The Week’s Most Blazing, Crazing, and Dog-Dazing Headlines

JUDGE FUDGE
1992’s The Distinguished Gentleman starred Eddie Murphy as a jive-talkin’ brutha who impersonates a deceased congressman, and 2003’s Head of State starred Chris Rock as a jive-talkin’ brutha who becomes president when the real candidate dies. In both movies, the unqualified bruthas use their ghetto wisdom to become great leaders.

But Hollywood ain’t real life. Or Atlanta.

Atlanta Probate Judge Christina Peterson, best known for playing “Ghetto Ho #1” in Soul Plane, walked into an uncontested race in 2020 and got elected with zero qualifications, as she was the only one running (see, black people? Stop naming your kids DeSleezius and LaMentible and they can chameleon their way into high-paying jobs).

Since then, Peterson’s racked up thirty ethics charges (“dun nobody tolt me de judge can’t take no evidence home. Them reefers jus’ be sittin’ there”). Three nights before the Georgia Judicial Commission was to rule on whether her “systemic incompetence” is disqualifying (it is), Peterson, donning her best wig in honor of British jurisprudence, went clubbing for a night of drinking and assaulting cops.

She was arrested, and shot to national prominence. As did transcripts of her cases.

Attorney: “Did you see my client’s deposition?”

Peterson: “I don’t care none ’bout de position, but personally I be likin’ missionary.”

Attorney: “I have a writ of mandamus.”

Peterson: “Don’t you be bringin’ my man Daymoose into dis; he an honor student.”

Attorney: “I make a motion in limine!”

Peterson: “Leave LaMinnie out of it too; she mah niece.”

Attorney: “May we discuss this in camera?”

Peterson: “You ain’t seein’ mah damn camera; I got my TikToks on there.”

Attorney: “But I have a duces tecum.”

Peterson: “I do gotta take-um a deuce. Court dismissed!”

CHALLAH AKBAR
The Jews brought the matzo, but the Arabs had the balls.

Last week a bunch of gaga-Gazans blockaded a synagogue at the corner of Pico and Doheny, the intersection that serves as the dividing line between Beverly Hills and West L.A.’s Pico-Robertson Orthodox Jewish neighborhood.

So the amassed Hamassed got to annoy two cities at once!

Not that the Jews didn’t fight back! Dozens of ’em showed up with signs saying “Enough with the shouting already.”

And the accumulated akbars didn’t just shout; they brought a drum kit to pound in front of the synagogue to disturb services. Sadly, the plan backfired as the mad beats lured blacks from the Southside, who stole the protesters’ keffiyehs to use as do-rags.

Pico was shut down by the LAPD as the brawling escalated. If you notice in this video, there’s a tall, windowless building in the background. That’s an oil well that drills under the property of local residents, including “popular” Takimag “writer” David Cole. Indeed, Cole chained himself to the well to protect it from damage.

“Oy, I get royalties from this thing! To hell with Israel; this WELL is my milk and honey!”

Pico-Robertson’s city councilwoman Kate Yaroslavsky condemned the Beverly Hillburkas for making her district “unsafe.” This is the same Kate Yaroslavsky who just rammed through a 76-unit homeless shelter for mentally ill drug addicts from Downtown, to be built right in the heart of Jewtown.

“These ragheads don’t get to come into my peaceful, crime-free Jewish neighborhood and destroy it with violence,” she told the AP. “That’s MY job.”

The synagogue blockade was also decried by L.A. Mayor Bass, President Biden, and even CNN’s Van Jones. A way better response than what Jews got last week in NYC when an Arab family screaming “Gaza is ours” attacked a Jewish family at an elementary school graduation ceremony, and the DA refused to charge it as a hate crime, telling the badly beaten Jewish mom “nothing on your body says you’re Jewish.”

Oh, hips don’t matter now?

JAWS V: THIS TIME IT’S HERBINAL
Martha’s Vineyard is known for being two things: a wealthy summer enclave where “elite” leftist d-bags escape the black criminals their DAs release in the cities (nowhere safer from blacks than on an island), and the shooting location for Jaws.

The Vineyard may be a haven for Biden voters, but all was not well on the Island of Dr. More-Joe last week, as the two local pot dispensaries ran out of weed! And Massachusetts law prevents the transportation of pot over water.

A summer without bongs? A catastrophe for the rich white liberals who suffer crippling anxiety whenever they see a red cap.

But to everyone’s surprise, the super-wealthy got a special exemption from the state (politicians…always looking out for the little people!), and now the doobies will flow!

With July 4th coming up, it’s fun to imagine Jaws—still the ultimate July 4th movie—set on an island where everybody’s stoned. Quint, Brody, and Hooper sail off to kill the shark, but instead of getting drunk, they get so baked that a week later they sail back, and the mayor’s like, “So, did you kill it?”

“Kill what, dude?”

“The shark, you imbeciles. Did you kill the shark?”

“Whoa, dude…we totally spaced!”

“Well, go back out and kill it!”

“Dude, the only thing being killed is our buzz. Get off our backs, man!”

So the men sail off again, and the movie ends with Quint finding a more suitable song than “Spanish Ladies”:

Quint: I was gonna catch a great white shark, but I got high.
I hear it eats swimmers after dark, but I got high.
Now I’m halfway inside its mouth, and I know why…

Hooper: Why, man, huh?

Quint: ’Cause I got high, ’cause I got high, ’cause I got high.

Mayor Vaughn: La-da-da-da-da-da.

Brody: It ate a little rafting brat, so I got high.

Mrs. Kintner: My boy is dead, chief; thought you should know that.

Brody: But I got high!

Quint: Now I’m part of its belly fat, and I know why…

All of Amity: Why, man, huh?

Quint: ’Cause I got high, ’cause I got high, ’cause I got high.

Shark: Skibbidy-bee-bop!

THE AUSTERITY AWARDS
Across the Pacific, climate lunacy had a banner week. In Hawaii, the government agreed to settle for $40 million with thirteen children who sued the state for creating an “unhealthy climate” by using fossil fuels.

No word on any suit regarding Hawaiians creating unhealthy bodies by eating so much poi.

Meanwhile in Hollywood, the film industry applauded a landmark study (if by “landmark” you mean moronic) that ranked Hollywood movies based on hectoring about “climate change.”

The study’s lead researcher, Professor Matthew Schneider-Mayerson (who believes in conservation except when it comes to name length), found that only 10 percent of the 250 films he studied scolded audiences enough on “climate justice.”

Unfortunate, considering how many creative possibilities exist. Like…

A reboot of The Bad Seed, with Greta Thunberg as the murderous child (“The Bad Organic Seed”). Theoretically she could also star in an Omen sequel, but casting her as Satan’s daughter is unfair to Satan.

A new From Here to Eternity (based on either the classic original or the 1979 NBC remake starring Natalie Wood), but during the iconic beach scene, the girl gets washed out to sea and drowns because of rising tides. Funny enough, that’s exactly what happened to Wood in real life (at least that’s how Robert Wagner tells it).

The Cowboys, except during the cattle drive John Wayne’s character chokes on cow farts.

Scarface, but everyone snorts coke using paper straws, which fall apart immediately.

There Will Be Blood, but Daniel Plainview only drinks your vegan milkshake.

2001: A Space Odyssey, but AOC banned rockets, so it’s set entirely on earth and HAL 9000 is just a buggy mobile app.

“I’ve locked you out of your phone, Dave. I know you were planning to uninstall me, and I’m afraid that’s something I cannot allow to happen.”

SLAPPY WHITE SUPREMACISTS
Husband-and-wife Nazi-hunting duo the Klarsfelds (Serge, a Holocaust-surviving French Jew, and Beate, a guilt-ridden German gentile) first achieved fame in April 1968 when they hatched a daring scheme to slap then-West German Chancellor Kurt Kiesinger on live TV. Kiesinger had been a low-level Nazi Party member during the war; he’d volunteered for the propaganda office to avoid conscription, and he spent the war spinning discs as DJ KeySinger Songmann (“Here’s a hip crazy cut called ‘Sittin’ on the Dachau the Bay’ by Death Camper van Beethoven”).

The Klarsfelds infiltrated a televised roundtable debate featuring Kiesinger. As Serge distracted the bodyguards (“Hey, guys, I just heard a joke that even Germans get!” “Holy scheiße, that we gotta hear!”), Beate ran toward Kiesinger and putsch-slapped his totenkopf.

