzer. Yet even with these two ricket scientists at the helm, last week Daily Harvest went Dust Bowel when its “French Lentil + Leek Crumbles” sent customers to the ER. Turns out the lentils were raw and disease-ridden, resulting in dozens of customers suffering permanent liver damage.

Of course, there’s no way to tell if a vegan is terminally ill. They all have “resting death face.”

The bad news for Daily Harvest is that when your customer base is millennial vegans, many of them are likely to be “influencers.” So the company is facing a barrage of negative publicity as TikTok and Instagram stars rant about their nonstop vomiting and diarrhea, which admittedly is more entertaining than the content they normally post.

Trying to make the best of a bad situation, Daily Harvest has rebranded the lentil dish using a photo of Serena Williams and the caption “Like an overhead smash to your gut, it’ll be sudden death when you have a stroke and drop a deuce after we serve our no-fault lentils. Thanks for supporting our racket!”

NIGHTHAWKS, BY EDWARD HOPHEAD
And now, on to the one group more annoying than vegans…

Imagine a late-night diner somewhere in California. The clientele comprises young morons who can’t stop expressing surprise that they’re smoking pot in public:

Pothead: “Whoa, dude, can I do this?”

Counterman: “Yes, for the tenth time, you can. This is a cannabis café.”

Second Pothead: “Dude, check this out! I’m totally lighting up in public. Just let ’em try and stop me!”

Counterman: “They’re not going to try and stop you; it’s a legal pot café.”

Third Pothead: “Duuuuude, like, if they knew we were doing this we’d be so busted!”

Counterman: “They do know, and you’re not busted.”

The big thing in California right now is “weed cafés,” where, thanks to the state’s 2016 referendum legalizing pot, stoners can toke openly. You might wonder why stoners are flocking to these places like they’re a novelty. Medicinal pot (i.e., pot for anyone with insomnia or anxiety, meaning everyone) was legalized in California almost thirty years ago, so the notion of open smoking shouldn’t be so exciting. But pot users are like vegans, except with damage to the brain instead of the liver. Everything’s a novelty when you can’t remember last week.

So, like idiots, the state’s Cheech and Bongs are frequenting these cafés just to giggle like retards, “I’m blazin’ in public and the Man can’t stop me!”

Plus, like vegans, stoners love evangelizing about the supposed benefits of their fetish. “The Mayans used hemp to build the pyramids, and, like, the Native Americans smoked pot every day and that’s why they’re so healthy.”

California lawmakers are trying to reconcile the explosion of pot cafés with the state’s ban on indoor smoking, but considering that many cities in the state don’t prosecute murder or assault, no one’s really sweating the enforcement issue.

Plus, at least California politicians can say, “Thank God we’re not Oregon.”

Speaking of which…

PACIFIC NORTHMESSED
Welcome to the Oregon LSD Trail…and it’s a trail of corpses. A rugged land of rain forests and Rain Men: politicians who defund the police and then marvel at the concomitant rise in crime as though such a thing was unexpected, and voters who approve a ballot measure decriminalizing hard drugs—including heroin, methamphetamine, LSD, and oxycodone—and then stand aghast when their streets become littered with dead junkies.

2020’s Ballot Measure 110, a.k.a. “The Useless Eaters Elimination Act,” has led to a 41 percent rise in overdose deaths in the state, with more than 1,069 in 2021 and 2022 on track to break that record. Cities like Portland have become open-air markets for homeless druggies, living monuments to Oregon’s favorite son, River Phoenix, a shooting (up) star who burned his crack pipe at both ends.

But one brave suburban Portland mayoral candidate has a plan to warehouse the problem: Leslie Wright, a black gentleman and former Marine, wants to put the homeless addicts in tiny pods like them Japanese hotels:

Have you ever seen the Japanese people, how they live? They live in these small, compact areas. We’re gonna take each one of those [homeless] people and give them their own little area and give them an address.

A perfect plan! No flaw at all. Except for the fact that the Japanese don’t fill their capsule hotel pods with feces and meth. Other than that, Wright’s plan should work like a charm. Surely being housed in a coffin won’t trigger psychotic episodes in drug-addled schizos.

When Wright’s plan was criticized, not for its impracticality but for its “racism” at invoking WWII Japanese internment (remember, it’s Oregon, where stupid things can only be criticized for stupid reasons), a chastened Wright told the local press, “I was disappointed and dismayed about my reference to the Japanese people.”

He’s told himself that if he doesn’t start speaking smarter, he’ll lose his vote.

Just what the city needs: a mayor who sounds like he’s on drugs himself.

THE ELEPHANT TRANSMAN
Remember the days when tabloids ran features about the worst plastic surgeries in Hollywood? Cruel, mocking stories (always featuring Bruce Jenner) about bad nose jobs and grotesque face-lifts and chin implants.

What ignorant times! Back then, human deformity was seen as something to avoid, rather than encourage. How much more enlightened we are now. In this progressive age, we understand that the very best thing you can do for a teenager, especially a teenage white girl, is encourage them to get Elephant Manned by some psychotic butcher who gets Obamacare subsidies to disfigure children.

“I am not an animal! I am stunning and brave!”

Fast-tracking teen girls into the tranny mutilation machine has reached assembly-line efficiency, with thousands of quacks bypassing parental consent in order to turn scores of “shes” into “its.”

As doctors compete to see how many severed breasts they can accumulate per month, Mengele looks up from hell saying, “Damn, talk about being born before your time.”

Unfortunately, a growing group of ingrates—girls who are oddly bitter that charlatans maimed them for life—are speaking publicly about how they wish doctors hadn’t been so quick to carve them up. A New York Post piece last week detailed the stories of several teen girls who’d been coerced into transforming into medical monstrosities by social media pressure, peer bias against “cis white girls,” and doctors who give out tranny-pills like an octogenarian tossing breadcrumbs to ducks. The girls, who had their breasts lopped off and their features wrecked by injections, have a host of malformations, from Robert Z’Dar jawlines to Zach Galifianakis-level unwanted hair.

