The Week’s Most Randying, Bandying, and Halloween Candying Headlines
HAPPY HITLERWEEN!
With Halloween parties and trick-or-treating back in full-swing post-pandemic, the woke scribes who make a living telling white folks how to dress for the season are back too, to tell you what costumes to avoid.
Sesali Bowen is Refinery29’s in-house Halloween decolonizer. Proprietor of BadFatBlackGirl.com, Bowen is a one-woman supply-chain crisis, leaving supermarket shelves barren of candy every October (and the rest of the year).
She’s so black and massive, her Halloween costume is “the universe before the Big Bang.”
This week, she released her No. 1 Halloween no-no for whitey, No alteration of skin color or hairstyle: “If you can’t pull off the costume with the skin and hair that you currently have, pick something else.”
No widow’s peak? Lay off that Dracula outfit!
Bowen commands whites to examine their “relationship to the culture that’s being referenced in your costume,” and “stay in your lane.”
Almost sounds like permission to embrace white nationalism for Halloween.
Forget “almost.” Another rotund black woman in a year-round Grimace costume, Sassy Latte over at CafeMom, straight-out commands whites to only dress up as “your own Eurocentric history.”
Absolute genius! “Eurocentrism” as the key to anti-racism. So, white people, get those King Leopold costumes ready, and really play the part: Seize everyone else’s candy and make it yours. Grab your Master Race-inets, add another “K” to your Kit Kat, and slap a yellow star on those Jewnior Mints.
It’s your Candymanifest Destiny.
CHANCE THE GARBLER
John Fetterman’s debate performance last week left no doubt that the bizarre-looking Democrat isn’t right in the cue ball. Halting and monosyllabic, Fetterman did little to instill confidence (his aides blamed the poor showing on his electronic captioning device, which, they claim, accidentally played a nonstop loop of the Jetsons song “Eep Opp Ork Ah-Ah”).
Rushing in to save “Goomba from the Mario Brothers movie,” MSNBC host Lawrence O’Donnell delivered a lengthy monologue about how having a stroke is actually good, because Churchill had one and he defeated Hitler, and Roosevelt had a brain hemorrhage and he ended the Depression (in fact, Churchill did have a stroke at the end of his wildly unpopular final term as prime minister, and it killed his political career).
Who can forget brain-injured FDR’s inspiring words from Dec. 7, 1941: “Today is a day that will glivst im blinklammby.”
Hopefully, Democrat politicos will show commitment to the bit and invite constituents to beat them over the head with heavy objects so they can all join the stroke club. A Fetterman win would almost be worth it if it leads to Americans being able to go Three Stooges on the Squad.
O’Donnell lamented that unlike in olden times, when politicians could hide their strokes, paralysis, hemorrhages, and spastic colons, today it’s almost impossible to keep such infirmities from public view. If only voters would just shut up and not look!
Funny enough, Populace, a D.C. think tank, released a study last week confirming that voters have been so bullied by the press and Big Tech, they no longer feel comfortable expressing their political views in public. So even though voters can no longer be shielded from the sight of gibbering mouth-breathers like Fetterman, Biden, and Harris, they can at least be bullied into silence about it.
As stroked-out Churchill famously said in June 1940, “We shall shrite them on the gleeches.”
REAPING UP WITH THE JONESES
It was a very odd false flag. According to Alex Jones and his “expert,” “Dr.” James Fetzer, the Sandy Hook massacre was a hoax perpetrated by the Obama administration as a pretext for ending the Second Amendment. But in fact, not only was the Second not ended, thanks to the current SCOTUS, it was strengthened.
Jones and Fetzer, on the other hand, are quite ended, hit with massive judgments from civil suits brought by the parents of Sandy Hook victims.
Oh, the irony! Two men done in by the very hoax they tried to expose; a hoax that would’ve actually done no harm had they not spoken of it. Americans still got their guns, whereas Jones and Fetzer don’t got their money.
For Fetzer’s part, the little setback of the civil judgment won’t stop him from exposing conspiracies that don’t accomplish the things they’re supposed to. His current “best-seller” offered by Moon Rock Books (established to expose the moon landings as fake) alleges that the Parkland shooting was a hoax perpetrated to stop Florida from voting GOP in 2018.
Okay, is it really worth it to continually risk lawsuits by exposing hoaxes that never do the things they’re supposed to do? These are the most incompetent false flags ever! They actually accomplish the opposite of what the perpetrators desire: The Second Amendment’s expanded and Florida’s gone red.
So if nobody’s actually killed in these fake shootings, why bother bringing them up? Let the crisis actors have their summer (bump) stock; just stop paying attention, right?
Unless people like Jones and Fetzer aren’t really interested in exposing “the truth” as much as they just want to sell books. And if the recent billion-dollar judgment against Jones, and the possible $2.5 trillion punitive judgment sought by the families, has taught these super-truthers anything, it’s that the term “public figure” exists for a reason.
Buzz Aldrin? Harrison Schmitt? Say what you want about those guys; they have to take it. But leave parents of murdered kids alone.
Keep shooting for the moon, Jones and Fetzer. Unlike those lying crisis-astronauts, one day you might reach it.
WAIVE YOUR BANNERS
Orwell wrote, “If you want a picture of the future, imagine Rebecca Klar’s boot stamping on the ashes of your grandma—forever.”
That might not be the real quote, but who needs standards of accuracy? Certainly not Rebecca Klar, tech reporter at The Hill. Ms. Klar is the Gen Z future of journalism…as frightening a notion as anything in Orwell’s oeuvre.
Klar once bragged on Twitter about having gone to Auschwitz to “stand on the ashes of our ancestors” (oh, that Gen Z and its TikTok fads). A vegan with a lifelong Justin Bieber obsession and deep thoughts about Taylor Swift (“everytime taylor performs at one of these thigns eveyroen says she cnt sing. like fuck you! hwo cares wat u thin!”), Klar graduated from Binghamton University in 2017 with a BA in “rhetoric” (a degree that comes in two-ply for maximum comfort when wiping).
Last week, Klar took the vegan gluten-free fair-trade free-range doobie from her mouth and banged out a masterpiece about the dangers of the new trend in which “billionaires are buying, creating and investing in social media apps.”
Wait, wasn’t that already a thing? Zuckerberg, Dorsey? Aren’t they billionaires? Didn’t they own social media apps?
Please! As one of Klar’s “experts” points out, those billionaires are “trustworthy.” The ones to worry about are (in Klar’s words) the “right-wingers.” Musk, Thiel. They’re, like, totally not trustworthy! Why, they might’ve actually allowed discussion of the Hunter Biden laptop story. So fcuk thenmn; hwo cares wat thye thinc!
Meanwhile, as Musk takes the reins at Twitter, the platform’s career censors, the shadowbanners who sit around all day waiting to suspend anyone who believes in biological sex, have penned an open letter “demanding” that Musk not fire them, because if Twitter users get to openly express their views, it’ll be bad for “the public conversation.”
“If you allow people to converse it’ll end conversing as we know it! The best conversations are the ones where nobody converses.”
The odds of Musk being moved by that open letter are about as good as the odds of trannies remaining on Twitter once people are free to point out that they’re just ugly dudes in lipstick.
Still, if the open letter doesn’t impress Musk, perhaps Rebecca Klar can get through to him with the wit and clarity that’s her trademark: “Fkuc yu, Elwon, eveyoen htaes you, d’ton fier th bnaners.”
BEER HALL PUTZ
Call it “Night of the Long Teeth.” A 75-year-old grandma was arrested in Saxony last week for trying to single-handedly overthrow the German government and reinstall the Kaiser. The old kroner’s plot was simple: blow up a power station, cause a blackout, and, in the ensuing chaos, topple the government.
Okay, kaboomer.