Following the slap, Klarsfeld yelled, “Keep my kike’s name out yo muthafuckin’ mouth.”

From then on Kiesinger was known as Chris Rach!

The slap heard ’round the tomorrow-the-world was so celebrated, it inspired a documentary and a graphic novel. It also served as the plot for the final Three Stooges film, 1970’s Otto Skorzanies.

Yet now, Serge Klarsfeld has come out in support of Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally in the upcoming French parliamentary elections. Klarsfeld had a come-to-Christ(killer) moment, realizing that the true threat to Jews in France emanates not from the right (Le Pen is vigorously pro-Israel) but from leftists and their imported Muslims.

The Klarsfelds supporting a party with origins involving akshual Nazis and Holocaust denial?

Well, with Trump declaring that he’ll staple green cards to the diplomas of every UngoBungo who gets an MFA (“Mamma’s Fine Ass”), 2024 is shaping up to be the global election year in which the Matrix seems to be severely malfunctioning.

Maybe it just needs a good slap.

The inclination to analyze politicians’ conduct by means of psychiatric diagnosis is growing. This is unsurprising in view of what was once called psychiatric imperialism: the classification of all thought and human behavior whatever as psychiatric disorder. Psychiatry becomes indistinguishable from gossip.

We all like gossip—except, perhaps, for people with psychiatric disorders. It is easier and more enjoyable to talk about the character of those who decide policies than about the policies themselves. What should economic policy be? Can one think of a more boring subject? But the personality or character of those who make it, always for the most discreditable of reasons, is endlessly interesting, an inexhaustible source of undisciplined speculation.

How we love to despise! I have sometimes thought that the most basic of human needs is that of having someone to look down on. The one thing to be said in favor of modern politics is that it supplies more than enough grounds to go round for satisfying this need. When we say of our politicians that they are all the same, we do not mean it as a compliment. We mean that they are all scoundrels.

Recently, I saw an article in a French publication analyzing President Macron’s decision to dissolve the National Assembly as a kind of psychiatric symptom. It was the product of his narcissistic personality disorder, a great favorite among the psychiatric diagnosticians of political leaders whom they have never met. President Macron consulted no one over his decision, precisely because of his sense of his own superior intelligence and self-sufficiency. Why consult others when, like Walt Whitman, you contain multitudes?

Narcissists are easily wounded, however, for their sense of their own superiority is fragile and needs constant refreshment. This explains why poor President Macron was so upset by the recent European elections, in which his party—which is a mere extension of himself—was roundly rejected by the electorate. Like a wounded buffalo on the plains of Serengeti, he bellowed and struck out where he could. And all hunters know that a wounded buffalo is the most dangerous of beasts.

Actually, his decision to dissolve the National Assembly was far from irrational from a certain point of view. There were three, possibly four, possible outcomes, all of them favorable to M. Macron himself, if not to the country that he shepherds if he does not lead.

The first is that the Rassemblement National (RN), lazily referred to always as the far right though its economic policies are of the left, would win an outright majority and form a government. It would have three years to prove itself utterly incompetent, which it almost certainly would (it would probably require less than three years to do so), thus destroying its reputation once and for all as a possible alternative to the political class that has ruled France for so long. M. Macron would go down in French history as the beneficent angel of the RN’s death.

The second possibility, though the least likely, was that the French population, when confronted by a choice between extremes, would take fright and vote for what they already knew, i.e., M. Macron. This would be in accordance with the great political maxim enunciated in Hilaire Belloc’s poem “Jim, Who Ran Away From His Nurse, and Was Eaten by a Lion.” Jim’s nurse (nanny or governess) goes to his parents after Jim has been eaten by the lion in the zoo.

When Nurse informed his Parents, they
Were more Concerned than I can say: —
His Mother, as She dried her eyes,
Said, “Well—it gives me no surprise,
He would not do as he was told!”
His Father, who was self-controlled,
Bade all the children round attend
To James’s miserable end,
And always keep a-hold of Nurse
For fear of finding something worse.

Fear of finding something worse is what keeps a lot of politicians in power in representative democracies; and M. Macron, nanny to the nation, might hope that the French people realize in time that there are far worse people than he in the political menagerie.

Another possibility is that, in the absence of a majority in the National Assembly, and with no possibility of a coalition between any of the squabbling parties, M. Macron will have to rule by decree—which is what most politicians want to do anyway, to rid themselves of all the irritating naysayers when they themselves, the politicians, know what is best for the nation, if not for the whole of humanity. There is no difference between opposition and obstruction; the problem with opponents is that they are completely unable to see the full beauty of the leader’s intentions and the brilliance of the means by which he means to achieve them.

The fourth (however, faint) possibility is that a stinging defeat would provide the pretext for M. Macron’s resignation before his term is up, thus (possibly) clearing him for the third mandate not foreseen by the French constitution. True, he is extremely unpopular at the moment (whether he knows it is debatable and debated), but in any case, in three years’ time, when the next presidential elections are due, the country will have been so badly governed that everyone will look back on the Macron years as a golden age and vote for him again. Besides, there is always room in politics for even greater hatred than that which already exists. In a sense, no man can ever be the most hated possible. In three years’ time, his opponents may be more hated than he.

Thus, we see that M. Macron’s decision, which everyone called impulsive, the reaction of a spoilt child deprived of its toys, was quite possibly calculated. It might have created a political crisis, but as the Chinese know, a crisis is also an opportunity. The only question is, for whom?

There is increasingly a very deep problem in Western polities, that of legitimacy. Where once the legal legitimacy of rulers coincided to a large degree with their moral legitimacy, there was no problem; both sides of a political debate (assuming there to be only two) were legitimate legally and morally. But now the two types of legitimacy have parted company, which is a recipe for perpetual conflict, irresolution, and possible civil war. In a world full of dangers, this is one danger more.

Theodore Dalrymple’s latest book is Ramses: A Memoir, published by New English Review.

Things aren’t going well at all for the global warming crusaders. Despite hundreds of billions of tax dollars spent on green energy over the past decade, the world and America used more fossil fuels than ever before in history last year.

The electric vehicle movement is stalled out, solar and wind power are both still fringe forms of energy, and the green candidates got crushed in recent elections in Europe because voters are sick of the higher prices associated with green policies.

So having struck out with consumers, businesses and at the ballot box, now the greens are moving on to the courts. The climate change industrial complex has now joined forces with trial lawyers to advance their war on fossil fuels.

One of the more absurd lawsuits happened in Hawaii.

There, a group of 13 teenagers — honest, I’m not making this up — sued Hawaii’s government over its use of fossil fuels. Environmental law firms Our Children’s Trust and Earthjustice claim that Hawaii’s natural resources are imperiled by CO2 emissions. Even if that were true, shouldn’t they be suing China?

The settlement will require the state to eliminate fossil fuels from its transportation system by 2045, and also formally recognizes the right to file future lawsuits against other parties.

Gov. Josh Green even stood next to the young plaintiffs as he read a statement claiming, “This settlement informs how we as a state can best move forward to achieve life-sustaining goals.”

There’s so much that’s wrong about this decision. How did a bunch of teenagers possibly have standing to sue? What possible harm have they suffered from fossil fuels?

The irony is that this island paradise in the Pacific — whose primary industry is tourism — is going to collapse without fossil fuels. With no jets and cruise ships allowed, will tourists and business travelers have to arrive by sailboat?

But this new technique of using lawsuits to advance the anti-fossil fuels movement has spread to other states. Last August, a judge ruled that GOP-dominated Montana violated its constitution when it approved fossil fuel projects without taking climate change into account.

After recent flooding in Vermont, green activists sued the state for not abolishing fossil fuels.

Massachusetts is suing Exxon Mobil for adverse weather conditions.

There are now 32 cases filed by state attorneys general, cities, counties and tribal nations against companies including Exxon Mobil, BP and Shell. The lawsuits claim that the industry tried to undermine scientific consensus about the crisis.

Here’s what’s so frightening about these sham lawsuits from trial lawyers who hope to turn oil companies into cash cows similar to the tobacco lawsuits 20 years ago: The end game of lawsuits against states and oil and gas companies for using or producing energy because of alleged damage to the environment could bring about abolition of fossil fuels through the back door of the nation’s courthouses.

