The Week’s Most Gayish, Grayish, and May-Dayish Headlines
FORTY ACRES FOR A FOOL
William Darity, a Duke University “professor of economics,” declared last week that the U.S. should shell out $14 trillion for blacks as reparations for slavery.
Darity, who’s black himself, believes this won’t be a problem, because the money will come from the government, not taxpayers.
You see why “professor of economics” is in scare quotes. Apparently Darity’s econ teacher was the “Obama’s stash” woman from 2011.
And where did Darity make his announcement? The Dr. Phil show. And in so doing, he managed the impossible: He replaced the “Cash Me Outside” girl as the dumbest human to ever appear on that program.
Professor “Cash Me Southside” stated that the payout will be a modern version of the government’s Civil War-era pledge to give freed slaves “40 acres and a mule.”
Which raises an intriguing possibility. Many Americans don’t know this, but the “40 acres” pledge, which originated with a high-level meeting between General Sherman, Secretary of War Stanton, and twenty black leaders from Georgia (the meeting was cut short when the White House kitchen served cold “French-mannered fried potatoes” and all hell broke loose), included a provision long-lost to history: “In the settlements hereafter to be established, no white person whatever, unless military officers and soldiers detailed for duty, will be permitted to reside.”
Yep, the 40 acres settlements were to be fully segregated reservations (or “colonies,” as they were referred to in the plan) where America’s blacks would live separate from whites.
Well, President Biden, you might just be able to sell this thing to whites after all.
A hundred and fifty years before rightists started saying “national divorce,” blacks were advocating the same thing.
What would “The United Acres of Black America” look like? It would have an army with no sense of aim, and every fast-food restaurant would have a moat, natural protection against the clientele.
ROCKET MAN (OVERBOARD)
Fly me to the moon,
Let me play among the stars,
The bastard’s rocket ships explode more than his electric cars!
Poor Elon Musk. His plan to build a rocket so he can return to his faraway home planet populated by pale-skinned, beady-eyed autists with perennially blank expressions (it’s the same planet Zuckerberg’s from) hit another snag when the unmanned ship blew up real good just four minutes after takeoff.
Musk took a break from his current hobby of flooding Twitter with Holocaust denial while banning race-realist intellectuals like Jarred Taylor to gaze upward at the sky, a tiny tear appearing from his eye (turns out it was just the coolant his race uses for blood to protect them from Earth temperatures).
While Musk announced that the test wasn’t really a failure, because the rocket did “stay up for four minutes” (thus beating Matthew Perry’s record in bed), the FAA was not as pleased. The doomed Blowstromo scattered massive chunks of debris and a sea of toxic dust over the town of Port Isabel, Texas.
Port Isabel is a major processing hub for illegal immigrants, and it’s been reported that rocket debris blocking the town’s roads has made it difficult for the newcomers to drink and drive.
“How can I drive drunk when there’s metal falling everywhere, ese?” one illegal told the AP. “I was just about to hit this woman when a big piece of rocket do it for me.”
So indeed, Musk’s ship made contact with aliens. Just not the ones he’d intended.
Some of the detritus also landed over Laguna Atascosa National Wildlife Refuge in Los Fresnos. Fortunately, the sanctuary has no birds, as they’ve all been eaten by asylum seekers who assume anything with “sanctuary” in the name is their new home.
As for Musk, he’s not giving up hope. He’s planning another launch for later this year, and this time the rocket will be packed with Holocaust denial literature, so if it explodes, Musk states, “the debris will red-pill the townsfolk!”
ROCKET WOMAN (HEAR HER BORE)
Sticking with space, Dr. Eloise Marais, Associate Professor in Physical Geography at University College, London, exploited Musk’s misfortune to advance her own pet project and personal beef:
Mankind must not explore space!
Marais believes that rocket launches are destroying the planet! Rockets release black carbon (not to be confused with “black car-bum,” which is who you’ll find defecating in your stolen car in San Francisco).
Black carbon soots up the atmosphere, and enough of it will shut the skies and produce endless night on planet Earth! In a BBC interview, Marais admitted that the aviation industry releases far more pollutants than the space sector. Then she shrugged her shoulders, said, “But what are ya gonna do?” and boarded Bill Gates’ private jet to attend a climate conference in Bermuda.
Marais’ fearmongering recalls that wacky comedy duo, Ted Kennedy and James McDonald. In the early 1970s, Kennedy brought McDonald, a UFO fanatic, to Capitol Hill to argue against the creation of supersonic air travel. McDonald warned that a plane like the Concorde would destroy the ozone layer and lead to 10,000 deaths a year among those living near the airports serviced by the planes.
Kennedy, for his part, argued that a two-and-a-half-hour transatlantic flight would not give him nearly enough time to incapacitate a woman with alcohol, rape her, sober her up, and get her to sign an NDA with a cash payoff.
“I, err, ehm, am not supah-human,” he told his colleagues.
Kennedy and McDonald’s antics killed supersonic flight development in the U.S., but in Europe, none of McDonald’s dire scenarios came to pass. No 10,000 annual Concorde-related deaths. McDonald, though, died shortly after the hearings, at age 51. He was on a UFO-hunting trip in the Arizona desert, and park rangers found him dead with an entry wound to his head.
Looks like he made contact, and looks like the probing went poorly…and from the wrong end.
BIG SKY COUNTRY? MORE LIKE WIG GUY COUNTRY
Recalling the earlier-mentioned “national divorce,” how would you solve a problem like Missoula?
Second-biggest metro in Montana. And leftist as all hell. If red Montana seceded, who’d get custody of Missoula?
Washington?
As Montana’s politicians try to prevent the genital mutilation of the state’s children in the name of trannyism, they’re being thwarted at every turn by “Zooey Zephyr,” a bewigged monstrosity who serves as Missoula’s highly popular representative at the Statehouse.
“Zooey,” a man pretending to be a woman, was elected in 2022, defeating his GOP opponent with a whopping 79.2 percent of the vote. And now “Zooey” is using his mandate to run a one-transwoman campaign to make Montana a safe haven for carving up children so mentally ill adults can get off and money-hungry doctors can get rich.
Yes, the people of Missoula like their trannies the same way they like their native bull trout: stinkin’ up the house.
Last week, “Zooey” slammed his colleagues for committing genocide by trying to prevent child torture. You know that genocide, right? The one that’s completely fake. The one you can’t question in public.
No, Mr. Musk, not that genocide. That one’s real. This is the tranny genocide.
Jeez, man, you’re obsessed.
For calling his colleagues murderers, “Zooey” was removed from the House floor and given a suspension.
So now of course he’s being genocided by being “silenced.” And a bunch of trannies have pledged revenge.
In Utah, a gang of trans-creatures got their revenge, vandalizing a lawmaker’s house and promising more violence to come, because he backs a bill that outlaws “trans surgery” for kids.
Scream national divorce all you like. The freaks are already in your state. It ain’t gonna be easy gettin’ ’em out.
GRIOPATRA
The funny thing about Netflix’s new Cleopatra “docudrama” is that even if Afrocentrism were not the current holy writ and guiding force in Hollywood, even if the director weren’t an identitarian nutcase, and even if the producer weren’t Will Smith’s wretched Lex Lutherian wife, Cleopatra still wouldn’t have been portrayed the way she actually looked.
