People eagerly give money to rich environmental groups. The Natural Resources Defense Council has $463 million in assets.

It claims it uses law “to confront the climate crisis.”

What it really does is pay lawyers to torture people who try to do useful things.

Example: America needs minerals like copper and silver to make things. Even President Joe Biden made a speech saying America will need 400-600% more such minerals to make “solar panels, wind turbines and so much more!”

An iPhone alone requires aluminum, iron, lithium, gold, copper …

But when investors dare try to dig up such minerals in America, the NRDC objects and uses political connections to stop them.

Twenty years ago, entrepreneurs tried to open a mine in Alaska. Before they even got the application in, the EPA vetoed it.

Why? Because groups like the NRDC say the mine “would be a catastrophic threat to the wildlife and … fragile ecosystem.”

They get their way because when Democrats run the EPA, they not only support NRDC’s positions, they even hire NRDC employees.

The next Republican administration removed the EPA’s veto. The Army Corps of Engineers then studied the mine and concluded that it wasn’t an environmental threat.

So, is Pebble a bustling mine today? No.

Democrats got elected and vetoed it again.

Physicist Mark Mills wonders why anyone would try to open a mine in America today. “Why in the world would you put millions, maybe billions of dollars at risk, spending those decades to get a permit, knowing there’s a very good chance they’ll just cancel a permit? How in the world do you build mines in America knowing that that’s the landscape you have?”

Well, you don’t.

America now ranks second to last in the time it takes to develop a new mine — roughly 29 years. Only Zambia is worse.

“You start applying for permits,” says Mills, “You’re going to be waiting not months, not years, but decades!”

Waiting while the NRDC sues and runs frightening anti-mine ads, saying nature will be “destroyed by a 2,000-foot gaping hole in the ground!”

Mills points out their deceit. Today’s mines disturb “a tiny infinitesimal pinprick in the landscape” and we do need to disturb the landscape a little, because “we need metals and materials and minerals to build everything that exists to make society possible!”

I confronted NRDC spokesman Bob Deans, saying the NRDC killing mines also kills people’s opportunity. He responded that “clean” energy creates jobs.

“We created 50,000 new jobs in this country, putting up wind turbines, solar panels, building the next generation of energy efficient cars. This is where the future is!”

“But also, you need copper and gold,” I point out.

“That’s right,” says Deans, “And we have to weigh those risks.”

But the NRDC doesn’t weigh the risks. They just oppose American mines.

I asked Deans, “Are there any mines that the NRDC doesn’t complain about?

“Sure,” he replied.

He said he’d send us some names. But he never did.

I asked again this month. Again, no names.

“Don’t hold your breath,” says Mills. “The mines that they implicitly support are in Africa.”

“Implicitly” because they don’t actually say mining should be done in poor countries.

“They don’t say that,” says Mills, “But the green movement has been perfectly happy outsourcing mining to disadvantaged countries where thousands of children in bare feet, working by hand with shovels, dig minerals out of the earth.”

At least in America, children wouldn’t be digging with their hands, advanced equipment would make mining safer and our rules would reduce pollution. You’d think environmentalists would want more mining done in America.

“To have a sane world,” says Mills, “We should be doing a lot more of it. Not all of it. But not none.”

Allowing America to do more would definitely be good. Our future needs minerals.

“Society can’t exist without mines,” concludes Mills.

A £100 million bat protection tunnel being built in the U.K. might be utterly pointless, except that it brings a wonderful new phrase into the English language: bat shed crazy.

Beside half a mile of the already lunatic rail scheme called High Speed 2, a disastrously ugly aboveground tunnel is being built near a Buckinghamshire wood to house around 300 bats who don’t live there but who might, in theory, flutter over there on a night out and get hit by a train. The scheme works out at £333,000 per bat.

This is significant not least because the amount paid to my parents when they were displaced from their modest home because of High Speed 2 (HS2) was only slightly more than that.

In other words, the British state now rates bats as highly as it does humans, and possibly more highly, because the bats did not have to fight a long legal battle to get their compensation, whereas my parents, and many like them, absolutely did.

Not all big infrastructure projects are worthwhile, and some are particularly bat shed crazy.

To understand how bat shed crazy HS2 is, you need to get your head around the fact that it’s going to cost taxpayers upwards of £60 billion for 140 miles of track (that’s equivalent to the GDP of Panama being spent on a line from New York to Albany), and you need to understand that it’s a rail line replacing a quite good existing rail line, and that all it’s going to do is shave ten to twenty minutes off the already quick and efficient rail journey from London to Birmingham.

Invented by the last Labour government, under Tony Blair, and perpetuated by subsequent cowardly Conservative ones, and perpetually in construction, possibly forever, or until people no longer use trains because they can beam themselves up like Star Trek, HS2 is a mind-blowing way to blow public money on almost nothing, in that once it’s built it will most likely be obsolete or of very little practical use to anyone, given the way life is going.

The philosophy of the Labour government that invented HS2 was that you can boost your economy by creating problems to solve. If there aren’t any potholes in the roads, make some, goes the theory, because filling them creates jobs and wealth.

This is socialism, and why you want to avoid it. This is why America is very lucky to have Donald Trump about to start running it again, like a business. Because not caring about spending and wasting money for the sake of it impacts worse on those with the least, and leads to a terrible moral rot, far worse than any charge leveled at Trump.

My family had to appear before a House of Commons select committee taking evidence on the proposed rail line and explain why we should be compensated for our home of fifty years not qualifying for compensation under an arbitrary fifty-meter rule. It was slightly outside this, but still close enough to the line to be blighted and rendered worthless, and my parents were unable to release equity from it for their retirement.

It took many years, lots of expensive lawyer time, and much fighting, and in the end the British government and HS2 Ltd. agreed to compensate them by buying their home at what they called market value. Only one other family on the street got compensated; the rest were refused help.

Meanwhile, the Bechstein’s bats living in Bernwood, a 350-hectare area, were compensated with this vast bat shed being built in Sheephouse Wood, Buckinghamshire, where the line goes through, and where the bats don’t live, but might visit, and get hit by a train.

The Sheephouse Wood Mitigation Structure will “stop bats from emerging from the western edge of Sheephouse Wood immediately into the railway corridor.”

Yeah, alright. Whatever. Obviously, bats will not go anywhere near a train traveling at 225 miles an hour, or whatever Back to the Future speed they’re claiming this useless train will do as it propels a mythical class of businessperson to a physical meeting they need to get to ten minutes quicker than they might have before.

The bat tunnel is being cited as one reason why the hated rail project has gone so vastly over budget. Latest estimates suggest it will cost £66.6 billion. Three sixes is right. It’s an evil beast of a thing.

The company that’s building it by bulldozing half of the best bits of the English countryside, from Buckinghamshire and the Chilterns through Oxfordshire and Warwickshire, moans endlessly about the cost of accommodating bats, and pesky troublemakers like my parents insisting their house means something to them and they ought to be able to sell it for some money.

Obviously, the new rail line with its massive flyovers and crossings will look horrendous.

But if you saw a picture of what this half-a-mile-long concrete and steel bat shed is going to look like, you’d conclude that the various environmental mitigation structures—there are lots of them everywhere, for bats and birds and badgers—are a more damning indictment of the vain folly of socialism than the railway itself.

At no point has anyone in authority said, “Darn it! This idiotic project to make a quick journey quicker is ruining too many people’s lives, and maybe displacing or just slightly upsetting too many bats. Anyway, they’ve invented Zoom and Teams. Who gets a train to a meeting? Let’s not build it.” No, no one in government has thought of this. It is simply beyond them. Or the project is worth too much to them, for reasons they’re keeping to themselves.