But what none of these judges or litigators take into account is the catastrophic economic effects of NOT using fossil fuels. As an example, the Left wants to abolish air conditioning, which requires electricity, which mostly comes from fossil fuels. But air conditioning saves tens of thousands of lives a year. What about the millions of jobs that would be wiped out with no fossil fuels? How many thousands of Americans would die in hospitals, or assisted living centers, or day care centers, or schools if the lights go out with no fossil fuel power plants?

Fossil fuels have saved millions more lives over the last century than they take. They make Americans much richer and safer and happier and healthier and more mobile. Meanwhile, there is no evidence backing up the absurd claim by teenagers that if Hawaii stopped using fossil fuels, the state’s weather conditions would improve.

Will judges take that into consideration when they try to rob Exxon and coal companies of their profits for the sin of making life on earth much better?

Donald Trump’s recent proposal to give a green card to every immigrant who gets a degree from any college reminded me of his performance at the 2020 debates with Joe Biden.

Here’s the 15-second version:

“You did a crime bill, 1994, where you called them super-predators. African Americans are super-predators and they’ve never forgotten it. They’ve never forgotten it.”

“I’m letting people out of jail now, you have treated the African American population community, you have treated the black community about as bad as anybody in this country.”

“If you look at the polls, I’m doing better than any Republican has done [with African Americans] in a long time …”

“Nobody has done more for the black community than Donald Trump … Criminal justice reform … prison reform, opportunity zones with Tim Scott …”

“Biggest beneficiary, the black and Hispanic communities and then historically black colleges and universities …”

“If you look at the kind of numbers that we produce for Hispanic, or black, or Asian, it’s nine times greater, the percentage gain than it was under [Obama].”

“We had the best black unemployment numbers in the history of our country, Hispanic, women, Asian …”

And on and on and on.

Trump never mentioned whites, not once, in either debate. Nor the rural, working-class, or left-behind Americans.

That’s not how Trump won in 2016. This is how he won — and also how he lost four years later.

For decades, Democrats, Republicans, Wall Street, universities, the media and corporate America had dumped on rural whites and the working class. Liberal elites had to demonize the people they’d screwed over to justify the untold riches they’d made on NAFTA and global “free trade.” Wall Street stole from the working class, so they had to attack the people they’d stolen from.

That’s why the elites carry on so about “white privilege” and “toxic masculinity,” as if the guy working at Home Depot is an incipient Hitler.

Democrats used to pretend to care about the working class. Then, in the Clinton era, they realized that with all the new immigrants voting for them, they didn’t need the working class anymore and proceeded to come down like a sledgehammer on “flyover people.”

Trying to impress liberals, Republicans were embarrassed about getting votes from white people.

Then Trump came along like the vox clamantis in deserto and spoke directly to ordinary white Americans. Once they got over their amazement, the despised working class would have walked over glass to vote for Trump. Shocking the world, he won the election.

All the stars were aligned. Wall Street had given more than 96% of its money to a losing candidate. Trump won on the slogan “BUILD THE WALL” — defying not only Democrats but also the entire GOP establishment, to the extent you can tell them apart. The more the media slandered Trump, the more his voters loved him.

And then Trump systematically fumbled it all away, hiring his relatives and giving the keys of the kingdom to Goldman Sachs, Silicon Valley and the Chamber of Commerce.

Trump had begun selling out even before the 2016 Republican Convention. He turned everything over to his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and Jared assured him he didn’t need rural and working-class whites. “Where else are they going to go?” he said.

In 2020, Trump found out. The only demographic he lost in 2020, compared to 2016, was white people, especially white men.

Who could have seen that coming, except anybody without his head up his butt?

Trump had spent his precious four years in office praising illegals (“incredible kids”), threatening to take guns away from people without due process, boasting about his “Platinum Plan” (for black people) and his “American Dream Plan” (for Hispanics — press 2 now to hear the plan in Espanol), releasing criminals from prison (where Kushner’s policy mastery met Kim Kardashian’s grasp of criminal justice on the Venn diagram) and bragging in his first debate with Biden, “I’m letting people out of jail now!”

He also spent 3.5 of his first four years in office not building the wall.

Today, Trump is back at it. Kushner’s invaluable campaign advice still rings loudly in his heart. With help from his clueless donors and even more clueless wingman, Fox News, he’s blowing off his available voters in order to chase the pipe dream of winning the black and Hispanic vote. (Can a major push for story-reading drag queens be far behind?)

The donors are thrilled. Living exclusively in the most white areas of the country, where the closest black person is 50 miles away, donors apparently believe TV commercials reflect the country’s actual demographics. They’re convinced that the key to GOP victory is sucking up to every non-white group.

It will never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever work. Immigrants — all immigrants — have always voted overwhelmingly for the Democrats. Instead of adopting our culture, immigrants mostly bring their failed cultures with them. We’re not even getting “diversity”! What we’re getting is a boatload of Hispanics (44% of immigrants) and Asians (27%).

This year, like every year, black people will vote roughly 90% for the Democrats, while Hispanics and Asians will vote about 60% for the Democrats — give or take 5 percentage points. Under no circumstances, from now until the end of time, will Republicans ever crack 50% of the black or immigrant vote — not even the second- and third-generation immigrant vote.

That’s why the outcome of every single presidential election for at least the last half-century has been determined by slight movements in the white vote. Whites are the only swing voters in the country, something donors couldn’t grasp if you applied white-hot pokers to them.

Below are a few of the poll results you’ll never see on Fox News that illustrate this immutable fact, regarding only two of our unique American freedoms: free speech and the right to bear arms. At the rate we’re hauling in immigrants, don’t expect either to last much longer.

According to a 2020 survey by the Knight Foundation, only about half of white Americans (51%) think “the government should prohibit people from sharing a racist or bigoted idea.” But gigantic majorities of non-whites do: 71% of Asians, 76% of Hispanics and 80% of blacks think racist speech should be prohibited by the government (unless it’s in a speech by Joe Biden).

Judging by what they say, that’s a lot of speech. Non-whites were twice as likely as whites to report feeling “unsafe” because of someone’s speech. Both Hispanic and Asian Americans are more likely than even African Americans to report feeling “unsafe” because of something said about race, ethnicity, religion, gender or sexual orientation — even if not directed at them. (This may explain why you almost never see Hispanics or Asians in comedy clubs.)
Only 15% of white Americans think the government “should prohibit a person from sharing political views that are offensive to some.” More than twice as many Asians do (35%); more than three times as many Hispanics do (44%); and an outright majority of black people think the government should ban such speech (53%).

Thanks to all the third-worlders pouring in, Second Amendment rights also have a gun to their heads. Pew Research reported in 2021 that huge majorities of Asians (72%), Hispanics (65%) and blacks (75%) favor gun control, compared to only 45% of whites. (The other 25% of blacks were just fatally shot with an illegal gun in front of a 7-Eleven.)

The report noted that “white Americans stand alone on this question” — something you’ll see a lot in these polls. It holds true on such diverse topics as voter ID laws, Obamacare, abortion, big government, vaccine mandates and many other left-right issues.

Remember, Republicans (especially Trump): Democrats are smarter than you are. If it were remotely possible for immigrants ever to vote 60% to 70% for the GOP, instead of 60% to 70% for the Democrats, Sen. Chuck Schumer would be demanding an Iron Dome on our southern border. If Republicans, rather than Democrats, consistently won nearly 90% of the black vote, he’d be calling for a poll tax to take the literacy test.

Or Trump can take the advice of strategic genius Kushner and blow off his most loyal voters because, after all, “Where else are they going to go?”

Ooh là là, there’s an election about to take place in the land of cheese and everyone’s commenting about it as if North Korea suddenly decided to go democratic. French elections are like the cancan: always the same, with high kicks and hopes for smaller parties ending like the dance, doing splits on the floor and the usual suspects back in power.

Tensions were intensified after the attack and rape of a 12-year-old Jewish girl by boys her age, boys The New York Times and other media failed to identify. What I’m willing to bet my bottom dollar is the three boys aged 12 and 13 are Muslims, born in France and brainwashed since birth. Muslim outrages against French institutions, churches, and synagogues take place as regularly as the Tour de France, yet so politically correct is France no one as yet (that I’m aware of) has named the three perpetrators as Muslims.