Just examine the contemporaneous images. Huge hooked nose, bitter little mouth…Hollywood—you know, the town that made Ruth Bader Ginsburg look like this, Deborah Lipstadt look like this, cast Rachel Brosnahan as Mrs. Maisel, and by God if they ever do a biopic of Madeline Albright they’ll cast Margot Robbie—would never allow it.
Still, the decision to cast Cleopatra as a Soul Train sista who looks more at home TikToking about how Darquan be cheatin’ on her than ruling a royal palace, has provoked outrage in Egypt, where politicians and antiquities experts have slammed Netflix for spreading the completely unfounded myth that Cleo was black.
One Egyptian attorney even filed suit against the show, trying to get it shelved.
Queen Cleopatra director Tina Gharavi responded to the controversy in a Variety op-ed in which she used terms like “melanated” and “misogynoir” as shorthand for saying, “I’m functionally retarded.”
She declared that black women need to see “black queens” to better understand that their lineage is royal and dignified.
And as Gharavi wrote those words a bloat of black women on both sides of the counter at a Georgia McDonald’s began beating each other with sticks, buns, and brooms, ripping out wigs and weaves and destroying the countertop, all because the store ran out of sweet ’n’ sour sauce.
As when the hunt for McNugget meals,
Drives on with horn and strife,
Hunger of hopeless things pursues.
No sauce? I’ll end your life.
Who talks to me of reason now?
It would be more delight
To have died in Cleopatra’s arms
Than lose my weave tonight.
(Apologies to Robert Louis Stevenson.)
NEW YORK—The most likely place to be injured, even killed, in the Bagel is the sidewalk, any sidewalk, where bikes and scooters run free to mow down the old, the infirm, and those unable to perform lifesaving, matador-like avoidance moves. Yep, marauding bikers use the sidewalks of New York to beat the traffic and intimidate people, and have managed to impose their illegal presence on sidewalks as a beleaguered police force turns a blind eye.
It all started under the last mayor of the Bagel, one so bad that I dare not mention his name in the pages of Takimag, and it continues even more so under the present mayor, a nice but incompetent ex-cop no one dares criticize because he’s black. Total disregard of the law is now acceptable, with bikers openly performing glissandos past very fat and short traffic wardens who pretend not to see them mowing down walkers.
As I walk everywhere in the city and use a car only on rare occasions, I am a daily witness to this outrage, and after some narrow escapes I have loudly protested against the bully ruffians, eliciting an intriguing elision of “mthfkr” and other such elegant responses. Dripping with attitude, bikers and scooter riders are terrorizing mostly the very old, who can remember a time when walking on a sidewalk almost guaranteed a safe arrival.
Actually, I gave up long ago on bike-free sidewalks, but I try to point out to leisure riders that bikes on the walking paths of Central Park are strictly a no-no. There are signs everywhere saying “Dismount and walk” that everyone ignores and most riders do not understand. “Dismount” is too hoity-toity a word. A much better understood and obeyed caution would be “Get off your f—ing bike, you f—ing asshole.” The most dangerous of all kamikazes are the food deliverers. They are mostly from Central America, do not speak English, and are dressed in all-black outfits and are always speeding. Oh yes, I almost forgot, the great majority have no lights as they hurtle down one-way streets the wrong way in order to deliver. The trouble is that I don’t blame them. They’re very hardworking, get paid peanuts, and come from countries where the rule of law is considered for suckers only. I’ve almost been run over by a couple of them, but I’m on their side. They’re the hardest-working stiffs in the Bagel.
Never mind. My son was once a bike messenger, hence I sympathize with those who use two-wheelers for work, but the arabesque-performing, greasy-haired, bum-clenching megalomaniacs are the ones I daily pray will end up in that sauna-like place below after their early demise. Which brings me to a different kettle of fish altogether, and a great lunch I recently attended, one that double-silver-star, Special Forces old buddy of mine threw to celebrate his 82nd birthday. Chuck Pfeiffer and I used to hit the clubs rather hard in the good old days—nights, rather—and we often ended up mixing it up with those who took umbrage at our right-wing remarks. The trouble being that Chuck is very big and looks very hard, whereas the poor little Greek boy “no look so tough.” While getting out of a flashy car he had once hired, we were confronted by two hard guys who made fun of my Anderson & Sheppard suit, hinting I was Chuck’s boy toy. I was getting ready to rumble when Chuck growled, “I’ll rip your hearts out and show them to you before you die…” End of confrontation.
In the land of bulls—, such talk is taken seriously, hence the ex–Winston Man had a free ride most of the time. He now has trouble walking and no longer drinks, which makes him a very dull boy, but I was glad to see him and he put me at the head of the table where I proceeded to get nice and drunk in the middle of the day. And I was very happy to see Julian Schnabel and his beautiful Swedish companion. Julian was very famous back in the ’80s, his paintings going for lotsa moola, as well as his films. He made some good ones, my favorite being Before Night Falls, about a gay Cuban artist trying to flee Castro’s paradise.
Julian has always been friendly, and for this reason I withdrew the contract I had taken out on his son Vito. Vito has pulled more beauties than I’ve thrown punches in the dojo, so about twenty years ago I decided he had to be eliminated. But I couldn’t go through with it, especially as the kid was funny and did not take life seriously. During the lunch I realized that if anyone had to go, it was the father. Julian has been much married, but his latest is a rare beauty of Swedish vintage, and a very nice person to talk to. Vito, incidentally, was the one who took Amber Heard to the island of Koronis long ago, where she woke up the host and complained that the shower wasn’t working, an obvious come-on to the host, George Livanos, that he ignored, an act that had me hitting my head against a large plaster plant in frustration.
Oh well, Alexandra dragged me home telling me it’s embarrassing to be seen with a drunk in the middle of the day. I agree.
A friend of mine kindly sent me the brochure of a conference of art historians that has just been held at University College, London, which claims to be one of the best academic departments of art history in the world.
This claim naturally put me in mind of a line from a poem of Gerard Manley Hopkins: No worst, there is none.
I now quote from the summary of a keynote speaker to this conference; merely the first that I came across, not chosen because it is the worst.
What does it mean to speak in this space “for art history”? Speaking “to” not “about,” speaking “with” (in disparate company, scattered yet gathering, outside in)…. Walking with the words of Trinh Minh-ha and Maria Lugones in my hands and ears, “against and away from that hushing of the manyness of the past in the present,” I assemble some off-key notes…to sound out some of the voicings and ventriloquisms echoing in my praxis of the last 30 years, to locate myself momentarily and uncomfortably “here.” Invoking words, gestures and interruptions that might be partially read, seen and heard (or not at all), I want to revisit and affirm these as small, tactical acts of disturbance and resistance, decolonial and otherwise. A farcical calling card (1995–ongoing), a disobliging “artist’s statement,” my ghosts of AAH conferences past (1998, 2008, 2018), and the multiplicity of voices coming into play in between and since—improvised choruses and ad hoc witnesses to mundane and fabulous displacements, to live archivery, aspiring and refusing.
This does not quite rise to the level of schizophrenic verbigeration—the repetition of nonsensical phrases or fragments of phrases seen in severe cases—but it is very near it.
I do not mean to be disparaging. It takes great skill to use language in this fashion. I suggest that, if you don’t believe me, you try to do likewise. I have tried but not succeeded: Whatever I say, meaning keeps breaking through. Evidently, I am too attached to language as an instrument for the conveyance of thought to succeed as an academic art historian in the Western world.