According to German authorities, the stoopin’führer, identified in the German press as “Elisabeth R.,” was arrested under the Night and Fogy Decree. Investigators say they found Axis memorabilia in her home. She told police her goal in life was to plan a coup even more retarded than Mishima’s.
Geezer Braun is being held in the notorious Fossilburg concentration camp (it was either that or Biddy-Belsen). In keeping with its policy of banning all speech and symbols associated with nationalists, the German government has ordered all copies of Titanic to have the old lady edited out, and 10 years in prison will be the fate of any German who says, “Where’s the beef?”
Yet that wasn’t the dumbest “old Nazi” story last week. That award goes to disgraced actor Kevin Spacey, who took the stand at his sexual-assault civil trial and blamed his love of molesting boys on the fact that his father was a Nazi.
Apparently, Spacey’s dad encouraged him to form his own Dirlewanger Brigade in order to properly administer his jugendmannschaft to a kindertransport.
That would explain Spacey’s early musical endeavor, Boys II Mengele.
Spacey’s “I fondle boys because my dad was Hitler” defense (a.k.a. “Soup Nazi to nuts”) totally worked; he was acquitted. Word is, he’s on his way to South America to stage a real-life reboot of Boys From Brazil.
NEW YORK—Ms. Geniece Draper is a Noo Yawker who has been in the news lately. She is 40 years old with modern Bagelite manners, and by that I mean they are not exactly those of, say, C.Z. Guest or Babe Paley, two ladies who are no longer with us but whose presence in drawing rooms we could do with rather desperately. Ms. Draper is angry as hell and has declared she will not take it anymore. She was recently charged with grand larceny as well as petit larceny for snatching a wallet from a Manhattan man. Nothing strange about that, it’s an everyday occurrence in the city that never sleeps, in fact a New York Post columnist wrote on a different matter that no one gets PTSD from “getting pickpocketed.” Yes, I agree, but for one small detail: Ms. Draper’s victim had just been run over by a truck and was as dead as the proverbial doornail as he lay in the middle of a downtown street. That’s when Ms. Draper appeared, took one look, and then lifted the poor man’s wallet. After her arrest she was immediately freed under the state’s new bail laws. She only had forty prior arrests.
What distinguished Ms. Draper from other pickpockets who usually when caught blame their sleight of hand on nervous tics and other pathologies, is that she blamed the dead man, Jerome Smith, age 62. She also claimed that Smith and she used to be an item. As Noël Coward would surely have said, some item. And it gets better—actually far, far worse: Smith was hit by a tractor and dragged near a construction site. Draper was caught in surveillance camera footage reaching into the dead man’s pocket and taking his wallet. But here comes the really juicy part. The video showed onlookers cheering her on. And you thought some Mongols in a faraway place long ago acted unreasonably.
This must be a brutish new low even for New Yorkers, cheering the fleecing of a dead man. If you thought that was sick, try Larry Griffin, 29, a parolee who was attacked last week in the subway by a weirdo dressed as a ninja. Griffin was bonked on the head with a knife by the ninja, who got away. Then it emerged that the conked one had been charged back in 2017 for showing a video to a minor that involved him having sex with a chicken. And you thought the Conservatives were funny when picking prime ministers. Over here youngsters keep getting shot and killed while riding the subways, and older women are mugged daily by wackos, while the lefty media is busy censoring and canceling free speech. It has gotten so bad, this grievance and victim epidemic, that the trashy Bagel Times has announced that niche sports play a role in perpetuating inequality. Fencers, polo players, rhythmic swimmers, skiers, squash players, golfers, not to mention real tennis players will all end up in an American gulag in the near future because some ugly bald-headed nerd in the Bagel said so.
No wonder the latest polls show that only 7 percent of Americans trust the media. Hollywood, however, is a different story. It just so happens that a few nights after the Draper horror I turned on my television set and watched a flick that those lowlifes who cheered her on must value on a par that I do Gettysburg and The Best Years of Our Lives. No use giving it any publicity, suffice to say it’s the story of a female who is in debt and goes into crime in order to get out of debt. Stolen credit card fraud leads to more serious crimes and bigger profits. Finally our heroine ends up wealthy in South America teaching poor natives how to be rich thieves. Moral of the story: Crime pays.
It is said that successful movies are about the change from “this to that, poverty to riches, justice to injustice.” It is also said that endings matter most. Well, this was a crappy movie with a crappier message, written by an untalented crap artist who should be forced to watch La Grande Bouffe, a French tale of four men who eat themselves to death in a villa, after he’s forced to swallow about fifty laxatives. Ouch!
Actually, what these untalented Hollywood types are doing should be called crimewashing. The Saudis practice sportswashing by buying football teams and golf players, which helps a sports-mad public forgive and forget Saudi crimes against women and homosexuals. Crimewashing in movies helps the public forget the lack of talent of the moviemakers. Back in the good old days such shenanigans would never work. Lack of talent got you a job at Schwab’s Pharmacy as a soda jerk. Today, things are different. Everyone is great, beautiful, and talented. Everyone deserves to be rich, and the politicians promise to give more and more money to every Tom, Dick, and Molly. Students are relieved of their debt and more handouts are promised. No wonder both the U.K. and the U.S. are nearly becoming ungovernable.
I write about these freak shows over here to remind Takimag readers there are clowns everywhere, not only in the British Parliament. By the time you read this there will be another prime minister, and he or she better be able to control the members and the government. Teresa, Boris, and Liz were unable, hence the mess. Good luck.
Recently, I had the doubtful pleasure of flying aboard British Airways back to London. No doubt the airline is safe, its pilots well-trained and its maintenance staff competent; and these are no small virtues in an airline, you might well say. Moreover, the plane took off and landed on time, even if it took half an hour for a space to be found for it at the terminal. It was as if it had turned up unexpectedly, like an extra guest at a dinner party.
No doubt it is a sign of human frivolity to judge the quality of an airline by its cabin staff; very few of us, however, are qualified to judge it by anything else. Even the proper interpretation of a safety record might be difficult, for accidents are nowadays so rare that when one occurs, it might be quite by chance rather than by defect of the airline, and therefore not reflect on it at all.
The cabin crew of the aircraft that brought me back to London was no doubt well-intentioned, and they were not actively rude, but they were singularly lacking in grace or charm; and in that respect, they were truly representative of the population from which they were drawn.
Britain has pioneered a new kind of economy, having long since abandoned manufacturing as a way of paying its way in the world: a service economy without service. Indeed, the very word service raises hackles in Britain, for it implies hierarchy, the servant who provided it being by definition subordinate to the person for whom the service is performed; and in these prickly democratic, or rather radically egalitarian, times, such subordination is anathema.
Two members of the airline spoke to the passengers through the public address system, and for two reasons what they said was so painful on the ears that one longed for earplugs.
The first reason was that it was evident that no one had ever taught them how to use the public address system in such a way that their voices did not emerge as ear-splitting shrieks (I deemed myself fortunate in the circumstances that a recent audiometry test demonstrated that I had 15 percent loss of hearing, normal for my age). When I say that it was painful to hear them, I do not mean this metaphorically, I mean it literally. They caused an unpleasant tingle in the ears.
Any person of average intelligence could be taught in a few minutes how to speak in such a way as not to have this effect, yet it was obvious that no one had thought to do this. Such inattention to detail, such unutterable sloppiness, is typical of British service industries, and partly explains why, in conditions when there are many millions of able-bodied economically inactive people in the country, foreigners in large numbers must be imported to wait tables or man hotel receptions with efficiency, politeness, intelligence, and grace. These are tasks quite beyond the British, at least in any numbers, to perform.
There was a second reason the shrieking over the public address system in the British Airways aircraft was so painful: The two members of the crew who were responsible for it spoke English very badly, although it was almost certainly the only language that they spoke. Certainly no linguistic concessions were made to the foreigners aboard, who were most of the passengers, not even a recorded announcement in the language of the country from which we had taken off. If they didn’t understand the safety announcements in English, well then, it served them right if they died as a consequence of their incomprehension.
