At this point, the only thing we know for sure about the presidential election is that if Donald Trump loses, it will be because of his personality, and if he wins, it will be because of immigration.

I know this because the media are publishing almost as many stories about the wonders of immigration as they are about Trump being Adolf Hitler. The New York Times, The Washington Post, NPR, MSNBC, the lickspittles at Cato — you can’t open your computer or turn on the TV without encountering a tidal wave of lies about our beloved immigrants. (Former Washington Post readers, you’ll just have to take my word for it.)

In the Times, Linda Qiu produced a whopper of an article purporting to refute Trump’s malicious nonsense about immigration, and as an immigrant herself, she must be completely unbiased, so I’ll use that as my template.

Qiu begins with the silly claim that Trump and his vice-presidential nominee, JD Vance, blame everything on illegal immigrants. (Her article is already hanging in my Museum of Straw Man Arguments.)

“Be it gun violence, high housing costs, long wait times at emergency rooms or an impending depletion of disaster relief funding,” she writes, “Mr. Trump and Senator JD Vance have offered the same diagnosis: All are because of unauthorized immigration.”

Well, maybe not exclusively because of illegal immigration. (Only RACISM can be blamed for everything.) But while immigration is not 100% responsible for these problems, it’s hard to think of anything that’s been made easier to solve by dumping millions of uneducated, poverty-stricken, non-English-speaking people on our country.

Nevertheless, Qiu claims Trump and Vance are not merely overstating the case, but are completely wrong. You see, she has “experts.”

One “expert,” Ieva Jusionyte, a professor at Brown University, said, “Vance is not correct that there is an influx of illegal guns from Mexico … It is simply not a thing.”

I totally trust someone who says, “it is simply not a thing.” If she threw in “not on my bingo card” or “saying the quiet part out loud,” she’d have sold me right there.

Except Jusionyte’s claim is absurd. Where do liberals imagine criminals get their guns? According to the Department of Justice, the guns used in crimes mainly come from illegal sources, to wit: people involved in the sale of illegal drugs, markets for stolen goods and other criminals or criminal enterprises. (How about the much-maligned gun shows? A grand total of about 0.8% of guns used in crimes come from gun shows. Ninety percent of guns used in crimes do not come from any retail source at all.)

As it happens, Mexican cartels are a gigantic criminal enterprise right on our border. They move enough fentanyl, synthetic methamphetamine and other drugs into our country to kill about 100,000 Americans every year. But, according to Jusionyte, not guns — no sir! Perhaps cartel enforcers protect their “multibillion-dollar narco empire” (New York Times) with complaints to the HR department.

The Times‘ Qiu cites other “government data and experts” who claim we’re the ones sending guns to the cartels. (NYT rule: Always blame Americans.)

Liberals have been pushing this lie for 20 years. They finally got so desperate that Barack Obama’s attorney general, Eric Holder, had to start putting U.S. guns directly into the hands of Mexican drug cartels so that Democrats could blame innocent American gun dealers. (For my younger readers, look up “Operation Fast and Furious.”)

Except Holder got caught, so the Democrats’ next idea was to dummy up a phony study that’s been refuted a million times, but was bought hook, line and sinker by the crack Times reporter.

Citing “U.S. and Mexican governments and independent researchers” — I just hope the independent researchers use phrases like “that’s not a thing” — Qiu somberly reported that “about 70 percent of firearms recovered at crime scenes in Mexico came from the United States.”

That is precisely the opposite of the truth — also my idea for the Times‘ new motto.

Mexico doesn’t send all guns retrieved from crime scenes to the U.S. for tracing, only the ones with serial numbers, indicating they came from the U.S. About 70% of guns used by Mexican criminals have no serial numbers and no conceivable connection to the U.S., and, therefore, were never sent to the U.S. for tracing.

It’s only among the roughly 30% that were sent to the U.S. that a majority were traced to the U.S. That’s the Democrats’ big gotcha: Guns from the U.S. were traced to the U.S.! It’s a miracle! On the other hand, more than 80% of all guns found at Mexican crime scenes were not from the U.S.

This is the sort of stupid game liberals play to try to convince us that all guns are bad and all Mexicans are good — definitely better than Americans, with their nasty gun culture.

As for housing, anyone with the intellect of a parakeet ought to be able to grasp that more people in need of housing will inevitably drive up the price of housing. It’s called the Law of Supply and Demand. If Qiu has figured out a way to repeal that law, she should publish immediately. Not only will she win a Nobel Prize in economics, but everyone in the world can have beachfront property and a classic six on Park Avenue.

On the other hand, if she hasn’t repealed the law of supply and demand, Qiu is, in fact, dumber than a parakeet.

Finally, of course mass third world immigration harms our schools, hospitals, Social Security, disaster relief and every other service meant for the American people. First, there are the gobs of money required to accommodate millions of non-English speakers — like bilingual teachers, doctors, nurses, law enforcement officers, court translators, etc. All mandated by law.

But also, since 1970, we have been deliberately bringing in the poorest, least-educated people in the world. They don’t come close to making enough money to pay for the massive amounts of services they consume. Every additional schoolbook, teacher, bus driver, janitor, hospital bed, catheter, liver transplant — that’s on you, taxpayer. (If Kamala Harris is elected, you’ll be on the hook for illegals’ transgender operations, too.)

Not surprisingly, a majority, 54%, of immigrant-headed households are on welfare, compared to only 39% of U.S.-born households — i.e., the people government assistance was intended to help. For illegal immigrants, the figure is 59%. It might be time to update liberals’ favorite cliche to, “We’re a nation of immigrants on public assistance.”

What happened to the claim that immigrants, especially illegals, aren’t allowed to collect welfare? Oh, yeah, that’s a lie.

Among other free stuff, illegals get free school breakfasts and lunch, as well as women, infants and children (WIC) benefits, plus emergency room care for all their medical needs. Some states give illegals Medicaid and SNAP. Most important, illegals simply need to drop a baby, and they can immediately start collecting full welfare on behalf of their allegedly, but not really, “American citizen” kid.

I don’t like Trump’s personality either, but since the left will not stop bringing in the third world until our country is the same as every other country and there’s no reason for anyone to come here, we don’t have much of a choice on Tuesday.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that the main American media includes many homely, bitter, left-leaning women and numerous bald, left-wing, and equally unattractive men. No wonder, then, that Kamala is the media’s favorite and Trump is referred to as Hitler and, in the words of a Quasimodo type, one Adam Gopnik, “a vile and malignant actor.”

Another universally acknowledged truth is that the main media in America, in lockstep with the entertainment industry, does not object to its left-wing agenda. Network executives, newspaper editors, publishers—whose core job is deciding which stories get told and which do not—have decided that everything Trump does or says is vile, and everything Kamala says or does is not. In fact, the media has dedicated itself to destroying Trump, with Anne Applebaum (an old friend) calling the Donald “Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini.” Better yet, CBS trimmed and favorably edited Kamala’s answers on 60 Minutes, making her sound and look like a female Demosthenes rather than the inarticulate blowhard that she is in reality. The New York Times, needless to say, has its new Hitler to attack daily, and manages to sling mud at “bombastic billionaires” even in stories that have nothing to do with politics or the Donald. A recent book, a real hatchet job by two drippy Times gasbags about the Donald, was joyously reviewed—surprise, surprise—and an unwatchable movie, ditto.

I am writing this column five days before the election, an election that I cannot see Trump winning as long as the media, Hollywood, Big Tech, and even parts of Wall Street are stacked up against him. For years I’ve watched the networks slant their reporting to straight-up propaganda, and now it has grown to sheer deceit. This corrupt media/Democratic Party alliance is a scandal, but no one seems to be doing anything about it. Talk about a biased system. And never have I seen this country more split, with Kamala’s diphthongs that resemble those of a customer complaint robot making headway into Donald’s camp via intelligently placed ads: Pro football is now the American pastime, having replaced baseball, and Kamala’s ads before each quarter reach tens of millions of possible Trump voters announcing the end of any welfare insurances and social security in case of his victory. It’s all lies, of course, but our so-called independent media are not about to denounce it.

The media has clearly chosen to become a propaganda arm of the Democratic Party, spreading disinformation and conspiracy theories galore. Just for starters, there are more than 10 million men, women, and children who have illegally made it to these shores since the Biden-Harris duo came into power in 2021, yet Kamala, a border tsar with a broken border, is not held to account, and no Times or Washington Post or network phony has made a fuss about her biggest lies of all. These are people who call themselves journalists but are nothing but activist hypocrites, and I apologize to activists and hypocrites who are not posing as journalists.

