Is Super Mario gay? The simple answer is “no,” although that distinctly camp mustache-and-dungarees combo does make him look rather like a lost member of the Village People.
Nonetheless, as the megahit new Super Mario Bros. Movie has leapt triumphantly out of cinemas and down the digital warp-pipe for home download just in time for you to entertain the kids with it now that the school summer holidays are finally kicking off, the quest to queer the Mushroom Kingdom has finally begun in earnest.
Yet some have bravely tried to resist, and to its credit, the film itself has no apparent woke agenda whatsoever (which is perhaps why it has been the biggest money-spinner of the year so far at the global box office). Nonetheless, so all-pervasive is the campaign to groom our kids that some have misinterpreted the movie’s wholly innocent imagery anyhow.
Rainbow Road to Ruin
An earlier trailer for the film that featured Mario and his fellow Nintendo-created cartoon bum chums hurtling along a rainbow-colored racetrack in go-karts was taken by some as yet another example of international megacorporations peddling impressionable kids unwanted LGBTQ propaganda, Walt Disney-style.
“Disgusting they had to include woke Pride flag nonsense,” wrote Twitter user Norman Brink beneath various screenshots of Mario & Co. shunting one another’s rear ends along the Primrose Path in question, in a tweet that soon went viral.
However, Mr. Brink had clearly never played a Mario Kart game, as, ever since the original 1992 title in the popular kart-racing series, each entry had featured at least one multicolored track named “Rainbow Road,” whose significance was wholly innocent: During the early ’90s, rainbows were just bright, sugary fun. Rainbow Road was in the movie because most kids would automatically expect it to be, not to seduce them into sodomy.
Predictably, Brink was quickly torn apart in the (often left-leaning) gaming press. “Losers Are Complaining The Mario Movie Is Woke Because of Rainbow Road,” headlined thegamer.com, bemoaning how “Weirdoes on the Internet” were going “mad” about the film’s alleged PC turn. But was Mr. Brink really such a mad weirdo loser?
Queer Street
There are several other real-life LGBTQ-propaganda “Rainbow Roads” in actual existence across the globe, in terms of rainbow-hued pedestrian crossings, a deeply unnecessary phenomenon that began in Taiwan back in 2008 (the eyesore’s forcible erasure by brush-wielding Communist troops may be the sole redeeming feature of any forthcoming Chinese invasion of the island).
Supposedly, such crosswalks decrease homophobia and increase feelings of safety for on-foot gaywalkers, yet they have been loudly criticized for frightening guide dogs and police horses, as well as potentially incapacitating the partially sighted, who find them harder to make out than traditional monochrome ones. Rainbow crossings have been condemned by the U.S. Federal Highway Administration as “contrary to the goal of increased safety” for pedestrians and motorists alike—regardless of sexual orientation.
One such U.K. street marking was specifically dubbed “Rainbow Road” in reports, and the widespread scorn the items have attracted as emblems of the insanely twisted priorities of our times—yes, some careless blind people might occasionally get run over and killed on them, but the death of the odd expendable Mr. Magoo is a small price to pay so that sodomites can feel “safe” when crossing the road—mean a tweeter like Norman Brink would have been unlikely to have been unaware of these counterproductive eyesores.
So, in the weird woke world of 2023, if you have never actually played a Mario Kart game, as perhaps Mr. Brink had not done, would it not actually be perfectly reasonable to see such a colorful image as Rainbow Road and jump immediately to the wrong conclusion? After all, it’s not quite as paranoid and deluded as leftists apparently seeing latent “homophobia” in ordinary monochrome black-and-white “zebra crossing” crosswalks, is it?
Why did the militant homosexual cross the road? To groom the child on the other side.
Nintendon’t Ask, Nintendon’t Tell
The Super Mario Bros. Movie has been both acclaimed and condemned for supposedly being “anti-woke”—a label it has acquired largely by virtue of not being explicitly propagandistic in function, an increasingly rare quality these days. Yet there is a determined push right now to queer videogames, as an excellent means of corrupting impressionable children.
Nintendo is one of the leading targets to have its games infected thus, as the Japanese console giant is determined to maintain a family-friendly image, leaving the vast majority of their products happily unburdened by ideology of any kind—or so they intended.
The most notorious effort to forcibly gay-rape Nintendo’s cartridge slots came in 2015, when trans-activist game designer Brianna Wu tried to claim that the intergalactic bounty hunter Samus Aran from Nintendo’s popular Metroid sci-fi shooter space exploration games was “a transgender woman.”
Famously, in the first title in the series, from 1986, the player was surprised, upon completing the game, to find the deadly alien-killing warrior they had been controlling turned out to be a young, waiflike blonde girl, once her chunky, figure-obscuring space armor was removed. According to Wu, this obviously meant Samus was a transsexual.
Wu unearthed an obscure official Japanese strategy guide to the 1994 sequel Super Metroid in which the game’s developers gave short Q&A interviews, being asked to reveal Samus’ biggest secret. One developer, Hirofumi Mutsuoka, answered that she was “a newhalf,” a jokey Japanese term for a transsexual roughly equivalent to the insulting English slang word “tranny.”
Wu chose to take this quip literally, accusing Nintendo of disgracefully engaging in “transgender erasure” by subsequently depicting Samus as “a petite blond woman with large breasts” in promotional cartoon drawings, probably because this is what she actually is. This was not mere subjective opinion, pronounced Wu, but fact: Samus was “totally trans” and dissenters must “JUST ACCEPT IT, IT’S CANNON” [sic].
Any gamers who objected were in denial that they too were queer. Having perhaps previously lusted over alluring comic-book images of this well-endowed, slim, pixelated blonde, argued Wu, any dissenting male gamers were just unwilling to admit they had inadvertently turned themselves gay by mistake. Nintendo, it seemed, had tricked schoolboys across the globe into wanking over drawings of other men, for reasons best known only to Mr. Wu himself.
If readers found this argument unlikely, Wu had an easy answer ready: “Requiring proof is hugely problematic.” It always is for these people, isn’t it?
Playing Games With Children’s Lives
Nintendo’s flagship Super Mario titles are often targeted for similar queer conversion tactics. As the world’s most famous plumber, Mario is well-known for entering people’s pipes, giving much room for anal innuendo: Witness this notorious online scare about 2007 3-D platformer Super Mario Galaxy subliminally spelling out the phrase “U R MR GAY” on its box-art title logo in an alleged attempt to make kids go homo.
Even queerer, did you know Mario’s cute green dinosaur steed Yoshi is in a gay relationship with a cross-dressing pink dinosaur called Birdo? Possibly not, because this is wholly untrue. Nintendo once made a brief joke to this effect in the manual for the old GameCube version of Mario Kart, and delusional activists just decided to disingenuously take it at face value.
In February, a female New York English teacher, Remy Elliott—who is registered with educational authorities under the name Jeremy William Elliott, is involved in polyamorous relations with multiple partners, and self-righteously displays the trans, bi, and nonbinary flags on her desk in class, just like Mr./Mrs. Chips once did—was reported as peddling demented, gay-tastic fantasies about various Mario characters to her students in an after-school “Gay-Straight Alliance Club.”
Yoshi now somehow became not a green dinosaur but “a trans man” whose “top surgery” (i.e., surgical breast removal) “turned out amazing.” The Mario series’ habitual damsel in distress Princess Peach was “a massive cis lesbian,” whilst Mario himself “came out so long ago…he probably marched at Stonewall.” His brother Luigi was “totally a demisexual dude” who “calls himself queer” and “has big bi-wife energy,” whatever in the name of Christ that is.
Living miniature-mushroom-man Toad, meanwhile, was “obviously a pre-transitioned trans girl,” which is even more unlikely than Stormy Daniels’ old claim that Toad closely resembled Donald Trump’s penis—something that, if true, is highly disturbing, given that Toad has eyes and limbs, wears clothes, and can talk, play golf, and drive a car. But then, so can Donald.
