I’m writing on Monday night, so when you read this, you’ll know more than I did about how badly the Los Angeles fires flared back up during Tuesday’s forecasted windstorm.

The coming annihilation of Los Angeles has been a persistently popular topic over the past century, which has once again flared up with the current fires.

The late journalist Mike Davis published a local bestseller in 1998, Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster, in which he tabulated, “The destruction of Los Angeles has been the central theme or dominating image in more than a hundred and fifty novels, short stories, and films.” Common fictional causes of L.A.’s coming catastrophe include fire, earthquake, flood, nuclear bombardment, comet strike, and invading hordes of creatures, whether human, animal, or alien.

Some of this is a supply-side phenomenon: The movie industry is centered here, so Los Angeles is the most convenient city for them to blow up.

And many famous science fiction writers were attracted to Los Angeles by the military-industrial complex, such as my late neighbor Jerry Pournelle, who cowrote his comet-strike epic Lucifer’s Hammer with his authorial partner Larry Niven. (In contrast, Niven is about as old money as Los Angeles gets: His grandfather Edward L. Doheny was the first to strike oil in Los Angeles in 1892, making him, vaguely, the source for Daniel Day-Lewis’ titanic Daniel Plainview in There Will Be Blood.)

But much of it is demand-driven. Lots of people enjoy thinking about the annihilation of Los Angeles.

For example, one of the earlier L.A. Armageddon books, Nathanael West’s 1939 novel The Day of the Locust, features a sensitive Ivy League-trained painter who is inspired by encountering a typical Los Angeleno simpleton named Homer Simpson (yes, that’s where Matt Groening got the name) to envision his masterpiece: “The Burning of Los Angeles.” At the end, the overexcited throng at a movie premiere white-riots and carries out his theme by burning down Los Angeles.

West, born Nathan Weinstein, was a classic example of the indignant indigent man of letters lured to Los Angeles to write for the film industry. The crass self-expression of the inhabitants drove West crazy. He wrote of a residential street in the Hollywood Hills:

But not even the soft wash of dusk could help the houses. Only dynamite would be of any use against the Mexican ranch houses, Samoan huts, Mediterranean villas, Egyptian and Japanese temples, Swiss chalets, Tudor cottages, and every possible combination of these styles that lined the slopes of the canyon.

Well, the Sunset fire that broke out suspiciously last Wednesday near the popular Runyon Canyon hiking trail in Hollywood came close to cleaning up the architectural diversity deplored by West. Almost like in a scene from Day of the Locust, the wind blew it straight toward Hollywood Boulevard.

But a huge turnout of firemen knocked it down quickly.

West went on:

It is hard to laugh at the need for beauty and romance, no matter how tasteless, even horrible, the results of that need are. But it is easy to sigh. Few things are sadder than the truly monstrous.

But lots of people who aren’t in Los Angeles also enjoy visualizing its demise. After all, if you live in a frigid part of the country, it’s pleasant to imagine the lotus eaters of Los Angeles getting what’s coming to them.

But the prosaic reality is that Los Angeles isn’t likely to be left a ruin anytime soon. It’s alarming to flatlanders like myself that homes have burned not just on winding roads in the sagebrush-covered hills but also in normal street grid suburban neighborhoods. Still, so far, just a small fraction of 1 percent of the homes in Los Angeles County have been destroyed.

Then again…

Although many emphasize the inevitability of Los Angeles’ downfall, the amount of time matters. If the best guess is that your home will be destroyed in 250 years, nobody much cares. On the other hand, 25 years is highly worrisome.

So, what will happen between the time I write this and the time you read this? As I’ve often admitted, I prefer trying to make sense of the recent past than predicting the future. So, I’ll tell you what I’m most worried about.

The good news is that there are a lot more firemen in place this week than on the morning of Tuesday, Jan. 7, when only about 10 percent more than normal were deployed despite forecasts of extreme winds, along with the near total lack of rain since spring (after two years of heavy rains grew much now-dry grass on the hills). The New York Times reported:

Those extra firefighters the city of Los Angeles called on made up less than a tenth of the approximately 1,000 on duty on any given day. And the 100 additional people called up by the county added to its daily firefighting force of 900.

Yet, once Los Angeles’ city and county fire departments rounded up enough resources, borrowing heavily from other places, they’ve mostly executed their contingency plans brilliantly.

For example, when the wind from the north reversed on Friday afternoon, on the fourth day of the fire, and started pushing the Palisades fire northward toward the massively populated San Fernando Valley, where I live, they had ten helicopters filling up with water from the Encino reservoir and dropping it every thirty seconds all night long. It was an impressive sight.

The next day they even managed to save all but two homes deep in Mandeville Canyon just west of the 405.

Hopefully, they’ve since laid down enough strategic lines of the pink fire retardant goo to keep the current fires bottled up.

Of course, we also could easily get new fires in new, unprotected places, due to more faulty power lines, arsonists, smokers, tweakers, homeless campers, and all the other stupid reasons that about twenty wildfires break out on the average day in the state of California. (As for natural causes, the Golden State has less lightning than most other places.)

Five of California’s top ten wildfires in acreage ever, since the late 1800s, happened in 2020, which could be due to climate change and/or to the various insanities of the year 2020, delusions I may have mentioned once or twice in this column.

And the bad news is that firefighting aircraft can’t operate when the winds are at their worst, which is exactly when wildfires are most dangerous. The great majority of homes lost last week came while the airplanes and helicopters were grounded during the initial high winds.

I suspect that Southern California needs a huge investment in infrastructure to fight fires on the ground.

What we saw on Friday that worked to keep the Palisades fire out of the San Fernando Valley was that after the flames roared up the south side of the crest of the Santa Monica Mountains, they greatly slowed down once they started having to advance downhill. Heat rises, so fires move much faster uphill.

Intelligently though worrisomely, the firemen made their stand on the downslope. Tanker planes, which only operate during daylight to prevent crashes when flying low, had laid down a band of pink Phos-Chek on the north slope, which slopes down. Firemen working on the dirt portion of Mulholland Drive, which runs just north of and thus below the crest west of the 405 freeway, cleared more brush. And the choppers dropped water for hours.

Encino and Tarzana were saved.

The next day, the firemen repeated the process in Mandeville Canyon, going all-out on the counterattack once the fire reached the downslope into the canyon. It’s scary how firefighters wait until the last moment to strike back, rather like how in the crisis at Waterloo, the Duke of Wellington kept his best troops hidden by lying down on the reverse slope while Napoleon’s crack Imperial Guards charged upward.

But that tactic depends upon having men and, especially, aircraft close by. Unfortunately, nobody knows where the fire will break out next. Los Angeles County is home to almost 10 million people over 4,000 square miles—roughly a square 64 miles across.

And low-level bombers can’t fly with sustained winds over 40 mph.

A military analogy is the millennia-long debate over the utility of fortifications versus mobility. Since May 10, 1940, when the German tanks blitzkrieged around the end of the Maginot line, fixed lines have been unfashionable.

But technology changes. For example, in the current war, the Russians have been investing much more in hardening their defensive barriers than the Ukrainians. We shall see which strategy proves most prudent.

The next revolution in firefighting might involve increased mobility, such as having a huge number of drones loaded with flame retardants or water being stationed every mile or so to allow them to hit new fires within their vulnerable first five minutes.

Or, the future of fighting wildfires might involve fixed lines of defense.

For instance, Southern California mountains already have countless fire roads: dirt roads running along the top of ridges that provide both a firebreak, at least when winds aren’t blowing embers too far, and access for firemen.

