Times Square, New York

Source: Bigstock

The Week’s Most Idyllic, Sibyllic, and Nyctophilic Headlines

JUNETEENTH IS BUSTIN’ OUT ALL OVER
It’s getting harder and harder to keep up with all the black-themed “holidays” each year. Already we’ve had MLK Day (Jan. 18), Black History Month (February), Rosa Parks Day (Feb. 4), Black Love Day (Feb. 13), Frederick Douglass Day (Feb. 14), Harriet Tubman Day (March 10), Emancipation Day (April 16), Duke Ellington Day (April 29), Malt Liquor Day (May 5), The Guy Who Does the Jittery Shaky Dance in the “Beat It” Video Day (May 14), and Violent Rage Over Something Trivial Day (ongoing).

And the year’s not even half over!

Next month, the nation will observe “Juneteenth,” a formerly little-known unofficial holiday made widely known and very official last year following weeks of BLM violence during what could be referred to as Black Fistory Month. For those who may not know, Juneteenth is a day of observance that marks the moment on June 19, 1865, when news of the Emancipation Proclamation, which had been signed three years earlier, finally reached the slaves of Texas. For some odd reason, white Texans had not yet informed their slaves that they were free (what could possibly have been the motivation for that?). Upon hearing the news, black Texans declared a day of celebration: Juneteenth, a portmanteau of June and nineteenth. It soon became a day marked by blacks in all states.

Whites in Texas declared their own day of mourning, called Junedamfoudout, a portmanteau of June and “Damn, they found out.”

Now that Juneteenth is an actual official holiday, whites are struggling to find the best way to join in the celebration. Traditionally, the proper manner of expressing “Happy Juneteenth” to a black person is to give him three-year-old news that he didn’t already know.

White Guy: “You ever heard of Lowrell Simon?”

Black Guy: “Nope.”

White Guy: “He was a soul singer. Founded the Vondells.”

Black Guy: “Oh, cool.”

White Guy: “Well he died on June 19, 2018.”

Black Guy: “Damn, I didn’t know that.”

White Guy: “Happy Juneteenth, jackass.”

If that’s the right way to celebrate Juneteenth, what Old Navy tried to do last week was most assuredly the wrong way. The geniuses who run the clothing giant decided that the best strategy for making some coin off this whole “woke” thing would be to sell a line of Juneteenth T-shirts in their stores and online all throughout May and June. It was either that or commemorative George Floyd shirts (100% cotton for breathability; comes with a complimentary choker).

The same rocket scientists who thought BLM would react positively to a non-black-owned mega-corp selling Juneteenth merch also decided that the best way to hawk these exciting woke items would be through the dynamic youthful world of social media “influencers.” So, acting through a talent agency that represents these Instagram wastes of plasma, Old Navy reached out to “black Instagram” to persuade its biggest stars to promote the Juneteenth shirts.

Now, Old Navy CEO Sonia Syngal is an India-born Canadian, so it’s understood that she might not know much about black Americans. She’s also in her 50s, which makes it understandable that she might not know much about influencer culture, either. But it’s astounding that no one down the line picked up on one very key similarity between blacks and influencers: They like free stuff. Old Navy told those black influencers that they’d have to buy their own Juneteenth shirts…in order to shill them so that Old Navy could make the profit.

Most influencers actually charge a fee to do that kind of thing, but even if they don’t, free merch is the rule not the exception.

Well, black Instagram certainly “influenced,” just not in the way Old Navy wanted. The reaction to Old Navy’s “buy yo’ own shirts” policy was so overwhelmingly negative, last week the company scrapped the entire plan. And for Syngal, who’s overseen a dramatic decline in Old Navy sales due to a number of poor business decisions, the Juneteenth debacle was yet another bud-bud-bad move.

So this Juneteenth, celebrants are going to have to find something else to wear…although most will likely just don whatever they can grab from the store they’re looting.

BLACK IN WHITEFACE
“Negro poet” and drunken wife-beater Paul Lawrence Dunbar’s 1895 poem “We Wear the Mask” is considered a classic of the genre:

We wear the mask that grins and lies,
It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,
This debt we pay to human guile;
With torn and bleeding hearts we smile.
And when we burglarize your place,
The mask we wear upon our face,
Looks a lot like Harry Potter…
Man, why you pullin’ me over? I wasn’t even doin’ nuthin’.

