In these willfully ignorant times, the powers that be seem, in their haste to be politically correct, to forget that America fought its bloodiest war to end human bondage. Almost three-quarters of a million men died, yet the Civil War is being refought with fact-purging propaganda that makes cartoon villains of great American soldiers, while one group of citizens is robbed of their heritage in order to please another.
About one year ago I found myself in a car with a New York couple, both guests of an ex-headmaster (sorry, head of school; use of the word “headmaster” leads one to a woke gulag) of my prep school who was accompanying me to an unveiling of a wall honoring an ex-classmate of mine who had recently passed away. I had contributed to the memorial wall. The man, whom I had never met before, talked about how when he was on the tennis circuit he was given only ten minutes to shower and dress in certain American country clubs during the grass summer-season tournaments following Wimbledon. The reason was because he was Jewish. The trouble was that I had played the exact same tournaments from 1957 until 1964, as had players like Sidney Schwartz, Herb Flam, Ron Holmberg, Mike Green, and Ed Rubineau, all Jewish and all ranked in the top fifty. Although I was a guest and the man a friend of the headmaster, I told him in no uncertain terms that he was a liar and that I doubted very much if he had ever played in the tournaments he was now denouncing, places like Newport, South Orange, Southampton, and Marion. Like most liars when caught out, he insisted his story was true but then dropped the subject of tennis altogether.
Things got worse when his wife, a Texan Christian lady sitting in the back with me, took umbrage when I said I considered Robert E. Lee among the greatest Americans. “How can you admire a traitor?” she drawled. Which led me to call Honest Abe the real traitor until the headmaster, sorry, ex–head of school, had to intervene. The couple changed their tune later in the day—night, rather—but that’s because our little group ran into a close friend of mine they were trying to social-climb with. One year later I still don’t know what was worse, a blatant lie over WASP tennis clubs forcing Jewish competitors to take short showers, or calling Lee a traitor. I suppose it has to do with a meticulously prepared campaign by the media and the Washington swamp to vilify and destroy this country’s past and its admirers. Mind you, it is undeniable that certain country clubs back then excluded Jews, as did and still do many Jewish clubs today that exclude Christians. But the idea that USLTA-sponsored tournaments would force invited Jewish players to cut short their showers is so incredible and so outrageous, I should have thrown the bum out of the car for such a gross lie. A year later, I now clearly see what the couple was up to: nothing in particular, but just being woke and with-it.
This disinformation campaign about America’s past is no accident. It is a well-thought-out plan to disunite Americans and keep in power those who already wield it: corporate leaders, left-wing politicians, entertainment tycoons, media hustlers, and college czars eager to brainwash our youth. Another ploy is to put Christianity on the back burner, where it belongs, according to the entrenched ones. Once you get religion out of the way, the West becomes a formless entity, with materialism and globalism replacing Christianity.
In disuniting America, those profiting by it are helped by mass immigration of different colors and creeds, not to mention cultures. The archvillains disuniting Americans are the media, starting with The New York Times and The Washington Post, both owned by billionaires eager to keep their billions by pretending to be for the common man. Purporting to care about progressive values is simply virtue-signaling while distracting from the true motive of financial gain.
Unfortunately, many well-meaning people have been fooled by the anti-American rhetoric of Hollywood, the media, and the universities. The unimaginable abuses perpetrated by African regimes against their own people, not to mention the corruption, are never mentioned, and if they are it’s considered racist. And corporate leaders know how to protect their monopolies. When Facebook and Twitter banned the Donald, he had around 88 million glued to their screens. Trump’s new site has, at best, 4 million today. See what I mean about corporate do-gooders? Politically biased journalists spread the fiction that the Zuckerbergs and Dorseys of this world are godlike figures, and the public eats it up. I don’t know what’s worse, the above-mentioned nerds or those know-nothing student enforcers of PC who use their phones in the manner the Gestapo used their clubs while denouncing anyone for using the gendered “guys.”
Let’s face the facts. America is split in half, with the left bringing in nonstop support from Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Cuba, which is not exactly cricket, as they say over on the other side. Racism is now a capital offense and considered the most abhorrent of sins. Western culture and civilization is under attack, and teaching it is on a par with using the N-word. Take it from someone who knows all about discrimination. When I played all those tennis tournaments long ago, I was made to shower for two minutes only because I was Greek. And if you believe that, you believe in woke.
As a tactical concern, the House GOP’s decision to open an investigation into Biden family corruption is questionable. It promises limited political return. It would serve Republicans, and the country, far better if the House focused on a hyper-politicized Justice Department that targets the political opposition, labels concerned parents “domestic terrorists” and ignores violence aimed at pregnancy centers, for starters.
None of that, however, means there isn’t sufficient circumstantial evidence suggesting President Joe Biden not only lied about knowing his son was favor-trading on the family name with corrupt autocracies but that he was a beneficiary of those business dealings. Indeed, precedent says we Republicans have a duty to “democracy” to investigate. Yet Greg Sargent over at The Washington Post warns: “If Republicans can obliterate the distinction between congressional investigations done in good faith and ones that weaponize the process in bad faith, they win.”
You see, only Democrats can launch investigations in “good faith.”
Pathological partisanship can lead to cosmic shamelessness. And you almost have to admire the chutzpah. These are the very same people who spent years championing one of the most unethical investigations in American history. We now know that Russia “collusion” hysteria was predicated on partisan opposition research and disinformation meant to delegitimize the 2016 election. There was a grand total of zero indictments related to 2016 election “collusion.” So rickety was the evidence that guardians of our sacred norms never even tried to impeach former President Donald Trump over this alleged sedition. I’ll spare you the slew of blown one-source anonymous “scoops” spread by major media organizations in concert with the FBI and Democratic Party. Sargent highlighted them all.
Let’s remember, when the New York Post broke the Hunter Biden laptop story, virtually the entire left-wing media complex regurgitated the risible claims of former intelligence officials — including known liars James Clapper and John Brennan — that the entire kerfuffle was just Russian “disinformation.” Sargent dismissed the news as a “fake scandal” and worked to discredit the story.
The Hunter story always had far more journalistic substantiation than the histrionic and fallacious Russia-collusion investigations that Sargent and his paper peddled for five years. Post reporters had interviewed the owner of the Delaware computer shop where Hunter had abandoned his computer. They had Hunter’s signature on a receipt. They had on-the-record sources with intimate knowledge of his interactions. They had Tony Bobulinski, one of two former business partners of Hunter Biden who contend that “the big guy” was Joe.
Now, it’s certainly possible that the computer shop owner and Bobulinski, a Navy veteran and former chief technology officer at the Naval Nuclear Power Training Command who made campaign contributions to progressives like Ro Khanna, were part of an elaborate fascistic cabal spreading “disinformation.” But now, Congress can put them under oath.
Later, emails implicating the president as a participant in Hunter’s schemes were authenticated by forensic specialists. Yet virtually the entire censorious journalistic establishment, with the help of tech giants, limited the story’s exposure to help their preferred candidate win.
“Democracy,” indeed.
Then there is the issue of the president claiming he knew nothing about Hunter’s leveraging of the family name for influence peddling and never personally “profited off” any of his son’s schemes. What did the president think Hunter was doing when he hitched a ride to secure deals with the Chicoms on Air Force Two in 2013? Does Joe not remember that two Obama administration officials raised concerns about Hunter’s relationship with the Ukrainian energy firm Burisma? When finally asked about his son, Biden claimed the “vast majority of the intelligence people have come out and said there’s no basis at all.”