And on Twitter last week, a thread went viral in which a boy-to-girl “transitioner” graphically explained what “she” became after surgery:

No one told me that the base area of your penis is left, it can’t be removed—meaning you’re left with a literal stump inside that twitches. You wake up with morning wood, without the tree. I have random pockets of sensation that only seem to pick up pain, rather than pleasure.

How did a profession that used to quiver at the thought of malpractice suits become a league of reckless mutilators?

We used to despise ambulance-chasing lawyers. But boy, are they missed today!

It’s nice to be back in the old continent again, especially after getting within a couple hundred yards of the phoniest bunch of Hollywood East types, fakes with names like Pelosi, Schumer, Schiff, and their ilk. It made me fly out from the Bagel without mixed feelings for a change. America has become unrecognizable, a violent land where a Democratic Congress winks at riots and intimidation by the left, where career criminals are seen as victims, where one’s livelihood can end with a slip of the tongue. If that’s a free country, I’m Benito Mussolini, some of whose tactics would improve San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York. Over here, in lefty old London, everyone’s against Boris, but telling whoppers over a party or two or even ten cannot compare to Blair’s lies for going to war where hundreds of thousands died—or does it? I find it amazing that Blair is given the garter, and Boris might soon be shown the door. I am against lying, and didn’t lie when customs asked me if I was carrying almost forty years ago, but between a cake and thousands of dead, I’ll take the cake any day.

And speaking of leaders, Macron recently caught hell for asking us not to rub Putin’s nose in the dirt, but I’m afraid the frog was right. Biden knows how to spout slogans reading a teleprompter, Boris plays tough guy in order to make them forget the cake, but Macron understands the world. I haven’t read much about the French president, but I think I understand him. He’s a bit of a con man, but so what? I like Mme. Macron: She’s old and elegant, and she’s got good legs. A con man whom I met once and whom Macron reminds me of is André Malraux: fantasist, famous novelist, Gaullist minister, Cambodian historical treasure plunderer, self-invented Resistance hero, and air squadron leader for Republican Spain against my favorite—after Salazar—dictator, Francisco Franco.

André Malraux was a man of action, that’s for sure, and an attention seeker par excellence. Unfortunately, I met him when he was a very old man, and half asleep or doped up while getting a lecture from my dad on the evils of communism. (The Greek minister of culture had brought him on board my father’s boat.) Malraux became famous early on after his book Man’s Fate was published. It was 1933, Malraux was a Marxist activist, and he followed up with Man’s Hope and other books. From early on Malraux was accused of being a man of image, not of ideas, by people who would soil their trousers if a shot was fired anywhere near them. Malraux admired and wished to emulate T.E. Lawrence. Unlike the tortured Brit, the Frenchman adored women, but identified himself as Lawrence’s son—symbolically, that is.

Malraux’s other hero was D’Annunzio, also a bit of a con man, but great, and Man’s Fate dealt with the revolutionary movement in China. He paraded around with a cape and a cane and had a true passion for art, and an even greater passion for the root of all envy. He satisfied the latter with an archeological expedition in Cambodia to rob Khmer temple ruins near Angkor. On a boat downriver with the loot, he and his party were arrested and spent a few months doing a Taki. His wife, Clara, got a petition going and he was eventually freed. Returning to Indochina, he became active in the Canton uprising and saw action. The artist and the man of action became one. From then on he was known as an exemplary revolutionary figure and a symbol of the Communist Revolution.

He sided with Stalin against Trotsky because the former looked like more of a winner, but then he redeemed himself in Spain, a Byronic enterprise, as he called it. Without qualifications, he took command of an air squadron and went on operations against nationalists but also filmed himself while bombing the enemy. His force of personality and courage prevailed over his inexperience. He made himself the hero he had pretended to be. When hostilities broke out with the Germans, he went to Lanvin and ordered a uniform. He was taken prisoner almost immediately.

Malraux joined the Resistance at a very late stage and greatly inflated his role in it. He met De Gaulle after the liberation and became his minister of culture in 1958. He had Paris washed, freshly painted, and spruced up. I remember seeing him disheveled and probably doped up leading an anti-student rally of pro-Gaullists in 1968. Eight years later he was dead, and twenty years later his remains were transferred to the Pantheon.

Malraux was an aesthete and self-invented. He lied a lot about himself, but his courage was undeniable. Why does he come to mind when I think of President Macron? I wish I could explain it, but I cannot. (Actually, Malraux more resembles Francois Mitterand—brainwise, that is.) What they have in common is an understanding and love for art and an opportunistic streak. Macron—like Malraux, who saw no glory in resisting the Germans, only death, but jumped in at the end when victory was assured—went after the brass ring after two French presidents had failed the office. The cultural after-effects of Napoleonic grandeur influenced them both. Malraux is long gone, but in the Pantheon. Macron is still to make his mark, but don’t bet against him. And we should take his advice and talk to Putin. It is not Putin who is defaming American history, destroying our monuments, and promoting gender fluidity to our children.

One of the confusions of the age is the conflation of what is desirable with what is a right.

For example, it is clearly desirable that everybody should be housed decently: No one wants to see anyone homeless who does not desire to be, or to live in horrible conditions. But that is not the same as saying that everyone has a right to a home, for such a right would impose on others the duty to provide such a home irrespective of the person’s conduct. Since no home can be provided except at the cost of human labor, a right to housing is also the imposition of forced labor.