What if both edges of these fire roads were lined with sprinkler pipelines that could spray down the hillsides, either with water or, ideally, low-viscosity retardant? What’s needed is an automatic response before firemen can be mustered.

California was hugely effectual at building infrastructure, such as its vast water projects and college campuses, from about 1885 until 1969. Then, in a remarkably short period, its elites, rather than course-correcting moderately, flipped 180 degrees to devoting their brainpower to blocking the bulldozers. This is famously epitomized by the generation gap between master builder father/governor Pat Brown (first elected in 1958) and “era of limits” son/governor Jerry Brown (first elected in 1974).

During this vibe shift, though, can we just change 90 degrees rather than 0 or 180?

It’s not that most people are stupid (though way too many are). It’s that they become stupid when out of their element. I know girls from high school, dumb as bricks back then, not exactly rocket scientists today. But in the forty years since, they’ve raised great families; they’re brilliant at momming.

I know rugged blue-collar dudes who can weld anything. They’ll weld a dog to a hydrant; they’ll weld a tin can to a Chinaman’s dick. When it comes to welding, they’re Einstein. But when it comes to abstract thought, not so much.

Know what you’re good at, and stick to it. That’s why I find amateur sleuthing so offensive, why I rail against it so much. And before you say, “Dave, this is an obsession for you; why don’t you rail against taxes or tariffs?” Well, other people do that. Rightist soopersleuths, that’s my niche, the Jones/Unz/Rogan/Musk/Carlson/Owens/JURMCO cultists who are told by their grand leaders that they can sleuth out any mystery, suss out any conspiracy, while possessing no actual knowledge of forensic science, or science of any kind.

To rightist sleuths, being a detective means “Well, it makes sense in my head, so it must be true.”

And now JURMCOs have declared themselves thee experts on fire. Mind you, they have no actual expertise in the fields of arson investigation, forestry, fire science, firefighting, etc. They don’t need it. These dumbasses have noticed that in the aftermath of the L.A. wildfires, there are trees standing unburned next to the charred remains of houses. The photos are similar to those of California’s 2018 Camp Fire, which killed 85. Foundations of wiped-away homes sitting right next to unmolested trees.

How can this be, JURMCO asks?

“Directed Energy Weapons,” of course! The fires were started by space lasers that targeted only houses while leaving trees alone. Nothing else can explain it. Viral posts among JURMCO cultists make it clear: Those unburned trees mean lasers.

The DEEP STATE, or OBAMMER, or the Zionists, are using space lasers to destroy houses so that they can be TAKEN OVER by BlackRock or Biden or Baron Rothschild, I guess, because his grand plan of world conquest hinges on owning a desolate rural trailer town in Butte County (where the Camp Fire occurred).

And now, as I’ve done so many times, I’ll pants JURMCO and expose its shortcomings to the sane rightists who I fervently hope will one day jettison “citizen sleuths” instead of lionizing them.

If you look at old photos of massive wildfires, photos from back when even JURMCO will agree we didn’t have space lasers, you’ll see the same phenomenon: healthy trees in between burned-down structures.

The Bel Air fire, for example. 1961. We weren’t even on the moon yet (oh, wait—JURMCO sez we never went). Photo after photo of unburned trees next to burned-down homes.

Now, wanna learn something?

Cool.

There are three reasons for the “unburned trees” phenomenon.

First, trees are on average 50 percent water (depending on the tree, as much as 66 percent). Healthy green leaves are 90 to 95 percent water.

Second, bark on a healthy tree is not immediately flammable; it’s fairly flame-resistant.

Put those two things together, the high water content and the resilience of bark, and you have something that generally can’t be ignited by a simple ember. And wildfires are spread by wind-blown embers. Dead growth is a tinderbox. But blow a hot ember at a healthy tree and that tree will not immolate like flash paper.

Third, many times a fire will not reach a tree’s canopy. Fires pushed by wind-blown embers tend to move laterally, not vertically. If you look closely at the postfire photos, you’ll see that the bases of the trees are indeed blackened. The fire touched the base but didn’t rise higher.

The post-9/11 “jet fuel can’t melt steel beams” nonsense caught on because many of you don’t actually understand fire. Jet fuel is an accelerant; an accelerant plus a spark lights other things on fire. The heat comes from what the fuel’s burning, not the fuel per se. Take an empty metal BBQ grill and pour in some lighter fluid. Toss a match. You’ll get an immediate flare-up, but it’ll die down quick, because the fire has nothing to feed it.

Now do the same, but with briquettes in the BBQ. Now you’ve got a hot, long-lasting fire, because your accelerant has something to burn, much like how the jet fuel on 9/11 had entire office floors of highly flammable material to consume.

Rightist ignorance about fire goes back to the dawn of Holocaust denial. That’s why it rankles me so; I’ve been dealing with this shit for 35 years. Rightists were ignorant of fire before Candace Owens was even born, back when Tucker Carlson wore a bow tie and Joe Rogan was playing a dumb guy on NewsRadio instead of being a dumb guy in real life.

You can beat Holocaust deniers on every meme they throw at you.

“The ‘Red Cross Report’ of camp deaths shows only 271,000!”

As I’ve written time and again, those figures don’t include anything on the Eastern Front where the exterminations took place.

“The World Almanac doesn’t show a decreased Jewish population figure for 1946!”

The Almanac didn’t accumulate updated figures for WWII losses until 1948. Even today, with computers and wireless, it takes more than two years to tabulate the U.S. Census. That it took three years to fully count the WWII dead in the 1940s isn’t weird or suspicious, especially as the world was rather preoccupied with international devastation and the beginning of the Cold War. The Almanac was not priority No. 1.

“Wooden doors!”

I’m the mutherfucker who gave you the “wooden doors” in 1992, and even though I despise that video I did as a kid, I did make clear that the point of the “wooden doorth” was that it proved that Krema 1 at the Auschwitz Main Camp was a reconstruction; I quite clearly showed the markings where there had been a dividing wall that was knocked down postwar by the Poles/Soviets. That wall would’ve been the gas chamber wall, not the wall with the WOODEN DOORTH!”

“There are no Nazi documents talkin’ about the Holocaust!”

Completely untrue; I dealt with that in this Substack.

In the end, you can corner deniers to the extent that they have no choice but to drop all of their memes and flee to the “physical impossibility” argument. “Okay, okay, there are wartime documents—Himmler, Goebbels, Stroop, Korherr, Kube, Strauch, Lohse, Bräutigam, Buehler all talk about Jewish exterminations. But documents are irrelevant if something’s physically impossible, and you can’t burn that many bodies! It can’t be done. So your precious documents crumble before the laws of physics!”

Deniers say human bodies don’t burn. Maybe in a high-powered crematorium, but it takes hours. This is Nick Fuentes’ “cookie monster” argument. If every cookie takes more than an hour to “bake,” you can’t bake 6 million in four years.

In the end, this is where all deniers run.

Nobody claims 6 million Jews were burned, of course; that’s a denier straw man. Let’s take a look at Treblinka, one of the Reinhard extermination camps. At Treblinka, more than 713,000 Jews were killed and burned in open-air mass-incineration pits over the course of roughly eighteen months.

Deniers say that’s impossible. 713,000 human bodies burned in eighteen months? Can’t be done. COOKIE MONSTER! It would take too long! Plus, there’d be a mountain of ash reaching the moon!

Now, you can point out that every year in India, approximately 8 million bodies are burned, one by one, on pyres. But deniers will say, “India’s a huge country; the Holocaust only involved a small number of burn sites.”

