One of the characteristics of the present age, no doubt a consequence of the expansion of tertiary education beyond the capacity of people to benefit from it, is the prevalence of intellection without intellect.

Mr. Charles Norman, of this magazine, is kind enough sometimes (actually, quite often) to furnish me with examples of absurdity that he thinks, rightly, that I might have overlooked. Recently, for example, he drew my attention to the work—if “work” is quite the word I seek—of Amy Ireland. An Australian intellectual, Dr. Ireland has a PhD from the University of New South Wales. Her style seems to be a mixture of polysyllabic verbigeration and neologism, giving to her prose barely more meaning than the word salad of deteriorated schizophrenics. It does, however, manage to convey a savor of self-satisfied knowingness.

Last year, with someone called Maya B. Kronic, who apparently likes to be referred to as “they,” she published a book with the title Cute Accelerationism. Possessed of a bright pink cover in the most abominable taste, Amazon described it thus, I assume at the request of the writer or publisher:

An impassioned philosophical celebration of the multiple dimensions of contemporary cuteness.

“These are adolescent musings dressed up in all but impenetrable jargon.”

Involuntarily sucked into the forcefield of Cute, Amy Ireland and Maya B. Kronic decided to let go, give in, let the demon ride them, and make an accelerationism out of it—only to realize that Cute opens a microcosmic gate onto the transcendental process of acceleration itself.

Joining the swarming e-girls, t-girls, NEETS, anons, and otaku who rescued accelerationism from the double pincers of media panic and academic buzzkill by introducing it to big eyes, fluffy ears, programming socks, and silly memes, they discover that the objects of cute culture are just spinoffs of an accelerative process booping us from the future, rendering us all submissive, breedable, helpless, and cute in our turn. Cute comes tomorrow, and only anastrophe can make sense of what it will have been doing to us.

Evading all discipline, sliding across all possible surfaces, Cute Accelerationism embraces every detail of the symptomatology, aetiology, epidemiology, history, biology, etymology, topology, and even embryology of Cute, joyfully burrowing down into its natural, cultural, sensory, sexual, subjective, erotic, and semiotic dimensions in order to sound out the latent spaces of this Thing that has soft-soaped its way into human culture.

Traversing tangents on natural and unnatural selection, runaway supernormalisation, the collective self-transformation of genderswarming cuties, the hyperstitional cultures of shojo and otaku, denpa and 2D love, and the cute subworlds of aegyo and meng, moé and flatmaxxing, catboys and dogon eggs, bobbles and gummies, vore machines and partial objects, BwOs and UwUs…glomping, snuggling, smooshing and squeeeeing their way toward the event horizon of Cute, donning cat ears and popping bubbles as they go, in this untimely philosophical intensification of an omnipresent phenomenon, having surrendered to the squishiest demonic possession, like, ever, two bffs set out in search of the transcendental shape of cuteness only to realize that, even though it is all around us, we do not yet know what Cute can do.

Seriously superficial and bafflingly coherent, half erudite philosophical treatise, half dariacore mashup, 100 percent cutagion, this compact lil’ textual machine is a meltdown and a glow up, as well as a twizzled homage to Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus. Welcome to the kawaiizome: nothing uncute makes it out of the near future, and the cute will very soon no longer be even remotely human.

In the book itself, we read:

Throughout the derelicted warrens at the heart of yassness, feral youth cultures get off on allowing themselves to be invested by artificialized desires that migrate them to new spaces of networked inhuman affect. “Revolution is not a duty but surrender”: Go with what you want even and especially in spite of “your” self.

(Just ask Freddo: an awkward, sickly, socially isolated incel weighed down by generations of heavy bratwurst-denken, who still wanted to dance; sworn enemy of gravity, phil-LOL-ogist, who called for a gaie science, the first real theorist of the catboy, a child with lion’s paws.)

As far as I can make out, this could translate to something like the following:

Youth culture is full of bogus enthusiasms and replaces real human contact by an electronic simulacrum of it. To avoid this, you should do whatever you want, especially if it is counter to conventional morality.

Ask Nietzsche (here called Freddo). He was a pathetic little introvert, inhibited by the Christian past, who dreamed of being a practicing psychopath. He was the first philosopher to suggest that this would be a good idea.

These are adolescent musings dressed up in all but impenetrable jargon. But on further search, I discovered that there was a subculture in which it passed for philosophy. Published by the same company as Cute Accelerationism is Revolutionary Demonism by the Gruppo di Nun, the latter being “a collective of psycho-activists aimed at organising forms of occult resistance to hetero-patriarchal dogma, promoting an alternative form of ceremonial magick based on a non-dual Love for the entropic disintegration of the cosmos.”

In this learned work, we learn that “The occult thermodynamics of separation is fascist time sorcery that provokes locally polarised flows of energy,” and that “Pain should be understood as a radical form of insurrection…. With each spasm we urge our reluctant ego into the flames of sacrifice. Blood must be shed to the last drop in order that the light of the fire should rise splendidly in the night.”

This is surely a case of fascists calling fascists fascist.

Does any of this arcane drivel matter? It must reach a very small audience, after all. As the late Francisco Franco said when he was shown some art that was said to be revolutionary, “So long as they keep revolution to art.”

It came as a shock (at least to me) to find that the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, a respectable university press some of whose learned publications I have read and even reviewed, distributes these books and even advertises them on its website. I cannot believe that it does so for purely commercial reasons, which would be understandable if not very glorious. On the contrary, there is probably a powerful person, or powerful persons, in the press itself who considers this stuff of value. O tempora, o mores!

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

This Kushner-less Trump presidency is fantastic! Instead of the president’s son-in-law releasing criminals, Rep. Paul Ryan prioritizing tax cuts over the wall, and Kushner pal Gary Cohn preserving Wall Street’s tax boondoggles, we’re finally getting all that great immigration stuff Trump ran on in 2016. (Maybe he finally read In Trump We Trust and remembered how fantastic he was.)

