The Week’s Most Spanking, Banking, and Pranking Headlines

CHINAMAN WOKS THE PRANK
Me Chinese,
Me make joke,
Me make fools of African folk.

As China ruthlessly colonizes Africa, usurping and exploiting the Dark Continent’s resources for the benefit of the yellow nation, Chinese pranksters are doing their part. After all, what’s colonization without humiliation?

Of course, in sub-Saharan Africa, putting pee-pee in somebody’s Coke would actually be a step up from their usual drinking fare (“Welcome to Mbongo’s Café. May I start you off with a glass of raw sewage?”). So ching-chong chucklemen are having to think outside the takeout box to put one over on the locals. Lu Ke is a Chinese citizen living in Malawi. And he’s become China’s favorite online jokester, a regular Deng Xiaozing, by making videos of African children humiliating themselves by speaking phonetic Chinese. Wildly popular on Chinese social media, Ke’s content consists of African kids unknowingly saying things like “I’m a black monster” and “My IQ is low.”

Lu Ke uploads under an assumed name (sadly, not Sky Walker), in order to avoid repercussions from Malawian officials. But last week the BBC concluded a lengthy in-depth investigation into the identity of the Phantom Yuenace, and Ke’s name was revealed (it’s nice to know that even though the BBC refuses to investigate Asian rape gangs in London, they’ll spare no expense going after Asian cutups in Africa).

Ke fled Malawi ahead of an arrest warrant, but he was caught in Zambia, where officials reported that he was absolutely delicious with a side of sweet-and-sour rice.

Let this be a lesson to other Guangdong gagsters: Stick to prank calling your local bar.

“Mao’s Tavern.”

“Yeah, hi. I’m looking for Hu Flung Pu.”

“Hold on.” [Calls out to bar] “Hu Flung Pu? I’m trying to find Hu Flung Pu. C’mon, somebody’s gotta know Hu Flung Pu?”

BUBOES BY ANY OTHER NAME
Ashwin Vasan is New York City’s Health Commissioner. The Indian-American physician is also a professor at Columbia’s Mailman School of Public Health, where his lectures consist of, “Today we’re going to examine whether you should eat the mail. No, you should not. Even if you’re very, very hungry. Eating paper is not good for you. Class dismissed.”

This light workload allows Vasan to concentrate on his city’s gravest health concerns.

Like monkeypox.

Well, not monkeypox per se. More like the racism caused by the name monkeypox.

JaMarcus: “Man, I think I gots monkeypox.”

Ashwin: “Please, don’t call it that! That word is racist!”

JaMarcus: “What? How?”

Ashwin: “Because blacks are often thought of as monkeys. Apes. Dirty, filthy, banana-eating apes. Poo-flinging stinking violent stupid…”

JaMarcus: “Actually, you’re the only one I’ve ever heard makin’ that…”

Ashwin: “…subhuman animalistic bestial monstrous feral brutish…”

JaMarcus: “Look, will you just help me with my…”

Ashwin: “…depraved repulsive grotesque barbarous vile swinish fetid…”

JaMarcus: “Dude, you ain’t right in the head.”

In response to racism that exists only in his twisted Punjabi mind, Ashwin is lobbying the WHO to change the name of monkeypox because of the “painful and racist history within which terminology like monkeypox is rooted for communities of color. Continuing to use the term monkeypox may reignite these traumatic feelings of racism and stigma for Black people.”

A great epidemiological strategy: fight an epidemic by telling blacks that the word “monkey” refers to them.

Regarding Vasan’s suggestion for a replacement term, “Carbuncle Tom” actually seems kinda worse.

OXY CANADA
It’s easy to laugh at Canada, a nation with boundless resources but zero international import and influence and even less respect. A nation ruled by a semi-retarded child with a Moe haircut. A nation whose greatest folk singer had to make his bones singing about an American shipwreck, because Canada can’t even produce decent disasters.

The legend lives on from the Chippewa on down,
Of the roller coaster in West Edmonton Mall.
Mechanic Gordy McHugh, failed to tighten a screw,
And a bunch of the riders did fall.

“Dammit, that don’t work. Back to the bottle.”

But in fact, if only the United States had taken Canada more seriously, many innocent Americans would still be alive today. To little fanfare, Canada has been experimenting with a program to solve the opioid epidemic by giving addicts free opioids.

Sure, sounds horrific. Another calamitous Canadian idea, like seal hunts and censorship laws and Neil Young. But think of it this way: Is the world better off because George Floyd had to write a bad check to afford his fentanyl? A simple bus ticket to Vancouver would’ve made Floyd and everyone victimized by BLM’s 2020 summer of terror a whole lot happier.

As reported last week in The New York Times, fentanyl dispensaries are the new big thing in British Columbia. Addicts need only walk in, and they can walk out with all the fentanyl they want, no cost (plus, a free Nanaimo bar every tenth visit).

Dr. Christy Sutherland, the can-do Canuck who oversees the program, told the Times that “the goal is to help bring stability to their lives so that they may think about what they might want to change.”

Hey, it’s how Coruscant dealt with death sticks.

The fact that China owns over one-third of Vancouver real estate and is looking to buy up the rest has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that the city is killing off locals with free fentanyl.

Woe, Canada.

BLACK WRECKSELLENCE
In American fiction, every small town has one troublesome resident. Mayberry has Otis the drunk, Hill Valley has Biff, Cabot Cove has a murderer a week, and Smallville has Bryan Singer hanging around asking teen boys if they’d like to “screen test” for Superman.

Kenly, North Carolina—population 2,385 and windowsills wide enough to accommodate cooling blueberry pies—has its local ne’er-do-well: Ass-Grabbin’ Andre. Michael Andre Douglas enjoys walking into the homes of female residents and grabbing their privates.

For years he got away with it because he was Kenly’s town manager. Unfortunately for Garrison Feel-’er, one local lady finally had enough and went to the cops after Douglas entered her home, squeezed her breast in front of her sister, and asked, “Why won’t your sister let me hit it?”

Douglas was charged with sexual battery, and Kenly needed to find a new town manager.

Kenly is 36 percent black (hence the high theft rate of cooling blueberry pies). Michael Andre Douglas is also black. The town council decided that, having fired a black town manager, they’d need to hire another one to avoid accusations of racism.

So they hired a woman who’s made an entire career of accusing people of racism.

Sometimes a town is “one stoplight” because nobody’s smart enough to build a second one.

Justine Jones from Virginia is a certified “National Urban Fellow,” a credential that screams “hire me because I’m black cuz I got nothin’ else” (at least with a National Keith Urban Fellow you get cocaine). She’s worked for various towns all over the South, and she’s sued ’em all for racial and gender discrimination.

So of course Kenly hired her. And within a month, every single cop and clerk quit over the “toxic and hostile work environment” she’d created. And now the council is afraid to fire her, because, well, you guessed it.

Yahoo News “race and justice” reporter Marquise Francis claimed last week that racist Kenly rejected Jones because she’s black. When asked why, if that’s the case, the town tolerated Ass-Grabbin’ Andre for so long, Marquise didn’t reply, as he was running off with a blueberry pie.

GUILE E. COYOTE
Fifty-three Mexican migrants died last month in a horrific scene of carnage, perishing in stifling, unbearable heat—temperatures better suited to hell than earth—the life slowly sapped from them as they expired amid a sea of dehydrated, desiccated corpses, the stench of urine, strong though it was, overtaken by the mephitis of noxious gases seeping unchecked from the bodies of the screeching, incoherent doomed.

No, these migrants weren’t in Lake Havasu. They expired in an abandoned tractor-trailer, left by human smugglers to die under the merciless San Antonio sun.