The public reasoning for High Speed 2—High Speed 1 was the obviously brilliant channel tunnel rail link to France—has never had even the remotest whiff of logic to it.

In an age where people travel by train less and less, and conference-call more and more, it is obviously bogus that the government of the U.K. has been investing billions for years in making a one-hour-twenty train journey into a one-hour journey, at some point—no one knows when, because the darn thing never threatens to come anywhere near being finished.

This old-fashioned bullet train—yesterday’s solution to last century’s problem—must be being built for reasons the government is keeping to itself, because the ones they’ve given simply make no sense. It won’t link the north to the south, because Birmingham is not the north. It’s the Midlands. And economically speaking, the Midlands is doing very well, thank you, without being made a bit closer to London.

The second part of the line that was meant to be going north from Birmingham to Leeds, which you could argue was needed if you believe “it’s grim oop north,” was canned.

It’s not happening. What they are linking is two cities with a journey time between them that is so short anyway it’s hard to see who wants it made shorter, and more expensive. I’d pay not to get to Birmingham ten minutes quicker, but I can say that because I’m from the Midlands.

The point is, England is a small country and the distance between the capital city and the center of the country is negligible. You can drive it in two hours, quicker than New York to Albany. The existing train service is sometimes so quick it’s an hour on a good day as it is.

Some journalists claim the government has already spent £100 billion on HS2, which the company denies, backed up by those idiot fact-checkers who always weigh in when someone is onto something. It insists the figure to date is £27 billion, with the projected spend £66.6 billion, admitting that may rise. I bet it will. This is not so much a gravy train as a red wine jus train.

Its alleged future usefulness has ceased to be of any significance, or even the subject of much debate. HS2 is a moneymaking machine, grinding endlessly along. Like a war, or a global vaccination project, it has grown so big it simply aims to feed itself, and keep those involved in it knee-deep in wealth for as long as possible.

Remember when Anthony “I Am the Science” Fauci showed up for congressional hearings wearing two masks, knowing full well that masks didn’t prevent the transmission of COVID?

With great leadership like that, for two years, most of the country dutifully (or by legal sanction) walked around masked all the time — indoors, outdoors, on playgrounds, beaches and bikes. Day care centers tortured infants by forcing them into the completely useless masks; fist fights broke out on airplanes because the government was requiring flight attendants to make everyone over the age of 2 wear a mask; and public school teachers sadistically taped masks to kids’ faces.

To this day, you still sometimes see the 6-foot markers on floors at airports, post offices and government buildings, mementos of the made-up distancing rule that “just sort of appeared,” according to Fauci. They’re like phrenology skulls or Aztec human sacrifice temples — artifacts of an odd and discredited belief system.

In the face of 100 years of scientific knowledge, “I Am the Science” Fauci stubbornly denied the existence of natural immunity. Although studies consistently showed that prior COVID infection provided better protection than the vaccine — something even the E.U. recognized — our public health mandarins remained studiously ignorant of the science. (Not to be confused with “The Science,” which apparently is a small, egotistical Italian man with a godawful Brooklyn accent.)

Nearly alone in the world, our government’s medical “experts” recommended repeated vaccine shots for healthy young people, age 5 and up, despite their facing near-zero risk from COVID, but serious risks from the vaccine, such as anaphylaxis, myocarditis, pericarditis and/or early death. Ask your doctor if the COVID vaccine is right for you!

Fauci and Francis Collins, then head of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), were so devoted to the scientific method that they conspired to manufacture a “quick and devastating published takedown” of scientists who dissented from their demand that the entire country be shut down — specifically, the authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, which argued against universal shutdowns, advocating instead for focused protection for the elderly, i.e., the only people at risk of death from COVID.

Obviously — thank you Sweden and Florida — the dissenters were 100% correct, while Fauci, Collins and the rest of our health bureaucracy were 100% wrong. But at the time, the declaration’s principal authors, from Harvard, Stanford and Oxford, were smeared by Collins as “fringe epidemiologists” and blacklisted from social media with the connivance of the federal government.

It isn’t just that these “public health” experts failed spectacularly and never apologized. They’re still bragging about ruining millions of lives for no reason. Fauci was paid nearly $5 million for his memoir about his “journey in public service.” Collins delivered his letter of resignation in the form of a whimsical ditty, sung by himself, accompanied by himself on acoustic guitar. The guy is nuttier than Lizzo’s personal trainer.

Our constitutionally protected watchdog media lavishly praised these bozos while ginning up nonstop COVID hysteria.

In addition to The New York Times‘ lachrymose “Those We’ve Lost” series, producing obituaries for every COVID death (average age of the dead: 120), the paper told an alarmist story about a “26-year-old physician” who died of COVID in a New York City hospital early in the pandemic. His death was somberly reported in the magazine section by Times contributor Dr. Helen Ouyang.

In response to repeated requests from an alert reader for evidence that such a death had occurred, the editors indignantly claimed that Ouyang had spoken “with the man’s attending physician,” and the death was “confirmed by fact-checkers.” Executive Editor Dean Baquet snapped at the persistent skeptic: “Enough. … [W]e have answered and we are done.”

Then it turned out that, of course, the doctor who died of COVID was made up. After The Washington Post‘s Erik Wemple got on the case, the TimesTimes expressed outrage when it discovered the CDC had been hiding data that proved booster shots did absolutely nothing for adults between the ages of 18 and 49. Nothing, that is, other than put them at risk of death and other side effects.

Outside physicians, who’d been begging for this data, “were stunned to hear that information exists.” But CDC spokeswoman Kristen Nordlund explained they’d withheld the data because it “might be misinterpreted as the vaccines being ineffective.”

Although nothing can compare to the Chinese water torture brought to us by the COVID autocrats, let’s not forget that, to this day, all major medical associations support the Mengele-like poisoning and mutilating of adolescents who think they’re the opposite gender. This includes the American Medical Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics.

This will be at least the second medical catastrophe foisted on the country by the pediatric academy. These same geniuses single-handedly created the peanut allergy epidemic. Based on pure speculation — not research or studies — in 2000, the academy began recommending that children under 3 not consume peanut products in order to reduce the possibility of their developing a peanut allergy.

They had the cause exactly backwards. Studies — yes, eventually, actual studies were performed — later showed that infants exposed to peanuts before age 3 are 86% less likely to develop a peanut allergy than those denied peanut products. But because a few pediatricians had a hunch, the number of kids ending up in the emergency room due to peanut allergies tripled from 2005 to 2014. By now, about 1 in 18 American children have peanut allergies.

I haven’t even mentioned the opioid epidemic, brought to us by Big Pharma. Oh well, at least they learned their lesson.

Except they didn’t. Not at all. A recent Times article reports that, in 2022, nearly 80 million Americans were taking prescription stimulants. That was a mere aside in a story about a study that found a five-fold increase in psychosis among those taking high doses of Adderall and other stimulants. (If that makes you worried, there’s something you can take for it.)

As our mind-boggling rates of obesity and diabetes attest, there’s no question but that Americans are consuming vastly too much sugar and overprocessed food. What’s the medical establishment’s answer? Put fat kids on a weekly nausea-causing injection for life that costs a thousand bucks a month.

The whole lot of them — the public health bureaucrats, the phony scientists sucking up grant money, the pharmaceutical and food industries — must be punished, and RFK is the man to do it.