Fair enough. So let’s examine the U.K.’s 2001 foot-and-mouth outbreak, which resulted in the preemptive slaughter of nearly the entire U.K. cow, pig, and sheep population.

I doubt those of you who love to opine like experts on fire have ever studied that event; after all, facts are irrelevant to what makes sense in your head.

We look to the June 2002 final report on the outbreak and the disposal of carcasses, courtesy of the U.K. National Audit Office (NAO) by order of the House of Commons.

Here’s what we find.

6.5 million cows, pigs, and sheep were slaughtered. But that figure, the report makes clear, is incomplete. See, Her Majesty’s bleedin’ Government was forced to compensate farmers for their seized and slaughtered livestock. So to penny-pinch, it was decided to only compensate for mature cows, pigs, and sheep; slaughtered calves, piglets, and lambs were not counted by the NAO.

That 6.5 mil figure represents only full-grown animals. According to the U.K. Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, if you factor in calves, piglets, and lambs you get 10 million carcasses. But let’s stick with the NAO’s 6.5 million adult animal figure.

According to the report, of the sheep that were slaughtered, the average weight was 100kg (220 pounds) and the average cow weight was 500kg (1,102 pounds). The NAO doesn’t provide a weight for the pigs, but the average farrow-to-finish adult pig is 270 pounds. So for sheep we’re talking heavier than the average human, for pigs much heavier, and for cows, many, many times heavier.

The British government initially began disposing of the carcasses via pyres at a small number of burn sites in mid-March 2001. This was the preferred manner of disposal for the government, but due to complaints from environmentalists regarding the smoke, the government was forced to shift to mass burials, and on May 7, the burning ceased.

So the outdoor incinerations took place from March 14 to May 7.

55 days.

And how many carcasses were incinerated during that time frame? The NAO states that 29 percent of the 6.5 million carcasses were burned during that period.

That’s 1,884,999 cows (41 percent of the slaughter), pigs (39 percent), and sheep (27 percent) incinerated at official burn sites in 55 days. And that’s not counting the calves, lambs, and piglets.

And there was no “mountain of ash reaching the moon.” And no land forever scarred. Twenty-four years later, the burn sites look perfectly healthy and normal.

Deniers tell us that it’s a physical impossibility for 713,000 human bodies to be incinerated in open pits over eighteen months. But we know for a fact that 1.88 million much heavier beasts were incinerated in open pits in a mere 55 days, using no high-tech 21st-century equipment, just accelerant, as the Nazis used.

According to J&D Manufacturing, makers of single-carcass cow cremation units for farms, it takes approximately fourteen hours to cremate one cow carcass individually. So if you use Nick Fuentes’ “cookie monster” one-per-oven methodology, 1.88 mil in 55 days is impossible. But it’s entirely possible with mass outdoor incineration, as was used at the Reinhard camps, and as Auschwitz eventually had to employ (there are photos).

You lose, deniers. You lose, all you amateur sleuths.

I know Andrew Breitbart told you that inside every rightist is a “citizen journalist” waiting to pop out.

He lied.

The “thoughts in your head” are worth two things: jack and shit.

Stop playing with fire.

Or at least learn about fire first.

The first question I want answered when Donald Trump takes office next week is: “What’s with all those mystery drones flying over USAF bases in America and England lately?” Given Trump’s admirable willingness to talk matters ufological with podcast bro-hosts like Joe Rogan in the preelection run-up, I’m optimistic he might provide us with an answer.

Are such craft really UFOs at all, though? As they are Unidentified, they are Flying, and they are Objects, in the literal sense, yes. Yet, in the popularly understood sense of alien spaceships, surely not. The objects are smallish unmanned drones, not flying saucers per se, albeit seemingly of unusually advanced capability. The question is, where do they come from? Moscow? Beijing? Atlantis? The Hollow Earth? Alpha Centauri? Or maybe even…Hell itself?

You Scratch My Back, I’ll Scratch Yours
Takimag recently reported Tucker Carlson as guessing the drones came direct from Satan. Since his departure from Fox News allowed America’s most famous pro-Trump journalist to become even more outspoken and free, Tucker has been talking about both his Christianity and his alleged tendency to be “mauled” in bed at night by demons who cruelly scratch his torso.

Carlson called his witching-hour assault by Edward Scissorhands or Freddie Krueger a “transformative experience” that had left him “seized” with a “very intense desire to read the Bible.”

He should try Psalm 22: “For dogs have compassed me: the assembly of the wicked have inclosed me: they have pierced my hands and my feet.” This is because Tucker also confesses he sleeps with his four dogs in the same bed, another breed of fierce hairy being that also possesses sharp claws—but still he prefers to blame demons for his nocturnal stigmata.

Tucker blames demons for a lot of things these days, also arguing these very same sulfurous entities may have surreptitiously been behind various aspects of advanced technology, from nuclear bombs to UFOs.

For this, Carlson has largely been portrayed by skeptics and naysayers as a lone lunatic, but in fact (appropriately enough for an ET-spotter) he is not alone.

More ET, Vicar?
Here in England, there was the surprising post-WWII phenomenon of so-called “Flying Saucer Vicars,” most notably the Rev. Paul Eric Inglesby. Inglesby had a prophetic vision of UFOs whilst lying deliriously ill with a tropical disease in 1938, psychically perceiving a future Earth where Tucker Carlson-like demons in spaceships fought a nuclear war for possession of human souls: prophetic indeed, as the first widely accepted flying saucer sighting did not occur until nine years later in 1947, over Washington State’s Cascade Mountains.

In 1977, alarmed by a TV documentary about the growth in new UFO-based pseudo-religions, which he saw as mere fronts for satanism, the Anglican Inglesby established CHRUFORA, the CHRistian UFO Research Association.

The real leading British UFO Research Association of that time, BUFORA, also harbored sympathetic minds, no fewer than three of its directors similarly thinking saucers were piloted by devils. One abandoned the field altogether after becoming possessed by a malign entity urging him to throw himself under a train. When another BUFORA man burned all his saucer books, he claimed the resultant smoke “billowed up in the form of a human being and two hands began to reach out” toward him, a sure sign of demonic influence.

Prince Philip, the husband of Queen Elizabeth II, was a noted UFO enthusiast himself. When Inglesby found the couple were due to attend a royal premiere of Close Encounters of the Third Kind in London in 1978, he wrote them a letter of warning, saying the very experience may risk damning their immortal souls, but the Archbishop of Canterbury failed to pass it on for some strange reason.

Circle Jerk
Like my sort-of namesake Tucker, I too am interested in ufology, having written several books touching upon the topic. So, I know it is in no way unusual for a man to interpret strange lights in the sky in line with his own personal spiritual or intellectual worldview, as Carlson has lately done with his Devil Drones. In the past, people guessed UFOs to be fiery dragons, luminous witches, or glowing angels zooming by; the now standard idea that they are alien spacecraft is merely a modern, post-WWII development.

There were several far odder early competitors to this now near-ubiquitous notion. I once wrote a pair of books, The Saucer and the Swastika and Nazi UFOs (I wanted to call the latter Unidentified Fascist Objects, but the publisher wouldn’t let me!) detailing how various fantasists began theorizing the new post-1945 saucers were Hitler’s latest top-secret superweapons, akin to the V-2 flying rockets, aboard which he and his cronies had escaped bombed-out Berlin.