The two of the cabin crew selected to speak made no concessions to those damned foreigners, for example by speaking slowly and enunciating their words clearly. On the contrary, they spoke both fast and indistinctly, with a profusion of glottal stops that would almost certainly have presented difficulties in understanding to foreigners who had learned English and might even speak it well, but who had learned it in a very formal fashion. Anyone who has ever tried to learn a foreign language knows perfectly well how much easier it is to understand a person who enunciates it clearly in an educated fashion; it is only on achieving complete fluency that indistinct pronunciation becomes comprehensible to someone other than a native speaker.
Apart from the general sloppiness of British management in service industries that emerges as a natural result, perhaps, from the slovenliness, both physical and mental, of the general population, what accounts for the failure of the management to correct this problem?
The lumpen deportment of the staff (noticeable by comparison with that of the staff of other airlines) would no doubt be difficult and time-consuming to improve, being part of an immemorial national trait, but the way in which they used the public address system would take far less time and be easier to ameliorate. But, in British circumstances, it would also take courage to do so, and the one characteristic that one can rely upon the British managerial class not to have is courage (cruelty being something else entirely).
In Britain, to tell someone that he speaks in such a way that he is both painful to listen to and difficult for foreigners to understand would be taken as personally insulting and, moreover, politically retrograde, undemocratic, even elitist. Is not the vox populi the vox dei? Indistinct speech is the problem of the listener, not of the speaker; it is up to the foreigners on British Airways to learn to understand demotic British speech.
It is a curious fact that public address announcements in English made in foreign countries, even by foreigners, are now much clearer and more pleasing on the ear than those made in Britain, where the shrieking voice of a person whom I always think of as Ms. Slut-Harridan is much in vogue, probably because there is no suggestion of education, cultivation, politeness, refinement, or any of those other qualities that the British now so detest and find so threatening and reproachful, in her voice.
Theodore Dalrymple’s latest book is Ramses: A Memoir, published by New English Review.
At this point, it would save everyone time if Democrats could simply point to a policy agenda item that isn’t going to save democracy — if such a thing exists.
If Republicans vote, they are killing democracy. If they don’t vote, they are killing democracy. The only way to “save democracy,” writes The Washington Post’s Max Boot, is to empower one-party rule — a position that probably sounds counterintuitive to anyone with a middle-school education. “Now you need to vote to literally save democracy once again,” contends President Joe Biden, or we will lose our “fundamental rights and freedoms like the right to choose, the right to privacy, the right to vote — our very democracy.”
Chilling stuff. But it doesn’t end there. You will remember that by failing to “reform” the filibuster, which would entail authorizing the thinnest of fleeting majorities to shove through massive generational “reforms” without any national consensus or debate, we are also killing democracy. This has been the position not only of left-wing pundits and The New York Times editorial board but also senators tasked with defending their institution. I wonder if they will support this democracy-saving fix next session, as well?
Then again, if we don’t nationalize the economy to avert a climate crisis, we are also killing democracy. “We’ve got to save democracy in order to save our species,” Jamie Raskin explains. And if we don’t empty the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to temporarily keep gas prices low to help Democrats win in 2022, we are killing democracy. “We find ourselves in a situation where keeping gas prices low is key to preserving and strengthening the future of our democracy,” MSNBC’s Chris Hayes says.
We must allow the president to unilaterally create trillion-dollar spending bills and break existing private sector contracts by fiat. For democracy. We must pack the court to “save democracy.” We must create a Ministry of Truth to help with “strengthening democratic institutions.” We must vote for a Pennsylvania candidate who can’t cobble two consecutive coherent sentences together because the “fate of our democracy” is at stake, says our former President Barack Obama.
If the Supreme Court empowers the public to vote on an issue like abortion, unmentioned anywhere in the Constitution, it is “degrading” our “democracy.” If the court protects rights that are explicitly mentioned in the Constitution from the vagaries of the political process, it is also undermining democracy — which is convenient.
The only way to save democracy is to allow one party (guess which one?) to federalize elections so they can compel states to count mail-in votes that arrive 10 days late, legalize ballot harvesting, force the overturning of dozens of existing voter ID laws, allow felons to vote, create onerous burdens to chill speech, and empower bureaucrats to redraw congressional districts. Otherwise … well, you know.
You’ll remember last year, when left-wingers were arguing that Mike Pence’s support for basic voting ID — backed by around 80% of the American public and implemented in virtually every free nation — heralded a “permanent authoritarian rule.” The president called Georgia’s moderate voter law “odious,” “pernicious,” “vicious,” “unconscionable,” a “subversion” and “suppression,” the “21st-century Jim Crow” and the sure sign of an emerging “autocracy.” In 2022, early voting in Georgia is “shattering records.”
Then, of course, there are the nefarious “election deniers.” You know, “The Big Lie”? If Democrats believed “election denial” was an existential threat to American “democracy,” they probably wouldn’t be perennially engaging in it. The American left hasn’t accepted the legitimacy of a Republican presidential election win since 1988. Democrats “save democracy” by pumping millions into the primary campaigns of “election-denying” Republicans to try and set up a more favorable general election.
Just this week, Hillary Clinton, one of numerous prominent Democrats who wouldn’t accept the legitimacy of the 2016 presidential election, claimed that “right-wing extremists already have a plan to literally steal the next presidential election.” This is the kind of preemptive election denialism Democrats have been engaged in for nearly two decades. Democrats don’t lose elections; they are victims of gerrymandering or voter suppression or “structural” problems or too much free speech or Fox News or Russian gremlins.
Beginning in 2016, the Democratic Party descended into the politics of hystericism. It began with a mind-bending tale of a second-rate power stealing our democracy with a few Facebook ads and a Manchurian candidate. The collective psychotic break that followed was bolstered by an unethical political media and a corrupt investigation into the president that was predicated on an opposition-research document filled with fictions, distortions and Russian disinformation. Democrats wanted to cripple the president. They succeeded.
Since then, a large swath of the left has become so reliant on infantile fearmongering that they seem incapable of debating any issues or dealing with the reality of an opposition party. When they’re not slandering political opponents as (semi-) fascists or racists or misogynists or homophobes or transphobes or death cultists, they’re engaging in cloistered pseudointellectual debate-club discussions on “saving democracy.”
Democrats, who have spent years delegitimizing the Supreme Court and rule of law, undermining legislative norms, cheering on unprecedented and blatant executive abuses and using the DOJ to target their political enemies, among other “democracy”-destroying behaviors, do not occupy any high moral ground. And while “democracy” was once just a transparently silly euphemism for “stuff we want,” it has since evolved into a rhetorical device that denotes a decisively illiberal mindset.
Last week in New York City, career criminal Argenis Rivera punched a woman who was pushing her 2-year-old in a stroller, then began choking her, screaming that she was a “white bitch.” He let go only to attack another woman sitting on a bench, reading — apparently, also a “white bitch” — until he was scared off by a man with two dogs who came to the women’s rescue. This happened at around 1 p.m. in Hudson River Park, a nice area.
A few months earlier, Rivera had been arrested for punching a doorman in midtown Manhattan, the latest of about a dozen arrests. But under the law, he was immediately released.
In February, Frank Abrokwa, 37, was arrested for the 45th time. (Thanks, U.S. immigration officials! Another job well done.) Among Abrokwa’s most recent arrests:
— On Jan. 7, he was arrested for hitting a 30-year-old man, a complete stranger, on a subway platform. Released without bail.
— On Feb. 5, he was arrested for punching a 53-year-old man, also a stranger, at the Port Authority Bus Terminal. Released without bail.
— On Feb. 21, he was arrested for smashing his own feces into a woman’s face as she sat in a subway station. Released without bail.