Rockim Prowell is a 33-year-old black man from Inglewood with a simple dream: rob the living hell out of them rich whiteys in Beverly Hills. Rockim Prowell is also a guy who’s apparently seen the Mission: Impossible films a few times too many. He hatched a brilliant plan for his burglary spree: He’d disguise himself as a white boy! He bought one of those lifelike human masks, complete with wavy, messy brown Harry Potter hair and glasses. And off he went, to cast a vanishing spell on the possessions of the mugglesteins of Beverly Hills.

And here’s where BLM and other so-called black “representatives” failed one of their community’s finest. By constantly repeating the falsehood that black men are being targeted by cops, that a black man can’t even walk down a street without getting arrested for doin’ nuthin’, these “black leaders” convinced Prowell that if he just committed his burglaries as a whitey, he’d be left alone.

In fact, just the opposite is true. Prowell should’ve been reading VDARE, not Salon. Because then he would’ve learned that in fact it’s only white wanted criminals who get their pictures and full descriptions included in media crime reports. Yep, Rockim Sockim Robot screwed up royally. Every newspaper and local TV station broadcast and tweeted security camera pics and descriptions of the “Harry Potter bandit,” including info about the car he drove.

Had the burglar been understood to be black, it’s likely the media would’ve ignored the story. But by being white—by giving the L.A. press the chance to highlight a non-black criminal—Prowell brought so much heat down on himself, it was only a matter of time before someone spotted his vehicle.

Poor bastard…you can wear Harry Potter’s face, but that doesn’t mean you’ll absorb his wisdom.

And indeed, last week the Beverly Hills PD pulled Prowell over. And any initial confusion the officers had regarding the race of the driver vs. the race of the suspect was soon cleared up when they found the white-boy mask and burglary booty in the guy’s backseat.

Also, the car itself was stolen.

Prowell was booked on multiple counts of burglary, grand theft, and vandalism. And the ignominies didn’t end there; Beverly Hills cops forced him to put the mask back on so that a shaggy stoner, a bespectacled fat girl, a pretty skinny girl, and a tall blond guy and their Great Dane could pull it off. He was then forced to say, “And I’d have gotten away with it too if it weren’t for you meddling kids.”

A spokesman for the BHPD said, “We couldn’t help ourselves; when’s an opportunity like that ever gonna come around again?”

L.A. County’s Soros-backed DA George Gascon is currently deciding whether Prowell will be prosecuted as a white man, in which case the DA’s office would seek the maximum penalty, or a black man, in which case he’d be freed with an apology and a gift basket.

And California governor Gavin Newsom has declared Prowell one of the “heroes of Covid” for his dedication to wearing a mask, even when alone.

“I just wish it hadn’t been a Harry Potter mask,” Newsom told The Sacramento Bee. “That J.K. Rowling is so transphobic.”

“BUY MY PAPER, YOU MISERABLE RACISTS!”
Patrick Soon-Shiong is a man on a mission. The billionaire businessman, surgeon, and bioscientist wants to prove to the world that even the highest-IQ Chinaman can be dumb as a hammer and not nearly as useful.

Soon-Shiong owns the Los Angeles Times, which he purchased for $500,000,000 in cash in 2018. Analysts have suggested that Soon-Shiong was overcharged for the property by roughly $499,999,995.75.

The L.A. Times makes the post-iceberg Titanic look buoyant. In two decades the rag has gone from subscription numbers in the multiple millions to numbers in the multiple hundred thousands. There’s been a bankruptcy, mass staff layoffs, and a revolving door of incompetent editors. Even digitally, the Times manages to be the village idiot in a village of idiots. The New York Times boasts 6.9 million online subscribers. The Wall Street Journal, 2.2 million. The Washington Post, 1.7 million. The L.A. Times? 240,000 (and that’s due to a “pandemic lockdown bump.” Prior to Covid, it was only 170,000).

Soon-Shiong’s money would have been better spent being committed to fire in a Buddhist temple as an offering to his ancestors.

Last August, Times staffers told The Wrap that the paper was engaging in deceptive practices in order to attract new subscribers. Now, why would a newspaper have to trick people into reading it? And why would the only major paper in a city the size of L.A. not have readers?

Baffling! Or…not. Over 50% of Times readers are over 50 years of age (almost 35% are over 60). And although the Times doesn’t release reader breakdowns by race, the stats likely mirror those of The New York Times—71% white. So, you have a paper with an older, white base of likely readers, and an editorial bent that can be summed up as “Screw you, whitey.”