In an article in the Guardian newspaper, former “special rapporteur” on the right to adequate housing (the kind of right that totalitarians love to write into their constitutions) Leilani Farhi points out quite correctly that the cost of housing has far outstripped the growth in incomes, which means that housing eats up an ever-higher proportion of many people’s incomes, whether they buy on mortgage or rent a property. In the biggest and most desirable cities, people are often faced with the invidious choice of living far into the suburbs where they can afford to rent a decent space, adding three miserable hours or more to their working day, in the process losing all the pleasures of living in a city which are almost entirely to be had in its center, or of paying a huge rent for a few overcrowded square yards of space.

There are two reasons why rents have risen so high. The first, of course, is that demand has outstripped supply. No doubt the rise of single-person households has not helped matters; but it seems to me that rents have risen faster than any possible supply of new housing could have slowed significantly.

The U.N. former special rapporteur on the fanciful right to housing again correctly points out that the second reason for the rise in rents has been consequent upon the increase in both demand for and the price of property, namely the creation of money and low interest rates.

Where interest rates are low and the money supply increases, it is not at all surprising that asset prices should rise and share prices free themselves from any constraining connection with profitability. Money has to go somewhere, after all, and property has long been an asset whose value, barring the total destruction of the world (which now seems less improbable than not so long ago), will never fall to zero.

The special rapporteur, however, does not ask herself why interest rates should have been kept so low for so long, to the great advantage of those who already own assets. And one of the reasons surely is that governments needed low interest rates in order to finance their chronic deficits. Without low interest rates, their debts would have become impossibly expensive to service.

But why the deficits in the first place? Because, of course, governments were acting as if all kinds of benefits were rights, such that they were obliged to provide them without regard to their underlying economic ability to do so. And many governments were able to avoid inflation in the price of consumer goods by outsourcing production to wherever (mainly, but not entirely, China) they could be cheaply produced. The war in Ukraine put paid to this glorious system, in which the rich got far richer than could be accounted for by the increased production of anything, and the poor did not get poorer as far as their ability to buy food and other essentials such as PlayStations was concerned. This era is now over, at least until Russia is returned to the comity of nations and business as usual can recommence.

Inflation is a solution of a kind to this situation, for it melts away debt so long as interest rates are lower than the rate of inflation. Of course, it has its inconveniences, as those who have lived through periods of high inflation know, and it decimates creditors to the advantage of debtors. There is no safe haven in this situation except cunning, which most people (including me) do not have.

But to return to “adequate” housing as a human right. The term “adequate” is an infinitely expansible one, just the kind of term that those with a thirst for bureaucratic power like, because whatever is adequate today will be inadequate tomorrow (in my early 20s, I sometimes lived in conditions that would now count as abject poverty).

It will come as no surprise, perhaps, that one of the principal means favored by the former special rapporteur is the dilution of property rights and the bureaucratic control of the housing market by means of rent controls and the like.

Now I understand the frustration of people who are either homeless or living in very expensive but overcrowded accommodation, when they know that there are unoccupied flats or houses nearby that are owned by absentees. It is a natural human reaction for them to ask why they cannot have better or cheaper living conditions. Person x is badly housed, person y owns an empty flat. The solution seems simple and obvious: move x into y’s flat at a rent controlled by z, the philosopher-king bureaucrat who acts only in the general interest. Problem solved. Human rights have now been complied with (not that anyone is grateful, for one is not grateful to have one’s rights complied with, for gratitude and rights are oil and water).

It is, alas, only too clear what happens when this approach is tried. It fails, and then the reason for the failure must be sought: It is because the policy has not gone far enough. It becomes clear that person a lives in a house far larger than he needs, for example with an empty bedroom or more. Person b, alas, has to share overcrowded accommodations with person c. Again, the solution is obvious: Billet person b in person a’s spare bedroom. Admittedly, person a might not be delighted, but persons b and c are rendered very happy, and since the rule of ethics is what produces the greatest happiness of the greatest number, it is clear that a’s objections, alas typical of the selfishness of property owners in a regime of private property, must be overridden. Anything else would be immoral.

Voilà the United Nations and its well-paid officialdom: human rights to include the right to impose forced labor on whole populations.

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

Bill Barr, two-time attorney general and one of approximately 2.5 members of the Trump administration to leave with his reputation intact, has also written one of only two books about that administration worth reading, “One Damn Thing After Another.” I’ve read ’em all. At least partially. Most did not merit more than a quick skim.

[For those interested, the other book about the Trump administration worth reading is Michael Wolfe’s Fire and Fury, but judging by its sales, you probably already have this book.]

I’ve been a fan of Barr’s since long before he worked for Trump, and was thrilled when he became Trump’s A.G. But when I got to Barr’s description of Trump’s appeal — which went on for pages and pages! — I wanted to throw the book out the window.

You can probably guess where I’m headed.

By Barr’s lights, none of Trump’s positives involved … immigration.

They will not learn. No matter what we do, no matter how many times Americans tell pollsters they want less immigration, no matter how loudly we beg Washington to halt the endless flow of the third world into our country, the ruling class refuses to listen.

If electing a cretinous flimflam artist to the presidency solely on the strength of his promise to be a hard-ass on immigration didn’t wake them up, nothing ever will.

The first clue about the absolute thickheadedness of anyone living within 100 miles of our nation’s capital was this deeply concerning line from Barr’s book:

“I had long planned on supporting Jeb Bush for the Republican presidential nomination in 2016.”

Next, Barr turns to the political landscape that allowed such a preposterous creature as Trump to sail to victory. “The source of the problem, as I saw it,” he writes, “was the growing strength in the Democratic Party of a Far Left progressive ideology that aimed to tear down and remake American society.” Trump, Barr writes, was merely the result of “our embittered politics,” a bitterness “engendered not by Trump but by the increasing militance of the Democratic Party’s progressive wing.”

Yeah, OK, fine. He gets two points for accurately describing how loathsome Democrats have become. How about the elected Republicans we send to Washington to represent us? It’s you guys we really hate. If it were only progressive Democrats voters detested, why NOT Jeb-exclamation point? Why not John “My Father Was a Postman” Kasich?