Though the story made headlines worldwide, an investigative piece in last week’s New York Times uncovered a curious detail about the victims: Several of them had paid the coyotes $10,000 for the trip. And while paying that much money for a journey that ends with being baked alive in a feces-filled trailer still beats flying Delta, many Americans were puzzled by the fact that these impoverished migrants not only had $10,000 to spare, but that they couldn’t think of a better way to spend it.

Just go to Houston. Any number of local crackheads will marry you for half that amount.

“I now pronounce you Santiago and LaQueenzetta Hernandez. You may kiss the stankwhore.”

Green card stapled!

Turns out the mind of Mike Lindell isn’t the only place where Trump is still president. Coyotes have been hesitant to tell the impoverished flotsam of Latin America that Biden’s made it possible to waltz across the border for free. Fees for smuggling increased to such an extent during the Trump years, when ICE was actually allowed to do its job (imaginary whips and all), the coyotes didn’t want the gravy train to end. So smugglers are acting like your office’s IT guy and pretending the task’s a lot harder than it is.

Gullible migrants are selling family property and taking out massive loans (from the smugglers!) to pay for the trip.

When thanks to Biden, all they really need is a good pair of shoes.

Not sending their best, indeed.

I now find resorts more fun out of season. Civilized tourists are as rare as an intelligent Hollywood movie, so local talent will do nicely, and to hell with the vulgar jet set. Gstaad is perfect in June and July, March and April, as are St. Moritz, the Ionian Islands, and Patmos, my next destination. Once upon a time the French Riviera was a must, but now it’s a sweaty hellhole, a shabby place for not-so-sunny people.

Although I spent my youth on the Riviera, I was 2 going on 3 years old in 1939—the time I would have chosen to be an adult had I been given the choice. Old hands used to tell me about that summer, the gayest (in the old sense of the word) on record. Back then Monte Carlo was still Ruritania-by-the-sea, and whispers from late revelers about columns of troops between Cannes and Monaco had replaced the latest gossip. Even better were the tales of German spies being put ashore from submarines at Cap Martin and showing up at the casino in dinner jackets. But nothing could put a damper on the fevered atmosphere of fun by people anxious to have a final fling before the imminent war broke out. On the day in August when the Soviet-Nazi pact was announced, pandemonium broke out on the Riviera. Hotels and villas emptied in hours. Officers and men on leave left within a half hour. The main Monaco casino struggled on, but most of the croupiers, as Frenchmen, were called to join their units. An international tennis tournament was canceled, as were the boat races. The high-class tarts who usually ran with the high-stakes gamblers gathered at the Hotel de Paris and consoled each other. Monte Carlo had never experienced this before, a townful of hookers and a few very rich but very old men and nothing else. Everything shut down; then came May 1940, and hectic attempts were made by Brits to leave the coast via Monte, including Somerset Maugham, and some ultimately reached England.

The ax fell when Italy declared war on a rapidly collapsing France and the Italians walked from their border into Monaco. Even worse was the embarrassment when the Italian troops were cheered to the rafters from the Italians of Monaco. After a temporary shutdown the casino reopened and posted unprecedented profits as rich French Jews and other refugees reached the principality once Prince Louis declared Monaco a neutral sovereign state. This suited everyone, including the eventual occupying German army surrounding Monaco.

Twelve years after the end of the war I walked down to the Old Beach hotel and the Sporting Club with a gentleman who owned them, a certain Aristotle Socrates Onassis. He knew my dad and was nice to young Taki. Onassis became a household word during the early ’50s when he “bought” Monte Carlo. Actually what he did was become majority stockholder of the SBM, the company that controls the Monaco casino and its biggest hotels. Onassis wanted to keep Monte Carlo a tiny island of old-fashioned charm, but the ruling prince Rainier wanted a Las Vegas by the Med. Rainier, who looked just like any concierge in his principality, won by issuing more stock and turning the golden Greek into a minority holder. The result seventy years later is the Grimaldis are among the richest families around, and Monte Carlo is an overbuilt, overcrowded cement hell out of a Hieronymus Bosch painting.

St. Tropez was slow to follow the rest of the Riviera, but even there the unacceptably vulgar have prevailed. Rich Arabs and until this year rich Russians turned the once peaceful fishing village into a nightmare. Super yachts, as those monstrosities and super polluters are called, have turned the main strip of the harbor into a freak show, with masses of sweaty seminude voyeurs ogling fat slobs eating and drinking with their whores on board. Very ugly people own very ugly boats, my old daddy always said, but fortunately he never saw today’s “yacht owners.” Come to think of it, another great man long gone said exactly the same thing, one Gianni Agnelli.

Oh dear, we are getting nostalgic yet again. I’ve just finished Anne De Courcy’s Paris life of Nancy Cunard, and memories of the French capital returned stronger than ever. I’ve read many of De Courcy’s biographies, and this one was as good as any, except that I’ve never been attracted to nymphomaniacs, especially rich, bullying, left-wing nymphos like the Cunard dame. (The degree of difficulty in seduction is very important, at least to me.) What rang my bell was reading about the Noailles. Vicomte and Vicomtesse de Noailles were as upper-crust as it gets, and noted patrons of the arts. Marie Laure de Noailles had the artsiest salon in Paris and was close to Cocteau, Dali, Max Ernst, Man Ray, Picasso, and so on. The Noailles’ palatial house had Dalis, Goyas, and other greats hanging on its walls. This was in the ’20s. Around 1965, I was invited to the Noailles’ by Raoul Levy, the man who discovered Brigitte Bardot and was after young Taki. (I don’t swing that way so he was slightly disappointed.) But I met Marie Laure and enjoyed myself speaking with her. A crushed automobile by Cesar was in the entrance hall. (Levy committed suicide later on, but not because of young Taki.)

And so it goes. Memories of grand times in grand places that are no longer fun.

Attentively watching the grass grow in the meadow in front of my house, which is my major contribution to gardening, I saw two dogs approach. They were obviously companions, for they were trotting side by side contentedly. I hoped that they would come to me, and they did.

They were both mongrels; one, a rusty brown color, short-coated with something of the Labrador in him, and the other, much smaller, all terrier, white, with floppy brown ears whose points folded over most appealingly. They neither of them wore collars, but they must have been owned by someone not far away, for they were in good condition. They must also have been well-treated, for they had no fear of me; rather the reverse, they were trustful and even affectionate toward me. They followed me into the house, as I had hoped that they would do, because I knew that my wife would want to see them. The brown dog in particular took to her; he rested his head straightaway on her lap and gazed up at her in that soulful way that dogs have.

Naturally, this resulted in a biscuit, one for each dog. They were of very different personality: the brown dog craving affection and the white, the terrier, busily exploring the house, though slightly nervously, since he jumped a little in reverse whenever he moved something with his nose.

It seemed that they had come, more or less, for afternoon tea, because after about half an hour, during which time we made a great fuss of them, the terrier left the house and stood waiting for his companion to join him, which after a couple of minutes he did. Then they trotted away, I suppose (and hope) back to their home, wherever it was (you can’t see another house from our house). They were, in fact, very polite and well-brought-up dogs. They did not outstay their welcome, though my wife said that secretly she wished that they would stay. The next day, she bought some dog biscuits in case they returned, for the fact is that there are few consolations in life like a good dog.

But what do we need to be consoled for? I have a satisfactory life and want for nothing because I have nothing that I want, or rather, all that I want. And yet a dog would still be great comfort to me. Why?

A dog would distract me from the information that bombards me daily. A dog communicates, but not in propositional language. It cannot comment on the coming recession, on the rate of inflation, on the escalation of war, or on any of the other thousand afflictions that mankind torments itself with. A dog’s interest in the world is very intense but is strictly local. A dog helps its master to concentrate on the here and now and sucks him into his own small world. Other cares fade into the background in the company of a dog.