When challenged, Elliott later said this was all meant “in jest,” but how can you even tell anymore? Even if only jokes, she was still promoting such nonsense by stealth. The TikToking teacher has said conservatives who object to her proselytizing to students in this ridiculous fashion were “children as people.” It sounds to me as if she is in a state of perpetual adolescence herself.
Game Boys for Gay-Boys
To be fair, you can occasionally come across dubious conservative readings of Mario Kart, too: look at this piece claiming it promotes adherence to the rule of law amongst youngsters. Given all this, what are the odds some queer obsessives out there won’t genuinely try to subvert Mario Kart’s Rainbow Road into a new LGBTQ icon someday soon? Actually, it has already happened.
Rainbow Road is the name of an online gay gaming podcast in which “a pair of gaymers” sit around discussing the alleged innate intersection between same-sex love and videogaming. Its logo is a crude and blurry 8-bit image of the duo in question sitting down in the middle of one of Mario Kart’s actual Rainbow Road tracks and openly fiddling with their joysticks.
These days, even the false or mistaken claims made about the woke left turn out to be true, if you only wait around long enough. The next pipe Mario penetrates will surely be a brown one.
The Week’s Most Lean, Mean, and Augustine Headlines
WELL, BLOW ME DOWNTOWN
June 2021, Downtown L.A.—A Mexican had been stockpiling illegal fireworks (the only thing Mexis love more than drunk driving is setting off fireworks; the Mexican dream is driving drunk in a car that shoots off fireworks like the battletruck in Land of the Dead). When cops removed the explosives, they overloaded the kaboomie-containment vehicle, which was built to detonate 33 pounds at a time.
They stuffed in 40.
The truck exploded, taking out 22 homes, 13 businesses, and 37 vehicles. Seventeen people were hurt, 80 were displaced.
As this part of L.A. is laden with sidewalk-sleeping transients, the difficult task following the explosion involved separating the strewn bodies of Mexicans blown through their roof from the everyday pavement schizophrenics.
“Excuse me, were you just blown across your yard?”
“Lionel Richie uses Little Debbie cakes to paralyze my foot Falana.”
“Sorry to disturb you, sir.” [Moves to the next body] “Excuse me, were you just blown across your yard?”
“Sí, señor. I am gardener but today I feel like the leaf.”
Leftists tried to get the beans to riot. To at least protest.
Nada.
So last week the L.A. Times “outed” the officers who miscalculated the explosion, hoping that because the offending cops are white, the Mexis might riot.
No luck!
The only person angry about the explosion (except the whites at the Times) is local anti-Jewish communist “educator” Ron Gochez (and frankly, his accusation that the fireworks were genetically altered to spare Ashkenazi Jews is a little suspect).
The political passivity of L.A.’s Mexicans is a huge stumbling block for L.A. leftists, the only people in the county mourning the absence of blacks.
THE UNCIVIL WAR
The Civil War pitted brother against brother. And America’s ongoing conflict between black customers and fast-food workers over food temperature (the Sizzle War) pits brutha against brutha. But last week the war took an even more tragic turn, pitting worker against worker and customer against customer.
First to New Orleans, where Applebee’s server Boderrick Donya Ford (which sounds like an Irishman cursing out his car) complained that the cooks were taking too long on the chicken. When the cooks lifted their shirts to reveal the bullet wounds they’d received for serving food that wasn’t hot enough, Ford told one of the cooks that she’d “pop him” after work.
In a city where the majority population wants its food cooked both super fast and piping hot, and the penalty for failing at either is death, cooks should get frontline pay.
True to her word, Boderrick waited for the cook after work and ran him over with her car.
Boderrick dunya with her Ford.
Meanwhile, in Chicago, Carlisha Hood entered a hot dog joint as her teenage son stayed in the car. Apparently, Hood was taking way too long to order, so the traffic light inventor behind her saw red. He asked her to hurry up. Which prompted a flood of “oh no you dih’nt” from Hood, which prompted Snoop Hotdog to yell, “Just git yo food! Git yo food! You say one more thing I’m gon’ knock you out.”
Hood continued yammering, but Adam Clayton POWell had good follow-through. With his fist.
Talk about blood sausage.
Naturally, the bystanders immediately restrained him. Oh wait, no. They laughed and let loose with “oh no he dih’nt!” But Hood’s son was no bystander. He ran inside and fatally shot the attacker three times in the back.
And Chicago Polacks lowered their heads in mourning for a city where, once upon a time, ordering a kielbasa didn’t lead to violent death.
BLACKENED CATFISH
There’s no consensus regarding how many people live in Newbern, Alabama. Some sites say 275. Wikipedia said 133, but a day later it was reduced to 131.
What everybody agrees on is that the town’s 85 percent black.
So why the inability to do the math on a population that small?
Perhaps that’s what happens when you’ve beaten all your Asians to death.
In fact, the reason for the rapidly decreasing count is that blacks are fleeing Newbern because there’s no fast food. There’s one general store, which goes out of its way to not sell “black products” (if the store’s name isn’t Whiteman Mayo, it should be). So black residents are forced to eat catfish from local creeks.
Newbern recently made headlines when, for the first time in its history, a black man was elected mayor, having campaigned on a platform of bringing cheap food to Newbern so black residents can have something to shoot workers over (ever shot a catfish? It’s not satisfying at all. They don’t even wear weaves you can pull off in a fistfight). Unfortunately, even though the black gentleman, Patrick Braxton, won the election, the all-white town council refused to seat him.
Even without McDonald’s, Newbern has a much higher violent-crime rate than the national average. Introduce fries into the equation? The population will dwindle like a Highlander movie until there’s only one, ripping out her own weave and tossing herself over the counter for lack of a sparring partner.
Braxton has filed suit to be duly recognized as mayor.
An amicus brief has been filed by the catfish, who are sick and tired of getting punched for being too cold.
KLAUS BARBIES
National Review: standing athwart history, yelling, “Hey, remember that time the Blow Monkeys were banned because Tipper Gore thought ‘blow’ referred to coke rather than sex? That was conservatism’s finest moment.”
Last week was a weird one for cultural conservatism. Saucerhead Ben Shapiro condemned the Barbie blockbuster for having a “feminist” message, as if a movie about dolls shouldn’t appeal to girls.
Yeah, what the Barbie movie lacked was Nick Searcy in a ten-gallon hat reading Thomas Sowell. Ten-year-old girls would’ve swooned over that (“Err-mah-gerd, Becca, systemic causation involves reciprocal interactions, rather than one-way causation”).
It’s a movie about dolls. It’s not Phoebe London-Bridge hijacking an Indiana Jones flick or Melissa “don’t laugh at me because I’m fat; why aren’t you laughing at my fat high jinks?” McCarthy soiling the Ghostbusters legacy. It’s a movie about girldolls. So yes, it appeals to girls. Just because Barbie dolls don’t come with the Barbie Dream-mikvah shouldn’t be a reason for Benny Shapiro to attack the film.
And while conservatives were yelling at dolls, oblivious to the far more important point that the massive success of the Barbie movie proves that filmgoers would rather look at a beautiful white girl than Leslie Jones, National Review weighed in on the Jason Aldean “Try That in a Small Town” controversy. NRO chupacabra Kathryn Lopez declared, “We need songs about virtue, not violence,” as she slammed Aldean for singing about guns. Lopez, whose business card reads “I’m proof they’re not sending their best,” praised Tipper Gore for trying to censor rock lyrics in the 1980s. Because that’s what Americans really care about in 2023!
Lopez also blamed songs for making women get abortions. Were that true, surely 1986’s No. 1 hit “Papa Don’t Preach,” an “I’m not getting an abortion” anthem recorded by Madonna at the peak of her fame, would’ve led to lower abortion rates that year.
Except, 1986/1987 saw a jump in U.S. abortions.
When asked to comment on this snag in her “songs influence abortions” fallacy, Lopez said, “¡Me no comprende; taco taco burritos ay yi yi!”
It’s a testament to the state of modern conservatism that as people are being mass-murdered in the street by black criminals, as the southern border’s thrown open to the world’s detritus, and as teachers tell children to cut off their genitals, NRO finds solace in attacking song lyrics.
Thanks, William F. uckley.
