“Does anyone else look like me in Alcoholics Anonymous?” says the headline on AA’s latest promotional leaflet, above a picture of four smiling cartoon faces, two of them Muslim.
This leaflet has so many possibilities for comedy, not to mention complaints from the Muslim Council of wherever. But if this was a caption competition I would suggest a reply speech bubble from one of the faces saying:
“No, because we follow sharia law and do not do something that is haram. White people should do the same and stop drinking like filthy infidel fish. Stop comparing us to you. We do not drink until we fall over in the street because we have high moral standards. Praise be Allah.”
Two of the faces in the picture are later described as Muslim. Another is wearing a turban, so in my fantasy caption I would also have a speech bubble coming out of his mouth saying: “Hang on a minute, I’m Sikh!” And then another bubble from one of the others would say: “Well, you keep your mouth shut, then, because you’re also the infidel.”
The serious point is, I’ve tried to point out to the AA top brass before that no matter how hard they try, they’re not going to recruit more Muslims to AA by persuading more Muslims to get drunk in the first place, which I really don’t think will go down well with the caliphate. But they seem determined.
Inside this latest “racial equality” leaflet AA GB have put out is the AA “responsibility statement”—“I am responsible when anyone anywhere reaches out for help”—and this is displayed with twelve different-colored cartoon hands around it. Some are dark brown, one is charcoal gray, a few are tanned, some are a weird maroon color. I have no idea which ethnicities gray or maroon represents.
Leaving that aside, only three of the twelve hands are white. As someone who goes to meetings, I had no idea only a quarter of AA members were white.
On other pages, there is a patronizing guide to being black, ethnic, and drunk. It reads like “My First Equality Leaflet.” You would think a 5-year-old had written it.
HOW DO YOU FEEL? And the answer is given as: “Nobody else looks like me in AA. I’m alone nobody understands me. How can you help me if you don’t understand me and my culture…” (which is not drinking).
The words in parentheses are mine. But you get the idea.
Another headline presumably spoken by a black person states that “AA is only for white people.”
I’ve never heard a person of color saying any such thing in all the years I’ve sat in meetings. But the most patronizing and awful thing about this leaflet is to come.
On the next pages it gives examples of ethnic minorities who go to AA. All are depicted as cartoons, so it is very stereotypical and offensive before you even get to the words.
The first smiling cartoon ethnic man is called Raj, and he says: “I came into AA believing that I would not be accepted partly due to the environment I grew up in. Growing up in a predominantly white area, we suffered with racism. I am from a Muslim Pakistani background.”
Again, all I can say to try to help the people who produced this leaflet is that you really ought not to imply that Muslims are secret drinkers. Some of them no doubt are, in numbers severely limited by the extremely harsh penalties their authorities impose.
But it’s not for Westerners or Western organizations to point this out. It’s no less insulting than writing a leaflet for Muslims on how to cut down their pork intake. You are veering into very dangerous territory, but anyway:
The next cartoon ethnic minority AA member is called Raja. And without further ado, I’d like to skip to the next, for he is called…Navraj.
That’s right. Incredibly, AA has produced a leaflet on racial equality in which it betrays itself as being completely unable to think of any Asian names other than Raj, Raja, and Navraj.
You couldn’t make this stuff up.
At this stage, Raj, Raja, and Navraj can say what they like to encourage more Pakistani Muslims and Sikh Indians into AA, but the damning racism of all this is there for any ethnic minority to see.
AA top brass is so blinkered, and so used to dealing with white people mostly, up there at head office, that they cannot think of any other Asian names for men aside from names based on Raj, which in itself, dare I say, is racist because if you were going to pick a foreign name pertaining to the East, that is probably the one with the most imperialistic overtones.
I think AA should get out of the equality leaflet business right now. Withdraw this insulting leaflet and never put one out again.
There are also some black cartoon women, and these are called Yasmin (who says she is Muslim), Shana (who says she is a POC, which I presume means Person of Color), Rita (Sikh), and Karen, who says: “In 2019, I set up the Sober Sistas WhatsApp group for Black women in AA. In May 2020, we started the UK’s first AA meeting for Black women. This opened the door to a vast world of Black and people of colour online meetings, which revolutionised my recovery. I learned to reconnect to my ancestral spirituality and discovered a wide array of ways to deepen my relationship with my Higher Power.”
Yeah. Because you’re more likely to stay sober if you go to black-only meetings and find your ancestral spiritual base. I was brought up by an Italian mother, so I must try to find some other Roman Catholic nutcases and connect with them on the Catholic Guilt in AA network. Also, should I go to white-only meetings, or tanned-olive-only meetings? It hadn’t occurred to me before, and I really don’t want to, but this leaflet does seem very clear that segregation sobriety is the way ahead.
There is a fourth black guy, called Tony, who says: “Colour didn’t enter my conscience when I called AA for the first time….” I think he means consciousness.
But yes, imagine that. And now you’re a cartoon Tony being forced into a leaflet on color. How does that feel?
Of his first meeting, he says: “I looked around at the people and they didn’t look like the drunks I grew up with, they certainly didn’t look like me, there was one brother there, we didn’t make any sort of contact at the time, you know the brother nod.”
No, I don’t know. What is the brother nod in this context? Let’s rob this load of white pussies later in the car park? What on earth is AA insinuating about black men?
He concludes by saying (and I think the word “neither” is missing from the start of this sentence): “Colour nor race [sic] came into it for me. AA works if you work it.”
Interestingly, there are no cartoon Jewish people in this leaflet. Nor are there any Chinese or Jamaicans. For some reason, the ethnic types most likely to get sozzled are not depicted. But that is no doubt because they are already in AA. What AA wants to do with this leaflet, I think, is to recruit more of the cultures it does not have, which is to say Muslims. It is deluded.
AA is in the grip of a woke mania, trying to get hardline cultural teetotalers to become recovering alcoholics so it can tick a box.
I thought about asking them for comment, but as they never give me any comment, and as this leaflet is so conclusively idiotic, I couldn’t be bothered. If anyone in the AA general service office is reading this article, then by all means send me some comment. You have my email. I’ve written to you often enough about your various manias. Tell us what your excuse is this time and I’ll write about it next week.
Were these cartoons based on real people? Do you really think all black men call each other “brother”? Do you really think black women don’t know how to spell the plural of “sister,” or chose to cap up Black to make a point, and join black women’s networks wherever they are?
On and on go the horrible clichéd assumptions until you just cannot work out how the printers didn’t refuse to print this garbage on the basis that someone at the printers had to be black or Asian and must have looked at what they were sent by AA to make into leaflets and thought, “Dear God, are these people from 1953?”
As a boring old white alcoholic, I would also like to say that in the 23 years I’ve been in AA, I’ve sat in meetings with lots of black people. People of Afro-Caribbean descent and African Americans can be really good at drinking, so racial equality of destructively alcoholic behavior does already exist, for what that’s worth to people, for heaven’s sake.
What I resent most about the current AA drive to recruit Muslims, specifically, is that they are taking the cultural “ownership” of alcoholism away from the people who arguably patented it.
With all due respect to all the black people who’ve drunk themselves to death over the centuries, alcoholism is a white man’s disease when you consider it at its most insane level.
It’s a northern hemisphere thing, this desire to while away the cold, dark evenings of the soul with drink. The Brits, the Scandis, the Dutch, the Polish, the Russians, and so on, all perfected and exported the misery of drinking oneself to death for no particular reason other than an existential feeling of inner hopelessness, perhaps brought on by the darkness of the weather, which somehow entered the northern genes.
Yes, men of all creeds and colors have crushed grapes and gotten sozzled for fun since time began, and in every tribe in every corner of the planet, man has had one too many for a laugh.
But the art of miserable drinking, of very deliberately ruining one’s life by drinking to excess when you’ve no very good reason to, that’s largely a white man’s skill, or at least something half-white, half-tanned morons like me can’t help doing.
As my Italian mother said to me when I checked into rehab in 2001: “You get this from your father!” (who was of miserable north of England extraction).