Is this necessarily a good thing? Yes and no. The information that causes us so much distress is usually about matters over which one has no control or the slightest power to affect. What is the use of my ruminating over inflation, its causes and cure, when nothing that I say or do will make it increase or decrease? The same goes for all other vexatious or contentious public affairs. I am a person of no power and no influence; I can only make myself miserable by such ruminations. I am happy with a dog; I am miserable with the news. The utilitarian calculation is clear: I will add to the sum total of human happiness if I spend time with a dog and will detract from it if I concern myself with the news and public affairs.

What is true of me, however, must be true of millions of others. Not all of them will love dogs, though personally I am mystified by people who do not love dogs, but they will all love something that will bring them happiness, whether it be stamp collecting or atrocious popular music, and practically none of them will be made happier by familiarity with public affairs. In other words, on a utilitarian calculation (at least at first sight), public affairs should not interest anyone unable to affect them, which is probably 99.9 percent of the population.

But what would a modern society be like (and modern societies are the only societies that we have or can possibly have) if only the powerful concerned themselves with public affairs and everyone else was completely indifferent to them, their lives absorbed entirely by, and in, their private pleasurable concerns? Such a situation would give carte blanche to the powerful minority, which at present is inhibited to some extent by exposure to the millions who do, in fact, interest themselves in public affairs, even if it be at the expense of their own individual unhappiness or misery.

This changes the utilitarian calculation. While uninterest in public affairs conduces to the immediate personal contentment of the uninterested person, the carte blanche such uninterest, if sufficiently widespread, would give to the powerful would soon enough add to the miseries of the uninterested, given the propensities of people who exercise unfettered power. From this it follows that making yourself miserable by following the news might actually conduce to a greater sum total of human happiness than not doing so, even if it makes no individual happier. The best solution for an individual, perhaps, is unconcern about public affairs while all those around him concern themselves with them, but clearly this cannot work for everyone, any more than everyone can be above average in some respect or other.

As usual, the solution is a happy medium, between indifference to public affairs and overconcern with them. You should never reach the stage at which, because you are so worried about public affairs, you cannot derive immediate pleasure from (say) two charming dogs who come uninvited to tea, but neither should you suppose that the availability of such pleasures (and there are many) means that you can safely disregard public affairs and leave them entirely to others to worry about.

Therefore, I am somewhat worried about the price of dog biscuits. Perhaps we had best lay in a large supply.

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

I see the pro-abortion crowd is still bragging about their “10-year-old rape victim,” lamenting that the poor kid had to travel all the way from Ohio to Indiana to get the abortion. They make it sound like a trek from Iran to Iraq in the 13th century.

I don’t expect coastal liberals to know this, but Ohio is next to Indiana. The drive from the child’s home in Columbus, Ohio, to the abortionist in Indianapolis takes 2.5 hours. The cost of the gas was probably a greater trauma for the family than the trip.

But as long as they’re going to keep talking about how hard it is to get an abortion in Ohio, I’m going to keep talking about how hard it is to assimilate the third world to first-world norms about women and children.

Child rape, gang rape, incest — it’s been a long time since we’ve seen much of that in the United States. Of course, there are lots of things we thought had been abolished a hundred years ago that our immigration policies are bringing back.

Indeed, the precise reasons people doubted “10-year-old rape victim” (until we found out the rapist was an illegal immigrant from Guatemala) were:

1) We grew up in America, where such crimes were freakishly rare;

2) We are being systematically lied to about the new cultures being brought in by mass third-world immigration.

In its treatment of women, America is rare even among Western nations.

Toward the end of Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville attributes “the unusual prosperity and growing strength” of America to “the superiority of their women.”

This admirable creature, he said, was the product of Protestantism combined with self-government and the spirit of freedom. “Amongst almost all Protestant nations young women are far more the mistresses of their own actions than they are in Catholic countries. … [S]he has scarcely ceased to be a child when she already thinks for herself, speaks with freedom, and acts on her own impulse.”

Cut to: The mother of the 10-year-old rape victim in Ohio adamantly defending her child’s rapist.

Women rallying around the menfolk — who are rapists — is something else that’s new to Americans. But such behavior is disturbingly well-known to police and prosecutors who deal with large immigrant populations.

“Hispanic rape victims are unlikely to report victimization to the police because in their families the male is the head of the household, and women are subordinate to men,” criminal justice professor Shana L. Maier writes in her book Rape, Victims and Investigations: Experiences and Perceptions of Law Enforcement Officers Responding to Reported Rapes.

She continues: “Because maintaining the honor of the family is important, Hispanics and Latinos are more likely than other racial/ethnic groups to blame the victim. The victim, not the perpetrator, is blamed for bringing dishonor to the family.”

With the media actively covering up the crimes of immigrants, it may take a while to notice, ladies, but American men were the best you ever had it.

Let’s check in with de Tocqueville again. “[A]lthough a European frequently affects to be the slave of woman,” he wrote, “it may be seen that he never sincerely thinks her his equal. In the United States men seldom compliment women, but they daily show how much they esteem them.”

And he was comparing America to Europe — forget primitive tribesmen.

After your government undertook a massive program to relocate the Hmong people from Laos to Minnesota (and elsewhere in the U.S.), local law enforcement and medical authorities began to notice a striking upsurge in gang rape and forced prostitution. At one St. Paul clinic, a pediatric nurse calculated that Hmong girls were about six times more likely than other victims to have been raped by five or more people.

But their families blame the child rape victims. “In Hmong culture,” the Associated Press matter-of-factly explained, “a girl who loses her virginity before marriage may be looked down upon by her own relatives, even if she is forcibly raped.”

Thus, one Hmong mother’s response to her 12-year-old daughter being gang-raped by at least 10 men (also Hmong, of course) was not to call the police. To the contrary, when the girl limped home after an especially brutal episode, her mother said to her: “You’re just a little slut.”

This is their CULTURE.

Our culture sparkles and gleams, even compared to advanced European democracies, as noted by de Tocqueville. Among the interesting facts about America he cited was this: “In America a young unmarried woman may, alone and without fear, undertake a long journey.”

Not anymore, ladies! Sorry, but the rich needed cheap labor and the Democrats needed voters.

When the Conservatives became the first recognized British political party in 1834, the catalyst was Robert Peel’s Tamworth Manifesto, designed to embody conservative values constitutionally and so improve the lot of the British people. How times have changed. The reason for the creation of Britain’s most recent political party, 186 years later, was that an actor rolled his eyes on television.

Until Jan. 16, 2020, Laurence Fox was a reasonably successful English actor, known largely for his supporting role on the popular TV drama Lewis. He comes from an acting dynasty, with his father James known among cult film fans for playing a gangster alongside Mick Jagger in the 1970 movie Performance, while his uncle Edward famously starred in 1973’s The Day of the Jackal. Fox Junior’s fame led to an invitation to appear on the BBC’s political TV panel show Question Time.

Fox showed from the program’s start that he was going to be casually sarcastic, but when a “woman of color” asked him if he was aware that his viewpoint was that of a privileged white man, things became a little frayed. She also accused him, as predictably as night follows day, of racism. Fox retorted that actually her comment was racist. She reiterated the charge of white privilege. Fox looked at her.

And then he looked to the heavens and he rolled his eyes.

A quarter of a century or so before the Conservative Party formed, and the morning after his poetic debut, Childe Harold’ s Pilgrimage, was published, Lord Byron “awoke and found myself famous.” Imagine that news on top of a hangover from drinking port. In these days of rabid social media response, Fox awoke to find himself infamous. The brush fire of Twitter was blazing, and Fox was immediately shunned by both his profession and even Equity, the actors’ union. He was about to become a “resting actor,” in between engagements. He found another.