A question that has long puzzled me is whether the thoughts of a person who produces this kind of verbigeration actually correspond to what he or she says or writes. In the fastnesses of their skull, do they actually think like this? On the train home, for example? If so, how terrible it must be to be him or her! How boring! How utterly dispiriting!
Art history is not the only field in which people have turned themselves into verbiage-generating machines; far from it. The person who produced the above example could easily change careers and become a manager in Britain’s National Health Service, having so triumphantly mastered the art of high-flown meaninglessness combined with vague but false connotations of innovatory thought. Indeed, in the modern Anglophone world, any ambitious mediocrity can rise far in any hierarchy simply by mastering this language—although, as I have intimated, this is not at all easy to do. The main requirement for success in achieving such mastery is determination; then, with a little ruthlessness and willingness to stab people in the back, the sky is the limit as far as a career is concerned.
University College, London, is funded mainly by public grants and student fees, and I regard the promotion of the polysyllabic drivel that I have quoted above as a form of legalized theft, both from the public purse and from the pockets of private persons; though I repeat, to make it clear to libel lawyers, that it is theft morally speaking, not juridically.
Its purpose (in this context) is to advance the careers of those who want the status of scholar without the dreary necessity of actual scholarship. The endless recombination of a few phrases hinting at a small repertoire of half-formed thoughts, with a lacing of neologism, is all that is required. And if a person is sufficiently ambitious, and mediocre, he or she never grows tired of or bored with this particular goose that lays the golden eggs.
If we ever recover from this academic sickness, which at the moment looks rather doubtful (for as the American senator said, you can’t get a hog to slaughter itself), we will wonder how, when, and why the sickness started. I don’t have a definitive answer; no doubt the process was insidious and crept on us unawares, more like old age than a declaration of war. Tracing disasters to their origins can in a few steps take us back, not very usefully, to the Garden of Eden and the idea of original sin; nothing, after all, has ever been right since the fruit of the tree of knowledge was first bitten into by our ancestors. But we must bear in mind that what explains everything explains nothing.
If I had to plump for a single cause, then, it would be the expansion of tertiary education, especially in the humanities. “More means worse” was the cry of reactionaries who were against this expansion, and they have been proved right. This may not be so in the exact sciences, where it is easier to maintain standards, but genuine humanistic scholarship is inherently and rightfully intense and of small scale. The attempt to make it a mass phenomenon was bound to dilute its quality, and so it has done. Homeopathic doses of real learning now seem to go a long way in academic careers.
The production of graduates of the humanities in large numbers was dangerous. One of its principal effects was to greatly increase the prevalence and scope of pretentiousness. What word better conveys the quality of the keynote speaker’s summary than pretentious?
Pretentious teachers teach pretension to new generations, who must then be found occupation to flatter their pretensions. Thus, the process is self-reinforcing and self-reproducing like a colony of bacteria in a petri dish. The only thing that will halt the expansion is the irruption of reality, for among other things, the pretension is always reality-denying. Let us hope that the irruption of reality will not be violent.
Theodore Dalrymple’s latest book is Ramses: A Memoir, published by New English Review.
Extremists have got to learn to take half a loaf. Just like the cheap labor-demanding GOP donors, pro-lifers need to be told: You can’t get everything you want. If Republicans give you this, they’ll lose their jobs, and the people who’ll replace them want you dead.
Unlike a lot of people complaining about the anti-abortion zealots, I am an anti-abortion zealot. That’s why I’m begging them to stop pushing wildly unpopular ideas. These fanatics are going to get millions more babies killed when Democrats win supermajorities in both houses of Congress and immediately pass a federal law making abortion-on-demand the law of the land.
They’re also going to get a lot more adults killed when those same Democratic supermajorities pass laws taking our guns, defunding the police and packing the court, among other great Democratic ideas.
We’ve been rolling our eyes at pro-choicers forever, telling them to calm down, that overturning Roe would just return the issue to the states. Blue states would make abortion legal until the kid turns 14. A few states, like Louisiana, would impose tough restrictions, but most states would come out in the middle — allowing abortions in the first trimester, plus parental notification laws, and exceptions for rape and incest.
Instead, the moment Dobbs was released, pro-life nuts rushed to the mics, saying, This is gonna be great! We’re going to ban abortion from the moment of conception and prosecute the mothers for murder!
The Democratic Party has been using abortion to scare suburban women in every election cycle for 50 years. Now, Republicans are finally giving them something to be scared about.
In Michigan, the Republican gubernatorial nominee, Tudor Dixon, said she opposed abortion for 14-year-old girls who’d been raped because giving birth to her rapist’s baby could be “healing.”
Does the name Todd Akin mean anything to you? Anything at all? Richard Mourdock?
Dixon lost by 11 points.
Pennsylvania responded, Watch this! Doug Mastriano, Republican candidate for governor, called abortion the “number one” issue of his campaign and said he looked forward to signing a six-week abortion ban. In 2019, he’d called for criminally prosecuting women who got abortions and doctors who performed them.
Mastriano lost by 15 points, taking the Republican Senate candidate down with him.
If we don’t bind and gag these pro-life militants, in about two more election cycles, we’ll have no Republicans in office anywhere. Good luck saving babies then!
Of course, it’s possible that there were other things voters didn’t like about Dixon and Mastriano.
Ah, but we also have pure test cases. Since Dobbs, there have been a total of six statewide ballot initiatives exclusively about abortion. The pro-life side lost every single time. They lost in blue states, in purple states and in red states. They were not outspent. These were direct-to-the-people votes. The tiniest restriction on abortion failed — even wholly theoretical restrictions! Every expansion of abortion rights won.
Army of Todd Akins: I don’t care! They’re wrong! They’re evil! What about the babies??? [Please give me a standing ovation now.]
In Montana, a proposal merely to require doctors to give life-saving treatment to babies born alive after a botched abortion lost 53% to 47%. Trump won Montana by 20 points in 2016 and 15 points in 2020.
In Kansas, pro-lifers wrote a ballot initiative that would have amended the constitution to clarify that it said nothing at all about abortion. The initiative placed no new restrictions on abortion, but simply moved the issue from the courts to the legislature.
It failed by 18 points, 59-41, losing in every congressional district in the state. Trump won Kansas by 20 points in 2016 and 15 points in 2020.
Kentucky voted on a similar initiative, proposing to amend the state constitution to say: “… nothing in this Constitution shall be construed to secure or protect a right to abortion or require the funding of abortion.”
That initiative lost 52-48. In 2016, Trump won Kentucky by a whopping 30 points, and in 2020 by 25 points.
In three other states, Michigan, Vermont and California, voters put a right to abortion in their state constitutions.
Six ballot initiatives expressly on abortion, and the pro-life side lost ’em all.
We’ve been waiting half a century to get Roe overruled so Americans could finally vote on the issue. Well, guess what? They’ve voted! In the privacy of the voting booth, the people have spoken, and what they’ve said is: We don’t want the stupid and incompetent having any more babies.
The fanatics cite three Republican governors who won reelection after signing six-week abortion bans as proof that a certain miracle governor in Florida hasn’t just nuked his own presidential chances by approving such a law. All three governors signed their six-week bans when Roe was still the law of the land. All three bans were tied up in litigation on Election Day.