His buddies lied — just like they had during the Russia collusion hysteria. This week, only two years late, CBS News confirmed that the Hunter Biden emails were all genuine — just like everyone knew they were. Now we have authenticated emails showing an executive from Burisma thanking Hunter for facilitating a meeting with the vice president.
If Joe were a Republican, Adam Schiff would not only have opened an investigation but he would have claimed to be in possession of irrefutable proof that the 2020 election had been bought by the Chinese. Sargent would be churning out one hyperbolic piece after the next. We would all be watching another thermonuclear meltdown.
Of course, nearly every congressional investigation in history is to one extent or another undertaken in “bad faith,” and that’s fine. One of the most beneficial roles of political parties is that they will hold the opposition accountable. But Sargent, and other advocates of one-party rule, only see legitimacy in their objectives, which is one of the numerous reasons their claim to be democracy’s defenders is so laughable.
Britain’s worsening immigration crisis is actually two crises for the price of one. The first concerns the U.K. government and optics, a weaselly little word I first heard used by Obama when he was caught by the media playing golf during some national crisis. “The optics,” he said, “were not good on that one.” The British Conservative Party—many of whom are the equivalent of the infamous RINOs, Republicans in Name Only, in the U.S.—have been talking tough on immigration throughout their dozen-year incumbency, but net migration this year is half a million on the wrong side of the ledger. Eventually, in a country that is already the seventh-most populated in the world, folks notice.
And so the second, and very real (what the media have taken to calling “existential”), crisis is faced by those very folk, the indigenous unfortunates already living in Britain, and England in particular. Over 200 hotels throughout the U.K. have now been requisitioned by the state to house illegal immigrants, with canceled bookings and weddings now standard procedure, and local populations left unnerved and uninformed. Tearful staff are fired and replaced with immigration officials. One town with a population of around 700 was told to expect 1,000 new and diverse neighbors. This is a bit more than fifty Venezuelans on a day trip to Martha’s Vineyard, and having met Venezuelans stranded here in Costa Rica en route to the US of A, I can tell you that you would rather have neighbors from Caracas than Tyrana, capital of Albania.
Albania is about as close to a failed state as it gets. In 1997, a combination of Ponzi schemes, money laundering, and arms trafficking led to up to two-thirds of the population losing investment money. Now it is payback time for the failure of this violent, corrupt, and dim-witted nation. Sadly, it is not the Albanians who will be out of pocket, but the British taxpaying public. More, the U.K. has proposed to pay money to Albania in order to give it a lick of paint so that, it is laughably assumed, its detritus will want to shelve their English plans and stay home.
Just as older Brits reached for their atlases (and the youngsters asked Siri) to find Ukraine when Putin made his move, so too Albania was a mystery until recently. This coastal country lies a short hop across the Adriatic from Italy, and borders Greece, North Macedonia, Kosovo, and Montenegro. So now you know. The population is, at the time of writing, a little shy of 3 million. Impressive, given that 40 percent of Albanians have left since 1990, and 2 percent of the adult male population have moved to the U.K. this year.
It is estimated that up to 80 percent of illegal immigrants entering England via the beaches of Kent are Albanian, and, to quote from a Mr. Trump, they are not sending their best. Actually, that is not strictly true. They are sending leading practitioners of two staple industries of Albania: drug-dealing and prostitution. Many Albanians entering England—this is not a British problem—are pushers and pimps, often fresh from jail in their home country. This is evinced by the jail tattoos and haircuts sported by fighting-age men who have calculated they will earn more money and evade justice more easily in London than in Tyrana, and be put up in top-quality accommodations. Welcome to the hotel Albania, where the British government has ensured that you can check in anytime you like, but you never have to leave.
Albanian immigrants have been fully briefed, of course. “No, Alteo. You don’t tell them you are gangster. You tell them you are gay.” Troublesome passports and worrisome, data-bearing cell phones are ditched into the English Channel, and the new arrivals set foot in England’s green and pleasant land with nothing except possibly diphtheria, markedly on the rise and traced to detention centers holding Albanians. Also, to ease their transit, people traffickers have been posting on social media with all the instructions for a new life on the British taxpayer’s ticket. Travel brochures are old-fashioned, and the Albanian traffickers keep up with the times, using TikTok to advertise their services.
And Albanians are no slouches when it comes to the power of language west of the Balkans. When Home Secretary Suella Braverman described the influx as an “invasion,” the outrage machine got into gear. Albanian premier Edi Rama (Albania is almost two-thirds Muslim, to add to its attractive qualities) claimed that his countrymen are being scapegoated. He also suggests that more visas for Albanians would improve matters. Yes, for Albanians.
So it was that 1,500 or so Albanians were able to march through London protesting Braverman’s entirely apposite term to describe them, and mark their territory by defacing a statue of Sir Winston Churchill with the fascistic-looking Albanian flag. Churchill, of course, famously declaimed that Britons, when faced with invaders, would “fight them on the beaches,” meaning specifically the same Kent beaches that welcomed home the troops liberated from Dunkirk in 1944. How cruel history is. A property company, Serco, currently making millions from leasing hotels and boardinghouses to the government to house illegal immigrants, is owned by Rupert Soames, Churchill’s grandson, who has vowed to welcome them on the beaches.
The U.K. is running out of four-star hotels, and so new arrivals are being upgraded to five-star accommodations. This is not enough for some, however, who have complaints about the food. It is so inconvenient to a hotelier when an illegal immigrant with no documentation is also a gourmand.
Robert Jenrick, a U.K. Immigration Minister, proposes solving the problem of what he wittily calls “Hotel Britain” by relocating the illegal immigrants to holiday camps and cruise ships. This is breathtakingly callous. Holiday camps are where people who can’t afford hotels in the first place take their breaks, so that hurts the poor, while cruises are linked primarily with retirement, so that affects the elderly.
The problems will begin when pushback starts. Come the assaults, rapes, and murders that inevitably accompany Albanian newcomers, the first sign of a vigilante response will see Britain’s police tear themselves away from the latest pride march to start cracking heads should anyone really decide to fight them on the beaches.
Welcome to the Hotel Albania. Such a lovely place.
Last week I was watching Tammy Bruce on Fox, and…hey, is she still a lesbian? That used to be her thing, right? Whatever happened with that? Tammy Bruce’s lesbianism was like Bobcat Goldthwait’s screaming: It was never interesting, but it was at least distinguishing.
So there’s Bruce, the day after Trump’s presidential announcement, and she’s explaining why, even if you don’t care for Trump, he’s still badly needed in the 2024 primaries.
Of the GOP and Trump’s potential challengers, Bruce declared, “If you can’t handle Donald Trump, how can you handle the world?”
Her point was, Trump is like a drill sergeant abusing Marines to make ’em hard for battle, or an abusive father who only beats you because he’s prepping you to handle the harsh realities of life. So even if you support DeSantis, let Trump have at him! Let’s see if he can take it!
With such brilliance, I wonder why Bruce ever felt the need to resort to sexual gimmickry.
She completely glosses over the harm a bruising primary can cause, the damage it can do to a party and a candidate. Carter/Kennedy 1980, Bush/Buchanan 1992, Clinton/Sanders 2016. Bruising primaries only create bitterness and deflated enthusiasm among the people who supported the failed challenger.
But more to the point, Democrats don’t attack like Trump. “Surviving” Trump doesn’t prep you for jack shit. Trump attacks like a child; it’s actually quite easy to “handle” him. Nobody is scared of Trump. What they’re scared of, and here’s something everyone on the right sorta knows but few will admit, is his followers. Trump’s hardcore loyalists are a special kind of scary; reality-detached kamikazes who’d rather lose a hundred elections than support someone their leader condemns.