Now effectively unemployed after perhaps theatrical history’s most expensive eye roll, Fox started his own political party, Reclaim. They hardly set the world on fire, but Fox gained experience in the political arena, standing for mayor of London as well as fielding candidates in by-elections. He also became a regular guest on right-of-center outlets such as New Culture Forum and GB News. But as electoral success began to look unlikely, Fox moved away from politics proper and into an area better described as political activism.

Fox set up the Bad Law Project with ex–police officer Harry Miller, the object being to draw attention to and challenge the damaging use of some modern British laws, on a case-to-case basis. Mr. Miller, after being reprimanded for tweets concerning transgenderism, was famously told by a British policeman to “check your thinking.”

Miller is a powerful ally for Fox, having recently won a High Court case that now means that so-called “Non-Crime Hate Incidents” (NCHIs) can no longer be recorded by increasingly politicized police forces across the U.K. (although the hapless Home Secretary Priti Patel is moving at glacial speed on implementing this).

These extraordinary legal citations can be made against, say, someone who “misgenders” someone else on social media, or even at school. The police do not have to inform the recipient of the NCHI, but it stays on their record and could thus affect future employment. This looks for all the world like a dry run for a Chinese-style social credit system, and it must never be forgotten that Britain is running without the safety net of a First Amendment. Fox, and his colleagues at Reclaim, believe that the authorities are being politicized just as the law is being weaponized.

Fox also has his own online channel, Reclaim the Media, on which he interviews those who have fallen foul of so-called “cancel culture,” thus giving at least a small voice to those the media would not deign to talk to. He has also produced a video that takes on a subject Britain’s mainstream media would never dare to approach: the teaching of gender theory in British schools.

Fox’s 23-minute film, Groomed, is well paced and calm, patiently exposing the corrosive curriculum that, as in the USA, is being imposed on schoolchildren, often with neither the knowledge nor the consent of parents. It is almost eerie to hear Fox’s calm, measured tones describing junior school lessons given by a drag queen called Flo-Job, and another ideological supply teacher described as a “rainbow dildo butt-monkey.” Shakespeare never dreamed up such grotesques.

Groomed is simply shot, features smart and informed guests, and has the advantage that Fox is an actor, and therefore comfortable in front of camera and microphone. But if Groomed is a cultural good deed, it will not go unpunished and, if you understand the political climate in today’s Britain, you won’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows. It will be in the direction of Reclaim and Fox, and it will be more than just a stiff breeze. I wondered how Fox and his colleagues viewed the future, knowing they had kicked a hornets’ nest, and decided to contact Reclaim for comment.

The first contact I had had with Reclaim was when they replied to a request for a short interview earlier this year in connection with another piece I was writing. A gentleman called Martin Daubney asked to see some links to my work and I promptly sent three. I never heard from him again. Perhaps he didn’t like my style.

This time around my inquiry was answered by Victor Haggard. I explained to him that I wanted to write about the Reclaim Party, Groomed, and British politics in general. I told him who I was writing the piece for and who I had written for in the past. His reply was swift, courteous, and curt:

Hi Mark, this isn’t one for Reclaim, but I wanted to let you know rather than keep you waiting.

Mr. Haggard obviously had a problem, and I know what it is. It’s called “guilt by association.” I have written for magazines that are just a bit too rich for Reclaim’s blood. But Reclaim can hardly be blamed for declining to be associated with me and, by extension, those same magazines. There are assiduous little weevils out there hunched over computers, just waiting for someone like Reclaim to associate themselves, however tenuously, with magazines described by some as “far-right” or “white nationalist.” Why take a chance?

Reclaim have already been victims of covert censorship. Bank accounts have been closed. This is familiar to any dissident organization. Laura Towler of Patriotic Alternative—a very different setup to Reclaim—had her bank account closed without explanation but with the maximum amount of inconvenience.

But Reclaim’s reluctance to correspond with me shows two things. Firstly, despite their maverick stance, some aspect of the political/media complex has them scared of certain contacts deemed to be toxic. Secondly, this reticence is not confined to Reclaim, and there is a line now—defined by one’s footprints in right-wing publishing—that cannot be crossed and that will further divide the political right into sects and cadres. We shall see.

In the meantime, Fox has plenty of high-quality allies. The Free Speech Union (FSU) was started by journalist Toby Young, and Fox has followed their model of taking cases for which donations are ring-fenced and attempting by legal means to protect free speech. The difference between Reclaim/BLP and the FSU is, in Fox’s words, “Where they defend, we attack.”

Freedom of speech is high on Fox’s list of priorities, although he may need to confirm to himself how far those freedoms go. If you won’t talk to a journalist because you don’t like the magazines he writes for, what is your opinion of his freedom of speech? Fox will have a lot of cognitive dissonance to think his way through in the coming months and years.

Movie legend has it that filming Performance did considerable mental damage to Laurence’s father, James. I hope the son is made of stronger stuff if he is going to continue, and succeed, both in British politics and the even riskier venture of activism that is not approved by the state.

Who is more into conspiracy theories: the right or the left?

A new study sheds light on the political tilt of conspiracy theories.

First, though, let me admit that I’ve always been more sympathetic to conspiracy theories in theory than in practice. The notion that powerful figures plotted, say, the assassination of Julius Caesar, Abraham Lincoln, or Archduke Franz Ferdinand seems not implausible.

But the quality of popular conspiracy theories is dire.

One fundamental problem is that widely appealing conspiracy theories demand formidable villains, bad guys who can keep a secret and who adroitly understand how the world works in order to seize the future.

But our elites instead seem inept at understanding cause and effect. They are recurrently surprised that, for example, their depolicing drives lead to an explosion of riots, murders, and car crashes.

The essence of conspiracy thinking is: “Fear the Plan”—but not because elites getting their way will no doubt unleash yet another orgy of unintended consequences, but because it will all go as nefariously calculated. (Amusingly, QAnon was a sort of reverse conspiracy theory in which supporters of the capricious and publicity-mad Trump administration were instead reassured, “Trust the Plan.”)

Hence my kind of conspiracy theory is that the reason Pfizer shut down its Covid vaccine clinical trial from late October 2020 until the day after the election was to deprive Trump of his October Surprise.

But it’s a boring conspiracy theory even though (or because) it’s likely true. As far as I can tell, there was no long-range secret strategy to do down Trump. Instead, CEO Albert Bourla kept stubbornly promising that Pfizer would announce results in October despite mounting anger toward him among Democrats (who were vaccine skeptics back then). Finally, it appears, it was made clear to him at the last moment that the media and the Biden administration would not look forgivingly upon Pfizer if it did.

I suspect that’s what real-world conspiracies are frequently like: desperate improvisations.

But nobody remembers and nobody cares, whereas less plausible conspiracy theories are ever-popular.

A new study in Political Behavior entitled “Are Republicans and Conservatives More Likely to Believe Conspiracy Theories?” by political scientist Adam Enders and colleagues finds, according to three different methodologies, that, contrary to the media stereotype going back to Richard Hofstadter’s 1964 book The Paranoid Style, the right side of the American political spectrum is no more conspiratorial-minded than the left side:

Across all studies, we fail to observe consistent evidence that the right exhibits higher levels of conspiracism––however operationalized––than the left.

First, the researchers looked at eight surveys conducted over the last decade regarding 52 different conspiracy theories. Twenty-five were more popular on the right, 23 on the left, and four fell right at the midpoint.

They readily admit that that you should worry about selection bias in their research:

Of course, one might protest that the patterns depicted…are artifacts of the conspiracy theories we chose to examine and, indeed, they would be correct!