Real scientists like Jay Bhattacharya and Martin Kulldorff (the Great Barrington Declaration guys) should be brought in to run the CDC, NIH, FDA and so on. But at the top, overseeing the whole public health apparatus as head of Health and Human Services, we need someone whose overall approach is driven by utter contempt for the arrogant “health” bureaucrats who’ve done so much damage to our country.

Funny how the Brits are always falling behind the Yanks, as they pejoratively call them. No sooner had the Americans woken up and voted Trump to power, those in Britain wielding power are arresting and jailing people for using…non-woke language, such as “asylum seeker.”

Yes, you read that right, calling someone an asylum seeker will land you in the pokey in the country where shoplifting has been decriminalized, with supermarkets going broke as a result. The Brits are known for thieving, and they now practice it with abandon. But stealing aside—along with buggery, known as the British disease—what is truly unbelievable, actually it is Stalinist, is the fact that a woman can be arrested and held for 31 hours for using those two words.

Better yet, another woman got 31 months (the fuzz and the bewigged buffoons who sentence innocent people for non-woke language seem to like the number 31) for demanding mass deportations and writing online that she felt like burning down asylum houses. Incitement was the reason given for the imprisonment. Can you imagine spending 31 months in the pokey for writing to persons unknown that you feel like burning down asylums? How can anyone in their right mind accept that fool Charles as King, never mind all those politicians who have allowed the fuzz and the bewigged buffoons to jail people for saying such things?

And did you know that a hate post online or on paper is now considered by police on a par with rape and child abuse? This is modern Britain, where George Orwell was born—Eric Blair was his real name—and where he wrote the definitive book, 1984, about the state turning its citizens into obedient robots. Orwell had Big Brother watching over us and punishing us if we strayed. Today we have technology as Big Brother and the state with the fuzz dishing out punishment. The present, of course, is worse because back in fictional 1984 one could sort of escape from the TV cameras. No longer. And what makes it even more incredible than fiction is the British fuzz playing along and leading the fight to enslave the people.

The methods of the state today make Stalin and Mao look like innocent 7-year-olds playing cops and robbers. Every accuser is now seen as a victim, and the presumption of innocence is ignored. Write something against woke, or call some immigrant who has illegally entered the country an asylum seeker, and two or at times as many as six coppers arrive and put you through hell by not telling you who your accusers are, but only what you are accused of. But if you see them coming and you escape through the back door, feel free to go to the supermarket and help yourself to everything your heart desires. For free.

How did we get to this? Easy. The left-dominated, nihilistic pop culture and academic establishment, supported throughout by the laughable “mainstream media” that has pushed our culture way to the left. The cultural Marxists are everywhere, especially in the fields of education, entertainment, and mainstream media. One of the reasons that the Donald wiped out the Democrats this month was woke. America has become a nation of identity politics and grievances. Everyone speaks the language of oppression. Many feel they are victims. Many more claim that they are. They learned that early in life, and it is confirmed daily by their schools and the media. Long ago, one was considered a racist by one’s actions, spoken words, or thoughts. At present one is judged by the color of their skin, which makes the majority racists.

Well, Americans have had enough and voted for the Donald in hopes he’d do something about woke, inflation, and foreign wars, and in that order. The Brits are always behind, and they’re still enjoying woke. The government insists that it’s important that police record “non-crime hate incidents” when necessary to help prevent serious crimes. This is double-talk. Non-crime hate incidents being reviewed by cops means no freedom of speech, period. Actually it’s chilling when you think about it: Cops can come into your home and quiz you for hours about something you wrote without specifying what it was and without telling you who has complained, and then decide whether to charge you or not. To incite violence online is a no-no. As is to shout fire in a crowded theater when there’s no fire. But for the state to butt in and decided whether you hurt someone’s feelings or not—and to quiz and even charge you for it—is the real no-no.

So, next time you’re in sunny Britain, where it rains most of the year, be careful what you’ve written online about your aunt Agatha, or some asylum seeker. You could end up doing 31 months in the pokey. See you in sunny England.

Men like thinking about the Roman Empire.

So, should Sir Ridley Scott have cast Denzel Washington as the bisexual bad guy in his new movie Gladiator II? Is it historically accurate to cast a black villain in the Roman Empire?

Conversely, should New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art be hosting an exhibit titled “Flight Into Egypt” celebrating African-Americans’ dubious assertion that blacks are responsible for ancient Egypt’s artistic glories?

My view on ethnic casting is that different art forms need different norms. In opera, for instance, singing ability is far more important than visual authenticity, so anything goes. In big-budget movies, however, actors need to be cast so as to maintain suspension of disbelief during close-ups.

Theater, in contrast, falls in between opera and film. I sympathize with low-budget acting troupes who just want to put on a show with whomever they’ve got on hand.

In contrast, the Metropolitan is America’s foremost museum, so it should be expected to mount a scholarly exhibit that calls more skeptical attention to bogus claims such as the common assertion that blacks built Egypt.

My view doesn’t mean that a film actor’s family tree has to resemble the genealogy of his character, just that he should look like it does. For example, New Zealand Maori character actor Cliff Curtis can plausibly play Arabs and Mexicans. (Presumably, there are also Mexicans and Arabs who likewise can get by credibly as Maoris.)

Without having seen Gladiator II yet, I’d respond that casting Denzel is fine:

First, it’s the Gladiator franchise, which doesn’t pretend to have a track record of meticulous historical accuracy. As you probably recall (if not: spoiler alert), the 2000 Gladiator with Russell Crowe ends with the Emperor Commodus (Joaquin Phoenix) being overthrown in A.D. 192 and…the Roman Republic being restored.

In actuality, the Roman Empire survived for another 284 years.

Second, he’s Denzel Washington, one of the great movie stars of his generation. (Check him out in 2012’s Flight for an example.)

Third, due to pro-black racial favoritism, black actors don’t get hired as often as they should to play antagonists. By most accounts, Denzel has a grand old time for himself in Gladiator II in his rare role as a miscreant. In contrast, white actors can make a living specializing as defective or dumb characters, like Phoenix in Joker, The Master, and the original Gladiator. (Unfortunately, Scott’s casting of Phoenix in last year’s Napoleon as Bonaparte, a legendarily competent man, proved a disaster.)

Fourth, there indeed were some sub-Saharans in the classical Mediterranean world; not many, but some, enough to justify casting Denzel in a popcorn movie.

For example, one of the more prestigious early converts to Christianity in The Acts of the Apostles (Acts 8:26–40) is the “Ethiopian eunuch,” treasurer to Queen Candace of Kush, whom Philip the Evangelist encounters in his chariot on the road from Jerusalem to Gaza. He was probably not from modern Ethiopia, but instead was a brownish Nubian from modern Sudan up the Nile River from Egypt.

The existence of the Nile made north-south travel in northeast Africa easier than crossing the Sahara in parched northwest Africa. This was especially true in Roman times before camel caravans began regularly connecting West Africa with the Mediterranean during the post-Gladiator late Roman Empire. (However, the impenetrable Sudd swamp on the upper Nile effectively blocked Mediterraneans from reaching the blackest parts of Africa by river.)

It was, however, not impossible for Romans to get across the Western Sahara before well-organized camel caravans. We have records of a number of legionary expeditions across the Sahara, at least one of which brought back a rhinoceros to fight in the Colosseum (as depicted in Gladiator II).

But there wasn’t much profit in the arduous overland trip. After all, Romans had no compunctions about enslaving anybody from their own part of the world, so they hardly had to cross the Sahara to find slaves.