I know a lot of people, too many probably, who are deep into the Trump-worship cult. They range from very decent older folks—good people, but also people who’d give their Mastercard number to a Punjabi cold-caller claiming to be from Windows security—to unmoored ideological fantasists who speak of “national divorce,” “secession,” and “accelerationism,” and who see in Trump a guy who’ll “burn it all down” even though he didn’t even remotely do anything like that the first time around (“He wasn’t angry then; he is now!” is the response you’ll get if you bring that up).
A core belief of these cultists is that MAGAs alone can elect anyone anywhere. They don’t just dismiss independents; they’re outright hostile to them. “To hell with anyone who’s not ‘one of us.’ We can do this ourselves!”
Even though, of course, they can’t. It’s a complete fiction that MAGAs alone can elect as much as a dogcatcher. But you’ll never convince them of that. They refuse to understand that Trump barely won in 2016 (a handful of votes in a few swing states), and of course they can’t accept that he lost in 2020. Not with MAGAs behind him! If you’re MAGA and you lose, it has to be fraud!
Kari Lake telling McCain supporters—in McCain’s state—“to hell with you; beat it, we don’t need ya” had nothing to do with her loss. She had MAGAs, and that’s all you need! So she must’ve won!
After the midterms, Styxhexenhammer666, that dude who vlogs in a leather jacket and no shirt, tweeted that all of the supposed “news” about Trump-endorsed candidates losing was nothing more than “carefully crafted astroturf meant to stop Trump, because he terrifies them.”
I put a simple question to Styx: “How do you explain Dems elevating MAGA candidates in the primaries under the assumption that they’d be easier to beat in the general? How do you reconcile that with the claim that Trump terrifies leftist operatives?”
His response: “They may be terrified of Trump—that does not mean they fear all of his picks. Like anyone, Trump is fallible and sometimes chooses the likely loser (see: Mastriano).”
My follow-up: “What I’m having difficulty understanding is, in what way are ‘they’ terrified of him? The Dem scheme to elevate MAGA candidates in place of GOPs who didn’t have Trump’s blessing was a calculated bet that Trump-loyal MAGAs don’t exist in great enough numbers to bring a candidate across the finish line by themselves, and Trump’s endorsement is not enough to move independents and non-MAGA GOPs. I’m having difficulty reconciling the notion that people who would place that bet are also people who are terrified of Trump.”
I’m sure Styx wanted to reply, but he probably had to rush to the dry cleaners to get the armpit stank out of his Fonzie jacket. Because I never heard from the man again.
The fact that leftists despise Trump, and they do despise him, doesn’t mean they fear him. Think right now of someone in politics you hate. I mean, really hate. A politician, or a media figure. Got a name? Okay. Now, do you fear this person? Probably not. In fact, I bet you’d love to go head-to-head with the object of your scorn. You’d like to take them on, and you probably think you’d prevail.
Assuming that people who hate you are scared of you is the right’s version of AOC’s “everyone who criticizes me wants to date me.” It’s bullshit; don’t let your thinking get sloppy like that. Yes, Trump is hated by the left. No, that doesn’t mean he’s feared.
And the left certainly doesn’t fear Trump loyalists. Leftists are hoping these guys make a mess of the primaries. Trump won in 2016 on a single unifying issue (immigration). That’s what the left fears. The MAGA personality cultists who scream, “We don’t need a platform; Trump is our platform!” are the left’s best hope. Leftists want that mob to get loud enough to not only drown out the issue-oriented voices, but keep Trump lost in his illusion that the mob alone can elect him.
Check out Trump’s Truth Social page. All he does is “retruth” QAnon memes. That rally in September when Trump played the QAnon anthem and a sea of idiots did the “pointy finger” shtick? That wasn’t an anomaly; that’s the future. Even as Trump was boring the tar out of all of us with that leaden hour-long announcement speech that was so dull, attendees were hoping Madison Cawthorn would whip it out just to alleviate the tedium, Trump’s Truth feed was filled with retruthed memes about the coming “Q storm” and the battle against “satanists” who “feed children to Moloch.”
No mention of immigration; just cabals of blood drinkers.
In all political or ideological endeavors, there’s a balancing act that must be performed regarding the fringe dwellers. To illustrate that point, I’ll dip into my own past. Thirty-five years ago, there was a small group of intelligent guys who were interested in strengthening Holocaust history by challenging some of the factually unsupported aspects of the mainstream narrative. Right or wrong, it was a noble goal. And because the goal was intellectually defensible, our circle included great minds like Christopher Hitchens, John Sack, John Toland, and professors and authors from around the world.
But on the fringe you had the crazies—the people who weren’t smart enough to understand the subtleties of historical revisionism; the people who wanted to deny! Holohoax! Fight the Jews! Restore Hitler’s honor! Demolish the lies that created Israel!
The people in charge of running revisionist think-tanks and magazines had to do a balancing act; tolerate the crazies, accept their support, but never empower them. Cater to them just enough, but at the end of the day, give them no vote, no veto power.
We knew who the crazies were, and we did our best to keep them in their place. But over the years, the rational revisionists aged out or moved on, and as the gatekeepers left (and as the internet made gatekeeping more difficult), the crazies filled the void. And now there is no more Holocaust revisionism, only lunatic denial. The nuts took over. And once that takeover was complete, there was no trace left of the original mission. What started out as an academic exercise to separate fact from fiction has now become an exercise in denying fact and disseminating fiction, and if you confront any Holocaust denier about the falsehoods they spread, they’ll invariably say that for them it’s not about sifting fact from fiction anymore but weaponizing denial to fight the Jews (“They weaponized history against us, so now we’re doing it back to them! There’s no truth in war; only defeat or victory”).
The initial mission, to cleanse the historical record of war propaganda, mutated into the exact opposite, a bunch of people who think they’re in a war, which requires them to spread propaganda.
That’s what happens when you let the crazies take over. That’s why now, among the QAnon nuts, there’s no mention of immigration. The initial mission was of no interest to them (as Trumpist diehards like Darren Beattie freely admit). Yeah, it was of great interest to voters, but not the cultists. And since the cultists no longer believe they need the voters, the initial mission ain’t coming back.
Trump isn’t even trying to do a fringe balancing act; he’s 100 percent with the lunatics. He’s fully empowered them. He’ll bring them with him to the primary, and they’ll be like black girls in a crowded theater: the only voices you hear, and the more you tell them to be quiet, the louder they get, until their din fills the room at the expense of all other sound.
Unrestrained, crazies will always drown out everything else.
We’ve just had midterms that proved conclusively that swing voters exist and the GOP needs them, and we have Trump launching 2024 with an army of acolytes who’ll alienate those independents. And don’t be fooled by his “dry” announcement speech; he’ll always play to his cultists (“stolen election!” “Moloch!” “Q!”), more so as the primaries get underway.
There’s only one way to head this off: Rational rightists have to stop pandering to the cultists. Zero tolerance. No winking at their wacky theories, no playing to them just enough to get subs for your Substack or views for your videos. You have about a year before any of this matters; a year to isolate and demoralize the Moloch fingerpeople.
I often joke about Cerno and Poso being the same person, but I have to say, I was impressed to see Cernovich being brashly impolite to Trump cultists following the midterms. He responded to tweets about “rigged elections” and QAnon nonsense by essentially saying, “You’re crazy, go away.”
Do likewise. Shame them. Mock them. Thin that herd. “No, Moloch isn’t trying to drink your blood, you imbecile. Now smarten up or get out.”