However, as much would be the case for ANY study of specific conspiracy theories.

As, they imply, that’s also the likeliest reason why many political scientists assume that conservatives are more conspiracy-crazed: When they start making up lists of conspiracy theories they put down all the right-wing ones that drive them nuts, but ignore many of their own side’s.

This critically important point explains the discrepancies among previous studies: substantive inferences are heavily dependent on which conspiracy theories are considered. Inferences about the fundamental nature of conspiracism should not be made from patterns in a single or small number of conspiracy beliefs, even though precisely such generalizations are commonplace in the conspiracy belief literature…. Thus, findings of left–right asymmetries (or lack thereof) may be an artifact of which conspiracy theories researchers investigate.

If you were conspiracy-inclined, you might start thinking there had been a conspiracy to rig academic studies of conspiracy theories. More plausibly, it’s just been the usual bias and lack of self-awareness.

Enders & Co. point out all the conspiracy theories that are equally believed by the masses on the left and the right (but not the elites, who tend to have gotten the memo about which conspiracy theories are fashionable on their side and which aren’t):

For example, partisanship and ideology are not correlated with beliefs in conspiracy theories about the JFK assassination, the MMR vaccine, the Holocaust, GMO’s, Fluoride, cellphones, AIDS, pharmaceutical companies, government mind control, and lightbulbs.

What, you may be wondering, is the lightbulb conspiracy theory? It’s not the old lightbulb conspiracy theory about how Big Lightbulb had invented a product that never burns out that the cartel was withholding from the market.

Instead, it has to do with those twisty CFL bulbs from before LEDs:

“The U.S. government is mandating the switch to compact fluorescent light bulbs because such lights make people more obedient and easier to control.”

Personally, that sounds about as sensible as any reason for CFLs (although I’m sure that at some point in the future there will be a nostalgic Stranger Things-style TV show about being 14 years old in 2011 that will feature the sickly but still heartwarming glow of CFL bulbs in every indoor scene).

But this new lightbulb conspiracy is not actually a real theory. Instead, it was fabricated by researchers for a 2014 poll as an all-purpose generic test untainted by previous exposure to determine just how much you like conspiracy theorizing for the sake of conspiracy theorizing. They found a tiny leftward slant among its believers.

Similarly, the new study looked at responses to a general conspiracy theory that “captures a sentiment that is presumably foundational to many specific conspiracy theory beliefs”:

Regardless of who is officially in charge of governments and other organizations, there is a single group of people who secretly control events and rule the world together.

They remark about this theory:

that we observe no difference between left and right may suggest that the psychological bedrock for conspiricism traverses mainstream political orientations.

Then the researchers hired an international polling firm to ask about eleven conspiracy theories in twenty countries. Once again, they didn’t find much difference related to politics.

Finally, they made up ten ambidextrous conspiracy theories in which they could substitute in either “Democratic” or “Republican,” such as:

Do you think that Democratic [Republican] political elites are secretly plotting with large banks to lie about the health of the economy to gain support for their economic policy proposals?

Democratic respondents turned out somewhat more paranoid than Republicans on these questions.

In sum, we find no support for the hypothesis that those on the right are more likely to endorse conspiracy theories that impugn liberals than liberals are to endorse the exact same conspiracy theories when they impugn conservatives.

I would add that there is a whole class of woke conspiracy theories that our culture is suffused in that aren’t asked about in this study because virtually nobody ever dares point out that they are indeed conspiracy theories. Instead, they are considered prestigious findings of the social sciences, even though most of them are empirically dubious. For instance:

(1) Unarmed blacks are being murdered in huge numbers by racist police.
(2) Redlining denying loans to blacks is the reason their property values are lower.
(3) Predatory lending is the reason black property values are lower.
(4) Black crime rates are higher because of over-policing of black neighborhoods.
(5) America’s murder rate is high due to rural rednecks buying rifles at the sporting goods store.
(6) Black test scores are lower because of the systemic racism of white schoolteachers.
(7) Female entrepreneurs seldom found tech unicorns because venture capitalists hate women so much that they leave billion-dollar bills lying on the sidewalk.
(8) The AIDS crisis of the 1980s was the fault of Ronald and/or Nancy Reagan.
(9) Races don’t exist and they were concocted by Enlightenment scientists to promote racism.
(10) Huge numbers of people were assigned the wrong gender at birth.

And so forth and so on.

Indeed, working together with other influential actors to punish people who point out that your conspiracy theory is a conspiracy theory is perhaps the most useful kind of conspiracy of all.

Golem tales always follow the same template: A Jew builds a monster of clay to destroy his enemies, but in the end the golem turns on its creator.

In 2019, in a piece that generated unintended national controversy, I wrote about immigrant golems. This week, I’ll examine the homegrown ones.

George Soros is a golem creator extraordinaire. An atheist Jew who fancies neither Israel nor communism, Soros defies the easy anti-Jewish conspiracy theory stereotypes. But in fact Soros is not difficult to understand. He’s defined by his youth in WWII Hungary, watching with pride as his attorney father outsmarted the Nazis, keeping his family out of the camps and providing forged papers to keep other Jews out of the camps.

Soros frequently describes the war years as his happiest, and he’s lived a life of trying to replicate those years. He still sees himself as under occupation by gentile racists. Hungarian Jews during the war were not like Polish Jews; they weren’t impoverished and ghettoized. They were prosperous and integrated. Hence, Soros’ personal prosperity doesn’t lessen his fantasy; he doesn’t associate occupation with destitution. There’s still a Reich to defeat, and the Nazi-fighting torch has passed from father to son.

To battle his present-day (imaginary) Nazis, Soros has constructed an assembly line of black golems. He’s devoted his fortune ($32 billion just since 2017) to shielding black criminals from prosecution and incarceration. Every day in cities across the U.S., black thugs with Soros-bought immunity from consequences venture forth to murder, steal, rape, and assault.

For Soros, this is war, and every murder committed by one of his blacks is its own mini-Dresden, another blow against fascist Western Christendom.

Now, let’s compare Soros with another influential leftist Jew, one whose motivations were spelled out in a tell-all book by his daughter.

Herbert Aptheker (1915–2003) was a wealthy Brooklynite and one of the most prominent American communists of the 20th century. A friend and benefactor to Angela Davis and dozens of lesser black “revolutionaries,” Aptheker devoted his life to encouraging black militancy and pushing blacks to “burn down the system” (he even authored what could be considered the 20th-century version of the 1619 Project in an effort to encourage black radicalism).

We know what drove Aptheker, because his daughter Bettina wrote extensively about it in her autobiography:

My father rejected Judaism as a religious practice in the face of the Holocaust, detesting what he saw as the acquiescence of the Jewish people in their own destruction, and the failure of any God (Jewish or otherwise) to stop such a catastrophe…. My mother hated the Chasids. When she saw one on the street she would sputter and curse, nearly spitting in her rage. Her fury frightened me. She despised even the most reformed expressions of Jewish religion, referring to anything religious with bitter sarcasm and contempt. Zionism was unmentionable…. My father had substituted black people for Jews in his work. That is, he made black people larger than life by erasing their foibles and failures. This was to compensate for his deep shame about the way, he believed, the Jews had acted during the Holocaust.

What we have with Aptheker and Soros is “the same but different.” Two atheist Jews, hostile to faith and unmoved by Zionism, seeking vengeance for the Holocaust, using blacks as proxy soldiers. But whereas Soros’ Holocaust origin story is one of pride (pride in his father’s accomplishments, and a desire to carry on his family’s noble Nazi-fighting heritage), Aptheker’s is one of shame (shame in the perceived failures and weaknesses of his fellow Jews).