But more important, in the entire country, only one incumbent governor lost in 2022 — pro-life, pro-choice, it didn’t matter. Thirty-six governors up for reelection; 35 won.
The only flipped governorship was in Nevada, where the winning Republican, Joe Lombardo, said he opposed a national abortion ban. Luckily, abortion was a complete nonissue because state law already allows abortion up to 24 weeks and can only be changed by a vote of the people. (Lombardo also said there was no fraud in the 2020 election, for any Republicans who care about winning.)
But even in the face of a brutal 6-0 losing record, there are still pro-lifers who will say, I’m proud and I’d do it again! (Did you see my write-up in Catholic Insights magazine?)
This is our “DEFUND THE POLICE” faction — people whose ideological zealotry outruns their rationality.
Fine, be a showoff. Just understand, you’re going to get a lot more babies killed. I hope that’s worth your moral preening.
If you read news coverage about the brewing battle over raising the debt ceiling, you might think it’s a fight between demons and angels. On one side, you have Republicans who are willing to risk a default on the government’s debt unless they get spending cuts that will starve people. On the other side, you have Democrats who, guarding the interests of ordinary Americans, want a “clean” increase in the debt ceiling with no cuts in spending.
None of this is accurate. The concessions sought by Republicans are relatively small compared to what needs to be done. In fact, the truly problematic position is the one that blindly insists that we shouldn’t cut spending or worry about government debt.
Does the debt ceiling supply the right moment to seek commitments to cut spending? I think so, if only because this year’s negotiation might offer a rare window of opportunity that usually only happens during a financial crisis, something nobody wants. Republicans might do a bit more than merely pay lip service to fiscal responsibility and force Democrats to consider spending cuts. Yet, let’s face it: These negotiations were never going to produce any kind of meaningful and broad fiscal reform.
That’s in part because modern Republicans aren’t paragons of fiscal responsibility. When one of them is in the Oval Office, they spend like drunken sailors, and most of their members cannot be called economic freedom fighters. This lack of unity, paired with the scale of the debt problem, was always going to result in insufficient demands, especially under a tight debt-limit deadline.
And as every serious budget observer knows, insisting on spending cuts that would make a real difference would require putting on the table real reform of entitlement programs. Today, many Republicans explicitly oppose such reforms.
So, let’s see what is on the chopping block. First, there’s cancellation of unused COVID-19 relief appropriations, which will probably save less than $60 billion. Most of these would have expired anyway, but periodically purging the massive overhang of appropriations from earlier years is good budgetary hygiene.
Next, we get a rollback of discretionary spending back to fiscal year 2022 levels and something of a freeze thereafter. According to the Congressional Budget Office, that means that in FY2024, discretionary spending — which represents only 30% of the budget — would fall to about $1.7 trillion from the currently projected $1.9 trillion. Mandatory spending due to entitlements, however, would continue to balloon — from $3.8 trillion this year to $5.9 trillion in FY2033, for a total budget of about $8 trillion.
This plan would block student debt forgiveness, reduce some special-interest tax credits (but save biofuel tax credits to please the Iowa caucus) and cut the $80 billion increase to the IRS budget. While symbolic of a change, these cuts won’t make much of a dent in the projected $20.2 trillion deficit over 10 years.
Yet story after story in the media alerts readers of the horrible things that could happen if these paltry cuts are implemented. Flight delays would mount due to air traffic control budget reductions; hunger would afflict children; suicides would skyrocket. Woe would sweep over the republic.
Really? I don’t recall chronic flight delays or a food crisis in, say, 2019. Yet at the time discretionary spending was $1.338 trillion, or some $320 billion less than what Republicans want that side of the budget to be after their cuts. I wish people would stop fearmongering for a second so we can have a real conversation about our fiscal future.
Such a conversation might acknowledge that in the next 10 years, the federal government will spend over $80 trillion, most of it on three programs, while it will only collect $60 trillion as revenue. We could also talk about the fact that over $10 trillion will be used to pay interest on the debt. This figure will be even higher if inflation persists or if interest rates rise further. And since these payments require more borrowing, they could fuel inflation further. The debt held by the public will grow by some $20 trillion by FY2033.
Instead of pretending Republicans are monsters for demanding small budget reductions, Democrats need to start putting facts ahead of politics. And even if Republicans succeed in getting small cuts, the GOP must acknowledge that much more needs to be done. Maybe then, after the current debt-ceiling crisis passes, we can start talking about truly meaningful changes.
Ever since his 1966 book Inquest documented that the Warren Commission’s own staffers believed that their enquiry into who shot JFK had been too rushed to be reliable, Edward Jay Epstein has been that highly useful rarity: a center-right heavyweight investigative journalist.
Epstein’s new memoir, Assume Nothing: Encounters With Assassins, Spies, Presidents, and Would-Be Masters of the Universe, recounts his Zelig-like career as a confidant of the rich and powerful around the world (even while often going on to reveal their embarrassing secrets).
Epstein, now in his mid-80s, was a star during the legendary Tom Wolfe Era of magazine journalism when nonfiction writers could become moderately wealthy writing for the big New York magazines. In that long-gone era, reporters were expected to subvert power, not be the ill-paid but loyal servants of the system as they are today.
And yet, Epstein’s career flourished because the mighty tended to see him as a potential sympathizer and thus often provided him with abundant human interest material about themselves before he stuck the shiv in.
For example, after Epstein had heard a former chief financial officer of Occidental Petroleum describe his ex-boss Armand Hammer as “the Nijinsky of bribery,” he got himself commissioned by The New York Times Magazine to write a profile on the celebrated oil tycoon. Back then, Hammer was a candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize due to that communist capitalist’s friendships with both Kremlin premiers and Republican presidents.
Rather than tell the nosy reporter to go jump in a lake, Hammer set out to win over Epstein, inviting him and his girlfriend to a dinner at which the three other guests were the owner of the Times, the First Lady, and the Prince of Wales. For months, Hammer took Epstein on his travels, introducing him to Bob Hope, Saudi ambassador Prince Bandar, Al Gore, and Pierre Trudeau.
But Epstein’s friend James Jesus Angleton, who had been deposed as head of CIA counterintelligence after he perhaps got lost in espionage’s “wilderness of mirrors,” warned him there was “another side” to Hammer and suggested Epstein get ahold of secret Soviet documents seized by British intelligence in 1927.
But how? Fortunately, Epstein’s research assistant was the daughter of a former British cabinet minister and a best-selling historian who had remarried Nobel laureate playwright Harold Pinter (who, Epstein recounts, cheated at bridge). The British spy archives showed that the Bolshevik billionaire had been Lenin’s and Stalin’s American fence for stolen art treasures.
Eventually, Epstein got his hands on sixty hours of Nixon Oval Office-style tapes that Hammer had made of himself bribing government officials, which vindicated the credibility of his 1996 exposé on Hammer, Dossier.
On a lower level of scandal, Stephen Ross, a mortician who somehow became one of the most powerful men in American media as owner of Time-Warner (and whom Epstein recruited to fund his mentor Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s 1976 Senate campaign), is depicted cheating at Scrabble. The night before playing with Epstein and socialite Amanda Burden, the mogul had carefully pocketed the tiles that spelled the high-scoring word “zygoma.” The next day, he used sleight of hand to lay them down and declare himself the winner.
