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The Week’s Most Humbling, Grumbling, and Bumbling Headlines

ARBEIT MACHT KRANKHEITSFREI
For almost a year now, anti-lockdown protesters and refuseniks in the U.S. have dropped the capital N-word regarding heavy-handed government efforts to control the behavior of Americans in the name of (supposedly) controlling Covid. The capital N-word is, of course, quite different from the lower-case n-word, which only rappers and Quentin Tarantino are allowed to use.

Conversely, everyone’s allowed to say the big N-word—Nazi—as long as they’re lobbing it at someone in hatred and not claiming it for themselves with pride. And the repressive (and in many cases blatantly unconstitutional) responses to Covid by state and local governments have earned a lot of American politicians the “Nazi” moniker. Churches shuttered, small businesses padlocked, bench-sitters, park-players, gym-goers, maskless walkers, and restaurant diners rousted, fined, and in some cases jailed by “Covid Nazi” public officials.

It must have been terribly upsetting for the Germans to see another nation claim the title of “Naziest of them all.” Rather like when the French see cheap illegitimate knockoff champagne.

“Zat’s our thing! You don’t get to call it champagne unless it’s from France, le home of ze sham-pah-nyah!”

Last week Germany finally put its foot down regarding the unauthorized use of the political label it made famous. If there are going to be Covid Nazis, they’re gonna be in Deutschland, dammit! So the government decided to put anyone who repeatedly violates Covid quarantine in…concentration camps.

Top that, Gavin Newsom.

German officials are being forced to convert refugee camps into the new network of Covid detention facilities, because all the really good camps are currently filled with tourists taking photos and Jews making documentaries. It’s a lesson that every oppressive regime needs to learn: Don’t turn your best concentration camps into museums; you never know when they might be needed again.

That German officials have no problem with putting quarantine violators in camps is a testament to the German trait of cold, unemotional practicality and efficiency. And that other German trait of having no sense of humor. In fact, German newspapers appear to be the only ones in the entire world that don’t find the Kovid Kamps darkly amusing.

One problem facing the Germans as they prepare to evacuate quarantine violators to the East is the absence of highly trained commandants skilled in the art of administering such facilities. Many of these professionals appear to have personnel files that abruptly end around 1945. Another issue is overcrowding. With the possibility of potentially hundreds of thousands of incoming inmates, current refugee camps might not provide enough space.

That said, word has it that there’s some very nice camp real estate in Poland.

What harm could possibly come from making a play for it?

DRUM RAPER INSTINCT
Last week’s Martin Luther King Jr. Day was not necessarily the most joyous in the 21 years since the holiday was first officially observed by all states (and the 38 years since President Reagan signed the holiday into law). With so many millions of Americans locked down due to the pandemic, or unemployed due to the lockdowns, what’s the value of a three-day weekend?

Still, people in the U.S. might want to start appreciating the holiday a bit more over the next few years…because it just might have an expiration date of 2027. That’s the year the “rape tape” is due to be released to the public.

On Jan. 5, 1964, FBI agents, as part of an organized campaign of surveillance and harassment of MLK, recorded something exceptionally unpleasant in a Washington, D.C., hotel room. King had been summoned by Baltimore preacher Logan Kearse to the Willard Hotel. There, Pastor Kearse raped a woman after she resisted his advances, as King (in the words of an FBI agent who summarized the recording for his bosses) “looked on, laughed and offered advise [sic].”

Sometimes a guy needs the kind of advice Dear Abby just can’t provide.

The audiotape of the incident totally exists. However, in 1977 a federal judge ordered it sealed for fifty years, because Jimmy Carter wanted to make sure he was long dead before that shit got out (jokes on you, Jimmy—you may actually still be alive in 2027, you rabbit-killing Methuselah).

So, in six years, the nation will likely hear the dulcet sounds of MLK cheering a rape…unless Kamala Harris uses her newfound status to discreetly replace the tape with an old Tupac recording (it’s not that Harris is disturbed by MLK’s role in a rape; it’s more that she’s outraged that a woman would resist the opportunity to sleep with an influential man).

The ticking clock on the release of the rape tape was not lost on filmmaker Sam Pollard, whose new documentary film MLK/FBI opened last week to coincide with the holiday. Pollard’s movie details the FBI’s clandestine war against the civil rights leader. And while the film roundly—and justifiably—condemns J. Edgar Hoover’s less-than-honorable tactics against King, when the topic of the rape recording comes up—and kudos to Pollard for at least bringing it up—the filmmaker runs a rather ineffective interference, claiming that the FBI agent’s notes “might” be misleading, and to give credence to the accusations without “hard evidence” would be to assist the FBI in “sullying” King’s memory.

Pollard has exactly six more years until he’ll have to come up with a better defense. Ditto the media. In their reviews of Pollard’s film, The Atlantic, the AP, and NPR avoided mentioning the rape accusation entirely. Yahoo News mentioned it, but purposely distorted the charge, claiming that MLK “witnessed a rape and didn’t intervene to stop it” (no mention of the “looking on, laughing, and offering advice” part). Sky News preemptively declared “pictures or it didn’t happen,” stating that since the “proof” will be “audio only,” it can’t be accepted as proof at all (an optimistic take…“rape advice” will likely be pretty damning audio).