There are thousands of migrants from Mauritania flooding into a small Ohio town, with the federal government doing zilch about it, and thousands of illegal Haitians turning an Indiana town into a hellhole, yet it’s Trump the fascist who’s occupying our Fourth Estate at the moment. Almost one million illegal migrants have been given quiet amnesty under Biden-Kamala and can remain in the country without the possibility of deportation. Add to those 10 million illegal migrants in our country since the duo of Joe and Kamala came to power, and you’ll be excused if you reach for your gun.

So, what will happen five days from now? America will go to the polls, and the major networks will do their damnedest to claim irregularities and cheating if the Donald lucks out, and dismiss any irregularities if Kamala wins the top prize. I don’t know why, but this election reminds me so much of the run-up to the Iraq war twenty years ago. William Buckley, who was responsible for my start as a journalist and a very close friend, was pro-war and disappointed in me for not only being against the war in my various columns but also starting a magazine in order to protest it. Yet later on, when I visited Bill in Connecticut, he told me in no uncertain terms that he had been taken in by the neocons and their lies. He was neither the first nor the last to be taken in by what in reality are unpaid Israeli agents.

Well, I cannot get myself to write anything against Bill, but he certainly should have known better. The same applies to American voters. If you listen to the media and to Hollywood scum, you will live to regret it. Perhaps I’m overstating the influence of the media on voters, but movies and podcasts and television play a very big part in how Americans think. Just look at the Menendez case, with two brothers who murdered their parents and are serving life without parole about to be freed because of a Netflix series. (And even if the father did molest them, which I doubt, what about their mother? Murdered in cold blood.)

I obviously hope I’m wrong, and that the Donald wins, but the pestilence of wokeism and the media’s left-wing shift have sickened more souls than Covid did, hence I fear the worst.

I almost never bother to try to forecast the outcome of an election. After all, we shall all know soon enough. High-tech California, for instance, should be done counting its votes by early December.

So, rather than attempt to offer insights into the same thing everybody else is talking about, I’m going to indulge myself. The World Series has been on TV and that got me thinking about the history of major league baseball.

Baseball is a traditionalist sport. When Freddie Freeman of the Los Angeles Dodgers hit a last-out, come-from-behind, game-winning home run in the first game of the 2024 World Series to almost exactly match Kirk Gibson’s heroics in a near identical moment in the 1988 World Series, announcer Joe Davis consciously echoed the late, great announcer Vin Scully’s call of “She…is gone!” and then immediately explained the historical context: “Gibby, meet Freddie!”

What’s changed in 36 years? There’s now more posing (with Freeman holding up his bat and saluting his father like a trailer highlight from Gladiator II) and more multimedia razzmatazz at Dodger Stadium with flashing lights and Randy Newman’s 1983 theme song “I Love L.A.” starting up as the slugger rounded first base.

But, in the big picture, not much has changed and baseball remains baseball.

Big league baseball has been a highly standardized product for a very long time—for example, from 1901 to 1960, there were sixteen major league teams each playing 154-game seasons, and 162-game seasons since then. So its statistics are famously comprehensible and appealing to Aspergery-type intellects.

In contrast, the game of professional football has changed so much that it’s fairly pointless to attempt to compare the passing statistics of Patrick Mahomes and Johnny Unitas. And college football’s sample sizes are too small for reliable statistical analysis.

Yet it can be demonstrated with a fair degree of confidence that Aaron Judge of the New York Yankees enjoyed in 2024 the best season any ballplayer has had as a batter since Ted Williams and Mickey Mantle in the mid-1950s, outside of the turn-of-the-century years when there was no testing for performance-enhancing drugs. (On the other hand, I can say with some assurance on Tuesday morning, with the Dodgers up three wins to none over the Yankees, that more than a few hitters have enjoyed better postseasons than Judge has…so far.)

Recently, during the George Floyd racial reckoning, the baseball powers-that-be announced that pre–Jackie Robinson Negro League statistics would count as major league statistics. While it’s undeniable that Josh Gibson, Satchel Paige, Oscar Charleston, and the like were among the greatest baseball players ever—after all, their major league successors such as Willie Mays, Hank Aaron, and Frank Robinson (although fewer black pitchers) were demonstrably great—the inclusion of Negro Leagues stats, such as they are, undermines the neurodivergent appeal of the completeness of big league stats.

We are still missing the box scores of 20+ percent of Negro Leagues games, and Negro Leagues schedules were constantly being disrupted by teams taking the opportunity to abandon their league to barnstorm on the West Coast or to compete in the North Dakota semipro championships. Reading about Josh Gibson (1911–1947), who may well have been the greatest catcher ever, is like reading about Achilles: We hear about his greatest hits, such as his 500-foot home runs, but the kind of statistical analysis that allows us to meticulously compare 1950s catchers like Roy Campanella vs. Yogi Berra remains impossible.

This is not to say that Gibson of the Negro Leagues was not as good as Berra, Campanella, or Johnny Bench of the major leagues, just that Gibson’s data is inherently not as appealing to the more autistic fans.

Baseball emerged in the Victorian northern United States as a descendant of British ball-and-bat games like rounders, with the two main variants spreading west out of New York City and Boston. During the Civil War, Union army troops had to choose which sets of rules they preferred to play by, and Midwesterners picked New York’s over Boston’s. After the Civil War, the combination of national rules and railroads allowed professional baseball to develop from 1869 onward.

Modern big league baseball can reasonably be dated to the founding of the American League in 1901 to compete with the National League. In the 1890s, when it was the sole major league, the National League had allowed itself to become dominated by brawling, drunken big-city Irishmen. So in 1901, entrepreneur Ban Johnson announced the American League as a more family-friendly variant aimed at the English and German parts of the country. The American League has been the more dominant division ever since, falling behind mostly when the National League took the lead in breaking the color line from 1947 onward.

A basic comparison is average attendance per major league game:

During the low-scoring deadball era of the first two decades of the 20th century, attendance shot upward during the great pennant races of 1908 (the year of Merkle’s Boner, a term I attempted, unsuccessfully, to revive in 2015 to denote German chancellor Angela Merkel’s decision to invite in a million military-age Muslim men) but then declined during the formation of the rival Federal League in 1914–1915.

Crowds shrank in the war year of 1918, but then rose in 1919 (+93 percent) and 1920 (+26 percent) when the boys returned home from the Western Front and Babe Ruth invented home run hitting. The revelation late in the 1920 season that the Chicago “Black” Sox had thrown the 1919 World Series depressed the more sensitive fan (F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 The Great Gatsby is centered on the Black Sox scandal), but Ruth’s revelation that swinging for the fences paid off kept baseball on an upward trajectory until the Depression.

Baseball’s big breakthrough came in 1945–1948 when a combination of the soldiers coming home from winning the Big One and integration from 1947 onward more than doubled average attendance. By several metrics of human happiness, 1946 was the best year in American history, with baseball attendance up 69 percent. Further, movie tickets sold reached an all-time high that year, as did weddings. For instance, my parents were married on Saturday, June 15, 1946, which may well have been the busiest day ever for marriages.

Weirdly, not much happened to increase baseball attendance during the third quarter of the 20th century. From a nostalgic perspective, it seems like a good era, but its numbers are ho-hum. My guess is that other sports like football, basketball, and ice hockey emerged to break baseball’s monopoly on the national attention.

But then the superb 1975 World Series between Cincinnati’s Big Red Machine of Pete Rose, Joe Morgan, and Johnny Bench versus Boston’s Red Sox of Carlton Fisk, Fred Lynn, and Jim Rice reminded sports fans of how good baseball could be, launching almost two decades of growth in per-game attendance. Attendance grew steadily from the later 1970s to the early 1990s, before skyrocketing in 1993–94.

Ballplayers appear to have discovered steroids and other performance-enhancing drugs around 1993–94. I can recall a high school friend who had become a successful player’s agent explaining to me around then that Jose Canseco (whose grand slam in the first game of the 1988 World Series set up Gibson’s winning two-run homer) was “the Typhoid Mary of steroids,” as Canseco’s autobiography confirmed.

Fans loved steroids but hated the late 1994 strike, with attendance per game dropping from a huge 30k in 1994 to 25k in 1995. It took until 2007 for attendance to exceed the 1994 apogee.

Crowd sizes have been fairly flat ever since, with 2024 averaging a little under 30k as franchises have concentrated upon squeezing more money per capita out of ticket buyers.