Moreover, the medical defining of the art of self-destruction through the medium of whiskey, and the concept of being rescued from this once hopeless state of mind, was pioneered by two white fellas in the Midwest. Until then, people of all colors just drank themselves silly without really putting a label on it.
Akron, Ohio, was where alcoholism the brand was born. One night, stockbroker Bill Wilson was sitting in the Mayflower Hotel and realized what would happen if he started drinking after a day of business deals going wrong. He looked to the bar and he looked to the public phone booth in the lobby, and by some miracle he chose to make a phone call, and by another miracle he was connected to Dr. Robert Smith, who also couldn’t stop drinking once he started. For many years, it remained a fellowship for low-bottom drunks, including many black Americans.
I’m not sure what Bill and Bob would think of AA actively trying to recruit Muslims to meetings. But I do know that in the writings of their later years, they did worry about some of the new people coming in, who were “barely alcoholic.”
Chiefly, they worried that if you broadened AA’s base enough, you would eventually get to a situation where non-alcoholics were coming in for the company and the chat, possibly the networking, and in this scenario, they predicted that these people would want to change meetings to make them in their own image.
If Muslims do start coming to AA, who can say what AA will become? I would hazard a guess that it won’t be a place where members can bang on about transgender issues—and I’ll be more than satisfied with that.
Remember all those great ideas George Soros had about crime and open borders? Guess what the spawn of Satan, whose every idea is designed to increase human misery, is pushing now? Legal weed.
Switching out Americans for third worlders and releasing violent predators from prison gave him kicks for a while. But way too many Americans had not yet become McDonald’s-fattened, glassy-eyed deadbeats who spend most of their time sprawled across a filthy couch ordering DoorDash pizza, playing video games and not looking for work.
Legalizing marijuana is the last step, the silver bullet to the heart of what’s left of our country. Tantalize the public with a drug that will turn them into low-IQ losers, crashing cars, committing suicide and rushing to emergency rooms with their cannabis-induced scromiting (uncontrollable screaming and vomiting at the same time — one of the many charming side-effects of widely available pot).
That’s not even the best part. The cherry on top is that a very, very, very small number of corporate magnates with absolutely no conscience stand to make billions. Big Pot will make Big Tobacco and Big Pharma look like your family doctor.
With that kind of money at stake, the pot-legalizers are spending hundreds of millions of dollars on pot initiatives this year in Arkansas, Florida, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oregon and South Dakota so they can start profiting off ruined lives in six more states. According to Open Secrets, the group pushing the Florida pot initiative, “Smart & Safe Florida” — or, more accurately: “Lose 8 Points of Your IQ & Murder Your Wife Florida” — had raised more money than for any other ballot initiative this year, on any issue, in the entire country.
(About my alternative name: One of the first legal pot consumers in America was Colorado’s Richard Kirk, who ate a marijuana edible, started hallucinating, held a gun to his wife’s head and shot her dead.)
That kind of spending could persuade voters to support cannibalism. Which, come to think of it, they might be: Remember Rudy Eugene, the Miami face-eater believed to be high on bath salts? The toxicology report identified only one drug in his system: marijuana.
Soros has so much money sloshing around that he got Newt Gingrich to campaign for Prop. 47, the initiative that put thousands of violent criminals on California streets — also promoted by the renowned tough-on-crime attorney general Kamala Harris.
This column will attempt to provide an eyedropper of truth about pot, against the tidal wave of lies — even, no doubt, from people like Gingrich.
Today’s marijuana is nothing like what it was 20 years ago. Although polls seem to show that younger voters are the most in favor of pot legalization, my experience is the opposite: Older voters who have absolutely no idea what’s in today’s pot are the most susceptible to legalization pitches.
The oldsters think marijuana is still about 2% to 3% THC. Maybe when they were listening to the Beatles’ “White Album” in their dorm rooms, but currently, pot averages about 15% to 25% THC and can be 99.9% pure. That’s a completely different drug.
The National Institute on Drug Abuse reports that about 30% of cannabis users will become addicted, especially those who start before the age of 18. Brain scans of regular users are consistent with the brain circuitry of an addict.
The corporate interests behind legalization are pushing a fairy tale about how legalization will swell a state’s tax coffers. Marijuana’s been legalized in 24 states (and another 17 for “medicinal purposes” — a total fraud). Are they rolling in tax revenue?
Quite the opposite. For every dollar in marijuana taxes a state collects, it spends about $10 on increased hospital admissions, police to clean up after all the car crashes and psychosis-induced crimes, and mental health therapists to deal with suicide ideation, depression and anxiety caused by increased cannabis use.
In Colorado, the first state to legalize recreational marijuana, crime soared to 11 times the national average. Not only did marijuana-only DUIs increase, but 40% of the stoned drivers were under the age of 18. Increased hospital admissions due to pot alone (and the always enjoyable “scromiting”) are estimated to cost the state hundreds of thousands of dollars.
The corporate interests pushing pot claim it works wonders on veterans with PTSD. Yes, if you consider suicide a cure. Two studies have shown that cannabis use by veterans was associated with “PTSD severity, depressive symptom severity, and suicidality.”
As one psychiatrist said, “You can’t trust the people who sell the drugs to be upfront with the risk.”
The main upshot of legalizing pot will be to accelerate our nation’s galloping descent into mass retardation, laziness and the inability to engage in a normal adult conversation.
It’s basically impossible to increase IQ permanently — as Charles Murray has been pointing out forever. But Soros has found a way to decrease IQ permanently.
The 2012 Dunedin Study compared the IQ of more than a thousand participants at age 13 and then again at age 38, with their pot usage assessed at ages 18, 21, 26, 32 and 38.
Result: The more pot they consumed, the more IQ points they lost. Heavy, frequent or longtime users lost an average of six points, and early-onset users lost an average of eight points. Mental impairment was evident across all four Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale IV components: working memory, processing speed, perceptual reasoning and verbal comprehension. The cognitive loss was even greater compared to non-users, whose IQ actually increased from childhood.
No other factors could explain it — the researchers controlled for alcohol, education level, other drugs or still being high. It was just the marijuana. And quitting didn’t reverse the decline, especially for users who started young. Once the IQ points are gone, they’re gone. You can’t Uber down to the IQ dispensary and buy some more.
Eight points isn’t a gigantic cognitive deficit. It’s only about the IQ difference between Connecticut and Mississippi, or the U.S. and Chile. But why would any country adopt policies that reduce the national IQ by even a few points?
I don’t know. A$k Newt why he campaigned to relea$e thou$and$ of violent criminal$ from pri$on.
If outrage, grief, and concern were the civilized world’s reaction to the killing of 1,200 Israelis on October 7, 2023, total indifference by the same types seems to be the response to the death of more than 41,000 Gazans, most of them women and children. Here in New York the headline is one and the same, “Israel Under Attack,” never mind the bodies of innocents piling up both in Gaza and now Lebanon.
I know, I know, Hamas started it and Hezbollah deserves it, but we are supposedly civilized people who don’t gloat while innocents are slaughtered. Well, are we that civilized? Back in the ’60s we dropped more bombs on Vietnam than we did on Germany in the ’40s, including Agent Orange, and in Iraq we killed close to half a million Iraqis before “mission accomplished” was announced. Yet the mission was never accomplished, and the neo-cons who moved heaven and earth to start the war are still around urging Israel to kill more people. Yet no one with a moral conscience can ignore the barbarity of those thousands of dead women and children, no matter the Israeli lobby’s Circe-like spells. The latter has succeeded in linking anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism into one and the same, thus any criticism of Israel is now seen, at least here in America, as anti-Semitic.
Israel possesses a mystical ability to always come out of any conflict as the victim, hence I will now recount to you a brief history of victimhood that for once is not an Israeli fable. In 1922 the League of Nations approved the British Mandate, which facilitated Zionist immigration to Palestine. Waves of Jewish settlers arrived and purchased land while using exclusively Jewish labor. They also armed themselves and incrementally dispossessed Palestinians, particularly in rural areas. The rich Rothschild clan had financed many of the settlers, whereas those they dispossessed had been cultivating the land for generations.