Trump’s most important executive order is the one that returns to the American people the ability to determine who becomes a citizen. The way things are now, that decision is put in the hands of illegal aliens, who are here against our will and in violation of our laws or — in the case of birth tourism — in the hands of the Chinese government.

Apart from trivialities such as there being no law, no court ruling and no history to support treating kids born to illegals and tourists as “citizens,” it’s preposterous that America would cede control over who becomes a citizen to foreigners.

The media’s incessant references to “birthright citizenship” — I’m looking at you, New York Times — deceptively suggest that the Constitution already contains a right to citizenship for anyone born here. There is no such right, and no sane nation would create one.

The constitutional provision allegedly bestowing this right is the 14th Amendment, one of the Civil War amendments, guaranteeing full citizenship rights to former slaves.

Give me a scenario — it doesn’t have to be true, give me any scenario — where, immediately after the Civil War, Americans felt compelled to amend our Constitution so that, 100 years hence, a pregnant Mexican could run across the border, drop a kid, and that kid would be a citizen, entitled to all welfare and education benefits, who could then bring in six more relatives.

You’re telling me that if a foreigner sneaks into our country and has a baby, that kid isn’t already a citizen? Damn straight we have to fix that!

Obviously, the Civil War amendments were exclusively about slavery — as the Supreme Court has repeatedly held.

The trick was to write an amendment stating that former slaves were citizens — without acknowledging the institution of slavery, an embarrassment in a country founded on the idea that all men are created equal.

To refer to former slaves, the drafters chose the phrase “subject to the jurisdiction thereof.” At that point, newly freed slaves had been “subject to the jurisdiction” of the U.S. for nearly a century. (By contrast, if we don’t even know you’re here, you can’t be subject to our “jurisdiction.”)

In one misbegotten case, United States v. Wong Kim Ark, a divided court extended 14th Amendment citizenship rights to the son of legal Chinese laborers. (The Chinese Exclusion Act had been passed 16 years earlier and would remain in full force and effect for another half-century. Way to read a room, Supreme Court!)

That case was probably wrongly decided — as the Yale Law Journal argued at the time — but in any event, it has nothing to do with Trump’s executive order, which is about illegal immigrants and tourists, not legal residents.

One thing Wong Kim Ark definitely didn’t do was grant a constitutional right of citizenship to anyone who happens to be born here. First, children born to diplomats and heads of state were excluded.

Second, well into the 20th century, white Europeans born on U.S. soil — whose great-grandparents may have come on the Mayflower — were denied citizenship if they were women married to an immigrant.

Progressives have bullied Americans into believing that the post-Civil War amendments had nothing to do with slavery. Forget the Middle Passage, Gettysburg, Ulysses S. Grant and the 600,000 men dead as a result — they claim Americans rushed to add these amendments to the Constitution just after a bloody civil war to ensure the happiness and well-being of illegal aliens.

Like everything with the left, in five minutes, we go from the manifestly absurd to constitutional right. We had the body, we had witnesses, we had fingerprints, we had his confession. Damn — we forgot to read him his Miranda rights! You’re free to go, sir.

Similarly, under the “birthright citizenship” idiocy, enemies of the state, giant sucks on our welfare system, spies and terrorists — “U.S. citizens” all! Just sneak past our border agents, have a baby and Ha-ha — you didn’t catch me and now my kid’s a citizen!

The wife of the world’s biggest drug lord, Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, Emma Coronel — herself an anchor baby — briefly left the cartel’s hideout in Mexico in 2011 to give birth in California, for the express purpose of forcing this country to accept her twins as “American citizens.” It’s like gold chain migration.

Unfortunately for the left, Trump is not, in fact, a dictator. His executive order on citizenship is a good way to start his presidency with a bang, but given recent history, Republicans surely understand that it will be revoked on Day One by the next Democrat to sit in the Oval Office. Congress needs to make it law.

Congress unquestionably has the power to exclude anchor babies and birth tourism babies from U.S. citizenship. As legal giant Judge Richard Posner said in a concurring opinion 20 years ago, “This rule [that birth on U.S. soil confers citizenship], though thought by some compelled by Section 1 of the 14th Amendment … makes no sense. … The purpose of the rule was to grant citizenship to the recently freed slaves … Congress would not be flouting the Constitution if it amended the Immigration and Nationality Act to put an end to the nonsense.”

Harry and Meghan looked like ambulance chasers in burning Los Angeles a couple of weeks ago, but acting like virtue-signaling disaster tourists is what they do best. It does not surprise me. For those of you who don’t read comic books or gossip columns, they’re also known as the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, he a Brit and she an American of mixed race. They’ve both become richer of late thanks to the lawsuit they brought against the Murdoch newspapers in London. Enough said.

Self-flattering PR stunts are nothing new in La-La Land. For publicity-addicted freaks like Paris Hilton the catastrophe had its positive side: She got on the news posing in front of her burned-out Malibu house. The ones my heart bleeds for are those folks in Altadena, working types, as far removed from the phonies of Hollywood as Meghan and Harry from the real world. I’ve never met either one. I was a friend of his mother, Princess Di, and I believe I was the last one to speak with her before the Paris car crash that killed her.

Never mind. I’ve written about this before. Diana and I became friends after she asked to meet me at a rather grand ball in London. I was in my cups, and when she pointed at a chair next to her and asked me to “Sit here and tell me why you write that I’m a madwoman,” I missed the chair and fell under the table. She burst out laughing, bent down, and heard me mutter, “All I know is I’m mad about you.”