The South African Oppenheimers, the central figures in Epstein’s terrific book on the De Beers monopoly, Have You Ever Tried to Sell a Diamond? (which Epstein makes available for free on his website), don’t wind up looking as bad as Hammer. On the other hand, after reading Epstein on the diamond racket, you’ll never watch an engagement ring TV commercial the same way again.
Not every rich and powerful man who tried to impress Epstein paid as big of a reputational price as the odious Hammer did. For instance, Sir James Goldsmith, whom Epstein met at a dinner party at Taki’s, comes off fairly well in Assume Nothing.
So does Richard Nixon, whom Epstein met at Goldsmith’s Mexican rancho. To Epstein’s surprise, the elderly Nixon proved an ideal leader of serious conversation at the dinner table, sensitively giving each guest a chance to shine about what he knew best, like a hobbling but wily old quarterback finding ways to get the ball to the athletes in the open field.
The academics whom Epstein taught with at Harvard and MIT before becoming a full-time journalist—social scientists Moynihan, James Q. Wilson, Edward Banfield, and Andrew Hacker, along with mathematician Tom Lehrer, the legendary songwriter and, according to Epstein, inventor of the Jello-O—also appear in a good light.
From his Ph.D. adviser Wilson, author of the political science classic Bureaucracy, Epstein learned the “organizational theory” perspective that made him averse to assuming that all the scandalous disclosures he uncovered necessarily added up to some overarching conspiracy. While there are some real-life Bond villains like Hammer, most things get done by large organizations of officials of highly constrained competence. (Even the top guys don’t know that much: The funniest example of this is that on his way out of the White House, Barack Obama connived to get his daughter an internship with…Harvey Weinstein.)
For instance, even though Epstein’s JFK book Inquest was essential to the growth of American conspiracy theorizing by proving just how fallible the Warren Commission had been, Epstein himself, over three books on the assassination, never adopted a particular conspiracy theory. To Epstein, the time limitations put on the investigating staffers by Chief Justice Earl Warren—such as that they couldn’t go to Dallas until after Jack Ruby’s trial was finished, and then they had to wrap up before the election—did not appear to grow out of some nefarious plot to cover up the awful truth. Instead, they simply appear to have turned out to have been mistakes that had seemed like good ideas at the time to Warren.
It’s not immediately obvious why so many cunning men didn’t flatly turn down this dangerous journalist’s entreaties. Epstein himself sketches an explanation on the first page of his memoir. For one thing, he’d grown up in New York affluent and Jewish at a time of rapidly growing Jewish success. (Numerous rich Jews seemed to assume that he’d pass up exposing their foibles because that wouldn’t be “good for the Jews,” but Epstein isn’t very ethnically biased.)
But his big advantage, he writes, was that at age 12, a difficult time for most boys, he was already 6′ 2″ and 200 pounds. This precocious size “conferred on me a bold social confidence that would remain.” Whereas magnates tend to see most reporters as ink-stained wretches, many seemed to find the audaciously assured Epstein as, by nature, a fellow buccaneer.
Hence, Epstein’s book includes a remarkable array of encounters with the rich, famous, and notorious, from Vladimir Nabokov to Jeffrey Epstein.
As a sophomore at Cornell, he signed up for Nabokov’s legendary course on European literature. But he hadn’t gotten around to reading any of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, so he was initially stumped by his professor’s single essay question: “Describe the train station in which Anna first met Vronsky.” But he had seen a movie adaptation starring Vivien Leigh, so he filled up the test booklet with every detail from the movie. When he finally read the novel, however, he discovered that the director had made up much that wasn’t in the book.
Hence, when Epstein got a note to meet with Professor N., he figured he was being flunked out. But it turned out that Vladimir and his wife-assistant Vera, not having seen the movie, had assumed that they had discovered a creative prodigy. They even offered Epstein the undergrad English major’s all-time dream job: to see all four movies playing in Ithaca each week and advise the Nabokovs on which one they should watch on the weekend.
The work went well for a couple of months until Epstein reported back on a movie based on a Pushkin short story.
[Nabokov] seemed uninterested in having me recount the plot, which he must have known well, but his head shot up when I said in conclusion that it reminded me of [Gogol’s] ‘Dead Souls.’ Vera also turned around and stared directly at me. Peering intently at me, Nabokov asked, “Why do you think that?” I instantly realized my remark apparently connected with a view he had, or was developing, concerning these two Russian writers. At that point, I should have left the office, making some excuse about needing to give the question more thought. Instead, I said pathetically, “They are both Russian.”
His face dropped…
While researching the Vatican Bank scandal in 1988, Edward Jay Epstein met Jeffrey Epstein through Goldsmith (who didn’t seem impressed with the second Epstein).
This younger Epstein was an amiable con man from the beginning. He offered to upgrade the older Epstein’s airline ticket to first class for free. But the third time the elder Epstein tried to use the younger one’s upgrade service, he was ignominiously booted out by the ticket clerk:
When I pointed to the first-class sticker, she said anyone could steal one and paste it in. I was unceremoniously moved to coach.
A friend says that the media business is about two things: public relations (of which the subdivisions are hype and damage control) and accounting (finding the money and hiding the money). The author’s conclusion, based on what Jeffrey Epstein told him in the 1980s, is that his financial specialty was hiding the money from the taxman, and names Leslie Wexner and Leon Black as likely billionaire clients.
Not surprisingly, Jeffrey Epstein wanted to hear from Edward Jay Epstein all about his old professor, the author of Lolita. The jailbait aficionado was disappointed that the author’s recollections of that great man of letters were so seemly.
Some schools are ditching traditional grading.
Instead, they use “labor-based grading,” an idea promoted by Arizona State University professor Asao Inoue.
Labor-based grading means basing grades more on effort than the quality of work.
In addition, Inoue lectured a conference of rhetoric professors “stop saying that we have to teach this dominant English. … If you use a single standard to grade your students’ languaging, you engage in racism!”
So I reported that Inoue opposes teaching standard English. He complained that I was being unfair.
“What I’m saying is that students should have choices,” says Inoue in my latest video. “Is it possible that a student comes in who wants to learn the standardized English in my classes? Absolutely.”
My German-speaking parents made me learn proper English. Where would I be if they hadn’t?
“There are absolutely benefits to a standardized English,” says Inoue. “But that same world creates those same benefits through certain kinds of biases. Those can be bad.”
Lecturing to professors, Inoue says, “White people like you … built the steel cage of white language supremacy … handmaiden to white bias in the world, the kind that kills Black men on the streets!”
What? Teaching standard English kills Black men?
“I think it can,” says Inoue. “We have Eric Garner saying, ‘I can’t breathe.’ But no one’s listening and he dies. That’s the logics that we get.”
I still don’t get it. Eric Garner died because white people teach standard English? He uses words like “logics”? “Languaging”?
Much of the time, I don’t understand what Inoue is talking about. If this is how professors speak now, I see why students are bored and depressed.
Twenty-six years ago, a school board in Oakland, California, announced that its Black students were “bilingual.” They spoke both Black English (Ebonics) and standard English, and the schools should give “instruction to African-American students in their primary language.”
Ebonics advocates told teachers not to correct students who “she here” instead of “she is here.”
When many people, including Black parents, objected, Oakland officials said that they never intended to teach Ebonics, just to recognize it as a legitimate language.
Inoue says that the Ebonics movement didn’t do enough.
“Everyone says, yes, we believe in that, but they didn’t do anything in their classrooms.”