No one imagines that Democrats give a crap about the country. It’s Republicans who run for office, pretending to agree with the voters on immigration — then get into office and sell out to the Chamber of Commerce.

Oh, you wanted a wall? Yes, absolutely, but first we have to pass these tax cuts, lavish billions of dollars on some foreign country and push through another Wall Street bailout.

For 50 years, in poll after poll, a majority of Americans have said they want LESS immigration. Even the Cheap Labor Lobby at the Cato Institute produced a poll last year showing that 81% of Americans want less immigration than we have today. Sixty-one percent of respondents want to cut immigration by at least half. Nearly 10% of Americans want zero immigration.

Unfortunately, everything Trump was ever going to accomplish was accomplished at 2:50 a.m. on election night 2016, when he announced his victory over Hillary Clinton. (Everything other than turning judicial selection over to the Federalist Society.) At that moment, the densest Republican had to realize that restricting immigration is so popular that even a lout like Trump could win the presidency on it.

After 2016, how could any sentient mammal begin a sentence, as Barr does, “But the main reason Trump won the nomination — and later the general election — was …,” and not end it with: “IMMIGRATION!”? (I’ll accept a range of substitutes — the wall, illegals, Dreamers, “Press 1 for English,” wages lost to cheap labor immigrants, Kate Steinle, the 9/11 attack — did the media forget to tell you that was done by immigrants? — the drug epidemic, etc., etc.)

Not Barr. He reels off the standard RNC suicide pact, prattling about the “economy,” “military power,” “pro-life” and school choice.

Yes, Trump won in 2016 because of school choice.

You could “Ctrl + F: immigration” through Barr’s entire book and get nary a hit, other than general references to “the Immigration and Naturalization Service” — and this:

Before one of the 2016 presidential debates, Barr is careful to note that he contacted a friend on the candidate’s team to suggest that Trump say, “we welcome legal immigrants, and … Latin Americans who come here legally — people with a strong work ethic and family values — contribute enormously to the country.”

And that’s how Jeb-exclamation point won the nomination and the general election!

Just this week, Republican Sen. John Cornyn was spotted on the Senate floor, seeming to propose amnesty, collegially telling a Democrat, “First guns, now it’s immigration.”

In Cornyn’s defense, he is massively stupid.

But Barr? He’s a smart man. And yet he picked up nothing from the Shock-the-World 2016 election of Donald Trump — except tax cuts and a strong military?

Referring to the monumental arrogance of the Bourbon kings, blithely assuming they could revert to the very behavior that had led to the explosion of the French Revolution in the first place, Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand is supposed to have said, “They have learned nothing, and forgotten nothing.”

The French nobility’s got nothing on the Republican Party.

In perhaps the biggest setback yet suffered by the transgenderist juggernaut, the International Swimming Federation has sunk the dreams of Olympic gold of Will “Lia” Thomas, the also-ran male swimmer who declared himself a woman and won an NCAA championship. In a shocking spasm of sanity, the ruling body declared that ex-men who had gone through male puberty (from age 12 onward) are ineligible to enter women’s events because of the permanent advantages in size and strength they have gained.

It’s hard to lose when you have as much of an ideological tailwind at your back as Thomas has had, but his compulsion to crush his enemies and see them driven before him—and to hear the lamentation of the women he beat—made him a remarkably unsympathetic standard-bearer.

And yet, Thomas’ toxic masculinity is not unusual among the better-known transgenders. An extraordinary fraction of the most prominent and influential male-to-female transgenders are, when you stop and think about them, obvious examples of male ego, aggression, and self-assertion run amok.

For example, MSNBC anchorwoman Katy Tur has just published a memoir, Rough Draft, of growing up the daughter of Bob Tur, the top TV news helicopter pilot. With his wife/camerawoman Marika Gerrard, Bob captured the most notorious footage of Los Angeles’ tumultuous 1990s, such as the beating of truck driver Reginald Denny during the Rodney King riot and O.J. Simpson’s odyssey in the white Bronco from lawyer Robert Kardashian’s house (the keystone event of 21st-century American trash culture).

A relentless wife-beater—somebody in the L.A. news business put together an hour-long tape titled Bob Tur’s Greatest Hits of Katy’s dad punching her mom in their copter live on air—Bob now wears a dress and calls himself Zoey.

Similarly, a few years ago Susan Faludi, another well-known woman journalist, published a memoir, In the Darkroom, about her nasty dad who decided late in life that he was a woman.

When you point out these recurrent patterns, many respond that The Science teaches us that Zoey Tur always felt like a girl on the inside; and all the evidence to the contrary must have been just her elaborate, seamless lifelong hoax mounted from earliest girlhood to cover up her innate femininity by acting 24/7 for 40-plus years like a giant macho prick. After all, they reason, you couldn’t possibly doubt the word of a woman who claims to have deceived the whole world for decades, could you?

Yet few on either the left or the right have noticed this pattern that many of the most influential men to declare themselves women have virtually no feminine traits whatsoever.

The right tends to assume that the only possible causes for transgenderism could be leftism and a lack of masculinity, so they are unable to notice that many of the best-known M-to-Fs are excessively masculine and right of center politically.

The left assumes that Lia Thomas and Zoey Tur must be a bullied minority of natural leftists, making them unable to notice how many famous transgenders are selfish bullies.

This dual intellectual failure is a problem for American society because ever since Wheaties box Olympic hero Bruce Jenner of the massively popular Keeping Up With the Kardashians reality TV show announced in 2015 that he was now Caitlyn Jenner, unhappy adolescent girls in horrifying numbers have been self-diagnosing that the source of their discontent must be that they were “assigned” the wrong gender at birth.

Granted, there have always been a certain number of small children who refused to play with their own sex’s toys. For instance, I knew one little boy who would explain when I’d see him on Christmas, “I only play with girls’ toys. That’s just the way I am.”