Diana was a shrewd, extremely nice girl who was completely uneducated but kind and well-meaning. She asked me over to Kensington Place for lunch a couple of times and came over to my place for three dinners I gave so she could meet pro-Diana journalists. There was absolutely no hanky-panky. She didn’t appear to me at all insightful, was always on guard, très comme il faut, but empty in a way. I knew most of her lovers, and they too were empty somehow. Tina Brown, who got a bestselling book out of the one meeting with others present she had with Di, did her homework, but it was mostly guesswork. Diana’s last boyfriend, as vile a character and liar as there ever was, proved what an empty vessel or how confused she was at the time. I always believed and still do that Charles was a spoiled shit who treated her badly and turned her into a nutcase. A man can cheat all he wants in my book, but he’s obliged to treat the wife with love, honor, and gentleness. Dumbo ears did neither and got away with even blackening her name. She was a lost soul by the time Charlie Windsor got through with her. Harry takes after her. He’s not very smart and is being played like a Stradivarius by Meghan.

A glossy monthly is the latest to “expose” the life of Meghan and Harry, but take it from me, it’s all bull, gossip picked up from desperate so-called journalists from all over. Writers for these mags have no access and don’t know those who know the people they write about. Meghan is hardly the first woman from a modest background to pull rank on people she deems inferior. That is exactly what separates people like her from people like, er…her late mother-in-law to be. It’s very simple, really. The Brits genuflect and ring-kiss royals, the rest of us do not. Meghan got a taste of Brit ass-licking and took it seriously. It doesn’t work in America, nor does it work in Britain unless you’re the real McCoy. Americans genuflect to celebrities, the Brits kneel down for royals and rock stars, whereas Greeks like yours truly only bow their heads to military heroes like Erwin Rommel and George Patton.

And let’s face it. Those claiming long-term therapy needed after working for Meghan need long-term therapy for mendacity and defamation. Exaggeration is as normal as victimhood today, especially in English-speaking countries. (It must be the water.) Both Harry and Meghan see themselves as victims, as do those who worked for them. Victims Anonymous is what I recommend for everyone involved.

With the 2025 Super Bowl eleven days away, much seems to be going well for the National Football League.

For example, the current decline of wokeness reduces the concern aroused during the Colin Kaepernick era that this inherently conservative game would self-destruct over race.

The NFL remains the most broadly popular sport, and perhaps institution, in diverse America. Whereas, say, the World Series, the Olympics, and the Academy Awards could once be compared in popular appeal with the Super Bowl, these days the Super Bowl stands alone at still unifying the attention of Americans, who are increasingly distracted by The Algorithm delivering on social media exactly what they’d personally find most diverting.

Meanwhile, the biggest black complaint about the NFL, the lack of star black quarterbacks relative to their abundance at most other positions, appears to be resolving itself the right way via numerous fine black quarterbacks emerging in this decade. This year’s Super Bowl matchup of the black Jalen Hurts of the Philadelphia Eagles versus the half-black Patrick Mahomes of the Kansas City Chiefs follows their confrontation in 2023 as only the second Super Bowl in which neither starting QB was all-white.

Counting the mixed-race Mahomes and Kaepernick as black, through 2025, blacks will have made up fourteen of the 118 starting quarterbacks in the Super Bowl (12 percent), about their share of the U.S. population.

Nobody much cares that other races than black and white haven’t been much represented recently. The part-American Indian and part-Mexican Jim Plunkett won two Super Bowls in 1980 and 1983, and the part-Mexican Joe Kapp lost one in 1969, but nobody not white or black has been involved since.

But liberals define representation in this case not by the black share of the country, but relative to NFL players, a majority of whom are black for reasons that progressives don’t want to talk about.

The recent rise in black quarterbacks probably goes back to the events of 2007–2008. All-time great quarterback Tom Brady of the New England Patriots typically had receivers assembled on the cheap by coach Bill Belichick, often overlooked pretty good white athletes such as Wes Welker, Chris Hogan, and Julian Edelman. But when Brady got an all-timer as a target, such as specimen tight end Rob Gronkowski, watch out. In 2007, the Patriots acquired the historic black deep threat Randy Moss, who caught a record 23 touchdown passes as Brady threw for a then-record fifty.

But then in the first game of 2008, Brady was injured for the entire season. The NFL brass started to wonder whether it would be sissy of them to start changing rules to keep their biggest stars from being sidelined so often.

The initial result of the various rule changes to reduce the NFL’s old ultraviolence was to extend the careers of the veteran white pocket passing quarterbacks like Brady, Drew Brees, the Manning brothers, Aaron Rodgers, Ben Roethlisberger, and Philip Rivers. Thus, Brady won his seventh Super Bowl in 2021 at age 43.

Over time, however, the new rules protecting quarterbacks made more feasible the ancient dream of black quarterbacks who could both pass and run without quickly getting ground into a pulp like running backs usually are.

Running backs like Jim Brown and O.J. Simpson used to be huge stars, but over time rushers had become disposable cogs. This year, however, two veterans, Derrick Henry and Saquon Barkley, had massive seasons. Hopefully, that’s a sign that the new rules mean running backs aren’t getting chewed up in just a few years.

Black quarterbacks often used to start off brilliantly, like Vince Young or Robert Griffin III. But their ability to run out of trouble during their youths usually kept them from developing as pocket passers after injuries sapped their quick-cutting running talent.

This doesn’t mean there wasn’t discrimination based on racial stereotypes against black quarterbacks with pocket passer skills. The clearest example is Warren Moon. After winning the Jan. 1, 1978, Rose Bowl for Washington, Moon went undrafted by the NFL because he refused to switch to another position such as tight end, saying he wasn’t a good enough athlete to play any position other than QB. So he went to the Canadian Football League and in six years with the Edmonton Eskimos won five Grey Cups, before coming to the NFL and playing seventeen seasons.