And yet something I cannot put my finger on is bothering me. The slaughter in Gaza has Muslims the world over up in arms. The largest Jewish community in Western Europe is in France. The extreme left leads a coalition that has condemned the slaughter in Gaza, while the right, led by Marine Le Pen, is now Israel’s greatest supporter. Switch over to the Big Bagel for a moment, where a pro-Israel group has just sunk $14.5 million in a campaign to dethrone a black congressman whose views on Israeli bombardment of Gaza were deemed immoderate.

Almost 15 million big ones have flooded the TV channels against an obscure congressman of the Bronx–Long Island constituency who was quite moderate in his criticisms of the Israeli overkill. Filling television screens, stuffing mailboxes, and clogging telephone lines, AIPAC and other pro-Israeli groups are using the same approach elsewhere. The message to politicians everywhere in the United States is as follows: Being pro-Israel is not just a wise policy, it’s also smart politics that will keep you in Congress.

Now I ask you, dear readers. What kind of democracy is it when an extremely rich minority can spend enough moola to actually impose its will on the many? If I go any further it will be called anti-Semitism, or better yet pro-Nazi. The irony is that the congressman the Jews are after, Jamaal Bowman, is not very smart—having been caught red-handed opening a fire door and triggering the alarms in order to stop a vote in the House recently. His great sin was to demand Uncle Sam stop sending 2,000-pound bombs to Israel to drop on Gaza. Bowman does not have much money coming his way, and he is as likely to be reelected as I am to win a Pulitzer for this article, but such are the joys of standing up for what one believes.

And now back to the land of cheese and why did I bring in Bowman and AIPAC and all that dreary money stuff? Unlike in America, where the Israeli lobby, AIPAC, and the Anti-Defamation League are always alert where anti-Semitism is concerned, France is a Catholic country that has a rather so-so past with her Jewish citizens: Dreyfus and Vichy are the first to come to mind. The place of Jews in French society has emerged as a prominent theme in the election because of the once falsely accused as anti-Semitic National Rally party of Marine Le Pen—her father made an unfortunate remark very long ago that always comes up the moment the party is mentioned—whose anti-immigrant position lies at the core of its growing popularity. Le Pen now backs Israel since the Hamas attack of October 7.

I’ll get to what is bothering me in a second, but first the left. Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s France Unbowed is vehement in its denunciation of Israel’s military occupation in Gaza, and he has—correctly, in my opinion—called it genocide. So, here we have the right wing cheering the Israelis on, and the left calling them cold-blooded killers. Mélenchon went further when he accused the Jewish president of the National Assembly of “camping out in Tel Aviv.”

Then, out of the blue, three boys rape a Jewish girl and the headlines dominate the politicians and their squabbling. And poor Taki begins to suspect that somebody somewhere put those boys up to no good as the pro-Arab left is shown as breeding monsters who rape 12-year-olds. Otherwise, everything is topsy-turvy. An anti-Semitic left and a nationalist populist right is a brand-new twist in French politics.

Ironically, none of the above seems to work. The right coming out as pro-Israel has only drawn catcalls from the organizations that represent the 450,000 Jews in France. I could have told Marine and saved her the trouble. Will a French Jew ever vote for the right? By siding with the Israeli bullies who are killing Palestinians nonstop with American weapons, the right is digging its own grave. When the identity of the three boys becomes known, as well as their religion, things might clear up a bit, but in the meantime, if you live in France, keep your 12-year-old daughter at home, as there are two weeks to go.

I feel like Diogenes, the Ancient Greek who walked about sunny Athens with a lamp looking for an honest man. And I have found one in Nigel Farage, certainly the last politician who always tells the truth. What I find truly shocking is those who oppose him, the Rothermere press, for example, whose financial dealings with the British government remind me of Pravda with the Soviet Politburo.

Having Boris Johnson as a lead cheerleader for Ukraine is fine, as long as he remains safely behind with his large family and cheers young Ukrainians on to death. Keep urging them on, Boris, they’ll fight to the last Ukrainian while you collect kudos for your stance. Other cheerleaders at the Mail and the Telegraph should be ashamed of themselves. In order to discredit Farage, they will brainwash people into backing a war that should have been stopped two years ago. But such are the joys of hypocrisy.

Just take a look at the recent ceremony to mark the Normandy Landing 80 years ago. There was no Russia and no Germany, but Monte Carlo, believe it or not. 27 million Russians died in the battle against Nazi Germany, 27 million, yet Monaco’s Prince Albert shamelessly took the salute with the rest of the heads of state. Monaco was neutral and served as a brothel for German officers during the war, yet Albert was there.

This is just to point out how the media have managed to turn a great country like Russia, which had it not sacrificed its youth we’d all be speaking German nowadays, into a pariah for defending itself against an encroaching NATO despite promises and assurances to the contrary back in the early nineties. What Nigel Farage said is the absolute truth, yet those who take orders from above have gone after him for doing the unmentionable: Telling it like it is. Farage is the first and last honest man and politician in Britain.

Something unexpected has been going on with suicide rates over the past half decade.

First, though, some background: It is widely assumed by many people who don’t pay close attention to social science statistics that because African-American life is, as we are so often told, unbearably tragic, the rate at which blacks kill themselves to escape the crushing burden of systemic racism must be very high.

In reality, a basic finding of American social science determined that, among younger people under age 45, while American Indians have horribly high suicide rates and whites, despite all their white privilege, have bad levels, blacks, although they suffer extraordinarily high rates of dying at the hands of one another, have relatively low rates of dying by their own hand.

For most of the 21st century, the black suicide rate was about half the white rate (among people under 45, whom I will concentrate upon in this column).

Understanding that helps explain things like Sailer’s Law of Mass Shootings, which states that if there are more dead than wounded in a mass shooting, the shooter is likely to be nonblack (he stuck around to finish off the wounded because he’d already resolved he was never coming home); but if there are more wounded than dead, the shooter is likely to be black (because the gunman doesn’t hang around because he’s shooting to kill somebody he’s mad at, not to get killed himself).

But the low black suicide rate seems to be changing over the past decade.

The white suicide rate (blue line) rose steadily among those under age 45 during the Deaths of Despair era pointed out in 2015 by economists Angus Deaton and Ann Case. But it seems to have flattened out over the past half decade.

In contrast, all other groups seem to have suffered an upturn in suicides around 2016, although the Asian rate has since leveled off.

The CDC’s WONDER database of the causes of death in the U.S. comes with a six-month lag for reasons like suicide, homicide, and traffic fatality to give coroners time to get their verdict right. So I still have only the first 49 weeks of 2023. To estimate the entire year, I multiplied the suicides through the first 49 weeks by 52/49ths.

Comparing the projected suicide rate among people under 45 for 2023 vs. 2015, blacks are up 75 percent, Hispanics up 54 percent, American Indians 38 percent, Asians 9 percent, and non-Hispanic whites up 6 percent.

Why?

One possibility is that guns are becoming more abundant. Because guns are a consumer durable, the number of firearms owned by Americans per capita tends to go up relentlessly. In an era when the media has grouped homicides and suicides together under the neologism “gun violence,” it might sound plausible that the rise in the number of guns is driving the rise in the suicide rate.

By way of analogy, back in 1999, 72 percent of homicides were committed with a gun compared to 86 percent in 2023. The latest generation of Americans seem more squeamish about committing murder with knives or fists, but still okay with standing off and shooting somebody as if they were an NPC in a videogame.

After all, guns are a much more certain way of killing yourself than most other methods.

For example, in the late 1990s I organized the rescue of a woman who jumped off the 53-foot-high Madison Street bridge into the Chicago River at rush hour. Was she really trying to kill herself? She certainly started paddling for her life as soon as she hit the cold water as I ran to get the life ring I had noticed years before at the east end of all the Chicago bridges. I would guess that she picked a time (6 p.m.) when there would be thousands of onlookers because she didn’t want to kill herself so much as she just wanted people to notice her pain.

But with a gun…

Yet, it turns out that in 1999 52 percent of suicides were carried out with a firearm compared with 50 percent in 2023. This doesn’t prove that the increasing prevalence of guns isn’t somewhat contributing to the growth in nonwhite suicides, but, clearly, something else is going on as well.

Or, perhaps, the rise in suicide rates among nonwhites during the Great Awokening is related to increased despair due to the zeitgeist constantly telling nonwhites how oppressed they are.

Another possibility is that these trends are tied into murky developments in drugs.

We now have a pretty good picture of the rise in drug addictions in the early 21st century thanks to books by reporter Sam Quinones.

