I wonder how many Americans quite understand what the US is facing in its aggressive confrontation with China. Washington clearly prepares the public for another unnecessary war. Given America’s routine defeat in war and catastrophic miscalculations in fighting small powers, picking a fight with what, increasingly, is again becoming the Middle Kingdom seems less than bright. Yet within the Beltway there is the usual smug complacency, the unshakable arrogance that appears to think the China is just a big Norway or Guatemala that needs to be put in its place.
A quick glance at China:
China easily leads the world in civil engineering, building roads, bridges, ports, rail lines, long-distance high-voltage transmission lines, and digital infrastructure. People returning from China, including yours truly, discribe it as being like coming back from a more-advanced planet.
Everyone talks about the high-speed trains, with good reason: 180 miles per hour, quiet, comfortable, huge windows, with very short stops at villages between major cities, giving rural populations the speed of air travel without the nuisance. By contrast, American rail looks like something out of 1955.
The importance of civil engineering is more than symbolic. Infrastructure facilitates commerce. China is of course the manufacturing powerhouse of the world. By contrast, America simply ignores infrastructure, spending instead on the military and long since having largely abandoned manufacturing.
China leads the world in ship-building, with South Korea being another major player in this game. America has almost no ship-building except for military, and this has been criticized by the Government Accounting Office for primitivism and slowness. Ship-building obviously is important for commerce, and also for military purposes–China now having the world’s largest navy.
China leads the world in Five G, in patents, technology, manufacturing capacity, installed base. This is not always well understood. Five G allows the transmission of large amounts of data with short response times–high throughput, low latency, as we say. Huawei now has what it calls Five. Five G, an improved version. Five G is important for controlling factories, smart cities, and so on. Beijing takes it seriously, China now having around 3.6 million installed base stations versus something like 100,000 pseudo-Five G base stations in the US.
China finds its brightest students by rigorous testing, and then sends them at government expense to its excellent universities. The US deliberately enstupidates its schools at all levels to make minorities look smarter than they are. How is this going to work?
China dominates the planet in electric vehicles. Its lead over the US is so great as to be insuperable in technology, batteries, price, and productive capacity. If you follow tech news, you see things like a Chinese EV battery that charges in ten minutes. As many have pointed out, BYD’s sub-ten thousand dollar car will find an almost unlimited market in the Global South. No other country is even close. Biden’s high tariffs on Chinese EVs will serve only to allow American companies to continue selling wildly over-priced vehicles to Americans who will have no choice.
China, Russia, and perhaps Iran have developed hypersonic missiles, of which America doesn’t have any. This is interesting. Americans have always assumed technological superiority over Russia and China. Judging by the poor performance of Western weaponry in the Ukraine, this seems questionable.
In other fields, America maintains a lead, or at least an important part lead, though usually not by competing but by strong-arming, sanctions, and tariffs. The greatest of these is semiconductors. The situation is curious. The Chinese have the brains, engineers, and savvy to design and make high-end chips, but Washington has a stranglehold on the equipment needed to manufacture them. However, China has a recent history of horrifying Washington by doing things it wasn’t supposed to be able to do, such as make chips in seven and five nanometer nodes and stay neck-and-neck with the US in supercomputers. But it has not been able to make the advanced lithography tools needed at the forefront of the chip business. If it does, it will be Katie bar the door, but it hasn’t.
China leads the world in production of steel and aluminium. America can’t compete, so it imposes tariffs.
It leads the world in solar panels, leads in technology, production capacity, and price. America can’t compete, so it imposes tariffs.
China remains behind America, but not by much, in aspects of its space program. However, it has an extensive and robust launch capacity, a successful space station in some ways more advanced than the International Space Station, and moves rapidly toward reusable launch vehicles. Years back now, it sent a successful fully automated moon-sample return mission to our satellite, and, later, a combination Mars orbiter, lander, and rover, all functioning perfectly on the first try. NASA and Space X maintain a lead, but it isn’t a growth stock.
There are other fields in which America holds a lead. Jet engines, for example. My point is that Washington seems to suffer a recto cranial inversion, imagining a superiority it only barely has but probably, all things considered, doesn’t. China has four times the US population, the Han by agreement among psychometrists have a five or six point advantage in mean I.Q, and an intelligent government focused on increasing its commercial superiority.
It is all the fashion in America to decry authoritarianism, but this allows Beijing to take decisions and then carry them out, over decades if need be. It also allows a noticeable system approach. In America, individual states or corporations undertake projects like high-speed rail or Five G. China tends to do things on a whole-country basis. The difference in results is clear.
Washington, which subsidizes its own industries, complains that Beijing does the same–but the Chinese system works.
What China doesn’t have is a sprawling, over-extended, low-grade, incomprehensibly costly military draining funds desperately needed to bring America up to modern standards domestically. China is not an appendage of its military. It seems to have figured out that wars cost money and, if there is one thing the Chinese really really like, it’s money.
Sez I, a little more realism in the Yankee Capital might be a good idea, a bit less huff and puff, more spending on America and less on a blood-sucking arms industry. But what do I know?
Never mind the cesspool of toxic masculinity in the Vatican, London’s gentlemen’s clubs, and the Greek monasteries of Mount Athos. This is far worse, an insult to all women, especially lesbians, an institutional blackmail that threatens American democracy and unmarried women the world over. Here’s the lowdown: During a commencement speech at Benedictine College, a Catholic school in Kansas, a professional football player and three-time Super Bowl winner, Harrison Butker—as it turns out, a devout Catholic and married father of three—delivered the speech and praised the institution of marriage and children. The reaction by the usual suspects was to be expected. Moral authorities such as those who claim that sensitivity to minorities is more important than free speech were outraged. How can marriage and children be mentioned and not DEI, was the message from the suspects.
It seems that in America today—by this I mean the bicoastal America of media and entertainment—a man like Butker is excoriated when he chooses to speak his truth. The usual suspects aside, the worst example of hypocrisy came from Harrison’s own team and football’s commissioner, Roger Goodell, a greedy bum-sucker who makes the recently departed crook Ivan Boesky look honest. The Kansas City Chiefs team distanced itself from his remarks, remarks that were as poignant as they were benign: He found happiness in being married and having children and the students should try it. Shock horror!
So, the football player found happiness and told the graduates that he respected and honored the women who chose to be wives and mothers. He never once said that every woman should be a wife and mother, nor that any woman should choose that path in life. And yet, the National Football League and its commissioner distanced itself from his remarks. The NFL has its fair share of tough young felons who regularly are busted for battery against their girlfriends, pulling guns on people in bars, and criminally driving at top speeds in very powerful cars in crowded cities and causing mayhem, injuries, and deaths. Few of the stars can read or write but are all college graduates. And yet the league chose to quickly distance itself from his sincere and salutary words.
There you have it: The America that people read and talk about is distancing itself from love, marriage, and children. It’s as predictable as it is horrible, and I think a reassessment of our culture is badly needed. Actually, it should have been a storm in the proverbial teacup because how many people make life decisions about marriage and children based upon what a commencement speaker recommends? And yet, 214,000 numbskulls signed a petition demanding the Kansas City Chiefs fire the kicker. These are the very same 214,000 morons who insist that they value diversity, equity, and inclusion but refuse fair treatment for those who believe differently. It’s a very old story, this preposterous posturing, of people wanting to stop the rest of us from thinking and acting freely. After all, disdain for free speech is the essence of woke.
And lying is now far more acceptable than any truth. Take, for example, Biden’s recent commencement speech to an all-black university. He told these aspiring leaders that “American democracy had failed them,” that they had to be ten times better than anyone else to get a fair shot: “You are victims of racism and white supremacy.” Adjectives fail to describe how irresponsible, idiotic, and harmful this pompous human barnacle’s remarks are. And he went on to condemn removing explicit pornography from school libraries as a ban in order to erase history. Biden has obviously been conceived by an ape with a dose of the clap. There’s no other excuse.