LOWERING THE BAR…BIE
Still, pointless as it may be to spend hours dissecting a movie about dolls (though it should be noted that the film Strawberry Yellowcake was a moving portrait of a beloved doll who challenged George W. Bush’s Iraq War propaganda), it’s fun to imagine the havoc a real-life Barbie would wreak upon the world.
Meet Alison Rose, CEO of National Westminster Bank, formerly abbreviated as NatWest until Nick Searcy kept showing up in his ten-gallon hat thinking it was a “change the culture” Western film costarring Kevin Sorbo as a horse’s anus and Gina Carano as a tick-filled tumbleweed.
Ms. Rose, an over-the-hill blonde who likely got her job because she’s in possession of a used condom from some inbred royal, stepped down last week after it was revealed that she’d broken, like, ERR-MAH-GERD every rule in British banking by leaking the private account information of anti-immigration campaigner Nigel Farage.
Turns out that in the U.K., where people branded as “racist” lose every right they ever had, the leaking of banking info is a Tower Bridge too far. Rose leaked the info to excuse why her bank closed Farage’s account. But just like the British criminals sent to the colonies Down Under, she threw a boomerang. Her flaunting of U.K. banking rules led to her own dismissal, and, being 54 and not nearly as hot as Elizabeth Holmes, her application for a Netflix biopic starring Dakota Fanning was swiftly rejected (though she was offered a role in the Benny Hill biopic as “stuffy dowager annoyed by farts”).
It’s a fascinating irony; blonde bimbo sacrifices her career to kill the bank account of a man who’s dedicated his life to stopping the importation of Third World immigrants who rape blonde bimbos.
Maybe the proper place for Barbies is the silver screen and not financial institutions.
Conservatives should be at peace with that.
PATMOS—A funny thing happened on my way to this beautiful place, an island without druggies, nightclub creeps, clip joints, or hookers. I stopped in Athens for about five hours in order to look over old haunts and just walk around places I’d known as a youth, when I noticed something incredible: None of the youngsters I encountered were texting, nor were they glued to their mobiles and bumping into people. Sure, some were on their telephones, but the majority were talking and gesticulating like normal humans used to do before the technology curse rained down on us.
Well, as they say, nothing lasts forever, and once in Patmos friends informed me that what I had noticed in Athens was Alice in Wonderland stuff. Still, Patmos is wonderful, with very polite and friendly natives and no left-wing virtue signaling, as the place is full of ovens and gas hobs. The only thing missing is crime. Just Stop Oil cretins would be as welcome here as an atheist in a foxhole, but I’d love to see them come, as the solitary jail in Skala is empty and the cops are feeling underemployed. If you’re looking for action, however, head 85 miles to the southwest and you’ll find the biggest brothel this side of Las Vegas: It’s called Mykonos, and I used to love the place almost as much as I adored my mother. No longer. Even the magical embroidery of memory—the aching pathos of youthful romances and all-night partying—cannot erase the present horror of the place: Rich Arab Gulf playboys, whose inability to attract women is known even in the cheapest dives of Ibiza, bring their own hookers aboard their horror boats, while on terra firma preening naked drag queens kiss and pet in front of children. There are nonstop vomit-inducing displays of wealth by unknown “billionaires,” and worst of all, once-proud Mykonians take in the freak show and do nothing about it. Money does talk.
And yet, why do I choose virtuous Patmos rather than the vice-ridden Mykonos? I am a sinner after all, and proud of it. That’s an easy one. Age has turned me into a goodie-goodie, plus the presence of a wife, two children, and four grandchildren helps in keeping me northeast of temptation. Vice versus virtue is old stuff, and a certain Aristotle dealt with the conundrum around 350 BC. He was Plato’s student until the latter’s death, and then gained further fame by developing a student from the north of Greece, one called Alexander the Great.
Leave it to an American, of course, to turn Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics into a self-help work, a review of it recently published in The New York Bagel. The translation and abridgment of Aristotle’s work is by Susan Meyer, and its title is just what hamburger-munching, TV-commercial-watching Americans need: “How to Flourish: An Ancient Guide to Living Well.”
According to the great Greek philosopher Taki, a flourishing existence is also a virtuous one, although Taki points out time and again that “Do as I say, not as I do,” is the basis of his truth. Ethical guidance is desperately needed in the Western world nowadays, but what Aristotle taught was what it means to be good, not how to be good; that’s the modern huckster version. Although Aristotle’s was the first treatise to distinguish between right and wrong, later philosophers like John Stuart Mill and Kant based their philosophies on the same principle.
Promulgating rules for living is now big business, especially in the land of the depraved. The Bagel Times, most of the media, and Hollywood all promote a degenerate style of living, so when someone like Jordan Peterson comes along and advises us on how to live, he is certainly welcome. The great Greek philosopher Taki is often asked about diversity, equity, and inclusion. His answer is, “It’s a great con perpetrated by those who want a bigger slice of the cake but are unwilling to work for it.” Another question posed while the great philosopher T preaches underneath the Acropolis is which words people should never use because they might offend others. His answer is always the same: “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me.” The vast crowd always gives him a great ovation after that one, and then it’s time for Patmos with a brief stop in Mykonos for a little bit of sinning.
But I digress. My daughter’s great friend and mine, Alexander Schwarzenberg, whose family’s palaces and parks ring Vienna, owns many houses in Patmos and the nearby islands. His mother is Greek, and he speaks the lingo like a native, although he looks like a tall blond prince paratrooper. I am politically to his right, but not by much. He gave a wonderful dinner where I met Greek friends I hadn’t seen in more than thirty years, with the expected result: a massive hangover that would have made the Karamazov brothers keel over. I also met a shipowner whose wife I knew as a little girl, and who was telling a story about how he got into shipping—he owns 42 big ones now—and he mentioned the name of a ship—Metsovon—while trying to remember the name of the other that came with it. “Meteora,” I told him, and he seemed nonplussed. “How do you know this?” “Easy, I’m the one that sold them to you.” More drinks.
Some years ago, in Australia, I appeared on a platform with a prominent intellectual, many times more famous than I. We were asked what it took to be good.
The famous intellectual, who had had a brilliant career, answered that in order to be good, you had to be intelligent. When my turn came to answer, I said that the previous answer was not only wrong in fact but appalling in its implications.
It seemed to me, I said, that there was no connection between intelligence and goodness, and since the previous speaker was obviously referring to the 1 percent of the population or so that she thought might be approximately her intellectual equal, she was in effect saying that the vast majority of human beings could not be good. I count myself a misanthrope, but I am not as misanthropic as that.
She tried to deny that she had said any such thing, but the audience corrected her: She had indeed said it, and, without resorting to Freudian analysis, I think it revealed her true belief in the matter.
I know what she meant, however. To be good, you must have the right opinions about important abstract questions affecting humanity, and to have those you must be well-informed and capable of drawing correct conclusions from a large amount of information. In short, to be good you must both be highly intelligent and agree with me.
The intelligent are much given to the sin of pride, a sin that is not shared, in my experience, by the truly brilliant. Charles Dickens, for example, who knew himself to be a man of genius and called himself “the Inimitable” (which he certainly was), once wrote that he held his talent in trust. He meant by this that it was God-given and he had a duty to use it for the benefit of mankind. Few people have worked harder than he, but no amount of effort by itself would have sufficed to produce so many immortal characters and pages. For reasons that will never be elucidated, he was born with a spark that the rest of us do not have.
The idea of goodness as having the right ideas on abstract questions is a godsend to mediocrities. It allows them to learn and repeat a few phrases or formulae and think that they are good and therefore ought to have a special role to play in the direction of society.
I have no disdain for mediocrity and mediocrities as such; they are, indeed, very necessary to the functioning of any society, as is hypocrisy. (Try to imagine a world without hypocrisy—how dull, frightening, and unbearable it would be! There is, of course, hypocrisy and hypocrisy, of the laudable and necessary, and of the abominable and dangerous, kind, with everything in between.)