The 1936–1939 Great Revolt was a Palestinian uprising against the mandate and Zionist immigration. But it was not to be. Zionists insisted that Palestine was theirs, “all of it, unassailable and eternal.” In 1948, the year Israel declared itself a nation, 750,000 Palestinians were expelled from their homes by Zionist militias, and this catastrophe continued after the 1967 six-day war that saw Jerusalem, the West Bank, and the Golan Heights all captured by Israel. When I was based in Jordan back in 1969, I saw the camps the disenfranchised had been living in since ’48, and now, after seventy years, the third and fourth generation are still refugees in overcrowded and dirt-poor camps.
So I ask you, dear Takimag readers: Is it anti-Semitic to see the Palestinian point of view and for one’s heart to bleed for those whose houses are regularly blown up by the Israeli army, or whose sons are murdered by hardcore Israeli settlers? Are Palestinian lives the same as those of flies or mosquitoes we kill while swatting them away? Why is ethnic cleansing tolerated when practiced by Israelis on the West Bank? How can 41,000 deaths be acceptable as revenge for the 1,200 Israelis slaughtered by Hamas? Why is there no outcry over the regular torture of Palestinians in Israeli prisons? How can the civilized world tolerate Itamar Ben-Gvir, Netanyahu’s security chief, who openly steers a policy of humiliation of Palestinian prisoners and tramples on their basic rights?
Another question is whether Israel is entitled to kill as many as it has and will in the future because of the threats issued by Hezbollah and Hamas. There are those who will say yes, but until October 7 of last year, they were just that—threats, and empty ones at that. In reality, what Netanyahu seeks is a war with Iran, as long as Uncle Sam is very much involved. The neo-cons conned George W. Bush to go to war against a “nuclear-armed” Saddam, and Bibi thinks this time it will be even easier to get the good uncle to attack the ayatollahs. This is the long-term plan, but for the moment killing the Lebanese and what’s left in Gaza is the policy. The 2,000-pound American-supplied bombs falling on defenseless women and children cannot make any of us very proud, but leave it to the Israeli lobby to take care of any bad publicity. If any, it is simply anti-Semitism, dear readers.
In the meantime, American law and policy have long forbidden the transfer of weapons to nations engaged in gross violations of human rights, such as the ones in Gaza where children are regularly shot in the head, newborns and their mothers are starved because of blocked food aid, and a health system has been destroyed. Israel and the U.S. have together turned Gaza into a wilderness, yet most people in America are unaware of this crime. Hypocrisy alerts go off nonstop when American diplomats hail the international rule-based order. American weapons and Israel will continue to shatter lives. It’s a bloody shame, and we are all responsible.
Here is something no one in the media is reporting as Vice President Kamala Harris continues to duck and weave like Muhammad Ali in the ring to avoid any questions about her economic plan.
The American Business Defense Foundation reports that under the Harris tax plan, the number of Americans subject to the hated death tax would double or triple. This would happen because Harris has declared she will let the Trump tax cut expire next year if she becomes president.
Thanks to the Trump tax cut, the amount of an estate that is currently exempt from tax is roughly $13.6 million.
But according to the IRS: “Under the tax reform law, the increase is only temporary. Thus, in 2026, the exemption is due to revert to its pre-2018 level of $5 million, as adjusted for inflation.”
Kamala wants this to happen. She wants to soak the millionaires and billionaires. But under her plan, thousands more families will be clobbered by this tax when a parent dies. This brings new meaning to the idea of “the grim reaper.”
We aren’t talking about the very rich — people like Warren Buffett and Bill Gates, who are already subject to the unfair death tax. (Though these super billionaires have built massive family foundation tax shelters to escape the tax.)
Now many farms, ranches and family-owned businesses will have to be sold after a funeral just to pay the taxes. These are mostly owners and operators of small businesses that have been built up over a lifetime to million-dollar-plus enterprises. The owners have already paid Uncle Sam millions of dollars of income, property, payroll, energy, business and other taxes and annual levies.
Now they will have to pay a 40% estate tax rate, plus another 5 to 15% depending on what state they die in. In other words, roughly half of a family inheritance must be forked over to the politicians. The IRS gets almost as much as the kids and grandkids. The agents should at least pay their respect at the funeral!
How is that fair?
But wait. It gets worse.
Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren has introduced a bill to make the death tax even more onerous. Under her bill, the estate tax rate would rise to as high as 55% to 65%, and the exemption would lower to $3.5 million. This means that as much as two-thirds of an estate could be seized by the government. This isn’t taxation. It’s confiscation of family property. Is the IRS going to seize grandma’s jewelry or grandpa’s stable of horses and the mansion he built himself?
Will family businesses have to undergo the indignity of a fire sale to vulture companies just to pay the taxes owed?
Guess who supports the Warren tax scheme? Yes, Harris thinks this is a swell idea.
Incredibly, if the Warren tax came to pass, the United States — the land of the free — would have the highest estate tax in the world.
Higher than Russia. Higher than China. Higher than the socialist nations of Europe.
The real-world impact of death taxes this high is that older people will avoid the death tax by lavishly spending down the family estate so that there is no money left to tax. The incentive is to die broke. Family businesses won’t be able to pass from one generation to the next. This is how the death tax destroys jobs and investment.
By contrast, former President Donald Trump will make his death tax relief permanent. Family businesses and estates will remain vibrantly intact.
This is one of many vital tax issues voters should consider on Election Day.
Sometimes it’s beneficial to break down a bad argument. To dissect it, deconstruct it, disassemble it. Get to the heart of why it stinks.
To put it more crassly, a dog turd looks bad enough on your front lawn. But bring it in the house, chop it up, examine it under a microscope? It looks much worse.
Like that JD Vance argument for spreading fake cat memes. I ridiculed it a few weeks ago, but just generally. I’d like to go into a little more detail this week.
In an interview with CNN’s Dana Bash, the would-be veep declared:
The American media totally ignored this stuff until Donald Trump and I started talking about cat memes. If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do, Dana, because you guys are completely letting Kamala Harris coast.
Okay, beyond the point I made a few weeks ago, that fake stories are the last refuge of people who don’t have real stories in their favor, and if you have real stories of immigrant crime—and heaven knows there’s no shortage of those—you’re only weakening your case by relying on fake ones, what other takeaways can we find in Vance’s comments?
“If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people…”
Vance uses the term “American media” a half-dozen times in that one interview.
“I say we’re creating a story meaning we’re creating the American media focusing on it…. We created the actual focus that allowed the American media to talk about this story and the suffering caused by Kamala Harris’ policies.”
Note that he’s not saying “liberal media” or “mainstream media.” He’s admitting that the left-leaning press is still relevant, that it’s still the “American media,” and if the “American media” doesn’t focus on a story, the public might remain unaware of it.
Wait there, Moonshine Jimmy…I thought Andrew Breitbart’s entire raison d’être was to make the “liberal media” irrelevant, to relegate it to a tiny bubble to be consumed only by a small number of Oberlin feminists, oygenflaygin Jews, and Frisco faggots (i.e., people conservatives will never win over, so why even fret about ’em)?
Don’tcha recall? Conservatives were gonna make their own media and it would be COOL and EDGY and it would completely displace the fossilized “legacy media.”
How many times have rightists retweeted some conservative icon who proclaims that the “lamestream media” is now irrelevant? “Nobody reads the NYT or WaPo anymore! Nobody watches CNN! The lamestreams are dead, too stupid to climb into the grave where they belong.”
Well, not according to Vance. According to the banjo duelist, the “American media” is still so powerful that whatever it ignores remains unknown to the general public.
By gosh, you mean the Breitbart/Roger Simon/Wilks Brothers plan to launch a network of conservative news sites, some with purposely nonpartisan names (“Big Hollywood,” “Big Government,” “PJ Media,” “Daily Wire”), failed?
That’s not where the American public goes for info?
The mainstream press is still so powerful that it’s ethically excusable to spread fake stories if it puts your issue in front of the producers at CNN and the editors at WaPo?
Wowza…Breitbart failed like a mutherfucker, huh?
Remember, his Obama-era dream was that the lamestream press would be staked through the heart by conservative news sites run by “citizen journalists”—the only honest journalists around!