Similarly, after white Doug Flutie washed out of the NFL for being too short, he went to the CFL and won six Most Outstanding Player awards before returning to the NFL and making it to the Pro Bowl.

In contrast, Colin Kaepernick didn’t bother to go to the CFL to show he still belonged in the NFL.

Less publicized is that Cooper DeJean, a white cornerback, will likely start for the Eagles in the Super Bowl. The last white cornerback to start a Super Bowl was Jason Sehorn two dozen years ago in 2001.

A rookie out of the U. of Iowa, DeJean took over the starting job midway into the season, started nine regular-season games and all the playoff games, and made the Pro Football Writers Association All-Rookie team as a cornerback.

No nonblack player had been a regular starter at cornerback since 2003 (the white Sehorn and the half-white and half-Thai Kevin Kaesviharn started at cornerback that year, but both shifted to safety in 2004).

But this year, DeJean’s former teammate at Iowa, Riley Moss, started fourteen games at corner for the Denver Broncos. (A third, Ethan Bonner of the Miami Dolphins, played a few snaps at corner over the past two seasons.)

Why were there no white cornerbacks over the past two decades, until the U. of Iowa apparently discovered a niche it could exploit?

There used to be a saying in the corporate world that nobody ever got fired for buying IBM. Similarly, few coaches got fired for playing white quarterbacks or black cornerbacks. Granted, you could eventually get fired for consistently losing while playing stereotypical players at their stereotypical positions, but a coach’s nightmare was getting fired on Monday morning because his white cornerback got burned for two touchdowns in a single loss.

Similarly, coaches didn’t get fired for punting on fourth down. These days, advanced analytics have shown that teams punted too much, so the four teams in the conference finals on Sunday punted only seven times but went for it on fourth down fourteen times, succeeding ten times.

Some of this is due to advanced statistical analytics finally coming to football. In 1947, the greatest baseball executive, Branch Rickey, hired the first sophisticated baseball statistician, Allan Roth, the same year Rickey broke the color line with Jackie Robinson. In contrast, football coaches didn’t need analytics as much because they watched countless hours of game film. As catcher Yogi Berra pointed out, you can observe a lot just by watching.

On the other hand, football coaches worked out a handful of customs at which they all agreed in order to make their careers less stressful, such as automatically punting on practically every fourth down, not going for the two-point conversion after a touchdown, and so forth.

For example, when I was a kid, all NFL teams always ran out of the T formation in which quarterbacks took a direct snap from inches behind the center. Sure, it looked kind of gay compared with how in the 1940s the quarterback had stood five yards behind the center, but football science had proved that it was the modern way to play. Or something.

Then on Jan. 4, 1976, Tom Landry’s Dallas Cowboys went to the Super Bowl by crushing my Los Angeles Rams 37–7 by baffling the Rams with the shotgun formation. Today, it’s the dominant setup.

Around 1968, the quarterback option, in which the QB could hand off to the fullback, pitch out to trailing halfback, or keep it himself emerged as a massive weapon in college football. One advantage was that you didn’t need a 6’4″ quarterback with a rifle arm. For example, UCLA went 17–5 in 1972–1973 with future TV star Mark Harmon (St. Elsewhere and NCIS) running their wishbone offense. He couldn’t throw much, but he was a gutty kid. The military academies tend to run these offenses even today since they get few NFL-quality quarterbacks but lots of brave little guys who love football.

Analytics have tended to make other sports worse, such as the NBA’s current emphasis on three-point shooting and the MLB’s on hitting homers and getting fresh pitchers into the game. But it seems likely that statistics have made the NFL better: fewer punts on fourth down, more mobile quarterbacks, more emphasis on giving the ball to your best player on the crucial downs (such as Los Angeles Rams wide receiver Cooper Kupp’s fourth-down end around in the 2022 Super Bowl), and the return of the option play on which the Bills scored by having Josh Allen pitch out at the last moment to James Cook for a touchdown.

The coming problems with football appear to be twofold: First, they’ve only slightly mitigated the concussion problem. So, it’s unlikely that NFL quarterbacks will continue to emerge from the best of the best. For example, the QBs in the 2019 Super Bowl were Tom Brady of San Mateo, Calif., and Jared Goff of Marin County, Calif. The future of the NFL looks less bourgeois, more gladiatorial.

Second, the NFL getting into bed with professional gambling is going to backfire. For example, I’ve noticed a big increase in conspiracy theorizing lately about how Patrick Mahomes’ 17–3 record in the playoffs going back to 2018 is due to his tight end Travis Kelce becoming pop star Taylor Swift’s boyfriend in 2023 and thus the NFL is obviously rigging games in Kansas City’s favor.

Granted, that’s pretty stupid. But then you didn’t lose big money betting against the Chiefs, so you aren’t as irrationally sore about it.

Furthermore, eventually so much money will be on the line that somebody will likely rig a big game.

Why take the risk?

The defining entertainment industry story of 2024 was the collapse of Hollywood, the “death of movies,” to quote the L.A. Times. The defining story of 2025 is, to quote the Times again, “Will the work ever come back?”

Taking some time off from politics (because everyone and their retarded uncle is opining on the new administration, and it bores me), I’m gonna devote the next four columns to an in-depth exploration of that question.

This week: “Fortune Favors the Fetishist.”

The “death of movies” has nothing to do with “wokeness.” If it were just a matter of too many movies with trannies and blacks, the problem would be fixed, because execs are in such a panic right now they’ll try anything, even jettisoning DEI (indeed, woke writers and showrunners are complaining that the open studio doors from 2020 are now soundly closed).

The problem, in a sentence so key to the Times piece that it’s used in the title, is that “the audience has moved on.”

It seems the audience has moved on to other things…. People have other things to do with their screens. They prefer to spend their time on YouTube and play video games on their phones.