Baseball tends to be a big-city but red-state game, so it only has a few obvious expansion prospects left, such as Nashville, Charlotte, and Austin, with Portland appearing to have self-destructed in this decade.

Remember Charles Rothenberg?

Hopefully not, as it’s a most unpleasant memory.

In the early 1980s, Rothenberg was locked in a bitter custody dispute with his wife, Marie, over their 6-year-old son David.

Charles and Marie lived in New York. Rothenberg had visitation rights, but he was convinced that his ex was trying to curb them.

In March 1983, during one of his visitations, Charles took David to California without Marie’s consent. The two had a furious phone conversation, she from her home, he from a motel across the street from Disneyland. David had been promised that the theme park would be the next day’s activity. Instead, Charles slipped his son a sleeping pill, went out to buy kerosene, doused the boy head to toe as he slept, and tossed a match.

David was burned over 90 percent of his body. Everything was gone but his eyes. Though he survived, he’d suffer painful and debilitating complications for the rest of his life. He died at 42.

Charles Rothenberg’s “defense” was that in the custody dispute he’d been treated unfairly by the courts and his ex. That final angry cross-country phone call was the last straw; he was driven to his act.

They made him do it.

Violence, after all, is the voice of the oppressed. Bullied by judges and bitches, what else could he do? Of course he had to burn his son alive.

Are you sympathetic to poor Charley?

Likely not. I’ll bet “they made me do it” leaves you cold as an excuse.

But wait…the man feared losing his son! And his wife and the judges had been chipping away at his visitation due to accounts of his propensity for physical violence; indeed, during that angry phone call, Marie had even threatened to cut off visitation entirely!

Again, what else could he do but burn his child alive?

Surely you’re sympathetic to him now.

No? Still?

You coldhearted bastards. You’re just like the courts in the immolation aftermath. They painted poor Charley as some kind of monster, a beast, if you will! The press despised him; when California law stipulated that he could only get thirteen years for the crime, politicians from all parties rallied to change the law to keep future Rothenbergs locked up for life.

Anti-Charley bigotry, that’s what that is.

ABC even made an Emmy-winning TV movie about the incident that painted Rothenberg as a villain.

Media bias…is there no end to it?

Following Rothenberg’s release, police and prosecutors persecuted the poor dear. Every little crime he committed outside prison—possession of a gun and ammo (illegal for a parolee), credit card fraud, threats to public officials—was bumped up to a felony, until he was finally put away for life under Three Strikes.

Today, at 82, he sits in a cell, the victim of the biggest witch hunt—nay, legal lynching—in history.

Am I swaying you?

Probably not. And here’s why: We’re dealing with a principle, I’ll call it the Rothenberg Principle. Whatever beefs Charles Rothenberg had regarding custody became irrelevant the moment he set his son on fire. In theory, even if every complaint he had was legit—even if he had been treated unfairly by the courts, even if his wife was a raging bitch—none of that justified what he did to his son. I know that, and you know that. And neither you nor I care to relitigate his custody dispute in moot court of the damned because his act of March 16, 1983, not only made his complaints irrelevant but verified his wife’s. Yep, he was a shit-poor father, and if his ex wanted to end visitations, he proved her judgment correct.

Once you cross a line of such extraordinary egregiousness, whatever you claim “drove you to it” ceases to matter, and the rest of us have every right to say, “We don’t care. We’re checking out of the discussion.”

Bullied at school? That becomes moot once you shoot ten classmates. Boss treatin’ you bad at work? That becomes irrelevant once you kill fifteen coworkers. Whites bein’ raycist to you? Once you slit the throat of a white child or shoot up the LIRR, it doesn’t matter. You crossed a line, and one of the ways in which you should pay—beyond, of course, prison—is that your bitching about your gripes will never be heard. Even if they were legitimate gripes, fuck off with them; we ain’t listening.

I bet you’re all nodding at that. A sea of nodders.

But the right’s been getting pretty damn Rothenbergian recently. We can start with the formerly fringe nutcases, now the highest-visibility influencers thanks to Musk, who spend their days on Twitter crying “Hitler wuz wronged!”

“He wuz wronged by Churchill, wronged by FDR, wronged by Stalin who killed and expelled Germans at the end of the war and all Hitler ever done to him was violate the nonaggression pact and invade Russia slaughtering millions of Russians as he pledged to liquidate the entire nation.”

Hitler’s prewar beefs became irrelevant the moment he invaded Russia, taking the war into the realm of apocalyptic conflagration, and the moment pacified Jewish civilians were murdered en masse just for being Jews. The price Hitler needs to pay for Barbarossa, the Einsatzgruppen, the Ostland ghettos, and the Reinhard camps is the same price Rothenberg needs to pay: Cry all you want about what “drove you to it”; you crossed a line, and you proved correct all the bad things that were said about you.

The Palestinians are Rothenbergs supreme. “WE WUZ DRIVEN TO IT!” Endlessly relitigating a lost war from almost eighty years ago, they’re blameless for all they’ve been “made to do”: Entebbe, the Olympics massacre, the Avivim school bus bombing, the Coastal Road massacre, the Dolphinarium discotheque massacre, the Empire State Building shooting, the Hebrew University bombing, RFK (yes, it was Sirhan; sorry, Tucker), the Paradise Hotel bombing, the Passover massacre, October 7, and hundreds—not dozens, but hundreds—of individual bus bombings, restaurant bombings, hijackings, hostage-takings, and the like.

Yes, from their perspective they’ve been “driven” to use “the language of the oppressed” because the Jews won’t hand back their precious olive groves…the bestest olive groves in the world. Magical olive groves, tragically lost by the Palestinians, who now have no choice but to rape teens at a music festival because, I mean, olive groves, man!

And many far-rightists seem on board with the Palis on this.

So now go back and ask yourself: Theoretically, if Charles Rothenberg had, indeed, been treated cruelly by the courts and his ex, if he truly feared losing his olive grove (sorry, only son), if he felt disenfranchised and hopeless and unheard—does his “look what I was driven to” defense give you pause now?

Does it make you wanna start a petition for his release? After all, he’s an old man deprived of his rights! His right to free movement! Property ownership! He lost everything he owned. He sits in cruel isolation (literally, in segregated housing because other prisoners threaten him).

If he was “driven” to his crime, and if being “driven to your crime” means you get a free pass (like Hitler and the Palis to their fanboys), shouldn’t Rothenberg get a pass too, if his claims of oppression and mistreatment are true?

Obviously, there are people who sincerely want to save Pali children, and I respect that. But it’s not “Islamophobia” or “Jewish brainwashing” that’s made a lot of Americans and Israelis check out of that issue. It’s the Rothenberg Principle.

A principle, BTW, that needn’t involve violent acts. In fact, there’s a nonviolent, but still hugely destructive, example of the Rothenberg Principle that MAGAs have really taken to. It goes something like this: “Sure, I spread fakes, rumors, and ridiculous conspiracy bullshit online. Is everything I post, or say, verified? Accurate? True? That’s not the point. The libs and the lamestream media have driven me to this. It’s my only way to fight back against their big-money lies! Fake memes are the language of the suppressed. Plus, with all the evil shit the libs do, how am I supposed to not believe every story about false flags and weird plots? Paul Pelosi was attacked by his gay lover! Tim Walz is a pedo! J6 was a setup! School shooters are midgets working for OBAMMER! Hurricanes are weather warfare! Those evil libs have made me believe they’re capable of anything! They’ve robbed me of my incredulity. If I’m nuts, they made me nuts.”

“Look what they did to me, man!”

Candace Owens saying “Scientists are so untrustworthy, so corrupt, I no longer believe the earth is round. I no longer believe in the moon landing. See what they drove me to? It’s their fault; LOOK WHAT THEY’VE TURNED ME INTO!”

That, BTW, is her literal reason for embracing flat earth.

And do you think scientists are saying, “What have we done to beautiful, brilliant Candace? Because of our wicked deceitfulness, the poor girl has embraced flat earth. Witnessing how we’ve forced her to become a babbling lunatic has convinced us that we need to fly straight from now on. We’ve learned the errors of our ways!”

That’s what Owens thinks scientists are saying right now. Because she’s mentally retarded.

But no, scientists are not “shamed” by Owens embracing flat-earthism. Rather, they’re pleased Owens is discrediting herself and, in the process, making it harder for legitimate critics of junk science and agenda-driven scientists to be believed. Yes, much of popular science is corrupted by money (government and corporate); yes, scientists justifiably lost public trust during Covid. No, you’re not “shaming them” by going off the deep end while screaming, “Look what they turned me into!”