Some pushing this narrative were bizarre neo-Nazi occultists, like Miguel Serrano, a Chilean diplomat and poet, who invented his own pseudo-religion of “Esoteric Hitlerism.” This taught not that leading Nazis were flying across our unwary planet inside UFOs, but that leading Nazis actually were UFOs.

SS occultists had managed to perfect a new form of Aryan rune magic, Serrano said, that allowed men like Hitler to begin spinning around on the spot in mystical fashion like whirling dervishes until such a point as they suddenly transformed into giant flattened circles called mandalas, a type of traditional round Buddhist symbol of the soul, and spun away off up into the sky.

Here they now flew around, glowing eerily, awaiting the final glorious day when the ghosts of dead SS men would return from the Aryan afterlife in the form of the Wild Hunt, and the Third Reich would be paranormally reborn, with even its bomb-ruined old buildings suddenly shifting back into existence on this Earth plane from another, more agreeably fascist, dimension.

Buzzing the Earth
An even more outré idea came from Gerald Heard, an eccentric English intellectual and writer resident in California, where he explored alternative spiritualities, whose story I detailed in another old book, Space Oddities. Heard was the inventor of the whole “Killer Bee” genre of sci-fi yet thought UFOs were piloted not by normal earthling honeybees, but by a new cousin race of superintelligent bees from Mars with jewels in their foreheads.

Noticing the saucers’ reported impossible-sounding maneuvers, Heard deduced that any large, non-aerial beings of a humanoid form would be immediately splattered dead against the spaceships’ walls by the sheer g-forces involved. So, tiny flying creatures must have been piloting the crafts instead; bees seemed to him the best candidates.

Aware bees had a primitive quasi-language based upon dancing to inform one another about the location of pollen, Heard proposed special human translators should be employed to work out how to communicate with Earth Bees via the medium of dance. Then the translators would jiggle about and train the insects up to become our intermediary diplomatic corps with the Mars Bees. Finally, the special-agent insects could be flown up into space on rockets to ask the invaders what they wanted. Some free jam, probably.

Non-Killer Clowns From Outer Space
The more you look into the subject of UFOs, the more obvious it is that we are not being invaded en masse by aliens at all. I do think a certain hard core of encounters currently stand as being unexplained, but even many of these appear to be some kind of ultra-weird hallucinatory phenomena, sometimes of a mysteriously shared nature.

One of my favorite examples occurred in 1973 on England’s Isle of Wight, when two small children, a girl and a boy, were crossing a bridge from beneath which a seven-foot-tall extraterrestrial clown (see their amusing drawing here) abruptly emerged, or so the kids said.

Unlike Stephen King’s rather more disturbing ET clown Pennywise, this far more friendly one had two wooden antennae poking out from either side of his head. His face had two triangular slots for eyes, a brown square for a nose, and “static yellow lips” that couldn’t really open.

The alien bounded off in strange leaps, like an astronaut on the moon, toward his apparent spaceship, which was cunningly disguised as a windowless tin hut, like Dr. Who’s TARDIS posing as a big blue phone box. The children followed him inside, finding the internal walls full of dials.

The space clown took off his hat and asked them, through a handheld electronic voice-box, if they would care to see how he ate berries. He then popped one in his ear, bobbed his head, and it rolled into his triangular eye socket. Nodding again, it rolled down his throat. Understandably, the infants made their excuses and left.

Illegal Aliens
So, you see, when Tucker Carlson babbles excitedly away about extraterrestrial demons piloting flying saucers and scratching him with their iron claws whilst he lies dreaming on a mattress next to his pet dogs, he still has a long way to go when it comes to descending down into the true weirdest and most florid depths of ufological theorizing and ET encounters.

The time to truly start questioning Carlson’s state of mind is when he says he wakes up in bed one night bearing severe beestings all over his abdomen, spinning around in a big circle with mandala swastikas carved deep into his forehead, and with a large custard pie smeared right across his face and berries bouncing about inside his eyes.

In the meantime, I sincerely hope that Trump really does open up the White House X-Files and tells his great fan Tucker what he really knows about the space demons and the devil aliens next week. Come on, Donald! You know the poor man will get no sleep until you do.

The Week’s Most Swelling, Smelling, and Biden-Farewelling Headlines

GRANDMA THROWSES
Animal rights, animal wrongs.

A new study claims that vegans are more likely to be depressed. Perhaps it’s the diet, or perhaps it’s weeping over the grave of every chicken turned into KFC.

Here’s a story of two decidedly non-vegans who were perfectly happy until animal lovers queered their caper.

Florence has the Uffizi Gallery, London has the Tate Gallery, but 53 percent black Mobile, Alabama, has the Tavoris Gallery, and unlike those snooty museums that are hardly pet-friendly, at the Tavoris Gallery, all dogs are welcome…to die.

On Dec. 28, 18-year-old Tavoris Gallery was called to his grandma’s house. 71-year-old Mary Rivers had a post-Christmas grandma/grandson chore: She wanted to murder some dogs.

Why? As Gallery would later say to reporters while being perp-walked, “She wantin’ to kill them dawgs.”

Is any other explanation needed?

Carrying two mini-pinscher puppies, Tavoris went over with Rivers and through the woods to the aptly named Dog River Bridge. And granny and junior chucked the dogs like so many bags of unwanted cold fries. Unfortunately for Ma Barker and Snoop Soggy Dog, there were white people by the riverside. So the dogs were promptly rescued.

Damn those whites and their love of animals and ability to swim!

The dogs sustained no serious injuries, as they were able to tread water until their rescuers reached them. Even tossed from 73 feet, both dogs handled water better than the average black.

Flea-opold and Lobo are in custody; suffice to say it was a ruff New Year’s for them both, but perhaps they can start 2025 with a new leash on life.

The entire incident will be dramatized in Madea’s Dogs Go to Heaven, coming from Tyler Perry this summer.

PIDDLE TO THE MEDAL
Joe Biden’s waving farewell with one final middle finger to the nation. Last week he presented the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s fourth highest civilian honor (the first three are Starbucks Rewards Cardholder, Official Mustache Ride Inspector, and Name Mentioned in the Magic Mirror on Romper Room) to a bevy of undesirables. Indeed, it’s appropriate that one of the recipients was Hillary Clinton, because she finally found her “basket of deplorables,” and behold, she was in it.

Along with Benghazi Gazzara, Biden also honored George Soros, because with Hitler, Pol Pot, and Stalin dead, nobody has this guy’s kill count. Biden praised Soros for ensuring that NYC subway tracks are routinely greased with the blood of riders. He also thanked the Hungarian Holocaust survivor–turned–Holocaust creator for his tireless work regarding rape awareness (by preventing sex offenders from going to prison, Soros ensures that female victims remain constantly aware of their rape).

Upon receiving the gold medal, Soros, who got through the Holocaust masquerading as a Nazi, melted it down and used it to finance his escape to Paraguay (old habits die hard).

Also honored: Bono from U2, a choice that brought joy to pretentious poseurs the world over who routinely bore people at parties with lectures about how Achtung Baby was the most daring album in music history.

Biden also presented a medal to “Bill Nye the Science Guy,” who was honored alongside Captain Kangaroo, Detective McGruff, and the Burger King in the category of fake TV characters with unearned titles.

And whereas Nye claims there are 31 genders, his fellow honoree “Magic” Johnson knows that there are only two, and he done messed up big-time by having intercourse with the wrong one.

Johnson’s a big shot in the legalized marijuana industry (there’s even a pot strain named after him). So it was fitting that he was honored alongside Michael J. Fox, as the two are currently touring the country as “Shake and Baked.”