That’s from the June 10, 2024, Times. This is from my Sept. 19, 2023, column:

So what are “the kids” spending money on? Not tickets to Batman vs. Flash: Revenge of Emperor Fuckwad. Not Netflix subscriptions. They’re spending on videogames…. A large portion of the audience has moved on to videogames, Twitch, and OnlyFans.

See, that’s why people read Dave: prescience.

The thing is, though, if you compare the 2024 Times piece to my column from 2023, you’ll notice a difference: While trying to be cutting-edge, the Times is actually behind the times, obsessing about YouTube, which has already been eclipsed by sites like Twitch (for gamers) and OnlyFans (for fapping).

In 2024 OnlyFans saw $6.6 billion in revenue. The site’s currently valued at more than $18 billion.

Singer Lily Allen told Variety last year that as popular as her music is, she makes more money from selling online photos of her feet.

“Imagine being an artist and having nearly 8 million monthly listeners on Spotify but earning more money from having 1,000 people subscribe to pictures of your feet.”

That’s the actual quote from Allen.

You cannot compare your appreciation for music to a foot fetishist’s appreciation for feet. Whatever type of music, whatever song, whatever artist is your favorite, your desire to hear that music is simply not comparable to the compulsion of a fetishist to whack off.

Lily Allen has been forced to face this reality: Yes, many people love her music. Also yes, the deviants who like her feet will pay more to see them than healthy-minded people will pay to hear her songs.

You’ll always make more money by appealing to the compelled as opposed to the inclined.

When I lived with porn girl Kera Lynn (“Kirsten Lee”) during her prime when she was 21 and the top draw on PornHub, she’d average five grand per film. But her real money came from fetish fans. There was a wealthy Connecticut attorney who asked only one thing of Kera—videos of her as a mermaid. In exchange, he was a faucet. In 2017 he bought her a $60,000 truck so huge it didn’t fit in my two-car driveway. Whatever she asked for, she got. Yet he never met her in person, and they never slept together. He just liked fapping to her as a mermaid.

I’ve known a few bimbos who’ve turned to escorting (against my counsel), and I’ve known a few who’ve turned to fetish modeling. And I can’t counsel against that. Because paying for fetish modeling is perfectly legal, while paying for normal sex isn’t. If all you want is to bed a bimbo, the law says you can’t exchange money for that. But if you want to watch a foot fetish model stomp on turds, you can pay for that, no problem.

The law favors the pervs. If a hetero man wants intercourse, he’s gotta work for it. Earn it! But if a deviant wants to get off by videotaping women’s feet, the law says free market!

And the deviants pay well. Making out with Debbie Beaverbrook or LaQwanda Stankass is easier than asking those girls to stomp on a raw egg, then have a dog lick their feet. So because the fetishists demand the unorthodox, they pay better.

Fetish-catering is the future (for now). Passive experiences like movies large (Marvel, DC) and small (Kevin Sorbo and Gina Carano fight Old West desperados) are passé. Not that things won’t morph again at some point; they always do. As profitable as fetish videos are to the girls who do them, the problem with having fetishists as customers is that they grow bored.

I knew a 21-year-old girl (white, somewhat attractive) who, in 2020, was raking it in with ASMR videos—monetizing the hell out of eating food in front of a camera, fully clothed.

Of all the surreal moments in my life, in the top 20 is Jared Taylor and Mark Weber coming into town for dinner, and me showing them my ASMR fetish girl and the look of shock on their faces upon learning that you can become wealthy by slurping noodles in front of a webcam. It was hilarious, like watching Christian missionaries’ first contact with a Cook Island tribe of naked savages.

ASMR Girl: “Mmmmm…(sluuuurip)…these noodles are good…(sluuuurrrrruuup)…remember to like and subscribe!”

View count 10,000,000 and climbing.

Weber: “Oh dear.”

Taylor: “Oh my.”

Me: “It ain’t our world anymore, boys.”

But that was 2020. The web girl’s fans have moved on. She’s 26 now; who wants to see an old lady slurp noodles? So she came to me wanting to segue into “real” acting. But when I gave her sides and some critical notes regarding her reading, she stormed off in a huff. Her fetish fans never critiqued her slurping! How dare I be anything less than worshipful of her acting?

You’re going to have a generation of these girls who, once the money’s gone and the first crow’s foot appears, are completely unequipped to make money other ways. Not when you’ve had a year or two of making it with no effort, eating cake or posing as a mermaid or stepping on gerbil shit barefoot.

The fetish biz is at the same time foolproof and not foolproof. The risk for the girls is that they grow older and their fans look for someone new. The reward for the girls is the nature of the fetishist to constantly require new content and ever more extreme thrills. You ever notice how every time a kiddie porn perv is busted, the TV news is always like “investigators found over 10,000 files of child pornographic material on his computer”? It’s always some massive number, but it’s that way with legal fetishists, too; you just don’t hear about it because it’s, well, legal. But they always need moar content!

So when the girls are young and purdy, they cater to the fetishists en masse. As they age out, and thus lose quantity, they have to zero in on quality—a small number of guys looking for something more personal (customized videos, the kind of direct interaction offered by OnlyFans). You trade monetization via massive view count for monetization via a handful of wealthy fetishists.

This principle doesn’t just apply to the sexual world; it goes for politics, too.

Political fetishism is a thing. That’s how I knew Musk wouldn’t sink Twitter when he took over. To be sure, he’s turned the site into a garbage dump. But I’m talking about the leftist doomsaying that the site would fail in terms of users. That hasn’t happened; the site’s numbers remain high.

Let’s pause to understand the word “fetish.” It comes from the Portuguese feitiço, meaning “spell.” It was first popularized after the Portuguese encountered West African ungabungas and their mud-and-stick gods. That’s how the word got its definition as “an object believed to have magical power to protect or aid its owner.”