Roman sailors similarly shied away from venturing far south in the Atlantic. Unlike the Portuguese and Spaniards in the 15th century, who were blocked from trading profitably with the Indies by Muslim control of Middle Eastern choke points, the Roman Empire controlled the easy sea route to India: sail down the Red Sea, then have the steady monsoon winds in the Indian Ocean blow you directly to the Malabar Coast of India. So, to get to the rich Indies, the Romans had no need to go around Africa or around the world as the audacious Iberians did 1,500 years later.

While sailing about in the Indian Ocean, Romans and Greeks also occasionally traded with sub-Saharan ports on the east coast of Africa. But there was less to trade for in Africa than in India.

Hence, there was a trickle of blacks into the classical Mediterranean world, mostly from east Africa.

But not many.

Harvard ancient DNA geneticist David Reich estimated in 2017 that among Egyptians around the time of Christ there was 6 to 15 percent sub-Saharan ancestry. That’s not a large fraction, but it’s not tiny, either. Likewise, the appealing Fayum mummy portraits from Roman Egypt depict a certain number of Egyptians who resemble the new generation of mixed-race NFL quarterbacks, such as Patrick Mahomes.

On the other hand, the black share of Egyptian ancestry appears to have been climbing over the millennia. When the superb traditional Egyptian aesthetic, such as hieroglyphics, first emerged about 5,000 years ago, the population was largely descended from Caucasian farmers of the Fertile Crescent.

Hence, the Met Museum’s current show about African-American infatuation with ancient Egypt is embarrassing because it lacks the guts to mention that blacks didn’t have much to do with Egypt’s artistic accomplishments.

I have a question for MAGA following Trump’s blowout victory against a cackling cretinous curry-stained flesh-and-blood Thalia mask: How could it have happened?

According to the rule you’ve lived by for four years, a rule that made you storm the Capitol, assault cops, destroy property, and, in some cases, die yourselves, trampled under the feet of your imbecilic cohorts, Trump’s victory not only shouldn’t have happened but couldn’t have happened.

The Deep State’s in full control, no? It can steal any election.

Right?

However you envision this “higher power,” whatever identity you assign to “they” (“Deep State,” “CIA,” “the Jews,” “the Frankists”), they can steal any election as easy as Daquan steals a box of cigarillos from Baghwan’s minimart.

But Trump won in a landslide. His victory was declared by midnight on Election Day. It was fast, it was a swing-state sweep, it was indisputable.

Yet according to your worldview, which you adhered to with such conviction that you beat and bear-sprayed cops, Trump’s victory should not have been possible. Anything “they” did in 2020 “they” could certainly do again, and better, in 2024. MAGA won zero post-2020 court victories to restrain “them.” Indeed, the opposite happened; every MAGA who tried to fight “them,” from the Kraken whore to the Pillowman to Lin Wood to that pathetic husk of a former giant named Giuliani, lost, went bankrupt, went to prison, got indicted, or was in some way hobbled.

“They” were just as, if not more, powerful in November 2024 than they were in November 2020.

So how could Trump have possibly won so decisively?

Have you considered that maybe you’ve been wrong this entire time? That Biden really did win in 2020? That to whatever extent the Dems “cheated” it was by taking advantage of perfectly (though lamentably) legal pandemic voting regs, things the GOP could’ve manipulated too? Perhaps voters really did strike out in anger against the guy in charge during Covid and BLM, the man who tweeted “law & order” 200 times like that would stop the rioting, the man who fawned over Fauci.

What if Trump really did lose in 2020, and now the voters, having acted in haste during Covid, have corrected course? What if everything’s fully explicable with no need for conspiratorial bullshit? What if all the grief you’ve put everyone through, from J6 to the “fake electors” scam to the drift toward utter insanity about Rothschilds drinking baby blood, what if all of it was unnecessary?

Are you sorry? Are you even slightly contrite for the cult of ignorance you birthed and succored? Or are you gonna pretend it never happened? Are you gonna accept the victory and act like you haven’t spent the past four years crying and wailing and making life miserable for everyone else with your horseshit about killer Venezuelan voting machines and haunted drop-boxes?

I doubt that a single one of you will ever admit error, because to do so would mean admitting that you wasted the country’s time and shot yourselves in the foot (from Tucker fleeing Fox following the Dominion lawsuit to hundreds of MAGAs landing in prison for your J6 escapades…your cult claimed Jay Johnston—and I loved Jay Johnston—all for nothing.

You boobs.

You fucking boobs.

So explain to me how “they” allowed such a decisive victory for Trump on the 5th. Because, with whatever small impact I may have in the rightosphere, banned by Musk, banned by Amazon, banned by YouTube, I will use my nebbishy voice to never let you forget the rule you’ve now abandoned as though you never held it.

You’re gonna have to answer for your cult. You’re gonna have to explain, if there’s indeed a “they,” how and why “they” allowed this decisive victory.

Maybe one or two of you might get introspective and renounce the psychosis, the brain rot you nurtured, a psychosis encouraged by your God-King, who, I think we all now realize, could’ve accepted the 2020 results with grace and saved a lot of people a lot of misery.

There’ll be a segment of MAGA that will never renounce the rot. We saw this already with Naziboi Nick Fuentes, who made the point—and admit it, MAGA, this is the logical response that anyone with a J6 mindset would proffer for the sake of intellectual continuity—that Trump must be a bad guy, one of “them,” a Jew-controlled Frankist baby-eater, because if he weren’t, there’s no way “they” would’ve let him win.

Makes sense, right? If “they” are all-powerful Moloch-worshipping Christ-slaying Satanist pedos with half of D.C. willingly in their corner and the other half strong-armed into their corner via blackmail courtesy of the “Epstein and Diddy files,” then the fact that “they” let Trump win so decisively must mean that “they” approve of Trump and control him.

C’mon, MAGA, don’t run from your beliefs. According to you, “they” are all-powerful. Therefore, “they” must have greenlit Trump’s victory.

Be a man, MAGA. After all, you’re ALPHAS who deadlift weights and bitches. So be a chad and stand by your worldview.

Or, you know, be a human and admit that you were wrong. You weren’t the alpha but the bitch, emotional little dandelions so upset by Trump’s 2020 loss that you let some fast-talking shifty-ass hucksters convince you that green goblins and killer voting booths were casting spells and that’s why you lost.

Spookity-spookity ghosties were terrorizing you.

There’s zero accountability, zero responsibility, on your part.

How very feminine. How beta.

Okay, I’m being mean.

Look, MAGAs, I myself birthed a cult. Thirty-three years ago, in good faith, I said things about the Holocaust, some accurate, some not, but nothing spoken with malintent, and now, there’s a global cult of the dumbest, most foul humans on earth who revere my early-1990s work while refusing to read a single word I wrote from 1994 onward, when I realized my errors.

This cult haunts me. I’d like nothing more than to kill it. But instead, Elon Musk boosts the cult while banning me from speaking against it.

Honestly, folks, there’s no shame in admitting error. And MAGA should do that now. Kill your cult, the “Moloch and the Jews and the Deep State stole 2020” cult. You were wrong. Many of you—most, likely—had only the best of intentions, but you were wrong. Apologize to the Capitol police. Apologize to your fellow Americans. And learn from your mistakes.

Of course, you and I both know that ain’t gonna happen. The madness of “stop the steal” will be memory-holed by the right.

Introspection’s for faggots, after all. And you’re ALPHAS!