Trump and his acolytes may have their hearts set on a disruptive primary, but you don’t have to make it easy for them. Turn Bruce’s “bruising primary” thing around on her.
Take away Trump’s mob.
Hey Trump, if you can’t handle an audience of non-cultists, how can you handle the world?
The Week’s Most Remembered, Dismembered, and Decembered Headlines
WOE-PENING CEREMONIES
A dictatorship where slavery is commonplace, homosexuality is illegal, and women are subjugated, Qatar saw the World Cup as an opportunity to prove that it’s even worse than its reputation.
The greatest minds in Qatar (five camels and a caracal) decided that creating an Olympics-style opening ceremony would be just the thing to psychologically destroy attendees to the point where they’d accept Islam to end their torment.
The spectacle began with a white ghostlike figure in a Klan robe sweeping over the stage, a tribute to American noose hoaxes. A petite lip-synching woman joined in (correction: It was Korean boy-band superstar Jungkook). Then Morgan Freeman entered, also lip-synching (poorly) to a speech about tolerance (for everyone but gays, women, and slaves), a magical moment briefly interrupted as Qatari emir Tamim walked by to give him huge bags of cash in sacks with dollar signs on them in exchange for his soul (“Honestly,” Freeman snapped, “you couldn’t have picked a worse time”).
Then Freeman knelt to speak with a talking soccer ball. Wait, it was actually Ghanim al-Muftah, a deformed Qatari “influencer” born with nothing below his chest (he’s the poster boy for the emirate’s campaign to promote birth control in man/sheep couplings). As Freeman tried to look comfortable sitting on the floor talking to inch-high caliphi (and here even Freeman’s talents failed him), Tamim invited the Saudi crown prince on stage, where the latter bragged about having recently beheaded four women for “sorcery.”
Whether the heads will be used as balls in upcoming matches, the emirate has yet to say.
Vladimir Putin told the AP, “Losing all those men in Ukraine was a small price to pay for getting banned from this dumpster fire.”
Meanwhile, Hollywood’s planning a Shawshank Redemption reboot with Freeman reprising his role of Red and Ghanim al-Muftah as Andy. “I remember thinking it would take Andy 600 years to tunnel out of here. Turns out all I had to do was stuff him in a pillowcase and chuck him over the wall like a hammer throw. I hope he landed in the Pacific.”
HBCU IN HELL
Twenty-five-year-old Shanquella Robinson of Charlotte was known as the “braid queen.” When her girlfriends from their HBCU alma mater Winston-Salem State invited Her Royal Twineness to join them for a weekend in Cabo, Queen Shanquella’s noblesse oblige dictated she accept.
Sadly, within 24 hours of landing, Robinson became the second queen to die in 2022. Her friends told authorities that Cornropatra suffered alcohol poisoning. And that claim would’ve held up had the autopsy not revealed that Her Majesty had been beaten to death (with injuries so bad, even a Mexican coroner noticed them).
Also, the tragic black girls forgot to erase the cell-phone footage they shot of them beating Shanquella to death.
Such irony! They would’ve gotten away with it if only they hadn’t recorded the murder and put it on TikTok. Every criminal mastermind forgets one small detail.
Reportedly, as Queen Shanquella’s courtiers ambushed her, she turned to her friends and remarked, “Et tu, Bootay?”
HBCU grad and self-described “sophisticated African-American male” Todd Smith told Fox News that Shanquella’s friends were jealous because she’d “blown up” and “found success” as the braid queen.
The assassination of Frizz Ferdinand by Gavril-ho Princip.
At Shanquella’s funeral, mourners wore “RIP Braid Queen” shirts. As for the question of who’ll reign in her place, all eyes are on Meghan Markle, who not only needs a new royal title, but proved her mettle by passing the female version of the Excalibur test by driving a sword into Prince Harry’s stones.
MAD-HATTER TRANSFER
At first, Colorado gay-nightclub shooter Anderson Lee Aldrich seemed like a perfect villain: a white kid whose grandpa is a prominent GOP politician. A right-wing white-cis-homophobe-transphobe mass killer! Time to pass a law making drag shows as mandatory as the vax.
Unfortunately, Aldrich wouldn’t play ball. He told his attorneys that he’s “non-binary,” identifying as “Mx.” and using “they/them” pronouns. And as dictated by the media’s Tran Commandments (“Thou shalt not take the pronouns of the Tranny in vain”), journalists had no choice but to take the killer at his word (after all, trannies never pretend to be trans, except most of them).
Is Aldrich trolling? He’s an obese basement-dwelling heroin-using computer nerd obsessed with anime porn. So yeah, he might be trolling. And it says a lot about our media that a lunatic can murder five people and then dictate to the press how they speak of him. CNN host Alisyn Camerota, in a discussion with Al Franken, expressed frustration with Aldrich’s gender claim, which throws a monkeypox wrench into the narrative of “antigay hate crime.”
She also expressed frustration that Franken wouldn’t stop grabbing her boobs.
Over at NBC, “reporter” Ben Collins, a boob of such magnitude even Franken is intimidated, shifted his tweets about the story from “right-wing homophobe murders gays” to “bullied transgender pushed too far by transphobic trolls.”
Hopefully, Collins migrates to Mastodon, so nobody has to hear from him again.
As for fleshy incel Aldrich, expect him to keep up the trans routine in hopes of being sent to a women’s prison, the only place on earth a guy like him will ever have the chance to see a naked woman who’s not behind a paywall.
VERY BLACK FRIDAY
Still reeling from the gay-nightclub disappointment, journalists spied a shot at redemption after a mass shooting at a Chesapeake Walmart. As NBC News pointed out, the killing had all the hallmarks of the time in May “when a racist white gunman shot 10 Black people dead at a grocery store in Buffalo.” After all, the Walmart’s in a black area and the survivors have names like K’Maria and Kwintessa and other words you’d expect to see on the name badges of people who roll their eyes when you ask a simple question (“I’m awn break now, n’kay?”).
The news media’s communications-degreed infinite monkeys were poised at their keyboards, ready to bang out another “white racists must be stopped!” story to spur a few riots (because how better to mourn a mass murder at Walmart than to loot Walmart?).
Unfortunately, word came that the murderer was the store’s disgruntled manager. Which means black, because nobody does disgruntled shooting sprees better than blacks.
And indeed, the shooter, Andre Bing, turned out to be every reporter’s worst nightmare. According to witnesses, he burst into the break room and shot everyone he saw, which was pretty much every worker in the store, because of course they were all on break.
Bing had a history of behavioral problems and multiple complaints that had been ignored by upper management because the new rules are you can’t fire a black person for any reason.
Whereas conversely, you can fire a white person for no reason.
As der Bingle brought a blight Christmas to Chesapeake, over in San Francisco, John Arntz, the city’s elections director, is about to be fired for his skin color. The Elections Commission told Arntz that even though his service has been exemplary, they’re terminating him for being white.
If you thought that kind of discrimination is illegal, take it up with the nation’s “civil rights” lawyers.
Oh wait, they’re on break.
TRANSPOTTING
If a mass-murdering incel can change gender at will, why not an entire nation?
Twenty-seven years ago, filmgoers were treated to Danny Boyle’s Trainspotting, a gritty look at an Edinburgh crawling with addicts and thugs.
Americans, who’d been used to movies depicting Scotland as a civilized, pastoral paradise only occasionally sullied by lake monsters or Mel Gibson’s ass, were shocked by images that made the nation look like a Third World hellhole.