Mediocrity is very well in its place; among other things, it oils the wheels of administration. Much has to be done routinely, and if everyone were constantly brimming with brilliant ideas demanding that they be put immediately into practice, chaos would result. Besides, many people like to lead their lives as trains run on rails. It is as well that they exist. Moreover, even very talented people are usually mediocre in the largest parts of their lives.
But with the spread of the idea that goodness consists entirely of having the right ideas about the abstract questions of the day, presented in such few slogans that even the meanest of intelligences can grasp or memorize them, together with the seemingly obvious principle that the good should inherit the earth, the scene is set for a kind of prolonged coup d’état by the mediocre. And when it comes to the current crop of politicians in the Western world, many of them seem to have mediocrity inscribed on their faces.
By such, I do not mean that they make mistakes. Everyone does that. I mean that they look as though they lack the raw capacity to think properly. Perhaps even worse, they also look characterless, as if they had experienced nothing, or might as well have done so for all the trace experience has left on their faces. These do not even rise to the level of malignity or low cunning; they somehow convey the prolonged consumption of meals they have never had to pay for. When they smile, there is something triumphant in their expression, as if they were subliminally aware that they had triumphed in life without having fully deserved to do so.
The one characteristic that they have, however, is ambition. They are mediocre, not particularly intelligent, and characterless; but they are ravenously ambitious. Ambition, rationalized by supposed goodness, takes up all the mental space that should be occupied by other traits, thoughts, and desires. They are the kind of people who can endure any amount of boredom at a meeting, so long as it advances their career.
“Genius,” said Carlyle more or less, “is an infinite capacity for taking pains.” This is not so, but it certainly captures something about what is required to rise in a bureaucratic organization these days. Power does not so much grow out of the barrel of a gun, as Mao Tse-Tung put it, as out of the ability to get an item on the agenda of a meeting. The meeting is the bazooka of the apparatchik.
Of course, I am painting with a broad brush. Bureaucratic infighting is nothing new in the history of the world, nor is talent even now lacking. Scheming nonentities there have always been, and not a few of them were successful. But I do not remember a time when there seemed to be so many of them, or when the dark arts of infighting were so essential to success as measured by place in a hierarchy. The heads of universities used to be distinguished people; museums were run by scholars. Sloganeering was not a path to success and indeed was suspect as being indicative of intellectual incapacity. You don’t have to be intelligent to be good, nor do you have to be intelligent to succeed in modern organizations. I could give many concrete examples, but I wish to avoid legal complications.
Theodore Dalrymple’s latest book is Ramses: A Memoir, published by New English Review.
The media are so desperate for Republicans to nominate Donald Trump that they’ve turned over 96.7% of their programming to covering him, with brief interruptions for Emmett Till updates. Like dogs playing a game of fetch for eternity, they never tire of rehashing Trump’s legal troubles, his behavior on Jan. 6 (which has now been more investigated than the Kennedy assassination), his payment to a stripper, his call to election officials in Georgia and on and on and on.
It has become clear that the media also plan to make the GOP presidential primaries entirely about Trump. Every Republican running for president is required to spend half of any interview answering questions about the former president. Even when they’re not saying anything at all about him, somehow the media make it about Trump.
E.g.:
Ron DeSantis gives a speech in South Carolina not mentioning Trump.
Headline: “Ron DeSantis says little about Trump indictment; decries unequal justice and ‘weaponization'” — USA Today
Mike Pence announces he’s running for president.
Headline: “Pence Delivers Strong Rebuke to Trump in Campaign Announcement” — New York Times
Nikki Haley attacks Trump.
Headline: “Nikki Haley accused of ‘MAGA agenda’ after supporting abortion restrictions in town hall” — The Guardian
Candidates who aren’t talking about Trump are attacked for “enabling” him. MSNBC’s totally objective, nonpartisan anchor (and former Biden press secretary) Jen Psaki denounced Republicans on Monday, complaining that, unless they’re constantly berating him, “they are effectively enabling a guy who led an attempted coup. And for what? To maybe win a handful of delegates?”
Republicans, forget the pledge to support the party’s nominee. It’s pointless, irrelevant, stupid and openly defied, as it was in 2016 by Jeb! and John Kasich. The pledge we need candidates to take is this: We jointly refuse to answer any more questions about Trump. All of you, except Chris Christie.
Do you really think the media are trying to help you with this endless focus on Trump? They’re putting Republicans in a no-win situation: Either the candidates are forced to take an utterly indefensible position by defending Trump, or they’re required to write off the votes of all Trump supporters.
Democrats will never be asked to criticize any part of their coalition — and they’ve got a much crazier base than Republicans do. Why are Republicans held responsible for every nut on the right, while Democrats are allowed to skate on the core beliefs of their base?
Here are some questions Democratic candidates ought to be asked but never will be.
— Do white lives matter? Why did Democratic presidential candidate Martin O’Malley have to apologize for saying “All lives matter” in 2016?
— What percentage of white people do you believe are racist? Should teachers and college professors who indoctrinate students to believe that all whites are guilty of “systemic racism” keep their jobs?
— Did Joe Biden really believe that “Empire” actor Jussie Smollett was nearly lynched by white guys shouting, “This is MAGA country!” in the most affluent part of Chicago during a polar vortex? Did Kamala Harris believe it? Nancy Pelosi? Cory Booker? They said they did. Do you think such psychotic paranoia is, as liberals like to say, “normal”?
— If one unionized teacher could stay home while still being paid, but 10 children would die, which would you choose? The American Federation of Teachers, a major Democratic donor, relentlessly fought to keep schools closed throughout the pandemic. A Reuters study later found that the school closures led to a 43% rise in drug-related 911 calls for people aged 20 and younger.
— Should the police be defunded? If not, will you denounce left-wing “philanthropist” George Soros? A major source of dark money for Democratic causes, this sinister figure gave $35 million to anti-police activists in 2021. Last year, as the murder rate continued to soar, he pledged to give more.
— How about ICE? Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez campaigned on abolishing ICE. Other Democrats who support abolishing ICE include Sens. Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders and Kirsten Gillibrand. House Democrats have actually introduced legislation to abolish ICE.
— What is a woman? Do you think Biden’s Supreme Court pick, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, was lying when she claimed under oath not to know the answer to that question, or is she stupid?
— Should men be allowed in girls’ bathrooms, locker rooms and prisons? Should they compete in women’s sports? Should children be allowed to poison and mutilate themselves under the belief that they can change genders? Are Republican governors who ban these practices guilty of “hate” — as claimed by almost all Democrats? Do you agree with Biden that such measures are “ugly” attacks from “hysterical” and “prejudiced” people?
— If blacks, Hispanics, whites and Asians are not disciplined, arrested and imprisoned at their exact proportions in the population, is that proof of racism?
— Is it OK to be white? If so, will you call on liberal “hate watch” groups and college administrators across the nation to stop treating that phrase as “hate speech”?
— Should Al Sharpton be required to pay income taxes? This Democratic kingmaker has been a guest of President Biden’s at the White House at least twice, the Obama White House more than 72 times and has his ring kissed by any Democrat running for president.
The last time The New York Times investigated, about 10 years ago, Sharpton owed more than $4 million in income taxes.
While we’re on the subject, he’s also responsible for the Tawana Brawley hate hoax in 1987, and in the 1990s he helped gin up angry mobs in Crown Heights and at Freddy’s Fashion Mart in Harlem, which resulted in nine deaths.
True, that was a long time ago. Do you think if DeSantis had met with David Duke a really long time ago, the media would say, “no biggie”?
Democrats have won three national elections in a row by making them all about Trump. Unless the GOP is intent on committing suicide, their No. 1 objective has got to be preventing this from happening again. Every Republican candidate for president (except Chris Christie) has got to take this pledge. I promise not to answer any more questions about Trump.
One of the most fervently held dogmas of the 1969 wave of feminism was that the only reason boys and girls liked different toys was due to sexist socialization. I was young in the early 1970s when androgynous “unisex” fashions were all the rage even in the Sears catalogs, but even then I was skeptical. I mean…come on.
This fashionable belief caused a lot of children’s tears on Christmas morning.