As someone who used to spar daily with Holocaust deniers on Twitter until “Free Speech Musk” banned me for life, I can tell you that if you nail deniers again and again on a particular denial falsehood, they’ll always resort to “but with all the lies told after the war—soap! Lampshades! Eagles and bears!—how can I be expected to believe in anything anymore?”

In other words, look what they drove me to! It’s a good thing the great historians of the world didn’t use old falsehoods as an excuse to not seek new truth. But of course deniers aren’t historians—they’re perpetual victims, either lying about the Holocaust or lying that the Holocaust made them lie about the Holocaust.

No sense of accountability. Like Owens, MAGA memers, Hitler fanboys, and Charles Rothenberg, whose excuses, it should be noted, won nobody over to his side. His self-piteous whining about “unfairness” made no one forget his atrocity, an atrocity that led to his wife gaining sole custody, and him losing his child in the most permanent manner possible.

Swing voters will not weep for you as you cry, “Pity me for the untruths I’m forced to share!”

With one week left before the election, do try to keep that in mind.

At last! The benefits of diversity have finally arrived in my hometown! Recently, the front-page regional news story was all about a big black man named Mohammad Alhadi who had decided to begin spreading spontaneous joy across the locality by accosting random young men—some of them underage—and molesting them.

Sentenced to eight months behind bars, Alhadi pleaded guilty to Sexual Assault by Touching, having approached a 15-year-old boy claiming he “needed help.” Whilst seeking vital aid from the child, Alhadi made “a sexual hand gesture” toward him, before touching his victim’s genitals through his trousers. The lad fled, so Alhadi turned his attention toward a passing 21-year-old male dog-walker, to whom he made “inappropriate comments,” before “touching himself” equally “inappropriately.” He then bothered a second nearby 15-year-old boy, yet again requesting “help.” When asked, “What with?” he replied, “Sex,” and offered the teen the princely sum of £10 to oblige, before following him home.

Sexual Black Male
The story of a large negroid individual approaching youths and trying to feel them up reminded me inescapably of another homegrown bogeyman figure who it seemed worth profiling for Halloween. This Papa Lazarou-like folk devil is known to all the children of the Merseyside region (the area surrounding the northwest English city of Liverpool) as “Purple Aki.” When I was a Merseyside child myself in the 1980s, tall tales of Aki were rife in playgrounds and parks: I knew several people who claimed to have met him personally.

Rumor had it Aki was a gigantic black male of bizarre fetishistic tastes who would approach boys in the street and “request” to feel or measure their muscles. If you refused, you then had two inescapable alternatives offered up to you: “pop or slash.” If you said “slash,” Aki would produce a knife and carve his initials “PA” onto each of your bum cheeks, one letter per buttock. If you said “pop,” meanwhile, he would “Pop yo’ Ass” (“P&A” again), as in sodomize you, then and there.

As for why he was called Purple Aki, it was due to him being “so black he’s purple,” like in comic books where you see images of sinewy figures like black panthers with blueish-purplish highlights painted around their rippling muscles to make them stand out, although a minority of dissenters argued he just dressed head to toe in the bright royal color. He was supposedly the son of an African diplomat based at the (nonexistent) Nigerian Embassy in Liverpool, which lent him diplomatic immunity for all his alleged sinister crimes.

The Candyman Can, But Aki Can’t
Aki also possessed supernatural powers. No matter how many times frustrated Merseyside citizens took the law into their own hands as vigilantes and assaulted him en masse with baseball bats, guns, and knives, he would just shrug off their efforts like an African Rasputin, it was whispered, and keep on going, brushing his assailants away as mere gnats.

Meanwhile, if you were stupid (or perhaps just gay) enough to say his name out loud five times in front of the mirror, it was said he would suddenly walk straight out of the glass and bum you in front of it, so you could watch your own sad sodomitic fate playing out before you in crystal clarity.

By this stage his legend had clearly merged with the titular character of the 1992 Hollywood horror film Candyman, an undead black murderer who also manifested through a mirror after you repeated his name.

As Clive Barker, who wrote the original short story upon which the film was based, grew up gay in 1980s Liverpool himself, it is sometimes (dubiously) said he based the Candyman upon Aki.

So, all in all, viewed through the disenchanted lens of adulthood, it should seem quite clear that this particular homo Halloween horror did not in any sense actually exist. Or did he…?

Aki Mug in Taki Mag
Actually, although the above legends are wholly untrue, Purple Aki is a real man, and a real nightmare for both the region’s young males and their spell-checking software, named Akinwale Oluwafolajimi Oluwatope Arobieke. He is no son of a Nigerian diplomat but does now have his own range of unofficial merchandise (produced by others, not himself), advertising his alleged past great achievements in the field of boy fondling, such as this mug featuring a genuine photo of him grinning and asking, “Can I feel your muscles?” with Aki sticking his thumb up (in the air, not inside anything or anyone else).

There is even an entire Facebook group, called “Aki Watch,” devoted to tracking his movements across the nation, with delighted members of the public posting smartphone images of Aki captured without him noticing, like human wildlife photography, or even snaps of them posing happily alongside him like some minor celebrity.

Extraordinarily, in our twisted online age, Aki is now actively approached by young men asking him to squeeze their muscles so they can then boast about it on social media, rather than the other way around, as in the 1980s and 1990s of my youth. In 2017 an English restaurant even sold a dish of “Purple Teriyaki”; would they dare try doing the same with a “Jimmy Saveloy”?

Unsporting Behavior
Had I ever bothered to read British newspapers as a child beyond the pages with tall tales about people purportedly being abducted by aliens or attacked by ghosts on them, I may have been able to read more genuinely disturbing tabloid scare stories, such as a piece in The People from 16 March 1997 headlined “6ft 5in GIANT STALKS RUGBY SUPER LEAGUE STARS.” Here readers were warned that “Strapping stars at Warrington Wolves and Oldham Bears [Rugby Super League clubs] are living in fear of 6ft 5in bodybuilder Akinwale Arobieke.”

U.S. readers may be unaware of the sport, but rugby is our rough British equivalent of your own athletic diversion of football (or “American football,” to U..K readers), i.e., a rough, physical-contact game with an oval-shaped ball played mainly by large, well-toned young men of distinctly sculpted appearance. Naturally, such individuals would represent prime targets to get their muscles massaged or have a tape measure wrapped around their biceps, as in Aki’s unique playground-rumored modus operandi.

According to the tabloid version (though not necessarily Aki’s own account), The Purple One had managed to enter rugby grounds with a fake press pass, or taken to “loitering around stadia in flash hire cars,” waiting to nab emerging youth-team players. Then he would allegedly perform curious actions, such as lifting a 17-stone 18-year-old Warrington player named Warren Stevens off the ground, throwing him over his shoulder like a human dumbbell, and performing “squat exercises with him” in order to demonstrate his all-time super-strength.

Warrington Wolves chairman John Smith said: “This man’s a menace. He has an astonishing ability to get hold of players’ addresses and phone numbers and they just don’t feel safe.” As some club employees got bomb threats, bricks through their windows, or had their cars paint-stripped in the night—they suspected by Aki, though this was never proved, and Aki himself denied it—you can see why they thought this way.

The Color Purple
Weirdly, today Aki seems to have become increasingly reassessed in a newly positive fashion as a local mini–George Floyd figure, the tragic victim of racial and sexual prejudice. His record at the hands of the law is long and complex. Most notoriously, in 1986 a 16-year-old boy died after jumping onto the tracks at a Merseyside train station, ostensibly whilst fleeing from the man-mountain. Aki was initially convicted of manslaughter but later had this overturned, saying he wasn’t actually chasing the lad, and winning £35,000 in compensation, after he claimed the prosecution case against him contained racial overtones.

During the 2000s, he was convicted (and sometimes cleared) more than once, with a judge calling his behavior “both strange and obsessive.” When released from prison in 2006, Aki had what must have been the oddest interim Sexual Offences Prevention Order ever produced issued against him, under the terms of which he was “banned from touching, feeling, or measuring anyone’s muscles; asking people to do squats in public; entering the [rugby club] towns of St Helens, Warrington, or Widnes without permission; and loitering near schools, gyms, or sports clubs.”

However, as time passed by and the West became more woke, and both blacks and gays became living saints who could do no wrong, Aki’s persistent attempts to get his Prevention Order overturned finally succeeded in 2016, with a distinctly lenient judge accepting the assertions of psychologists that Aki’s actions were not sexually motivated, but driven by mere “emotional needs to feel…connected to others” (we should note that he has never specifically been convicted of any actual sexual offenses at all, but “just” for trivialities like witness harassment and threatening behavior, and I can find no record of Aki explicitly saying he is gay, as most members of the public automatically presume).