— On Feb. 22 — the very next day! — he was arrested for shoplifting at a hardware store and threatening employees with a screwdriver. Released without bail.
All in all, New York’s no-bail law is working great! The law is called “no bail” but really means “no jail, not ever, no matter how many times you’re arrested.”
How did such a dangerous policy become law? It seems that in 2020, Democrats finally gained total control of state government, the first time that’s happened since World War II, except for a single year in 1964.
And what was the first item on the Democrats’ agenda, literally the moment after they were sworn in? Crack down on Wall Street? Fill potholes and creaking bridges?
NO! They passed a law to ensure that no criminal ever spends a night in jail!
True, a lot more people are getting raped, stabbed, slashed, mugged and shoved onto subway tracks on account of the no-bail law. But for Democrats, protecting New Yorkers from violent attack is not the goal of law enforcement. The main objective of the criminal justice system is to ensure that it does not “worsen racial disparities,” as explained by The New York Times‘ Mara Gay.
The law certainly achieved that! “Black bodies” are being kept out of jail like nobody’s business. SUCCESS!
As one of Rivera’s strangling victims exclaimed with relief, Thank God this black man was not already in jail when he attacked me. The possibility of my daughter growing up without a mother is a small price to pay to safeguard the self-esteem of any black person who happens to look up the racial composition of New York jails.
No, actually, that wasn’t her response at all. She said, “I thought I was going to die … I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t get out … I don’t want to be here anymore. I want to leave. This doesn’t feel safe.”
By now, the word is out that if you commit a crime in New York, NOTHING WILL HAPPEN TO YOU. Rivera told his strangling victims, “Call the cops. I don’t care.” During one of his assaults, Abrokwa also taunted his victim, saying, “Call the police.” After the feces attack, he posted on Facebook, “I’m not posting Bail. Never Been Up North Never Will.”
Even if you’re caught dead-to-rights, at worst, maybe you’ll have to waste a couple hours of your afternoon getting arraigned. And then you’ll be right back on the street.
But as the Times primly reminds us, people who are arrested are “presumed innocent until proven guilty.”
Liberals act as if we have absolutely no idea if the people the police arrest are guilty. Maybe he did it, maybe he didn’t. Who knows? I guess we’ll have to wait for the trial to see!
No, if the police make an arrest at all, they’re pretty sure the guy did it — that crime as well as five others. The trial, if there is one, is merely to confirm that he did it, not discover whether he did it.
Street muggings aren’t like murder investigations, requiring months of painstaking DNA analysis by forensic experts. If a criminal punches you and steals your purse, there isn’t going to be an “investigation.” The police either catch the guy, or they don’t.
If they catch him, it’s usually because the perp is on camera. There are witnesses and people who recognize him — his hat, his shirt, his face. Or he has the victim’s blood or property on him. Often, he’s still standing 20 yards away — as with the attack in the park, when the victims and witnesses watched as the police arrested Rivera at a nearby bus stop.
Democrats: You never know! Maybe he’s innocent!
Another career criminal, Lamale McRae, shoved a stranger onto the subway tracks last week. He was quickly arrested thanks to the exceedingly clear photos of his face, build and clothing captured by subway cameras as he takes a running leap to push a man onto the tracks. When McRae was arrested a few days later, even a child could see that it was absolutely, 100%, positively the same guy. He was even wearing the same distinctive bright yellow sweatshirt.
Articles about McRae’s arrest repeatedly refer to New York’s amazing facial recognition cameras as “controversial.” Huh. I wonder who they’re “controversial” with.
Liberals think public safety should be like a sporting event: The Police v. The Criminals. Unless the guilty have a decent shot at getting away with it, where’s the fun? The rules have to be modified to make the game more thrilling. High-tech subway cameras are like spitballs. Hey, no fair! It’s cheating to have cameras.
If that’s what you like, watch sports. But if you don’t want criminals controlling the streets, destroying neighborhoods and committing violent crimes in parks and subway stations, please vote Republican on Nov. 8.
With an election coming up, various well-known Democrats haven’t been able to keep themselves from arguing with me on Twitter about crime statistics, which tends to be an imprudent idea.
For example, David Simon, creator of the famous TV show about black crime in Baltimore, The Wire, has been furious at me for days. It’s hard to quote our debate because he blocks me on Twitter, so it has to be carried on through gleeful intermediaries, but it seems to go more or less like this:
Sailer: Judging from my watching ‘The Wire’ and reading CDC and FBI crime stats, Baltimore has a high homicide rate.
Simon: Not for wealthy white gentrifiers like me, you racist!
The ditch Simon has decided to die in was his assertion that a white person is no more likely to die by homicide in Baltimore than in Boise, Idaho.
So, I looked up the CDC’s death-by-homicide stats for Baltimore City (6.2 homicides per 100,000 non-Hispanic whites over 2018–2021) and Ada County, where Boise is: 1.3 or one-fourth as much. In indirect reply, Simon objected, not unreasonably, to my comparing a city with a county. Then a reader tracked down the homicides for just the city of Boise and they were almost the same: 1.5. So, Baltimore is about four times as dangerous for whites as Boise.
But, of course, Boise, which in the 2020 Census is 82.6 percent non-Hispanic white, merely 9.0 percent Hispanic, and only 1.6 percent black, is extremely safe. One reason is that a sizable fraction of Boise’s whites are mild-mannered, sober Mormons. So Simon is unlucky that alliteration drove him to compare his beloved Baltimore with ultra-safe Boise.
Yet, Simon has a point: Whites die by homicide in five-eighths black Baltimore no more often than do whites in three-eighths black Mississippi. Of course, East Coast Catholics and Jews tend to shoot each other less often than do inland Protestants, so white Baltimoreans dying that much ought to be concerning to him.
Still, considering how extraordinarily homicidal blacks in Baltimore have been during the Black Lives Matter era, the moderate white violent-crime death rate in Baltimore may strike some as a surprise.
After decades of black-crime-driven white flight, Baltimore more or less stabilized in the late 20th century with the remaining whites being able to afford defensible whitopia neighborhoods like Simon’s historic Federal Hill. But hundreds of thousands of whites who couldn’t afford expensive real estate fled to where safety for their children is more affordable, such as Baltimore County and Boise.
It was widely hoped that the 1992 construction of the Baltimore Orioles’ beloved ballpark at Camden Yards (the landmark first retro-look stadium) would spark a white renaissance in Baltimore after generations of white decline. But the 2015 Black Lives Matter riots over the death of Freddie Gray and the subsequent Ferguson Effect crime surge appear to have dented those dreams.
Yet, for the 27.3 percent of Baltimore that is still white, life can be nice. Indeed, Baltimore’s quaint Federal Hill district where the successful writers live (average household income is $118,000 and 95 percent of its residents are U.S. citizens) sounds great.
A reader of mine included an ode to his life on Federal Hill in one of his novels. If you are an old newspaperman, imbibing on the historic streets where the even older newspapermen H.L. Mencken and Edgar Allan Poe caroused sounds like heaven. On the other hand, Federal Hill struck me as a slightly claustrophobic version of paradise since it’s only seventy acres and you don’t want to wander too far outside it.
If you get offered an ER surgeon job at Johns Hopkins, you can afford a nice place to live in Baltimore where you’d be quite safe. If you are a working-class white, however, without a nepotistic connection to a union job, your wife and kids would be safer in Boise.
Similarly, James Surowiecki of The New Yorker tried to frame his statistical challenge to me narrowly enough to have a puncher’s chance of landing a telling blow:
Do “blacks” have homicide rates an order of magnitude above the remainder of the population, or do black people in the lowest SES quintile have homicide rates an order of magnitude above the remainder of the population?
In other words, are only poor blacks at fault for the huge black vs. white murder rate gap?