Knowing that a significant number of his readers lack functioning frontal lobes, The Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw wrote, “There was even a suggestion that King was present at a rape. But wait. Where is the proof here?”

In the National Archives, mate. For six more years.

The big question is, when the tape is finally released, and if it lives up to the FBI’s description, will MLK be canceled? An ironic possibility: With leftist American blacks becoming increasingly violent and radicalized, and with the GOP increasingly catering to “moderate” blacks, 2027 may produce the spectacle of leftist blacks damning MLK as an Uncle Tom and joining with feminists to cancel him, while establishment conservatives defend him as a flawed but honorable man.

As always, the GOP will lose that fight (the GOP loses all racial battles; that’s just a law of the universe), but as a consolation prize, if states begin to cease celebrating MLK’s birth, conservatives could fill the vacuum by appropriating January 15th for an even worse human being who was born on that date—Ben Shapiro.

NIGGARDLY CHEESE
Sometimes a name is just a name, and sometimes it isn’t. Sometimes calling out a name that sounds rude or racist or funny will make you a hero, and sometimes it’ll land you in a big pile of dick-shit.

Back in 2010, popular New Zealand radio and TV host Paul Henry lost his job for having a bit of fun with the name of an Indian government official, Delhi Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit. Henry found the name rather humorous, ad-libbing on air that it “is so appropriate, because she’s Indian, so she’d be dick-in-shit wouldn’t she, do you know what I mean? Walking along the street… It’s just so funny.”

Well, it wasn’t funny to the government of India (which lodged an official complaint), the government of New Zealand (which promptly apologized), Henry’s TV station (which was fined by the government), and Henry himself (who apologized and resigned).

The message? Just because a name sounds like something else doesn’t mean it is something else. During the Dikshit row, rueful New Zealanders even tried to make amends by pronouncing the name “dixit” or “diggs-it,” but the woman herself made clear that yes, it’s pronounced “dick-shit,” and pronounced so with pride (for all anyone knows, somewhere in Hindu lore there’s a sacred ten-armed bright blue bison/gibbon/mollusk deity called Shankar Dikshit).

The point was, respect people’s names even if they sound funny to you. A human being’s name is not what you mistakenly take it for. If there’s one right that’s sacrosanct, it’s the right to not have to give up your name just because it coincidentally and randomly sounds like something else.

Oh wait, those rules only apply to the names of nonwhites. For whites, the rules are different.

For whites, if people of color don’t like your name, or if they think your name means something it doesn’t, your name gotta go!

Edward William Coon was a Philadelphia cheese-maker at the turn of the 20th century. In the 1920s he patented a bunch of new cheese-making techniques that eventually led to the processed crap everyone “loves” from Kraft (where Coon and his patents ended up finding a home).

Okay, hate the guy for that. Hate him for sliced American cheese.

But his name? Coon’s an old, old surname that long predates the use of the word as a racial epithet (which dates from around the 1830s). Just don’t tell that to Australian leftists! A long-running campaign finally reached its conclusion last week, as an Australian cheese known as Coon Cheese (originally marketed by Kraft, now sold in Australia by Canadian dairy company Saputo) was forced by pressure from a few very bored leftists to abandon its moniker.

Because the human surname Coon, which is not an epithet, sounds like an epithet, nothing Edward Coon did will be allowed to bear his name. From now on, the cheese will be called Cheer Cheese, although a more appropriate name might be something French, considering the speed with which Saputo surrendered.

Australian aborigine activist Stephen Hagan, who led the campaign against the cheese, published an entire book last month about why the name Coon Cheese should be changed (in the aboriginal Kullili tongue, “Hagan” means “man who wastes his time and ours”). Hagan announced last week that he is suing Saputo for $2.1 million in damages for making him write that book.

Well, that’ll quell those racist notions about aborigines not being bright.

As New Zealanders learn to enjoy their Cheer Cheese, one hopes that the attentions of busybodies like Hagan never find their way to American shores…especially Winter Haven, Fla., location of a funeral home and cremation facility known as Crisp-Coon.

Word has it they cremate whites, too.

WALLOONATICS WILL LOON
Even under the best of circumstances, African immigrants and “refugees” are rarely grateful to the Western nations that take them in. Whether the Northern Africans who worship Muhammad or the Western Africans who worship magical dung beetles and logs, inviting hordes of Africans into your nice, tidy European nation is a recipe for disaster.

Even under the best of circumstances.

Now, under the worst of circumstances, things get even dicier. Like, for example, if your “nice tidy European nation” was once ruled by the dude whose actions in Africa led to the coining of the term “crimes against humanity.” Old King Leopold was a genocidal old soul, and a genocidal old soul was he. The Belgian monarch ran the Congo as his own personal goody bag, and his hunger for rubber, gold, and ivory was matched only by his craving for 200-foot-tall mountains of severed African heads.