The judge said he did not agree with the basis of the 2006 order, empathizing that “I’m not into bodybuilding myself [like Aki was], but I’d have thought men who have muscles in their arms the diameter of my leg are the sort of men who will admire each other’s bodies.” Even more sympathetically, the official commiserated with Aki on the fact that “You are still carrying the stigma of the boy who died on the railway tracks” back in 1986. Yes, but I think the overall long-term effects upon the boy who died himself might have been rather greater in most respects, no, m’lud?

Purple Prose
Aki has also lodged grievances with the U.K. Press Complaints Commission that media coverage of him using the label “Purple Aki” is racist, and that his full name ought to be used instead, besides complaining to police about a 2016 BBC documentary, The Man Who Squeezes Muscles, which supposedly constituted a “race-hate crime” as it referred to him as being “a big black man.” In that case, Aki really ought to try taking legal action against himself, as during a 2008 hearing, he pleaded psychiatric counseling had made him realize of his many muscle-touching victims that “if I am towering over them, and I am a big black man, they may not be consenting, they may be consenting out of fear.”

Nonetheless, in online write-ups of Aki’s legend, we now get anguished “I’m not racist, me!” rationalizations of his case like this:

“Let’s be realistic. If he was a white guy, he’d be just another pervert. I’ve watched a bunch of videos of people describing him, and several say things like, ‘I’m not being racist; he’s just purple.’ That is racist, though. Even if his skin was a bit purple, why mention it? Nobody calls Charles Manson ‘Beige Charlie.’ Are there really so many Akinwales of note in Liverpool that people have to classify them by their color? There is a part of me that feels sorry for Aki. He grew up without a family, and being a big gay Black lad in Liverpool in the 1980s doesn’t sound like a lot of fun.”

Neither does getting literally “picked up” by him either.

The true horror story to have emerged from Aki’s legend, I would suggest, is not that of Candyman, but Sympathy for the Devil. Once upon a time, a “big black man” (Aki’s own verbatim words, remember) approaching English kids in the street and asking to feel them up, biceps-wise, was an idea so incredibly rare, comical, frightening, and worthy of note that schoolboys all across the region invented whole absurdist folktales about it. Nowadays, as the mass-immigration-driven surge in similar cases grows larger with each passing year, there is a risk they almost begin to sound normal.

Despite his promising name, I doubt that, come Halloween in thirty of forty years’ time, Mohammad Alhadi will still be remembered in awestruck terms by Merseyside’s still-terrified schoolboys as Purple Paki.

The Week’s Most Meaty, Peaty, and Trick-or-Treaty Headlines

MOAT-TOWN
With the L.A. Dodgers in the World Series—and with ticket prices reaching Taylor Swift concert-level expensive—it’s instructive to recall that legendary Dodgers GM Al Campanis was fired in 1987 for claiming that there are no champion black swimmers because blacks “don’t have buoyancy.”

Was he wrong? In 2018, a Branson “duck boat” sank, wiping out two entire black families (seventeen people total). Sixty-four percent of black children can’t swim, and the other 36 percent are already drowned.

Last week on Georgia’s Sapelo Island, home of the Gullah-Geechee slave descendants, the locals were having a festival when several dozen decided to board a boat to prove to the world that blacks ain’t scared of water.

Then the gangway collapsed and they drowned. That’s how bad it’s gotten; blacks are now drowning before they leave the dock.

The Sapelo tragedy prompted Biden’s handlers to switch his IV from formaldehyde to sodium chloride so he could be rehydrated long enough to express his condolences.

True story: In 2016 the Red Cross was forced to apologize for a swimming safety poster that showed a public pool with a black kid drowning as a friendly blue whale says “not cool.” Sadly, telling blacks that “drowning isn’t cool” didn’t work. But maybe the whale idea was solid.

Introducing Bellcurve Beluga, the new Red Cross swimming safety whale, and his little black pal Booker.

Bellcurve: Ready to learn, friend?

Booker: You bet, buddy!

Bellcurve: Two skills could’ve saved blacks from the slave ships: lock-breaking and swimming. Sadly, blacks have only managed to master one of those.

Booker: The hell?

Bellcurve: The key to buoyancy is fast, repetitive leg-kicking. You’d think blacks would be good at that, with all the experience they get running from the cops.

Booker: I ain’t takin’ that crap from no fish!

Bellcurve: Actually, Booker, whales are mammals. So we have that in common. But we’re also sentient beings who mate for life, so the similarities end there.

Booker: You mutha! I’ll put my boot up yo’ blowhole!

Bellcurve and Booker: Coming to a pool near you!

HOMECOMING DUNCE
Mountain View, Colorado, has a population of 541. Needless to say, they don’t get a lot of new faces ’round those parts.

So to keep things interesting, they create new faces…with a shotgun.

Last week two Mountain View high school students were driving through town looking for a spot to take homecoming photos with their sweethearts.

Spotting a home boasting a glistening pond, the teens agreed that this would be the perfect spot for a photo to last a lifetime.

Parking outside the property, the teens approached the house to ask permission to take the pics. Finding nobody home, they returned to their vehicle, writing a polite note requesting permission from the homeowner.

And then the homeowner drove up and blew the face off one of the boys with a shotgun.

If Los Angeles is the City of Angels, Mountain View is the City of Mangles. The shooter was local councilman Brent Metz. And although the teens were not on Metz’s property when he pulled up, he suspected they might be up to no good, so he exited his truck Rambo-style. The boy who retained his face told police that he heard Metz shout, “Oh shit, my gun went off,” indicating that Metz’s firearms training is as well-honed as his ability to size up a situation.

Metz was arrested, and the shot teen is in critical condition. At least his body is. They’ll know the condition of his face when they find it.

On the plus side, while the teen is unlikely to be snapping any homecoming pics, he’s gonna be a real hit as a zombie at this year’s Halloween haunted hayride.

FAT’S MY MAMMA
The city of Carson (L.A. County) is so black its flag is a weave. Carson so black the streets are paved with gold teeth. Carson so black the city seal is Seal. Carson so black its main industry is diabetes. Carson so black its official tree is the Pickin’ Cottonwood. Carson so black it elected Mayor McCheese, then assassinated him for being too cold.

Carson’s black, okay?

And last week the city, located 7.2 miles from the beach (or as Carson residents call it, “the forbidden zone”), proved just how black it is. A dozen sophomores from Nipsey Hussle High (where every student earns an Eazy-A) were congregating at a Taco Bell when they got into an argument with a rival bunch of teens at another table (unconfirmed reports suggest that the topic of the disagreement was Édouard Manet’s role as a bridge from Realism to Impressionism, though several eyewitnesses claim it was because Darquesha called LaTrina a stank-ass ho).

Whatever the cause of the disharmony, one of the girls phoned her mamma, and nobody’s sayin’ the mamma be fat, but the recent L.A. earthquake cluster was caused by her doing jumping jacks.

Mother Macretin ran to the Taco Bell, bursting through the door like the Kool-Aid Man filled with Ripple, screaming, “I beat kids, I’ll beat you” (with Tito Jackson dead, somebody has to keep alive his daddy’s favorite bedtime lullaby). When the teens laughed, mammalardo produced a police-grade pepper spray fogger and doused the entire table (and by extension the entire establishment; you’d think a woman that obese would know how noxious gas can fill an enclosed space).

Fats Momino then started punching the kids, using a Chromebook to crack one over the head. Eventually the cops came and Gastroscoperah Winfrey was arrested.

As for the Taco Bell? Management gave refunds because the kids didn’t find the pepper spray hot enough.

GOP THE EXTRA-TERRESTRIAL
It’s long past 1990, but don’t tell that to congressional Republicans, who are perpetually stuck in the year that’s considered peak terrestrial radio in terms of stations and listenership.

Last week Hebraic Bond villain George Soros won approval from the FCC to assume ownership of the bankrupt radio conglomerate Audacy. Audacy was a terrestrial radio giant, owning such powerhouse stations as KXFG Riverside, WRCH Hartford, KFBZ Wichita, WWKB Buffalo, and WTPT Greenville. At any given moment on any given day, upwards of ten people might’ve been listening to Audacy stations.

That’s why it went bankrupt, with over $1 billion in debt.