Aptheker railed against Jewish Holocaust “collaborators.” As Bettina tells it, he despised “Jews [who] had collaborated with the Nazis,” even though that “collaboration” often involved “very complicated circumstances.” Still, “These instances of collaboration seemed to be the entirety of my father’s focus, the place of his guilt and rage.”

Soros is exactly one of those “complicated” collaborators; as a teen under Nazi occupation he masqueraded as a gentile and even assisted in confiscating the belongings of deported Jews.

Studying how Aptheker, architect of 1960s black political violence, and Soros, architect of post-2000 unconstrained black street violence, are “the same but different” is edifying. Aptheker, tormented by self-loathing (which he visited upon his daughter via beatings and sexual molestation), viewed his stock as filthy and worthless, abject failures who fell to the Nazis without resistance. In blacks, Aptheker saw fearless warriors who could fight the Nazis as Jews should’ve. Soros, on the other hand, sees his stock as good and noble, canny survivors who beat the Nazis then and will do so again now.

To Aptheker, blacks are to be idealized; the true übermenschen. To Soros, blacks are a tool, no more superior than a hammer.

Aptheker and Soros traveled different roads, albeit from the same starting point (the Holocaust) and to the same conclusion (blacks as instruments). Two golem builders, but with different blueprints. Aptheker, a doctrinaire communist, didn’t just want his black golems to wreak destruction. Sure, that was a part of it. But they were also supposed to build a Marxist utopia.

Aptheker lived to see the death of that dream. Bettina’s book details her dad’s disillusionment as his black “revolutionaries” drifted from ideological violence to common thuggery.

But surely Soros, who expects nothing of his blacks but common thuggery, must be quite satisfied with his golems. Are they not giving the creator exactly what he desires? Whereas Aptheker tried to turn blacks into disciplined political partisans armed not only with guns but with the teachings of Mao, Soros has no desire to do any Reading Rainbow bullshit. He doesn’t want to teach them, or change them. He wants to unleash what’s already inside them: “Go be your worst you, and I’ll ensure there are no consequences.”

Low-effort, high-yield goleming.

So how can it go wrong?

Well, we’re seeing how right now.

Soros has recently suffered several key defeats, one of which it’s guaranteed you haven’t heard about.

We’ll start with that one.

Soros is like an online pedophile, but instead of trolling for small children he looks for useful negroes. About ten years ago, he thought he’d found a good ’un. Rev. William Barber is, well, was (we’ll get to that) president of the North Carolina NAACP (the largest chapter in the South, and the second-largest nationwide). Since 2001, Barber, a man of most generous girth (known locally as the “Round Rev”), has been saddled with a troublesome underling: Rev. Curtis Gatewood, president of the Durham branch and 2nd vice president of the North Carolina NAACP Conference of Branches. Gatewood achieved notoriety after 9/11 for essentially saying “whitey deserved to get blowed up,” and since then he’s wished death (or hosted those who wish death) upon whites, cops, Jews, Israel, Asians, Latinos, and even Obama (for not being radical enough).

The national NAACP wanted Gatewood gone, as he was saying way too many quiet parts out loud. But year after year Barber withstood the pressure to fire him. And the more Barber defied the national office, the more popular he grew at home.

This attracted Soros’ attention: an NAACP state president willing to defend a “kill whitey” maniac against the entire NAACP leadership.

A 2016 hack of Soros org documents revealed that Barber was specifically targeted by Soros for grooming. Soros put Barber on the payroll, and the two of them secretly funneled money to Gatewood’s “HK on J” subgroup (a more radical N.C. NAACP appendage).

Flush with Soros cash, Barber took some steps toward greater radicalism, fomenting local civil unrest and inflaming anti-cop sentiment.

But this year, it all came crashing down in spectacular fashion. Long story short, in between killin’ whitey, Gatewood was chasin’ booty, sexually harassing his branch’s female members. At first, Barber covered for him. But when enough “magic black girls” demanded action, the national NAACP finally had an excuse to dump both loose cannons without looking weak on the whitey question. Barber “resigned” and Gatewood was sacked. Always the rational one, Gatewood, furious at Barber for not protecting him “better,” accused Barber of financial mismanagement as state president, which led to a media investigation and the revelation that the Round Rev may have been pocketing much of the Soros lucre that was supposed to have gone to rioting.

Soros lost control of the N.C. chapter. Worse still, he realized his useful negro had played him for a chump.

That was June, the same month Soros lost his favorite minion Chesa Boudin in San Francisco. This month, Soros lost Marilyn Mosby, his Baltimore City State’s Attorney, and it looks like his handpicked Baltimore County State’s Attorney candidate Robbie Leonard is going to lose as well. On top of that, the recall of L.A. DA George Gascon looks likely to make the ballot.

Barber, Gatewood, Mosby, Boudin, and probably Leonard and Gascon. Six losses in a month.

What gives?

Soros’ golems aren’t behaving. In N.C., Soros paid for riots. Gatewood used that money to chase skirts and Barber used it for his $3,000-a-day BBQ ribs habit. Soros chose Mosby to rain more death and disorder upon Baltimore (if that’s even possible), but she spent her days skimming (for which she’s been federally indicted). Soros poured millions into BLM and what did he get? A bunch of LaQueenies buying mansions with their baby-daddies.

Ironically, post-Floyd riot fervor was lessened, not furthered, by Soros’ money (and the money from all the other gullible leftists who donated in 2020). The gravy train distracted BLM leadership from actual activism. Remember that prior to Floyd’s death, the weave-wearing heifers who came to lead BLM were busting up fast food joints because they fries be cold.

Soros thought he could throw money at that trash and get disciplined partisans in return.

Aptheker’s error, repeated.

Okay, but what about Boudin, Gascon, and Leonard, who aren’t black? There’s no money malfeasance there. They did exactly as ordered, using black criminals to sow mayhem.

Yeah, too much mayhem. Whereas the “ideological” black golems took the money and ran, the thuggish black golems were incapable of showing restraint once incarceration was taken off the table. Too many murders, too many assaults. If Soros thought he could rely on his golems to go slow enough to avoid backlash, he was wrong. L.A., S.F., and Baltimore will tolerate a lot from blacks; when you alienate those cities, you know your golems have gone too far.

Soros is a dinosaur, as was Aptheker. Jews with vendettas rooted in the Holocaust and romanticized visions of using blacks as proxies like it’s 1955 when black leftists were deferential and the most radical thing you could call them was equal. Now that every black has to be called “magic” and “brilliant,” and now that blacks have had a taste of “progressive prosecution,” decarceration, defunded and defanged police, and zero-consequence rioting, the ghetto golems have become uncontrollable.

In Jewish literature, that’s always where the story ends.

Now, in real life, we get to see what comes next.

Lucky us.

When Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi added to the itinerary of a valedictory trip through Asia the island of Taiwan, she could not have been oblivious to the reaction she would produce in a stunned Beijing.

Thus, when the Financial Times revealed that the speaker would be visiting Taiwan, which China regards as a breakaway province, an enraged Beijing took the Pelosi visit to be a deliberate U.S. provocation.

Beijing’s reaction appears authentic and understandable.

“If the U.S. insists on going its own way, China will take firm and forceful measures to firmly safeguard national sovereignty and territorial integrity,” a Chinese spokesman told reporters in Beijing. “The U.S. must bear all the consequence of the visit.”

Privately, Beijing is said to be issuing more pointed and serious warnings, which involve military action.

Pelosi apparently did not coordinate or clear the visit to Taiwan with the White House or Defense Department. Wednesday, President Joe Biden told reporters: “The military thinks it’s not a good idea right now” for Pelosi to travel to Taiwan.

So where do we stand?

