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It’s a tradition ’round these parts (and by “these parts” I mean my desktop, comfy chair, and rum bottle) to end December by cleaning house of interesting bits and pieces I didn’t get to use during the year. Normally, this housecleaning consists of unused back-and-forths with journalists and academics. But this year’s different: I had no such exchanges. This year, practically everyone I reached out to would only speak off-the-record.

I attribute this to the fact that 2022 was the year in which talentless predatory hacks like Taylor Lorenz and Felicia Sonmez scanned their colleagues’ tweets for cancellation material. So journalists got cold feet about genially corresponding with a guy like me, at least publicly. Privately, they’re fine. They know I’m not nearly as scary as my Wikipedia page implies.

But to keep the tradition alive, here are a few nuggets I couldn’t use in 2022.

A Vox on All Your Houses
I truly regretted not being able to work this one in, as it combines my hatred of “movies will change the culture” cons with my love of getting the last laugh.

So there’s this white separatist moron and videogamer (so very unique) named Theodore Beale who blogs as “Vox Day.” And apparently he has lots of followers, because he’s the guy who’s gonna lead whites to freedom and establish a “white homeland” in the U.S. (hopefully Maine, because that would really piss off Stephen King).

Beale’s a low-IQ nut who gets by on being “based,” because that’s all his followers demand.

I came across Beale in 2018 when I wrote a piece about how, with race and gender off the table, faux-edgy comedians resort to lewd jokes about children because it’s the only shocking thing the left still allows. Based on this (and nothing more), Beale decided that I must be hiding a secret list of Hollywood pedophiles (wotta sleuth!). He demanded that I reveal the list: “Cole knows the names! Why won’t he publish them?”

It was a bafflingly absurd accusation, because it had no basis beyond that one column about comedy. But his acolytes rallied around him, which brings us to…

In 2022 Beale told his followers to send him money because he was going to make a movie that would change the culture! A Marvel-style superhero film titled Rebel’s Run about an anti-woke Confederate-flag-wearing superheroine who fights leftists. And Beale raised a million bucks from his lemmings. Then he handed that cool mil to a based Aryan “crypto trader” named Wolfgramm to hold in escrow, and the crypto bro spent every cent of it on himself.

Every single thing about that crypto guy was fake, and even the smallest due diligence would’ve exposed him. But Beale didn’t do any diligence. He just handed over the money and poof, a million bucks gone.

Doing his best “falconer from The Simpsons” bit, Beale confessed to his fans, “I wouldn’t count on us getting that money back.”

The lesson? Smarts matter. A guy who’s dumb about politics will be dumb about other things, like money-managing.

An odd quirk of far-rightists: They’re the only people who talk about IQ, but when it comes right down to it, they’re no different from the blacks who gave their dough to Shaun King and the BLM Shaniquas who splurged on a mansion. Wait, they are different: King and BLM profited directly. Beale was given money and lost it because he’s dumber than a BLM black. He was a brainless middleman in the con; he didn’t steal the money—he gave it to the guy who did. That makes him worse than Ben Shapiro. Shapiro at least profits from his cons.

Plus, Beale proved why that “white homeland” thing can’t work.

Apparently, you’re still gonna need Jews to manage your money.

Complaint Department
Which brings me to (based on your emails and DMs) your No. 1 complaint about me: “Why you always pickin’ on the right?”

Well, because leftists ain’t gonna get any less vile by me criticizing them. What concerns me is the quality of opposition to the left.

Lemme phrase it like this: Back in 1994 I was talking with a Palestinian numbnut who wouldn’t stop squealing like a hillbilly, “They took mah layand! They took mah layand!” And my reply was, “Maybe so, but blowing up a school bus was a poor counterstrategy.”

If you look at the Palestinians, you see a people locked in a binary of failure. On one side, the fanatics who say, “Hmm…the last time we blew up a bus, it didn’t help. That means we need to blow up two buses this time!” and on the other side, the massively corrupt Palestinian Authority “establishment.” One side advocating suicidal, self-defeating extremism, the other side looking to shear a desperate population.

The American right’s very much in danger of falling into that binary. On one side, absolute lunatics, Q-types, January 6ers, Teddy Beale, people who live in fantasy worlds and whose mindless antics play directly into the left’s hands, and on the other side, establishment GOPs and “safe” (corrupt) conservative shearers like Shapiro and Boreing.

Is there a third way? A (dare I say) nonbinary? I dunno. But being aware of the trap is a good first step to not falling into it.

Tone Deaf(amation)
Please stop saying “Alex Jones was bankrupted for ‘speech crimes.’”

“The CDC is wrong all the time, but they get off scot-free. Alex Jones is wrong about one thing, and he gets fined a trillion bucks!”