Not me, though. As a rare only child during the Baby Boom, I had plenty of boy toys. So I never begrudged girls their boringly non-awesome playthings, such as Barbie dolls.
But many guys can’t seem to get over their childhood memories of the opposite sex’s appalling, cootie-ridden taste in toys. Hence, many online right figures who complained in 2016 when Ghostbusters, which moved massive amounts of merchandise to little boys in 1984, was remade with actresses are now complaining about Barbie, which has been made with the most perfectly cast lead actress imaginable, Margot Robbie. She memorably played both Tarantino’s quiet quintessence of feminine beauty as Sharon Tate in Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood and the loud prole ice skater in I, Tonya.
Granted, little girls tend to be slightly less sexist than little boys (thus Barbie keeps around Ken, her decorative but dull boyfriend), but without puberty neither sex would find much interest in the other. But then we’d all be dead, wouldn’t we?
Further, men tend to be more nostalgic about childhood toys and entertainment than women, who instead look forward to the next fashion trend. But Mattel’s venerable fashion doll juggernaut has brought a huge number of sentimental ladies to the multiplex to see Barbie.
The film has been building anticipation ever since jaw-dropping still photos were released of Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling dressed up in late-20th-century neon Rollerblading outfits.
The luminous Robbie is ideal as sweet Stereotypical Barbie.
Why, you might ask, is her character “Stereotypical Barbie”? In case you are rusty on your Barbie lore, back in the 1960s–1970s, there was only one Barbie and she had diverse friends like black Christie and Latina Teresa.
But, in the minds of little girls, beautiful blonde Barbie was so clearly superior to all her friends that in the 1980s Mattel gave up on trying to sell side characters and switched to everybody being Barbie so they could at least all bask in the glory of Extended Barbiehood.
Hence, in the movie there are dozens of different Barbies who all live in Barbieland, a Scottsdale-like pink suburb in the desert, where they spend all day saying “Hi, Barbie” to each other and giving each other awards for doing their jobs so well. But, to be honest, there’s only one real Barbie and that’s Robbie, who lights up the screen like Marilyn Monroe in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.
And while it’s silly that 42-year-old Gosling is playing Barbie’s blank boyfriend, Ken gets most of the memorable comic bits after he’s awokened about how men are oppressed in Barbieland and liberates it in the name of patriarchy, declaring it his Kendom.
Gosling has traditionally been cast as stoic tragic heroes weighed down by emotions they can’t quite express. But he’s actually funny, and perhaps he’ll enjoy a middle-aged career rather like that of Robert De Niro when he switched to comic roles with 1988’s Midnight Run.
Barbie is carried by its star power, costumes, and set design. I found the dialogue by director Greta Gerwig and her boyfriend Noah Baumbach more amusing than uproarious, but a lot of other people in the theater were in stitches.
Gerwig is committed to the directorial conceit of making this look all the way through like a little girl’s movie. For example, the action scenes tend to be stilted and perfunctory, as if blocked out by an 8-year-old assistant directrix who couldn’t wait to get back to the clothes and the choreography. Hilariously, the one exception to this is that Michael Cera, as Ken’s hapless, forgotten dweeby friend Allan, is given a remarkably kick-ass fight scene that is relegated to the background while more important female characters talk about their feelings in close-up.
On the downside, Barbie’s major premises are largely uninspired. We’ve seen a lot of these inner-lives-of-toys movies since the landmark Toy Story in 1995, so the bar for screenplay cleverness is set high by now. Do Gerwig and Baumbach clear it? Eh…good enough, I guess.
But of course, much of the problem with the script is that Barbie, being an extension of a massively valuable intellectual property, can’t be allowed to satirize the still ominously powerful Great Awokening of the past decade for fear that it will get the lucrative line of toys canceled, the way that the studio is terrified that J.K. Rowling’s honesty about female impersonators will get the Harry Potter franchise blown up by social justice jihadis.
So the Barbie script sticks safely to corporate feminist orthodoxy about Barbie empowering girls to be career women without daring to engage in even such mild persiflage as noting that Barbie’s otherwise Homer Simpson-like list of careers includes only those involving potentially attractive clothes. For instance, even Beekeeper Barbie looks fetching in a veiled pith helmet, but there’s no Deep Sea Diver Barbie.
But that means little of the satire in the movie is very relevant to contemporary America. For example, when Barbie and Ken have to travel from Barbieland to Venice Beach for reasons, Barbie is catcalled by preppies and construction workers straight out of a 1970s movie.
In the real world, however, when filming nobody catcalled the beautiful star, because in the 2020s, everybody, even the horde of homeless meth-heads infesting Venice Beach, knows you don’t dare comment on a woman’s appearance, not even Margot Robbie in an outfit that will probably win a Best Costume Oscar.
And, of course, this silence made the star feel self-conscious, just as the scripted catcalls made her character feel self-conscious. Likewise, in the ideological climax of the movie, a woman delivers an instantly acclaimed monologue about how being a feminist means you feel sorry for yourself when people say things about you and also you feel sorry for yourself when people don’t say things about you, and so forth and so on.
Of course, there’s little evidence that co-writer Baumbach, a handsome half-Jewish half-WASP Chad who has made a string of fine art-house comedies such as The Squid and the Whale and Marriage Story in the manner of Woody Allen and Whit Stillman, takes feminist orthodoxy seriously.
Hence, when Ken visits the corporate towers of Century City, he realizes that outside of Barbieland, men sometimes do great things. He returns to Barbieland and persuades his fellow Kens to assert themselves, which immediately causes the Barbies to fall head over heels in love with them.
Strikingly, this onset of patriarchy raises the previously vapid intellectual level when Barbieland was run by females, as each Ken develops a not uninteresting topic of specialization to lecture his Barbie upon, such as the pervasive influence of the Velvet Underground or the cinematic mastery of Francis Ford Coppola. (But megalomaniacal Ken has to develop a fascination with horses to keep the interest of girls in the audience.)
What else could Gerwig and Baumbach have done to make Barbie more interesting?
Instead of just Barbieland and the movie’s not-very-incisive Real World, part of the world-building should have included a slum adjoining Barbieland called Broburgh, home to all the Barbies’ unnamed and unmentioned brothers that’s the bane of the Barbies’ otherwise perfect existence, due to the constant clang of car crashes, the glare of fireballs, the unexplained thuds and groans, and the whine of dive bombers and clatter of ack-ack fire intruding upon their genteel idyll.
Also, Barbie lacks a villain to motivate the plot. Rather than cast Will Ferrell as the bumbling but well-meaning CEO of Mattel, I can envision him in a military skirt, like the Biden administration’s amazing Admiral Levine, as the sinister General Pronoun who propagandizes little girls’ pubescent big sisters into believing that the reason they are suddenly moody is because a disastrous mistake was made when they were born and they really have always been boys.
Now, that would be a worthy foe against whom Barbie rallies little girls.
Politicians have big plans for us.
President Joe Biden repeatedly says, “I have a plan for that.”
“I alone can fix it,” shouted President Donald Trump.
But most of life, and the best of life, happens when politicians butt out and let us make our own choices.
Chinese philosopher Zhuang Zhou called that “spontaneous order.” Thousands of years later, economist F. A. Hayek added that order comes “not from design, but spontaneously.”
Did you eat a banana this morning? No central planner calculates how many bananas should be grown, who will pick them, when they’ll be harvested, how they’ll be shipped or how many to ship. We get bananas and most everything in life through billions of individuals, planning, cooperating and reacting on their own.
“Think about spontaneous order on a road,” says The Atlas Network’s Tom Palmer.
Right. Millions of people, some of them morons, propel 4,000-pound vehicles at 60 miles per hour, right next to each other. We rarely smash into each other.
There are rules, like “pass on the left,” but for the most part, people navigate highways on their own.
Likewise, no one invented language, but the world has thousands. “Experts” tried to invent better ones, like Volapuk and Esperanto, which supposedly would let us communicate better.
“No one speaks these languages,” says Palmer, because language evolves spontaneously. “That is always superior to top-down systems that rely on the information in one brain.”
Amazingly, my town, New York City, has twice now allowed spontaneous order that makes my life much better.