But he was like that from toddlerhood. That always was just the way he is.

In contrast, the tens of thousands of cases of rapid-onset gender dysphoria that have swept American adolescent girls since the Jenner whoop-de-do are a novel mental disease never before seen. It’s the most blatant and alarming example of cultural contagion I can recall in my lifetime.

Our institutions have responded by packing moody girls onto the express train to being poisoned with puberty blockers, mutilated by “gender-affirming” surgery, and permanently sterilized. While our society now has an appropriate horror of the sterilizations performed under old-time eugenics laws, elites are now complacently encouraging sterilization in response to a brand-new mental illness that didn’t exist even a decade ago.

The most excusable reason neither the left nor the right has made much sense of transgenderism is that it’s confusing. Until the social construction of rapid-onset gender dysphoria over the last decade, it came in two very different types, the second of which has been covered up.

The first type is early-onset gender dysphoria: extreme effeminacy in little boys or extreme tomboyism in little girls. This variety sometimes goes away with time (especially among tomboys) and often resolves itself into conventional adult homosexuality, and sometimes the sufferer can’t seem to live as his or her own sex and demands clothes, hormones, and even surgery.

The second and in some ways more socially important type is the male-only disorder of late-onset gender dysphoria. This is frequently (and perhaps always) related to a rather comic sex fetish called autogynephilia in which at puberty, a normally masculine boy begins dressing up in his mother’s lingerie and masturbating in front of the mirror, imagining himself as the beautiful girl he desires.

For reasons that I’ve never seen completely explained, those with the late-onset syndrome tend to be highly intelligent; ambitious in their stereotypically masculine careers (e.g., Tur insisted on being called “Chopper Bob”); fans of hard science fiction (with Robert Heinlein a favorite); and, often, not very nice. They tend to be highly insistent that others validate their sex fantasy about themselves and relentless trouble to those who won’t.

It’s important to note that there is no female equivalent to late-onset gender dysphoria. Instead, rapid-onset gender dysphoria in which conventionally feminine little girls hit the emotional turmoil of puberty and decide that the cause of their unhappiness must be that they have always been transgender is a new thing spread by social and legacy media in recent years. It’s a fad, a catastrophic fad.

The existence of the late-onset type among some males is well-known among scientific specialists in the field, but has been almost completely covered up in the mainstream media due to furious campaigns by hyper-aggressive men in dresses to hush up the embarrassing news about their fetish.

Almost twenty years ago, I interviewed Northwestern U. psychologist J. Michael Bailey about his book The Man Who Would Be Queen, which brought down upon me the wrath of a small group of ex-men such as the brilliant libertarian economic historian Donald-Deirdre McCloskey and computer scientist Lynn Conway. Man for man, these guys were the Seal Team Six of proto–cancel culture.

They aligned with Southern Poverty Law Center cofounder Morris Dees, who is not, so far as I know, an ex-man—he was on his sixth wife last I checked. Morris is a junk mail genius and thus accurately anticipated that the madness of the times would eventually make transgenderism the Next Big Thing for him to raise funds over. But sometimes even a maestro can get too far out ahead of his era. So America wasn’t quite ready back in the 2000s for their Baileyian Jihad.

But what, you might ask, could be the harm in vituperative men covering up their fetish?

Well, now we know: Lies can help mislead children into a lifetime of regret.

Of course, the impact of high-IQ men who declare themselves to be women on teenage girls tends to be indirect (with the exception of Jenner, due to his fathering the influencer models Kylie and Kendall Jenner). No tween girl looks at, say, Colonel James-Jennifer Pritzker, the military-obsessed transgender scion of the Chicago money, philanthropy, and politics dynasty, and says, “I want to be just like her when I grow up.”

But with their aggression, intelligence, and self-centeredness, the ex-men have managed to keep completely off-limits for the media, and thus unknown by American girls, the true nature of their embarrassing predilection.

It’s not fun to have 150-IQ obsessives out to ruin you for crossing them, so only a few journalists dare take them on.

Will anybody ever succeed in communicating to impressionable adolescents that these famous ex-men weren’t really always the opposite sex on the inside, that in fact they tend to be excessive examples of stereotypically male traits likes ambition, aggression, and megalomania?

When the ex-men tell you they knew there was something different about them as a child, that they could sense that they weren’t like the other boys, what they are actually recalling is that they felt the other boys were their inferiors, that they were superior males with special capacities like the heroes of Heinlein sci-fi novels.

For example, the reason Thomas wants so much to beat women in the pool is likely because his innate sense of superiority was being invalidated by his being a constant loser in male swimming. So, he undertook a course of superiority-complex-affirming therapy by beating women.

Pointing out to young people that these guys are lying, that they are pervs whose hilarious sex fetish took control of their brains, might someday make kids less vulnerable to rapid-onset gender dysphoria.

It’s time to tell the truth.

Remember the Dhaliwal brothers?

No?

Good. Like yesterday’s bowel movement, they don’t deserve remembering, let alone an encore.

That said, I’m gonna reluctantly invoke them, because even the worst of mankind can offer lessons for the rest of us.

Christmas Day 2007, brothers Kulbir (23) and Amritpal (19) Dhaliwal, their friend Carlos Sousa (17) in tow, crept into the San Francisco Zoo after closing time to taunt the animals. Drunk and stoned, the threesome decided to take on Tatiana, the zoo’s endangered Siberian tiger. Standing on the railing of the enclosure, pelting the animal with pine cones, the bud-bud-buddies were shocked when the enraged cat leaped a hell of a lot farther and higher than zoo officials thought possible when they built the pen. Jumping the length of her moat, the cat set upon the three unwise men. Carlos Sousa became carne asada, and the panicked Punjabis ran screaming. Police were forced to shoot the beautiful animal to save two worthless members of a herd that could’ve used some thinning.