Harvard economist Raj Chetty has put together a vast database that can answer that question. Somehow, he talked the IRS into giving him just about all your 1040 returns (anonymized) from 1996 to 2000. And he compared all the boys’ childhood incomes to the identities of everybody incarcerated on Census Day, April 2010. Here’s The New York Times’ graph of his findings:
Clearly, at every income level as a child, black men are far more likely to get themselves incarcerated as an adult than are whites. And the racial ratio even increases with adolescent family income, from 3.2 blacks to whites incarcerated at the national 20th percentile of income, to 3.7x at the 50th percentile, and to 5.9x at the 80th percentile.
Why are smart centrist Democratic white guys like Simon, Surowiecki, Rick Pearlstein, Paul Krugman, and Dana Milbank so worked up lately over crime statistics?
Because Republicans are finally getting around to emphasizing the crime issue. The numbers of cars stolen recently from Hyundai and Kia owners alone might be enough to tip the House Republican.
Not surprisingly, Democratic pundits are dismayed that Republicans have the unmitigated gall to campaign against the enormous crime surge unleashed during the mostly peaceful protests that followed George Floyd’s demise.
Of course, being Republicans, the GOP can’t actually come out and tell the exact truth: Homicide in the U.S. is basically a black problem.
The latest FBI crime statistics were even more ramshackle in methodology than earlier years, so I don’t know how much to trust them. But they reported that blacks made up 60.4 percent of known murder offenders in 2021, up from 55.9 percent in 2019.
The CDC reports just on the race of the victims of homicides without trying, like the FBI, to determine the race of the perps. Then again, most murders are intraracial. The CDC says blacks made up 55.0 percent of victims in 2021, up from 52.0 percent in 2019.
But Republicans feel uncomfortable citing official crime statistics by race, so they prefer to blame Democratic mayors of big cities.
Because practically all big cities are Democratic, it’s hard to test statistically how much worse Democratic politicians make black proclivities.
One approach is to look at the level of urbanization, since there is a high correlation between population density and voting Democratic. The CDC reports on six levels of urbanization, ranging from counties that form a “Large Central Metro,” such as Cook County in Illinois, down to purely rural “NonCore (Nonmetro).” (The second level, “Large Fringe Metro,” includes suburban counties around big cities, such as DuPage County west of Cook County, so it interrupts the descent in density.)
The main thing that stands out in this graph is the immense black vs. white gap: In total, across the country, blacks died violently 10.8 times as often as whites last year.
Unsurprisingly, all groups behave least lethally in the suburban counties outside big cities, which traditionally tended to be affluent and run by moderate Republican politicians.
As the Republican theory would imply, blacks are at their worst in Large Central Metros, with homicides rates 56 percent higher than in the most rural counties: 42.4 per 100,000 compared with 27.1.
But the density trend isn’t strongly consistent. And it might have more to do with what you might call the critical mass theory of black-on-black homicides: As with the uranium in fission bombs, the more blacks are around, the more likely one is to set another one off.
Hispanics also tend to get murdered less in more rural areas.
Another theory beside voting for Republican politicians is that having armed, ornery whites around out in the country encourages blacks and Hispanics to behave better. With whites, it’s the other way around: The homicide rate increases from 3.2 per 100,000 in big cities to 3.9 in the sticks.
Hence, the black-to-white ratio of homicide deaths is worse in big cities (13.3 to one) than in the hinterland (6.9x).
Democratic pundits like Simon tend to be urbanites who are extremely uncomfortable in the countryside around armed whites. Thus, Democratic gun-control energies, other than those of Mayor Michael Bloomberg in New York, tend to be pointlessly devoted to preventing rural rednecks from buying rifles at Walmart rather than to having cops disarm black criminals packing illegal handguns a few miles from where they live.
The national increase in homicides from 2019 (pre–George Floyd) to 2021 (post-George Floyd) was 43 percent for blacks and 41 percent for Hispanics vs. only 20 percent for whites. Black and Hispanic homicidal deaths went up 48 percent each in the metropolises.
So, there’s a modest amount of evidence to support the Republican talking point that big-city Democratic politicians made things worse. But the most obvious problem is that the “racial reckoning” against law enforcement egged on first blacks in 2020, and then Latinos in 2021, to carry more illegal handguns in their cars and waistbands, and thus shoot each other at social events more often.
Until Republicans feel free to point that out, they are likely to continue to be victims of Democratic obfuscations.
Kanye West’s Jew-obsessed meltdown offers many potential angles for analysis.
I could start with the “why do you still trust Tucker?” angle. Carlson prefaced his now-infamous Kanye interview with an assurance to you, the viewer, that even though Kanye’s detractors claim the man’s mentally ill, he isn’t: “Is he crazy? No, he’s not. He’s not crazy at all.” That’s a direct quote. Yet Tuck knew when he uttered those words that he’d had to edit out footage in which Kanye clearly displayed mental instability (ranting about impostor children kidnapping his kids, Louis Vuitton assassinating black people, a divinely inspired plan to build “free kinetic energy cities,” and blacks being the real Jews, which is why Margaret Sanger wanted to exterminate them on behalf of the KKK).
Tuck must’ve known that the excised footage would eventually leak (even he can’t be so stupid as to think that in 2022 you can bury embarrassing video), but he also knew it wouldn’t affect your opinion of him when you learned he misled you.
I could take that angle, but I’m always ragging on Tuck; I’ll give it a rest this week.
Another possible angle is the fanboying by conservatives about how Kanye is “on their side,” and how it lays bare the hypocrisy of these imbeciles who, behind all their mockery of pompous, ignorant Hollywood celebrities, are in fact deep-green envious that Democrats get to hang with showbiz superstars. The average conservative would slobber over Alec Baldwin in a heartbeat if he were “on their side.”
But you guys don’t need another lecture from me about Hollywood conservatives. At least not at the moment (because I’m never gonna stop picking that scab).
I could explore an angle that focuses on the Kanye reactions I’ve been seeing on the far right (the rightists who dabble in race): “Kanye speaks the truth! At last, someone willing to take on the Jews!”
You know a movement’s dying when it has to rely on the mentally ill for its spokespeople. This is something nobody on the far right likes to talk about, but the fact is, the thought leaders who can rationally and persuasively write about issues of race (not just Jewish stuff but matters involving IQ heritability and race and crime) are aging out, and no one’s replacing them. Where’s the new generation of Taylors and Brimelows? My colleague Steve Sailer isn’t old by normal standards, but it says a lot about a movement when the 64-year-old guy is “the kid.”
The young generation of far-rightists are LULZers who can’t (or have no desire to) discern between a Jared Taylor book and a Kanye rant; the intellectualism is dying off with the intellectuals. I saw the same thing happen with Holocaust revisionism: The smart guys whose hard work attracted the attention of people like Christopher Hitchens and John Sack either got chased out (as I did) or died off, leaving only the lunatics and retards. That’s why today there’s no rational revisionism left; only the two extremes of 6 million dogmatism and “Holohoax” denialism.
That’s what’s coming for race rationalism. Look at it like this: Every year thousands of young people leave college prepped to talk and think like Ibram Kendi. They have the pseudoacademic jargon down pat; they know how to make the nonsense sound reasonable. But where are today’s young Charles Murrays? Chased out because the market doesn’t allow them to thrive, and the bullies don’t allow them to exist. And what are we left with? Memers and groypers who see an obviously mentally ill black man and cheer, “He shall lead us!”
Same with tranny ideologues. PhDs, medical doctors, those who are able to make the most batshit insane notion in world history seem like science, are being churned out daily. And what does the right have in response? Matt Walsh, who does a decent job countering tranny nonsense but then has to blow it by adding off-the-wall “based” bullshit about satanic anime and teenage girl fertility.