Finally, Denzel Washington received a medal…not for his acting but for being the only black celebrity unaffected by scandal. Unfortunately, at the post-ceremony reception, the fries were served cold, so…

STUNTEDMAN
Remember Kayvon Edson?

The second most fascinating thing about this self-described “bipolar faggot performance artist” is that, with the name “Kayvon,” he’s not black. But the first most fascinating thing is what he did on April 15, 2014, the first anniversary of the Boston Marathon terrorist bombing. Edson took two pressure-cooker bombs to the site where the Muslim perps detonated their pressure-cooker bombs a year earlier. But Edson’s cookers were filled not with shrapnel but with confetti. His plan was to detonate the cookers, shooting confetti in the air, to bring “peace and love” to a city scarred by trauma.

Who’d think a “bipolar faggot performance artist” would come up with an idea so stupid?

Edson never got the chance to be RIP Taylor; Boston cops, on high alert due to the anniversary, arrested him as he screamed, “Eau my gawd, no, it’s confetti!”

Edson’s long forgotten because his act of idiocy happened before the MAGA era.

Matthew Livelsberger wanted to go out with a stunt even dumber than Edson’s. A suicidal soldier with PTSD, Livelsberger parked his rented Cybertruck in the valet station of the Trump Hotel in Vegas on New Year’s Day. Inside the truck? Minor explosives and a whole lotta fireworks. As Livelsberger explained in his “manifesto,” his desire was not to inflict casualties but rather to issue a “wake-up call” to America (a wake-up call about the hazards of stuffing a Cybertruck with explosives and fireworks).

Livelsberger’s plan was nuttier than Edson’s, but MAGA won’t allow it to be seen that way. On X, MAGAs have theory after theory of what really happened: Livelsberger was a patsy, knocked unconscious by the Deep State and put in a remote-controlled Cybertruck. Or Livelsberger was traumatized not by war but by Diddy’s pedo-parties. Or the real goal was to kill the valet because he once dinged Baron Rothschild’s BMW.

Turns out a nutcase can’t do a simple stunt anymore without everyone reading too much into it.

Hard times for America’s stunt Rain Men.

THE FIREWORKS NEVER END!
2025 is barely two weeks old, and it’s already a banner year for dissatisfied black fast-food aficionados.

January 2, Columbia: 18-year-old Marterius Byrd was working the drive-through at Bojangles when he sprayed a customer’s car with bullets, injuring two. He then leaped through the window and sprinted away. “I knew a man at Bojangles and he advanced on you, in worn-out shoes.”

January 6, Charleston: While waiting in line at McDonald’s, two black gentlemen entered into a spirited debate that ended with one shooting the other. No account is given regarding the nature of the discussion, but as the restaurant is located on Phosphate Road, almost certainly the debate was over whether nitride or phosphate makes for a better gun finish. Cops have yet to catch the “winner,” so the question remains open.

January 7, Memphis: Two black gunslingers drew on each other inside a Church’s Chicken. Only one was hit, but fortunately this Church’s is located in the “Medical District,” which, in this 63 percent black city, is the perfect placement for any fast-food joint.

January 7, Louisville: A black male and a black female at Wendy’s were arguing over fries. So the man shot the woman in the ass. Among blacks, this is known as a “potato wedgie.”

In news possibly related to all the above, McDonald’s is curbing it’s “diversity initiatives.” For some odd reason, the corporate giant is wary about making McDonald’s any “blacker” than it already is.

Go figure.

BLARNEY STONE
A British expedition ventures into darkest Africa. The team brings along a sole Irishman for labor, against the wishes of the Captain, who greatly dislikes the Irish. One evening the team’s captured by hostile tribesmen, who tie the members to trees as the native chief informs them that tomorrow at a grand feast their innards will be eaten and their skin used for tribal drums.

Alone, frightened, the team members see the Irish lad struggling with the ropes. He manages to free one arm and pull out a knife he’d concealed on his person.

“By Jove,” the Captain declares, “Declán, thank God! I’m truly sorry, lad. I thought the Irish were thick as bricks, but now we can show them jungle brutes a thing or two.”

“Damn roit,” says Declán as he raises the knife, then repeatedly plunges it into his own stomach. “No savage gonna make a drum outta ME!”

The Irish, notorious for not liking Jews, have, in their own way, done Jews a great service by opening up Ireland to African savages by the millions, thus proving that “replacement theory” isn’t always caused by Jews.

It’s the literal drum joke; “We ain’t gonna let no JEWS come in here and spoil our nation wit’ open borders; we’ll do it ourselves!”

Last week it was reported that the moon rock collected by Neil Armstrong and presented to then Irish president Eamon de Valera was tossed out as rubbish. De Valera threw it in his basement, and several years later the basement burned up and the rock was gathered along with the other rubble and sent to a dump.

One suspects that at every decision-making step along the way, whiskey was involved.

De Valera’s long dead, but speculation is that he tossed the rock into his basement after finding out the hard way that it wasn’t cheese.

“Ay, I broke me toot’ on dat piece o’ shite. Down in da basement ya go, ya fokker; let da moice have atcha.”

For decades the Irish have tried reaching the moon themselves, but they’ve had difficulty timing the landing to a full moon. “We wanna land when the moon’s all there,” said lead Irish rocket scientist Miles O’Tarded.

Growing up as I did, in post–UDI Rhodesia, I was exposed early to the deceptive habits of wily British politicians. My adolescent naivete notwithstanding, I was puzzled and distressed by the fact that none of them seemed to have any interest in knowing the true situation on the ground, let alone allowing the facts to influence their judgment.

For them it was quite simple, and it suited their audience and their constituents; Ian Smith was an unrepentant racist obsessed with power to maintain white privilege, and Robert Mugabe was a fearless freedom fighter risking his all for the sake of the horribly oppressed black majority. By their implacable aversion to the truth they were well placed to signal their virtuousness to the loud applause of the international community. Sadly their message was well received by the global community, and amidst universal jubilation Robert Mugabe won power and the rest is a sad story.

Unfortunately for the many good people of the United Kingdom, they are on the receiving end of similar behavior, with their politicians and public officials exhibiting the same penchant for peddling falsehoods, dodging the truth, and “virtue-signaling” that has now brought the country to the brink of catastrophe. I refer to the rape rings of Pakistani immigrants that have flourished in more than fifty towns and cities in the U.K.

Thanks to the intervention of Elon Musk, who, with a few short, sharp, but very pertinent public interventions on X, has blown the lid off the can of worms that have been bottled up by the British media and successive governments over a period of more than twenty years, what is now revealed has all the hallmarks of a self-inflicted cultural and generational national tragedy that resonates with what happened in Rwanda and Bosnia.

Recent figures indicate as many as 250,000-plus, almost exclusively, white Christian underage girls from mostly poor or “working-class” homes have, over the past two decades, been victims of almost unimaginable sexually related horrors at the hands of well-organized Pakistani “grooming gangs.” The perpetrators were cunning and ruthless, paying special attention to girls in poorly supervised foster care whose absence would not be missed. Some of these homes were actually managed and supervised by men in cahoots with the rapists, or assisted by rogue Pakistani police officers. To the police and political establishment these children were simply dismissed as “white slags” getting what they deserved. In many instances the police declined to intervene, arguing that there was consent to the activity, ignoring the fact that it is legally impossible for a girl under the age of 16 to give “consent” to sexual intercourse. In several instances underage girls themselves were arrested in rape dens, drugged and drunk, in the presence of Pakistani males. Some of these girls have testified that they were raped more than 1,000 times.