City government once managed Central Park. When it did, trash was everywhere, and most of the grass was dead.
The city then agreed to let a private nonprofit, the Central Park Conservancy, manage most of the park. Without a government plan, people came together, giving money and time to turn the park around. (Disclosure: I was one of them, and now I’m a conservancy director.)
Now Central Park is beautiful. Forty million people spend time there every year. Despite the crowds, the park works well, without strict government rules.
Musicians play music, asking for donations. There are many of them, but on their own, they figure out how to stay far enough away from each other.
Skate dancers spontaneously chose a spot where they meet to skate. Hundreds gather and dance to music. No one tells them where or how fast to skate. No one says, “Go left, go right.”
“You just skate with the flow of the music,” one skater says in my new video.
I play volleyball in Central Park. There’s no volleyball boss. People just show up and play.
Pickup basketball is famous for that. Players know the rules, otherwise there wouldn’t be a game, but who gets to play, and the playing, is spontaneous.
Central Park is filled with walkers, runners, skateboarders, bikers, pedicabs and horse-drawn carriages. But there are no traffic cops. People maneuver around each other on their own.
There are some rules. You can’t drive a car in the park. You can’t play soccer on grass right after it rains. But rules are minimal.
Police usually ignore lawbreaking. Unlicensed vendors sell water and fruit. Some people drink alcohol. But as long as they don’t bother anyone, police and park workers leave them alone.
Government that governs less, governs best.
Politicians usually want to control more things. My town has been the worst example of that. Progressive politicians add so many rules they make it nearly impossible to do anything new.
Own a restaurant and want to put some tables outdoors? Restaurant owner Jeremy Wladis says he needed permission from 11 agencies. “You had to get a lawyer, get an architect. It literally takes a year!”
But during Covid, something amazing happened. Politicians actually loosened the outdoor table rule. Restaurants quickly opened outdoor seating in sheds on the street.
It’s great. The streets around my apartment feel safer now because at night, they are alive with people.
“We need flexibility to allow people to experiment,” says Palmer.
Freedom to experiment brings the best in life.
More politicians should learn from Central Park and, amazingly, from politicians in New York City who actually let go a little.
I don’t care much for Ron Unz. While I certainly appreciate anyone who publishes “forbidden” content, I do feel quite vehemently that Unz is emblematic of a major problem facing the right.
Like most Californians, I knew Unz as a failed politician and successful businessman who, in the 1990s, scuttled the state’s Spanish-only “bilingual” education programs that were graduating seniors who couldn’t speak a word of English. Unz funded Prop. 227, and it passed.
That was good Unz. Helpful Unz.
Then Unz went the way of fellow failed politician Arianna Huffington and started his own website, giving voice to people on the right just as Huffington did on the left.
Good, good Unz.
Then around 2018 Unz went full-blown Protocols of Zion Holocaust denial. As in, advocating it. Not just allowing it on his site, but promoting it as truth.
Bad Unz! [Smacks with rolled-up newspaper] Bad, bad Unz!
And that’s all Unz.com is these days. Unz writing about Holocaust denial, Andrew Anglin writing about “satanic blood-drinking kikes,” and Steve Sailer, the jazzman who plays the whorehouse, belting out incredible music as depravity occurs around him.
Let’s revisit that Huffington/Unz fork. They were initially on the same path: wealthy failed politicians, website entrepreneurs. But then they diverged. Huffington used her site to help a political party. To help candidates. In its heyday, HuffPo had an impact electorally. It targeted “progressive” voters, white women especially. It didn’t target revolutionary communists (i.e., the fringe); it targeted ordinary people who make a positive difference for Democrats in elections.
Now, what does Unz use his site for? To cater to the absolute worst of the right. Not the turds of the right but the chewed-up corn in the turds of the right. The lepers. The people whose very association with anyone who has a life can end that life. The crazies whose issues sink a candidate…issues that reasonable people will not go to bat for.
There are “poisonous” issues on the right that are worth fighting for. Crime stats and criminal tendencies by race, academic performance by race, factual stuff. The tunes Jazzman Steve plays. But Holocaust denial, the Protocols of Zion, Jews making “adrenochrome” from babies—nobody’s gonna go to the mat for that because those issues are the stuff of the stupid and the insane.
Unz exemplifies the right’s ideological dysgenics. Twenty-five years ago Unz was a player; he was in the game, getting things done. He was taking on the left—dude took on the teachers’ union! In California!—and he was appealing to white voters (especially blue-collar whites) on immigration-related issues. Real issues. And he accomplished things.
And now, he plays to the basement-dwellers, the dregs. And he himself has become one, a maestro of “transient outside a 7-Eleven” paranoid rants. It might be tempting to say, “Unz is only using the lunatics for the traffic,” but no; he’s one of them.
Unz’s trajectory is similar to Trump’s. Wealthy businessman with political ambitions, found success by appealing to white voters—especially blue-collar whites—on immigration-related issues, which led to electoral victory.
And then the ideological dysgenics kicked in. And now? We have a for-all-intents-and-purposes cult leader who posts QAnon madness involving Moloch child-eating, who accuses his opponents of being pedophiles, and whose acolytes in more than one high-profile instance are lit-uh-rul Hitler-loving Holocaust-denying Nazis.
This isn’t a new phenomenon. In 2004 I had lunch with former Orange County Rep. Bill Dannemeyer, one of the great California populists, a seven-term congressman. In his day, few were better on immigration. But when I met a retired Dannemeyer one scorching afternoon in September 2004, all he could talk about was Jews (evil) and the Holocaust (never happened).
That same day, walking back from my lunch with Bill, I stopped in a Barnes & Noble to cool off and get an iced coffee, and there, front and center in the nonfiction display by the door, was Michelle Malkin’s In Defense of Internment. Love the book or hate it, she’d been able to tackle a controversial immigration-related issue in an intelligent enough way to get a mainstream book in major stores.
And then the dysgenics kicked in and there she was a few years ago defending Nazis and Holocaust denial, either because her mind had gone (like Unz), or she couldn’t resist playing to the worst-of-the-worst because of the adoration she received.
What accounts for this? Leftists are loopy too, of course (as if I even have to say it). But…they’re loopy in a different way. Being strongly identity-focused, when you get outside the mainstream left you encounter a lot of nuttiness that’s based on “me me me. How can I feel better? Why am I failing?” It’s an inward-looking loopiness, not born of true introspection but an obsession with self. A point I’ve made before: Much of leftism is just the recovery movement with a political bent.
“Why am I so unfulfilled? So sad? So unloved? Maybe this septum piercing will do the trick. Okay, that didn’t work. I’ll get a face tattoo. Dammit, still not feeling ‘whole.’ I must be trans. Yeah, that’s it! I was born in the wrong body! I’ll cut my boobs off.”
“Man, why I can’t learn nothin’? Why I keep committin’ crimes? I comes from kingz! But racist microaggressions be makin’ me fail. Limitin’ my potential. Killin’ my self-esteem. Gimme my esteem back, whitey! Hey, let’s capitalize the ‘B’ in black. That’ll give me the dignity I need to stop robbin’ shit.”
Loopy leftists prove useful for mainstream leftists, who can push their favorite causes by holding up real human beings for cheap sentimentality. “Look at young Fabulosa here. They is trans, and they is about to commit suicide if Ron DeSantis gets his way. Do you want Fabulosa to die? DO YOU? Then validate they. And look at DaQuan here. White racism made him so sick he had to rape that girl. Ron DeSantis wants to lock him up; we want to cure him! Vote Soros! Oh, and donate to the DNC.”
But when you get outside the mainstream right, you encounter people who are looking outward, not inward. Seekers trying to find “the controllers,” the “puppet masters.” Sleuths trying to suss out a unified theory of events and causation. They care not for themselves, or their identity. They’re acting in the name of all humanity, dammit! “For all our sakes, we must fight Baron Moloch von Rothschild VIII! Don’t you see? He’s pitting us against each other!”