But take these words from a guy who spawned a cult of stupidity that bedevils him daily: You will not be able to run from your monster. The tens of thousands of Jew-hating, Holocaust-denying cretins empowered by Musk as “allies” will turn on you. Because, insane as they are, they won’t abandon the holy writ: Trump could not have won had he not sold out to “them.”

Oh, sure, you’re all having fun right now in the euphoria of the big win…blue-collar MAGA boomers breaking bread with Zoomer “Holohoax noticers.” But you’ll be at odds real soon; I’ll bet my house on it. Trump II will underwhelm, and half of you will defend him, while half of you will say, “See? He cucked out to THA JEWS!”

Musk, an indecent man, will never enforce Twitter ToS against violent hate speech. But soon enough he’ll likely bring down the banhammer once the breakaway cultists start hammering Trump as a Jew-loving Frankist baby-blood-drinker. Musk allows ordinary Jews to be defamed as baby-eaters, but he will not allow his best buddy to be similarly libeled.

And the rest of you? To echo a point I made last week, I’m not sure you can adjust to no longer being victims. MAGA has always been the right/white version of ghetto Daquan. You can give Daquan an unearned admission to a university, an unearned diploma, an unearned job, an unearned promotion, an unearned loan, and unearned loan forgiveness, but he’ll still say, “Life be unfair and everyone be against me.”

MAGAs have spent the past four years weeping about how they’re victims, how BLM is treated better. “BLM gets to riot and they don’t even get prosecuted, while we have one tiny little deadly riot at the Capitol, beat up a couple dozen cops, and we’re hunted like criminals! BLM gets a billion dollars and celebrity support and Kamala’s bail fund and poor little old us, we get nothing but the worms we eat because nobody likes us everybody hates us.”

But look at things now. All those BLM billions were embezzled by elephantiasis-thighed weave-wearing stank gorgons who spent the dough on mansions and luxury cars. Ordinary “street blacks” saw not a cent. And now even the bluest of cities and counties, from San Fran and Oakland to L.A. and Portland, have kicked Soros to the curb and reversed his “progressive prosecution” insanity, as Biden and Harris hid from their “defund the police” 2020 rhetoric while mainstream Democrats went into 2024 screaming “FUND THE POLICE!” because they knew that their only hope of winning was to bury a relic of 2020 that’s as toxic as “six feet apart.”

Meanwhile, you, MAGAs, stormed the Capitol in the single worst case of poor losership in American history, and yet you just WON the presidency and you’re back in power now.

You’ve spent four years going, “Poor us; BLM gets all the love while we get pissed on.”

I doubt you can adjust to realizing that, in the end, you actually came out ahead. You’ve grown too comfortable as noble losers. Recasting yourselves as winners buckles fortune on your back; now you have to produce.

Daquan got Affoymative Akshuned into Harvard, and now his professor wants him to write a term paper.

What’s easier? Writing an intelligent, sourced, and compelling paper? Or just saying, “I’ze still be a victum an’ you’ze be oppressin’ me”?

I’m unconvinced that MAGA will be able to eschew the victim thing. What I predict will happen is that roughly half of MAGA will remain forever Daquan and subconsciously revel in every Trump policy defeat or inaction because it’ll give them the ability to still be “da victum,” while the other half of MAGA will actively rebel by casting Trump as one of “them,” a tool of the conspiracy, and Twitter will become nothing but boomer MAGAs fighting Nazi MAGAs over whether President Trump is being victimized by “them” or whether President Trump is one of “them” and how there’s no solution other than national divorce/ethnostate/physical removal of JEWS!

But hey, it’s likely that Trump will bring back “remain in Mexico,” and equally likely that he’ll deport a few Haitians.

And hell, that’s one thing we can all agree on. Nazis, boomers, and beaners alike, we can all agree that Haitians suck.

Common ground! Hooray for us.

Congrats on your improbable victory, MAGA. Now grow the fuck up.

In ancient Greece, women weren’t allowed to vote. This wasn’t mere bigoted, reasonless, irrational male sexism: It was based on actual biology.

Participation in the public polis of Athens was forbidden for females, as they were said to suffer from a severe chronic condition called hysteria, consisting of mood swings, erratic behavior, and “incontinence” of the emotional, not bladder-based, variety. This was because hidden away inside their bodies like a Russian doll lurked an independent parasitic entity, the womb or uterus, or hysterika, as it was known in the language of the day.

Like the fetal xenomorphs in the Alien movies, this was conceived of as “an animal within an animal,” and when it got too dry due to lack of sex, it would wander around inside its feminine host body in search of spermy sustenance, causing extreme physiological, and thence mental, imbalance. Wombs having good noses, the only solution was for a woman to repel the itinerant beast from her upper body by imbibing cloves of foul-scented garlic and entice it back down into the correct abdominal niche by smearing her vagina with sweet, sweet honey, as if seducing Winnie-the-Pooh.

Because of such in-built genetic flaws, even such noted authorities of the day as Aristotle and Hippocrates argued that “persons with wombs,” as they were definitely not yet then called, should be kept as far away from primitive voting booths as was humanly possible.

How archaic, many modern readers may think. How retarded. And yet, in light of the recent immensely cheering election of Donald Trump to become the 47th new American Alcibiades, some contemporary political commentators have now suddenly decided the ancient Greeks may have been correct in their misogynistic prejudices after all—the difference being that, today, those who wish to deny women the vote somehow claim to be feminists.

A Gender Agenda
Prior to the ballot, we were constantly being hectored into believing this was going to be the “Gender-Gap Election,” in which boys went Trump and girls went Harris.

Where black female humans were concerned, this was indeed the case. Exit-poll figures show only 7 percent chose Donald, whilst an overwhelming 91 percent voted Kamala. Latino women split themselves right down the middle like a careless gymnast, tearing violently apart nearly 60–40 in Harley Quim’s favor.

Alone amongst their sex, white women preferred to vote for the Big Orange Man, by a perineum-thin margin of 53–45, which many early analysts guessed may have handed Trump victory.

“Vote with your vag!” advised some slogan-bearing T-shirts prior to the election, and so America’s women did, apparently. The more melanated your muff, the more likely you were to vote for the blackish-brownish candidate whose personal concealed male-in ballot box would have most closely matched your own on a Farrow & Ball color chart.

But what does this pronounced ethnic distribution of votes along clear racio-vaginal lines mean? Most urgently, that white women, hysterical and unreasonable wandering-womb traitors to their own gender-kind that they so obviously are, should immediately have their future votes stolen away from them forever…in the name of feminism.

Girl-on-Girl Action
In the wake of the vote, Joyless Reid, an angry black woman with cropped yellow hair who looks like a Nintendo Mii, scolded America’s Caucasian Karens live on MSNBC that, having voted en masse for Trump in the past too, this was “the second opportunity that white women in this country have [wasted] to change the way they interact with the patriarchy,” blaming her Aryan Sistas for the fact her side lost to the alleged white “fascists” of Trump-Town. Reid’s own womb has evidently wandered so far astray, it must be in Vladivostok by now.

Gloomy Hostin, another angry brown media female with a platform, said the morning after the night before on ABC that “black women tried to save this country again last night,” just like they previously had in WWII and Vietnam. Kamala had run a “flawless campaign,” apart from all the massive flaws in it, she explained, before blaming “uneducated white women” for the unwanted and otherwise inexplicable result. “I think this was a referendum on cultural resentment in this country,” Hostin added, in a rather resentful fashion, culturally speaking.