You can go into a pediatrician’s office at any major U.S. hospital and consult with an MD about slicing off your 13-year-old daughter’s healthy breasts, and that doctor will gain your confidence by maintaining an appearance of professionalism, keeping his personal perversities to himself, because he’s goal-oriented: His desire to mutilate your kid and grow rich while doing so is greater than his desire to self-indulgently speak of personal obsessions that might scare away a patient.
Young rightists, on race or trannyism, don’t possess that level of discipline. In part because leftism, by virtue of having so many “intellectual” Jews in the upper echelons, is top-down. Ten years ago, what average black American had ever heard of “CRT”? Yet now they can’t live without it. They had to be told they need it. Twenty years ago, what suburban white Democrat mom knew that gender is something you guess about when your baby’s born? Yet now those same moms are disfiguring their own children, so strong is their belief in a “truth” they were only recently informed of.
Rightists, on the other hand, are bottom-up: It’s the base that tells the “intellectuals” what they need to believe. “I can’t trust that guy unless his manias mirror mine. Satanic possession! Cookie-monster Holohoax! Energy-controlling weather-weapons! You better agree with me about those things or I’m not supporting you, you cuck, you controlled opp.”
“Hey, Michelle Malkin, you fossil; wanna hang with us cool-kid rightists, you better defend our ‘Red Cookie Report’ Holocaust denial. The only way to prove yourself to us is to sacrifice your credibility for us.”
So of course these guys embrace Kanye. The nuttier he gets, the more “based” he is. The more he kamikazes his career, the more he can be trusted. Rightists prefer cocooning away from the “normies,” whereas leftists try to remake the normies (and therefore society) in their image, by persuasion, coercion, or force.
So that’s another angle I could take, but I won’t.
Instead, here’s the angle that interests me:
In his fevered, dissociated way, Kanye broached the topic of Jewish overrepresentation in managerial and ownership positions in music and sports. Unlike the “blacks are the real Jews” gibberish, this claim is not false. “Black Israelite” “Jews drinking baby blood” nonsense is never perceived as a genuine threat by ADL types, because only marginalized schizos believe those falsehoods. But Jewish overrepresentation in business, finance, entertainment, and medicine is a real thing, one that the ADL would always prefer not to discuss.
Well, The Daily Wire’s David Marcus decided, let’s discuss! Oy, what’s not to discuss?
Marcus’ take (expressed in a series of tweets, condensed here): Sap the antee-Semites of their power by teaching the real reason for overrepresentation:
No excuse for (Kanye’s) comments whatsoever. But I think they illustrate a need in our discourse on Anti-Semitism to address the very real over representation demographically of Jews in certain sectors, banking, entertainment, etc. Teach kids the historical roots of why Jews predominate in certain sectors. Remove the mystery. The truth is rooted in large part in the fact that Jews were forbidden from owning land for 1,000 years and focused their wealth and income on more liquid and mobile sources. Jews needed wealth and forms of income that were not land or property based. So they took to banking and music/theater. Which were not tied to the land.
That’s indeed the standard story, and it makes total sense. Prevent someone from being a farmer, and obviously they’ll become a banker or vaudevillian. Those are the only two options. The Dust Bowl directly led to an explosion of musical theater and comedy clubs across the Great Plains. Grapes of Wrath? More like Japes of Wrath, amirite?
In fact, the “land” cliché is far more convenient than explanatory. Indeed, it’s been directly challenged by the recent scholarship of Maristella Botticini of Bocconi University and Zvi Eckstein of Tel Aviv University, who point out that the timeline simply doesn’t jibe: Jews in Europe abandoned agrarian pursuits long before there were any landowning restrictions, and Jews in the Muslim world did so even though there never were any such restrictions.
In Botticini and Eckstein’s telling, Jews who were super into being Jews were also super into traditional Jewish mandates like literacy and the education of sons. Armed with literacy and education, these Jews found they could make a lot more money away from the farm. Meanwhile, Jews who stayed farmers tended to be less into Talmudic stuff and more likely to take the easy way out and convert to Islam or Christianity, thus removing themselves from the Jewish gene pool.
So (and this is my spin on Botticini and Eckstein), successful literate Jews with the IQ to leave the farm and excel in higher-paying professions remained Jews and kept breeding as Jews (because Jewish mandates like literacy and education were essential to their success), while Jewish dirt-farmers, who were less concerned with literacy or education, were absorbed by conversion-hungry “sales quota” Muslims and Christians obsessed with numbers over IQ.
As UC Berkeley’s Professor John Efron points out, in the 1600s educated Polish Jews (doctors, especially) could own land. So in an inversion of the “Jews & land” cliché, rather than becoming white-collar because they were banned from owning land, becoming white-collar allowed Jews to own land. It should be added that Jews made up a hugely disproportionate number of European doctors even during the centuries when they were prohibited from attending the continent’s medical schools (half of all Western European doctors were Jews during the Middle Ages), another flaw in the theory that Jews were pushed into occupations based on Christendom’s restrictions.
Of course, absent from the work of Botticini, Eckstein, and their contemporaries is any mention of IQ…because these guys wanna have books published. They can examine Jewish literacy traditions; they can even mention how Jews remained insulated as Christians and Muslims sought quantity over quality. But they can’t examine the inheritable IQ aspects of the matter.
Marcus and others use the “land ownership prohibition” theory to make it seem like “t’was the circumstances not the people! It could happen to anybody! Hey, black folks, if you’d been prevented from owning land in America, and prevented from attending medical schools, you too could’ve produced half the nation’s doct…oh, shit. Forget I said anything.”
Yeah, it’s great to clap along to Kanye’s auto-tuned beefs about Jews owning everything. But in the end, you’ll find yourself clapping for things that harm whites, too; you’ll be joining the chorus of envy over smart people reaping the rewards of being smart.
What Jews have done with their influence is another matter; and I’ve written about those harms many times. But as far as how they got that influence, if you’re pissed about that, if you’re furious that high-IQ people are overrepresented in white-collar professions, next time your mom needs a medical procedure, be like Kanye and take her to a black doctor.
Ye’s a based motherfucker who not coincidentally no longer has a fucking mother. Follow this “genius” at your own risk.
Everywhere I go, people are mystified about President Joe Biden’s economic agenda. So few of the policies comport with basic common sense that I’m asked the same question over and over: Is Biden intentionally trying to take a wrecking ball to the economy?
Is this all part of some diabolical plan, the “great reset,” to end our system of free market capitalism and replace it with some form of big government socialism?
Biden keeps saying that he wants to be a historic president who will “transition” the country into a new worker’s paradise where no one uses fossil fuels or electricity or cars and equality is paramount, ahead of growth and prosperity. Is he taking us there with no regard for the collateral damage to America?
My belief is that, no, I don’t think this is an intentional, nefarious Dr. Evil-type plot.
But if this were a scheme to burn down the village in order to rebuild it, Biden and his administration are doing a great job of it.
Here are seven Biden administration steps to undermine an economy and a society from within. They will all sound familiar with the president’s policies since he took office 21 months ago.
No. 1: Dismantle the nation’s energy supply
We get 70% of our energy from fossil fuels. Biden has declared war on American oil and gas, making us more dependent on our enemies for our basic energy needs.
No. 2: Don’t enforce the border
Biden is letting hundreds of thousands of potential criminals, terrorists, welfare recipients and enemies of the United States into our country through a porous southern border with Mexico. Immigration is good, but it must be orderly and regulated.
No. 3: Devalue the nation’s currency through inflation
Inflation is up nearly 9% since Biden came into office. Inflation is a means to erode the value of a currency.
No. 4: Destroy the nation’s finances by running up the debt by multiple trillions of dollars
No president in modern times has so recklessly pushed our nation into debt as rapidly as Biden through his $4 trillion in spending paid for with red ink.