No wonder his students label him “easy grader.” I’m glad he doesn’t teach engineering.
Inoue identifies as “Japanese American.”
I tell him that Japanese Americans earn, on average, $21,000 a year more than average Americans, yet he keeps talking about America’s “white supremacy.”
“What kind of white supremacist country lets that happen?” I joke.
Inoue replies, “Japanese American communities wanted to be seen as more American” and made great efforts to join American culture.
Exactly! Japanese Americans prospered because of it. So do other immigrant groups. Several now earn more than whites in America. They succeed by speaking standard English, and because America is relatively color blind.
“I get a little uncomfortable with colorblindness,” replies Inoue, “That’s not how humans work … there’s no such thing as a neutrality.”
“But there is,” I say. “Hire people based on the highest test score, you’re being neutral about other factors.”
“Depends on how you see the test,” he answers. Tests may be biased. He also criticizes high school honors classes, calling them “pretty white spaces.”
Inoue says he believes in “Marxian” ideas, and asks things like, “Who owns the means of opportunity production in the classroom?”
“Where has Marxian philosophy ever helped people?” I ask.
Marxian philosophies “don’t give us a plan of action. They’re not socialism,” he says. As for capitalism, “I think we can do better.”
I doubt it. For years, intellectuals promised Marx’s ideas will work better than capitalism. Instead, socialism perpetuated poverty.
Nevertheless, on campuses today, Marx’s views thrive. Students often hear them unchallenged.
At least Inoue was willing to come on Stossel TV to debate. Most “Marxian” professors refuse.
Continuing with last week’s theme—the decennial of my “outing”—let’s talk about the Holocaust.
Because I’m never going to be allowed to not talk about it.
Lord knows I’ve tried. I stopped speaking about it publicly after 1995. Returning from a monthlong gig at Waseda University in February ’95, where I’d lectured Jap kids who had no idea about Holocaust history and who—therefore—were literal blank slates, I had an epiphany of sorts, which boiled down to: “I don’t wanna be doing this anymore.” Because it seemed my choices were to speak about the Holocaust in countries where an orthodoxy is enforced by law (Europe, Canada) or by a rigid and unforgiving set of norms (the U.S.), or speak in nations where nobody cares because the Holocaust holds no import (I could’ve told those Jap kids anything. I could’ve said “…and then Hitler unleashed his worst weapon of all on the Jews: Nekopuss, half tabby half octopus,” and, awestruck, they would’ve gasped “Ohhhhhhhhh!”), or lecture in nations where the opposite of Western orthodoxy is enforced (during my Japan gig I was invited by a PLO rep to speak in Gaza, as long as the topic of my speech was “The Holocaust: Why It Never Happened and Why It Should’ve”).
In 1995 I removed myself from the field because I became convinced I could do no good. More than that, I became convinced there was no market for doing good.
The late 1980s/early ’90s had been an exciting time to be in Holocaust history. A natural process of revision was unfolding thanks to the newly freed Eastern Bloc. I was barely old enough to drink, and yet there I was in Moscow, Krakow, Berlin, and Paris…exchanging ideas with the likes of Christopher Hitchens, James Randi, John Sack, Carlos Huerta, and J.C. Pressac. Yeah, I did a few TV shows, which was a ghastly mistake, but even after I stopped doing TV altogether, they’d still put me on air without my consent (in January 1994 Mike Wallace said he wanted to interview me. I refused, so 60 Minutes profiled me anyway using archival footage).
From the beginning, I always said I was only researching the Holocaust to get my own questions answered…
Aw shit, I just said “questions”…now Ron Unz is scratching at my door. Hold on a second…
Unz: “QWESTCHINS QWESTCHINS QWESTCHINS BRAK BRAK BRAAAAK!”
Me [firing my shotgun in the air]: “Get outta here, you misshapen freak! Next time I won’t aim over your head.”
Sorry about that…you say “questions,” it summons him like a cat hearing a tuna can being opened. See, unlike Unz, I didn’t use “I’m only asking QWEST-CHINS” as a ruse to spread untruths. I genuinely was asking questions, and when, by 1995, I’d found answers, I moved on. I was done. But nobody would let me be done. In 1997 the Jewish Defense League put a $25,000 bounty on my head, even though I hadn’t spoken a word about the Holocaust in two years, and after that—after I’d changed my name and moved into the much safer world of GOP politics, documentary filmmaking, and bimbo ranching—my Holocaust past was “outed” in April 2013 and I was condemned to forever have to answer for the damn topic whether I wanted to or not.
And here I sit, pretty much imprisoned by my youthful choices. Banned from Amazon and YouTube as a “denier,” unable to find a publisher for a second edition of my best-selling autobiography because the only guy on earth willing to publish me died, tarred by Wikipedia as a denier (thus rendering me unemployable beyond my job at Takimag, which I pray never ends because my only plan B involves walking West Hollywood at 2 a.m. in short-shorts), and either lionized by moronic deniers who’ve never actually read my work or cursed by them as a “sellout” once they do.
Every now and then, I can be lured back to the topic. If I feel the person doing the luring is sincere. Last week, some pseudonymous “anti-denier” kid on Twitter (in my day, we used our actual names…on principle I don’t respect anyone who won’t) came at me like, “Ha, I just slammed Cole for something he wrote in 1992! Lookit me, I’m a BIG MAN! He failed to take Topf document 13/4/43 into account regarding Krema II; I dunked on him! Dunked! Dunked!”
Well, that kind of nonsense I don’t respond to, because it’s in bad faith (dude actually could’ve just DM’d me for my views on that doc, and I’d have happily shared them). 1992 was a time of discovery and trial and error. We were figuring things out. Pressac hadn’t written his second book yet, and Van Pelt hadn’t written anything (sorry, that’s very “inside baseball”), and we didn’t have the internet so we actually had to fly to archives, like, physically, man—which took forever—and as I’ve said again and again and as only dogs can hear because apparently I speak in a register humans can’t, historiography is a process. New evidence is uncovered, old evidence is reinterpreted, ideas are exchanged, we grow in our understanding.
If you’re in any way in opposition to that dynamic, whether it be from the perspective of “Ban Holocaust revisionism! Anyone who says 5,999,999 instead of 6,000,000 must be imprisoned” or that lunacy’s mirror image, “If you don’t say ‘Holohoax 300,000 dead by typhus’ you ain’t based cuck cuck cuck,” you’re a menace. You’re the bad guy. If you’re against the process, if you come at people with your fists raised because you’re enforcing an orthodoxy, any orthodoxy, you’re the villain.
So last November, a feller in Counter-Currents, Beau “Rainbow” Albrecht, came at me in peace. No fists, palms open. It was a respectful column that speculated that perhaps I’m not being entirely honest in saying that the Holocaust happened. Maybe it was the beatings I took in the ’90s, or my desire to not die (that’s the biggest myth of all—I have many fears, but death ain’t one of ’em), but if only I looked at the “new research” in the field, I’d be forced to admit that the Holocaust was a hoax.
It’s possible Cole might change his mind if he had a look at some of the research his fellow revisionists have done since he left the scene. On the other hand, as objective as he’s been in the past, I could still hardly blame Mr. Cole if he does not look into it or wish to comment further. He’s already come close to getting the ultimate penalty for heresy.
Quite a claim! Was there indeed “research” that could disabuse me of my belief that from 1941 through 1943 the Nazis ran an extermination program targeting Jews?