And where are we now, more than fifteen years later? Trump’s VP cedes that the mainstream media still runs the show, and Breitbart’s beloved “citizen journalism” has become Twitter memers with names like Catturd and GroypNazi88 who peddle fakes to an audience that, though huge on X, is in the actual bubble, a world far more insulated than that of WaPo readers and CNN viewers, who, leftist though they may be, actually step away from social media occasionally to traverse the real world.
Vance’s “I lied so that the American media would pay attention” excuse is the exact same excuse, word for word, as Breitbart’s after he botched the Shirley Sherrod story in 2010. To briefly recap for the Zoomers, Breitbart had received a video from a “source” that appeared to show the Georgia State Director of Rural Development for the Department of Agriculture, Shirley Sherrod (a black woman), proudly recounting to an NAACP audience the time she discriminated against a white farmer purely on account of his race.
However, the video sent by the “source” was incomplete; it abruptly cut off in the middle of Sherrod’s tale. Breitbart, knowing nothing of black culture, was too dense to see that Sherrod was in the middle of a redemption tale. This is a huge thing in black churches; you recount your sins in vivid detail and then celebrate how Jesus cleansed you of them.
Part 1 of a redemption tale is always ugly. “I dun da crack, I stolded my auntie’s weffare checks to buy more crack. I dun drunk da Ripple and did sex in da alley for da crack. Satan was eatin’ mah soul alive…but then JEEZUS dun freed me, hallelujah!” (cue fat women dancing in the aisles while shrieking in tongues).
Breitbart didn’t wait to see part 2 of the video. He went on Fox News showing only part 1. And Obama, at that time as frightened as anyone that this “conservative media” and “citizen journalist” thing might catch on (yep, he’s as dumb as the rest of ’em), overreacted and fired Sherrod.
And then part 2 of the video surfaced, and just as I’d predicted at the time, there was Sherrod with the payoff: “Satan had put racism in my heart, but then I realized my sin and repented, and I helped that white farmer, I gave all the aid I could to that white farmer, and today we’re best friends.”
And there was the white farmer himself, saying, “God bless Shirley Sherrod; she saved my farm.”
Humiliated, Breitbart had to think fast. He declared that his plan all along was to trick the media, to pretend to attack Sherrod in order to “draw media focus” to the real story: the racism of the NAACP audience members, who applauded her discrimination tale before she revealed her anti-racist epiphany.
Only problem was, the NAACP audience didn’t applaud—not once—as I pointed out in a column at the now-defunct site I was writing for at the time. But Breitbart’s minions congratulated him on spreading a lie to fool the media into reporting a story they wouldn’t have otherwise covered.
Isn’t it fascinating that rightists haven’t evolved at all since then?
“Breitbart knew that sometimes you need to create a fake story to get media coverage of a real story! He’s a genius.”
“Trump knows that sometimes you need to create a fake story to get media coverage of a real story! He’s a genius.”
As a fan of symmetry, I’m pleased by the continuity. Lie, get caught, claim the lie was necessary to trick the media into covering a story.
The problem is, that kind of thing only works on the worshipful minions who support you anyway. All the general public hears is “I lied.” Hence why Breitbart’s empire never did displace the MSM, and why Vance’s lie didn’t boost the Trump ticket in any measurable manner.
Breitbart’s grand dream of making conservative sites the go-to mainstream source for news as “citizen journalists” shamed their degreed counterparts with scoop after scoop wasn’t born in sin…but it sure as hell died in it, thanks not just to Andrew’s lack of fealty to the truth but to the antics of his top “citizen journalists” like James O’Keefe; even Breitbart himself called out O’Keefe over his “love yacht” plot to humiliate CNN, and while I can’t betray a source, I’ll say that O’Keefe’s firing from Project Veritas was an action that any prudent board would’ve taken in response to malfeasance.
To be clear, I’m not trying to defend the mainstream media. I broke my cherry with the MSM 33 years ago, late autumn 1991, helping CBS News “finesse” a story of questionable veracity. And I’ve dealt with hundreds of reporters since. Some are honest, some not. But you’ll notice that the dishonest ones never say shit like “Sure, I lied, but for a purpose.” Most MSM journos are smarter than that. It’s the thing “citizen journalists” could never master: how to be clever when caught in an untruth.
Because rightist “citizen journalists”/memers know damn well that they’re writing for a bubble. When you’re not relying on sources or facts to begin with, why bother worrying when you’re exposed? You’ll only gain new followers from the publicity.
That said, Vance is correct in spite of himself. Yes, mainstream voters do still read newspapers and watch TV news. Legacy media has not been supplanted by memers; the mainstream media does still largely drive the news cycle. And the “why” of it mainly comes down to competence (that includes competence in the face of a screwup).
Now, to what extent will the legacy media help determine the outcome of November 5th? I don’t know. But I do know that Trump, Musk, and MAGA are staking everything on the notion that memes can win elections. To echo a recent column of mine, one of the theories being tested on November 5th is the Breitbart (now Musk) theory that “citizen journalists” (in this case memers) can drive the news.
If Trump loses, it’s time to bury Breitbart figuratively to match the literal. Andrew’s dream was a rightist version of an old Rooney/Garland film: “Let’s get all the neighborhood kids together and put on a show in the barn!”
Let’s build our own news empire to rival the MSM.
Let’s make our own movies to rival Hollywood.
Let’s become journalists ourselves.
If we do that, we can save the nation!
If Trump loses, that means the barn newspapers didn’t win the election, the barn movies didn’t “change the culture,” and the barn journalists didn’t know their ass from an inkwell.
If Trump loses, it’s time to burn the barn. Shove the memes and the Shapiro/Boreing movies and the viral fakes inside, bolt the door, and reduce it to ash.
That doesn’t mean surrender to the MSM or Hollywood. It means wise up, embrace competence over “Catturd,” and grow up; move past the childish competition for likes and views online, and stop encouraging the conservative “bubble films” that only exist to fatten the wallets and egos of con artists like Jeremy Boreing.
If Trump loses, he’ll yell fraud, as he did in 2020. And the rightist bubble-boys will support him and run stories so phony even Dinesh D’Souza will blanch.
Many of you will want to replay the 2020 aftermath. You’ll want to burn the Capitol.
I, on the other hand, will want to burn the barn.
In a few weeks we’ll see if anything burns, or if anyone learns.
As my basement human-sacrifice room has been looking a little dingy of late and putting off the rest of the coven, I was recently in need of the services of some professional painters and decorators to cover up and dispel all the bloodstains, evaporated adipose, severe smoke damage, and associated effluvia with their magic brushes. Researching some local experts online, I was shocked to discover the exorbitant nature of their hourly rates. “I bet I could hire a prostitute for less money than that!” I thought. Which got me to thinking…
Accessing the website of my nearest escort agency, I found my initial suspicion was indeed correct: Thanks to the recent mass influx of illegally trafficked cheap labor whores from Eastern Europe and Africa, hiring call girls was indeed now cheaper than hiring skilled home improvement specialists.
I noticed that, on the site, it specifically said “Our girls will do ANYTHING!” so I called them up and asked if that included Artexing. The madam on the other end of the line said it did, so I submitted a special “outfit request” for two girls to be dispatched straightaway wearing white overalls, gum boots, and thick cloth gardening gloves, rather than the usual nurse, secretary, or flight stewardess uniforms, took them down to my cellar, and told them to get on with it.
Lyudmilla and N’Kombenzizi didn’t do a terribly good job, I must confess, but they were certainly cheap and eager to please, and happy to chat whilst they manned the stepladders and pushed the rollers about. Was this the strangest outcall they’d ever received, I asked? Not at all, they replied, directing me toward a recent article in The (London) Times discussing sex workers’ genuine weirdest requests, like one girl being asked to sit fully clothed and seat-belted up in her car whilst listening to a particularly boring client (probably Jeremy Clarkson) accurately describe its various safety specs and concealed airbag locations.
Carry On Follow That Kamala
This report about what might be termed “celibate prostitution” interested me, because not long afterward I turned on my television for what was billed as being a vice presidential debate and saw that a random middle-aged white American man named Tim Walz had apparently been hired as a celibate prostitute himself by a prominent blackish-brownish lady named Kamala Harris to wander around after her everywhere she went in public and pretend to be her friend, for reasons apparently relating purely to his race and skin color. But I have white skin too! Why couldn’t I do exactly what Tim had just done myself, but better?