China is promising serious retaliation if the highest U.S. official since Speaker Newt Gingrich in 1997 flies to Taiwan.

The Biden administration is putting out word that it does not believe that a Pelosi visit to Taiwan is a wise move, when the Chinese Communist Party is on the eve of a conference to decide on a third five-year term for President Xi Jinping.

If Pelosi postpones or cancels the visit, it will be seen as a U.S. climb-down in the face of Chinese indignation and protest, and an affront to our friends in Taiwan.

Around the Asia-Pacific rim, the word will be, “The Americans, faced with China’s firmness, backed down.”

But if the visit goes forward, China is publicly committed to respond. Either way, relations between our countries will likely suffer, and perhaps seriously, if the Chinese opt for a military response to a Pelosi visit.

However this collision plays out, the U.S. is paying the price for having adopted, decades ago, a policy of building up China in the hope and expectation that Beijing would evolve into a benign and friendly rival and competitor of the United States.

Granted most-favored-nation trade status by the U.S., which also ushered it into the World Trade Organization, China has moved, since the turn of the century, from a country with an economy smaller than Italy’s into a manufacturing monolith that is the rival of the United States.

Though China’s navy is less powerful than the U.S. Navy, it is now larger in the number of ships it deploys.

Strategically, China has moved to claim 90% of the South China Sea, the Paracel and Spratly island chains, and most of the rocks and reefs in the territorial waters of Vietnam, Malaysia, Brunei, the Philippines and Taiwan. Some of these rocks and reefs have been converted by China into fortified air and naval bases.

China not only claims Taiwan, and the Taiwan Strait as territorial waters; it claims the Senkaku Islands, occupied and claimed by Japan.

In 1972, U.S. President Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, in Peking, seemed to concede China’s claim to Taiwan in the Shanghai Communique that came out of that historic summit:

“The United States acknowledges that all Chinese on either side of the Taiwan Strait maintain there is but one China and that Taiwan is a part of China. The United States Government does not challenge that position. It reaffirms its interest in a peaceful settlement of the Taiwan question by the Chinese themselves.

“With this prospect in mind, it affirms the ultimate objective of the withdrawal of all U.S. forces and military installations from Taiwan. In the meantime, it will progressively reduce its forces and military installations on Taiwan as the tension in the area diminishes.”

In 1979, President Jimmy Carter broke relations with the Republic of China on Taiwan, recognized Communist China and abrogated the mutual security treaty with Taipei dating to 1954.

For the last three decades, the importation of Chinese-made goods by the United States and the transfer of U.S. manufacturing to China to take advantage of the low wages and productive labor force have led to many trillions of dollars in successive China trade surpluses with us and the rapid emergence of China as an Asian superpower.

Lately, Beijing’s military has made repeated incursions into Taiwan’s air defense identification zone and has had a growing number of encounters with the U.S. Navy and Air Force planes in the South China Sea.

Meanwhile, Biden has said the U.S. will fight to defend our ally, the Philippines, if a collision occurs in the South China Sea. We will fight to defend the Senkakus alongside our ally Japan. And, though his staff has sought to walk it back, Biden has said we will fight to defend Taiwan.

A U.S.-China collision somewhere in the Western Pacific appears inevitable. The only questions are when and where.

The Week’s Most Craving, Slaving, and Heat-Waving Headlines

GIVING BLACKS THE BIG BIRD
Over the years, Sesame Street has pandered to the “diversity and inclusion” crowd with numerous episodes aimed at black kids. Same message, again and again: Your color makes you special.

Last year the show even introduced the new characters Kermit Till and his friend Tusky-G the rapping syphilitic elephant.

But now all that good work’s been flushed down the toilet thanks to Sesame Street’s open-borders policy. “Rosita” is the show’s first bilingual Muppet. Hailing from Mexico, the character gives children valuable lessons in cultural tolerance and drywall installation.

Sesame Place is a Bucks County, Penn., Sesame Street-themed amusement park owned by Sea World and licensed by the government-funded PBS show. Last week, at the park’s daily Reaming of the Taxpayers Parade, two little black girls were watching the beloved characters march by when along came Rosita, waving at onlookers and high-fiving a bunch of white kids and parents.

The two black girls reached out to hug Rosita, but she shook her head “no” and waved them off, coldly marching away as the crestfallen children tearfully came to terms with how insignificant they are to this Mexican immigrant Muppet.

And with that, Sesame Street provided its first useful lesson in fifty years.

Yes, black Americans, the Rositas marching through our open borders don’t like you, don’t want to deal with you, and in the end will render you irrelevant.

These days, that’s a way more important lesson than counting to five cookies.

The park, of course, apologized. But one suspects that the bitterness and resentment felt by the two girls will one day be visited upon workers at a McDonald’s who are late with an order of fries.

Sesame Park’s motto is “Go Before They Grow.”

A wise warning to anyone in the presence of angry black children.

THE GROIN MILE
I must admit I didn’t think much of Demi first time I laid eyes on him. Looked like a stiff breeze could blow him over. Also, looked like in a breeze he could blow someone stiff. That was my first impression of the man. That tall drink of water with the silver spoon up his ass…well, hopefully it’s just a spoon.

—The Shawshank Redemption (Stephen King’s 2022 woke update)

You’ve heard of Demi Moore; now meet Demi Lots Moore. “Female” convicted murderer Demetrius “Demi” Minor is more than a woman, in a major way. “She” has a penis, testicles, and everything else dudes have.

Because Demi Minor’s a dude. But don’t tell that to New Jersey correctional officials, because they think Minor’s a woman. After all, he told them so. And why would a dude serving a thirty-year manslaughter stint lie about that?

Oh, right; so he could be housed among women. Which he was. And he wouldn’t stop knocking ’em up. After multiple pregnancies resulted from his time at the Edna Mahan Correctional Facility for Women, last week the 27-year-old Minor was transferred to the all-male Garden State Youth Correctional Facility.

And now poor Demi worries that he’ll be the victim of sexually predatory men (while he was born with a penis, he was not born with an appreciation of irony).

Minor’s story was told in a teary NBC News profile last week authored by ace scribe Tat Bellamy-Walker, whose Twitter bio lists his occupation as “Desk Assistant for diversity verticals.”

So if you need new multicolored blinds for your windows, you know who to contact.

In his article, Tat Pullcord-Shutterman links to Minor’s website, which explains that he’s only in prison because he “mistakenly” killed his stepfather over “misplaced hostility.”

Oopsie!

The website features multiple photos of Minor, who makes Biden administration monstrosity “Rachel” Levine look doable. It’s impossible to view Minor’s photos without thinking of the moment Schwarzenegger saw the Predator’s face.

Minor has vowed to fight for the right to return to female lockup, and the accompanying right to force himself on female inmates.

And with the ACLU’s help, perhaps soon the Bird Transman of Alcatraz can return to Ménage-à-Trois-shank.

ESTHER, QUEEN OF THE BLACK ISRAELITES
It’s nice to see something good finally happen to a Jewish-American princess. Marta Kauffman has always had to struggle. Growing up in an upscale 92 percent white Pennsylvania suburb, Kauffman was forced to attend school with Christians, an experience that she’d later tell the Jewish Journal scarred her for life.

Leaving behind the horrors of pricey suburbia, Kauffman attended a small community college called Brandeis, paying her way by working double shifts at the local shrieking yenta factory.

Following college, Kauffman hitchhiked to L.A. on a private jet, where she began a career in Hollywood, a town not known for employing Jews. In 1994 fortune finally smiled on Kauffman when she co-created a sitcom called Friends, which became a massive hit due to a 1990s explosion in Down syndrome TV ownership.