But the original meaning of the word, “spell,” also applies to the modern-day definition, “an obsessive devotion; an interest in an activity or object that makes someone spend an unreasonable amount of time doing or thinking about it.”

Something that casts a “spell.”

That “something” can be an idea. Musk kept Twitter alive by catering to the most extreme rightist fetishists—Nazis, deniers, Jew-haters, the most deeply entrenched ideologues the right has to offer. In an interactive forum.

Interactive fetishism. That’s Musk’s formula. X is OnlyFans for Nazis.

Hegel studied fetish gods among Africans, noting that the fetish is “nothing other than the fancy of the individual projecting itself into space, the human individuality remains master of the image it has adopted. If any mischance occurs which the Fetish has not averted, if rain is suspended, if there is a failure in the crops, they bind and beat or destroy the Fetish and so get rid of it, making another immediately, and thus holding it in their own power. A Fetish is merely a creation that expresses the arbitrary choice of its maker, and which always remains in his hands.”

I disagree (Hegel, you dumbass). I do not think the fetishist, whether in terms of an African with a goofa doll, a man who likes having his balls whipped, or an ideologically obsessed Nazi, is “in control.” They’ve been overtaken; they’ve surrendered themselves to the fetish. In the case of the African or the Nazi, if the fetish fails to bring good fortune, they don’t “beat or destroy the Fetish and so get rid of it, making another immediately.” Rather, they cling tighter to it, their surrendered mind rationalizing why the fetish did not fail. Events failed; nonbelievers failed. Or they failed for lack of faith in the fetish.

I’ve never tried to talk an African out of his mud god, but I have tried to talk Holocaust deniers down from their ledge, and I’ve been unsuccessful most of the time. I know a spell when I see it; I know “no longer in control” when I see it.

Politics is not downstream from Hollywood. They’re two separate entities, joined by the fact that they’re both experiencing the same crisis: Interactive fetishism has uprooted the old models and unsettled the old guard.

Candace Owens is making way more money as a Nazi fetish doll than she ever did getting gub’mint welfare. There’s little difference between sexual fetishists and political ones. They’re obsessives, and obsessives are the most reliable audience, whether they’re masturbating to a foot video or a “happy merchant” cartoon. If you want to make money, cater to fetishists.

That’s the situation.

For now.

“The audience has moved on”? The audience always moves on.

Hollywood won’t die, but it is gonna have to come up with some new tricks.

We’ll pick that up next week in Part II.

The Gaîté Lyrique theater, in Paris’ third arrondissement, has a long and très glorieux history dating back to 1862, once playing host to operettas by the likes of Jacques Offenbach, but today the establishment seems to prefer staging live-action exercises in the Theater of the Absurd.

Falling into disrepair during the 1980s, in 2002 Paris City Hall decided to reopen the famous building as a new, renovated cultural center devoted to the contemporary arts—the chief such contemporary art being that of hoodwinking the unwilling French taxpayer into funding his own forcible ethnic replacement.

Bad Actors at Play
Today the establishment is self-described as being not simply an ordinary theater, exhibition space, or concert hall, but as nothing less than a “factory of our times”: one remorselessly devoted toward churning out ever more identikit left-wing drones and activists.

On its website, the Lyrique boasts of being a place that “seeks to address pressing cultural, social, democratic and climate issues,” thereby hoping to combine “creation and social engagement to help people put ideas into practice.” Apparently it is “critical to elevate their [i.e., audiences’] civic-minded initiatives and their environmental, social and societal responsibilities,” as opposed to simply putting on a good show to entertain them all, as in the primitive era of Monsieur Offenbach.

It was in this utopian spirit that, on Dec. 10, the establishment organized a free conference titled “Reinventing the Welcome for Refugees in France.” The Lyrique certainly did that, as around 250 homeless African immigrants immediately turned up to the theater’s superbly refurbished and warm 19th-century building to sit enraptured by lectures from eminent French academics and senior officials from the Red Cross. So spellbound were they by such talks’ content, in fact, that once they were over, the immigrants concerned steadfastly refused to leave the building.

Today, their numbers now swelled to around 300, the squatters are still there, saying they will remain in situ until local Parisian authorities agree to give them some free permanent housing to which they claim to somehow be entitled, despite presumably never having paid a single centime in tax into the State’s coffers in their entire lives. Where could these poor, desperate street people have gotten such an erroneous idea from? Quite possibly from some of the bleeding-heart lectures the Gaîté Lyrique had just organized on their behalf back on Dec. 10.

The Children’s Crusade
Rather than being a theater, the Gaîté Lyrique has now essentially become a gigantic doss-house for illegal immigrants, most of whom had arrived in France claiming to be aged under 18, and thus able to be classified as “unaccompanied minors,” which would indeed have qualified them for the legal right to be housed by local authorities.

Yet they were judged by skeptical officials to have in fact been adults merely posing falsely as children in order to trick free homes from the French State, and so ended up sleeping on the street instead. Being failed child actors, it was perhaps only natural for such individuals to then gravitate toward their nearest theater.

As the Lyrique’s halls and display spaces are now full of makeshift beds and soup kitchens, there is little space left for their usual patrons, as photo galleries clearly show. As such, the theater has been forced to cancel or move out-of-house all scheduled events and exhibitions until at least Jan. 24. This is proving to be a very large problem, as its funding model is based upon receiving 30 percent of its running costs from the State, and 70 percent from ticket sales to visiting gullible Left Bank pseuds wearing berets.