By gum, if such research exists, I surely want to learn of it!
And thus began an email exchange that lasted from Jan. 6 through Feb. 7. And I’m thinkin’ maybe you’ll find it amusing. Nothing about Trump or MAGAs, nothing about trannies, nothing about Dy’Quarsha murdering a McDonald’s employee over cold fries, nothing about Soros investing $10 million into Dy’Quarsha’s defense and then even more into her successful mayoral campaign once acquitted.
Just history. The kinda stuff that used to excite me, intrigue me, as a kid, until some of you assholes turned it into a waking nightmare.
The complete exchange, all 7,587 words, can be found on my Substack. And I encourage you to read it in its entirety. I’ll include the opening salvos here, as a break from politics, from the terribly depressing stuff about our current state of affairs.
By God, how far have we fallen, how bad are our prospects, how bleak is our reality and how hopeless our future, that I can write a piece about the Holocaust and say, “Here, this’ll take your mind off things”?
Cole to Beau, January 6th
Hi Beau,
David Cole here. I’m planning to do a couple of Holocaust-related columns this year, and I’d like to have a back-and-forth with you regarding the one you penned about me. Lemme know if that’s okay. It’s not something I’m going to do immediately, but maybe in the next month or so.
Best to you in 2023,
David
Beau to Cole, January 7th
Hey, it’s good to hear from you. I hope you’re doing well and enjoying life with a girlfriend who treats you right. The psychos certainly can be a royal pain in the neck, and then some. Borderline personality disorder is no joke!
Anyway, hopefully my article came across as fair, since those were my intentions. If you’d like to further clarify my thoughts, ask away. Please note that as far as my interest in history goes, I’m more of a generalist than perhaps some of the folks you’ve met, and I prefer not to gaze too far into the darkest depths more than necessary.
Best wishes and kind regards,
Beau
Cole to Beau, January 9th
Hi Beau,
Thanks for getting back to me. I actually enjoyed your piece. It wasn’t a fair piece, but it was respectful, and that’s all I ever ask. I don’t expect opinion guys to be fair; I’m not fair. But I appreciate that you were respectful. Whatever I write about you, please know that I’ll return that favor.
So consider this a friendly exchange, not a hostile one.
If you’ll allow me to drone for a moment, last year’s Kanye thing, which coincided with Musk ending the Twitter ban on Holocaust denial, led to a flood of tweets from randos invoking me and my work in a way that damn near made me want to get liquored up and do a Dennis Wilson off a pier. It’s very unpleasant to realize that the thing you devoted your life to, the thing you got beaten up and threatened with death for, has been warped and mutilated by a generation of tards.
That I inadvertently inspired and empowered stupidity kills me inside. It’s the exact opposite of what I wanted to do with my life.
As it’s clear that you are most definitely not stupid, I’d like to probe you about something you wrote:
It’s possible he might change his mind if he had a look at some of the research his fellow revisionists have done since he left the scene. On the other hand, as objective as he’s been in the past, I could still hardly blame Mr. Cole if he does not look into it or wish to comment further. He’s already come close to getting the ultimate penalty for heresy.
That’s not fair at all. It implies that I haven’t examined such “research,” and—worse—it implies that I’m scared to do so, or scared to admit that those “researchers” are right.
And you can pick up the rest of the correspondence here at Substack. Feel free to comment away! I may even reply.
On Tax Day this year, about a dozen left-wing millionaires joined with some of the most liberal Democrats in Congress for a Washington, D.C., press conference. The luminaries included Abigail Disney, Walt Disney’s granddaughter, and former BlackRock whiz kid Morris Pearl.
The group argued that it wants to pay more taxes and urged new tax laws with a tax rate as high as 90% for the super-rich due to concerns, it said, about having too much money, which evidently contributes to income inequality.
This “tax me more” coalition calls itself the “Patriotic Millionaires.” Other prominent billionaires such as Bill Gates and Warren Buffett have made the same case that they think they should be paying more taxes.
To that, I say: Be my guest. That would be a patriotic act to help reduce our $31 trillion national debt. And by the way, hundreds of thousands of people do pay more than they owe because they are concerned about the financial condition of our country.
But when I showed up at the Patriotic Millionaires press conference, even though several speakers insisted, “I want to pay more taxes,” when I asked if they would comply with the tax rates as high as 90% voluntarily, there was an embarrassing silence. No one raised their hand.
They claimed that they want to “change the system” to force other rich people to pay more tax. Where is the patriotism in that? I’d argue that’s a very foolish policy.
It should be pretty clear that raising our tax rates to 70% or 80% or 90% would be an economic killer. Jobs, businesses and people would leave, or the rich would stop investing. We know that every time tax rates have been raised that high, as during the Great Depression and in the 1970s, the economy crashed. Economist Arthur Laffer’s book “Taxes Have Consequences” proves this point fairly conclusively.
So, how would flattening the economy help reduce income inequality, other than by making virtually all Americans poorer?
The Patriotic Millionaires reply that they will pay higher taxes if everyone else does. But again, that isn’t patriotism.
It’s hypocrisy. At the time of our founding as a country, the real patriots who fought for our honor and the many who put up the money to help pay for it didn’t say, “I will give up my life and fortune — if the other guy down the road does.” Today, we have a voluntary military, and those who serve are patriots. They are protecting the rest of us thanks to their sense of duty and love of our country.
It turns out the Patriotic Millionaires aren’t touting patriotism of that kind — or any kind. What they are promoting is a far left-wing agenda, not just in terms of raising taxes but in almost every other economic policy they espouse. They want more income redistribution and more social programs and green energy subsidies.
People can disagree about the wisdom of these policies. But what is for sure is that most of the ideas come out of the Bernie Sanders playbook, although even he doesn’t support 90% tax rates.
I love my country, and I’m also solidly against raising tax rates on anyone — rich or poor. There. I said it. What I am for is letting people keep as much of the rewards of their labor as possible. That’s not being greedy or unpatriotic. It’s being smart. And it’s what makes America great.
Today, 24 April 2023, marks seventy years since Winston Churchill got down on one knee and allowed Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II to dub him into a “Sir”—but was the true queen here actually Winnie himself?
Churchill’s reputation has taken a bashing lately. Winston, we are now told by biased BLM-loving academics, was a racist, an imperialist, an Islamophobe, a bigot, a warmonger, a white supremacist, a drunkard, a misogynist, a coward, and a genocidal maniac—far worse than Adolf Hitler, when you really think about it.
How to salvage Churchill’s reputation in the eyes of the woke? One tactic would be to retrospectively reclaim him as being a member of an oppressed minority group himself. The most common method of political rehabilitation has been to dubiously “out” Britain’s greatest-ever leader as a closet homosexual: less warlord, more gaylord. As we all know, in 1940 Winston stood alone—but was this really just because sitting down now hurt too much?
We Shall Bum Them on the Beaches
An early attempt to force Winnie out of his War Cabinet came with the 2004 proposal of longtime Gay Liberation Front activist and Rainbow Warrior Peter Tatchell to establish a “Gay Museum” in London, devoted to fighting the previous colonization of homosexual minds by “a straight version of history, where we queers were invisible.” The trouble was, like so many invisible beings, some of the particular fairies Peter was talking about didn’t actually exist—not as fairies, anyway.