Staggering cruelty is being revealed in the city of Oxford, that elite academic center; one perpetrator prepared his victim “for gang anal rape by using a pump…. You subjected her to a gang rape by five or six men. At one point she had four men inside her. A red ball was placed in her mouth to keep her quiet.”

Lucy Lowe died at 16 alongside her mother and sister when the man abusing her burned the family home down. She had given birth to one child and was pregnant at the time of her death.

Another girl, aged 14, after making repeated reports of rape and brutal abuse, was then “married” off to her abuser with the sanction of the social worker tasked with caring for her.

Virtually none of the survivors have emerged from this living hell of an experience sans permanent physical or mental damage.

What is now beyond question is these monsters were able to operate with almost total impunity because officials at every level, from politicians to prosecutors to policemen, despite knowing exactly what was transpiring, agreed to look the other way and do nothing.

In fact, that is not entirely true; on occasions, the police and prosecution service, then headed by Sir Keir Starmer, did spring into action and arrest the parents of abused children when their pleas for someone to save their daughters became too rancorous and risked offending the sensibilities of the offenders. And the law-enforcement authorities, under political instruction, were also very energetic in silencing, and in some cases imprisoning, people who had the temerity to register a dissenting voice on social media platforms.

As head of the CPS (Crown Prosecution Service) and the country’s most senior law enforcement officer at the time when these thousands of girls were being raped, there is little doubt Starmer was aware of the outrages; not only did he ignore their calls for help, but he probably failed to give the crucial instructions to law enforcement throughout the country to investigate or prosecute. This is the same Keir Starmer who called President Trump a “racist” and an “affront to humanity” in the course of the riots that wrecked American cities following the death of George Floyd. He is also head of the government that is refusing to open a proper public inquiry into what can only be described as a crime against humanity.

The fact that virtually the entire British police force and council social services officers could find nobody with the courage and compassion to do his or her duty and help these poor girls is beyond belief, and speaks to an entrenched soullessness at the heart of a nation once known as free, fair, and “Great.”

Why is it that this greatest-ever community atrocity in the history of the U.K., perpetrated for decades and continuing to this day, has not resulted in a single prosecution, conviction, and incarceration of these officials for gross dereliction of duty in public office?

Recently, I read a small masterpiece of Soviet literature (or at least a masterpiece of literature written in the Soviet Period, which is perhaps not quite the same thing). It was Sofia Petrovna by Lydia Chukovskaya, written from 1937 to 1940, its survival a little miracle in itself.

Chukovskaya was born in St. Petersburg and lived in Leningrad but was evacuated just before the siege by the invading Germans. She had written Sofia Petrovna by hand in a school exercise book, but it would obviously have been dangerous to take so anti-Soviet a manuscript with her into exile, so she entrusted it to a friend who remained in Leningrad. He, however, died of starvation, but the day before he died, he entrusted it to someone else who survived along with the manuscript, who returned it to Chukovskaya when she returned.

That was not the end of the book’s adventures. Clearly, it could not be published in Stalin’s time. The slow thaw after 1956 made its publication almost possible, and in 1963 everything was ready, including the design of the book, but at the last minute, permission was withdrawn. All regimes need a degree of legitimacy, and Chukovskaya’s book, in less than 200 pages, demonstrates beyond all possible argument that the Soviet regime was institutionally (to use a word much in vogue), and irredeemably, criminal.

Finally, the text was smuggled out and published in the Russian émigré press in 1966, appearing in English translation a year later. It was not published in Russia until 1988, during the Gorbachev years.

No book more concisely recounts the destruction of the human personality and character by a system of ideological conformity, denunciation both public and private, dismissal from work on grounds of social origins or opinion, and arbitrary arrest.

You might ask, why read about a time and a political system that is in the past, in a country that is very alien to us?

I think it is less past and less alien than we might like to think. Of course, we are far from the worst manifestations of what Chukovskaya so skillfully portrayed (from her own direct experience), and one must not exaggerate: No one is being hauled off to the gulag. But still the tendency to intellectual conformity with its concomitant—fear—exists, at least in university circles and wherever intellectuals gather. There is no inevitability about the progression to full dictatorship, and I do not think it will happen; but we should remember that Bolshevism was, after all, the work of intellectuals.

Even Stalin was an intellectual, at least by the standards of modern politicians. He was a poet in Georgian, and his poems were anthologized before he was notable for anything else. He read far more widely, and with much closer attention, than does any politician today, and he was also interested in music.

It so happens that among my records is one of Maria Yudina, the great Soviet pianist (born in 1899), playing a couple of Mozart piano concertos, including number 23, the concerto that Stalin supposedly demanded that Yudina perform for him at three in the morning, together with an orchestra, having heard her perform it over the radio. The story is an excellent one and could hardly be bettered as illustrating the utter whimsicality of absolute power, but unfortunately it seems not to be true, having been invented and put about by Shostakovich. But Stalin did like Mozart.

The recording of Yudina dates from 1947, at the height of another period of repression (victory in the war did nothing to reduce Stalin’s thirst for absolute power, the alternative for him presumably being death). The orchestra was the USSR Radio Symphony Orchestra. One tends to forget that even in the worst of periods, or perhaps especially in them, cultivated people try to keep civilization alive, as an act of faith that, in spite of everything, life is worth living and man is not irredeemably a swine. To play and to listen to Mozart while there are hundreds of thousands of one’s fellow citizens languishing, starving, suffering, and dying in the most abominable conditions might seem like self-indulgence but actually is an act of resistance against barbarism.

Oddly enough, it was Mozart in particular that Myra Hess played in the National Gallery in London during the war, in concerts designed to reassure the population that civilization would triumph over barbarism in the end. Perhaps it was particularly significant that the music played was composed by a supreme artist of a then-enemy nation.

However, I once heard a recording of a superb live performance of Schubert’s Winterreise in Berlin in 1943. This was the year of Stalingrad and the Final Solution. One hears in the recording the occasional stifled cough of the audience, a slight shuffling sound. No doubt the audience was deeply moved by the music, was subject to the finest, most exquisite feelings. But what did it know of what was going on at the same time? Surely quite a lot. It is quite likely, too, that some of the worst of the regime were present, and that they had all the exquisitely tender feelings that Schubert can inspire.

This has long been an argument against the value of high culture, and I confess that I find it troubling. If listening to Schubert doesn’t make us better people, if it is perfectly compatible, in fact, with the greatest brutality, what use is Schubert by comparison with, say, a penny whistle?

This is to assume that the value of high culture depends on its capacity to make us better people. But goodness is only one of the three traditional aims of life: truth, beauty, and goodness. To reject Schubert on the grounds that some very wicked people thrilled to him is to deny that beauty is also an end in itself. It is true that a life lived only for beauty might be a bad one, perfectly selfish, but a life lived only for goodness would be a meager one, lacking at least one essential element.

When the young Savonarolas of our universities pull down statues because—surprise, surprise—those to whom they were erected turn out not to have been saints according to our current notions of sanctity, they forget, if they ever knew or had been taught, that life has more than one end.

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

In retrospect, maybe the military should have spent a little less time worrying about “white supremacists” and paid more attention to black Muslims. As you’ve no doubt heard by now, an Army veteran, Shamsud-Din Jabbar, who happened to be a black Muslim, slaughtered 14 New Year’s revelers in New Orleans last week.