These days, Scotland can only aspire to Third World hellhole. Bonnie Alba has become Jessica Alba—beautiful a long time ago, still decent from afar, but up close, a craggy wasteland with a fried brain.
The Scottish government is about to pass something called “self-ID,” under which women would officially cease to exist as anything but a theoretical concept. A man need only say “I’m a woman,” and he’ll be one. Self-ID doesn’t even require proof of “transitioning” or intent to “transition.”
Just say the word, and laddie becomes lassie.
Already in Scotland’s prisons, male inmates have begun identifying as women in order to be moved to women-only facilities. According to the Daily Express, 50 percent of the men petitioning to be transferred only “realized” they were women once they were incarcerated (when they also coincidentally realized that by simply saying “Hoot, I’m a hen,” they could get their own reluctant harem).
Many of the male prisoners now declaring as women are sex criminals. Strikingly, there have been 6,758 allegations of sexual abuse lodged by female prisoners since 2014. More strikingly, SNP leader Sturgeon, who, like her namesake, is a bottom feeder with no vision, is cool with this.
It would be easy to make a joke about how a nation of skirt-wearing men was always destined to go tranny, or how the Scot reputation for stinginess wasn’t supposed to apply to brain cells. But perhaps the best epitaph for once-great Scotland is a rewording of the one its native son Robert Louis Stevenson penned for himself:
Under the wide and starry sky,
I realized that hey, I’m not a guy!
Do I still have a johnson? Aye, och aye,
And I’ll get laid with it against her will.
This be the gift Sturgeon gave to me,
That I be a woman, yet I stand to pee.
And for all the real women locked up with me,
Call me ma’am as I have my fill.
NEW YORK—Christmas partying, like Yule shopping displays, begins much earlier of late. After the lockdown, however, the urge to party and party hard is justified. Like others, I am trying to make up for the missing two years, but the hangover toll is prohibitive. It now takes a whole two days to feel normal again, and at this point in my life, days count as much as months used to.
Last week I hit a hot new club here on the Bagel’s Upper East Side, Casa Cruz, owned by Juan Santa Cruz, who also happens to be a Speccie reader. Juan was sitting at the table next to mine with some pretty girls and a couple of young men that I knew when they were still in short pants. Alessandro Santo Domingo and the newly married John Michael Radziwill, next to his very nice Polish wife, greeted me and were solicitous. The reason for their concern was that the first course had yet to arrive and the old boy was already gone. The problem was that my dining companions, Prince Pavlos of Greece and Arki (Romeo) Busson, were late to arrive and only did so as I was finishing my third double vodka on the rocks on an empty stomach after a violent karate session.
Mind you, I was in the club’s roof garden on a balmy evening looking out at the housetops of Madison Avenue that I had mistaken for a trompe l’oeil, and complimenting the waiters for the art, until more sober opinions set me straight. The club is on six floors and is quite amazing, but it will soon have competition because Robin Birley has permission to open his nightclub exactly one block away from my humble abode. This is the way it should be: two very top clubs targeting the same clientele, the way the Stork and El Morocco used to back when New York still had a society to speak of. I will tell you more about Robin’s club when it opens next year—and if I’m still around, that is.
Once Pavlos and Arki arrived, the vodka kept flowing, and after dinner I struggled to go down a couple of floors to another great room full of—well, yes, women, including Siena Miller, who was friendly and not at all Hollywood. Disaster struck soon after. Balance is the first to go, and I knew I was in trouble when I attempted to take a few steps. My group had disappeared by then, a wise thing to do because no one wants to be debriefed for hours by some nosy cop as to where they were and what they were doing while the old boy expired in their midst.
I’m exaggerating, of course, because I don’t plan to meet with the man in the white suit anytime soon. What I want to do is return to the subject of clubs, and the lack of the right people to fill them. By this I don’t mean Silicon Valley slobs and hedgies who are pretentious and pompous and give themselves airs, like so many of these barbarian nouveaux zillionaires we read about. The perfect example of a slob whom people took very seriously, especially among Wall Street types and the media, is Sam Bankman-Fried, the Ponzi-scheme wunderkind who recently sat on a dais with Tony Blair and Bill Clinton in suits while he was in filthy shorts and a T-shirt. Personally I am convinced that Bankman-Fried is a super Madoff, a much bigger con man and crook, and he was the second-biggest Democrat donor after Soros. (With other people’s money.)
Even worse, Bankman-Fried was a big shot at Davos and a World Economic Forum partner. He pledged to give 1 billion smackers to the Democratic Party, so everyone loved him in the media. I’ll bet my bottom dollar—I’ve never dealt in crypto because of crooks like him—that he’s got lotsa moola stashed away in the Bahamas, while the billions that have disappeared will be forgotten because the crook was such a lefty.
I bring this filth up because there are so many of his kind around nowadays, the ones who worship wealth and act in a superior manner, the exact opposite of those young men I was with during my drunken evening. John Michael Radziwill and Alessandro Santo Domingo were born very well-off, but you’d never know it by their attitude toward others. That’s because their parents, like mine, taught them early on how fortunate they were, and how to respect those who were not as lucky. It’s very simple, my dear Watsons: Everything starts at home, and if yours is in Silicon Valley, you’re bound to be in la merde, as they say in the land of cheese.
Exclusion, needless to say, is what makes an exclusive club, but those who are excluded nowadays are mostly nice, unglamorous, and unobtrusive people. My unsolicited advice to both bosses of the new clubs is to bar celebrities, except serious actresses like la Miller, and anyone with an entourage. Billionaires need to be screened and given a handbook of old-fashioned manners on how to act in public spaces. Most sports stars should be excluded, even the great and gentlemanly Roger Federer because he might bring in Anna Wintour. Women who join by themselves should be the type one takes home to mother. They’re boring but safe. Tarts are great fun, but I’d exclude them simply because they tend to get into fights late at night and mess things up.
Financial collapses are interesting and sometimes hilarious for those who observe them, but painful for those who suffer them. In addition to the economic discomfort or hardship they cause is the humiliation of having been fool enough to invest in what turns out to have been a giant and obvious fraud, having followed some preposterous financial pied piper in the company of a crowd of other credulous dupes.
There is a spectrum of fraudulent financial gurus, with Mr. Madoff at one end and Mr. Bankman-Fried at the other.
Mr. Madoff was the epitome of the dull, solid financier, sober and unexciting. He offered steady and good, but not spectacular, returns year after year. He did not seek clients; clients sought him and felt honored when he accepted them as such. From his photograph, he was just the sort of man to whom I would have entrusted my money (not that there was ever enough of it to have interested him). If you saw Mr. Madoff in the street, you wouldn’t have thought him anything extraordinary, and it was his ordinariness that stood guarantor of his supposed financial acuity or genius.
At the other end of the spectrum we have Mr. Bankman-Fried, flamboyantly unconventional in a way that is now its own convention. His hair was a carefully nurtured mess, he dressed and appeared to live like a slob. He was no respecter of persons. The fact that he had a degree in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology suggested the kind of brain that most of us could not even approximate and was therefore capable of penetrating mysteries such as conjuring money out of nothing by means of mathematical formulae without risk of loss. His youth counted in his favor: Everyone knows that mathematics, like crime, is a young man’s game.
There is a wonderful photograph of Bankman-Fried on a panel with Bill Clinton and Tony Blair, the two of them obviously groveling before the young genius who was worth so much more (in money, that is) even than they. Two former leaders of the free world were dazzled by the $16 billion that Bankman-Fried was worth; never was the worship of Mammon more evident than on the faces of Clinton and Blair.