Even some brainwashed white women joined in the nationwide hormonal hatefest against their own kind. Many wandering-wombed white wonders who voted Democrat vowed to quite literally signal their virtue by wearing pathetic gay Taylor Swift-style blue “friendship bracelets” to prove to all and sundry that they were not members of the hideous immoral 53 percent of sex traitors who had dared vote Drumpf.

In the name of their professed and entirely obvious anti-fascist leanings, I’m surprised the 45 percenters didn’t just demand the other 53 percent be forced to wear big yellow stars instead.

Womb With a View
One of the key feminist lines of anti-Trumpian resistance was that the man himself is supposedly a rapist, and victims must always be believed, except when they claim to have been raped by an immigrant, then it’s all just lies, lies, lies: Most Mexicans don’t even have penises, they’re just grown in pots from beans, that’s why they’re called that, all Sensible Democrat Women agree.

Trump himself, however, appears to disagree with this particular utopian genital assessment, promising to build ever more of his big, beautiful border wall and kick out all the rape-y illegals, hilariously telling a preelection crowd in Wisconsin that, by doing so, he was going to “protect the women of our country…whether the women like it or not.” Trump then went on to ask his audience whether any woman there did not wish to be protected from rape by foreigners. None raised their hands.

Across the Atlantic, meanwhile, a wearyingly prolific überfeminist British tweeter named Dr. Charlotte Proudman—who was radicalized against the other sex at birth by her own chauvinist name—was outraged that so many female voters had “left their homes and made their way to the ballot to vote for a rapist to take charge of their freedoms and reproductive rights.” Just wait until she finds out about the 1996 election, when a clear female majority voted for Bill Clinton.

“The only thing America hates more than a rapist is a woman,” fumed another Twitter user. That certainly explains why Bill’s wife lost in 2016, then.

Abortive Logic
Obviously, men vote on many issues during elections—the economy, defense, education, tax, immigration, health care, but only very rarely testicular cancer, mustaches, or the price of condoms. Women, though, are a different breed, only ever voting upon matters touching directly upon their genitalia or confusingly complex internal reproductive systems—or so say the left-wing feminists, anyway, who apparently think all other women are every bit as stupid and forever blob-on-the-brain as they are.

Supposedly, said the feminists, the only thing women were going to be voting on in this election was abortion—even if you were 75 years old, and thus long past reproductive age, all you were meant to care about was abortion.

Even if you’d just lost your job, and consequently had nothing to eat and nowhere to live, abortion was clearly the only relevant issue.

If you lived right on the open border with Mexico, and now had the entire population of Port-au-Prince camping out in your backyard, eating all your pets after giving them AIDS, “reproductive rights” were the only thing you were now presumed to give the single, tiniest poo about.

If you’d just lost your home, your husband, and your kids in a hurricane, the only issue currently crossing your mind was abortion.

If your hometown had just been invaded by Russia, Mars, and Iran simultaneously, abortion was the only topic trending on your timeline.

If your teenage daughter had just been groomed by her activist teachers into surgically mutilating herself to become a man, then, once again, abortion was the only issue at hand. You should have just aborted her over a decade ago, and then none of this would ever even have happened.

And, if you’d just successfully had an abortion anyway, one thing, and one thing only, now mattered to you regardless: When can I have my next one?!

Abortion, ABORTION, ABORTION!!! It’s all anybody biologically able to have one was ever talking about…well, apart from Kamala’s shoes, obviously.

Pure Shit, Sherlock
Women talk about shoes, don’t they? In fact, they very frequently base their complete choice of who to vote for, if not the entirety of their whole adult lives, upon such highly significant footwear-based concerns. That, at least, was the opinion of a quite laughable article on The Conversation, a commentary site toward which only academics and PhD students are allowed to contribute articles, and which is consequently full of mad identitarian rubbish.

Alexandra Sherlock is billed as being “Lecturer, School of Fashion and Textiles, RMIT University,” and her insightful essay “What Kamala Harris’ Converse All-Stars tell us about how shoes shape our identity” was published on November 5, the very day of the election itself, such was its profound importance to the future of psephological science.

Converse All-Stars are a popular brand of famously affordable white sneakers or running shoes for those who rarely actually run, with Harris’ own pair supposedly becoming “a focal point of her campaign,” something which, if true, may further help explain her loss.

Sherlock’s essay perceptively explains how “Like most public figures, Kamala Harris adapts her footwear to different occasions,” as such items “affect how we move through the world physically,” like wearing roller skates on a hill. Her epoch-making decision to bravely wear inexpensive sneakers in public “signals a new era in female political leadership,” the Great Detective argued, as “when we observe someone’s footwear we are using them [the shoes] to know whether or not we identify with that person. This is something that politicians and their teams know and manipulate to win votes.”

Is it? How so? Because, by choosing to don “an all-American shoe worn by people of all ages, races, genders and sexualities,” Kamala was using her Converse All-Stars as “a social leveler,” such magic socialist shoes allowing her to “identify with a broad audience” of gays, blacks, Jews, Communists, retards, etc. The empowering female-friendly message being broadcast? “In these shoes, she’s ready for anything.” Except the presidency of the United States, evidently.

If the Shoe Fits the Theory…
Impressively, Sherlock even manages to shoehorn transgender politics into Kamala’s sneakers, referencing the common Queer Studies lie that all gender is a pure performance:

Through the process of wear, shoes change us…. Identity can be understood as something that is performed…. One might say she [Kamala] has become her shoes…. [She] has come to embody the all-American values they represent. And at only 5 feet 4¼ inches, the choice not to compensate for her height with heels exudes a self-assurance more women are discovering.

Hey, girls, vote Kamala—she’s a giant shoe! Joy! Joy! Taylor Swift! Brat Summer! Sparkles! Sparkles! Unicorns! Pink things! Friendship bracelets! Susan B. Anthony! Don’t vote Trump or he’ll rape you! He’ll make you pregnant with an orange baby! Here, have a free abortion—even if you’re dead, have one anyway, just in case! Is this really how the “feminist” Democrats thought they would win female votes?

I fear I must respectfully disagree with Aristotle. It’s not females per se who should be denied the vote on grounds of inferior mental capacity. It’s just feminists.

The Week’s Most Herky, Jerky, and Buy-That-Frozen-Turkey Headlines

FAMIRY FEUD
Dog trainers have long abandoned the tradition of smacking misbehaving pups on the schnoz with a rolled-up newspaper, because the state of American print journalism is so foul, it’s plainly sadistic to expose your dog to it.

Owner: “Bad dog! Bad dog!” (Smacks dog on the nose with a rolled-up L.A. Times.)

Dog: “Wait, they publish op-eds from the leader of Hamas but not Trump supporters?”

Dog keels over dead.

Now this is “next-level inscrutability”: Billionaire Chinaman Patrick Soon-Shiong (Ric Ocasek sang “tonight she comes,” but of greater concern is that soon, she ong), owner of L.A. Times-brand toilet paper (motto: “anal fissures guaranteed”), prohibited his editorial staff from endorsing Harris last month. Soon-Shiong’s daughter, Late-Shiong, a self-described Marxist whose meddling in Times coverage has made the worst paper in the nation somehow more execrable (putting a Chinese communist in charge of the L.A. Times is like vomiting on a turd; you’ve made a stinky thing stinkier), claimed that the Harris endorsement was canned because cackleface is too pro-Israel.

Daddy Soon-Shiong disagreed with disobedient daughteru; he declared that the matter had nothing to do with Gaza.

And thus began a Chinese family feud in which many Cokes were defiled.