But Capitol Hill Republicans are balking at the FCC’s decision, claiming that allowing the diabolical Soros to take control of the Audacy “empire” two weeks before the election might skew the results.

Dudes, if there are any voters out there who’ll be swayed in their presidential choice by WVEI Providence morning DJs Richie Wrecked’er and the Pooman, those are likely not voters who’d be making a sound decision anyway.

The GOP outrage is “so 1990” in its belief that a station like WJMH Greensboro (“urban contemporary.” Tagline: “Hot booty to put you in the moody”) can sway an election. It’s also moot, considering that Trump’s biggest booster, the richest man on earth, runs Twitter/X as a nonstop pro-Trump platform. It’s pathetic to be bitching that George Soros might propagandize over KYYS Kansas City (“regional Mexican.” Audience: two gardeners and the guy with the churro cart on Eighth Street) when Elon Musk propagandizes to 245 million people a day.

There’s a time to play the victim, and there’s a time to ridicule Soros for spending a billion dollars to buy the “empire” that brings you Cowboy Kinky Kincaid, DJ at WGGY country music, Wilkes-Barre.

This endeavor will not only not influence the election, it’ll likely end as badly as Soros’ “Air America” in the 2000s.

GOP, take the W (for “win,” not “whine”).

BUDDY COP (KILLERS)
Homicides committed by juveniles are up a whopping 65 percent. “Experts” are blaming it on the pandemic, proving that it’s not just radio-obsessed Republicans who can’t stop living in the past.

Looking at one recent, unique example of juvenile homicide, it’s pretty damn difficult to find a “pandemic” angle to explain it.

The 1974 James Caan/Alan Arkin movie Freebie and the Bean was the first “buddy cop” romp. And in a Las Vegas courtroom, people are seeing what might be described as a “buddy cop killer” romp, as two teens are on trial for purposely running over a retired Nevada police chief last year.

What makes the “buddies” a mismatched pair is that Jzamir Keys (16) is a dreadlocked ghetto black and Jesus Ayala (17) is a tatted border-jumping Mexican.

So, a “gimme da free welfare” black and a quesadilla-munching wetback. In other words, Freebie and the Bean.

As Ayala and Keys ran over the 64-year-old former cop, Andreas Probst, on a desert road, Keys was recording with his phone as the two laughed hysterically about killing the old white guy. And they might’ve gotten away with it…except Keys uploaded the video online.

There are many reasons not to partner with a black teen. That’s one of them.

Last week, Ayala was ruled mentally incompetent to stand trial (wait…Keys spoiled the perfect crime by putting it on social media but Ayala’s the crazy one?). He’ll be committed indefinitely. Court-appointed doctors told the judge that Ayala has massive brain damage from birth (definition of “not sending their best”—a bean with a worse brain than a black).

It proved difficult for doctors to explain to Ayala’s madre why her son was going to the nuthouse:

Doctor: “Mrs. Ayala, your son has hypoxic–ischemic encephalopathy.”

Mrs. Ayala: “Qué?”

Doctor: “Perinatal brain injury.”

Mrs. Ayala: “Qué?”

Doctor: “Brain damage.”

Mrs. Ayala: “Qué?”

Doctor (sighs): “He’s three leaves short of a pile.”

Mrs. Ayala: “¡Ai Dios mío, es un monstruo!”

No one, I imagine, would include a speech by Donald Trump in an anthology of succinctness or political eloquence. Whether he is too lazy to organize his thoughts, or simply incapable of doing so, I cannot say; I can say only that if I were in his audience, I should be furious at his apparent failure to prepare anything in advance. I should regard it as an insult that he deemed that I and all the people around me were not worth the effort.

That said, I found the response to his casual description of a female Alabama senator as a young and fantastically attractive person distinctly odd, at least if the reports I read of it were reliable. The Independent newspaper said that among the commentary his description evoked was that it was “misogyny on full display.” Another commentator, not named, said, “It’s beyond disgusting how he talks about women. No one cared but him that [she] was ‘beautiful.’ It doesn’t matter. All women matter. All women are beautiful but that doesn’t mean it defines them.”

It is true, of course, that in the context, the attractiveness or appearance of the senator was, strictly speaking, irrelevant to the matter in hand. But to demand strict relevance of all speech would reduce most people to near silence, and conversation would become all but impossible. Nine-tenths of what we say is irrelevant.

What is bizarre is that some people regarded “young and fantastically attractive” almost as an insult, as bad and demeaning, perhaps, as “old and ugly.” If Mr. Trump had called the Alabama senator old and ugly, he would rightly have been accused of discourtesy at the very least, for no one calls anyone old and ugly meaning it to be anything other than an insult, even if it enunciates an evident truth. One draws a veil over such truths.

I suppose the two persons quoted by The Independent objected to the fact that Mr. Trump’s remark was a judgment and, as Doctor Johnson said, all judgment is comparative. If the Alabama senator was fantastically attractive, it implied that some people, including women, were not fantastically attractive, indeed may have been fantastically unattractive—as to me is Mr. Trump (this is not the same as saying that he is the worst candidate for the presidency in a severely limited field).

The idea that calling someone young and attractive constitutes misogyny is odd. It would also preclude anyone referring to an intelligent woman. A true misogynist would be someone who thought that no woman was beautiful, attractive, or intelligent, that women were, ex officio, contemptible stupid sluts or harridans.

Blinded by their rage, which obviously preexisted anything that Mr. Trump said about the Alabama senator, the commentators whom the newspaper quoted (I presume accurately) resorted to misunderstanding, non sequitur, and outright untruth. To say that a woman is beautiful is not to say that other women don’t “matter”; nor is it likely that “no one cares” whether the Alabama senator is or is not attractive. Indeed, someone may care who nevertheless thinks that her attractiveness is morally irrelevant to her political views or activities.

If all women are beautiful, then no woman is beautiful, for aesthetic judgment requires difference and discrimination for it to be exercised. It is perfectly obvious in any case that it is untrue that all women are equally beautiful, as it is untrue that all women are 5 feet 4½ inches tall. This is so obvious—a thirty-second walk in any frequented street is enough to prove it—that only someone whose brain has been colonized and completely dominated by a foolish ideology that requires people to believe patent untruths could deny it.

What one sees in these comments is what might be called a will to outrage. More and more people, it seems, are like politicians who, cornered by their own unpopularity, seek a casus belli for a short victorious war to restore their popularity or their rule. But the modern will to outrage is chronic, so to speak; it is anger in search of an object and will find one everywhere.

Moral outrage is a pleasant state of mind, or at least one that has certain advantages. This is not to say that it is never justified, only that, having been found gratifying, there is a temptation and a tendency to prolong it and indeed to keep it permanent.

What are the advantages of moral outrage? Man is the only creature that seeks to find a transcendent purpose for his own life, though of course only a proportion of mankind seeks one. But for those people who do, an answer must be found. It used to be supplied by religion, but that satisfies ever fewer of them. A cause, or supposed cause, is the answer, feminism of the above commentators’ kind being one among such answers.

A sense of outrage also serves to distinguish the person who feels it from people who do not and provide him or her with a sense of moral superiority. That is one of the reasons why an occasion for outrage is sought even on the most innocent and trivial of occasions. A throwaway line about the attractiveness of a minor politician is thus made to bear a heavy weight of condemnation, based upon a hinterland of the most dubious theorizing. I am outraged, therefore I am good; I am outraged, therefore my life has a purpose. It is, in a word, outrageous.

This will to outrage, I should add, is found on all sides. It leads to an inquisitorial state of mind and soul, in which people are on the perpetual lookout for the most trivial manifestations of unorthodoxy to root out. In a culture of inquisition, disagreement is heresy; and if we have not yet reached a stage of the auto-da-fé in the literal sense, we are approaching it in a metaphorical sense.

The will to outrage is also the will to power; and the ultimate power is that of forcing people to believe, or to pretend to believe, what is patently untrue, for example that all women are beautiful, on pain of excommunication or worse.

Theodore Dalrymple’s latest book is On the Ivory Stage (Mirabeau Press).

What does it take for a parent to get arrested?

Surprisingly little.

Scott and Heather Wallace of Hewitt, Texas, encourage their three boys to play outside on their own to build independence.

One day, driving home from karate practice, 8-year-old Aiden misbehaved. So, half a mile from home, Heather stopped the car and told him, “Walk the rest of the way on your own.”

He’d done it before. But this time, before he got home, someone called the police.

“There’s a little boy walking down the sidewalk,” she told 911. “He’s a perfect target for somebody to kidnap!”

Police picked Aiden up and drove him home.