We see from this photograph that Bankman-Fried is a man of principle: He is not prepared to make himself any less of a slob just because the people he is meeting are eminent, or formerly eminent. His genius places himself above such paltry considerations as respect for others. It is the duty of others to accept him as he is; anything else would be lèse-ego, a serious crime these days.
Whatever else he may have been, Bankman-Fried was not a master of the spoken word. Here is an extract of an interview that he gave on the Bloomberg website in April 2022, in which he tries to explain what a financial technique that he called “yield farming” consisted of:
Let me give you a sort of like toy model of it, which I actually think has a surprising amount of legitimacy for what farming could mean. You know, where do you start? You start with a company that builds a box and in practice this box, they probably dress it up to look like a life-changing, you know, world-altering protocol that’s gonna replace all the big banks in 38 days or whatever. Maybe for now actually ignore what it does or pretend it does literally nothing…
And so on ad what seems like infinitum. The longer he went on, the less one understood.
The incomprehensibility of a person can arise from at least two sources: The first is the inability of the person to explain himself properly, and the second is the inability of his hearer to understand him because his mental level is so much lower than that of the speaker.
Most of us are aware of how limited our understanding is. How many of the millions of people who use computers every day and now could scarcely exist without them have the faintest idea how they work? What is true of computers is true of many of the other things upon which we depend: We live in a cloud of unknowing.
This induces in us a state of credulity in the face of those who appear to understand what is incomprehensible to us, which in turn then gives them license, if they choose to take advantage of it, to talk gibberish, which is then received by us as if it were words of wisdom. Bankman-Fried’s degree in physics was the equivalent of ordination in an age of religion; in effect, he was a priest.
Normally speaking, the fact that he played videogames during meetings in which he was soliciting huge sums of money from fund managers should have alerted them to a certain lack of gravitas on his part. After all, if you went to a lawyer and he spent his time with you playing a videogame, you would pretty soon seek another lawyer.
But because of that physics degree, the fact that Bankman-Fried played videogames during meetings only added to his aura of stratospheric genius. He was a modern Sir Francis Drake, who had time to finish his game of bowls and defeat the Spaniards (though even Sir Francis Drake didn’t play bowls while defeating the Spaniards). Indeed, Bankman-Fried was a greater man than Napoleon, who said that a man who did two things at once did neither: Bankman-Fried could play videogames and extract millions of dollars from his interlocutors. The fact that he once said that he didn’t trust or read books was no warning, either, rather the reverse: Here was a man who was too clever for books, his mind working too fast for this slow method of learning. To read books was a waste of his incalculably valuable time.
What lessons will have been learned from this seriocomic episode? There is a simple answer: none. Credulity springs eternal in the human mind, and there will always be enough people to believe, when the next Bank-Friedman appears on the horizon, that this time it will be different. Financial bubbles are like bacteria or viruses, constantly mutating ahead of the ability to defeat them once and for all.
Theodore Dalrymple’s latest book is Ramses: A Memoir, published by New English Review.
For more than 50 years, our country has been engaged in systemic discrimination against the nation’s most despised racial group, whites. Recently, the Supreme Court heard cases challenging legal race discrimination in a pair of lawsuits brought against Harvard and the University of North Carolina for their “affirmative action” policies.
Despite the oft-repeated claim that affirmative action “hurts black people the most,” for the past half-century, it’s whites who’ve been bringing lawsuit after lawsuit for being rejected — solely because of their race — from universities (not to mention jobs, promotions, government contracts, scholarships, executive suites, homecoming queens, etc.).
In response, the Supreme Court announced this fundamental principal of constitutional law: Could you guys try hiding what you’re doing a little better?
That’s why the current cases have the legal world abuzz. Could this finally be the end of rank prejudice masquerading as virtue? This time, you see, the plaintiffs are Asian.
The switch from white to Asian has important legal implications. To be sure, with their high SAT scores and low crime rates, Asians are “white adjacent” and therefore also kinda hated. But at least they’re not white.
Thus, the attorney challenging Harvard’s race discrimination couldn’t say enough good things about “diversity”! The petitioners, you see, have another, better plan that will admit a boatload of Asians while preserving “diversity’s” life-giving force. Indeed, the lawyer boasted that the Asians’ plan would also “lower the number of white students on campus.”
This wasn’t a passing aside. Oh no, it was the heart and soul of his argument. E.g.:
— “[Under our plan] the number of white students would decrease. The number of Asian students would increase. The number of Hispanic students would increase. I think you’d see lots of benefits in that.”
— “Asians should be getting into Harvard more than whites.”
— “[California has eliminated racial preferences, and] whites are the third most represented group on campus.”
See? Everybody’s a winner!
Oh yeah, except whites.
Seriously — what on Earth? Even our putative allies, Asians, want to sidle up to their enemies by joining the anti-white zeitgeist? Is it now part of the citizenship oath to hate white people? I hereby declare that I renounce all allegiance to any foreign state, and that I will defend the United States of America against all enemies, ESPECIALLY WHITE MEN — THEY’RE THE WORST!
(That the plaintiffs are Asian has also permitted formerly comatose conservatives to come out swinging against affirmative action. Oh, the poor Asians!)
Sorry, Asians, but you’re a little late to the game. Universities have been explicitly discriminating against whites since at least 1970. Only recently have there been enough Asians living in the U.S. to merit their own special race hatred.
As we know from the Bakke case, the Medical School of the University of California at Davis began discriminating against white Americans in 1970 and admitting less qualified “minorities,” specifically “Blacks,” “Chicanos,” “American Indians” — and “Asians.”
(There was also a separate track for “disadvantaged” white applicants, but no one was ever admitted under it.)
Below are Allan Bakke’s scores compared to average scores of minority admittees that same year:
Science GPA 3.44 2.62
Overall GPA 3.46 2.88
MCAT Verbal: 96 46
MCAT Quantitative: 94 24
MCAT Science: 97 35
Terrific scores, right? But Bakke was white, so he got a big, fat “F” on the most important test. He was rejected.
Twice, in fact. He took his case to the Supreme Court, and the justices ordered U-Cal Davis to admit him, while admonishing universities to stop being so obvious about their anti-white racial animus.
To this day, whites are discriminated against in college admissions more than Asians are. Not at the tiny sliver of upper-tier colleges, like Harvard. Just at all the rest of them.
This was demonstrated in 2019 study that you may not have heard about, inasmuch as it was placed in a lead casket, wrapped in chains and dropped to the bottom of the ocean. Paid for with a grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation — presumably hoping to unearth some heretofore unheralded example of racism — Georgetown University researchers examined the races and SAT/ACT scores of students at the nation’s 200 most selective colleges.
Study conclusion: If students were admitted solely on the basis of their test scores, the white student population would soar from 197,000 to 225,000. Every other ethnic group’s numbers would fall. Asians would decline from 56,000 to 32,000; Hispanics from 32,000 to 29,000; and blacks from 16,000 to 14,000.
According to the august rulings of the nation’s highest court, race discrimination is permissible when used as a remedy for specific instances of past discrimination. Taking that as our guidepost, it’s whites — particularly white, heterosexual, Christian men — who should be sitting back, raking in the acceptances and promotions for at least the next several generations.
Adhere to precedent, Supreme Court!
What if I’m right about how the world works? What policies would that imply?
My basic insight is that the world actually is pretty much what it looks like, loath as we may be to admit it.
When it comes to human behavior, there mostly aren’t systematic differences between what your lying eyes tell you and what The Science says. There’s a continuum between anecdote, anecdata, and data.