The Dhaliwals sued the city for their self-inflicted injuries, and because it’s San Francisco, the city gave them $900,000. Since the Dhaliwals were brown, many leftists coddled them as victims. And as coddled brown folks often do, the Dhaliwals, now armed with a sense of entitlement, embarked on a crime spree, with Amritpal excelling in grand theft, assault, DUI, and reckless driving, before dying in 2012 (hopefully he was reincarnated as a Bombay sidewalk, to spend a lifetime being shat upon).

The story’s lesson? Don’t provoke a tiger. If you do, you’re likely to get mauled.

Now, the Dhaliwal incident is open-and-shut: blameless animal vs. fully culpable humans. Last week presented a more complex case, even if the lesson to be learned is the same. The right’s newest martyr is 17-year-old Akron boy Ethan Liming. You probably read the story: White kid beaten to death by black thugs outside a school funded by millionaire chattel-slave-of-Chinamen LeBron James. However, it’s possible you didn’t hear the story in a fully accurate way, so let’s start with the facts as they’re known at the moment:

In the words of its marketing materials, “the SplatRBall SRB400 is a battery powered water gel-gun that comes with a 400-round magazine. Set it in Semi-Auto or Full-Auto mode and start the fun!” The “toy” rapid-fires paintball-type pellets that riddle the “victim” with water or paint. And, as if America needs further proof that Covid isn’t the only deadly plague from China, the latest “TikTok challenge” among teens involves driving around shooting random strangers with these gel-guns.

At approximately 10 p.m. on the night of June 2, Liming and three friends (one other white juvenile, and two black ones) were driving through town shooting strangers with a SplatRBall. Pulling into a school parking lot where four black thugs were playing basketball, several boys in the car began discharging the toy weapon at the thugs, who initially ran in fear but, upon realizing they were being shot at with water pellets and not bullets, reversed course and charged the juveniles.

Three of the four pellet pranksters were assaulted, Liming fatally. There are other he said/she said details coming from Liming’s family and the thugs’ defense attorneys, but I want to stick to what detectives have confirmed.

So there’s the story. But certain rightists don’t want to tell it straight. Like The Blaze’s Jason Whitlock, whose distorted presentation of the incident went viral on Twitter last weekend:

Two black kids shot a water paintball gun at four black men, sparking a confrontation outside a white kid’s car. The white kid attempted to calm the situation. Three black men beat him to death. Five black kids got in a fight, and the white kid who initially acted as peacemaker got killed.

A complete fabrication. Whitlock separates Liming from the pellet shooters, removes the second white kid from the equation entirely, and paints Liming as a bystander “peacemaker” instead of a participant (Whitlock offers no links to sources to back up his presentation of the case). Liming’s father (who wasn’t present at the assault) did indeed tell the local press that his son told the charging thugs, “Relax, it’s a joke,” but Akron police say they have no corroboration of that.

Some rightists prefer Whitlock’s fantasized version of Liming’s death to the apparent reality of what occurred. I’d counsel against that. Now, I’m not comparing what happened in Akron to the San Francisco zoo incident. The tiger was inculpable, and as far as I’m concerned all three of the taunters deserved to be eaten. On the other hand, Ethan Liming didn’t deserve to die for a prank, and the thugs possess free will and something that at least approximates a neocortex, so they didn’t have to commit murder just because they were frightened by an idiotic stunt.

But I think the moral is the same: Don’t taunt violent animals. Four years ago I wrote about the explosion of “hood-prank” videos (a genre of YouTube video in which urban blacks are pranked specifically to elicit a violent response) and the dangers associated therewith: “Hood-prank videos are popular in large part because indolent ‘hood’ blacks are so easily driven to violent rage,” I wrote. “The responses to the pranks are inevitably furious and brutal.”

You prank these no-impulse-control, perpetually angry halfwits, you risk getting beaten or killed.

We can’t bring Ethan Liming back, so what’s left but to learn a lesson? Distorting the story as Whitlock did isn’t helpful. What’s helpful is viewing the story in the cold light of day and counseling young whites to not do as Liming did. Don’t portray the kid as a saint; use him as a cautionary tale.

White parents should from now on insert a Liming clause in their version of John Derbyshire’s infamous “talk.”

I’m not trying to pick on Jason Whitlock; he’s probably paid per click. But these lies aren’t harmless, because they obscure the lesson, and, as I said, the lesson is all there is.

And only through acceptance of reality can lessons be learned.

Which brings us to the 1/6 committee hearings. My opinion of 1/6 and the mob of Rain Mans who assaulted cops and the Capitol is well-known; no need for a retread. But I do want to mention how this “committee” is bringing out the worst instincts in the right. 1/6 was a clusterfuck of stupidity, but a lot of rightists are reacting to the Liz Cheney/Democrat Prime-Time Variety Show by digging the hole deeper, reflexively defending the indefensible, because in general, to partisans, that’s what you do.

The enemy says black, you say white. 2, 4, 6, 8, fight fight fight!

Here’s an example of what I’m talking about. As the hearings commenced, NFL dude Jack Del Rio of the team formerly known as the Washington Smallpox Savages called 1/6 a minor “dustup,” as opposed to the BLM riots, which were apocalyptic. The (now deleted) thread went viral, and the comments became a parade of alternating right and left morons, with rightists saying “1/6 was nonviolent” (posting cherry-picked video of peaceful MAGAs strolling through the Capitol) and “BLM was violent” (posting video of BLM thugs smashing things and attacking cops), and leftists doing the converse, saying “BLM was nonviolent” (posting cherry-picked video of peaceful George Floyd protesters) and “1/6 was violent” (posting video of MAGA thugs smashing things and attacking cops).

Both sides trading reciprocal lies. And some of you think that’s the way to do it. You literally think this is the pinnacle of effective ideological warplay: “They weaponize lies, we weaponize lies! #WARWARWAR!”