Never mind. Telling black college graduates that the system is against them was not only blatantly false, it was also an endorsement of every race hustler’s lie that the system is stacked against blacks. Only a brain-dead person is capable of such irresponsible speech, or one conceived by, well, I don’t wish to belabor the point of the ape. And while I’m at it, I might be accused of being old-fashioned, but when was the last time a trans man born a biological woman entered an athletic contest for men? I’m waiting for an answer that ain’t comin’. Better yet, have any of you heard the loud protest over Ivy colleges using their Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion policy to reject a huge proportion of candidates for faculty jobs because their views are deemed counter to their left-leaning ideological orthodoxy? No, there’s nothing wrong with your hearing, no one’s raising their voice in protest while the universities keep hiring only radicals to teach our youth.
Yep, America was once upon a time a great country, where even love, marriage, and children were welcome, teachers taught students how to think, and presidents pointed out to citizens that they all had equal opportunities to excel in life. “No mas,” as they say south of our open borders.
I did not think I could hate The New York Times more.
But thanks to Gregory Mantell’s amazing new book, Special Victim Status, The Era of Woke Journalism, I do! Mantell’s carefully researched book provides hundreds of new facts about the press’s fanatical propaganda on race.
Coincidentally, this week is the four-year anniversary of George Floyd’s death, and I think the traditional gift is paper. You know what would make a great anniversary gift? This book.
Nothing shocked me more than Chapter 3 on the Ahmaud Arbery case.
If you follow the news, you know that Arbery was the innocent black jogger chased down by three racist rednecks in Georgia and shot dead merely for “jogging while black.”
Arbery’s killers, Travis and Gregory McMichael, were convicted in about six minutes and sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. Plus 20 years, just to be safe. Eight months later, they got bonus life sentences in separate federal hate crimes prosecutions. A neighbor, William “Roddie” Bryan Jr., who happened to be there, got 35 years (state) plus life (federal).
Quite a turnabout for a case that three prosecutors refused to take after concluding there was no crime. But our media can perform miracles!
Mantell contrasts the media’s treatment of Arbery’s killing with their take on the murder of Christopher Lane, a white jogger shot and killed by a black man in Oklahoma.
Arbery: RACIST HATE CRIME, COMMITTED BY HATEFUL RACISTS!
Lane:
— “the simplest of motives — boredom.” — The Washington Post
— “a tale about teenagers from broken families, lives complicated by drugs and poverty, who seemed idle.” — The New York Times
The facts of the Lane shooting are pretty simple:
Lane, a 22-year-old Australian studying at East Central University in Oklahoma on a baseball scholarship, went for an afternoon run on Aug. 16, 2013, in a town that’s 2.5% black, and was shot in the back by a black teen, Chancey Luna, driving by in a car with two other boys. Lane died, blood gushing from his mouth, before the ambulance arrived.
Days earlier, one of the teens charged with Lane’s murder tweeted, “With my n*ggas when it’s time to start taken life’s.”
The facts of Arbery’s shooting are also simple, only made complicated by the media’s lies.
Mantell writes:
“The McMichaels said they attempted to make a citizen’s arrest to take Arbery into custody [after catching him again trespassing in neighbor Larry English’s house late at night]. Bryan, who followed behind the McMichaels in his own truck, caught part of the incident on his cellphone camera. In the video, Arbery punched Travis, and they fought over the gun; during the struggle, Travis shot and killed Arbery.”
But “from the start, both the Times and the Post pushed the false narrative by Arbery’s family and attorney (who were not present during the incident) that Arbery had simply been out jogging through the neighborhood …”
Indeed, a Times reporter wrote that “even if Arbery had been trespassing in the house, it doesn’t justify his shooting.” (Say, can we get Malachy Browne to write an article on Officer Michael Byrd’s deadly shooting of Ashli Babbitt for trespassing at the Capitol on Jan. 6?)
Mantell notes a few omissions from the Times’ and Washington Post’s “jogging while black” accounts:
— “Convenience store employees reported Arbery was known as ‘the jogger’ because he would stretch and pretend to warm up outside the store and then run in and out quickly, stealing stuff. … The employees said they tried to have police give the man a criminal trespass warning, but he always ran off before they could.”
— “On August 21, 2018, according to Burke County witness reports and Burke County Sheriff bodycam video, a black woman who was married to a sheriff deputy called for help after seeing Arbery in her backyard and looking in her car windows. Sheriff deputies also later mentioned he was trying to steal a dog from the same house … When officers arrived to give Arbery a warning about criminal trespassing, Arbery claimed he had been out jogging and threatened to ‘whoop the officer’s ass.'”
— “On October 23, 2018, a black woman called Burke County Sheriff deputies when she saw Arbery go into a vacant mobile home across from her house … When the sheriff arrived, Arbery ran away from deputies and falsely claimed he had been out jogging.”
— “Arbery was arrested and charged with ‘misdemeanor obstruction for running when given lawful commands to stop.'”
Following his pattern, before “jogging” the night he was shot, Arbery had apparently been burgling English’s house.
But “both the Times and the Post (and other media) continued to falsely report claims that nothing had ever been taken from English’s house in which Arbery had been caught on video trespassing on multiple occasions.”
In fact, Mantell says, “the Post and the Times knew about several 911 calls made in October and November 2019 which directly contradicted those claims … In one [of several calls] English told the dispatcher, ‘we had some stuff stolen from there’ in the last incident … The first time they stole everything out of the boat ‘that wasn’t tied down.’ The next night, November 18, 2019, English called 911 again, reporting that the same black guy who was there about a week or a week and a half ago was back.”
The media simply treated as gospel English’s post-hoc, not-under-oath, scared-stiff statement that nothing had been stolen. More likely, English noticed what had happened to the Atlanta Wendy’s where police had shot a black man in the parking lot in June 2020. (Reuters: “Protesters burn down Wendy’s in Atlanta after police shooting.”)
Tellingly, English “admitted in court he had been greatly troubled by death threats he received.”
No matter. The only relevant fact to the media was this:
“[T]he neighbor Bryan accused Travis McMichael of calling Arbery a ‘fucking n*gger’ after killing him — and when racist messages were found on Travis’ cellphone — both papers devoted breathless headlines and stories to the news. This was reported as absolute proof that the killing of Arbery was racially motivated.”
But, oddly, the media had zero interest in the racist tweets posted by James Edwards, one of the black teens involved in Lane’s shooting, such as:
“90% of white ppl are nasty. #HATE THEM.”
“Ayeee I knocced out 5 woods since Zimmerman court!:) lol sh*t ima keep sleepin sh*t!#ayeeee.” (“Wood” is a racial epithet for a white person.)
Another discrepancy noted by Mantell:
“[W]hile the Times pointed out that Lane’s killer had white friends, it didn’t worry about whether the McMichaels or Bryan had any black friends, though Travis McMichael had risked his own life years earlier to save a black man from drowning (according to a later “48 Hours” report).”
Yeah, “later” — after the media’s propaganda campaign had successfully led to multiple life sentences.
There’s much, much more in this chapter alone, but I’ll end with one more proof of what Mantell means by “special victim status”:
“As of January 15, 2023, Arbery was mentioned in 773 articles in the Post and 955 in the Times. … [O]n May 8, 2020 … the Times ran 14 articles and the Post ran 13 articles about Arbery on that single day. That was more coverage than the Times and the Post gave to Lane’s killing in two years — from his murder to the sentencing of his killers.”
In 2017 the pseudonymous blogger Spotted Toad appears to have coined the term “The Great Awokening” to denote the decade of identity politics mania that began about 2013.
His joke was of course a pun upon the various Great Awakening religious revivals that periodically swept Protestant America in the 1730s and the early 1800s (especially in upstate New York’s “burned-over district”), and the liberal Social Gospel movement of the late 19th century that inspired humanitarian reformers such as Jane Addams.
But Protestant history, which was long recognized as absolutely central to American history, is increasingly seen as boring, and thus all this is fading from consciousness.
Moreover, to the left, being aware of this fundamental U.S. narrative sounds bigoted. While to the right, the notion that the woke call is coming from inside the house is distressing. Thus, we see the obsession among callow rightists about declaring wokeness a foreign, un-American import by Marxists or Jews or Jewish Marxists or whatever.