For the past four years, the Pentagon, the Department of Homeland Security and President Biden have warned about the looming threat of white supremacy amid constant references to Jan. 6 — but not to BLM, in which police officers actually died. Apart from getting more girls and transgenders into the military, it seems like rooting out “white supremacists” has become the military’s full-time job. (Proposed new U.S. Marines’ slogan: “We’re looking for a few good men … who think they’re women.”)

Biden, repeatedly: “According to the intelligence community, terrorism from white supremacy is the most lethal threat to the homeland today. Not ISIS, not al-Qaida — white supremacists.”

To deal with the crisis, the greatest fighting force in the world scoured the social media accounts of its white troops, in search of “ties to white supremacists or violent extremists.” Considering the vast amounts of truthful information censored from social media under Biden — e.g., about COVID, masking, social distancing, Biden’s senile dementia, Hunter Biden’s laptop — I’d love to see what the military considered evidence of “ties to white supremacists.”

Even before Biden was sworn in, the Pentagon made a big point of announcing that troops guarding the inauguration — especially those who would be close to Biden and Kamala Harris! — would be carefully vetted. (I just hope that crack unit of muffin-topped gals who almost got Donald Trump killed in Butler, Pennsylvania, were available.)

Forget the two assassination attempts on Trump, as the mainstream media has. Even at that point, his supporters had been violently attacked at the University of Illinois Chicago, assaulted and egged in San Jose and murdered in Portland. Trump himself had been forced by Mostly Peaceful Protesters to retreat to the White House bunker.

But our military was worried about white Trump supporters guarding Biden.

In early 2021, an alarmed New York Times reported: “the views of its white service members skew conservative.” Particularly disturbing, “televisions [at the bases] are often tuned to Fox News.”

Having read reams of such doomsday stories in the Times, I have found only three specific examples of the white menace:

1) A female Army officer, who’d resigned a year earlier, transported 100 people to Washington, D.C., to attend Trump’s Jan. 6 rally. (There’s nothing racist, violent or illegal about that.)

2) A black Army sergeant told the Times he had no one to talk to after the death of George Floyd. (I’m free to chat.)

3) Biden’s defense secretary, Lloyd Austin (who is absolutely NOT a DEI hire), had, as the Times put it, “witnessed firsthand” racism in the military — in between secret hospital stays, no doubt. He claimed he’d seen troops with the Nazi insignia at Fort Bragg, North Carolina.

Which reminds me: Remember when Bill Clinton slandered our troops in his 1996 speech to the Democratic National Convention? He accused U.S. servicemen of painting swastikas on the doors of black Special Forces members at — guess where? Fort Bragg. Needless to say, the Nazi symbols turned out to have been put there by the black soldier himself, which Clinton knew when he gave his speech.

Still, that story was a real crowd-pleaser with the Democrats.

Hoping no one would notice that the New Orleans attack was committed by an angry black man, a Muslim, no less, the media have avoided promiscuous use of the perpetrator’s name — Shamsud-Din Jabbar — while obsessively calling him an “Army veteran who drove a pickup truck,” “a U.S.-born citizen from Texas” and a “military veteran from Texas.”

In other words, he’s just your regular, average all-American type of fella named Shamsud-Din Jabbar.

Liberal Twitter was ecstatic.

@CoachGrahamP23: This terrorist was from the “God, Guns, and Trump” republic of Texas. He served in the US Army.

@itsweezie: GregAbbott_TX allowed a born and raised Texan christian to go to New Orleans to kill … WOW!

(Jabbar wasn’t a Christian, nor raised a Christian, as some sloppy media accounts have it: Both his parents were Muslim. His mother converted before marrying Jabbar pere.)

@SophieRaccoons: … this tragedy caused by a Texas born Terrorist. He was a decorated USA Army Staff Sargeant. How hate in your heart can turn people to evil acts.

@gvnzng: New Orleans terror suspect utters words most feared by MAGA ‘I was born and raised in Texas’ And yet donOld is still blaming immigrants …

(And the words most feared by liberals are: “Shamsud-Din Jabbar.”)

Congratulations, liberals, you can hold immigrants harmless in this one case (which TOTALLY makes up for 9/11, San Bernardino, the Boston Marathon, Fort Hood, Pulse nightclub, Kate Steinle, Laken Riley, Mollie Tibbets, Ana Navarro, etc. etc. etc. etc.).

But we’re still left with yet another heinous mass murder committed by a black veteran. Anyone, in or out of the military, can go nuts (like the vet who blew himself up in Las Vegas the same day as Jabbar’s attack), but the per capita bonkers rate for black and Muslim servicemen seems kind of high.

There was the D.C. sniper, John Allen Muhammad, honorably discharged from the Army with a string of commendations — including the Expert Rifleman’s badge. In 2002, he and his young accomplice drove around the Washington area, randomly shooting people from a peephole in the trunk of their car, killing 10.

Army Major Nidal Hasan committed mass murder at Fort Hood in 2009, killing 13 people and wounding 30. (To cheer up my liberal readers: Hasan was born in America … to Palestinian immigrant parents.)

Aaron Alexis shot up the Washington Navy Yard in 2013, killing 12 civilian workers. He’d been in the Navy reserves from 2007 to 2011.

Also in 2013, former Los Angeles Police officer and Navy Reservist Christopher Dorner went on a two-week shooting spree against 40 law enforcement officers, killing four and injuring three before being cornered and committing suicide.

In July 2016, Micah Xavier Johnson ambushed and murdered five police officers in Dallas, injuring nine other officers. Johnson was in the Army Reserve and an Afghan War veteran.

I don’t know if paying attention to the nonwhite crackpots in their ranks could have averted any of these crimes, but hating on 68% of your own troops is surely consuming too much bandwidth from a top brass with little bandwidth to spare.

I’ve received a very interesting letter from Nicholas Farrell, author of the best biography of Benito Mussolini yet written. It begins by introducing a good friend of his, a poet by the name of Paolo Gambi, a close relation to the last mistress of Lord Byron, Teresa Guiccioli. Teresa was most likely the last female affair the great Byron had before dying 200 years ago in Missolonghi, Greece, fighting the Turks for Greek independence.

Gambi lives in Ravenna, as does Nicholas Farrell, where the greatest poet ever (after Homer), Dante Alighieri, lived and is buried. For anyone unlikely to be familiar with Dante’s work—by this I mean not regular Takimag readers, who are all-knowing—Dante’s fame derives from having written the world’s most famous eschatological thriller, Dante’s Inferno. Paolo Gambi worships Dante and has written a letter about poetry to Donald Trump, urging him to use poetry in his inaugural. (I sincerely hope that The Donald has heard of Dante.) Poetry, writes Gambi to Trump, is not merely an artistic endeavor; it is also a guide for eternal truths. Dante envisioned a world emperor who stood before God while uniting a divided world. A world without poetry, also according to Paolo Gambi, is a crooked place where the beauty of the human spirit is stifled. He adds, and I totally agree, that woke has drained the world of beauty. The best way to counter the ugliness of woke is through poetry.