But now that Trump’s won, Soon-Shiong is like, “Yeah, it was about Gaza after all.” So while conservatives have cheered the firing of the entire Times editorial staff as a blow against the “liberal media,” they may not be too happy with the replacement editor, Ali bin-Blowsup, whose main credit is beheading a Dane for drawing Muhammad.

This blurring of the lines between left and right was highlighted last week by an UnHerd piece that claimed “leftist professors” are victimized by cancel culture at a greater rate than their rightist colleagues. But the story’s author, Noah Carl (aka Noah Sense), equates the firing of pro-Hamas professors who scream “KILL THE JEWS!” with the firing of conservative professors who say genes exist.

The next four years are gonna be endlessly interesting…and confusing.

BALD-FACED FLYER
And speaking of lowering the (ak)bar, last week the Swiss banned burkas in public. Funny enough, the ban does not apply on airplanes.

You’d think that the one place where Muslims are most likely to kill Westerners is also the one place where they shouldn’t be able to hide their identity.

Then again, the burka exception for planes might have something to do with the bloody-scalp beaner whose uncovered head caused a his-panic on a jumbo jet in August.

Eugenio Ernesto Garnier has the surname of a hair-care company. An irony, as this lunatic scalped himself before boarding.

See, Garnier was worried that he was going bald. So he peeled off his own scalp flesh and tried to “plant” hair seeds.

Mexicans…is there nothing they can’t garden?

Then he tried to board a plane from Miami to Vegas, because as a gambler he wanted to get some skin in the game.

Problem was, the top of his head was spouting blood like a volcano.

Wetback? More like wet-head.

When the flight crew asked Edward Maims Olmos if he could bandage Mount Headna, he refused (after all, he had a ticket, like any good scalper). He was backed by his girlfriend, and yes, he was traveling with a girlfriend.

If you’re an incel, it’ll likely kill you to know that a beaner with no scalp can get a girlfriend but you can’t.

In the end, Garnier and his mu-hair were arrested, after delaying the flight for hours.

No word on if his homemade transplant worked, but hopefully his girlfriend never asks him to get a penile implant.

THE OLD BALL GAME
Few political “noticers” noticed how California senator-elect Adam Schiff man-handed two women out of contention for the job. Schiff craftily manipulated L.A. Dodger Steve Garvey to run, knocking out the other Democrats in the “top two” primary earlier this year.

Thanks to Schiff’s machinations, Democrats Katie Porter (aka Tubby O’Toole, a homely obese white woman whose electoral advantage was that she looks like all Democrat women) and Laphonza Butler (an aging Maya Angelou impersonator named after the French iteration of Henry Winkler’s Happy Days character) were defeated, leaving scheming Schiff to face Republican Garvey in the general.

Party affiliation numbers alone dictated that Schiff would win. But it’s astounding the extent to which Garvey didn’t campaign. When Garvey’s fellow Dodger, Mexican icon Fernando Valenzuela—a man whose fastball was said to pack the power of ten leaf blowers—died last month, affording Garvey a most fortuitous opportunity to commune with L.A.’s majority demographic, he refused.

It’s almost like Garvey didn’t want the job…or was paid off to not want the job.

Maybe MAGA sleuths could take a day off from investigating CIA midgets posing as school shooters and look into whether Garvey recently bought a new Sienna courtesy of an unnamed “donor.”

The press, not wanting to attack Democrat Schiff even though he screwed two women out of a job (and for West Hollywood Schiff, that’s the only screwing of women he allows), has tried to soften the blow that California’s two Senate seats, occupied by women since 1992, are now fully dude-owned and -operated, by bragging about how a black woman, Lola Smallwood, was elected to the state senate.

No word on the identity of Smallwood’s husband, but based on her name he’s likely Asian.

Also, for the first time ever there are two black female U.S. senators: Lisa Blunt of Delaware and Angela Alsobrooks of Maryland. So, one’s named for what blacks like to smoke, and the other for what blacks like to avoid (“We be scared of the ocean. Also, brooks”).

And Katie Porter, the dread zeppelin denied her chance at Senate glory by Schiff? She’s fighting charges of female-on-male spousal abuse (according to the National Post, an all-the-rage trend). Apparently Portly Porter burned off her husband’s scalp with “scalding mashed potatoes.”

Dude should call Eugenio Ernesto Garnier.

BUBOES BY ANY OTHER NAME
Last month actor Michael Keaton announced that he’s going back to his birth name, Michael Douglas. The Screen Actors Guild allows only one member to have a particular name, and since there was already a Michael Douglas when Twitchy Batman applied for membership, Michael Douglas No. 2 had to become Keaton.

Had Michael Douglas No. 1 died from his cunnilingus cancer, Keaton could’ve assumed the moniker. But it’s amazing the strides made by medical science regarding Welshwoman smegma.

So Michael Keaton will now be Michael Keaton Douglas. Hopefully now he can have a successful career.

The notion that changing your name improves your fate is gripping the Third World. Jonathan Chimakonam, Associate Professor of Killing Whitey at Pretoria University, is on a crusade to rename the continent of Africa.

“The name Africa was given by European exploiters, slavers and colonists,” Chimpacomin’ wrote in a recent op-ed. “This implies the history of the place began with the namer, as if it were uninhabited before the namer arrived.”

Well, if the namees had a written language, maybe they could’ve named the place.

Some thoughts on the new name? Malario Grande, Ebolivia, and Rancho Cucamonkeypox.

Chinpokomon continues: “Africa is taken from the Greek aphrike, meaning ‘without cold.’” Hey, just add the word “fries,” and welcome 40 million American blacks.

Meanwhile in India, students are rioting against a government proposal to change the name of Ravenshaw University, because the namesake, Thomas Ravenshaw, was a “colonizer.”

Angry students point out that Ravenshaw pioneered India’s No. 1 industry by showing students how to use the newly developed telephone to call elderly Americans claiming that their windows were open to spam.

Sure, the scam had no payoff, as the oldies would just close the windows (or wait hungrily for the spam), but still, without Ravenshaw, India would be all poop, no profit.

SWEENEY TODT
Demon Barber of Fleet Street? More like Demon Barber of Beat Meat.

In a Week That Perished dominated by bad scalps, here’s a story about a barber who didn’t take just scalps, but lives.

In Orange County, California, a black single mom needed a babysitter for her 6-year-old boy. As OC is only 1.5 percent black, the mom went to the blackest place in town—the barbershop—and asked hairman first class Ernest Lamar Love, whom she knew from church, to watch her son.

Certainly, no churchgoer with the surname “Love” could be bad, right?

Well, that surname should’ve been “ToughLove,” because when the boy peed against a tree in a local park, the barber went macabre, beating the kid with a piece of lumber until his flesh peeled off.

He is the Barber of Severe.

After his campaign of “shear” terror, Love took the unconscious boy to a hospital, telling the doctors he “tripped.” But the doctors at Slappy White Memorial know physical abuse when they see it; the boy died, and Love was arrested for giving the worst skin fade ever.

Sometimes a black barber gives you dreadlocks, sometimes he gives you deadknocks (to the head).

Meanwhile in St. Louis, a black child-care center called Kreatyve Kydz (that’s the real name) made the news after staff members beat themselves bloody during nap time (someone’s cranky!), throwing each other through windows and breaking liquor bottles over heads, showering the sleeping children with broken glass.

Parents should’ve known from the spelling of the name that this was not good day care.