No. 5: Divide rather than unite the nation
Rich versus poor, black versus white, gay versus straight, rural versus urban. Biden promised unity. Instead, he pits groups against each other. This is the identity politics of the Left that is the opposite of “e pluribus unum.”
No. 6: Dumb down and indoctrinate our children with anti-American propaganda in the schools and media.
And allowing teachers unions and left-wing activists to take over the curriculum with anti-American propaganda. It is the opposite of nurturing patriotism and love of country.
No. 7: Decriminalize a lot
Let criminals onto the streets. End bail. Empty the prisons. Let minor crimes go unpunished. Biden’s policies favor criminals over victims. It’s a scene out of a Batman movie.
Are these policies intentional or simply completely misguided? I don’t know. But does it matter? Either way, our country is in grave peril.
There have been many legendary comments made in the House of Commons, the primary legislative chamber of the United Kingdom, and Sir Winston Churchill is responsible for many of them. Supposedly, the old bulldog was sitting across from Labour Party Members of Parliament (MPs) and waiting for battle to commence, when a colleague remarked on the muttering from the other side of the House. “The enemy is restless tonight,” he said. Churchill looked across the floor and replied, “They are the opposition.” He then jabbed his thumb back over his shoulder in the direction of his own Conservative Party and added, “They are the enemy.”
Liz Truss could have Churchill’s comment tattooed on her arm, and she has the spare time now. After 45 days as prime minister (PM), comfortably the shortest British premiership in history, she resigned last Thursday. Her installation was the last official act of the late monarch, whose son will become the first British king to preside over a new PM since his grandfather George VI gave the green light to Sir Clement Attlee in 1950. More recently, occupants of 10 Downing Street have been, as the British used to say, in and out like a fiddler’s elbow.
Queen Elizabeth II oversaw fifteen Prime Ministers in her seventy years on the throne. Larry the cat, chief mouser at 10 Downing Street for just over a decade, has clawed the furniture of four of those and will now welcome a fifth. To add to Larry’s confusion, 11 Downing Street is occupied by the Chancellor of the Exchequer, and there have been four of those in four months.
British politics currently resembles the children’s game of musical chairs, where everyone dances around a decreasing number of seats and must sit on one when teacher stops playing the piano. It was amusing to see the generally dull Leader of the Opposition, Sir Keir Starmer, gaining deserved applause by channeling Andy Warhol in the House, noting that the Conservative Party seemed to have a policy whereby everyone would be Prime Minister for fifteen minutes.
From the start, Truss looked as though she was at the wrong end of the playground. Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng lasted a little over a month and was fired after being savaged by the markets and the media for his interim budget (labeled a “mini-budget” for those younger products of the British education system who would not know what “interim” means). Five days later, Westminster resembled a slasher movie in which the only question is, who’s next?
After an alleged row with Truss the night before, it was Home Secretary Suella Braverman who was knifed. Truss had awarded the three highest political offices in the land apart from her own to nonwhite politicians, and Braverman was the second of them forced from Truss’ ethnic shop-window dressing. Braverman had, in any case, shocked the establishment by uttering heresies such as her intention to secure the border and a desire for the U.K. to leave the European Convention on Human Rights, which currently hobbles attempts to expel illegal immigrants.
A day after Braverman’s exit, both the Conservative Chief Whip and Deputy Chief Whip resigned. Although Conservative MPs were once famed for their taste in masochistic flagellation, the Whip’s office is not a Soho bordello but rather coordinates party unity during legislative voting. This is a different type of discipline, and the crack of the whip is purely metaphorical. One assumes.
Also busy was Sir Graham Brady, Chairman of the 1922 Committee, the Conservative Party’s executive body. Fifty-four letters from sitting Conservative MPs requesting a vote of no confidence in a Prime Minister are required to force such a vote. Although that is currently constitutionally suspended for one year after Boris Johnson’s defenestration, Sir Graham has the power to override club rules. A vote of no confidence can bring down a Prime Minister, but it last did so in 1978 when James Callaghan’s Labour government got the imperial thumbs-down. It’s a terribly British version of impeachment. The carpet outside Sir Graham’s office door was wearing thin, observed one wag, with the frequency of Conservatives bearing such letters.
This may be a heavily disguised blessing. The Conservatives—or the party that bears that name—have been in power for a dozen years. Like an aging rock band who have forgotten how to play even their greatest hits, it might be time to forget the next tour, and a period in opposition may be beneficial. That will, of course, mean a Labour government.
I suppose that if there is a general election and Labour win it (they lead heavily in the opinion polls), then at least I can say I was at school with the Prime Minister. Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer was a year below me at Reigate Grammar School in England and clearly paid more attention in class than I did. But fewer chalices have been more poisoned. Inflation, angry trade unions, and the prospect of a very cold winter of discontent will not make the next Prime Minister’s honeymoon a long one.
The Conservatives will dread another defeat on the scale of the 1997 election, which ushered in the Blair years, but those Tory elders who know their Commonwealth history will remember 1993 in Canada, when the Conservatives were wiped out. Should that happen in Britain, then politics will abhor a vacuum and a new right-wing party will be inevitable.
The British right at present is an atomized, disparate group of perennial underachievers, but there are now rumors of coalitions and alliances, and Nigel Farage has hinted at a new party to replace the doomed Tories. Recent results in Italy and Sweden show that right-wing coalition is possible, and fledgling parties Reform and Reclaim have made tentative contact with each other, while UKIP have a feisty new deputy leader, Rebecca Jane, who will have eyed Meloni and Le Pen in Europe.
The British premiership increasingly resembles something ceremonial, like the changing of the guard outside Buckingham Palace. Now, it seems that PMs are being installed at the behest of bankers and bond traders first, MPs second, followed by party members and with the British electorate trailing the pack. Ex-Chancellor Rishi Sunak is to be Larry the cat’s next incumbent at Number 10, but he looks a globalist shill who approves of digital currency, net-zero eco-towns, and his wife’s fortune. She happens to part-own Infosys, the Indian IT giant linked to the World Economic Forum, and zealous lobbyists of government. Boris Johnson seemed the only serious rival to Sunak, and although for many Tories he is the disruptive schoolboy suspended from lessons but who the teachers would secretly be pleased to see back in class, he withdrew from the race on Sunday evening (when scarcely anything usually happens in British politics).
If Johnson is boxing clever and waiting for Sunak to fail in order to pull off an outrageous political comeback, he will have been playing chess while the others were playing checkers, and the sheer political theater may prove irresistible to the voters. For now, the BBC are delighted to have their first ever ethnic minority PM.
The words ‘unity’ and ‘stability’ have been thrown around in recent weeks, but while uniting the Tories will be like herding cats, we already have stability, thank you all the same. Climbing inflation, escalating crime, exponential illegal immigration and creeping taxes? All very stable. Sunak is a Hindu, a famously stoical people. He may need that.
The Week’s Flukiest, Kookiest, and Spookiest Headlines
AFRICAN-AMERICAN SNIPER
NewsOne bills itself as “Breaking News for Black People.” It carries headline stories of national importance (“Black woman receives cold fries; a nation mourns”), entertainment news (“Netflix to turn cold fries saga into movie starring Lupita Nyong’o”), advice columns (“Dear NewsOne: I received cold fries and my boyfriend didn’t shoot anybody. Does he really love me?”), puzzles (“six-letter word for proper response to cold fries; starts with ‘mu’ and ends with ‘er.’”), and comic strips (“Good grief; Franklin shot Charlie Brown over cold fries!”).
Last month, an anonymous Facebook poster claimed that he and his accomplices were planning to commit a white-supremacist mass shooting at an Alabama county fair: “We are coming to the Opelika Alabama fair to kill every NEGRO that we lay eye contact on so be prepared. WHITE POWER.”
The post was adorned with Confederate flags and swastikas.