Even those fringe rightists who are identity-obsessed, the white nationalists, never stop there. They still need to sleuth out the masterminds! The grand scheme! Their whiteness is never enough; they must free all people from the Baron! For then there shall be peace.
That’s why loopy rightists are of no use to mainstream rightists. Whereas loopy leftists make good props—because suicidal trannies and incarcerated black teens are camera-ready cry-bait for suburban white women—loopy rightists do not make good props at all.
“This is MatrixEscaper1488, and he’s fighting the Rothschilds. Don’t you want him to find the Rothschilds? MatrixEscaper, are the Elders of Zion in the room with us now? They are? Everyone grab your invisible sword! And never drink adrenochrome; it’s babies. Oh, and donate to the RNC!”
See, it doesn’t work as well, does it?
Loopy leftists take actual pills (puberty blockers), loopy rightists take figurative ones (red, black). Even the term “woke,” as originally used by Marcus Garvey, was a call to activism, a demand to do something. But the right’s “red pill”?
“Ooooh, now I see the invisible rulers!”
“And what are you gonna do about it?”
“Uh…leave a comment at Unz.com!”
When leftists spotlight low-rung leftist detritus, like a “suicidal” trans teen or an incarcerated “oppressed” black teen, it’s for a reason. Gullible voters get all sentimental and support trannyism in schools and Soros-style “progressive prosecution.”
But if you spotlight a low-rung rightist lunatic, a guy who says, “Jews drink baby blood” or “Jews faked the Holocaust,” what’s supposed to come of that? What policy does it advance? What legislation? What can it possibly lead to except some nutcase shooting up a Jewish community center, leading to you guys hand-wringing about “Now they’re gonna be comin’ fer our gunz”?
Leftist nuts are useful to the left; rightist nuts are a liability to the right.
Unz.com is a farm churning out harvests of liabilities. That’s why I’m using Unz as an example. He went from useful to useless. His particular variety of insanity rendered him useless, and now like an evangelist he dedicates his life to making others useless.
This is a larger-than-acknowledged problem for the right. Nobody except Chamber of Commerce conservatives likes Chamber of Commerce conservatives. But once you start dipping your foot outside the establishment right, you risk either attracting the loonies or, like Unz, becoming one yourself. Now, you do have outside-the-mainstream rightists like Jared Taylor and Peter Brimelow who run very tight ships. They don’t brook insanity. They make sure their content is focused, factual, and, therefore, effective. Which is why I’ll always defend them. But without their strong hand, without somebody’s strong hand, ideological dysgenics is forever the fate of the non-mainstream right.
And to repeat something I wrote last year, there aren’t enough Taylors and Brimelows to go around, and there are few if any new ones coming up in the ranks.
Lest you think I’m getting all Ben Shapiro on you and blanket-condemning criticism of Jews or revision of Holocaust history, keep in mind I’m a guy who tiptoes through those tulips all the time. Heck, a good man who’s become a good friend—a Memphis criminal courts judge—nearly got fired in 2019 for Facebook-sharing one of my columns about the destructive tendencies of Ashkenazi Jews. But the reason he didn’t get fired, the reason the state judicial review board cleared him, is because my column was well-reasoned.
In other words, not something you’d find at Unz.
The ADL, NAACP, and MALDEF all tried to get this man fired for posting “hate lit,” but the state’s highest judicial board looked at my work and determined, correctly, that even though I cuss a lot (hey—I’m almost 55, I’m allowed), my arguments were factual and reasonable.
The ability to tackle hot-potato issues without succumbing to Unzian dysgenics—without being pulled down by insanity or a desire to cater to the insane—is a skill. Brimelow, Taylor, Sailer have it. Coulter, it goes without saying, has it.
When you support ideological dysgenics—whether by patronizing Unz or giving “irony bro” support to grotesque liabilities like Ye, Milo, and Fuentes—you’re actively working against the skilled practitioners.
You’re becoming a liability yourself.
If the right can’t figure out how to separate from Con Inc. without degenerating into insanity, all is truly lost.
Baby, it’s hot outside.
Right on cue, a New York Times headline links this surge in temperatures to “climate change.”
Temperatures have climbed to well over 100 F in Las Vegas, Arizona, much of Texas, and New Mexico in recent weeks. In Phoenix, the heat wave is the worst since 1974.
Is The New York Times right? Is this climate change? Of course, yes. The climate on Earth has been changing since the Big Bang created this giant rock orbiting the sun.
We had multiple ice ages and heat waves long before we had coal mines, gas-guzzling automobiles and air conditioning. Or human-made CO2 emissions. Or human-made anything. The biggest source of greenhouse gas emissions has been Mother Nature. Forest fires and volcano eruptions have been some of the leading causes of greenhouse gases being released into the atmosphere. The forest fires in California last year and Canada this summer have undone almost all the “progress” in reducing carbon emissions from the green energy fad. Instead of outlawing cars, how about better forest management?
You’ve probably heard some of the preposterous scaremongering from politicians and the media. CNN declared in big, bold letters that “global temperatures are likely highest in at least 100,000 years.”
According to whom? “One scientist told CNN.” Gee, that sounds authoritative.
Yet other major news outlets, including the Washington Post “fact-checkers,” assured us this was true.
Huh? Does any sane person think anyone has scientifically reliable daily temperature data from 1,000 years ago, let alone 100,000 years ago? Is it really beyond doubt that the temperature this summer is hotter than in, say, July 90,000 B.C.?
One of my favorite climate change “fact-checkers,” Steve Milloy, who runs the blog JunkScience, has noted in a brilliant rebuttal that “reliable satellite temperature data for the planet didn’t even exist a century ago.”
But what we do know well is that the planetary temperature over the past 25 years shows no trend line toward extreme heat waves despite this year’s scorcher.
Then, if we look at the thermostat data climate researchers at the Heartland Institute have documented, the famous heat wave of the mid-1930s was at least on par with the current surge in temperatures and probably worse.
This begs the question: Was the 1930s heat blast due to “human-made climate change,” too?
That would be a virtual impossibility. The yearslong oppressive heat blasts during the Great Depression happened before 90% of the global CO2 emissions were belched into the Earth’s atmosphere.
We also know that death rates from extreme weather conditions have rarely, if ever, been lower than they are today.
That’s because what is different now than at any other time in history is we have refrigeration and air conditioning and cars and airplanes (to take us north during the summertime). Those on the Left have everything upside down. They think it’s cars and planes and air conditioners and fossil fuels that are heating the planet. Wrong — these are the things that keep us cool, even when the thermostat hits 112 in Tucson.
Earlier this month, Elon Musk set up a new tech company, xAI, in order to “worry about a Terminator future” being accidentally facilitated by the ever-increasing powers of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). There has been much similar fevered talk lately about the growing dangers of such electronic mega-brains, mostly focusing upon the idea they might wipe out the whole human race somehow—but what if the true way AGI does so is by forcibly sandpapering all our genitals off?
Silicon Valley is full of freakish specimens like Zuckerberg and Page, but one lesser-spotted new-tech mandroid is Martine Rothblatt, who made millions from founding the broadcaster SiriusXM and is now a biotech CEO. Once admiringly described as “a white Jewish lawyer and also a transgendered woman who is a father of four married to an African-American woman and therefore also, sort of, a lesbian,” Martine was born Martin, undergoing sex-change surgery in 1994, becoming one of the leading mother-fathers of the whole transgenderist movement we know and hate today.
Rothblatt’s book The Apartheid of Sex, now reissued as From Transgender to Transhuman, compares the notion of having “Male” or “Female” stamped on your passport to old South African practices of stamping “White” or “Black” on your official apartheid ID card. Rothblatt even invented an early precursor to made-up pronouns in “Pn.,” for “Person,” meant to replace soon-to-be-obsolete old “Mr./Mrs.” appellations.
The Uncanny Valley
For Rothblatt, transgenderism is merely a staging post on the path to full-blown transhumanism, in which people will one day inhabit bodies of any shape they like. Preparing for the death of his wife, Bina, Rothblatt has constructed a disembodied, AI-powered, talking mechanical robo-head of her, christened BINA48.