But this pathetic show…who’s it for? Do you see it as a game of volleyball in which committed ideological foes lob distortions back and forth? But then what’s the point? You’ll never change their minds, or they yours. Do you think your distortions are winning converts? That if you show cherry-picked video of 1/6 MAGAs walking calmly through the Capitol after they’ve taken it by violence, and you call them (to quote Tucker Carlson) “peaceful tourists” who were merely “walking around and taking pictures” while the cops were “arresting people for walking through the U.S. Capitol building,” somewhere a fence-sitter will be won over to your side?

How likely is that compared with the other possibility, which is that the fence-sitter sees your selective video and untruthful description, then sees all the violent 1/6 video that contradicts it, and now that fence-sitter will forever view you as untrustworthy and your “side” as lacking credibility?

When rightists distort 1/6 by using nonrepresentative video and leftists distort BLM by doing the same, neither side gains anything because representative video of 1/6 and BLM violence is so easily available. It’s a masturbatory partisan-on-partisan exercise that profits no one.

So enough with the reciprocal “weaponized lies” bullshit. 1/6 happened. I wish it hadn’t, but it did, and just as in the Ethan Liming case, all that’s left is to see it for what it was and learn the lessons. 1/6 was a brutal, inexcusable exercise conducted in the name of an ignoble man acting for ignoble reasons. Let Cheney and the Dems have their hearing; it’ll be forgotten by November. Don’t lose credibility over it. Copping to the brutality of 1/6 and the genuinely foul behavior exhibited by Trump regarding Pence, the election, and its aftermath isn’t being a “cuck.” It’s being smart, because the partisans who achieve electoral victories are the ones who can extract their head from their opponents’ asses long enough to realize that trading lie for lie has never helped win an election; it only hardens the resolve of the already-resolved, while robbing the partisans of credibility among middle-grounders.

Salvation never comes from untruth. That’s a good rule for life in general, but an especially good one for politics. Stay truthful, acknowledge reality, learn lessons.

Lessons like:

Don’t provoke a tiger. And if someone on your side provokes a tiger, don’t coddle them like they’re deserving of sympathy, or they’ll end up a reincarnated poop-sidewalk like Amritpal Dhaliwal.

Don’t provoke black thugs. And if someone does and dies in the process, don’t treat them like a saint; acknowledge their error and use it to save others from following the same path.

Don’t violently storm your nation’s Capitol ever, but especially don’t do it when the opposing party controls the White House, the Senate, the House, and the Justice Department. Don’t do it on behalf of a loser ex-president who handed the opposing party the Senate the very day before the storming. Don’t act butt-hurt when the opposing party does exactly what opposing parties do, and makes hay out of your stupidity.

And if you did it, or supported it, then take the hit and don’t dig the hole deeper by lying about what happened. Once the hearings end and the already-disinterested public moves on, you’ll emerge with your credibility intact.

None of these rules are difficult to follow.

For normal people, at least.

For partisans, they’re difficult indeed.

The Week’s Most Eeny, Meeny, and Juneteeny Headlines

31 FLAVORS A SLAVE
Juneteenth, a Texas-originated celebration marking the end of slavery, had traditionally been a regional, minor jubilee. But in June 2020 craven government officials needed figurative pork rinds to toss the ravenous BLM rioters laying waste to American cities, so it was decided to elevate Juneteenth to a federal holiday in George Floyd’s honor (“National Fentanyl Day” having already been claimed by Prince).

This year Juneteenth falls on Father’s Day, so every black child will have at least something to celebrate.

Unfortunately, darkness has descended upon the black festivities. Commercialism has reared its ugly head: Walmart had planned to market Juneteenth ice cream to commemorate the holiday. Thankfully, black activists and social media users bullied the mega-chain into pulling and destroying the product.

When Walmart execs couldn’t figure out how to quickly dispose of millions of gallons of ice cream, Stacey Abrams bravely stepped in to finally make herself useful.

To be fair to the lactose-intolerant activists, some of the Juneteenth flavors Walmart was planning to sell might’ve come off as a little crass. They included Emancipralines, Underground Rockyroad, Rum Raisin in the Sun, Mangonumission, Diaspumoni, Coffle Cognac, Maple Passage, Macamaroon, Tutti Strange Frutti, Flantation, Cotton Pickin’ Candy, and Uncle Tom’s Carob.

All available with whipped cream, of course.

Walmart apologized for the poor judgment, although CEO Doug McMillon told MSNBC that the company will continue to sell its Holocaust Remembrance Day dessert line, which includes Sobiberry Pie, Auschwitz-Bearclawnau, Einsatzgrapefruitten, Arbeit Macht Friand, Waffle SS, Krema Brûlée, Brownshirt Betty, and Orange Julius Streicher.

“The ADL never complains,” McMillon said, “as long as they get a cut.”

PRIDE OF THE STANKEES
If the problem with Juneteenth is commercialization, the problem with Pride Month is competition. Like Christmas neighbors trying to outdo each other with garish decorations, for Pride Month, corporations are trying to one-up each other with gross-outs.

But how do you up the “ewwww” factor to celebrate something that’s nothing but “ewwww”? You already have Pride parades where dudes in S&M bondage outfits wave their penises at children, and “drag queen storytime” at public libraries in which grotesque abominations from a John Waters wet dream read about vaginas to petrified tykes who’ll forever associate books with fat freaks in wigs who smell of burned cheese and lubricant.

How do you top that? You make millions of Americans associate dinner with poop.

Meal delivery service Postmates is marking Pride Month by offering a series of “bottom-friendly” advertisements aimed at providing the best food options for “mess-free” anal sex.

The ads list foods that can “cause a traffic jam in the digestive system, which can make a mess of your evening.” To put it in family-friendly terms, these are foods to avoid so that when you’re in bed with Jed Clampett and he goes shootin’ in your hole, he doesn’t unleash a bubblin’ crude.

Feeling hungry yet?