Can’t the Lyrique’s board just call in the cops, the lawyers, and the bailiffs to kick the “kiddies” out? Not without looking like massive hypocrites. Evicting “children” during the cold winter festive season is a highly bourgeois, capitalist, right-wing, and Scrooge-like measure to pursue, even though said enfants are not really children at all, but postpubescent impostors. As such, to act in their own rational self-interest here would undermine the publicly paraded left-wing credentials of the theater’s management, so this option is not currently open to them.

Instead, they settled for issuing a statement supporting their building’s unlawful occupiers, saying it would be “unthinkable” to “throw them out on the street…in the middle of winter,” and proudly proclaiming “the legitimacy of the collective’s demand to obtain a roof” over their heads, even if said roof was in fact the Lyrique’s own, and the immigrants’ presence there risked pushing them rapidly into bankruptcy.

The Occupation of Paris
When you examine the kind of exhibitions being staged by the Gaîté Lyrique of late, you could argue the staff were only reaping what they had sown. Consider their vibrant “educational workshop” called “The Migration Fresco,” which promised to begin “Changing the way we look at migration routes.” According to its online blurb:

“Taking the form of a collective and fun workshop…the Migration Fresco offers to discover the stories of Asrallah, Kamal, and Mila to retrace their migratory journeys from their country of origin to their arrival in France. These workshops are educational and invite us to redefine terms that are often used incorrectly in everyday language, and in particular in the media, such as ‘refugee,’ ‘migrant,’ ‘exile’ [what about the word ‘child’?]…. The Migration Fresco encourages us to deconstruct prejudices about the challenges of reception in France and Europe, and encourages sharing and multicultural encounters. The objective? Together, we must change the way we look at migratory paths!”

Objective successfully achieved! Ironically, this was one of the very pro-immigrant exhibitions that, due to the excess presence of immigrants in the building, has since had to be rehoused elsewhere, just like the immigrants themselves now demand to be.

Pictures at an Exhibition
Other exhibitions may have been resettled in other areas purely for their own safety. Most of the Lyrique’s immigrants are black or Muslim, hailing from culturally conservative lands in France’s former African empire, like Mali. As such, one can only imagine their likely reaction to the Lyrique’s “Trans*Galactique” photography exhibition, originally due to have run until Feb. 9, billed as being “An artistic plunge into trans identities” and “A visual exploration celebrating trans and queer identities and questioning notions of gender, identity and resistance in a rapidly changing world.”

The stated aim of the photo show was to display large images of various black and brown men dressed unconvincingly as women in order to begin “paving the way for more inclusive and supportive alliances,” placed “Against a global backdrop of rising intolerance” against transgenderists worldwide. Would that be a “global backdrop of rising intolerance” against them in foreign Muslim lands like Mali, where many of the immigrants currently occupying the Gaîté Lyrique were born, perchance?

A now-relocated special female-led workshop of erotic emancipation aimed at helping attendees “Put some poetry in your sexts,” meanwhile, may also have drawn ire from some of the more oversensitive infants on site who hail from lands where women are expected to wear burkas and yashmaks all day long, not send unsolicited images of their naked genitalia to strangers via Snapchat.

By deliberately encouraging individuals from such cultures to pour into their country unimpeded, do the left-wingers who run the Lyrique really not see how they will only end up undermining their own liberal values about things like gender and sexuality, which they profess so very loudly to love?

Collectif Insanity
It is not even as if the occupiers demonstrate any noticeable gratitude toward the Lyrique’s board for deliberately ruining themselves by playing their hosts. Every day, the immigrants gather outside on the steps of the theater, loudly banging drums and shouting demands and slogans, further putting the public off from approaching anywhere near the place.

Legal immigrants and their descendants in the area are also having their lives and livelihoods destroyed by the selfish squatters. U.K. broadsheet The Times sent their Paris correspondent out to interview the manageress of the Bistrot de la Gaîté, a restaurant that sits (now generally emptily) next to the theater.

Despite being the child of legal Algerian immigrants, the manageress told The Times that the new illegal immigrants “are ruining my business. They hang around outside my terrace, smoking joints and fighting among themselves. Not only do we no longer get theatergoers because the theater is shut but we don’t get passers-by either. They’re being frightened away by all these young men.”

According to the native French left-wing activists ultimately responsible for organizing the whole migrant occupation in the first place, the Collectif des Jeunes du Parc de Belleville, the Lyrique had become a center for their sacred “anti-racist and anti-colonial struggle.” I wonder if the seemingly successfully integrated and financially self-supporting Bistro owner from the former French colony of Algeria would welcome their wholly unasked-for “anti-racist” and “anti-colonial” efforts on her own alleged behalf?

Reading From the Same Script
Non-French media, getting hold of this story, have treated it very much as a lone one-off, but this is not so. During 2023 and 2024, several municipal public buildings in Paris became occupied by immigrants at the behest of the Collectif des Jeunes du Parc de Belleville, often cultural centers run by white-guilt-ridden, leftism-sympathizing useful idiots like those at the Gaîté Lyrique, who prove easily susceptible to such crude moral blackmail backed up by mob rule.

One such location was the Maison des Métallos show space, which was similarly flooded with around 230 strangely tall and well-developed foreign “minors” for three months until eventually Parisian authorities gave in and agreed to transfer the immigrant invaders to more suitable accommodations elsewhere in the city.

A better alternative might have been to forcibly transfer members of the Collectif des Jeunes du Parc de Belleville to semipermanent accommodation within a French State prison, as in the good old days of the Bastille. Capitulating to such morally self-entitled individuals only gives them the green light to go away and do precisely the same thing over and over again, as can currently be seen with the grand débâcle at the Gaîté Lyrique today. As ever, just like Rudyard Kipling once warned, if you pay the Danegeld, you never get rid of the Dane—or the Malian either, apparently.