His parents share their story in our new video.

“You weren’t worried about (Aiden)?” I ask them.

“Not at all,” says Heather.

Scott adds, “It’s a safe neighborhood.”

It’s true. Based on data from the FBI, their town is among the safest in Texas.

Nevertheless, the cops arrested Heather! They kept her in jail overnight.

“It was terrifying,” she tells me. “I was just waiting, crying.”

The cop told her, “To have an 8-year-old … walk by himself, that’s a big problem. … We don’t know who’s in that white van.”

That’s just dumb, says Lenore Skenazy, author of “Free-Range Kids.”

“99.99% of white vans are guys coming to fix your toilet or mow your lawn.”

She says ignorant media mislead us about what’s really dangerous. News reports cite Justice Department data and claim “460,000 kids are reported missing every year!”

But that just means: “460,000 children are late for dinner, stayed at school and forgot to tell their mom. … The definition of ‘missing’ is missing for an hour!”

Kidnappings by strangers are extremely rare. Just being in a car is 400 times more dangerous.

“You don’t see people saying, ‘I could put Johnny in the car, but what if we’re T-boned?” Skenazy points out. “We’ve come up with a culture that sees a kid outside and fantasizes not just something bad but the very worst-case scenario.”

The officer who picked up Aiden argued the worst-case: “You have a lot of crazy people out here,” he told Heather. “I don’t trust my child out of range (of) about 20 or 30 feet from me.”

Twenty or 30 feet?

“It was a lot of his opinion,” Heather tells me.

Police officers can act on their opinions.

Local prosecutors went even further. They indicted Heather, claiming she placed her son in “imminent danger of death” and acted “against the peace and dignity of the state.”

Really!

When her employer heard that, Heather lost her job.

Good thing officials weren’t this obsessed with stranger danger when I was a kid. I walked half-a-mile every school day.

Crime was much worse then. Even including recent upticks, crime has dropped sharply over the past 30 years.

What’s changed is media hysteria. Any dramatic incident, anywhere, appears instantly on our phones. Frightened, gullible, math-illiterate officials say, better safe than sorry.

Now Scott and Heather say that, too.

“Will you drop your kids off again?” I ask.

“No!” says Heather. “We’re scared.”

“It’s not that we don’t think it was the right decision,” says Scott, “But what they decided for us was not very affordable. (Now) we don’t even leave them in the car to go into the convenience store,”

“Not because someone’s going to take them,” Heather adds, “but because someone’s going to see and call the police!”

Lenore Skenazy has persuaded eight states to pass “childhood independence” laws. They clarify that letting kids do things on their own isn’t abuse.

“You don’t want the government telling you when you can let your kids do things,” she says. “You know your children better than they do.”

We know the Cambridge Union just held a shameful, ugly debate on making all vaccinations mandatory, because someone had the foresight to film it and put it on YouTube.

When you search the Cambridge Union’s website for the debate it says, “Oops, we are unable to find what you were looking for.” Indeed they are, if what you are looking for is an elite university imparting knowledge and critical thinking.

Cambridge can take this debate off its website and try to erase any trace of it ever having taken place, never mind admit that it ended in a vote for mandatory vaccination. But it cannot deny this happened because here it is.

“This house would make vaccinations mandatory” was the debate on the 17th October at 8 p.m. (On October 31 they’re doing “This house welcomes the decline of America.”)

If you can bear to click the YouTube link, you can watch a lot of acne-ridden budding fascists taking their seats in a wood-paneled chamber. A bespectacled Harry Potter look-alike points and bosses people around, whilst another geek wears a big black mask to prove his point—which is presumably that he feels unsafe just being in a room where not having vaccines is being discussed.

As an unvaccinated person myself, there aren’t swear words strong enough for how I feel about these morons.

Government ministers and Big Pharma executives trying to force Covid vaccines on us I understand. I’m a realist. But students? They’ve no dog in this race. It’s gratuitous.

The “debate” starts with Alessio D’Angelo, union president, in a black dinner suit and bow tie, speaking in a very posh voice and saying “Ya!” as he introduces the speakers.

A spotty first-year student called Haris Khan, in a dinner suit and bow tie, then steps up to propose mandatory vaccines. What he said was so stupid it doesn’t deserve reporting, but he compared forced vaccinating to having car insurance and picking up dog poo—“necessary for the greater good.”

“Yes, there’s loss of autonomy over one’s own body, but…” and he never finished that point, because he couldn’t, so he tailed off and blathered on about something else.

He claimed unvaccinated people were passing on Covid to others who are vaccinated. But if they’re vaccinated and therefore protected, how does that happen, Haris? By the way, I got it from a fully jabbed person. But really, why bother arguing with this fool? He kept sniffing, like he’d got something up his nose. In an attempt to explain how the mandate would work, he said, “It’s vaccinating or you can’t do x, y, z…”

He was so vacuous he bored me half to death, but when he finished the chamber erupted in applause so hysterical you would think Aerosmith had just performed “Love in an Elevator.”

The only person who interrupted him with common sense was an American in the stalls.

“So you can’t think of when health care has gone wrong? I love your confidence in the NHS,” shouted the American.

This threw the dickie bow dork off and he started blathering about people who were against vaccines being the stupid sorts who go hunting and gathering. What a twat.

Then his sniffing couldn’t hold whatever was up there anymore, and he had to start wiping his nose with his hand. If he was my son I’d stop his funds. That’s for having disgusting manners and for reading out intellectually lazy work, I’d say. Is this what your father and I are paying for? Grow up. Get a job.

Another student who spoke for the motion was called Pollyanna, fittingly. She was a rosy-cheeked cherub of a thing who looked like a colicky baby as she burped up the following:

“If you put the right barriers in place, humans will choose the path of least resistance.” Yes, dear, and if you beat someone with a big stick they will go the path of least resistance. Doesn’t make it right, though, does it?

“Vaccination is not about your individual public choice; it’s about public health—you are putting people at risk,” she further belched. “We need to be a society that believes in the science, that knows vaccines are effective,” she trilled. Everyone clapped wildly.

Speaking against the motion, Professor Helen Bedford, looking po-faced, didn’t really speak against compelling vaccination at all, but at least she said people like me should only be fined. Cheers, mate.

Another student speaking “against the motion,” Gabriel Rubens, only didn’t want mandatory vaccination because it might make anti-vaxxers more popular. “Ninety percent of people took the coronavirus vaccine and that’s good.” Right, move along, you’ve nothing to say.

Next? No. Nobody was speaking out against the Covid vaccine. Professor Jonathon Heeney, a “vaccinologist” and fellow of Darwin College, made Charles Darwin turn in his grave as he spoke for the motion by getting basic principles of evolution wrong.

He argued that viruses mutate because of the people who won’t get vaccinated. Er, they mutate when you put them under pressure, thicko, which is what vaccines do. That’s why vaccines have to be constantly updated for new variants.

He then quoted “recent data showing 10.2 healthy years of life gained because of the use of vaccines.”

I’m 52 now and it’s looking good so far, so maybe I lose 10.2 years off the end, or maybe I don’t. When shall I start counting? At 60, 70, or 80? The man was quoting garbage statistics that were conveniently unprovable.

He argued that we all lose our liberties if we won’t all have “the vaccine,” because then we get lockdowns.

Yes, that’s certainly the official threat. Who paid you to do a bit of Project Fearmongering?

“Vaccines help us to live our lives without restrictions,” he argued. Oh, behave.

Someone shouted from the stalls again, this time asking about MMR and autism. Professor 10.2 called Andrew Wakefield’s work “malarkey.” He got really quite cross and defensive. “That’s fiction!” he snapped. (Oh, and claiming you get precisely ten years, two months, and twelve days more of life if you’re vaccinated is not fiction, or malarkey?)

The chamber got noisy. The chairman stopped it. So a debate nearly started but they got on top of it just in time.

Another student, Isla Harris, tried to speak against mandatory vaccination but was so obviously scared of being socially canceled, or just plain lynched, she kept waving her arms defensively and wandering away from the podium as if she was trying to get to the door just in case.

She tried to argue that science was not 100 percent right all the time. “Science is messy, fluid, and evolving,” she said, making a good point, but someone easily interrupted her and she folded like a damp rag. It was hopeless.

The bottom line was that the Cambridge Union held a debate with both proposers and opposers speaking in favor of the central idea of vaccination being 100 percent good, always. All they disagreed upon was how hard you should hold someone down to have it.