What methinks is that The Donald would be doing himself a great favor if he read Paolo’s poem on January 20th. It would prove to those leftist so-called media types who hate him that there’s more to him than he’s let on. And he could go a bit further and invite Gambi to D.C. and have him read his poem to those mostly ignoramuses of the capital. In a world denuded of class and grace and beauty, poetry could save the world. Having a poet like Gambi at the inaugural would be a rallying cry to stop the vulgarity and perversion that dominate our culture. Caesar Augustus commissioned Virgil to write the Aeneid, while Lorenzo de’ Medici used Michelangelo and Botticelli. Go ahead, Donald. Contact Gambi and have him read the following poem:

A Toast to the Nation That Chose
by Paolo Gambi

Oh land too bold, too big to rig
Where hopes are vast and visions big

No crooked paths nor sloppy schemes
Can dim the light of your daring beams

I write to you, though not your kin
You echo abroad, a global voice
For what you breathe, the world takes in

Birdbrain whispers, slippery lies
Peekaboo truths in lamestream skies
You’ll drain the swamp, its lyin’ maze
You’ll turn deranged nights to brighter days

Drill, baby, drill—into the deep
Not just for you, but for the globe
Where hearts hold treasures that never sleep
You forge the threads of our shared robe

The land was ours before we were the land’s
It shaped our hopes with unseen hands

A Rock, A River, A Tree
Stand firm for those who dare to see

We have memorized America
Its echoes hum through every saga

Each day we go about our business
Seeking the sparks of life’s vast richness

One sun rose on us today, kindled over our shores
It called us forth to open unseen doors
When day comes, we ask ourselves
What truths we’ll find on future shelves

The world looks on with grateful eyes
That woke shall no more befoul the skies

Let art be cleansed of poisoned streams
The bridge between human and divine schemes
In your light, the free world gleams
A tapestry stitched of boundless dreams.

Colleges went mad.

They charge students big bucks and then make them feel guilty.

My new video looks at a new documentary called “The Coddling of the American Mind.” It persuasively suggests that today, young people are anxious and depressed because “adults” at their schools brainwashed them.

Students like Lucy Kross Wallace at Stanford.

“I was anxious,” she says. “I felt guilty constantly. I couldn’t stop thinking about the white privilege thing.”

Kimi Katiti attended The Art Institute of California and now says, “I feel like I lost my life for six years. I was full of self-confidence when I was 18. But in college, that disintegrated.”

Kimi, who is Black, was taught that she is a victim of “microaggressions” from white people who say things like, “You’re so articulate,” or, “Can I touch your hair?”

“I began to see myself through the lens of Black and a woman,” says Kimi. “If I see someone with their dog, for example, and the dog’s barking, I could interpret that as a racist microaggression.”

This new perspective began shaping every part of her life.

“To compete and get the best grades,” she says, “I showed how much of a victim I was in order to impress my professors.”

She didn’t think that was right, but she didn’t push back.

“I thought, I’m paying a lot, so (they must be) teaching me golden rules for life.”

She learned that it was important to censor speech by conservatives. Kimi joined a Twitter mob demanding that Twitter block Ben Shapiro’s posts.

“I would sit down, all the way through the night” looking for tweets to report. When Twitter didn’t block Shapiro, she’d “try again, try again.”

At Stanford, Lucy was taught that Shapiro’s ideas put “Black, brown, trans, queer and Muslim students at risk.”

“My first thought was like, ‘This is extreme, ridiculous,'” but then she thought, “‘You’re privileged, you’re white.'”

A good person, she was taught, “didn’t read too many books by white authors or listen to the ‘wrong’ kind of music. I was really torn on rap because I didn’t know if that was appropriation or appreciation.”

To be accepted, she changed the way she spoke.

“When I started to use the vocabulary … ‘marginalized, intersectional, hegemonic, blah, blah, blah,’ people just smiled a little bit more, and I started feeling like I was part of an in-group.”

A few years later, she decided she had made a mistake.

“This set of thought processes was unhealthy and making me miserable.”

Greg Lukianoff, co-author of the book “The Coddling of the American Mind,” says “Administrators teach students … that they can be permanently harmed by words. This is not a kind or compassionate thing to teach.”

The new censorship was supposed to help minorities, but minorities, too, are often punished.

In the documentary, Saeed Malami, a Nigerian student, talks about making a speech at a protest.

“I go up there, feeling all cool with myself. I was like, ‘Blackness is not a skin color. It’s an attitude to life. If you’re white, you can be Black. If you’re Black, you can be purple or whatever … ‘ What happened after that? A lot of people I thought I was tight with just stopped talking to me.”

So instead of saying, “I’m no victim,” Malami just shut up.

“What I thought to be true,” he says, “I will keep in my head, and say something else.”

This self-censorship not only stifles useful debate; it makes students unhappy.

Lucy says, “When I was a social justice advocate, I was tired, miserable, pessimistic.”

“Now that I’m out of that and I’m thinking for myself,” says Kimi, “I’m much happier. I’m at peace.”

“The Coddling of the American Mind” is a good introduction to how some of today’s schools harm students. You can find out how to watch the full documentary at thecoddlingmovie.com.

Shortly before Milton Friedman’s death in 2006, I had the privilege of interviewing him over dinner in San Francisco. The last question I asked him was: What are the three things we have to do to make America more prosperous?

His answer I have never forgotten: “First, allow universal school choice; second, expand free trade; third and most importantly, cut government spending.” That was long before Barack Obama and Joe Biden came along.

There aren’t too many problems in America that can’t be traced back to the growth of big and incompetent government.

It is notable that the two big bursts of inflation during modern times both occurred when government spending exploded. The first was the gigantic expansion of the Lyndon B. Johnson “war on poverty” welfare state in the 1970s with prices nearly doubling. Second was the post-COVID-19 spending blitz in the last year of Donald Trump’s first term, followed by the Biden $6 trillion spending spree, with the Consumer Price Index sprinting from 1.5% to 9.1%.

Coincidence? Maybe. But I doubt it.

The connection between government flab and the decline in the purchasing power of the dollar is obvious. In both cases the Washington spending blitz was funded by Federal Reserve money printing. The helicopter money caused prices to surge. (I still find it laughable that 11 Nobel Prize-winning economists wrote in the New York Times in 2021 that the Biden multitrillion-dollar spending spree wouldn’t cause inflation. Were they on hallucinogenic drugs?)

The avalanche of federal spending hasn’t stopped even though the COVID-19 pandemic ended over a year ago. We are three months into the 2025 fiscal year and on pace to spend an all-time-high $7 trillion and borrow $2 trillion. If we stay on this course, the federal budget could reach $10 trillion over the next decade.

This road to financial perdition cannot stand. It risks blowing up the Trump presidency.

Upon entering office, Trump should on day one call for a package of up to $500 billion of rescissions — money the last Congress appropriated but has not been spent yet. Canceling the green energy subsidies alone could save nearly $100 billion. Why are we still spending money on COVID-19?

We could save tens of billions of dollars by ending corporate welfare programs — such as the wheelbarrows full of tax dollars thrown at companies like Intel in the CHIPS Act. The Elon Musk Department of Government Efficiency is already identifying low-hanging fruit that needs to be cut from the tree.

Along with extending the Trump tax cut of 2017, this erasure of bloated federal spending is critical for economic revival and for reversing the income losses to the middle class under Biden.

This is especially urgent because the curse of inflation is NOT over. Since the Fed started cutting interest rates in October, commodity prices are up nearly 5%, and mortgage rates have again hit 7%, in part because the combination of cheap money and government expansion is a toxic economic brew — as history teaches us.

Nothing could suck the oxygen and excitement out of the new Trump presidency more than a resumption of inflation at the grocery store and the gas pump. Trump’s record-high approval rating will sink overnight if the cost of everything starts rising again.

Cutting spending won’t be easy. The resistance won’t just come from Bernie Sanders Democrats. He will have to convince lawmakers in his own party — many of whom are already defending Green New Deal pork projects in their districts.

Trump should borrow a line from Nancy Reagan: Just say no — to runaway government spending. Say yes to what Friedman titled his famous book: “Capitalism and Freedom.”

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