Yet even that endeavor brought no happiness. According to the Journal, “When the show went off the air, Kauffman found that although she’d created a Hollywood legacy, she needed to reinvent herself to stay current.”

That was 2004. And in the spirit of “look, do you want it done fast or done well?” last week Kauffman finally announced that reinvention: She’s decided to become Queen of the Blacks. Admitting her “guilt” (which she blames on “society”) for having had no black characters on Friends, Kauffman has personally pledged $4 million to Brandeis to hire a black professor who’ll head a department that bears her name: The Marta Kauffman Chair in Shrill Kvetching.

And with that, Kauffman waited for every black in America to arrive at her Hollywood mansion and carry her on their shoulders like the royalty she is.

Instead, all she got was a black panhandler outside Bristol Farms who drunkenly shouted, “Da f*ck was Friends?”

Poor Marta Kauffman…a queen without a maaaaaan.

GAYS LOOK AHEAD
Correction: That title should read, GAYS: “LOOK, A HEAD!” As in, “Hey, a public restroom; let’s have sex!”

Big cities in the U.S. are having a dick(ens) of a time stopping the rapid spread of monkeypox among gay men, who are refusing to curb their random hookups and weekend-long orgies just because a deadly disease is circulating among them. And all the CDC can muster is to instruct gays to wrap their runny infected areas with gauze before a liaison.

In epidemiological terminology, this is known as the “mummy method” of disease prevention.

Thanks to the CDC, West Hollywood, Castro, Fire Island, and Greenwich can now guiltlessly host orgiastic pyramids in which pharaoh fagalas Ram-ses each other in the Tutankhanus while exclaiming Imhotepdatass as they pylon the Sphinxter, secure that nobody is spreading monkeypox because of course gauze is a foolproof shield against infection (just like cloth masks and plastic partitions).

Monkeypox is an African-born disease, so the spread among gay Americans is yet another example of cultural appropriation. Not to worry, though—last week saw a new outbreak of Marburg, a highly infectious zoonotic hemorrhagic viral disease, in Ghana. Marburg has a 90 percent fatality rate, literally liquefying its victims like a Nazi looking into the Ark.

That said, watching someone die of Marburg is still not as disturbing as watching a Sam Brinton dog video.

According to Western public health officials (and the man-sized anthropomorphic mud-caked bundle of twigs and dung that serves as Ghana’s minister of health), it’s unlikely that the Marburg outbreak will spread beyond Africa, as the disease can only be contracted via close contact with bodily fluids.

Upon hearing that, every gay man in America exclaimed, “Sounds like a dare!”

AOC OMG WTF?
It was the worst week ever for unwise Latina Googly Gomez (better known as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez). First, AOC was brutally assaulted on the Capitol steps. Then she was rendered penniless by racist sexist congressional pay rules. And finally she was hauled off in handcuffs by brutish cops.

In AOC’s mind, all of that happened.

In reality, not so much.

First, “Eyeballs O’Shaughnessy” was heckled outside the Capitol by an internet troll who complimented her “booty.” And although AOC laughed it off (the heckling, not her booty) at the time, she later decided she’d been literally murdered by the rude constituent’s comments.

But as she started to plan her funeral (recyclable fair-trade coffin, designer dress made of aborted fetal tissue, and Alicia Keys on a solar-powered organ playing “Candle in the Wind”), she realized she was unable to afford such a lavish affair on a congresswoman’s salary (plus, the rights to “Candle in the Wind” are owned by the cowfart lobby, and they wouldn’t allow her the use). Brownie Bulger immediately took to Instagram to complain that she’s unable to live on a mere $174,000 a year, receiving many sympathetic replies from her mindless minimum-wage fantards.

And as if all that wasn’t enough, AOC and her fearleading “squad” decided to provoke arrest by blocking the entrance to the Supreme Court. But when the cops hauled off the hindering harpies, AOC, a practiced expert in the art of agitproptosis, pretended to be handcuffed, only briefly dropping the charade to wave at onlookers in a tribute to Uruguayan magician Daniel K.

Once at the bottom of the steps, AOC then pretended to get beaten Rodney King-style (and to be fair, she was more convincing than the guy who played Carlo in The Godfather).

A taxing week for a taxing Democrat. To soothe AOC’s imaginary wounds, Nancy Pelosi sent a car to scoop her up and bring her over for a girls’ night of ice cream and wine.

That’s the good news.

The bad news: The driver was Pelosi’s husband.

Michael Beloff QC and past president of Trinity College Oxford has just had his memoir reviewed in The Spectator, and it brought back memories. Here’s this really good man, the type who does the work, believes in the system, plays by the rules, and subscribes to the old graces of courtesy and politeness, but the sort we never read about. Instead, what is shoved down our throats are today’s politicians selling their snake oil on TV, or those untalented but self-entitled celebrities boasting about themselves, and the ultimate horrors, of course: those profoundly ignorant woke Nazis who block free speech.

I can’t remember how long ago it was when I received a telephone call from Michael, who introduced himself and invited me to the high table at Trinity College Oxford. I accepted with alacrity and promised myself I’d behave and impress the dons with my knowledge of ancient Greek heroes and modern British womanhood. Two weeks later I received a note from Michael saying he had read that I was a friend of Jemima Khan and wouldn’t it be a good idea to bring her along for the dinner? So I rang Jemima, who at the time was billing and cooing with Hugh Grant, and told her here was her chance to upgrade from the rock-bottom cinematic milieu of Grant’s to the Olympian heights of Trinity’s high table. She squealed with delight. On the prearranged date my driver took us up to Oxford, and after going into the wrong college next door we finally arrived at the high table packed with gowned dons. The president placed Jemima next to him and I was on her left. What followed were delicious courses and some epic drinking of very good wines. There was one lady don present, an American perhaps, who asked about Hugh Grant’s whereabouts. “I told him to wait in the car,” said I. “Oh, do tell him to come in,” said the lady. But I was adamant: “He stays in the car.” Jemima enjoyed this.

Afterward we retired to more salubrious quarters where the drinking of spirits continued unabated, and eventually Jemima and I were driven home. The evening, I like to think, was successful, at least because I learned how little I knew. I never met any of the nice academics I dined with again, nor have I debated at the Oxford Union after three victories. (My only defeat came after I told a very fat female student who was complaining about almost starving to death in New Orleans that she could use a bit of a diet.)

Incidentally, there’s never been any hanky-panky between Jemima and me, but that’s entirely her fault. I’ve known her since she was very young, and I’ve been a close friend of her parents and brothers. I spoke at one of her birthdays at the old Annabel’s, attended her wedding to Imran, and went to her housewarming some ten years or so ago in the country. Last week she kindly invited me to another chic bash for 300, but I didn’t make it. I flew instead to Switzerland and the loving arms of my wife. When one gives up a party in order to join the wife, you know the man in the white suit is not far behind.

Never mind. I got closer to Jemima than the two gladiators who fought during the annual Spectator party at 22 Old Queen Street. Never have I seen braver men; Josh vs. Guto was a fight to remember during a night to remember. They faced each other like two Spartans, two ex-advisers to Gove and Boris, and it looked like Godzilla against King Kong. After circling each other they started to throw roundhouses meant to decapitate. For twenty minutes the building shook as they stood toe-to-toe watched by an openmouthed crowd, including Rishy and Tom, and then the fight of the century was over. They had touched each other less than I have ever touched Jemima. It was a modern fight of two 6-year-old girls, but then that’s politics today. Takimag readers would have been disgusted by the femininity of the fight. Can’t anyone fight like a real man anymore? Mind you, it could have been worse, like Biden fighting with Trump, two types who probably have their fingernails polished like girls do, and their tootsies also. What is this world coming to when no one can throw a punch anymore?

---