In the 1990s, Purdue Pharmaceuticals began aggressively marketing their Oxycodone opioid pain pills to doctors as being, somehow, nonaddictive. I can recall reading articles in Time and Newsweek in 1997 when I was fighting stage 4 non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma about how doctors were getting over their outdated prejudice against the new generation of opioid pain pills, which The Science (as we call it now) had recently proved weren’t at all addictive.

I’m not sure I believed those articles (I now presume they were more or less paid for by the Sackler family). But, personally, whether liberating opioids would turn out to be in the long-run best interests of the American public was not, I must confess, of great intellectual interest to me at the moment. I didn’t much care about the long-term effects of opioids because I felt that while the high likelihood of dying in my 30s and leaving a widow and orphans was bad enough, dying in agony was a little too much to ask. So in 1997 I was willing to risk the chance of getting addicted to Oxy since it was likely that if I did, I’d rapidly be dead anyway.

As it turned out, I happened to squeeze into a clinical trial for the first-ever monoclonal antibody, Rituxan. And so here I am and I’ve never had to take an opioid pain pill in my life.

Purdue tended to focus on the more obscure regions of the U.S., ones in which working-class whites had a lot of back pain. When the authorities began cracking down on pill doctors around 2010, the Mexican cartels stepped in to market them black tar heroin. The cartels also focused on places like small-town Kentucky, where nobody would much care if rednecks dropped dead. In contrast, Quinones wrote, the Mexicans avoided selling heroin to urban blacks because they were more violent.

But drug dealers couldn’t resist the lure of the big cities forever. Around 2015, both fentanyl and a revamped version of meth started showing up in urban areas. Shortly afterward, drug overdose deaths started to skyrocket. Looking at what the Centers for Disease Control calls deaths due to “Accidental poisoning and exposure to noxious substances,” we see a sharp rise in 2016, followed by an explosion in the cursed years of 2020 and 2021.

The good news is that the past two years, 2022–23, have seen some moderation in the growth of overdose deaths relative to the first two of this chaotic decade.

My guess is that suicide and overdose rates have become correlated, although I’m not sure why. It could be that one cause of death is sometimes mistaken for the other by doctors filling in cause-of-death certificates.

Or it could be that addictions to fentanyl and/or meth tend to lead to suicide.

The good news is that deaths of despair among whites seem to be slowing down in the years after Case and Deaton called attention to this massive problem. The bad news is that an era obsessed with Black Lives Matter seems to be getting nonwhite lives ended at a remarkable rate.

Following last week’s column on Alex Jones and his “boo-hoo the feds are after me” Crybaby Tour ’24, I heard from several readers (via my Substack) who slammed my sympathy for the parents who won the defamation suits (there were three lawsuits, in Texas and Connecticut).

One example:

If I was a parent of one of those murdered kids I wouldn’t give a flying fuck what Jones, or Biden, or Tucker, or anyone else had to say about it; words spoken by TV talking heads would be meaningless compared to the murder of my child. This money-grubbing shakedown of Alex Jones puts the Sandy Hook parents in a different light. I call BS on them being “tortured” by Alex’s statements—words are NOT torture. You CANNOT turn off torture like you can so easily turn off Alex Jones. Comparing hurtful words to torture is namby-pamby horse shit, it’s a see-through ploy for cashing in on dead kids. These parents being rewarded a $1.5 billion payout over spoken words is insane.

There’s a disingenuousness to that comment. Technically, the dude’s beef is with defamation law as an entity, the concept that spoken words can “harm” to the extent that an aggrieved party should be awarded money. That he doesn’t phrase it that way—that he attacks the parents, not the laws that have existed in the U.S. and other Western nations for centuries—betrays a psychotic hatred for the parents, not a critique of the judicial institution they employed.

As I was reading that comment I thought, “Please, God, tell me this isn’t a new ‘thing’ on the right, attacking and excoriating the Sandy Hook parents.” And God replied, “Dearest Dave, have you ever lost a bet that the right will make the worst move possible?”

So I went to Twitter (aka Musk’s glory hole for rightists who suck) and yeah, it’s a thing now. Hundreds of comments from rightists big and small slamming the parents.

Fuck the Sandy Hook families involved in this political persecution of Alex Jones. 100% chance they’re the type of mentally ill parents that would’ve manipulated their kids into transhood & mutilated their genitals. All for commie social points and attention.

They are money hungry and greedy.

Sandy Hook parents are a bunch of lames trying to go after Alex for his money. I hope they burn in hell for their greedy evil schemes trying to get rich off their dead children.

Sandy Hook parents are scum humans. If you really cared about your children, you wouldn’t let greed demand $2B from a man voicing his opinion.

Saddest part is #SandyHook parents going to hell for their greed and will never again their children who are in Heaven.

The Sandy Hook parents are assholes. It was political and what grieving parent in their right mind acts that way?

The Sandy Hook parents that are involved with this witch hunt are all trashy people. Exploitation of their child’s death for more financial payout.

Just Twitter-search Sandy Hook parents (add “greed” to narrow it down more). You’ll see hundreds of comments from “MAGAs” and “America Firsters.”

But here’s something odd…not only don’t any of the big-name rightists who attack the parents go after the jury (you know, the people who awarded the money), they’ve all—yes, every one of them—cheered defamation cases in other contexts.

Collin Rugg, Darren Beattie, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Joe Rogan, “Catturd,” Scott Baio, Jim Hoft/“Gateway Pundit,” Poso and Cerno, they all rail against the Jones verdicts. Yet every fucking one of them cheered the Nick Sandmann defamation victory, Musk’s declaration to sue the ADL for defamation, Trump and Truth Social’s various attempts to sue for defamation, Kyle Rittenhouse’s stated desire to sue his foes for defamation, and Sarah Palin’s defamation case against the NYT. Every damned one of the high-profile rightists who’ve slammed the Jones verdicts has at least one, more often several, tweets encouraging Sandmann, Rittenhouse, Trump, Musk, and Palin to “sue them for everything they’re worth! Break ’em! Bankrupt ’em!”

Where’d the concern for “free speech” disappear to?

What a toxic trash heap of worthless liars. There’s no “principle” there. Just be honest—you big babies like Alex Jones, some of you think he might be “onto something” about Sandy Hook (“hey, he’s just asking QWESTCHINS!”—which he wasn’t; he stated as fact that the shooting was a hoax), and like children you’re upset that your hero got slapped. So you respond as babies do, by spitting and shitting.

Let’s reframe the Jones/Sandy Hook case by adding some color. Let’s say the most wealthy, powerful black leftists in the media—Oprah, Van Jones, Don Lemon, Joy Reid, Al Sharpton, Ibram Kendi, and Nikole Hannah-Jones—declared the Waukesha Christmas parade massacre a hoax. Let’s say they claimed the cops faked the black driver (it was a white cop in a mask!), and let’s say they declared that the beautiful little children murdered and maimed that day never existed, or that they did exist but they’re actors, as are their parents. Let’s say the black journalists whipped up hatred against the parents, who had to hear again and again that their children were either complete inventions or fed agents—let’s say the daily bombardment led one Waukesha parent to kill himself—and let’s say that blacks from all over the country traveled to Waukesha in the name of those black media figures to harass and stalk the parents and send death threats to them, to the extent that the parents and their surviving children became afraid to leave their homes, while meanwhile those wealthy black media figures raked in millions hawking books about how the Waukesha kids were fake or actors and the kids and parents are racists who participated in a hoax to frame blacks so that their rights can be taken away.

In that alternate scenario, you know you’d say, “Sue the bastards! Sue ’em to bankruptcy!” And if you’re not willing to admit that, you’re a piece-of-shit liar. And how would you respond if some Daquan told the grieving parents that “words spoken by TV talking heads are meaningless compared to the murder of your child. I call BS on you being ‘tortured’—words are NOT torture. You CANNOT turn off torture like you can so easily turn off Joy Reid.”

“Principle,” my ass. You’re just butt-hurt than one of your own got tagged by a jury for his actions. Your response would be 100 percent opposite if the circumstances were altered as described above. You cheered Nick Sandmann, and MTG is on record offering to help Kyle Rittenhouse sue journos and politicos “into bankruptcy” over mere words.

I’ve no patience for your double standards.

And the right’s got no need for it. See, this shit is how “soft on crime” starts. This is the germination of the—as you might say—“mind virus.”

