The Week’s Most Bitchy, Kitschy, and Twitchy Headlines

HOT (WATER) FOR TEACHER
Kids are such delightful scamps! Gettin’ into all kinds of Dennis the Menace-style trouble. Trampling mom’s flower bed, walking through the house with muddy feet…getting a man beheaded. That last one is the unique accomplishment of an unnamed “French” 13-year-old schoolgirl, who confessed last week to having killed her middle school teacher by proxy (the word “French” is in scare quotes because she’s from a family of lunatic Muslim immigrants living in Paris).

Last October the student began routinely skipping her classes because the French national curriculum doesn’t offer Jihad 101. After spending ditch-day after ditch-day chucking rocks at Hasidics and overturning headstones in Jewish cemeteries, the little angel was suspended from school for repeated truancy. Knowing that this would infuriate her strict, unforgiving father, she quickly whipped up an excuse—an outright lie, in fact—for why she’d been missing her classes: She told her martinet dad that she ditched school because one of her teachers was forcing his students to view blasphemous drawings of the Prophet Muhammad (Peace Be Upon Him), and little Sharia Twain, not wanting to sully her eyes with such filth, chose truancy over blasphemy.

Of course, Taqwa-na Brawley’s father credulously believed every word his little girl said, in part because in His wisdom Allah has never seen fit to create a Muslim who doesn’t carry a combative chip on his shoulder, and in part because the father just assumed that fitting in as a “Frenchman” means acting at all times like a gullible idiot.

The outraged and IQ-challenged father, Moroccan-born Brahim Chnina, launched a campaign of harassment against the teacher, Samuel Paty. Chnina filed a criminal complaint against Paty, and bombarded the poor bâtard with hateful social media videos. Soon, every mosque in town joined in, because showing caution before forming a lynch mob is not a lesson taught by Muhammad (Peace Be Upon Him).

Paty repeatedly informed the father, the school headmaster, and the local police that the accusation was false and the girl in question had not even been in his class, which school records confirmed. Apparently, he assumed that the physical impossibility of her claim would be a defense. He literally believed that facts could defeat fanaticism.

There’s that “acting at all times like a gullible idiot” thing in action!

A week and a half after the false accusation, a Muslim immigrant named Abdoullakh Abouyedovich Anzorov (who’d been expelled from his native Chechen village for stealing all their letters) paid a visit to Paty’s school. He slipped two students 300€ (about $357) to identify Paty as he left for the day. And what teenager wouldn’t assist in an assassination for $357?

Apparently not a French one.

Abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz followed Paty down the street and cut off his head and limbs (Pieces Be Upon Him).

Maybe remote learning is safer for teachers.

Soon enough, the schoolgirl’s classmates grassed her out to the cops for faking the accusation against Paty, because the only time teens will do the right thing is if they can fuck up another teen in the process.

And now everyone’s been arrested: the dad, the girl, the dad’s imam, the paid-off students…all but the assassin, who was shot to death (Lead Be Inside Him).

Writing on Twitter, National Review’s A.G. Hamilton lamented the fact that the girl is facing legal consequences for causing the teacher’s death. “Not sure criminal charges are appropriate,” the “conservative” pundit wrote. “This girl will have to live with this for the rest of her life.”

Yes, psychopaths are terribly sensitive souls. She just needs to sit there and think about what she’s done. That’ll be punishment enough.

Apparently, that “acting at all times like a gullible idiot” thing applies to certain “conservatives,” too.

DOCTOR “HEEL” THYSELF
It’s been a rough few weeks for our nation’s greatest “heroes”—teachers and medical workers. Two weeks ago, the entire school board in Oakley, Calif., was forced to resign after accidentally setting their Zoom conference to “public,” resulting in the parents of Oakley being able to hear exactly what these heroic educators actually say behind closed doors.

After dismissing parents as pot smokers who only want schools reopened so they can “have their babysitters back” (rather refreshing for teachers’-union hacks to be so honest about their skill level), and threatening to “fuck up” any parents who try to force them back into the classroom, one “hero” suddenly realizes “oh no, this is public!” to which another replies in disbelief, “Nuh-uhhhh.”

And the rest is history. Oakley is home to one of the largest alpaca farms in the state, so there’ll be no shortage of replacement school board members until a special election can be held (alpacas are more intelligent than teachers’-union thugs, and far cleaner).