His administration of the Congo led to millions of African deaths, and even more maimings; he had a thing for cutting off African hands. Once, when asked by a reporter for Het Laatste Nieuws why he was so fond of lopping off limbs, the king merely smiled and said, “I dunno…I’m stumped!” (that guy was a real cutup).

If black people have proved one thing since the end of U.S. Jim Crow and European colonial adventurism, it’s that they have long fucking memories. Blacks never forget a slight…from a white. So maybe it wasn’t such a good idea for Belgium to spend the past few decades opening its doors to every African who knocked (and those who climbed through the window unannounced).

Almost 25% of Belgium’s population is foreign-born, and Congolese make up an especially large segment of those non-natives. In recent months, Belgian cops have had a difficult time enforcing the nation’s Covid regulations in the African immigrant community. No matter where they’re from, blacks love them a good BBQ backyard party, and last week, when Brussels police tried to break up such a gathering, the celebrants responded with whatever is Kikongo for “Oh no you dih-int!”

In the resulting melee, a 23-year-old black man named Ibrahima Barrie was arrested. He later suffered a medical emergency while in custody and died (likely because he was forced to eat the bad prison potato salad instead of the guuuud stuff at the BBQ…oh, and also he had a shit-ton of ecstasy on him).

So of course African immigrants took to the streets to riot. It was then that Belgian King Philippe decided to have his driver take him through the riot zone as a shortcut to the palace.

A fine decision no doubt prompted by centuries of inbreeding.

Upon seeing the king’s BMW literally drive right into their def anarchy jam, the rioters began kicking the living crap out of the vehicle, pelting it with stones and other projectiles, and trying to force it off the road.

For some reason, this descendant of Leopold didn’t see it coming.

The king’s security detail soon surrounded the royal car and escorted it to safety, as the rioters paused briefly from their rampage to perform a ten-minute stand-up set riffing on what had just occurred (“White people, amirite? A BLACK king woulda been like, ‘Get outta my way, niggas!’ But a WHITE king be like, ‘Oh my, would you please let me through? I’m late for my tea and toast.’ What up wit’ that?”).

The king was unhurt, other than the brain damage he was already saddled with from birth.

Belgian authorities have promised a three-tiered investigation into the cause of Barrie’s death, the resulting riots, and how they managed to get Peter Sellers from Being There as a monarch.

YANKING DOODLE DANDY
Conservatives have long had “eccentric envy.” From the 1960s counterculture days (when you could tell a man’s politics by his haircut and clothes) through the preppy Reagan years, there have always been folks on the right who wish they could, well, cut loose a bit and be as colorful and eccentric as their leftist counterparts.

The Trump era, and the alt-rightists who helped define it, finally provided that long-sought-after injection of wackiness. Whether Milo Yiannopoulos prancing about with naked black men as he boasts of his fondness for their lengthy members, or LARPing Roman saluters and tiki-torch carriers, or the QAnon dude in the buffalo horns and face paint at the Capitol, the alt-right helped the old right break out of its boring crewcut rut.

Whether this new acceptance of eccentricity helped or harmed the cause is, well, an open question. Open as in “Did it harm the cause?” or “Did it really really really harm the cause?”

Which is why it’s probably best to show a modicum of restraint regarding Erik Estavillo.

Estavillo is the San Jose, Calif.-born “patriot” who’s suing Twitter and Democrat Reps Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar over Trump’s Twitter ban. Estavillo, a self-described clinically depressed agoraphobic with OCD and Crohn’s disease, filed the $88.7 million lawsuit because as someone who is housebound, as someone who depends on social media to learn about world events and interact with other human beings, to be deprived of the ability to see the (then) president’s tweets caused him “overbearing pain and suffering.” After all, Estavillo reasoned, if Trump (as president) couldn’t block Twitter users (as a federal appeals court ruled in 2019), then Twitter can’t block Trump.

Reddit’s r/conservative group (649K members) initially hailed Estavillo as a First Amendment hero! A real fighter for the red white ’n’ blue! A bunch of rightist sites joined the chorus. MAGA had a new idol. As one r/conservative Redditor declared, “This is gonna get interesting… If this guy isn’t a loonie, it should make it way to the us supreme court.”

But guess what? The guy’s a loony.

Erik Estavillo first came to (minor) fame for suing various videogame and software companies for banning him from online play due to his harassment of other players (dude actually wrote a book about that). Then he sued Twitch because he claimed that all the purdy young women on the platform were forcing him to masturbate compulsively, damaging his dirlywanger. He sued not just Twitch, but every individual female user he’d ever pleasured himself to (his suit claimed that one young Twitcher made him, um, climax so heartily that his ejaculate landed on some wiring and shorted out his apartment’s power).

But the icing on the cake is that he once tried to subpoena Internet star/troll/porn girl Belle Delphine for one of his lawsuits, claiming that based on her videos, he tried to eat out his own ass, and as a result he strained his back so badly that he was forced to wear a brace for two months.

Frankly, rightists need to demand that their new heroes do more than just try to eat their own asses. Failure must not be an option. Hell, if George Will can do it, anyone can.

On a related note, perhaps rightists should knock it off with the eccentrics for a while.