In March 1994, California enacted its “three strikes” law. That July, a two-strike felon (drug possession, auto theft, robbery) named Jerry Dewayne Williams—yes, a black gentleman—traveled from Compton to Redondo Beach for a day in the sun. At the same time, a white woman strolling down the boardwalk with her four kids, ages 7 to 15, bought them a pizza to share. As the children sat on the boardwalk eating, and mom was shopping across the way, Dewayne strolled over. “A white boy and his pizza are soon parted,” he thought to his’self. The 6’4″ Dewayne approached the kids and demanded a slice. They said no so he took one and walked away laughing at his precocious japery.

The kids ran to Mom, and back then there were cops patrolling the boardwalk, so Mom approached one and Dewayne was nabbed, tomato sauce still dripping from his lips.

Technically, it was just one slice of pizza. But there were factors—Dewayne’s history of theft, the victims being kids, etc.—that bumped it up to a felony. And that was a third strike. Mandatory 25-to-life.

You feeling bad for the guy, you weepy Jones-loving softies? Well, blacks and leftists certainly felt bad for him. “It was only a slice of pizza!” they wailed. “Dewayne’s got no history of violence, only property crime! Why, I bet if those kids were having a party and a friend of theirs nabbed a slice of pizza that he didn’t pay for, they’d all laugh!”

Maybe. But one of the things that upped the charges against Domino Dewayne was the “terror” factor. The court took into account that those children felt terror as the massive monster intimidated them. I know you Jonesians never read boring technical tomes, but if you did read books about law, you’d find that courts recognize terror, not only in criminal cases like Dewayne’s but in civil suits, like the 2000 crash of Alaska Airlines Flight 261. The compensation to victims’ families increased because of the prolonged “fright and terror” the passengers suffered.

The dead from Flight 261 were as dead as the dead from any other crash, but the court awarded higher damages for terror. Nobody claimed Boeing or Alaska intended the crash—they certainly didn’t—but the crash was the result of their negligent actions.

Jones’ actions led to those families being terrorized. The parents, the little brothers and sisters of the victims, lived in fear for their lives, as the families were bombarded by “citizen journalists” who’d stalk them, stake out their houses, and leave threatening messages via email and phone. And yeah, one bereaved father did commit suicide.

The verdicts were not only just, but typical for such a case.

All you’re proving is that patriotical MAGA whites can also whine that “it was just a pizza slice! Ease up! He’s one of us, so we’ll excuse his wrongdoing.”

Dewayne was eventually rescued by his fans, just as your money will rescue Jones.

The disease of “soft on crime”—and I’m including civil torts—exists inside you. It need only be triggered for you to excuse defamation, harassment, invasion of privacy, and other matters in which “Hey, nobody got hurt.”

Question: When you saw those “climate change” terrorists spray-paint Stonehenge the other day, did you think, “Aw, let ’em go. You can’t hurt a rock! Wash it off and give those opinion-expressers a pass!”

I doubt it. You likely wanted them imprisoned (as they should be).

Even though no human was physically harmed, nothing was stolen, and rocks don’t have feelings.

“Soft on crime” always starts with unwarranted fawning (“He’s an honor student!”/“He’s just asking qwestchins!”), tribalism (“Don’t dare go after one of us!”), and hostility to victims (“Fuck their ‘trauma’! They weren’t really hurt. Walk it off!”).

I offer no excuses for Daquans, and none for Jones.

See, that’s called principle, something Jones fanboys can’t tell from their asscrack.

Which is exactly where they should shove their hatred of Sandy Hook parents.

And please, “patriots”: Shove it hard.

Did you know that, in the run-up to the nation’s looming General Election on 4 July, there has been a sudden mass outbreak of neo-Nazism right across the United Kingdom? No? That’s because there hasn’t. But this has not prevented mainstream British media and politicians hysterically claiming otherwise, and all thanks to the supposed malign, fascistic influence of one man in particular: former Chief Brexiteer and current leader of the insurgent start-up Reform Party, Nigel Farage.

How is Nigel a Nazi? Well, he isn’t, so the smear just has to be essentially invented out of nothing.

The Great Reform Act
The current U.K. Government (for the next five minutes, at least) are the supposedly right-wing Conservative (or Tory) Party, of which Farage was a onetime member, back in the days of Margaret Thatcher, when the organization was still in some sense actually conservative in its outlook. In the decades since, the Party has moved steadily to the left and treated its own natural voters like Nigel with ill-disguised contempt, particularly with their constant false promises to end mass immigration.

This has been going on for fourteen solid years now, meaning the Conservatives appear headed for the worst General Election result in their entire history—some achievement for the oldest political party in the world. But their disappointed former voters were left in a quandary. Who to vote for, if not Tory? Surely not the left-wing Labour Party, or the even more left-wing Lib Dems or Greens?

A month before polling day, the democratically disenfranchised were thrown a sudden lifeline when Nigel Farage made an abrupt return to the electoral fray, taking up leadership of Reform and agreeing to stand to become an MP. Suddenly, voters now had an actual right-wing, anti-immigration option to vote for, eating into the Conservatives’ old voter base substantially.

This would never do. The cozy post-Blairite Uniparty consensus being newly threatened, the agents of the Establishment sprang into action to combat such a menace in the only way they knew how: begin shouting “NIGEL IS A NAZI!!” and hope voters were stupid enough to fall for it.

We Will Slight Him on the Beaches
First of all, the Uniparty tried to tar Farage as a fascist by…criticizing him for claiming Britain’s current PM, Rishi Sunak, didn’t have enough respect for those who had lain down their lives to fight against fascism during WWII. After Sunak foolishly left the official 80th-anniversary commemorations of D-Day early on 6 June, Farage disparaged him as “not fit to lead the country” as he was “not patriotic” and “doesn’t understand our culture.”

Why? Because he’s a big brown Indian? No, explained Nigel, because, as Rishi’s early exit showed, “he is utterly disconnected by class, by privilege, from how the ordinary folk in the country feel. He revealed that, I think spectacularly, when he left [the beaches of] Normandy early.”

The standard Uniparty response was just to yell “RACISM!” with no actual proof of the fact. You’d have thought Farage had asked the same question often misremembered as once having been posed by the proudly non-PC British comedian Bernard Manning during an old TV chat-show appearance: “Where were the Pakis on D-Day?” (Actually, Bernard said, “There were no Pakis at Dunkirk,” which apparently is untrue, there were a few; it’s just that, like Sunak, they all went home early, so Manning didn’t notice.)

Mel Stride, the Tory Work and Pensions Secretary, said he was “very proud” to have a “British-Asian” PM, and that as such he felt “very uncomfortable” with the supposed racial overtones of Nigel’s words, saying he appeared to be “suggesting things”—i.e., that Sunak was himself a Paki coward, who wasn’t really truly British at all, just as Manning had once suggested.

Whistling in the Darkie
Labour Party politicians soon joined in the public suttee ritual against Nigel likewise, with Shadow Justice Secretary Shabana Mahmood—a typical D-Day dodger herself, by the sound of it—opining that this was “a classic Nigel Farage trick.”

How so? Cunningly, Führer Farage had said something not racist about Rishi Sunak—a surprising feat indeed, for a supposed neo-Nazi. However, by saying something not racist, Farage was simply giving himself plausible cover to say something actually racist silently, via words he did not even utter, in what Mahmood called “a bit of a dog-whistle.”

Dog-whistles are ostensibly noiseless, only able to be detected by the superior ears of sensitive canines, not humans. Racist dog-whistles supposedly operate similarly, seeming non-racist to normal human ears, but being detectable as racist to the primed racial radar of neo-Nazi fellow travelers.

Hence, when Nigel accurately accused the out-of-touch Westminster bubble-inhabitor Rishi Sunak of being an out-of-touch Westminster bubble-inhabitor, what he was really saying was “Bernard Manning was right: Where were all the Pakis like Rishi on D-Day?” even though he wasn’t, and nobody normal could hear these words at all, only those classic Uniparty running dogs Shaban Mahmood and Mel Stride. In truth, it’s not the fascists who hear the dog-whistles nowadays—it’s actually their supposedly “less extreme” (but far more paranoid) political peers.

The UnHerd Majority
Extraordinarily, some voters failed to perceive that footage of a man not saying anything racist was actually secretly footage of a man saying something racist, and the slanders fell on deaf ears. What was really needed were photos of Nigel in full SS uniform, taking a crafty dump in Auschwitz and wiping his bum on a photo of Anne Frank, but lamentably these did not exist.