But those NorCal “babysitters” got off lightly compared with poor Dr. Mitchell Katz. Last week, Katz—CEO of NYC Health + Hospitals and deputy editor of JAMA Internal Medicine—was the invited guest on the JAMA Network podcast. The episode was titled “Structural Racism for Doctors: What Is It?” The idea was to have two white guys debate the existence of “structural racism” in medicine.

No way that could go wrong.

Dr. Katz started the program by explaining that he can’t possibly be racist because oy he’s a Jew and oy his family was Holocausted so many times that oy his father told him to oy nevah be racist because racism leads to Holocaustings OY.

Unfortunately, Dr. Katz—who sounds like he looks like Professor Frink—decided to take the position that many of the disparities in health care are poverty-based rather than race-based, and the medical community should approach those disparities with class- and income-centered solutions instead of racial ones.

Denying “structural racism”? Even Raoul Wallenberg wouldn’t be able to save this Jew.

Making things worse, the nervous, neurotic Katz kept throwing in incomprehensible anecdotes, including one about a “brown-skinned African-American (?) colleague from Canada (??) who wondered why Americans identify by race instead of nationality (???) because in Canada no one cares about race (????).

At that point the topic of the podcast inadvertently switched to “High Jewish IQ: Reality or Myth?”

Needless to say, Katz was immediately denounced by “equity” organizations as a “racism denier” (oy!). The AMA was forced to apologize for the podcast, which was swiftly erased from the ’net and replaced with the anxiety-ridden voice of a new Jew, JAMA editor in chief Dr. Howard Bauchner, apologizing not only for the show, but for the clumsily worded tweet that promoted it on the JAMA Twitter page and the poorly worded description of the show on the JAMA Network site. Bauchner solemnly asked forgiveness for “the harms caused by the podcast and the tweet about the podcast.” “Harms” indeed. Just think how many seriously ill black people will now refuse to seek medical attention because a jittery Jew on a podcast they never listen to sponsored by a publication they never read made some clumsy comments that were live for about 24 hours before being scrubbed.

Because of Dr. Katz, there’ll be a new generation of untreated Tuskegee syphilitics.

The Holocausted has become the Holocauster.

Katz ’n’ JAMAs forgot the first lesson of being a medical professional in the Covid era: If you’re going to do media, confine your activities to lectures about masks and TikTok dancing videos.

After all, that’s what heroes do.

BLACK EDITOR SLAMMED FOR SLANTED COVERAGE AND YELLOW JOURNALISM
It’s an open question whether any teens actually read Teen Vogue. The Condé Nast-owned magazine seems to function as an outlet for adults to publish the most idiotic far-left and sexually provocative drivel imaginable, to an audience of social media conservatives who react predictably with outrage at each new piece of excremental content.

Some past Teen Vogue masterpieces include “Sexting Should Make You Feel Good,” “How to Sext: The Best Tips and Tricks,” “Women Have Always Been a Part of White Supremacy,” “It’s Time to End White Politics,” “Queer Liberation Means Abolish the Police,” “How to Get an Abortion as a Teen,” and the Pulitzer-nominated “Anal Sex—What You Need to Know: Anal 101 for teens, beginners and all inquisitive folk.”

Teen Vogue hires only the youngest and most far-left identity-driven social justice imbeciles, which is totally not a recipe for disaster. For surely those committed to enforcing eternal ideological purity tests will never turn on each other.

That must have been the thinking when Condé Nast hired as Teen Vogue’s new editor a proud 27-year-old black (sorry, Black) woman named Alexi McCammond. McCammond has all it takes to succeed in 2021 corporate America: the ability to pose for a photo with a look of black pride and nobility. Armed with that skill—and absolutely nothing else—McCammond has experienced a meteoric rise over the past decade, going from intern to reporter to editor at publications like Cosmopolitan, sites like Axios, and newspapers like the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. Lauded by the National Association of Black Journalists as a “leading voice” and “news leader” (and “leading lead leader”), McCammond covered the Biden campaign for NBC/MSNBC and Axios…until it came out that she was dating Biden’s deputy press secretary TJ Ducklo, who resigned after he threatened a Politico reporter who was working on a story about the relationship.

In between posing nobly and dating psychopathic Biden staffers, McCammond appears to have a weird proclivity for having her drinks drugged by strangers in bars. In a 2016 Cosmo essay, she detailed multiple instances of having her drinks drugged by strangers in bars. At the end of the piece she boasted, “I still accept drinks from strangers.” So in 2019 her drink was drugged by a stranger in a bar.