Yet, a recent article in American Affairs by Sheluyang Peng called “More Christian than the Christians” makes a strong case for wokeness as an outgrowth of traditional Northern U.S. Protestant tendencies in an age of declining faith. In historian David Hackett Fischer’s famous four-layer model of British ethnicities in America, the northernmost Americans were the descendants of fiercely moralistic, cancel-culture-addicted New England Puritans. The next layer south traces culturally back to the less obnoxious Pennsylvania Quakers. Then come the feisty Scots-Irish of the Appalachians and Ozarks, and finally the conservative lowland Southerners.
Peng writes:
…wokeness appears to be a syncretic blend of Puritanism and Quakerism. Woke adherents value elite education and moralizing, seem obsessed with rooting out heretics, adhere to orthodoxy, and display a sense of personal salvation, traits that were all characteristic of Puritans, while also displaying the radical openness and commitment to egalitarianism that characterized the Quakers.
Puritans tended to be intense and Quakers nice. Put them together and you get an intolerant religion of tolerance.
Indeed, the entire American culture war might be best understood as a war over the future of Christianity, even if the combatants themselves do not recognize it in these terms. The talking points of both sides seem stuck in a previous generation, with conservatives continuing to stoke fears of Marxism and progressives continuing to stoke fears of Christian theocracy. The big irony is that it is progressives who are the new theocrats enforcing a Christian-derived morality, while conservatives increasingly abandon Christian churches and lurch toward economically populist proposals, views that Reagan-era conservatives would have called (and some still call) “Marxist.”
While there is no question that Jews achieved remarkable levels of influence in America in the later 20th century (although that may be fading at present because the antiwhite quotas promoted by the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion movement inevitably hurt Jewish chances of being hired, whether Jews personally feel they are white or not), Peng sees Jewish liberalism as, historically, a triumph of assimilation:
Whereas anti-Semites today like to blame Jews in academia for “cultural Marxism,” the correlation actually runs the other way: Jews gave up their faith and assimilated into liberal Christian values, including sometimes literally converting to Christianity. The Jews that resisted assimilation, Orthodox Jews, are a solidly Republican bloc. A similar assimilation is occurring among Asian Americans, who have swelled the ranks of the same colleges over the past few decades.
To evaluate these arguments, I looked for a data source so I could do my favorite task: counting. One of my standard techniques is to find a list that was made up by somebody reasonable for their own goals and repurpose it for my own. That’s better than making up a hypothesis and then looking for examples to support it.
So I took The Atlantic Monthly’s December 2006 feature on The 100 Most Influential Americans. The Atlantic’s team, including Benjamin Schwarz and Ross Douthat, recruited ten heavyweight American historians, such as H.W. Brands and Doris Kearns Goodwin, to nominate their picks.
While you can certainly argue over the historians’ ranking (after all, that’s the point of these kind of features), The Atlantic’s list is reasonable. The top ten names, for instance, are Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, FDR, Alexander Hamilton, Ben Franklin, John Marshall, Martin Luther King, Thomas Edison, and Woodrow Wilson.
Some biases are evident. The historians mostly seem to vote for individuals about whom they can find something to admire, so Roger Taney (author of the disastrous Dred Scott decision), Jefferson Davis, Huey Long, Joe McCarthy, and George Wallace don’t make the top 100. But in this prewoke era, instead of disqualifying Andrew Jackson for the Trail of Tears, he ranks No. 18 with the tagline: “The first great populist: he found America a republic and left it a democracy.”
Also, even in 2006 this historians’ list was biased toward people born before about 1925. One reason is caution. For example, the youngest of the top 100, Bill Gates (b. 1955), was chosen, not unreasonably, to represent the tech industry. But a few months later, his main rival for that honor, Steve Jobs (also b. 1955), unleashed the iPhone, the key invention of this century’s first two decades, upon the world. So public opinion would now rightly rank Jobs above Gates.
The first thing I did was tabulate basic identity demographics:
I count ten women: Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Rachel Carson, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Eleanor Roosevelt, Margaret Sanger, Addams, Betty Friedan, Margaret Mead, and Mary Baker Eddy. Not a bad list, although I might argue that Margaret Mead’s mentor Franz Boas was actually more influential in originating the now-dominant social constructionist perspective in academia.
Eight blacks: King, Jackie Robinson, W.E.B. DuBois, Frederick Douglass, Louis Armstrong, Thurgood Marshall, Nat Turner, and Booker T. Washington. Probably a couple too many, but sensible choices.
One Arab (Ralph Nader) and no Hispanics, Asians, or American Indians. Nader is a good selection to represent the rise of lawyers over the past sixty years in our current NIMBY era.
One striking aspect is how many of the 72 most influential white male Protestants could reasonably be called liberal, progressive, or radical.
Of course, opinions will vary. For example, was George Washington a man of the left or the right? By the standards of the British Empire in the 1770s, he was a treasonous radical. But by the standards of the American republic during the French Revolution, he tended to be center-right.
Still, white male Protestants who were considered on the progressive side in their own time would likely include Lincoln, Jefferson, FDR, Wilson, Teddy Roosevelt, Andrew Jackson, Thomas Paine, Harry Truman, Earl Warren, Ralph Waldo Emerson, William Jennings Bryan, John Dewey, LBJ, William Lloyd Garrison, Frederick Law Olmsted, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., Bill Gates, Horace Mann, William James, Henry David Thoreau, John Brown, Ernest Hemingway, Benjamin Spock, Rev. Lyman Beecher, and John Steinbeck.
Conservatives tend to be a little rarer: e.g., John Marshall, Ronald Reagan, Dwight Eisenhower, Robert E. Lee, John C. Calhoun, William Faulkner, Richard Nixon, and a number of businessmen like J.P. Morgan and Sam Walton.
This could be due to Northern regional bias on the part of The Atlantic, which was founded in Boston just before the Civil War. On the other hand, it’s not a coincidence that a famous highbrow magazine was headquartered in “the Athens of America.”
What about religious ethnicity? Note that I’m not categorizing by precise belief, if any, but by upbringing and background. For example, Henry Ford came to believe in reincarnation, but I don’t list him as a Hindu, but instead as a white Protestant.
And I’m simplifying some complicated family situations. For example, Ronald Reagan’s father was Catholic, but he was brought up in his mother’s Protestant faith, so I’m classifying Reagan as Protestant.
I note seven Jews: Albert Einstein, Jonas Salk, Robert Oppenheimer, Samuel Gompers, Friedan, Walter Lippmann, and Sam Goldwyn.
That’s a healthy number, but it might be fewer than you’d expect from 21st-century discourse. For example, Emma Lazarus of the “huddled masses” poem is now often depicted as a founding father whose word is law on immigration. But she didn’t make the list.
In general, Jews didn’t get here quite in time to be extremely influential on the long course of American history. This fact tends to annoy both Jews and anti-Semites, both of whom want to overstate Jewish influence.
Six Catholics: Sanger, newspaper publisher James Gordon Bennett (who is perhaps the most obscure selection), Babe Ruth, Armstrong, Enrico Fermi, and Nader, who is of Lebanese Maronite ancestry.
Where’s JFK? Granted, JFK ranks behind his vice president, LBJ (No. 44), in accomplishments that can be documented by historians. But in terms of American mythos, Johnson is of no appeal to non-historians today, while among grown-ups, Kennedy remains the most glamorous president. And, on the level of practical impact, the Kennedy family played a major role in boosting immigration. Still, the Protestant vs. Catholic struggle has almost completely vanished down the memory hole.
Two Mormons: Joseph Smith and Brigham Young.
Both were remarkable men, but two Mormons is probably one too many.
So, out of the top 100, eighty were of white Protestant background (or 78 if you don’t count the two Mormon converts).
American history was, no surprise, dominated by white Protestants.
As I mentioned last week, I took a Substack poll regarding my readers’ preferred topics, and the top vote-getters were “scolding idiot rightists” and “musing about Hollywood.”
So how’s about this week we do Hollywood?
In 1986 my high school AP history teacher—the finest instructor I’ve ever known (I’d name her but she’s still alive, in her 90s, and because of my continued baffling toxicity I’m concerned that naming her might cause Media Matters to harass her)—got me an apprentice casting gig at a movie studio.
To my Appalachian readers, “casting” is the job of choosing actors for a movie or TV show. A director says, “I need an actor to play a hard-edged private eye who’s also a werewolf,” and the casting director auditions actors and chooses the best “Werewolf P.I.” for the director.