Writers often being short of money, as just proven by my tragic inability to afford any qualified home improvement pros, just a pair of pros of another kind, I wondered if there might be any prospect of my renting myself out for such explicitly platonic purposes along demented racial lines too.
So, that was the avenue I determined to pursue: degradingly selling myself out to Negroes or Asians as a sort of temporary public DEI hire for show, as part of a new commercial enterprise to be called either Lease-A-Limey or Hire-A-Honky, depending upon which specific international market I was operating in at any particular given moment in time. Renting yourself out to others on the sole basis of your ethnicity! Is such a thing actually possible? Disturbingly, it actually is.
Jew Come Here Often?
No matter what race or ethnicity you are these days, thanks to the magic of the internet, there is someone out there just waiting and eager to hire your body/skeleton/mind/soul/spirit by the hour. The first such temporary companionship outlet I came across was a service called Rent-A-Jew, whose tagline, “Nice to meet Jew,” says it all: just so long as the Jew in question isn’t George Soros, in which case his proffered greeting immediately becomes reconfigured as “We’re going to replace Jew.”
Rent-A-Jew (now seemingly rechristened Meet-A-Jew) was established in Germany in 2015 in a deeply misguided attempt to reduce rising anti-Semitism in the nation, allegedly caused by the growth of the domestic Far-Right there (nothing to do with all the Hezbollah-’n’-Hamas-loving Muslims Frau Merkel allowed into the nation that very same year, obviously) by exposing bigots to real live Jews to interact with, thereby demonstrating they were just ordinary human people after all, and nothing horned, cloven-footed, or devilish to be frightened of—again, unless they happened to be a member of the Soros family.
But what do the Jews do to you once they arrive? Groom you, apparently. Like Jehovah’s Witnesses gone wrong, the Semites promise to arrive in pairs and “talk about their very personal everyday life and answer questions.” Better, they further pledge to “often bring illustrative material” (illustrative of what?) “and sometimes even Gummy Bears.” When they’re finished, do they offer to take you back home to their gingerbread house?
Who is on offer to hire, then? Well, the first one listed is Adrian, an expert in “food combining” (e.g., strawberries and cream, lemon and lime, bread and butter, Adrian knows them all!) who says he would be “happy” to turn up in your home or workplace and offer you “an encounter in the Ruhr area.” How long will said intimate educational experience take? “We recommend a time frame of 90 minutes for an encounter.” I’m not sure I can last that long. Never mind, reassures Rent-A-Jew, this is supposed to be a collective experience for me and my entire circle of family, colleagues, and friends, although “The group should not be larger than 30 people in order to enable a familiar atmosphere,” all of which must take place “at eye level.” Also, there are rarely more than thirty Gummi Bears in each individual packet, and Jews aren’t made of money, you know.
However, looking into the service more closely, I begin to have my doubts about its veracity, especially when, upon perusing its FAQs page, I find the telltale words “The offer [of our services] is free of charge.” They’re not Jews at all, they’re impostors!
Minority Interests
It all sounds like a parody, but then so does Rent-A-Minority, a U.S. website that hires out non-whites for show upon the following highly dubious rationale: “We have a minority for every occasion. Whether it’s a tech conference panel, an awards show, an advert, or a business meeting, we will collaborate to find the right minority for you.”
Or, at least, the company says it does. In fact, unlike Rent-A-Jew, Rent-A-Minority really is a parody, aimed at satirizing “diversity-washing” PR from wannabe woke Western firms who cynically flood their advertising and websites with lovely diverse “United Colors of Benetton” non-whites to look all PC and right-on, purely to hoodwink customers into thinking they are more socialistically righteous than they really are. As the creators explain:
Rather than address institutional inequality in any meaningful way, diversity is something that is generally just for (temporary) show. Companies tend to be very careful to ensure that their websites contain an acceptable ratio of women and non-white people; on their leadership boards, however, it’s another matter.
Although it appears some incredibly stupid people did actually fall for the joke, closer examination of the site’s overtly absurd content should have made it abundantly clear the whole thing was meant only as sarcasm. Amongst the listed “Featured Minorities” available for easy, hooker-style hire were:
Ethnically Ambiguous
Mexican? Arab? Asian? Mixed? What even are they? It doesn’t matter…the exotic Ethnically Ambiguous minority can be whoever or whatever you want her/him to be.
Cheerful Woman of Color
Won’t embarrass you by being an angry black woman.
Smiling Muslim Woman
Certified not to support ISIS (or your money back).
Intellectual Black Guy
Good for tech conferences. Also available to stand next to you while you say racist things at parties. Because you can’t be racist if one of your best friends is black, obvs.
Strangely, it seems the only major minority you can’t rent on Rent-A-Minority are Jews: Rent-A-Jew must just have this entire specific market all sewn up for themselves as a kind of sinister and exploitative racial monopoly, like they do with Hollywood and bagel stores.
A Black You Won’t Want to Give Back!
The Rent-A-Minority site may have been inspired by a similar spoof, Rent-A-Negro.com, created as a piece of online performance art in 2003 by black U.S. conceptual artist Damali ayo (the lack of capitalization on her surname appears intentional for some reason sadly incomprehensible to my own defective white mind) to satirize what she saw as the lingering legacy of slavery across America. Here’s a quick summary of her company’s purported chief benefits for clients:
How to Rent a Negro
Prove your commitment to diversity * Discover the many uses for black people in your life * Impress your friends and family * Boost your reputation by showing off a black friend * Utilize the services of black people without the hassle of buying
Rumors that handing in a simple photocopy printout of the above spiel on her CV is how Kamala Harris got hired to the vice presidential ticket by Joe Biden back in 2020 are as yet unconfirmed.
Ideally, of course, DEI Joe could have gone even further than simply temporarily hiring Kamala merely for what former Donald Trump adviser Sebastian Gorka crudely but accurately recently described on British TV as her “having a vagina and the right skin color,” and entered into an arrangement that was rather more lasting and formal in its nature instead. The original Rent-A-Negro site asked, “Why [only] rent a negro? Why not buy?” Because:
As we all know, the purchase of African Americans was outlawed many years ago. [Yet as] times have changed the need for black people in your life has changed but not diminished. The presence of black people in your life can advance business and social reputation. These days those who claim black friends and colleagues are on the cutting edge of social and political trends…. This adds currency to your image and events. We all go out for ethnic food every once in a while, why not bring some new flavor to your home or office…for all your friends and colleagues to enjoy!
In its original intended form, the website did sincerely offer paying users the option to hire the artist as a negro-for-rent, and Damali ayo truly intended to turn up and be her clients’ temporary slave for a few hours to make some weird proto-BLM political point, but ultimately this plan had to be aborted when people started sending her in death, lynching, and rape threats, which is obviously disgraceful. They should have saved all those for Kamala Harris.
In the end, alarmed by what I had just discovered during my researches, I decided to abandon my plan and continue selling myself and my electronic ink out to online media organizations like Taki’s as a humble pen-for-hire instead. Life as Tim Walz Mk. II is just not for me. If I ever do require more moola to decorate any further tattered rooms in my home, it would be far easier for me just to become an actual full-blown sexual prostitute for hire instead—and more dignified.
The Week’s Most Slippery, Zippery, and Yom Kippury Headlines
REDUN-DUNCE
When it comes to humor, there’s commitment to a bit, and then there’s Tommy Cooper.
Cooper was a 6’4″ pudgy alcoholic chain-smoking British stand-up comedian with an incredibly mediocre act (he’d pretend to do magic tricks that would purposely fail, sort of like when the British government pretended to be able to save Poland from Nazi invasion, except that was way funnier than anything Cooper ever did).
In April 1984, Cooper was appearing on a live TV show intended for the Queen’s amusement (’Er Bleedin Majesty’s Night o’ Japery on BBC Two). Shortly into his routine, Cooper grabbed his chest and sank to the floor, to tremendous audience guffaws. They thought it was a joke, but in fact he’d dropped dead in front of 12 million viewers and possibly ’er bloomin’ Majesty ’erself.