If there’s a strong statistical pattern in the numbers, you should be able to come up with vivid real-life examples of it. And if you can think of several examples suggesting a pattern, you might well be able to find large-scale data for it.
My main one weird trick for coming up with enough insights to make a living as an unfashionable pundit for 22 years has been to assume that private life facts and public life facts are one and the same. Most pundits assume public controversies, such as BLM, are of a higher realm than daily life, so that what they notice about “safe neighborhoods” and “good schools” when they are making real estate decisions for themselves couldn’t possibly have any relevance to the great issues of the day they discuss in the media.
In truth, you don’t need gnostic dogmas like “systemic racism” to explain why, say, blacks on average are relatively better at playing cornerback in the NFL than center. Biological and cultural differences explain these and countless other patterns.
That all truths are connected to all other truths helps explain why my columns often seem to end somewhat abruptly and arbitrarily: I don’t seem to reach the natural end of a topic because, from my perspective, there is no end, just an endless network of cause and effect. So, instead, I tend to knock off around dawn when it’s time to go to bed.
On the other hand, despite the success my methods have demonstrated over the years at explicating some of the major public affairs conundrums of this century, the answers I come up with are widely considered unmentionable.
Why?
The usual responses I’m given by my critics are either:
—My findings are rejected by all experts as completely untrue, or
—Everybody already knows what you are saying is true, they just don’t want to talk about it.
Among those who assert the latter, I am told that we shouldn’t mention the truth because either:
—The facts have no possible policy implications, or
—The facts have overwhelmingly horrible policy implications, such as the logical necessity of reimposing slavery or instituting genocide.
The former strikes me as obtuse and the latter as insane and/or evil.
When I try to think through the policy implications that would flow from honest public discussion of American realities rather than the current reliance on ignorance, lies, and wishful thinking, it seems to me that it could be useful if more people knew more about what they are discussing.
Knowing the facts doesn’t prove one set of values is better than another—that’s what politics is for deciding—but it can help you avoid making things worse than they have to be.
For example, consider affirmative action.
When surveyed, thumping majorities of the public incoherently endorse contradictory policies. In a recent Washington Post poll, American voted 63–36 in favor of:
Q: Would you support or oppose the Supreme Court banning colleges and universities from considering a student’s race and ethnicity when making decisions about student admissions?
But then the same respondents turned around and went 64–36 for:
Q: In general, do you think programs designed to increase the racial diversity of students on college campuses are a good thing or a bad thing?
It’s hard to be sure what people are imagining about affirmative action. Most likely, they are largely ignorant of how large the racial gaps are at the high end and how hard colleges have been toiling to squeeze in more underqualified blacks for the past half century, with little success other than by simply putting a massive thumb on the scale for blacks.
Even the last really important Supreme Court decision on affirmative action, Sandra Day O’Connor’s controlling opinion in the 2003 Grutter case, blithely assumed that racial gaps would become too trivial to worry about anymore by 2028:
It has been 25 years since Justice Powell first approved the use of race to further an interest in student body diversity in the context of public higher education. Since that time, the number of minority applicants with high grades and test scores has indeed increased…. We expect that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary to further the interest approved today.
Today, 19 of those 25 years have elapsed, and Justice O’Connor’s hoped-for happy ending is more chimerical than ever.
In particular, almost nobody is aware of how the extraordinary rise in college admission test scores among Asians in this century has worsened the chances of blacks to be admitted under a color-blind system. While whites are seven times more likely than blacks to score 1400 (out of 1600) or higher on the SAT, Asians are 24 times more likely.
You aren’t supposed to talk about these realities, so virtually nobody knows about them other than college presidents, who all appear to support quotas. I like to joke that just as in the old Nicolas Cage movie in which the president of the United States gets a key to the President’s Book of Secrets that divulges what really happened in the Kennedy assassination, there’s a Harvard President’s Book of Secrets that turns out to be a dog-eared copy of The Bell Curve.
If more people knew the facts, what could be done?
One possibility is that the SAT and ACT have broken down under the extreme test prepping paid for by so many Tiger Mothers, but that they could be fixed. Unfortunately, we are far more likely in the current climate to ban the tests as racist than seriously investigate how to improve them under the Asian onslaught.
Other reforms could be undertaken. For example, Asians are disproportionately exploiting the custom of giving one extra point of grade point average to students taking Advanced Placement classes. A study of University of California students found that a half-point boost generates more accurate predictions of student performance.
More broadly, we should reconsider the quantity of legal immigration in light of how much harder it is making it for African-Americans to earn elite status for themselves without race preferences. American blacks had a hard enough time competing with American whites. Putting them up against ever more of the cleverest and most ambitious of 4 billion Asians is a massacre.
To the extent that we decide we need preferences to admit enough blacks to elite colleges, we should use strict racial quotas that let in only the best of each race rather than the current trend toward wrecking the admissions system to make evidence for race preferences fuzzier.
And there’s no need for everybody to continue to pretend ever since the 1978 Bakke decision that exalted “diversity” as the excuse for violating the 14th Amendment’s requirement of equal protection of the laws that affirmative action makes colleges more intellectually stimulating when obviously the opposite has proven true. Quotas have helped make colleges minefields of cancel culture by bringing onto campus insecure and resentful masses of racially preferred students out to punish anyone who alludes to the race gaps that are American society’s central fact. Instead, underqualified preference beneficiaries should be told to be thankful for their privilege.
Similarly, American institutions currently waste huge amounts of effort interrogating themselves for racism whenever they notice that their objective systems find that blacks behave worse on the whole than other races. For example, New York City’s Administration for Children’s Services is currently torturing itself to find the source of the racism that must be behind why “Black families are seven times as likely as white families to be accused of child maltreatment,” according to a breathless New York Times article.
But if you read deep enough into the investigation about racism at this office, you find:
Most A.C.S. caseworkers are Black, as is most leadership in the agency’s Division of Child Protection, the agency said.
And
A New York Times analysis of 83 child homicides from 2016 to 2022 found that Black children in the city were killed by family members at about seven times the rate for white and Asian children and three times the rate for Hispanic children.
So what’s the worst that can happen when the Child Protection agency guts itself over its own charges of racial inequity?
I mean, besides more murdered children?
I get it, you’re tired of the midterms. Time to move on! After all, the GOP controls the House…by such a slim majority one softball shooter with decent aim could blow it to hell.
But hey—Boebert won! Yippee! Time to break out the “liberal tears” memes.
An incumbent barely won by 550 votes. And you’re celebrating.
Now, that’s lessened expectations!
Sure, there’s been analysis aplenty the past two weeks. But there are still a few things to be learned. What I want to examine here is one particularly unique aspect of the election: It occurred in the shadow of four “firsts.”
First No. 1: Abortion. This was the first national election in fifty years in which abortion wasn’t protected by Roe. An 18-year-old in 1972 would be 68 today. Meaning that most Americans have never until now voted in an election without Roe.
A first, for most of us.
I covered abortion last week; no need to rehash it here.
First No. 2: This was the first midterm (not the first election, but the first midterm) to be held under Covid vote-by-mail-or-drop-box rules. I’m not gonna spend a lot of time on this one, because I think, among rational rightists, there’s a realization that the late wins by GOPs in states like California and Arizona disprove the notion that slow ballot-counting of mail-ins is a rigged game that only favors Democrats. And those wins prove that the best strategy for GOPs going forward is to work the system as Dems do.
Yes, it’s fun to be Archie Bunker and cling to the old ways: “Edith, I ain’t puttin’ no ballot in no mail! George Washlincoln died at Valley Bulge to win me da right to stand in line.” But is it practical?