Casting directors are gatekeepers, the people who control which actors get passed up or passed along.
I loved casting. It combined my appreciation of acting with my desire to have godlike control over the fate of others. Indeed, I soon tired of being an apprentice, so I transitioned to head casting director for a company that, in 1986, was pioneering the “direct to video” market (the “streaming” of the late 1980s). Now I was the big gorilla. And I helped launch a lot of actors. Again, I won’t name them, because Media Matters.
The trick to being a casting director—indeed, the artistry of it—is more than just giving an actor the sides to read (sorry, Appalachians: “Sides” means a segment from a script. Like how a “side” of beef is a cutting from a carcass, as in when you sever that possum dick for a snack tonight). The skill is spending twenty minutes with the person to learn if, talent aside, they’d be a blessing or burden on set.
In 1986 most hot white chicks did coke. So, you had to look for the signs. You had to be able to differentiate allergy nasal issues from coke nasal issues. Cokeheads are great when they’re high, but when they crash, they’re a nightmare. They won’t get out of bed, they won’t show up on set. You had to eliminate the cokeheads because casting them meant burdening the director with an eventual problem, even if, on paper, the girl was a good choice for the role.
Boyfriends? When casting a bimbo, you had to ensure that she was not under the thumb of a Biff or Zeke or Deke. If an actress came to the audition with her boyfriend in tow, I’d never cast her. The presence of a controlling boyfriend meant that the bimbo was at risk of an emotional breakdown should Zeke leave her (“Bwaaaaa-haaaa-haaaaa, how can I go on without him???!!!”), or, conversely, he could become an on-set pain should the bimbo leave him, best typified by the experience of my friend Bill Sachs, who, in 1980, was shooting a film with Playmate of the Year Dorothy Stratten when her abusive boyfriend blew her face off and totally ruined the movie.
You wanna shoot someone, fine. But don’t queer the box office of an Avery Schreiber film.
Most of the women I’ve dated in my life were actresses, and they all wanted me to accompany them to auditions (“I want you to support meeeeeeeeeeeee!”), and I always refused, because the one thing a casting director doesn’t want to see is a bim who can’t go anywhere without “her man.” Because that means she’s dependent. And whether it’s coke or Zeke, directors don’t want dependent bims.
From 1986 to 1992, when I “transitioned” to the exciting new field of Holocaust revisionism because I just knew it would never impact my life in a negative way (maybe I’m not in any position to criticize the intelligence of bimbos), I’d become exceptionally good at reading people. Again, that was the artistry of casting. Twenty minutes in a room with a stranger, taking mental notes about their every move. Asking the right questions to understand their psychology…and their weaknesses.
In my revisionist years, I always knew how to present my Holocaust work to a stranger. Give me twenty minutes, I’d know the manipulative angle to employ. It was predatory, and I’m not proud of it.
So it’s January 1994 and I’m on a plane to NYC.
Coach. Because NBC’s flying me out to do a talk show, and ain’t no way they’re gonna pay for ol’ Dave to fly first-class. Hell, I was just grateful they didn’t send me via FedEx freight. Besides, with my rumpled shirt and unkempt hair, I looked like someone who belonged in coach.
The lady sitting next to me didn’t. She was so WASPy, so proper, so Mayflower-descendant nonethnic, she made Ann Coulter look like Nell Carter.
I’m sure Ann won’t be offended by that line.
Oh, I just got a text from Ann…
…damn, I’ve never seen her use that kind of language before.
Anyway, thirty minutes into the flight, I ratiocinated three things (sorry, Appalachians; stop raping Ned Beatty and buy a thesaurus) about my seatmate:
(1) She’s an equestrian; she didn’t say so…I just knew.
(2) She’s never once admitted to farting. Oh, she’s farted. She’s farted plenty. But at social engagements she keeps by her side two borzois to take the rap for her gas. In high society these are called “digestional support animals.”
(3) She had that old Anglo sense of decency, fair play, and Christian sentimentality. It’s the weakness that (as I’ve pointed out before, and as Steve Sailer recently did as well) led “foundational white Americans” to get all weepy and protective of nonwhites long before the 20th-century flood of Eastern European Jewish immigrants.
I knew I could exploit that weakness, and I did. “I’m a Holocaust revisionist Jew oppressed by the forces of censorship and intolerance! I’m just interested in free speech! Fairness! Asking QWESTCHINS! By gosh, shouldn’t we explore the uncomfortable truths?”
Turned out Frequent-Flyer-Miles Standish was the headmistress at a fancy-ass New England school for wealthy girls who don’t give head. And by the time we landed, I had an offer to lecture her history classes.
In my day, I was good. Damn good.
But it ain’t my day anymore. I couldn’t go back to casting even if I were miraculously cured of my toxicity, because three things killed the casting business.
First thing? Covid led to casting being online-only. No more twenty minutes in a room with an actor. Now you just get video submissions, zero personal interaction. It’s not that there exists any remaining fear of catching the disease. That year when L.A. forced casting to be online-only made casting directors lazy. Turns out they preferred being at home; they got used to it. And it made studios, in a time of falling profits, see the benefit of getting rid of physical casting offices (note to Appalachians: L.A. real estate is super expensive).
Why am I picking on Appalachians so much in this piece?
So the casting biz has lost its artistry. Actors hate it; my actor friends despise online casting because it robs them of the ability to charm their way into a part. Also, it ends one of the most important aspects of casting—asking an actor to do the lines again, with spontaneous notes on how to do it differently (this determines if an actor can take direction on the fly, a hugely important trait). When James Gandolfini auditioned for Tony Soprano, he gave a terrible first read. But then he asked for another chance, and he nailed it. When there’s no personal contact, that kind of thing can’t happen.
Second thing? Racial casting. Casting’s become increasingly about race box-checking. There’s less creativity in the process because casting directors are hamstrung by directives. Producers will say, “I need a Namibian transsexual for this role,” and the casting director might say, “But I got the best reading from a white girl,” and the producer will say, “Follow the quotas.”
The age of casting creativity—discovering talent based on talent alone—is over.
And third, when it comes to bimbos, there just aren’t as many of them around anymore. Bims in my day were drooling for film roles. Today? TikTok, OnlyFans, and Instagram give them immediate fame, instant gratification. Why slave away for years doing Attack of the Zombie Areolas for producer Schlemkin Scheinowitz, hoping to get a big break as you’re paid peanuts, when you can get paid fast cash directly via Twitch for eating an apple in an ASMR vid?
Sure, that kind of “fame” is fleeting, but bims never think long-term.
So casting became more racially regimented, while, at the same time, the pretty white actresses fled for more immediate gratification online.
BTW, those three things, though complementing each other, all happened independently. It’s not always a conspiracy. Sometimes events just converge.
That’s the first lesson rightists can learn from my casting experiences.
Lesson 2? Over the past few weeks, Holocaust-denier Twitter—Elon’s favorite and most coddled niche—has gone nuts with “piles of shoes” memes. “White Americans (or the West) have no rights (or are forced to admit immigrants, or are enslaved) all because of a pile of shoes” (the gist being, the pile of shoes at Auschwitz is why whites are subjugated and the West is dying).
Elon’s favorite million-follower denier accounts, and small-follower rightist accounts, have been madly partaking in this fad. Groypers and MAGAs have even been using AI to write “pile of shoes” ballads.
If you want to see the scope of it, just Twitter-search “pile of shoes.”
In January and April, I wrote about this idiotic far-right myth, that the Holocaust, and not white Christian sentimentality, is responsible for the West’s decline. And what was my reward? An explosion of “the West’s being destroyed because of a pile of shoes” memes. Proof that nothing I write matters, and I swear to God if I weren’t drawing a paycheck I’d be so out of this madhouse.
But let’s “circle back” (does Psaki still say that?) to that blonde airplane WASP. Yes, I sold her on Holocaust revisionism. But I just as easily could’ve sold her on open borders or prison abolition for black criminals. My message wasn’t what mattered; her weakness was. The ADL and NAACP understand that; they understand whites better than the so-called “white advocates.” While Elon and the Twitter Nazis try to make whites more Nazi, the “other side” realizes that the true power lies in harnessing white sentimentality. You can only bring these WASPs around by appealing to “kindness, decency, and fairness.”