As he expired, his death rattle brought down the house (no joke—the video’s here).
His heart attack was the funniest thing he’d ever done, and for a comedian it’s unclear if that’s a compliment or an insult. Cooper’s comedy partner Bernard Cribbins was so upset by the onscreen demise that he ceased working for several years. Cribbins was best known for novelty songs like “Right Said Fred” (yes, that’s where the 1990s “I’m Too Sexy” band got its name) that mocked British labor redundancy. Redundancy is when a union demands one nonworker for every actual worker (i.e., while Clive digs the hole, Ian sits in a lawn chair and gets paid the same).
It’s what The Sopranos called “no shows,” jobs that unions give Mob guys who get paid without having to show up.
Last week, the U.S. longshoremen’s union threatened to go on strike to “cripple the economy,” and in a twist so comedic it’s almost as funny as Tommy Cooper’s expiration, the threat resulted in widespread awareness that for every longshoreman who works, there’s one who doesn’t while getting paid for doing nothing. 50,000 salaried meatheads, 25,000 of whom spend the day watching Netflix at home. And if the union had been content with that without threatening a strike, the public would’ve been none the wiser.
Faced with the bad publicity, the union called off the strike in humiliation. And the real tragedy is that Bernard Cribbins—not an alcoholic or chain-smoker, who died in 2022 at age 93—didn’t live to see the best redundancy gag ever.
AMSTER DAMNED
California was the first state to ban smoking in restaurants and public places. Initially, in the early 1990s, the state left the decision to cities. But in 1995 Sacramento decided to stamp its foot and declare that all smoking was banned everywhere in public.
How times have changed! Last week Governor Newsom, aka “if Kamala loses I’ll never stop holding it over my party,” officially okayed “pot restaurants,” Amsterdam-style marijuana cafés where potheads can smoke all they like while munching on munchies and drinking coffee, tea, or designer water. Sure, pot smoke harms the lungs just like tobacco smoke, but isn’t a little emphysema worth it if in return you can publicly groove out to Phish coffee-shop Muzak?
“Smoke up the streets all you want,” says Newsom, “as long as, at the same time, you’re killing your brain cells and becoming an unproductive vegetable.”
Turns out the smoking ban was never about lung care. It was about, like, chilling, dude, with munchies, man. Huh-huh-huh. Maybe if Tommy Cooper had smoked joints instead of Pall Malls, he’d have still dropped dead in front of the Queen, but at least he’d have been laughing as much as the audience.
According to the local papers, the snack-shop drug dens are needed in order for California’s legal weed industry to keep up with the black market.
Yes, a genius plan. In a state filled with dine-and-dashers, stake everything on pot users buying expensive, heavily taxed weed, then buying overpriced snacks, then paying their bill and tipping generously.
Every week, it seems like California can’t get dumber.
And every week, such sentiments are proven wrong.
LASSIE, COME…HOMO!
According to a new survey, 3.3 percent of high schoolers identify as transgender.
The other 96.7 percent identify as “not wanting to meet Joshua Freyermuth.”
Freyermuth, aka “Vicki,” is a drug-addled tranny in Alliance, Ohio. A week ago Freyermuth was arrested after trying to lure kids into his car. Cops found meth inside his vehicle, but he was released anyway (nice work, Schmuckeye State), and he apparently resumed his search for boys, prowling neighborhoods and spying an 11-year-old playing with his dog on the front lawn of his house.
Decked out in a dress, lipstick, high heels, and a blond wig, “I’m-not-a-guyermuth” ran toward the child and tried to grab him.
Well, the family dog was havin’ none of that. Rex became Wrecks as he started biting the crap outta Freyermuth. Forget Pedigree dog food; that hound prefers Pedogree.
Freyermuth, meet Rover-mouth; the dog treated the shemale with unnecessary ruffness. After giving the dog a bone, this old ma’am went limping home.
No word on the breed of the dog, but it was likely from the “that’s-not-a-her-ding” family. Men in dresses might fool college professors and Democrat politicians, but they can’t fool dogs (of course, that’s an unfair comparison, as college professors and Democrat politicians have smaller brains).
The above was how the story was initially reported. Surprise ending: Turns out the boy, who’s black, made the whole thing up. No kidnapping attempt, no dog bites. The black kid just wanted to mess with a grotesque white tranny.
In hindsight, police should’ve been skeptical from the start. No black dog’s gonna eat cold Freyermuth.
FLAP JACK CITY
For 34-year-old Precious Williams of North Miami Beach, there’s no better way to spend an evening than going to IHOP for the all-you-can-eat Pan(cake)-African dinner complete with Marcus Gravy.
Because if Precious loves anything, it’s maple syrup straight from the tree (Precious—based on a novel by sap-phire).
But things took a bad turn last week, as Precious’ dinner was rudely interrupted by the presence of a white family in the establishment. Apparently, the family was (in her words) “talking badly,” and by God if there’s anyone with the skills to know “talking badly” when they hear it, it’s an obese weave-wearing ghetto black named Precious.
That white family put her right off her eggs-over-Eazy-E (it was either that or sunny-Liston-side-up), so what else could she do? She waddled over to the table and angrily smacked the white family’s 14-year-old child.
Precious—based on a novel by slap-ire.
A brawl ensued, with Precious hitting the whites with syrup and ketchup bottles. The mom tried to pull Precious away by grabbing her hair, not realizing that, much like how the North American skink sheds its tail in a fight, the fat-bellied ghetto ho (aka the North American stink) sheds its weave. As seen in this video, that hair came right off, and in an instant Precious went from looking like a female Charles Dutton impersonator to looking like Charles Dutton.
When the cops showed up, Precious begged to be able to finish her Rooty Tooty Fresh Prince ’n’ Fruity dinner, but she was hauled away (her weave faced a judge in a separate hair-ing).
Stunningly for “law-and-order” Florida, the state offered Precious a deal so sweet she lost a foot from diabetes—one year probation and an anger management course. Even more stunningly, she rejected it, a move her attorney saw as a major mistake (Precious—based on a book by gaffe-ire).
Her weave took the deal. It’s now living comfortably in Tyler Perry’s closet.
FIRE, RETARDANT
Sometimes the fireman puts the fire out, and sometimes he puts you out.
It was a normal Friday night for Oklahoma State University student Colby Parsons, a big lovable John C. Reilly look-alike, and his best gal, cute little blonde Katlyn Loubiere. Sitting in Parsons’ dorm at 2 a.m., they were doing what comes naturally for Oklahoma kids of that age—discussing corn and its amazing versatility.
All that talk about “nibbling on ears” and “stripping away husks” made the young ’uns hungry, so off they went to the 24-hour campus diner, Jud Frycook. Unfortunately, also out for a walk was local firefighter Luke Fields, the “hero rookie” of nearby Moore Fire Dept., who, in his short tenure, had already won the department’s “Lifesaving Award.”
Apparently, that station is big on irony.
Fields, a buff white guy with a mustache so gay anuses bleed in its presence, was out with his young blond male companion, and—seeing two hetero Okies enjoying the night—he became enraged, launching a bottle at Parsons’ head and, when that failed to fell him, tackling him and beating him to a pulp, breaking his leg and fracturing his skull.
Turns out that “Lifesaving Award” was for resuscitating a man Fields himself had nearly killed.
Magnum FD and his youthful ward were arrested, and as for Parsons, there’s a bright golden haze on his head…ow!
Meanwhile in California, Mendocino County fireman Robert Hernandez was arrested for starting five fires during the summer’s devastating wildfire season. While it’s not uncommon for firemen to start fires so as to appear heroic by putting them out, Hernandez told investigators that his motive was more deeply rooted in his Mexican heritage: “I wanted to blow thee leaves, but there was too many of them, señor. So I burn thee leaves. I hate thee leaves.”
Hernandez is being held at Mendocino County jail, where, thanks to him, the exercise yard has never been more well-mowed.