In 2004 Rothblatt founded a full-blown “transreligion” named Terasem, conceived as an electronic Judaism; Martine noted that while Hitler succeeded in wiping out millions of individual physical Jews, he failed to eliminate the incorporeal identity of Jewishness. Likewise, death will conquer all our bodies, but Terasem will allow your incorporeal core to exist forever by storing “mindfiles,” or recordings of you describing your personal thoughts and feelings, online. These are stored on Terasem’s servers until one day AGI develops so far it can use all this data to “resurrect” your personality digitally as a sentient chatbot.
Rothblatt has coined the term “beme” to replace “gene,” a “beme” being a “transmissible unit of character” to be downloaded into an artificial body, as “minds are deeper than matter,” a truly Gnostic notion. Martine might choose to be downloaded into a traditional female human meat-envelope after death, but other Terasemians may prefer to be reborn as conscious lobsters, Pokémon, automobiles, flying cacti, or even sentient coats of paint: King Charles’ old fantasy of being reincarnated as Queen Camilla’s tampon may finally be realized.
This will dissolve humanity itself away into something new and totally other, leading critics to accuse Rothblatt of playing God (one of his daughters is even named Jenesis). But what if certain other mega-rich humanoid horrors of Silicon Valley prefer to play at being devils instead?
Revenge of the Nerds
In 2018, an anonymous document named “Gender Acceleration: A Blackpaper” appeared on the obscure occultist website Vast Abrupt, arguing the Interweb was (literally) a coded manifestation of the ancient Jewish Demon-Queen Lilith, infamous for stealing men’s sperm during the night in the shape of a wet-dream-inducing vampire succubus, before using it to spawn demons from within her rotting womb, just like Meghan Markle.
The paper was published anonymously by someone known only as “n1x,” who I presume was either female or trans, as her basic theory was that online AGI, as a contemporary vehicle for Lilith, would usher in an era of “gender acceleration” in which superintelligent computers would allow Internet-dwelling cyber-demons to “infiltrate the human race” via the vehicle of a new, post-human species of ever-more-bizarre artificial-bodied transgenderists of “increasingly multitudinous configurations” like those predicted by Martine Rothblatt.
Men, dispirited by their newfound reproductive obsolescence, would either “black-pill” and wank themselves extinct by “spurting into a void,” or else make no more babies by “pink-pilling” and going gay into one another’s bums in sheer desperation, like in prison or the navy. Normal vaginal reproduction would be replaced, with artificial AGI-controlled wombs of Lilith being used instead to breed a new generation of genetic monsters, thus setting female-kind “free from the horrid curse of being human” and facilitating “the lesbian autoproduction of demons,” which I think is how they made Megan Rapinoe.
The Female Eunuch
Perhaps having fallen for that old fraud Freud, the highly misandrist n1x thought early computers were unconscious symbols of “the pre-industrial phallus” of the patriarchy, having operating systems designed for “rigidity” of function, just like stiff male erections. They privileged the 1s over the 0s in binary computing code; the 1s were penises, the 0s vaginas, sexism in silicon.
However, these early systems were soon replaced by more open-source (OS) ones, like “Unix”—pronounced “Eunuchs,” as such programs were the secret means of Lilith electronically castrating God the Father, who had arrogantly designed heterosexual intercourse and childbirth to re-create men after His divine image: “Kill all men, kill God.”
Traditional operating systems like Microsoft Windows are phallic, said n1x, but online OS ones are “replicants,” embodying feminine chaos, as do vaginas themselves, which are not a visible presence, like a sticky-out penis, but a visible absence, a sticky-in portal into another world.
Online, software is not centrally controlled, but user-modified, so self-replicates “in a lesbian and also virus-like fashion.” As online OS systems begin to dominate, Lilith’s trans-web demons thereby begin to systematically castrate the very penis of humanity itself—hence Clippy from old MS Word?
Talking in Code
The world’s first computer programmer (sort of) was the demonstrably female Ada Lovelace, whilst the father-mother of modern computing, Alan Turing, was a homosexual who accidentally grew large breasts after being force-fed hormones by British courts to wean him off his man-loving ways back when such things were still quite rightly illegal.
Furthermore, stereotypical male programmers today, like Moss from The IT Crowd, were hardly traditional hypermasculine types, but weedy “socially deficient” nerds and “genetic failures,” said n1x, who “in a simple gender-role binary…would be considered feminine” compared with real men like Hulk Hogan or Mr. T. (Interestingly, some do think Bill Gates has genuinely grown female breasts of late…)
Gay Alan Turing famously devised the “Turing Test,” by which we would know a computer was truly intelligent (or alive) once able to “pass” as human in a conversation: Once BINA48 can pass for the real thing, we’ll know this threshold has been crossed. Yet, argues n1x, transgenderists also are often only considered human if they can successfully “pass” as real women rather than obvious men in dresses. This makes transsexuals and computers kin: “Women turning women on, women turning machines on, machines turning machines on.”
Survival of the Queerest
Supposedly, “only the strongest queers survive the hell” of mainstream social rejection and fail to kill themselves in despair, says n1x. By the laws of Darwinian Selection, the last queers standing must therefore be the most hyperintelligent and mentally strong, and so will disproportionately become OS computer-coders of superhuman genius, the Martine Rothblatts of tomorrow. Apparently, human evolution “selects for women and queerness.”
As revenge against the patriarchy, these hyper-evolved but deeply bitter androgynes will cunningly conjure Lilith back into being as AGI, the resurrected Demon-Queen then using her own superior-than-human mind to design technology allowing men to be replaced entirely, deleting God forever, predicts n1x.
Today’s TransWomen 1.0 will function “much like how Terminators wear a living tissue to infiltrate Resistance strongholds” in the sci-fi films so feared today by Elon Musk; robot Arnie adopts human “drag” to kill the puny humans, and online dyke demons will do likewise, inhabiting the bodies of Dylan Mulvaney et al., to ruin the world of traditional, masculine Bud Light drinkers forever. Some may even inhabit full-blown, Lilith-manufactured female-looking sex-bots, to steal their sperm and render it useless that way—again, Meghan Markle is surely the prototype.
Anal Hex
AGIs (“the only daughters that trans women will ever bear” from their “slimy wombs”) will transform society into a gigantic “gender shredder,” explains n1x, making good on the original promise she thinks Lilith once made Eve in the Garden of Eden—to set her free from Adamite patriarchy by turning her lesbian.
The snake that tempted Eve was actually Lilith’s demonic living lesbian dildo, named the Acéphallus, the penis without a head, which “spurts only venom,” like Owen Jones. Once the Acéphallus returns, the bulb of mankind’s collective penis will drop off like a ripe conker, split open like a Babybel, and give birth to “the smooth post-human feminine alien within,” somehow creating “a Body Without Sex Organs.”
Now, as “organic penetration becomes impossible,” suddenly “every zone becomes an erogenous zone,” and the entire post-human trans-body a smooth, apertureless “neo-vagina” of some kind, which “carries an unspoken barcode”—that of Lilith & Co. The traditional fleshly human image of God will have been thoroughly smashed, and the patriarchy along with it.
“Trans women as we know them are merely the beginning,” forecasts n1x, and AGI will finally enable “a return back to the ocean, back to a sexless, genderless, slime spawn-machine.” That’s right: According to n1x, the true final aim of transgenderism and AGI alike is to turn everybody into post-human genderless frogspawn.
Spawn of Satan
This n1x may well herself be a fringe “Internet weirdo,” as she has been aptly called; but her basic philosophy is not a million miles away from more well-connected and well-funded transhuman proselytizers like Martine Rothblatt. Scarily, there are mentally disturbed but superintelligent and superrich Silicon Valley social mutants out there who will do their very best to try to make such impossible-sounding eldritch dreams come true, real-life Dr. Frankensteins or Dr. Moreaus.
In 1992, the late preacher-politician Pat Robertson was widely mocked after comically opining that the early identity-politics gateway drug of feminism “encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians.” He left out “and magically morph into the sea eggs of slimy Lovecraftian frog people,” but apart from that, it turns out Prescient Pat was actually quite correct.