Remember the good old days when rule No. 1 of food advertising was “Don’t associate the product with turds”? It’s the only reason Tootsie Roll has stayed in business so long.

Last week The Hill ran a lengthy piece about the increase in “anti-gay hate” this Pride Month. Left unexplored was how much of that “hate” is just people who were about to eat a nutty fudge bar, and then they saw a Postmates ad.

There’s a fine line between being “homophobic” and merely nauseous.

ACHIEVING ACHIEVER ACHIEVES ACHIEVEMENT
Cancer’s good as cured, and Mars good as conquered. The press was abuzz last week with news that 17-year-old Floridian Ashley Adirika, a child of Nigerian immigrants, was accepted for admission by all eight Ivy League universities.

Anyone perusing the many glowing profiles of Ms. Adirika looking for information about GPAs, SATs, or ACTs would’ve been sorely disappointed, because Ashley was chosen not for her grades but for her many accomplishments, which include being a student of color, being born a person of color and then becoming a student, possessing color while being a student, and being physically present in a learning institution for students as a student while encased in skin of color.

In high school, Adirika founded a group called Our Story Our Worth (“a community organization that empowers young female students of color”). She also served on her school’s debate team and as student body president. Other accomplishments include being a student, and being of color.

And the debate team. There was that, too.

Adirika has chosen Harvard as her destination. Regarding her major, she told CNN that her ultimate goal is “to fix issues in communities with the knowledge of government systems and policies” via “explorations in policy and social policy and things of that nature,” adding, “I am really passionate about policy and using policy to empower communities. I want to use that as a platform to do work in policy.”

Meanwhile, across town, an Asian-American teen with a 4.0 GPA, perfect SAT scores, and an internship at a nuclear power plant where he single-handedly innovated a new reactor design was handed his rejection slip from every U.S. college:

“Dear Quan, your application essay didn’t use the word ‘policy’ nearly enough. In the future, please keep your goals vague, and try to say ‘policy’ multiple times per sentence. Also, be more of color, but not your color; the other, better color. Best of luck to you in your uncle’s restaurant; with the dumplings, go easy on the vinegar.”

“YOU DEMONS GET OFF MY LAWN!”
When you think of the societal damage wrought by Covid, what comes to mind? Economic disaster? A ravaged job market? Elderly people left to die alone?

Children deprived of education and formative-years socialization skills? The health effects of 24/7 masking?

Or maybe you think of the suicide and opioid overdose rates.

Well, then, you’re a damn fool. Because Covid’s worst legacy is demons.

Yes, demons. Last week the Catholic Church opened its first-ever center to combat Covid-related demon possession. The St. Michael Centre for Spiritual Liberation and Exorcism, located in Manila, is equipped to zap the demons out of ten normal-size adults per day (or twelve dwarfs). The local archdiocese told the Daily Mail that the “mental, emotional, spiritual, and physical stress caused by the pandemic made for a perfect storm for possessions and demonic intervention.”

Thanks to Covid, demons are not only possessing people, but annoying them as well:

Chief exorcist Father Jose Syquia says “full possession” only accounts for 20 per cent of all exorcisms, with the majority being performed on people who are being “harassed physically” by the evil spirits.

Such “physical harassment” includes demons giving out wedgies, wet willies, and the “you got a spot on your shirt” nose-flicking thing.

Father Syquia also told the Mail, “The devil has power over anything electrical. If I give a talk and use a certain gadget, the devil would easily shut it down because he’s an expert in anything electrical.”

Thankfully, in a heartwarming display of interfaith unity, St. Michael’s has partnered with a Hindu call center in Bangalore to offer Windows security assistance for demon-possessed gadgets. Just give the Indians your password, social security number, and banking info, and those demons will be cast right out.

As for exorcising the malware that’ll be left behind, the Church can’t help with that. But you might find a few enterprising Asian kids who didn’t say “policy” enough to get into college who’ll do a secular exorcism of your hard drive for a nominal fee.

IF ANDREW CUOMO WERE AN ELEPHANT…
Speaking of Indians…

They say you should never meet your heroes.

Or your gods.

To Hindus, the elephant is a sacred being, the living incarnation of Ganesha, the god of wisdom, success, luck, and postmortem elder abuse.

Last week, 70-year-old Maya Murmu was collecting water outside her village of Raipal, Eastern India, when she came across an elephant wandering through the forest.

A sign of good fortune, surely, to have a random encounter with such a holy being. What wisdom would this magical beast convey to a humble, aged water-gatherer?

Absolutely none. The elephant trampled Murmu like a kiddush cup at a Jewish wedding.

The next evening, Murmu’s loved ones prepared a pyre to send Maflatma Murmu to the hereafter in the proper Hindu tradition. Murmu’s body, decked out in ceremonial dress and draped in flowers, was lovingly placed upon the woodpile, as mourners solemnly recited ritualistic prayers, in a scene of serenity and dignity.

And then the elephant came back and kicked the livin’ crap out of the corpse. According to the Daily Mail, the exact same elephant crashed the funeral, “took Murmu’s body down (from the pyre), trampled her again, threw her around and went off into the night.”

“I know he’s supposed to be a god and everything,” Murmu’s daughter told the Mail, “but man, that elephant’s a dick.”

Indian authorities revealed that the elephant had traveled 200km from the Dalma Wildlife Sanctuary in Jharkhand just to kill Murmu and beat the snot out of her body at the funeral, which led one wildlife official to remark, “That elephant must’ve really hated that old bat.”

They say elephants never forget, and apparently they also hold irrational grudges. The presence of animals that’ll murder your loved ones and come back to bust up the funeral like Don Ciccio in Godfather II sheds a little more light on why Indians are so desperate to immigrate to America.

When you’ve dealt with elephants that travel 200km just to kill your grandma and abuse her corpse for the sadistic fun of it, subway muggers don’t seem so bad in comparison.

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