Recently, I read a splendid book, titled Homo cretinus, by the French science journalist and writer Olivier Postel-Vinay, on the subject of human stupidity, a subject as perpetually amusing as murder, and eternally relevant to the situation we are in.
Stupidity is a much-underestimated factor in human history, perhaps because stupidity is the characteristic to accusations of which we all feel most vulnerable. If someone were to say, “I have never done anything stupid in my life,” the only possible reply would be, “That must be because you have never done anything at all in your life—which is stupid.”
Stupidity is like measles in the old days: Everyone has to go through it. But there is no possible immunization against stupidity. If anything, its prevalence seems to have risen with tertiary education and yet further with the so-called social media. Artificial intelligence will boost it to new heights, or depths.
Of course, stupidity is like beauty: It is in the eye of the beholder. While I commit understandable mistakes, you behave stupidly; but, as Postel-Vinay reminds us, stupidity is not the same as the absence of intelligence, certainly not intelligence of the IQ variety. Indeed, the stupidity of the intelligent and educated is worse and more dangerous in its effects than that of the unintelligent and ignorant, inasmuch as it is the former who are more likely to have power and make decisions that affect multitudes.
A precise definition of stupidity is not possible, though we all (apart from the person who commits it) recognize it when we see it. And if to make choices in the absence of good reason for them is stupid, life itself, at least in its modern form, forces stupidity upon us.
Recently, for example, I received an invitation from my doctor, or at least from a computer standing in for my doctor, an invitation to be immunized against flu and COVID. I had either to accept it or not to accept it; there was no third way. On what basis could I make my decision?
For quite a time, I followed at least some of the research on the value of such vaccines. I tried to separate the signal from the noise, which was very difficult because there was so much noise, and so many preposterous or ill-founded assertions. I came eventually to the tentative conclusion that the value of the vaccine was that it reduced the chances of death in someone like me but was not otherwise valuable. A reduced chance of death, however, is something not entirely to be sneezed at.
My chances of dying were not very high in the first place, however, so the vaccine was unlikely to have been my savior, and I probably do not owe my life to it. But still I took it, because I estimated that the benefit outweighed the possible harm. Oddly enough, for reasons that I cannot quite fathom, the process of immunization has aroused passions from the very beginning of its history, sometimes with disastrous effect. I suppose it has something to do with a subliminal and quasi-pagan feeling that Nature knows best, and to interfere with Nature invites trouble.
Be that all as it may, my situation has changed since the COVID epidemic was at its height both medically and in the panicky official response to it. I have since had an unpleasant but not mortal illness with a recrudescence twice when suffering from a minor viral illness such as a cold. For the moment I am free of it.
The recrudescence might have been caused by the viral infection or might have been a mere coincidence (there is no worse argument in medicine than that something stands to reason). It is impossible to judge the truth from a single case, and while there were in the medical literature similar anecdotes of cases such as mine, there was no proof one way or the other.
The vaccine might itself be an immunological challenge sufficient to cause recrudescence, or it might be sufficient to reduce the immunological challenge of the illnesses should I contract them. The vaccines might therefore protect me, or the reverse. Certainly, I have friends who have recently suffered very unpleasantly from a new outbreak of COVID. As far as I know, there is no definitive evidence either way. I am therefore forced to choose, yea or nay, but in the absence of evidence. Moreover, I am aware that were I to study the question more closely, I might come to a semi-reasonable, but not therefore correct, decision, for science is not a matter of laying down definitive doctrines. Given the vastness of the scientific literature, moreover, and given also that I have many other things to do than study it, I shall have to make my decision in a condition of ignorance.
This is how we make many, if not most of our decisions. I invest my savings, but I have neither the time nor inclination to study how best to do it. I am not even sure that there is a knowable best way to do it. The best way to do anything also depends on one’s goals: in my case, not the achievement of wealth but the avoidance of poverty (as I define it for myself). I have an adviser, but I have no idea whether he advises me in my interests or his own, or both. I am not sufficiently interested to find out whether there is someone better to advise me, of if that someone better, that is to say with a better record, is better by chance or by skill. There is probably a normal distribution of financial advice, and whether good performance is a matter of luck or judgment is a complex question that I am neither qualified nor willing to investigate. I have to hope that my adviser is good enough, or at least better than nothing. I do not want to spend the rest of my days poring over the financial data, though an American of my acquaintance says it is irrational of me not do so, since an hour a day would be enough (the same as I am supposed to devote to physiotherapy, in fact). I suppose you might call it a matter of financial physiotherapy.
So I return to my stupidities like a dog to its vomit. The unexamined life might not be worth living, but the too closely examined life is not worth living either. Therefore, seize the hour, seize the day—within reason, of course.
Theodore Dalrymple’s latest book is Ramses: A Memoir, published by New English Review.
Some politicians and activists are eager to give you “free” money.
They call it universal basic income (UBI) — cash for everyone, no strings attached.
Comedian Dave Chappelle thinks UBI would “save my community almost instantly.”
In my new video, UBI activist Conrad Shaw agrees, “You would effectively get rid of extreme poverty immediately.”
He says a UBI will help people “start businesses, fix their homes or invest in sustainable gardens.”
Well, “sustainable gardens” might be nice, but someone still has to make stuff. And that requires work — often difficult work.
When I was young, if I hadn’t needed to work to support myself, I wouldn’t have pushed so hard to overcome my fears, my stuttering and my reluctance to speak publicly. I wouldn’t have become successful. I might have stayed in bed most of the day.
But Shaw disagrees. “I don’t believe you,” he says. “Nobody actually wants that … people find their passions not simply because they need to make money.”
We could argue about this all day. It would be nice if someone ran a serious test of UBI — give a lot of people significant money for, say, three years. Would people still work? Improve their lives? Their families’ lives?
It turns out that Sam Altman, the guy behind ChatGPT, helped create such a test. His big study gave 1,000 low-income people $1,000 per month for three years — no strings attached. What happened?
Not the great things that were promised. After three years of getting $1,000/month, UBI recipients were actually a little deeper in debt than before.
Why? Because they worked less. Their partners did, too.
Some recipients talked about starting businesses, but few actually tried it. Most who said they did start a business waited until the third year of the study — when their free money was about to end.
I’m not surprised. Give people free money, you take away an incentive to work. Incentives matter.
Shaw argues, “We conflate the idea of work with jobs.”
It’s true, people do meaningful work outside jobs. But being paid to do a job does say you’re worth that amount to somebody.
“How much money are you worth to the kid you’re raising?” Shaw replies. “The parent who’s sick that you’re taking care of?”
A lot. “But it doesn’t address that other people have to work to pay for it.”
Shaw replies, “We pay taxes towards things that are better for our population, for the general welfare. It’s … something we do as a country.”
“But this would pretty much double it!” I point out. “We already spend almost $2 trillion on welfare programs. You want to add to that?”
Shaw says, no, UBI should “replace existing welfare programs.”
That’s an interesting idea.
“If we were to get rid of unemployment insurance, food stamps, welfare and all the other insane policies we have, and just have a moderate universal basic income,” says Harvard economist Jeffrey Miron, “I think it would be a huge improvement.”
But that will never happen. Anytime anyone tries to cut any government program, people freak out. Imagine trying to cut all welfare.
“The chances politically that will happen are probably zero,” says Miron.
Progressives want to add UBI to already existing programs.
“Adding more programs is insane!” says Miron. “It will make the entire country melt down. The people who will bear the brunt of that will be people who are poor. The rich will move to other countries … hide their assets. We will have a debt crisis like nobody’s ever seen before.”
We already have a debt crisis like nobody’s seen before!
Let’s not make it worse with a UBI.
On the night of the U.K. general election, I was on the phone with someone working for the campaigning MP Andrew Bridgen as the first two ballot boxes were opened at his count, and, as these were being verified, I was stunned by the bizarre news that there were only four ballot papers with his name selected in these boxes containing many hundreds of papers.
My heart sank, because in that moment I entertained a thought I had never thought I would have about the British electoral system. And the feeling only got stronger.
By the end of the night, Bridgen had scraped just 1,568 votes…from 33,811 votes in 2019. He went from being the sitting MP of fourteen years, elected four times, to losing his deposit. How could that be possible? Was it fixed? I couldn’t imagine how. But I could certainly imagine why.