Not “kill the kikes.”
Far-rightists can’t suss out psychology and weakness. They lack the intellectual ability. They’re children, idiot children, who’ll forever lose because the people they lose to are smarter.
I try to counsel these imbeciles—and I fail—with the knowledge I came to via casting.
A field I so dearly wish I’d stayed in.
Last month saw the thirtieth anniversary of the death of one of my favorite conservative thinkers, Russell Kirk, back in April 1994. Very possibly Kirk enjoyed the process of passing away into another world, as his conservative beliefs were partly inspired by a lifelong belief in the paranormal.
According to Kirk, his ancestral home of Piety Hill in Michigan was one of the most haunted houses in America, filled with apparitions, disembodied voices, mysterious raps and knocks, self-playing instruments, and an elderly relative who would levitate in her rocking chair. But what did such alleged experiences have to do with politics?
Political Postmortem
Kirk was best known for his 1953 book The Conservative Mind, which celebrated the combined thoughts of the Anglosphere’s leading Tory-type brains, notably the 18th-century statesman Edmund Burke. Burke spoke of there being a direct living chain in existence within all sensible, tradition-respecting societies like the Britain of his day, which linked together the dead with the living and those as yet unborn. However, any civilization foolish enough to begin forgetting or repudiating its ancestors was ultimately doomed to violent chaos and destruction, as in Revolutionary-era France, taught Burke, and Russell Kirk agreed.
In Kirk’s view, one of the best ways of ensuring we did not neglect our ancestors was to continue seeing their ghosts. One sign of a politically healthy and free society was that its people kept on reporting paranormal encounters on a regular basis: It was no coincidence that England, home of both Magna Carta and a traditional monarchy alike, was popularly said to be the most haunted country in the world.
Any land within which ghosts stopped appearing was in severe trouble: Cut off from its ancestral roots, it would soon wither and die, as in Maoist China of the Cultural Revolution period. Here, radicalized Red Guard schoolkids were urged to fight the “Four Olds” of Ideas, Culture, Customs, and Habits, by torturing their parents and teachers, digging up corpses, toppling statues, maniacally renaming buildings and streets, or raiding museums and libraries and burning all the contents, to disastrous social effect.
Red Guards, one would imagine, rarely saw any ghosts at all. Why? Because, as Kirk once wrote, “To have ghosts, one must have a past for ghosts to emerge from” in the first place.
Revolutionary Spirits
Lefties are meant to be progressives: They look forward in time, not backward. Conservatives like Kirk are the precise opposite.
Today, the “progressive” Maoist Cultural Revolution has been reborn anew in our own Marxism-captured schools and universities, where, far from teaching kids to respect their ancestors, they are taught to ritually shit upon them from a very great height: Washington was a slave owner, Churchill was a wog-starver, Jesus was a queer-baiter, etc., etc., ad infinitum. If this was our evil, racist, utterly irredeemable past, goes today’s cartoon campus line of reasoning, then we wouldn’t want to see the returning spirits of any such worthless individuals anyhow.
Awkwardly for the contemporary left, however, Americans stubbornly continue to report seeing ghosts nonetheless. According to one survey from 2019, Republican voters are somewhat more likely to believe in ghosts, at 46 percent, compared with 41 percent of Democrats—but 41 percent is still a hefty proportion of lefties, is it not?
As such, another anti-spook tactic has to be adopted by today’s radical Red Guard left. Rather than eliminating the prevailing false consciousness of belief in ghosts, why not simply morally discredit all such entities by painting them as a bunch of postmortem racist bigots instead? If you can’t exorcize the dead, why not just cancel them?
The Government In-Specter
You do get the occasional reported case of a full-blown racist ghost: In 2000, a black Detroit couple claimed a poltergeist was sending them “racially charged hate messages” through the audio-captioning service of their TV set, leading to an actual FBI investigation.
One of America’s most famous ghosts, the 19th-century Bell Witch, was supposed to be notorious for hating local black slaves. “I despise to smell a nigger, the scent makes me sick,” it once purportedly complained, an excellent potential advertising line for selling deodorant products in the Chicago, Washington, Baltimore, and Portland areas some 200 years later.
Yet stories about poltergeists calling people coons just seem a bit too far-fetched even for those 2020s Democrat voters gullible enough to believe that trans women are women, or that we only have ten years left to save the planet, so an alternative, superficially more plausible tactic of tarring ghosts as racist is to begin depicting parapsychology itself as an unacceptably “white space” instead.
Academic humanities modules are seeping like stale ectoplasm into university syllabuses across the land, bearing titles like “English 321—Ghosts and the Undead: Racial Hauntings in American Literature,” taught at the State University of New York College of Technology from 2020 onward. The basic idea of such course content is that, in truth, the REAL ghost America is haunted by today is the ghost of its evil past, not the Bell Witch or the Amityville Horror: Students in English 321 can learn all about the dreaded “Specter of Racism” by reading spooky novels featuring emotionally overwrought descriptions of the phantoms of dead plantation slaves and suchlike.
The course also apparently teaches students how to become politically psychic and thereby spot “Institutional Hauntings in Contemporary U.S. Culture”—like Puritan-age Witchfinders General once being taught to sniff out invisible demons lurking everywhere in the world around them, the new Wokefinders General of tomorrow will be able to divine the equally intangible demons of institutional racism lurking everywhere around them too.
The Fentanyl Phantom
One place English 321 particularly recommends sniffing out the possessing cacodemons of systemic racism is in the U.S. prison and criminal justice systems—where the chief presiding spirit is no doubt that of George Floyd.
It is now exactly four years since George became a ghost himself, on 25 May 2020, and within weeks he was already speaking from The Other Side through the voice of a white spirit-medium…who was subsequently automatically condemned as a racist. Channeler Carol Collins said George had sent her the urgent message that, with riots breaking out across America, he did not wish his name to be “associated with hate” like that of the protesters, arguing that “civil liberties are not what we need to be fighting for.” Instead, George advised BLM mobs to become “the one who says ‘I love you’ to all,” even neck-kneeling whitey.
Such conveniently anti-BLM messages were quickly linked by eager academics back to the days of 19th-century Spiritualism, when white U.S. mediums had apparently developed quite a habit of channeling dead black slaves who continued to call their owners “dear massa” whilst expressing suspiciously fond memories of their former lives of labor on plantations.
According to Timothy Worrad of the U.K.’s University of Newcastle, such messages were merely used by lying white fake mediums “to ventriloquize victims of racial violence, advance reactionary political messages, and undermine calls for institutional change” by implying that even the dead in heaven accepted slavery as part of the natural order of things. Privileged white mediums get to decide which dead people get to speak at all, you see, and what they actually say when they do so—i.e., generally not Malcolm X yelling, “Shoot all the honkies!”
Academic Exorcizes
Pathetically, some leftists have now begun studying the demographics of ghosts, finding that, as in so many other areas, non-whites are severely underrepresented. Pained paranormal op-eds asking where all the ghosts of blacks and Indians have got to are now starting to appear, whilst professional academic folklorists like Dr. Andrea Kitta of East Carolina University are beginning to publish shroud-waving articles with absurd titles like “Why Are Ghosts So White?” I chose that for the title of this present piece as a joke, thinking it the most retarded angle on this present subject I could possibly think of, then typed it into Google just in case…and found I’d already been beaten to it.
Dr. Kitta teaches a popular class called “The Supernatural,” which she appears to run as a kind of anti–Russell Kirk. As Kitta says, “ghosts give us a sense of history”—but, for a modern-day left-wing university professor, a “sense of history” is an inherently bad thing, as, by linking us back to the past in such a sickeningly Burkean fashion, such evil entities only “reinforce every single stereotype that we work so hard to deconstruct.”
Kitta’s class appears to consist of her getting students to hang around in her office and discuss their own personal paranormal encounters within a designated “safe space,” presumably a pentagram-containing circle of salt—but still the students “have trouble discussing why all of these ghosts [they see] are so white and why the rare ghosts of color are stereotypes of stereotypes.”