A small sampling of recent headlines:

“The burden of ending racism sits squarely on white people” (5/29/20)
“I sat and watched ‘Black Panther’ and thought about what smug hypocrites white people can be” (6/1/20)
“White women still can’t stop calling police on black people” (6/3/20)
“White people are, at long last, seeing the light: they’re racist!” (6/11/20)
“In the midst of a racial reckoning, what does whiteness mean” (6/15/20)
“Aunt Jemima and Uncle Ben aren’t just racist symbols, they flatten culture for white consumption” (6/17/20)
“How white people used police to make L.A. one of the most segregated cities in America” (8/11/20)
“White people will contort themselves to justify the police killing of Black people” (9/2/20)
“How white people gentrified Black Lives Matter” (9/8/20)
“White scholars try to pass as Black” (10/8/20)
“The Capitol marauders proved how dangerous white anger, and white privilege, is to democracy” (1/19/21)
“The white privilege that’s undermining vaccine equity” (2/3/21)
“This year, Black History Month has been overtaken by white history made on Jan. 6” (2/19/21)
“If you’re a white person, you’re not going to face racism” (4/16/21)

And that’s just from the past year.

And there’s poor Patrick Soon-Shiong, sitting at home, out a half-billion bucks, drowning his sorrows in baijiu and screaming, “I no understand! Why you no reedy my paper?”

But Soon-Shiong isn’t some ordinary dummy. No, he’s an extraordinary one. He hatched a brilliant plan to dig himself out of the Nanking mass grave in which he now sits. Does that plan involve shifting the paper’s obsessive editorial focus so that readers aren’t told on a daily basis, “You’re evil racist devils and the city would be better off without you”?

Nope! He’s asking Joe Biden to bail him out. Having already received a $10 million pandemic assistance loan, Soon-Shiong wants more government green. “I’m not asking the government to do anything drastic, but they have to step in and find a way to support the viability of this whole industry,” he told Bloomberg last week.

Fitting how a person brought up using a byzantine and impenetrable “alphabet” finds it so hard to recognize the simple, linear solution to a problem. The Times is not “viable” because readers don’t want to read day after day about how vile they are. Tucker Carlson could break wind live on air and it would be seen by more people than read the L.A. Times in an entire week.

It would be more informative than the Times, too.

The White House has not yet responded to Soon-Shiong’s request for a bailout. Sources say that President Biden used to read the Times for Marmaduke, but he stopped when the strip became too complicated for him to understand.

TIMES SQUARENDIPITY
It was like one of those movies with interlocking story lines, where the audience follows parallel plots with no idea how they’ll converge at the end. Like Paul Thomas Anderson’s noble failure Magnolia or Paul Haggis’ lamentable success Crash.

Story line No. 1: Times Square, New York, May 8 A black street thug named Farrakhan Muhammad is selling CDs on the street. And of course he’s a thug. His name is Farrakhan Muhammad; his destiny was cast the moment his momma named him. You name a baby “Farrakhan Muhammad,” it doesn’t get a social security number; it gets a parole officer.

For some reason, while busking his CDs, Farrakhan decided to start spraying the area with gunfire. The reason is unclear. Some news reports suggest he was in a dispute with another vendor who may have been his brother. Perhaps the dispute was over something weighty, a matter worthy of Cain and Abel. On the other hand, maybe it was over borrowed sneakers or an errant text from a stripper named Tyqwando.

In the end, does it matter? Of course not, as Farrakhan’s aim was as poor as his life choices. He missed his target but hit two female tourists and a 4-year-old girl. Thankfully, none of the injuries were fatal, as Farrakhan proved to be a failure even as an accidental murderer.

Now on the lam, Farrakhan Muhammad took off in his car, yelling out the window, “I still say The Bell Curve makes a flawed and inaccurate case for racial IQ differences.”

Story line No. 2: Somewhere in Russia, May 7 In bold defiance of their inborn predilections, members of a Russian criminal hacker gang overcome their inherently combative and uncooperative nature and stay sober and collegial enough to successfully cripple a major U.S. oil pipeline, effectively cutting off gasoline supplies to the entire Southeast. At the same time, the tech nerd who told Colonial Pipeline Co., “Let’s switch this business from relying on burly men turning giant valves to sickly dweebs pushing buttons on a Mac,” realizes that his vision of one day getting laid has moved forever beyond his reach as gas stations throughout the Gulf States run dry and people start to wonder why an oil pipeline can now freeze like Windows 10.

Story line No. 1: May 11 Farrakhan Muhammad races south in his gas-guzzling SUV. He’s made it all the way from New York to Florida, but his dedication to rap music has kept his radio tuned to 95.9 BUTT-FM, a station that plays nothing but songs about large rear ends. His love of hardcore rhymes about generous posteriors has prevented him from sampling the news channels. He is unaware of the gasoline shortage.