Andrew Bridgen was a very popular MP in his North West Leicestershire constituency, and in the wider world. Although—and perhaps because—he had lost the Tory whip over his anti-vaccine stance, he had maintained very high public visibility and a huge following on social media.
An endorsement from Robert F. Kennedy Jr. had cemented him in the minds of the public as someone who was a maverick in the very best possible sense. He was becoming, I don’t think it’s too strong a term, a cult figure.
He infuriated his party leadership and the then Conservative government with his opposition to the Covid vaccine and bravely spoke out relentlessly when no one else would.
He had taken a stand not only on lockdown and Covid measures but also on the Post Office scandal, and on the unpopular high-speed rail link HS2, which had led to many people losing their homes. He was strongly pro-Brexit.
He was confronted by the whips and told to come into line many times. He refused. When he managed to secure a debate on the floor of the House on the Covid vaccines, only a very few MPs turned up, and it was widely believed that the whips had prevented attendance.
He was a thorn in the Conservative government’s side, and he was expelled from the party in April 2023. This came after Matt Hancock wrongly and very unfairly accused him of anti-Semitism, twisting his words after Bridgen said the horrendous rise in excess deaths due to Covid vaccination was “the biggest crime against humanity since the Holocaust.”
His wife, Nevena Bridgen, said at this time, May 2023: “[The] character assassination campaign against my husband is a political instrument designed to assassinate his character, destroy his dignity, isolate and dehumanize him. From the moment he began speaking up about the current issues, our whole family has been targeted and persecuted.”
But his wife eventually left him, going public again in March 2024 to condemn him this time, in an interview that had a mighty strange tone to it in which she now claimed he had been radicalized by the “anti-vax conspiracy theorist movement” and “became their foot soldier.”
Shenanigans of some kind have undoubtedly been going on, and I have no doubt that Mr. Bridgen was and still is suffering attempts to dissuade him from speaking out on the vaccines. I have spoken to him at length about these attempts, and what he has been through is absolutely shocking. I hope it will come out in due course, but first, we need to find out what happened to his vote.
In the weeks leading up to the July 2024 election, his campaign team, one of whom I was friendly with, was hopeful that the word on the ground as they were knocking on doors suggested he had maintained very substantial support. His constituents were coming up to him in the street wherever he went to say “Good luck, Andrew” and “I’m voting for you and so are all my family.”
His constituents appeared to be remaining loyal to him, not least because he had spoken out so vociferously on their behalf. Out canvassing he was overwhelmed by the support that was being expressed for the courage he had shown in going against the establishment to stand up for his voters.
Of course, no one could be sure, but his X following, the huge postbag of support for his questioning of the Covid vaccines, his celebrity endorsements including from RFK…all these things suggested he would retain his seat while running as an independent, or if not, he would run his mainstream opponents very close.
Labour was the other front-runner, but there was also a Reform candidate, which might further split the vote.
An official Conservative candidate, Craig Smith, was standing, but he was keeping a low profile—so much so, in fact, that Bridgen’s campaign team was somewhat puzzled and suspicious about it. The vote was by no means certain, and, as every vote counted, you would have thought the Tories would be out in force trying very hard to raise Smith’s visibility and to explain to voters that he, not Andrew Bridgen, was now the official Conservative candidate.
However, Smith was barely seen. On polling day, the card was displayed with seven names alphabetically, including Bridgen and the new Conservative replacement as follows:
BRIDGEN, Andrew James/Independent
SMITH, Craig Andrew/The Conservative Party Candidate
This, I think, was potentially very crucial. As was the fact that out of nowhere, the exit poll in this constituency was canceled. This was really odd, because if you consider that the sitting MP was independent for the first time, it had become a key marginal. An exit poll had been booked to take place, but it did not go ahead, mysteriously. All attempts to get to the bottom of this, including calling the polling company, have gone nowhere.
Was it withdrawn so that there was no true sense of what the vote actually was, in terms of whom people thought they voted for? I cannot believe I am even thinking this, but this is where we are.
An implausible 95 percent decrease in votes is an implausible 95 percent decrease in votes. And for an MP who is easily the most troublesome for the establishment and who has made the biggest noise about vaccine harm, it has to be wondered about.
It seems to me unlikely that it would be feasible to fix the vote because the only way to do that with paper ballots would be to replace all the boxes with pre-stuffed ones. It is unthinkable.
But what does seem possible is a form of legal swaying, whereby voters were encouraged to confuse the newly independent former Conservative who is their popular sitting MP with the new official Conservative candidate, who is unknown but happens to have Andrew as his middle name.
Note to Deep State election fixers: If you put enough candidates on the ballot paper, can you frustrate the result?
It also seems plausible to me that the official Conservative did not canvass much so it wasn’t obvious to people that there were, effectively, two Conservative candidates, their old one (now stripped of the party title) and a new one.
No one notices internal party politics, and the fact of Andrew Bridgen losing the Conservative whip would not have been a big deal in most people’s lives.
It was to Craig Andrew Smith’s advantage that people might simply assume an Andrew was still the official Conservative.
At one point, Bridgen’s team received a call from a confused voter asking whose name she was to put the cross by if she supported Andrew: the independent or the Conservative, because she couldn’t work it out. How many more voters did not bother to call up and ask?
Perhaps thousands of people mistakenly thought they were voting for their loyal sitting Conservative MP, whom they knew by his first name, Andrew, when they saw a line reading across as follows:
SMITH, Craig Andrew/The Conservative Party Candidate
It is the only plausible explanation I can come up with. I think it is possible the ballot paper was not presented as clearly and therefore as fairly as it might have been.
In any case, Smith, Craig Andrew won 15,859 votes—the sort of number I was expecting Bridgen to win, while Labour’s Amanda Hack won 16,871 and took the seat.
A long, wordy statement was put out by Smith when Bridgen recently alleged there must have been election tampering.
Smith’s statement was so outraged and so confident in claiming no election tampering had taken place I cannot understand it because how would he know for sure? I can only think he suspected or knew he had benefited from the confusion, which was why he sounded so defensive.
He included one incorrect claim: that no exit poll had been planned, or canceled. Yet the polling company confirmed it had been planned, and was canceled.
The market research company Ipsos MORI, which conducts exit polls on behalf of the BBC, Sky Television, and ITV, confirmed that just two weeks before the election they canceled the North West Leicestershire exit poll with no explanation, removing any chance to check voters’ candidate preference.
Bridgen was first elected in 2010, overturning a Labour majority of 4,477 to win with a majority of 7,511, 45 percent of the vote. In the 2015 and 2017 general elections, he kept his seat and increased his margins to 11,373 (49 percent) and then 13,286 (54 percent). In 2019, his majority increased again to 20,400, 63 percent of the vote, with 33,811 voters.
To drop from 63 percent of the vote to 3.2 percent with just 1,568 votes seems so unlikely as to merit an inquiry.
Bridgen’s competitors were virtually unknown in the area. Both had a tiny social media presence. Amanda Hack, who won the seat for Labour, had just 840 followers on Facebook and 2,431 on X, compared with Bridgen’s quarter of a million.
Bridgen has said: “After the election, people were coming up to me, and still are, saying, ‘I voted for you, my whole family voted for you. What happened?’”
North West Leicestershire District Council strongly denied that the vote was tampered with.
A council spokesman told conservativewoman.co.uk: “With the exception of the exit poll being canceled, the allegations being made have no factual basis and are based on inaccurate assumptions.”
However, they did admit that exit poll was canceled and their spokesman said: “We were only informed at the very last minute.”
Bridgen has questioned the time it took to count the vote. The ballot boxes took around 25 minutes to reach Whitwick and Coalville Leisure Centre, where the ballot papers were to be counted. Polling stations closed at 10 p.m. But the count there did not begin until 2 a.m.—a four-hour time lag.
“There was no explanation,” Bridgen has said.
Personally, I dare not think the vote was directly rigged. I sincerely hope Britain has not fallen to a place of vote tampering. But in the treacherous times we live in, and given what has happened in America so many times, I am absolutely ready to admit I could be wrong.