Clever girl, this one. Almost as clever as the Einsteins at Condé Nast who hired her knowing that she has a history of “offensive” tweets aimed at Asians. Yes, the owners of super-PC Teen Vogue thought they could bring in an editor to oversee the most immature and cancel-hungry newsroom in the nation, and somehow it wouldn’t be an issue that the editor had “racist” tweets.

The “posing nobly” thing works wonders on white corporate bosses, but vengeful millennial zealots don’t get swayed by that shit. So, predictably, McCammond’s old tweets about hating “stupid Asians” and the menace of “swollen Asian eyes” prompted a revolt by Teen Vogue staffers after the tweets were compiled and put on blast by Asian-American journalist Diana Tsui, who possesses the striking ability to pose for a hundred Instagram photos with the exact same lifeless expression (it’s literally like she looked at Sandra Oh and said, “I bet I can make my face even deader than yours”).

Over twenty Teen Vogue staffers signed a letter demanding McCammond’s removal. McCammond replied by apologizing for the “insensitive” tweets, pointing out that they were written when she was a teenager. The staffers responded by even more vociferously demanding her removal, as she’d called the tweets “insensitive” rather than “racist.” To which McCammond replied by calling the tweets “racist” and asking for the chance to “earn back” her employees’ trust. To which the staffers responded by linking McCammond’s old tweets to the current “epidemic” of anti-Asian violent crime (and to be fair, she is the same color as most of the assailants).

At the moment, Condé Nast is telling both sides “We hear you,” while privately regretting having ever climbed into bed with “progressive” “diverse” millennials. Likely the best course of action for the company would be to gather all the involved parties at a bar and hope that McCammond’s streak continues and this time everyone’s drink gets drugged…with lethal doses.

NEGRO FANTASY LEAGUE
It used to be a common, clichéd comedy trope to make fun of nerds who spend their time engaging in moot debates like “who’s stronger—Superman or Mighty Mouse,” or “who’d win in a fight—Captain Kirk or Indiana Jones.” The humor comes from the fact that the pathetic dweebs, lacking any real-life accomplishments of their own, find outsize satisfaction in debating the relative merits of fictional characters.

That said, with the fantasy-sports industry pulling in billions from people betting on imaginary teams, it’s become a tad more respectable to obsess over things that don’t exist and have absolutely zero real-life import. But at least fantasy sports is anchored to something genuine. The names are real names of real players. You reach a whole ’nother level of pathetic when you become emotionally invested in a fantasy league comprising things that not only don’t exist, but have zero real-world counterparts.

Did someone say “whole ’nother level of pathetic”? Cue the black leftist “intelligentsia”! With last week’s streaming release of the Eddie Murphy sequel Coming 2 America, some of the world’s greatest black minds are hard at work on the defining question of the era: Which is better, Zamunda or Wakanda?

Yes, two upscale, prosperous, well-governed, peaceful…and completely fictional African nations. And big black brains are locked in a fierce debate over which has the better government.

The BBC ran a lengthy article detailing the Zamunda vs. Wakanda dispute. The various black intellectuals interviewed for the piece agree that Coming 2 America’s Zamunda and Black Panther’s Wakanda are equally “black empowered,” so on that score, they’re both fine places to live, and black people can “take pride” in the existence of both nations.

A quick reminder that neither nation exists.

Gabrielle Tesfaye, a U.S. film director of Ethiopian and Jamaican descent, admits that Zamunda and Wakanda are “imagined states of being,” but that’s irrelevant because they’re both “connected to truth.”

Of course, one could argue that if they were “connected to truth,” the great black thinkers could debate the “true” nations and not the fictional ones.

Former Guardian scribe David Jesudason criticizes Zamunda as “a regressive kingdom, in which women can’t own businesses and male-only royalty is obligatory.” Lindiwe Dovey, film professor at the University of London and head of the African Screen Worlds project, agrees. She worries that Zamunda’s policies might skew people’s perceptions of Africa as a whole. She also laments that Coming 2 America was shot in Georgia instead of on location.

Another quick reminder: Zamunda doesn’t exist. There is no “location.”

Jesudason points out that Wakanda is “a progressive kingdom that had strong roles for women in its hierarchy. It is a nation whose rulers have cut it off from the rest of the continent, while also pretending to the outside world that it is poor to prevent other countries stealing its stocks of the precious mineral vibranium.”