Local white people in East Carolina have ghosts of all kinds—phantom florists, trombonists, subatomic physicists, tree surgeons, mime artists, everything—whereas black ghosts are usually just dead slaves or lynching victims (although Kitta claims to know of a dead black maidservant who compliantly continues to fold up white students’ clothes and tidy them away in the form of a racially obedient poltergeist). This, says Kitta, “is surprising,” as the local living population actually contains “large Latinx, Indigenous and Black communities,” so where are all the ghosts of deceased leaf blowers, box dwellers, welfare recipients, and drug dealers, as you may reasonably expect to find? Nowhere, because “Even the structure of these narratives has the clear mark of whiteness in it.”
The White Lady
Risibly, Dr. Kitta takes her students on trips to European cities, purely in order to demonstrate how hideously white all their wraiths are:
“Even when I take students abroad to London to talk about ghosts there, the ghosts are white. London, one of the most multicultural cities in the world, is filled with white ghosts. The ghosts of queens and princes…theatre ghosts, but all white ghosts…. The ghosts of London often match what the students think of London: all double-decker buses, royalty, and beefeaters.”
But what else would the ghosts of London be? Rastafarians? Muezzins? Taoist priests? Turkish janissaries? England’s ghosts would be mostly white, wouldn’t they, as England’s past is mostly white too, at least until about five minutes ago, on a spectral timescale. It would be impossible to have ghosts of black English “queens and princes” when there were none before Meghan Markle, whose ghost sadly can’t haunt London as she regrettably is not dead yet.
But this doesn’t matter, says Kitta: “We need to face these ghosts, who demand we acknowledge our true history, and spend more time exploring the ghosts that we don’t know about.” What, you mean the “ghosts” of people who never actually lived, like a 16th-century black Muslim Prince of Wales, or a Victorian-era Cherokee Speaker of the House of Lords? Skeptics have long claimed ghosts do not really exist: These ones certainly don’t.
The left are always trying to rewrite our past along dubious racial lines, but I never thought they’d go so far as to start engineering a demographic Great Replacement of our ghosts too! Russell Kirk must be rolling in his grave.
The Week’s Most Arboreal, Raptorial, and Day-of-Memorial Headlines
EIN VOLK, EIN REICH, EIN FUROR
It’s been widely reported that when Jimmy Carter was running for reelection, he told his advisers, “If I get in, I’m gonna fuck the Jews.”
This from a man whose presidency had been crippled by OPEC, Iran, and the Soviets. Yet he blamed “the Jews,” adding that “if I’m defeated, I’m gonna build those kikes a free house…made of ham. A conundrum for those bastards.”
Carter’s fury came after the NSA intercepted a call between then NYC mayor Ed Koch and Menachem Begin, then prime minister of Israel. The two bald bagels were discussing ways to defeat Carter, although the first hour of the call was about whether the pastrami at Katz’s is too dry.
Begin: “You call that pastrami? A bowl of sand would be moister.”
Koch: “Meshuggenneh! What you know about pastrami could fill my bubbeh’s thimble with room to spare.”
Truth is, Carter always had a fraught relationship with Jews. After his disastrous 1979 river-rafting photo op in which he beat a drowning rabbit with an oar as it tried to cling to his raft for dear life, Carter told the press, “Look, I didn’t know it was a rabbit. I thought it was an Orthodox Jew in one of those rabbit-fur shtreimel hats.”
Because of Jewish dissatisfaction with Carter’s Israel policies, Reagan came within one point of matching Eisenhower’s take of the Jewish vote. Jewish support—especially in terms of donations—helped propel Reagan to a solid victory.
With Biden similarly alienating Jewish voters over Israel, literally all Trump needs to do is not be Nazi.
And yes, that’s asking too much.
Last week Trump’s Truth Social featured a video promising a “unified Reich” if elected.
This as potential VP Kristi Noem continues to defend shooting puppies, which makes Carter’s bunny-bashing seem mild in comparison.
In 2024’s short-bus election, Biden’s reported to have told advisers that if he loses, he’s gonna “juck the foos,” which his caregivers interpreted as he’s gonna have sex with the Foo Fighters.
Dave Grohl was unavailable for comment.
A DAM SHAME
Since we’ve mentioned Carter, it’s worthwhile to note that in four months he’ll turn 100, becoming the oldest living president in history.
For those planning your celebration in advance, here are some ideas:
(1) Go to your local gym and cripple an Olympic athlete to ensure that they miss the 2024 Games.
(2) Sabotage gas pumps so drivers have to line up at the station to use the remaining ones.
(3) Visit a children’s cancer ward and lecture the kids on how their main problem is a “crisis of confidence.”
(4) Go to Little Tehran with a few friends to “rescue” the animals caged in a pet store. Smash through a window, panic, bash into your friends leaving them unconscious on the sidewalk, and run away.
That latter suggestion is, of course, based on Carter’s disastrous Three Stoogian attempted rescue of the Iranian hostages, in which U.S. military choppers failed and collided, leading to the death of eight servicemen.
At the time, scowling beardo Ayatollah Khomeini claimed that the copter failures were an “act of God.”
Well, like the Lord, copters giveth and copters taketh away. Last week hard-line woman-hating Iranian president Ebrahim Raisi—whose name sounds like a Chinaman reacting to a Muslim named Ebrah eating too much rice: “Ebrah…him RICEY!”—went down in a chopper while inspecting a new hydro-dam powered by the flailing of drowning gay men. Raisi’s copter was flying over mountainous terrain in the middle of dense fog, icy buildup, pounding rain, and high winds.
Literally the only threat that wasn’t present was Godzilla. Yet conspiracy nuts still blame Mossad…because we all know that Jews can summon fog, ice, and rain at will.
True fact: The copter was a 1968 U.S. Bell 212 left over from the days America supported the Shah.
American copter crashes ain’t so funny now, are they?
Mullah that over in hell, jerk.
PSY-COPS
George Clooney comes from a long line of famous people. There was his aunt, Rosemary Clooney. Most Hollywood fans know her. Lesser known? His uncle who pioneered pulling down your pants and showing your ass to strangers: Mooney Clooney. And his grandpa who always had the runs: Pruney Clooney. And his great-great grandfather who engaged in an Old West gunfight: High-Nooney Clooney. And his cousin who last week tweeted about how saxophonist David Sanborn is now David Sandied: Too-Sooney Clooney.
Which brings us to Clooney’s wife: Loony Clooney.
When Amal Alamuddin left Beirut as a child and moved to the West, she told her mom that her goal was to meet a tall handsome white guy.
Mom: “To marry him or behead him?”
Amal: “Meh…I’ll play it by ear.”
Amal Clooney is now an “international human rights lawyer,” which is a synonym for “worthless sack of crap.” Last week it was revealed that Anal Aladdinmudder helped draft the International Criminal Court “war crimes” arrest warrants for Israeli head-of-state Benjamin Netanyahu and Hamas towel-head-of-state Yahya Sinwar.
Yes, that’s the way to end a war: show up at the doorstep of the combatants like it’s an episode of Cops.
“Sir, neighbors are reporting a genocide going on.”
Pol Pot: “They clazy! They nuts! I just watching TV. Reave me arone!”
“We pulled you over because Jews claim you gassed them. Please keep your hands on the wheel while we conduct our investigation.”
Hitler: “You muthas always be hasslin’ me! I din’ do nothin’. Git outta my face; I gots my rights.”
“Someone named Nan King says you raped her. You’re gonna have to come with us.”
Tojo: “She rying! I be here whole time.”
Amazingly, Amal’s warrant did not lead to the arrest of the prime minister of Israel or the leader of a terrorist org. In fact, it only accelerated the bloodshed in the conflict.
Nice work, Bodies-Strewny Clooney.
HURTY-GURDY
Turns out it may not have been the best idea for Sweden to breed generations of women who want to have sex with Africans. Yes, that’s a stereotype—the blonde Swede girl who lusts after blacks. Yes, as well, it’s true, with even high-profile African vloggers complaining that they’ve become unsettled by their treatment in Sweden because they feel like “a piece of meat.”
African migrant crime’s reached such a fever pitch in that nation, local experts warn that the country might be approaching a state of civil war, as black migrants rape and kill in record numbers, and as frustrated unsexed Swedish men develop balls bluer than their eyes.