Tatchell’s limp-wristed dream was to parade the “personal possessions of famous homosexuals and bisexuals” from throughout British history, such as Lord “Mount ’Em” Mountbatten, William “Bottom” Shakespeare, Rear-Admiral Lord Fellatio Nelson, Richard the Loveheart, and Pitt the Bender—only some of whom are actually definitely known to have been absolute credits to diversity. Central to this unprecedented Museum of Mince would be a “Gays at War” room, featuring interesting and intimate details about “lesbians who served in the Women’s Land Army,” which sounds like just about the most niche porn film ever made.
Another of Peter’s Friends celebrated here would be Sir Winston Churchill, who Tatchell claimed had enjoyed a “one-off gay encounter” with the celebrated prewar singer, composer, and actor Ivor Novello, both an accomplished player of the pink oboe and a genuine fan of musical theater in all senses of the term.
According to legend, the author Somerset Maugham once addressed an elderly Churchill with the rumor he had shagged about with other men in his youth, presumably alluding to an occasion when Churchill had successfully sued someone for libel after the liar in question had spread false gossip about Young Winston engaging in “acts of gross immorality of the Oscar Wilde type” with a willing soldier back in 1896.
“Not true!” Churchill replied, then quickly changed his mind, admitting he had actually stubbed another man with his secret cigar just the once, but only to see what it was like. “Who was it?” asked Maugham. “Ivor Novello,” said Churchill. “And what was it like?” further inquired an eager Maugham. “Musical!” laughed Churchill.
Modern-day readers like Peter Tatchell may not immediately understand this was just a joke, though: “Musical” in the slang of the day was a humorous term for “homo.” The rough modern-day equivalent might be someone boasting about once having been sodomized by Elton John before, and then, when asked how he had found it, replying “I’m Still Standing.”
Cum, Sodomy, and the Lash
Despite this low quality of “evidence,” Churchill today nonetheless enjoys his own personal entry on LGBT History UK’s official online list of prominent supposed sodomites, a real “Homopedia.” This contains the following classic sentence PROVING Churchill’s homosexuality once and for all: “Throughout his life, Churchill showed little interest in women other than his wife.”
So weak is the queer crowd’s case that Winston’s marriage to a woman has actually become a key plank in the campaign to paint him pink; apparently he only married a female to put people off his perfumed gay scent so as not to lose votes, a bit like how Barack Obama married a secret tranny named Michael.
According to Christian-baiting gay blogger Jonathan Poletti—who has also shown, inter alia, that Ron DeSantis, O.J. Simpson’s dad, John Wayne, Malcolm X, Top Gun, Little House on the Prairie, Mark Twain, and Mickey Mouse were all as bent as bent can be—Churchill had little interest in sex with women. Admittedly, he and his wife Clementine “had five children, but one might not know how.” I do. Women have a hole around the front too, Jonathan. Glad to have cleared that one up for you.
Like many straight men who have homosexuality suddenly thrust upon them, Churchill was “hard to pin down,” argued Poletti, but the amateur queer-spotter did his best to forcibly board the floundering Good Ship Winston nonetheless, using “evidence” that, under normal circumstances, may expect to be immediately dismissed by leftists as a litany of offensive gay stereotypes.
Apparently “He was tiny” and “As a boy, he lisped” and “worshiped his mother and nanny.” Also, “He cried easily” and “loved silk—especially for his underwear,” being “most extravagant about his [pink] underclothes.” Worse, Winnie’s private secretary, Eddie Marsh, was “a known…foot fetishist who loved male feet, especially when sweaty from hunting.”
Furthermore, argues Poletti, in a presumable double bluff, Winston often made dismissive jokes about gays, like: “It is impossible to gain a conviction for sodomy from an English jury. Half of them don’t believe that it can be physically done, and the other half are doing it.” So what? If repeatedly telling public gay jokes is evidence of hidden homosexuality, Kevin Hart’s arsehole must be an absolute bomb-crater.
Battle of the Trouser-Bulge
Much of this stuff stems from a sensationalist misreading of the homosexual historian Michael Bloch’s perfectly sensible 2015 book Closet Queens, a legitimate history of Britain’s numerous genuinely sausage-sucking MPs down the ages, from Jeremy Thorpe to Jeremy Hunt (well, he looks like one, anyway…).
As part of his research into Westminster’s many and varied Sir Queer Starmers, Bloch diligently examined the rumors Churchill was gay too, recording the various petty tidbits later made use of by the likes of Poletti and Tatchell…before then coming to the conclusion that Churchill was not in fact necessarily gay at all, just a bit apathetic about women.
Bloch guesses this was because of his father Sir Randolph’s descent into severe degeneration of body and mind in later life, after purportedly contracting syphilis from some diseased vagina or other. Winston perhaps married his Darling Clementine largely for career reasons and “as an ornamental sideboard,” contemporaries cited by Bloch suggest, to provide him with “a well-run household, ambrosial food, children and a loyal heart,” but this hardly makes him homo.
When glory-holing Labour MP Tom Driberg married a horrifically mannish and ugly woman of the rough Michael Obama type in 1951 so as to pretend he wasn’t a habitual swallower of sperm in public toilets for alleged medicinal purposes, Churchill joked, “Buggers can’t be choosers.” Tatchell or Poletti might say this showed Winston doth protest too much and had employed similar tactics himself with Clemmie; a real historian like Bloch is not so certain.
Churchill did have a lot of gay friends and colleagues, but so do many politicians—Joe Biden isn’t butt-plugging Pete Buttigieg, is he? Being raised and working in virtually all-male zones like boarding schools, the army, the Admiralty, and Parliament, it is not that surprising Winston often felt more comfortable in male than female company.
The most Bloch is willing to concede is that, just possibly, Churchill may have been a latent, nonpracticing homosexual—but this cannot in any way be proven, and that, on balance, he was perhaps just a bit uninterested in women, preferring good, honest, manly activities like getting drunk and bombing Germans.
They’ll Bend You Over the White Cliffs of Dover
The current queer thinking, however, is that WWII would have been lost were it not for the brave homos of the Home-Guard. Gay Labour MP Chris “Captain Underpants” Bryant’s 2020 book The Glamour Boys: The Secret Story of the Rebels Who Fought for Britain to Defeat Hitler even makes the overblown claim that a group of gay Tory MPs who tirelessly catalogued Nazism’s prewar persecution of their queer peers in Deutschland played as great a role in warning the world of the looming dangers of Nazism as Churchill himself did.
According to one academic, writing about the Glamour Boys for LGBT History Month 2021:
We should question why the Glamour Boys have not played a more prominent position in narratives of the Second World War…. [Public knowledge of Churchill’s more well-known role] has likely come at the historical expense of other groups such as the Glamour Boys…[whose sexuality] has prevented them from receiving their [rightful] historical place…. LGBT History Month offers a chance to…consider how certain stories have been airbrushed from national history…. The Glamour Boys offer just one opportunity—among many—to diversify entrenched national narratives.
So, there you have it. If gay evangelists like these get their woofterish way, queer-captive schoolchildren are soon to be taught that Winston Churchill didn’t win WWII, homosexuals did. With that many Glamour Boys skipping around Parliament in the 1930s and ’40s, it’s no wonder the British people spent so much of the war with their backs up against the wall.
KBO, as Sir Winston used to say: Keep Buggering On! Peter Tatchell certainly will.