Third quick reminder: Like Wakanda, vibranium doesn’t exist.

Funny (well, unfunny) enough, as the black elites were debating whether Akeem or T’Challa is a better king, in actual Africa, specifically Nigeria, 279 girls were kidnapped from a boarding school by bandits…who released them a few days later. It seems that no one was paying attention to their ransom demands, because even the Nigerians were too busy arguing over Zamunda vs. Wakanda. So the bandits sent the girls home and started planning their next extortion attempt, in which they’ll storm the royal Zamundan palace to kidnap Akeem’s daughters.

The scheme’s hit a small snag, though; the kidnappers are having a hard time finding Zamunda on a map. Surely an oversight on the part of racist cartographers who don’t understand that nonexistent African nations are just as “connected to truth” as real ones.

WRETCH-A-SKETCH
In the 1943 Popeye cartoon Happy Birthdaze, Popeye’s shipmate Shorty is about to shoot himself in the head out of loneliness. Grabbing the gun away at the last second, Popeye tries to cheer up his little buddy by suggesting that they spend shore leave together. It’s Popeye’s birthday, and Olive’s fixin’ up a sumptuous party for her sailor man. Popeye invites Shorty to share the bounty.

What Popeye doesn’t realize is that Shorty’s lonely for a reason: He’s a menace. Self-centered, destructive, thoughtless, oblivious to the damage he causes. He ruins the party, in the process causing Olive to break up with Popeye. In the final scene, an infuriated Popeye shoots Shorty dead. With a gun. The guy who can eat spinach and sock a bull into steaks or flatten a mountain with one punch just goes “fuck it” and puts a bullet in a dude.

That episode, like so many first-half-of-the-20th-century American cartoons, was banned in the 1960s for its violent content and “negative” messaging (“fuck the spinach; just pop a cap in any nigga who crosses you”).

Today’s millennial cancelers, like all young people, think they’ve invented the wheel. And indeed, cancel culture as it plays out on social media is novel. But canceling cartoons is hardly new. Warner Bros. and United Artists, for example, began censoring their “racist” cartoons in the 1960s. Nearly a dozen Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies shorts were removed from circulation due to images of African and American blacks that were, well, comically unflattering. Others, like 1946’s Bacall to Arms, were truncated (the only official version in circulation today lacks the final gag in which Humphrey Bogart smokes an exploding cigar that leaves his face blackened like a minstrel).

But it wasn’t just race that got cartoons banned. Animators in the ’40s loved to show characters blowing their brains out (check out this rather ghastly supercut of classic cartoon suicides). In the 1980s these scenes were redacted because pop psychologists decided that cartoon suicides prompt young people to do it for real (if that were true, rightists would’ve long ago launched a GoFundMe to send DVDs of those cartoons to every student at UC Berkeley).

Ever since its inception three decades ago, the Cartoon Network has maintained a laundry list of scenes cut for violence and adult themes. Conservatives have played that game too. When Republican Dan Lungren ran for California governor in 1998, he pledged to “arrest” a comic-strip character—“Zonker” from Doonesbury—for using pot (in the strip). Brian Lungren, Dan’s brother and political adviser, told the L.A. Times, “Zonker’s a real person in our society. He is not fictitious. And we should put Zonker behind bars where he belongs.”

Lungren, who bafflingly lost to Democrat Gray Davis 38% to 58%, should make a comeback with a pledge to invade Wakanda for its vibranium.

Cartoons have always been a target of censorship. Ironically, as Hollywood became more permissive in the ’60s and ’70s, censorship of cartoons increased. So last week, when Disney+ announced that it would be suppressing classic films like Dumbo, The Aristocats, and Peter Pan because of “racist” images, and when The New York Times took a day off from doxing people on Clubhouse to “cancel” Pepé Le Pew as a rapist and Speedy Gonzales as a tool of white supremacy (and when HBO announced last year that its rebooted Elmer Fudd would be banned from using a hunting rifle), we see a tradition that long predates cancel culture.

Why? Why the perennial focus on taking the fun out of cartoons?

There might be a hundred complicated psychoanalytical explanations for what drives nanny staters to attack cartoons, but in the end it probably just boils down to the fact that bitter unhappy soulless insecure scolds hate seeing people laugh.

Those killjoys should spend a day hanging out with Popeye. He knows how to deal with people like that.