The brawling employees have been fired, but many parents have opted to keep their kids enrolled in the center. After all, when the alternative is barbers who eschew Clubman Toiletries for club-boy toilet-trees, a blaxploitation fistfight seems benign in comparison.

These days, people of supposedly high caliber, or at least of high position, have difficulty in distinguishing vehemence of expression from depth of feeling, or even of thought. I may on occasion have made that mistake myself, since none of us is perfect, but it is my impression that what was once an occasional lapse has become almost a default setting of the mind—of others, of course.

Here I quote verbatim two tweets of someone in response to Mr. Trump’s recent victory in the election:

I apologize to younger voters that my Gen X is so full of fucking fascists.

Solidarity to everybody whose meanest, dumbest, most bigoted school classmates are celebrating early results because fuck them to the moon and back.

Perhaps literary criticism of these outbursts is redundant, but one cannot help but wonder what the difference is between a fascist and a fucking fascist. This is similar to the question I used to pose to my patients who, when I worked as a doctor in a prison, complained of a fucking headache.

“Before we go any further,” I would say, “can you explain to me the difference between a headache and a fucking headache?”

(In case there are pedants who read this magazine, I hasten to acknowledge that there is such a condition as coital headache, that is to say a headache that occurs during sexual activity, especially as excitement mounts, but this was not, I think, what the prisoners meant.)

“That’s the way I talk,” the prisoners would say.

“Yes,” I would reply, “that is what I am complaining of.”

As a verbal intensifier, fucking is so overused that it means practically nothing except in the mouths of middle-class intellectuals, to signify that they who employ it are of the people, the people being, implicitly, those of the lowest cultural level and therefore of the highest level of authenticity.

The semi-literacy of the second tweet is startling because it was written not by some uneducated drunk in a bar after a heavy night of inconsequential verbalizing, but by the editor in chief of the Scientific American, which justifiably prides itself on being the oldest continuously published journal in America and is—or was once—of a very high standard. The editor has a doctorate in neuroscience, and is presumably capable of expressing herself more circumspectly, as well as more accurately. “Fuck them to the moon and back” is what Polonius called “an ill phrase, a vile phrase,” not only aesthetically but in sentiment.

Do people actually think in such terms, in the solitude of their own minds? If the answer is in the affirmative, I feel sorry for them: They must live perpetually in a kind of mental sewer. But if the answer (as seems to me more likely in this case) is in the negative, one may wonder by what process of reasoning, or at least of mentation, the writer of these lines saw fit to send them out into the world—where, incidentally, they have been read by at least 1,200,000 people, more than 2 percent of whom went to the not-very-great trouble of expressing their approval of them.

The fact that the author of the lines was a woman might be significant (I don’t claim it as more than a possibility). Perhaps she wanted to free herself of the convention that women are expected to be more genteel than men, a convention that some feminists, no doubt, believe was intended to keep women subordinate to men, verbal coarseness being the royal road to power (and power being the ultimate, or perhaps only, good in life). Thus, the ability to sound like a construction worker swearing at a broken tool was a proof of final liberation from the shackles of gentility.

But such supposedly virtuous vulgarity is not confined to feminist intellectuals trying to prove that they are really no different in their tastes or way of being from hard-hatted construction workers. People who are trying to escape the terrible shame of belonging to a social class that is not the lowest possible adopt the same tactics. There are a thousand possible examples of the phenomenon, but here, as one, is what the actor Hugh Grant wrote in public about Boris Johnson’s Brexit policy:

You will not fuck with my children’s future…. Fuck off you over-promoted bath toy.

There were, of course, arguments both for and against Brexit, but calling Johnson an over-promoted bath toy did not add much to the debate. Vulgar insult, however, is increasingly regarded by such as Grant as the highest, or at least the most effective, form of argument. Napoleon once said that the only effective rhetorical tactic was repetition. We now know that he was mistaken: Crude insult is the most effective, or believed to be so by such as Grant.

At it happens, Johnson himself employed a man as his special adviser, Dominic Cummings, who dressed like a thug and used language that a fishwife would have blushed to use. By doing this, he imagined that he was distinguishing himself (in intellectually superior fashion) from the effete and ineffectual elite who nevertheless maintained some of the traditional proprieties.

But all that in theory is anti-elitist is not therefore egalitarian. Those of the elite who resort to the adoption of what they consider to be lower-class manners (though in England at least much of the working class was once extremely careful about its language, for example by never swearing in front of children) do not abjure their economic privileges; they have no wish to imitate the lower class in the matter of income, or live in lower-class houses, for example.

Perhaps they believe that by public coarseness other people will fail to notice that they are, in fact, part of a rarefied elite, and therefore will feel no dangerous envy toward them. They feel that they ought, for reasons of political philosophy, to be egalitarian, but they don’t really want to be equal, either. The result is that they resort to the highest form of flattery, imitation, at least in those things that will not endanger their elite position.

And thus civilization crumbles.

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

A few days before last week’s election, Bernie Sanders issued a dire warning to voters: “If Donald Trump is elected, the struggle against climate change is over.”

He had that right.

Climate change fanaticism was effectively on the ballot last week. The green energy agenda was decisively defeated.

It turns out that the tens of millions of middle-class Americans who voted for Trump weren’t much interested in the temperature of the planet 50 years from now. They’re too busy trying to pay the bills.

That result shouldn’t be too surprising. Every poll in recent years has shown climate change ranks near the bottom of voter concerns. Jobs, inflation and illegal immigration register much higher on the scale of concerns.

But if you asked the elite of America in the top 1% of income, climate change is seen as an immediate and existential threat to the planet. Our poll at Unleash Prosperity earlier this year found that the cultural elites were so hyper-obsessed with climate issues, they were in favor of banning air conditioning, nonessential air travel and many modern home appliances to stop global warming. Our study showed that not many of the other 99% agree.

Wake up, Bernie and Al Gore.

Climate change has become the ultimate luxury good: the richer you are, the more you fret about it.

Among the elite, obsessing about climate change has become a favorite form of virtue signaling at the country club and in the faculty lounges. There is almost no cross the green elites — the people who donate six figures or more to groups like the Sierra Club — aren’t willing to make lower-income Americans bear to stop global warming.

Herein lies the political curse of the climate issue. A millionaire doesn’t care much if the price of gas rises by $1 a gallon or if they have to pay another $100 a month in utility bills. But the middle class hates paying more.

It wasn’t just economic concerns that turned voters against climate crusaders like Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. Workers weren’t too thrilled with the heavy fist of government commanding them to buy an electric vehicle — whether they wanted one or not.

It hasn’t helped the greens’ cause that the same progressives out to save the planet with grandiose transformations and global government seem to have no problem with the garbage polluting the streets of our major cities, or the graffiti or the feces and urine smell on the street corners of San Francisco and New York City. That’s real pollution. And it’s affecting us here and now.

The good news is, this year’s voter revolt against the radical green agenda isn’t a vote for dirtier air or water. The air we breathe and the water we drink is cleaner than ever — a point that Trump correctly made. We will continue to make progress against pollution.

But the nonsense of “net zero” use of fossil fuels is a bridge way too far. The destruction of jobs historically held by blue-collar union workers ripped right into the heart of the Democratic Party’s traditional voting base.

In their zeal to save the planet, Democrats forgot to visit the steel mills, construction sites and auto plants to ask those workers what they thought.

Well, now we know. Americans recognize their shrinking paychecks and the higher price of gas they pay at the pump is the real clear and present danger to their way of life. If Democrats don’t start to get that, they too will go to bed worrying about their jobs.

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