NewsOne jumped on the story, assigning ace reporter Zack Linly. Linly is as good as they come. A real Perry Antiwhite, a Lois Stay in Your Lane, a Clark Kente, a J. Jomamah Jameson. There ain’t a journalist alive with better instincts. He looked at the Facebook post and knew it couldn’t possibly be a hoax. Indeed, in his analysis, it was proof of genocide against blacks: “It’s funny how Black people can be so frustrated and have so much resentment for white America but we’re never out here threatening to kill white people randomly and en masse.”
Indeed, it’s rarely “en masse.” It’s usually one at a time.
“One can only wonder how it is that people who represent roughly 13% of the population cause these violent thugs so much stress they feel the need to exterminate us on sight,” Linly added.
Unfortunately, turns out the “shooter” was one of that 13 percent. Last week police arrested 18-year-old Louisiana black kid Pharrell Smith for posting the threat. He’ll be facing terrorism charges.
And Linly, whose Spidey-sense was so on the nose? He won a Pulitzer Prize.
Correction: He’s one prize putz.
DEAF TRAGEDY JAM
Broadway grande dame Patti LuPone is known for her red-hot Sicilian temper; she feuds with costars and directors, she trashes dressing rooms. When she played the mom on the 1990s TV show Life Goes On, the infamous series finale in which half the characters died of AIDS wasn’t even scripted; the actors literally contracted AIDS just to get out of working with her (yes, even the Down syndrome kid).
LuPone is especially well-known for stopping Broadway shows cold to yell at audience members. A dozen times over the past decade she’s halted a show to grab a patron’s phone, or lecture them for talking, texting, or, infamously last May, for not wearing a mask.
So fearsome is LuPone’s reputation that in 2018, when Broadway okayed a phone app that lets deaf audience members read real-time closed-captioned onstage dialogue, AARP celebrated the invention as the one device Patti LuPone can’t seize.
Sadly, grande dumb Lillias White didn’t get the memo. A hefty black actress permanently embittered over being called “lily-ass white” every day of her life, last week White was in the middle of a performance of the musical Hadestown (a sassy black take on Greek gods, with characters like Afrodite and Nappy Hera) when she spied an audience member using the captioning app. Recalling how LuPone is celebrated for her tantrums, White followed suit, stopping the show to yell at the deaf woman.
When the deaf woman cried on Instagram about being humiliated for using an approved device, the theater, mindful of a possible ADA lawsuit, apologized, which enraged White, who deemed it racist that LuPone can yell at audience members but she can’t. Which enraged black Broadway star James Harkness, who declared that if a black woman can’t yell at audience members, LuPone shouldn’t be allowed to either. Which enraged LuPone, who became so furious at the thought of not yelling at audience members, she angrily announced her retirement.
If you think this is crazy, consider that people pay $500 per ticket to be abused by these pompous morons, when they could be yelled at for free by the homeless at any subway station.
Broadway’s the one thing Covid should’ve killed.
BEYOND MEATHEADS
The Dutch have declared war on meat! And why not? Now that pot’s legalized everywhere, cities like Amsterdam need to come up with a new gimmick to attract young idiots from around the world. And what’s more popular among young idiots than veganism?
Mindful of that, the Dutch have decided to exterminate meat consumption, in part to end “global warming,” and in part because Netherlanders have empathy for farm animals, whose barnyard noises mirror their own language (“Duur groot muur heeft oop aak ook”…that’s a real Dutch sentence).
The city of Haarlem (motto: “Relax—not the one with black people”) has banned all advertising for meat products, and the Amsterdam suburb of Wageningen is attempting to ban meat itself. Dubbed “Vegan Valley,” Wageningen is host to dozens of companies dedicated to developing faux meats made from insects, algae, fungi, mycobacteria, and other substances that still have more taste than a Domino’s pizza.
With meat being outlawed throughout the Netherlands, doughty resisters are building secret annexes to hide their Anne Frankfurters; if caught, those in possession of beef will be sent to Impossible Burgen-Belsen.
Oddly enough, as government ideologues act like veganism is the way of the future, in the real world, Beyond Meat was forced to cut 19 percent of its global workforce due to plummeting sales.
The good news for stockholders is that the company is offering recipes to turn worthless stock certificates into paper-based Salisbury steak.
Also last week, Beyond Meat was forced to fire its COO Doug Ramsey after he bit off a man’s nose in a road-rage incident, thus proving that any person deprived of meat will resort to extremes.
Still, the Ramsey incident led to a Vegan Valley company developing the “Impossible Dahmer”: gluten-free soy-based life-size gay prostitutes, for the cannibal with an environmental conscience.
GOOSE STEPPIN’ FETCHIT
Last week, to mark the conclusion of the High Holy Days, the ghost of Hitler materialized to tell the Jews to Sukkot long, Sukkot hard.
High Holy Days? More like Heil Holy Days.
First, a former TMZ staffer claimed that in an unaired 2018 interview, Kanye West professed his admiration for Hitler. While this may not seem out of character considering Kanye’s recent “tomorrow the world” tour in which he’s brought his unique brand of Otto-tuned anti-Jewishness to podcasts and talk shows, in fact rumor has it that Kanye once had a major beef with Hitler for trying to annex Kim Kardashian’s ass for lebensraum.
Next, the usual suspects condemned Donald Trump as “Hitler” for social media posts in which he ordered “U.S. Jews” to “get their act together,” which leftists interpreted as a threat but which was more likely a confused demand for the return of the Ritz Brothers.
Not to be outdone, conservative org Accuracy in Media (AIM) drove a digitally animated sieg-heiling Hitler truck through Berkeley, Calif., to show support for Israel. When enraged (and confused) Jews began pelting the truck with rocks, the AIM staffers realized that maybe it’s finally time to stop taking advice from Frank Luntz. At least the Hitler truckers made it out alive; the AIM activists driving the Klanmobile through Oakland weren’t so lucky.
Lastly, England’s Channel 4 drew criticism for purchasing one of Hitler’s paintings (his 1912 masterwork Jude Descending a Staircase) for a live TV program in which the audience will vote on whether to destroy it. Rabbi Marvin Hier of the Simon Wiesenthal Center condemned Channel 4 for “trivializing the Holocaust.” He then retreated to the Museum of Tolerance gift shop to restock the “Boo-chenwald” Halloween costumes and Zyklondike ice cream bars.
That was a lot of Hitler for one week. Next week: the annual NAACP Emmett Till-a-thon.
FLOYD THE BARBITURATE
Speaking of Kanye…
In 1785, Ben Franklin wrote, “It is better 100 guilty Persons should escape than that one innocent Person should suffer.”
Lesser-known but far more prescient is the sentence that followed: “Unless black people are burning down the nation, in which case, put any innocent guy behind bars if it’ll save the Walgreens.”
Last week Kanye took a break from blaming the Jews for killing the Humpty Dance guy to announce on a podcast that George Floyd died from a fentanyl overdose. This outrageous, appalling claim is backed by nothing except hard scientific evidence, meaning it must be false.
While the podcast hosts quickly pulled the episode out of a sense of duty (the duty to not be immolated by a mob of ghetto thugs), Floyd’s family members, grieving all the way to the Swiss bank, announced that they’re filing a $250 million lawsuit against West for defaming the memory of the Fentle Giant.
According to the Floyd estate’s attorneys, along with defamation, the family is suing for “harassment, misappropriation, and infliction of emotional distress,” the latter resulting from a fear that West’s comments might prompt people to actually read the coroner’s report.
In a heartwarming act of solidarity, BLM offered to cheer the family up by burning down an old white lady’s house, but even that was no balm for the pain caused by an accurate reading of a medical document.
According to all parties in the suit, an out-of-court compromise might be possible: Both sides would sack Beverly Hills again, allowing West to get some payback against the Jews, and giving the aggrieved family members the opportunity to grab as many Nikes as they can carry.
Can’t we all just loot along?