Here’s Fox’s Joey Jones, lashing out at Democrat “vote harvesting”:
Stacey Abrams’ legacy will be the machine she created to get people registered to vote and get their votes harvested, essentially. It’s not technically vote harvesting but it is the act of going back door-to-door and making sure the people you got registered voted during early voting season, mail-in voting season.
Going door-to-door to make sure the people you registered voted? Wow, I had no idea Abrams, that useless reject from a DMV desk, was such a master criminal. She actually made sure that the people she registered voted? Damn, she be Al Capone.
In 1988 I did some work for Morty Blackwell’s Leadership Institute (I helped them organize a seminar at UCLA), and one of his lieutenants gave me the institute’s big black book of strategy (I still have it somewhere in my garage). There was a whole section on how campus GOP leaders could use absentee ballot rules for college kids to essentially “harvest” their votes.
So conservatives used to know how to do this stuff.
But now it’s become so damn important to so many of you to scream fraud, you’d rather do that than use the new rules to your advantage. This is what happens when one goal (proving fealty to a messianic “god-king” by passionately screaming allegiance to his fantasies) takes precedence over another (actually winning).
So here you have irrational rightists like podcaster and boobgrabber Elijah Schaffer bellowing about how the “Founding Fathers” didn’t intend for every idiot to vote, and the solution is to stop so many Democrats from casting ballots.
Okay, Archie, you go ahead and try to stop other people from voting because “that’s the way George Washlincoln wanted it.” That’s not even remotely imbecilic. And it’s so much sounder than winning by using the rules as your foes do.
First No. 3: 2022 was the first national election since a bunch of cretins and lunatics stormed the Capitol with some unformed half-witted notion of stopping an election from being certified. To be clear, 1/6 was not at the top of any voter list of concerns this year. But among independents, 1/6 is hugely unpopular, and yet, even in the face of that, prominent rightists have never been able to admit defeat and move on. There’s a compulsive need to keep justifying 1/6; rightists revisit it just as much as leftists.
The retards of 1/6 committed an act that was itself a first. And this is something you can try to explain to MAGAs again and again, but it’s like trying to teach a dog to code: What sets 1/6 apart was that it was action. Yes, plenty of Democrats have bitched about elections being stolen. Words. 1/6ers were the first people to, as a group and with the vague blessing of a president, take action. Violent and illegal action. It’s not the same as words, and the public understands that.
It’s every American’s right to talk shit. To say “he’s a cheat” or “he stole the election.” “I’m gonna burn it all down” talk is so cheap, nobody even notices it anymore. But you don’t fucking do it. You don’t storm Congress. So your memes about “AOC said this” and “KILLARY said that” don’t carry the weight you think they do. Americans know the difference between talk and action. 1/6 was a first, and an unpopular one. And even though, as I said, it wasn’t even remotely a top voter issue, where it did break, it broke against the GOP, even if only because it’s hard to present yourself as the “tough on crime” party when so many of your dimmest bulbs are endlessly repeating, “We didn’t kill that cop, we only assaulted him. Those strokes he suffered might’ve happened anyway.”
Bravo.
Voters won’t necessarily vote against the party in charge, even during bad times, if they don’t have confidence that the opposing party will do better. So all that idiocy from 1/6 defenders about how “that cop who died wasn’t even one of the ones we beat” wasn’t a great way to go into an election where crime was on the ballot.
Again, I’m not saying 1/6 made a huge difference. But of all the things that didn’t elevate the GOP’s standing in 2022, it’s the most irritating because it was the most stupid and unnecessary.
First No. 4 is an important one: The 2022 midterms were the first national election in which a former president tried to turn the entire thing into a referendum on his loss.
Past presidents knew better. Nixon strongly believed that the 1960 election had been stolen from him. But he took the L and shut the fuck up about it. And voilà, he lived to not only win eight years later, but he lived to score one of the biggest landslides in history four years after that.
LBJ was livid that Nixon might’ve engaged in treasonous election interference in 1968. But he chose to keep the matter out of the 1970 midterms, and the Democrats held the House and Senate (to be fair, LBJ’s motives were not exactly noble, but still, he was in possession of information that could’ve been used to relitigate 1968, and he chose to keep quiet).
Regardless of how wronged Trump felt, once his loss was certified, once it was in the books, he could’ve just accepted it with dignity, with an eye toward repeating Nixon’s post-1960 trajectory. But Trump doesn’t have dignity in him, so he had to make “stolen election” an essential element for his lackey candidates.
Imagine if W. Bush had made WMDs an essential element of the 2010 midterms, just out of sheer egotism of not wanting to admit he took a loss (as in, the loss of going to war over WMDs and then having to admit you found none). W. handled that loss the smart way; in 2004—an election year—he said “oopsie,” made self-deprecating jokes, and moved on.
And it worked; he won 2004 handily.
But imagine if W. had never let it go, if in 2010, with everyone—the country, the Dems, the GOP—dealing with new concerns, Bush decided that every Republican running in the midterms had to claim that the Iraq WMDs were real; they existed and all evidence to the contrary was “fake news.” Imagine if W. had tried to make 2010 a referendum on the WMDs.
“Hey there, Rand Paul. Hey, Rowdy Randy, Randy-Bandy, Bandy-boy. You better say there were WMDs or I’m gonna target ya fer defeat.”
Hell, for that matter, what if one-termer Papa Bush had tried to make the 1994 midterms about “read my lips”? If, instead of admitting he fucked up and taking the L, Bush Sr. had clung to a fantasy that he never actually contradicted his “read my lips” pledge, and all reports to the contrary were “fake news.” And he bullied and cudgeled until the Contract with America contained the clause “George Bush never broke his ‘read my lips’ pledge, so therefore his 1992 loss was the product of Democrat and media fraud. Give us Congress and we’ll demand a do-over!”
Think the GOP would’ve still done as well?
Nixon, LBJ, Bush Sr., Bush Jr. Hate ’em all you want, but they had more skill for the game in one testicle than Trump has in his entire being. Trump tried to make 2022 a referendum on his “stolen election” claim, and the GOP went from potentially repeating 1994 and 2010 to getting wiped out to such an unprecedented extent (for an out-party opposing an unpopular president in a midterm) that the best MAGAs can do now is cheer that one of Trump’s empty-headed acolytes just barely won reelection by 550 votes.
Four firsts—Roe’s demise, Covid voting regs, 1/6, and an ex-president co-opting a midterm to bitch about his loss.
Four firsts, none of which helped the GOP, and all of which to one degree or another hurt it.
The GOP (1) is associated with the criminalization of a now-vulnerable right that most Americans have grown up with, (2) stubbornly refused to make use of new avenues for vote-casting, choosing instead to attack the Dems for being more skilled at it, (3) faced voters for the first time since MAGA extremists violently assaulted the U.S. Capitol, and (4) was saddled with an unpopular ex-president who demanded that candidates relitigate his loss and declare it invalid. Take all that into account, and the fact that the party didn’t do as well as it could’ve is less of a mystery than a Scooby-Doo episode.
Now, Covid voting can be used to the GOP’s advantage if you guys would just drop the Archie Bunker shtick. And 1/6 will fade from memory eventually once you guys stop acting like “we only beat the cops, we didn’t kill any” is a winning argument.
The GOP can recover from those firsts.
But Roe? As I said last week, that albatross is here for the foreseeable future. You just gotta live with it.
And Trump? Well, that albatross is alive, rabid, and ravenous, and being fed by people who have no plans to cease.
And that’s where I’ll pick up next week.