Jones wasn’t “fined for being wrong.” He lost a defamation case (several, actually) because he mercilessly tormented nonpublic figures, which is what makes all the difference in defamation law. This is the same principle that brought conservative victories in the cases of Nick Sandmann (via settlement) and Gibson’s Bakery. Defamation law giveth, defamation law taketh away. Don’t celebrate the law when it favors you, then moan about it when it doesn’t.

And don’t brazenly defame private citizens. These rules aren’t complicated.

Enough With the BS Polls
In 2023, maybe you could cool it with the “Harvard-Harris” polls? Harris org is run by a crank named Mark Penn, a leftist-turned-rightist (I never trust people who “snap” like that, because they’re either mentally unstable or running a con) who poops out monthly “push polls” engineered to make rightists think that everything they’re doing is great and there’s no need for course correction.

In July I tried to warn you about Penn’s abortion poll, which was deceitfully crafted to make rightists think they held the popular position on abortion going into the midterms. The poll didn’t allow “illegal under any circumstances” as a response, thus forcing pro-lifers to choose a more moderate, mainstream response.

“Push poll” means you push respondents, corral them via limited options, so that they give the desired answers.

The phony abortion poll went super-viral on the right. I said it was misleading, and the midterms bore that out.

A few weeks ago there was another Penn poll (more info here) about Twitter and the FBI, again finessed to create a preordained result (same deal: Respondents weren’t allowed to answer “I don’t know,” thus fatally skewing the responses), and again salivating Twitter rightists sent it viral.

Fake polls don’t help. That alone should stop you from sharing them. But if I have to wade into conspiracy-yarn territory to get you to stop sharing this crap, okay, ask yourself this: Would Harvard allow its name to be attached to these polls if they actually helped rightists?

Maybe Harvard understands that the false sense of security created by inaccurate polls (like the ones Hillary relied on that caused her to stop campaigning in swing states in 2016) never helps, and always hurts.

Arc of the Incompetent
Speaking of Hillary, it’s fascinating how her 2016 election tampering claims and Trump’s 2020 election tampering claims have followed the same arc. The initial accusations involved claims of blatantly illegal activity (Hillary—“The Russians hacked the election!”; Trump—“Venezuelan voting machines altered ballots!”), but soon enough, the claims weakened (Hillary—“The Russians bought some phony Facebook pages”; Trump—“Twitter was pressured into briefly removing the Hunter laptop story”).

As bad as FBI/Twitter collusion is in terms of government interference in speech, I don’t think it sunk Trump in 2020. For people on Twitter (a small percentage of the American public), Hunter’s laptop became a story specifically because of Twitter’s ham-fisted NY Post ban. I think a more important factor is the “legacy media’s” blackout of the story, which kept it from Americans not on Twitter. And like it or not, that blackout was legal (a free press can choose not to cover an issue. It might be a foul choice, and a biased choice, but it’s lawful).

So in the end, Hillary and Trump are both left whining about stuff that wouldn’t remotely justify an election “do-over.” Not that that’ll stop Trump from demanding one.

Comedy Isn’t Hard
The best unintentional comedy bit of the year came from Fox’s Brian Kilmeade. A few days before the midterms, Kilmeade was trying to explain how Democrats are all talk, but President Trump was a man of action!

Especially when it came to the 2020 riots and crime epidemic!

When CHOP, a lawless zone, was formed in Seattle and violence in Chicago raged out of control, Trump took action, tweeting this: “I am bringing out the military for this national emergency. They will be stopped!”

“He was trying to fix things,” Kilmeade bellowed.

“Trump took action, tweeting this.” That’s the best laugh line of 2022. Trump “took action” by tweeting. But it gets better: The tweet Kilmeade quoted had nothing to do with CHOP or crime. It wasn’t even from 2020. It was a 2018 tweet about the border, cropped by Fox to obscure additional text.

That’s golden. Kilmeade was trying to pretend that Trump’s crime tweets equaled action, but he couldn’t even find a usable crime tweet, so he invented one.

Good comedy deserves to be acknowledged.

The Prodigal Juan
Finally, remember in August when I wrote about my yard bean who tried to blackmail me about my Holocaust revisionism? Well, SoCal had multiple storms throughout December (we’re long overdue for a wet season), and my blackmailing bean texted that he’d love to do the cleanup work once the storms have passed.

And you know what? I said yes. Sure, he’s a blackmailer, but he’s a damn good worker.

Funny, I’m irritable about everything these days. I’m so irritable, odds are this will be the year my chronic hypertension Fettermans me out of commission.

But for some reason, Yardbeanio asking to work for me again without even acknowledging the blackmail didn’t irritate me at all. Maybe I just appreciate the ballsiness of it, or maybe in the end good work is so rare, I can overlook the foibles of those who perform it.

And thank you for overlooking my foibles as I clean my slate for 2023.

Happy New Year.