Story line No. 2: May 12 The Russian hackers get drunk and murder each other for no other reason than that they’re Russian. And Russians never need a reason to be violently contentious.

Story line No. 1: May 12 Farrakhan Muhammad runs out of gas in Starke, Fla.—population three meth-heads, a gator with cataracts, and two senile elderly Jews who aren’t sure if they survived the Holocaust or sat through a really bad Eddie Cantor concert in 1943. Baffled by the lack of open gas stations, Muhammad pulls his sputtering vehicle into a McDonald’s parking lot and buys some food.

Recognized by a patron (one of the cataract gators), the police are called. Farrakhan Muhammad is taken into custody. He gives an interview to a local TV station, in which he claims that he’s the victim of a racist white man with a Confederate flag who frightened him and for some reason that’s why he was framed for the Times Square shooting. That’s literally the best excuse he can come up with.

He then has a great revelation that The Bell Curve was right after all. He sits in his holding cell, staring blankly at a wall, his worldview shattered.

Epilogue: New York mayor and anthropomorphic stoma bag Bill de Blasio, stung by the international attention the Times Square shooting brought to his city’s violent crime surge, reverses himself on his “defund the police” fanaticism and pledges to increase the NYPD budget by $105 million.

Russian hackers, a black CD busker, shuttered Florida gas stations, and a fraudulent mayor named Wilhelm…and at the end of the day, the characters converge to create a happy ending. No innocents killed, a thug in jail, and the people of NYC slightly safer.

Grading on a curve by the standards of these troublesome days, that’s about the best outcome anyone could expect.

MAY YOU ONLY SEE THE BACKS OF THEIR HEADS
It was a time of fear…it was a time of panic. It was the Day of the Driver’s License!

Michelle Obama has a tale of horror to tell. A real sp-sp-spooky campfire story. So gather round the burning Rite Aid, and prepare to get the shivers!

“Former first lady Michelle Obama has revealed she is terrified that even her two daughters will be racially profiled when they’re in the car alone,” reported the New York Post.

Every time they get in a car by themselves, I worry about what assumption is being made by somebody who doesn’t know everything about them. The fact that they are good students and polite girls, but maybe they’re playing their music a little loud, maybe somebody sees the back of their head and makes an assumption. I, like so many parents of black kids…the innocent act of getting a license puts fear in our hearts. Many of us [blacks] still live in fear as we go to the grocery store, walking our dogs. I think we have to talk about it more. And we have to ask our fellow citizens to listen a bit more, and to believe us, and to know we don’t wanna be out there marching.

That would make sense if Michelle’s black activist buddies actually were “marching.” But instead they’re assaulting and looting, which probably is something they “wanna be” doing.

Michelle’s scare-tastical tale of terror, obviously intended to portray young blacks as shrinking violets quaking in fear of cars because someone might see “the back of their head” and “make assumptions,” doesn’t exactly jibe with real-life events. Indeed, reality dictates that the risk to young black wannabe drivers who are seen from behind is nothing compared with the risk to whites who have the misfortune of seeing young black wannabe drivers from the front.

The very day that ’chelle was spinning her yarn, two black kids in San Leandro, Calif. (adjacent to the anal fissure known as Oakland), mugged and beat an 80-year-old Asian man—giggling as the old guy cried out in pain—and then robbed a Hispanic man, and then carjacked someone else, before finally getting caught. The thug who was caught driving the carjacked vehicle? 11 years old. His accomplice was 17. But the 11-year-old was the driver.

Apparently, Michelle Obama’s story frightened him so much, he didn’t want to risk getting his license. Fortunately, none of the 11-year-old’s victims made any “assumptions” based on “the back of his head.”

The previous week, also in San Leandro, two other black kids tried to carjack an adult white male in broad daylight (as their two accomplices waited in a getaway car, also stolen). This time, the victim fought back, body-slamming one of the youths and making him squeal like a fragile little girl. When cops caught up with the kids, they found that they were ages 11 to 14.

More black kids scared to death of getting their driver’s licenses, lest the people they mug, beat, and carjack make “assumptions” about them based on “the back of their head.”

Michelle Obama’s shocking tale of suspense might strike fear into the hearts of her fellow eternally griping “professional” black victims, but for people in San Leandro, and in cities all over the nation, it’s a bit hard to fear for those kids when there are so many legitimate reasons to have fear of them.

And that fear isn’t based on “assumptions,” but statistics and probability.