In an interesting example of how immigrant invasions harm different Western nations in different ways, last week in California several immigrants were sentenced in a scheme to defraud the Post Office.
Lijuan Chen and her accomplice Chuanhua Hugh Hu (“Just an echo…hugh hu”) had been counterfeiting postage stamps to send parcels to China for free.
According to the USPS, the pair cheated the government out of $150 million.
Credit where it’s due…that’s a lot of fake postage.
Lack of credit where it’s due…the USPS didn’t recognize the fake stamps until it had been defrauded of that much money?
Apparently, the scam had been going just fine until Chen and Hu tried counterfeiting the Post Office’s “greats of American music” commemorative series. The stamps of “Ervris Plesly” holding an erhu, “Rouie Almstlong” with slanted eyes, and “Error Fitzgerror” with her feet bound gave the game away.
According to the L.A. Times, “Chen and Hu mailed more than 34 million parcels between 2020 and 2023 before getting caught.”
Okay, that’s just plain industrious.
Not good, but better than savages who rape and murder. Grading on a curve, it could be worse.
Besides, who likes the Post Office anyway?
HBCU LATER
“HBCU” stands for “Historically Black Colleges and Universities.”
Mind you, it’s not the only use of that initialism regarding the black community. There’s also the one used by fast-food restaurant managers to mark on time sheets why a hospitalized employee is absent—HBCU: Harmed Because Curly-fries Undercooked.
And now, at one “historically black college and university,” students have found another use for the letters: “Hating Biden, Celebrating Ummah.”
When President Biden decided to give the commencement address to this year’s graduating class at Morehouse, students made it clear that they were less-than-welcoming, because the president isn’t bombing Israel to protect Hamas or something like that.
Ironically, Biden actually thought he was going to be giving his address at Wafflehouse.
More ironically, he’d have encountered even more blacks there.
However, unlike at Columbia and UCLA, where commencement protests and sit-ins have ruined graduation like a strain of Hamas herpes, the Morehouse address went off without a hitch.
How did Morehouse manage to keep America’s most riot-happy demographic from doing what it does best? Easy: Morehouse administrators are black. They feel no guilt in silencing blacks if said blacks are potential embarrassments. That’s why Biden chose Morehouse. If he’d spoken at Columbia or UCLA, the white admins would’ve been like, “Let the poor coloreds riot! It’s the language of the oppressed!”
But a black college facing possible international humiliation should the President of the United States be shouted down?
You can be assured that the school put a stop to that nonsense with the ruthlessness of a black grandma raising her unwed daughter’s children.
“I’ll slap the Gaza outta yo’ mouth like Ali whuppin’ Frazier, you little shit. Now quit yo’ foolishness an’ go applaud dat retarded old white man.”
In a year of few good decisions, choosing Morehouse was Biden’s best.
It is a commonplace that the West is in decline, and that nothing can now save its bacon. It is addicted to consuming more than it produces, a situation that can continue only for so long. As Hemingway said, you go bankrupt first slowly, then quickly and suddenly. But for the West to become self-reliant in the matter of consumption would mean adjustments so painful that no politician would dare to make them. As the former prime minister of Luxembourg once said, we (meaning all politicians) all know what to do, it’s just that we don’t know how to get elected afterward.
Therein lies the Achilles’ heel of representative democracy: politicians who get elected by offering immediate benefits at the cost of future unviability. The fundamental philosophical principle of politicians of all stripes in modern democracies is Après nous, le déluge.
But I think that I have found the means by which the West may yet save itself. The idea came to me when I was browsing—online, of course—Japan’s English-language newspaper The Japan Times. I found there an article about a phenomenon of whose very existence I was until then completely unaware, namely Japanese rap music.
I was aware of the existence in France of this criminogenic genre of what is loosely called music, though I cannot understand its words even when translated into what is loosely called English. The young saint whose shooting death at point-blank range by the police while he was driving dangerously his bright yellow stolen car and who had repeatedly refused to stop when ordered to do so, provoking the most recent cycle of riots in France (which ceased only when the drug dealers ordered the rioters back to barracks because they, the drug dealers, were losing income while the riots lasted), had himself had a small part in a gangsterish rap video whose lyrics were not very lyrical. Suffice it to say that the video was not exactly an encouragement, incitement, or paean of praise to a quiet, decent life—that much of its lyrics, at least, I understood, besides which the gestures spoke for themselves. It would, perhaps, be going too far to say that, but for rap music, the young man would have studied algebra and the finer points of the French subjunctive, but it is not implausible to suggest that rap music would not have inhibited his tendencies to crime.
But to return to Japanese rap music. The article was about a rising star of this phenomenon, a young man by the name of Jumadiba, of whom, naturally, I had never heard. I looked up some of the lyrics of his songs, which were in Japanese, so I could not read them. However, a few words appeared in English, which presumably had no Japanese equivalent; or perhaps the use of a few words of English confers prestige among young Japanese.
Perhaps readers will not be very surprised by the tenor of the English words in question: “Stolen, stolen, stolen, stolen, stolen,” for example, or “Spit,” “Get more,” “Mixed up, mixed up,” “Fuckin’ coolish,” “Bad,” “Bitch,” “Ghetto.” (I note, by the way, that the word “fuckin’” does not cause red underlining by my computer’s automatic and eagle-eyed spell-checker, so I suppose it must now be considered a bona fide word. It is a strange experience to extend one’s vocabulary by reading the lyrics of a Japanese rap “song,” using the word “song” in the same loose way that one might describe a crow’s cawing as its song.)
I watched a clip of Jumadiba performing. His audience seemed to me to be desperate to abandon their individuality as human beings in favor of a kind of pagan unison. I also had the impression of a fascist rally of degeneracy. The audience was committing the mental equivalent of hara-kiri. Goodness knows what havoc a real demagogue might cause.
I have noticed before that East Asians such as South Koreans and Japanese are very good at decadence, and the Chinese too. Watching Korean television (the southern variety) in a Korean restaurant in Southsea—the town where Conan Doyle practiced medicine for a time—some years ago, the presence of the television being inescapable except by leaving the restaurant, I was astonished by the slickness and efficiency of the vulgar kitschiness and appeal to the lowest common denominator of what was shown. It was far slicker, more professional, than any Western equivalent. The difference between it and its Western equivalent was like the difference between a North Korean and Romanian communist rally under Ceausescu. It was, in its way, superb.
The idea came to me, watching the Japanese rap and recalling the Korean taste, and even vocation, for the tasteless, that therein might lie the salvation of the West. I have long given up hope of improvement in us: Our salvation, if there is to be one, lies in the deterioration of them, the Asians.
We should not be promoting ourselves by reference to the glories of our civilization, or to the intellectual and moral superiority of our conception of human rights, the rule of law, individual freedom, religious tolerance, etc. Rather, we should be promoting rap music for all we are worth (not for all it is worth, of course). With luck, this will sap the intelligence of the population, reduce their IQ by twenty points, turn them lazy, nasty, and criminal, and render them utterly disinclined to personal effort. In their nihilism will be our salvation.
The Japanese tried to seduce Asian countries before the war by means of what they called a Co-Prosperity Sphere. What we should be offering, or at least promoting, is a Co-Decadence Sphere. By this means, given humanity’s apparent attraction to the vulgar and the meretricious, we may hope that they, the Asians, will come to equal us in decline. Our relative position in the world would thus be preserved, albeit at the cost of a great deal of ugliness and the universal spread of militant stupidity.
I have seen the future, as Lincoln Steffens said on his return from Russia, and it is degradation.
Theodore Dalrymple’s latest book is Ramses: A Memoir, published by New English Review.
Donald Trump, always interesting if not obsessively cogent, says that he will deport perhaps twenty million illegal aliens if again elected. Can he? Legally, of course, Trump is in the right. The illegals are in the country illegally and the law clearly says that they may be deported. Polls show that a great many Americans favor the idea. The question is one of practicality. Can ten or twenty millions actually be deported, given the realities, political, legal and social of today?
Supporters of deportation point to Eisenhower’s Operation Wetback in 1954 in which over a million illegal Mexicans were deported. It was done then, deportistas say, and can be done now. But…can it?