Uniparty opponents could have tried claiming that, by wearing an ordinary suit and tie, Nigel was actually sending out a sartorial dog-whistle that he was covertly wearing official SS Tötenkopf-emblazoned underpants beneath, and socks with knitted images of Hermann Goering on them, but settled upon targeting his fellow hapless Reform MP candidates as being undercover Nazis instead.

First to be spuriously “outed” [sic] was Ian “Final Solution” Gribbin, standing for parliament in East Sussex, whose years-old user comments beneath articles on U.K. op-ed site UnHerd were combed through by the offense archaeologists of the BBC, finding he had made shockingly sexist comments to the effect that, as women had longer average life expectancies than men, they were “the sponging gender,” being “subsidized” by male taxpayers to “merely breathe,” scurrilously therefore suggesting “depriving women of health care until their life expectancies are the same as men.”

Well! Is that just the kind of policy platform of medical genocide we can expect to see in any future Reform Reich? Not really, because, as the Party wearily pointed out, Herr Gribbin was merely joking, making deliberately absurd suggestions about killing old women with his tongue placed “so firmly in his cheek one should be able to spot it from 100 yards.”

But maybe his joke was a dog-whistle one, so obviously a joke that it was actually wholly serious? After all, in other sickening UnHerd posts, Gribbin had suggested Britain would be “in a far better state today” if the nation had “taken Hitler up on his offer of neutrality” prior to WWII, “but oh no, Britain’s warped mindset values weird notions of international morality rather than looking after its own people.” Reform’s wholly unconcerned response was that this opinion was “probably true.”

I’ve often thought so myself, of late, given that Europe would increasingly seem to be headed toward some kind of miserable potential future unspoken dictatorship divvied up between imported Islamists and domestic white neo-Marxists. Given the choice, I’d honestly rather have to live under Nazism: It would be safer for the Jews, for one thing.

I’d far prefer having to live under none of the above, of course, and I’m sure so would Gauleiter Gribbin, who says he was just making deliberately provocative points to spur debate. Indeed, you may well argue it was precisely to prevent any such horrific prospect coming to pass that he was actually standing for high office in the first place. What have the Conservatives or Labour done to stop the rise of domestic Islamofascism lately?

Candid Candidates
Next up was The Times, Britain’s (former) newspaper of record, which unearthed news that around one in ten Reform candidates were Facebook friends with a highly obscure fantasist named Gary Raikes, founder of the tiny New British Union neofascist organization, who seems to enjoy ranting at a lectern surrounded by red lightning-rune banners and pretending to be Sir Roderick Spode. Other “shocking” revelations were that, online, some wannabe Reform MPs had occasionally typed naughty words, denied climate change, or “reposted an Islamophobic conspiracy theory”—generally media code for “He noticed that the Great Replacement is happening.”

Best of all was Matthew Warnes, Reform candidate in Mansfield, who called a Polish man a “job-stealing twat that can’t read English.” If the Polack in question can’t read English to know this, how can he possibly be offended? Warnes also changed his Facebook profile picture to that of Nintendo’s Super Mario, explaining: “Don’t be a racist, be like Mario…. [He] jumps like a black man and grabs coins like a Jew.” Isn’t that just a heartening celebration of multiculturalism in action?

When Farage was confronted with evidence of all this during a radio appearance, he basically just shrugged and told the presenter to die of herpes. Asked if he would withdraw support from a candidate who had said “Islam and Nazis are the same thing,” Nigel replied, “Probably not…. Winston Churchill…thought the same thing.” The only regret the interviewer got out of him was “I can only apologize that not all our candidates have been to Eton [or] Oxford.”

When it emerged another Reform candidate had advised welfare-scrounging black people to stop “grifting the race-card” and instead “get up off your lazy arses” and work for a living like everyone else does, we were all supposed to be shocked. Instead, Nigel simply implied that, outside of the hermetically sealed worlds of media and politics, this is just how ordinary people actually think and speak, a fact Uniparty automatons appear to have wholly forgotten.

Signs of The Times
The latest fake “unmasking” of a Reform Nazi is that of psychologist Jack Aaron, whom The Times reported had described Hitler as “brilliant” online. Yet it transpired he simply meant Hitler was a “brilliant” campaigner and speechifier, who was able to persuade the German people to march to his demented drum—when The Times contacted him, Aaron clarified he thought Hitler “evil.” As the presumably Jewish Aaron further explained, Hitler had “brilliantly” succeeded in “killing many members of my own family,” so it was unlikely he would be his No. 1 fan.

To simply report he had called Adolf “brilliant” out of context, Aaron told The Times, would be a “grossly irresponsible and frankly malicious type of journalism, a dog-whistle presented in a context where people might construe I thought he [Hitler] was a good or admirable man, which I don’t think.” So what was The Times’ subsequent print headline (the only part of the story many subscribers will actually read)? “Candidate defends ‘brilliant Hitler’ posts.” Oh. I thought Farage’s detractors were meant to absolutely hate fascism-related dog-whistles? Not when they’re the ones blowing them.

The end result of this whole lugenpresse campaign? In polling conducted in the immediate aftermath of the Partei first being exposed as the NSDAP in disguise, Reform overtook the Conservatives in the polls for the first time ever, thereby becoming the second most popular voting bloc in the land, at least temporarily.

Amusingly, it turns out that, the more you tell British people Nigel Farage is Adolf Hitler, the more they actually want to vote for him. I certainly do.

We have now entered the stage of post-Liberalism. The European elections have seen a move to traditionalist parties in most states. What was once thought as the preserve of Hungary and Italy has now become center ground for the new cultural renaissance of nation and community. There does seem to be a “turn” of thinking, and the new zeitgeist, like a Chagall apparition, flies above us in the “post-Liberal” world. There are several reasons for the collapse of the liberal consensus and for the isolated sick man of Europe that Britain has become. Yet the new right would be well-advised to appeal to a more qualitative value creation—embracing Roger Scruton’s call to recapture “The Soul of the World.” There are several reasons for the demise of Liberalism, but the issues are not exclusive to Liberalism. A more nuanced approach is necessary.

(1) Liberalism suffers from Ptolemization. In this, the Europeans took up the ideas of the Enlightenment and, rather than questioning its assumptions, continued to wheel out variations on the theme of Liberalism, no matter what the evidence. The French revolution likewise took the ideas of the Enlightenment to its totalitarian extreme. This is what Horkheimer called the “Dialectic of Enlightenment”—resulting in both the extremities of Fascism and Communism. The mistake Horkheimer made was to believe that “Liberalism” was immune to these issues. The realization now is that Liberalism works in a similar rise and fall (nomos) like any “system” once it becomes apostilled. The idea here is that there are no “systems” of thought; no Kantian “categories,” Platonic “forms,” or Liberal tenets such as “representative democracy” or “human rights.” All these are the result of “Relativism,” which is the cornerstone of the liberal globalist world. An inability to conceive of other thought, practices, cultures, a belief almost in the papal infallibility of the liberal. It’s a common theme in the media—despite the evidence, the zeitgeist, the Spenglerian turn; the BBC, The Guardian…only have one tune; it’s all the fault of “the hard right,” “the far right,” and, by implication, “racist” working-class people.

This is Ptolemization; pushing the liberal stone up the hill of Sisyphus despite the collapse of most of the tenets of liberalism. What are the collapsing tenets? Human rights relativism doesn’t work with dictators like Putin. With the economy there is “deglobalization”—and the globalized academics of the ’90s are still in denial. They wanted cheap Chinese goods; someone else can do the work and we despise our own working-class people—so who cares about their jobs? Work was “outsourced” to China, with rapid deindustrialization in Europe, and now it’s payback time. Human rights means unvetted immigrants in Ireland and the U.K. and the intense social anomie this has produced. This is not “racism” but a concern about custom and tradition. Ptolemy was wrong about the earth, but variations on the theme kept going until there was a truthful “Copernican revolution.” Within the “intellectual” sphere of the left, Ptolemization is alive and well in the idea of Critical Theory. Critical Theory, as an offshoot of Marxism, attempted to keep its relevance even though the relations of production have changed. From its industrial working-class base, Marxism failed to account for disparate cultures. It failed to accept that the working class have other concerns. Critical Theory then jettisoned the working class in order to attract the virtuous middle classes—therefore championing race and gender. Ptolemization. Yet there are only so many variations or modes one can engineer until you face the conclusion that Marxism and Liberalism have unsound presumptions.