To allow someone of the opposite view, an anti-vaxxer—gasp—to get up and explain why they didn’t trust experimental mRNA nanotechnology, and mounting evidence of blood clots, heart attacks, strokes, and turbo-cancers…that would have caused so much shock and horror the snowflakes might never have recovered.

As it was, they all got their cozy worldview reinforced—that the state was looking after them—so they could go sleepy-byes that night and have sweet dreams. Gurgle, gurgle.

This is why the spooks historically recruit from Cambridge. There you will find men, and now plenty of women, who were born of the establishment, were trained by the establishment, and want to protect the establishment.

Even so, wanting to turn your country into a place where people are held down and forcibly injected is going it some.

But is that what they are saying? What does a vaccine mandate really mean?

The health secretary in the U.K., Wes Streeting, who is himself recovering from cancer acquired since 2021, and has lost a kidney, and has now found another lump in his body that is being investigated, has announced that he wants to bring in a new digital health-care ID card.

Like its E.U. counterpart, this will be used to keep a person’s medical information “in one handy place,” as they say, easily accessible for them (and the authorities). So it does seem Britain is going down the mandate road, but what is a mandate?

If you look it up, a mandate is not compulsory in a legal sense. It’s saying you must do this or you are breaking the law. It is not a provision that can physically force something on you, only punish you for not doing it.

So I would say fine, I’ll break the law. I would rather go to prison than have the Covid jab. Then the system fines me or puts me in prison. But I still haven’t had it.

How do they make me have it? How do they get me strapped to a gurney with a needle in my arm and my bodily autonomy ended?

What is the legal precedent? Well, horrific things have been done to people’s bodies during wars, to soldiers and civilians, and of course the state can kill people if they’re sentenced to death.

But out of wartime, and in the absence of an actual death sentence passed in court, all I can think of as a legal precedent to end bodily autonomy is the suffragettes.

They were held down and had tubes put up their noses to force-feed them when they went on hunger strike in prison in the early 1900s. This was said to be for their own good, but also because it was argued at that time that the greater good was served by not giving in to their demand for women to get the vote.

Retrospectively, society now affirms they were right, of course. And many years ahead, society might say the vaccine refusers like me were right. But that doesn’t help me now.

Currently, in the case of mentally deficient people, and the very elderly in care homes, the Covid vaccine is given after papers are signed by the relative with power of attorney, even if the mentally disabled or old person says, “No, please, I don’t want it.”

The state could try to argue I have lost my mind and it is acting in my best interest by making me a ward of the state. And it could try to get my next of kin to consent.

But it all seems like a lot of paperwork and court orders, when you multiply me by the many other millions who won’t have the Covid vaccine, nor any other vaccines since we encountered this madness. Maybe someone with more legal knowledge can enlighten me as to how they might do a job lot of forced vaccinating?

Would people be rounded up into vaccine administration camps, where the unvaccinated could be processed more efficiently?

Or are they really saying, these Cambridge geniuses, that a vaccine mandate will simply stop the unvaccinated doing “x, y, and z.” In which case, we just need to decide what the x, y, and z are. Traveling by plane, obviously, but maybe also earning money, or going to the shops to buy food. A sort of slowed-up execution, if you will, unless the individual concerned is one of those hunter-gatherer types who can fend for themselves outside the system.

I’m not sure the Central Park Five really want a civil trial on what happened the night of April 19, 1989, but by suing Donald Trump for defamation, that’s what they’re going to get.

The alleged defamation was Trump’s typically garbled response to Kamala Harris’ lie at ABC’s presidential debate last month, about something that happened 35 years ago. She claimed that Trump had called for “the execution of five young Black and Latino boys who were innocent.”

Actually, Trump’s much-maligned ad in The New York Times never mentioned the Five, who weren’t remotely eligible for the death penalty, anyway. If everyone involved here weren’t a public figure, Harris’ accusation, as well as the Five’s legal filing, and every Times story for the past decade mentioning the ad, would all be defamatory, too.

But since they brought it up, let’s have a trial! Truth is an absolute defense to defamation, and one thing the public hasn’t gotten much of is the truth about the Central Park Five: Antron McCray, Yusef Salaam, Raymond Santana, Kevin Richardson and Korey Wise.

Here’s some testimony we’d like to see:

How did the detectives get the boys’ parents to go along with videotaping their sons as they confessed — falsely, they now claim — to the rape of the jogger, in addition to vicious attacks on bicyclists, joggers and other park-goers?

Weren’t the detectives worried that if they bullied five innocent boys into making false confessions, the jogger might suddenly emerge from her coma and be able to identify her attackers? What if she woke up and blurted out, “My boyfriend did it!”? Boy, would their faces be red.

In any event, it will be great to see those videotapes again!

As long as the detectives were making up confessions anyway, why not have the youths forthrightly admit to raping the jogger? Instead, all five readily admitted to the other crimes, but each of them minimized their role in the rape, as is typical for suspects in sex crime cases. They confessed — to the police, to detectives and to their friends and acquaintances — only to fondling or restraining the jogger while others raped her.

Thus, for example, when Santana was picked up by the police, he blurted out, “I had nothing to do with the rape. All I did was feel the woman’s tits.” The police didn’t know about the jogger yet. How did Santana?

Melody Jackson, sister of a friend of Wise’s, volunteered to the police that Wise told her he didn’t rape the jogger, he “only held her legs down while Kevin [Richardson] f–ked her.”

(Maybe not strictly relevant to the case at hand, but how dumb does she feel now, thinking this admission would help Wise?)

How did Wise know that — as Detective August Jonza’s contemporaneous notes show — someone he thought was named “Rudy” had stolen the jogger’s Walkman? Police had no way of knowing about the Walkman until 13 years later, when serial rapist Matias Reyes said so.

If it wasn’t the Five — and I’m assured it was not — then who really bashed ex-Marine John Loughlin in the head with a lead pipe, kicked and beat him unconscious, putting him in the hospital for two nights? Why would Loughlin identify one of the Five as his attacker in a police lineup?

Subpoenas will also have to go out to the other 30 or so youths in the park that night because so many of them implicated members of the Five in both the beatdowns and the rape — such as overhearing a couple of them laughingly say they “made a woman bleed.”

It’s always been a mystery why Salaam (New York City Council member, honored speaker at the Democratic National Convention and namesake of a gate to Central Park) confessed to the attack immediately after Detective Thomas McKenna told him, “I don’t care what you say to me. We have fingerprints on the jogger’s pants.”

Upon hearing that, Salaam said, “I was there, but I didn’t rape her.”

But why, Yusef? Why confess if you knew your fingerprints couldn’t possibly be anywhere near the jogger, of whose rape you are entirely innocent? Maybe the videotape will jog your memory.

Salaam also told detectives that one of the wilding youths said, “Let’s get a white girl.” Who said that? If Salaam made it up, I’ll be very disappointed in him.

We’ll need to hear from Wise’s acquaintance Ronald Williams, who told police that the day after the wilding, Wise said, “You heard about that woman that was beat up and raped in the park last night. That was us!”

When the case was reopened in 2002, Williams stuck by his story.

Having had 35 years to think about it, does Richardson finally have an explanation for how the crotch of his underwear got smeared with semen, grass stains and dirt that night?

The last two crucial witnesses are confirmed rapist Reyes, whose DNA was on the jogger, and then-assistant district attorney Nancy Ryan, who pushed through the Five’s “exoneration,” despite their detailed, videotaped confessions and guilty verdicts from two majority-minority juries.

Questions for Reyes: When you confessed to raping the jogger, did you know you could not be punished for it? Did you know you would instead receive a favorable prison transfer? You were in the same prison as one of the Five, Wise. Are other inmates telling the truth when they say he was threatening you unless you signed an affidavit prepared by his lawyer, claiming you acted alone?

Is your former cellmate telling the truth when he says you did not, in fact, act alone, but heard the jogger’s screams and ran over to join the fun?

For ADA Ryan: Why did you prohibit the police from interviewing Reyes?

If DNA is the only acceptable evidence in a criminal trial, how were homicides proved before the 1990s, when DNA evidence first began to be used in criminal trials? Would “videotaped confessions” figure into your answer?

Is it true that your bitter office rival was Linda Fairstein, head of the sex crimes unit, who oversaw the original cases? How much did it burn you up that she caught the case instead of you?

I have many more witnesses I’d like to put on the stand, including the jogger’s doctors, who say they distinctly saw many different handprints on the jogger’s body, and that her injuries prove that Reyes could not possibly have acted alone.

This is a wonderful opportunity to prove the truth in a court of law! They asked for it.

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