This is not 1954. Nineteen percent of the country consists of Latinos, who outnumber whites in California, are an absolute majority in Texas, have heavy support from the Democrat party, academia, the media, and wield economic and electoral power. The great majority of Latinos are citizens. How all of this would play out in the face of mass deportation of illegals isn’t clear, but 1954 it isn’t. For example, would California assist? Or resist?
Manual
While any one illegal can be deported, the legal and procedural hindrances seem so great as to make bulk ejection impractical. This manual, apparently written by an immigration’s attorney, gives detailed instructions to Latinos on how to handle ICE agents at work, at home, in public spaces, and so on. For example, you can request a lawyer, you have the right to remain silent, you specifically do not have to answer questions about your immigration’s status or country of origin, you can ask whether you are under arrest and if not, you can walk away. Example from manual:
“1: Know your rights during home visits. ICE agents generally need a warrant signed by a judge to enter your home. A warrant is a legal document that specifies the areas to be searched and the individuals or items to be seized. Ask the ICE agent to slide the warrant under the door or hold it up to a window, allowing you to inspect it. Make sure the warrant is signed by a judge and includes your correct address. If the ICE agent does not have a warrant, you have the right to refuse entry to your home. Politely but firmly inform them that you do not consent to the search.”
According to the ICE website, its agents need “probable cause” to make an arrest. This means approximately “information that would cause a reasonable person to believe that a specific person was committing a specific crime.” It is unlikely that the courts will regard simply being Hispanic or speaking Spanish or both as probable cause. This seems to have been established by the Ninth Circuit in Galarza. If we accept that 81 percent of Latinos in America are citizens, then arrests of Latinos based only on ethnicity would be wrong four times out of five. As cause goes, this isn’t too probable.
Mr. Trump has spoken of using the military to carry out sweeps to round up illegals. The army is seventeen percent Latino. Mr. Trump may be unaware of posse comitatus, which forbids the use of the military as police forces in America. The National Guard, when federalized, comes under posse comitatus. While there is some fuzz and there are murky exceptions in the act, the wording is pretty clear. How this could be finessed I don’t know, but it sounds like a matter for the Supreme Court and, I think for what that’s worth, a sure loss.
But one thing I promise: The military won’t like it. At all. The armed forces have a long and wholesome tradition of staying out of domestic politics. The US, note, has had exactly zero military coups. Using troops against an ethnic group providing many of its recruits will not set well in the Five-Sided Wind Tunnel. The soldiers will agitate, hard, against it.
But I think Mr. Trump poses another and greater threat: Right now there is a disastrous rift between black and white with intense but repressed anger of whites against blacks and intense but unrepressed anger of blacks against whites.
Latinos are quiescent. They seem preoccupied with making money while keeping their heads down. They are assimilating. Turning them into another hostile and alienated group would be a catastrophe almost beyond imagining.
Legal Latinos do not favor open borders and, if not provoked, will remain peaceful and integrate themselves into the country. What will be their response on daily seeing soldiers or police hunting down their co-ethnics? I don’t know. But if, hypothetically, Latino police came through white neighborhoods to grab, say, white high-school dope-smokers, I know what the white reaction would be.
If Latino barrios decided to resist, they could. They could blow SOS on a car horn when a deportation van was spotted, whereupon illegals would shelter in apartments belonging to legals, where is your warrant, and such. It would turn deportation into a fruitless, grueling, endless low-level social war with hatred growing on each side. The media would be wildly in favor of the hiders, and Mr. Trump’s people wildly against. The country would never recover. This apparently does not concern Mr. Trump.
Nor does it concern the more zealous of the deporttistas. In their writings they seem to imagine hordes of law enforcement people swooping in and scooping up dozens, or hundreds, even thousands of illegals. Unfortunately they would also sweep up Latinos who are American citizens, a category whose existence the deportistas do not fully seem to recognize. This would result in a huge wave of suits for false arrest that would go quickly to the Supremes, who inevitably would rule that citizens are citizens, period.
Bluster or promise? Mr. Trump has a history of often doing what he says he will do, or at least trying. For example, he did indeed impose tariffs on Chinese imports, and made a Herculean attempt to build The Wall. We shall, perhaps, see.
Have you heard about the “bee-pocalypse?” My new video explains.
Honeybees are dying!
It’s another environmental crisis we’re supposed to worry about.
The media call it “bee-pocalypse” and “bee-mageddon!”
A YouTube video with 15 million views says bee-mageddon “could lead to millions of people starving!”
Even Fox News shrieked, “Do you like to eat? The disappearance of honeybees could have a drastic impact on our nation’s food supply!”
It’s nonsense.
Now, it’s true that, about 20 years ago, many American bees did die. Beekeepers opened hives and found their bees gone. Scientists called it “colony collapse disorder.” No one knows what caused it. After the initial dramatic reports, it’s steadily diminished.
But media hysteria hasn’t.
Beekeepers adjusted to colony collapse. They divided remaining colonies to make new hives. Bee numbers increased by millions.
“We’re not in any way facing an apocalypse,” says Science journalist Jon Entine. “Things have never been better in terms of the numbers of bees.”
Entine runs the Genetic Literacy Project, which challenges scientific misinformation.
I remind him that the media continue to run scare stories.
“Bees are dying at an alarming rate,” says NBC.
CNN headlines: “Bee Population is Dying … the food we eat is at risk.”
It’s so stupid.
“They could have just Googled bee population and they would’ve seen them going up?” I ask.
“Absolutely,” responds Entine, “it’s farcical.”
In 2013, Time Magazine’s cover predicted “A World Without Bees”!
“I don’t remember seeing Time apologize,” I tell Entine.
“Time has not even written a new article that puts this in science perspective,” he responds. Nor did The New York Times magazine correct its cover story on “The Insect Apocalypse.” They just “skipped on to another ‘crisis.'”
“There’s always a scare,” I point out.
“Catastrophe, exaggeration,” he says, “That gets the clicks.”
Entine complains that the media rarely interview serious scientists for its scare stories.
“They have the Environmental Working Group or Pesticide Action Network framing these issues … Hysteria generates donations. The oxygen for these organizations is money.”
Sadly, “Many of these (environment) groups harm people.”
How? By convincing gullible politicians to ban fertilizers and new pesticides even though the new chemicals are usually safer.
For example, even with worldwide honeybee populations at record highs, the European Union prohibited the use of noenicitinoids, a common insecticide, out of fear they might kill bees.
That means farmers use older, more dangerous chemicals that actually do kill bees.
But why use these chemicals at all?
I push back at Entine, “‘Natural’ food advocates say: ‘Organic! You don’t have to have chemicals! Buy organic and you don’t get them!”
Entine laughs and says, “They use chemicals extensively! It’s not like organic farmers can sprinkle organic fairy dust to get rid of insects and weeds.”
Instead, they use “natural” chemicals “like copper sulfate,” he says, “one of the most toxic chemicals in the world!”
Sri Lanka’s president listened to activists and banned chemical fertilizers.
Suddenly, farms produced much less food. Prices rose 80%.
Sri Lankans invaded the presidential mansion and the president fled his country.
The new government re-legalized chemical fertilizers. Only then could the crisis end.
“This attack on industrial chemicals,” says Entine, “is really a way for the environmental industry, industry is what it is, to go after what they call big (agriculture), big corporations. It’s an anti-capitalist movement.”
The anti-capitalists oppose genetically modified organisms (GMOs). They’ve persuaded most European countries to basically ban GMO crops.
But genetic modification allows farmers to grow more food on less land. It creates plants resistant to disease and insects. That allows farmers to use fewer pesticides. That’s good for everyone, especially poor people.
In Bangladesh, scientists invented a GMO eggplant.
“It decreased use of chemicals by 85%,” says Entine. “Allowing women and children who do most of the farming to live a much more viable life. We have to be smart about these things!”
“We’re not being smart,” I note.
“No,” he says, “We’re following an outdated 40-year-old environmental script that doesn’t work in this technologically innovative world. … They hurt the very people they claim to help.”
Modern chemicals and GMOs make our food cheaper and safer.
Deceitful money-hungry environmental groups won’t acknowledge that.