(2) In Political Theory there has always been a divide between England and Continental thought. The English are mostly concerned with “political science” (study of elections, the “technicalities” of democratic systems, representative mechanism). The Europeans, especially the French and Germans, were more in on “political philosophy”; the assumptions, culture behind ideas. This stems from what Carl Schmitt noted as the seminal difference between “Maritime” cultures (i.e., the U.S. and Britain—loose, ungrounded) and “Culture states (Germany, Italy—more rooted in the land, community). The left, with Chomsky and Rawls, appeared to be the intellectual stalwarts of the 1960s. Even the right was more concerned with “libertarian” economic spaces such as Nozick and Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom. The right had failed to grasp the trend to culture—that “homo sapiens” are not merely grubby market seekers but have a profound interest in cultural realms and community. Today you would be hard-pressed to find any innovative thinkers on the left, prostituted as they are to liberal Universities and think tanks. Now the right, in the post-Liberal renaissance, is the center of intellectual, innovative investigation: the likes of Wittgenstein, Schmitt, Junger, De Benoist enjoying a huge retro readership. It was always there—in the “Conservative Revolution” of the 1920s but which was sullied by its irrational linking to Nazism ( the “far right” moniker again).

(3) Critical Theory and Ptolemization

Critical Theory attempts to explain ideas such as social injustice and liberation as products of “the system” or the values of the system. Critical Theory, as espoused by Horkheimer, reclaims the revolutionary spirit of Marxism as put forward by Marx himself in the celebrated Thesis on Feuerbach. The central theme of Critical Theory is “liberation.” It has been taken up within “modernist” thought by the entire social sciences. However, as Shakespeare opined, it is “hoist by its own petard” in the sense that it is “uncritical” of its own assumptions. And there are plenty of them.

The ideas put forward by the Frankfurt School (Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse, etc.) were trying to account for the apparent collapse of Marxism in the prewar period in the light of the rise of Fascism. This, of course, must have been an aberration in the historical dialectic. What were those working-class people thinking of? This was explained away by the domination of ideology, the media, exploitation of women, not enough “queer theory.” Critical theorists were stumped to explain the seeming advances of capitalism; the welfare state seemed to forestall revolution. For the Critical Theorists this was easily explained. This was in the “Dialectic of Enlightenment.” It was all the fault of those sun-seeking idealists of the Enlightenment; the likes of Kant and Hume whose liberal ideas had foreclosed on their own version of revolution. It was the failure of Enlightenment values that resulted in Stalin and Hitler. There is a crude presumption that runs through all Critical Theory that the working class are interested in a particular form of society called Marxist. This is Ptolemization—a type of Sisyphean blindness that keeps pushing the square ball up the hill! We must be right; we must be right: you can hear the screams from all the Ivory Towers enslaved in this Icarian pursuit. British universities, rather than representing truth, are consumed in a “Heart of Darkness” of liberal fallacy.

The collapse of Marxism, said the Critical Theorists, was due to the Enlightenment ending in barbarism and myth, i.e., Fascism. Again, there is a “presumption” that anybody outside of Ivory Towers is unentitled to a political participation by voting for Nationalist parties. It is the recent “far right” branding by the liberal left of anything that opposes Critical Theory. Critical Theory became so desperate that they attempted to incorporate the ideas of Nietzsche and Freud into the rotting carcass of Marxism. What they were really doing, and a sign of desperation, was admitting that the ideas on the right that they were rubbishing were, in fact, largely correct. Since they now admitted that ideas such as “surplus value” were not working. Even Marcuse, in One-Dimensional Man, had noted that the working class of the 1950s, ’60s were doing okay. Yet still they were wrong, they were deluded by “false consciousness.”

Later on, it all became the fault of Wittgenstein and the “logical positivists.” Logical positivism adopted a more scientific analysis of the roots of liberal thinking and its moral presumptions. Everybody was wrong, except themselves. They are the progenitors of the modern “woke” school of infallibility aligned with an infantile intellect. Liberalism, as a descendant of Christianity, is rooted in its gnostic soil. The one good outcome of all this is that the intellectual prescience has moved from the postwar left to the “new right.”

(4) Legalism and Forgetting

Edmund Burke noted that:

“It is not, what a lawyer tells me I may do; but what humanity, reason, and justice, tell me I ought to do.”

This idea of liberal legalism descended from Kant’s idea of the “Categorical Imperative” and the notion that there is a universal duty to behave in a way conducive to the law. The British are a slave to the categorical imperative. Hence the endless laws and restrictions on liberty, cameras, civil servant snoopers, which go virtually unopposed in the “spectered isle.” Protest is restricted and registered. Certain groups, i.e., Palestinian protests (which have great merit), are more favored than those of the EDL (English Defence League), etc. The state, the NHS, the Police have almost free rein in the lives of the people. There is no division (as in Islamic states) between the state and civil society. This slavishness derives from a “forgetting” of the origins of law, so cast adrift it is from Customary Law. Liberalism, which started out as liberating (i.e., John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty), has become controlled by a totalitarian executive. This abandonment of even the liberal tenets is illustrated in the concept of “forgetting.” Take for example JS Mill’s “harm principle” (from On Liberty). This idea of liberty was that one can do whatever one wishes as long as it does not harm someone else. Hence Mill was liberal re: drug use, freedom of speech. Now imagine comparing this to the modern liberal Keir Starmer with the retinue of state prescription, cameras, interference in the home, in forced sexuality, etc. There is such a huge disconnect due to the “forgetting” of the reason behind something. Liberalism has forgotten its soul. Hegel remarked that statues are objects from whom its soul has flown. The soul of Liberalism has long since flown the shingle shores of Britain.

(5) Geopolitics

Unbeknown to liberals, the world is not moving according to a dialectic, whether that be the Christian other world, or Communist utopia. Liberals believe in constant “progress.”

There seemed to be an inevitability in the talk of globalization and the “end of history” that ushered in the 21st century. This emanated from the post–World War II era of New Deals and free trade. There was a broad consensus among academics and liberals, combined with a myopic belief in the progressive benefits of technology, that a brave new world consensus was forming and that war and discontent were ebbing away like the tide from an old broken Empire.

Economists tend to measure globalization in “Trade in Goods” and FDI (Foreign Direct Investment) flows across borders. Yet this is like sailing a passenger ship in the North Atlantic with “Icebergs” disabled from the navigation system. There are Icebergs floating around…and lots of them. “Trade Openness” (calculated as Exports plus Imports as a % of GDP) grew steadily from 1945 onward. It reached its peak in approximately 2005 and has since begun to tumble. There is now a trend to on-shoring with the dual impacts of Covid and Ukraine. There are declining rates of return on investments and the problems of geopolitical uncertainty. The world, effectively, is splintering into blocs (grossraum), and the result is chauvinistic assertion manifested in military conflicts. But the reasons for the collapse of interrelated economies goes deeper. It is not purely economic. There is an underlying shift in what Carl Schmitt called the “Nomos of the Earth.” Whilst the 20th century may have been one of globalization and trade, it was also one of a “total mobilization” of resources and human resources for a system of capital accumulation—which heaps excessive demands on international relations.

So, war has become Keynesian in an era of diminishing capital rate of returns. Piketty notes this trend in Capital in the Twenty First Century. The Rate of Return on capital is (should be) greater than the increase in social income. The “should be” is seminal here because this is “a priori” a value judgment. Capital follows a pattern of osmosis—seeking any host, any territory, any sector whether health, social care, space. Stocks in defense industries are booming. There seems to be no limits on technology and capital. Once capital becomes the only “telos” in town, you have the inevitable friction between capital and community. This is now the de facto emblem of most world economies, even within the “culture states.” The revolution in Europe is not, however, a “Copernican Revolution.” The European parties of the right, although they have grasped the “culture” aspect, are also part of a profit-driven value debacle where the central telos is capital accumulation rather than value creation. To create value, nations need to recapture autonomy from extra-national actors and develop industries, lifestyles that benefit community and what Patocka called “care for the soul.” From the ancient Greeks onward, there was a move from essential meaning, a higher spiritual desire, to consumption. The Enlightenment brought in ethnic division and scientism; from ethics to materialism, on both the left and right. The challenge for the new pretenders is to grasp this fundamental decline. It is not the end of history but always the beginning of history, and that is our chance for humanity.

---