This entire self-defeating attitude is summed up perfectly in a comedy sketch from the 1994 spoof BBC news sketch show The Day Today, in which the program’s host, Chris Morris, tells viewers about the sad plight of one young foreign war orphan he has just encountered using the following highly emotive words (look around 22:37 minutes into this video): “I have a child about his age myself. When I phoned him ten minutes ago, I told him to move out of the house to make room for his new brother.” Back in 1994, that was still considered just a joke. Now it appears to be official French artsworld policy.

Are events currently playing out at the Gaîté Lyrique more truly a comedy or a tragedy? Either way, someone really should write a play about the whole thing.

The Week’s Most Shaking, Baking, and Year-of-the-Snaking Headlines

DOODLER DIDDLER
Darrin Bell had it all…Pulitzer-winning Trump-hating black political cartoonist for the WaPo and syndicated comic-strip artist. Yep, the gargantuan, overweight Bell had everything. Except that 134th kiddie porn video. He’d successfully downloaded 133, but just like when he’s at a Thai buffet, he just had to go back for one more yung prik.

That final video tipped off the cops, who found more than 600 child porn images on his computer along with the 134 videos. Bell’s strip Candorville, about a middle-aged loner who can’t relate to adults, seems way less funny in hindsight.

The L.A. Times, home of Candorville for two decades, ran a blank panel the day after the arrest, informing readers that Bell’s strip would not return, and the comics page will remain one short until a replacement strip is found.

Odd that notoriously anti-Israel Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong and his Marxist daughter Patricia Late-Shiong didn’t tap in-house “journalist” and Hamas supporter Adam Elmahrek—who in 2023 claimed that Jewish women rape themselves to frame Palestinians—to draw up a replacement. He has some boffo ideas:

Li’l Grabner: The adventures of a bestial Jew who seizes Arab land to increase the size of ZOGpatch.

MarmaDavidDuke: The plastic-surgery-obsessed Klansman is transformed into a Great Dane to escape his cruel Jewish pursuers.

Faminely Circus: The rollicking adventures of a Gaza family that has no food but lots of gumption and bombs.

Nancy: Nancy Mitford is constantly foiled by her Hitler-loving sisters Unity and Diana, along with their Mosley Blackshirt thug Sluggoy.

Blondi: Hitler’s dog serves large sandwiches to hapless Standartenführer Dägwald to keep him well-nourished for the fight against the Bolsheviks.

The Fareed Side: Fareed Zakaria discusses the two-state solution with cows, dinosaurs, and cavemen.

Rabbinicalvin and Hobbes: A young rabbi pits his imaginary tiger against Hamas’ imaginary commitment to peace.

DEADLOCKS
According to The Guardian, leftists have protest fatigue; Trump’s second inauguration brought no mass marches or riots.

Apparently, the power of the pussy hat was greatly overestimated.

Indeed, per the paper, leftists are resigned and depressed. And illegal immigrants?

Well, they’re not waiting for Trump to “take them out.”

Last week two Jamaicans decided to flee NYC for Florida, from there to sail back home. They had guts, determination, everything but a flight ticket.

Loaded up on ganja and looking to get even higher, they hid in the wheel well of a Jet Blue plane. And by the time it landed at Fort Lauderdale/Hollywood Airport, what fell out wasn’t so much Peter Tosh as Peter Squash.

Looking more like Ragu than reggae, the two mon died either by being crushed by the landing gear as it retracted, or, worse, they may have been crushed but not outright killed, dying from oxygen deprivation once the plane reached cruising altitude. And even the Jamaican brain, accustomed as it is to living in thick smoke, still needs some oxygen.

Decompression songs,
All I ever had,
Decompression songs,
These songs of bleed-’em.

It took airport officials several hours to fully recover all the body parts, as various extremities had become jammed in the gear.

We’re jammin’,
We’re jammin’ cause we can’t get on board.
Gear jammin’, jammin’,
Cause we’re carry-on not properly stored.

These men may not have been Bob Marley, but they likely died wailing.

Word has it that the Toyes are reworking their biggest hit in honor of the two ska’d marks:

I broke two joints in the morning,
At night I broke two joints.
I broke two joints when I got crushed by the wheel,
And with my frequent flyer points, I broke two joints.

I broke two joints, so rest in piece, I’m flattened to the floor,
I broke two joints before I broke two joints, and then I broke two more.

As maintenance crews clean up the runway goo, R.I.P. the Jamaican globsled team.

THE CONFESSIONS OF NAT TURNSTILE
Los Angeles has taken several measures to ease life for residents during the fire disaster.

And as always people of color are bearing the brunt of it.

The L.A. Metro subway and light rail system has suspended fares for the duration of the emergency. And just like that, the city’s taken all the fun out of riding the trains for local blacks.

“We’re still gonna jump the turnstile anyway,” rapper and baby-daddy D’Ashy Dermis told the L.A. Times. “But it just ain’t the same doin’ it with permission. It’s like, what next? Make it legal to shoot someone over fries? How much joy can they rob from us?”

Meanwhile Boyle Heights Beat, the newspaper for the 95 percent Latino East L.A. neighborhood, ran a piece highlighting how residents are coping with the fires. Boyle Heights is geographically quite far from the coastal hillsides of Pacific Palisades. But, as the paper notes, ash carried over the county is falling everywhere.

And the neighborhood is fighting back in a way that you’ll think is a joke but in fact is one of those “no joke can top it” moments: As the paper notes, with so many gardeners as residents, the Mexis are using their leaf blowers to repel the soot.

The beans have formed an impenetrable “Siegrefried Line” against ash.

Unfortunately, L.A. County has issued an official order banning leaf blowers during the crisis. The directive reads, “The use of leaf blowers is prohibited until further notice. These devices stir up ash and particulate matter into the air, further worsening air quality and increasing health risks, particularly for those with respiratory conditions, older adults, children, and other vulnerable populations.”

No more leaf blowers? Forget “deportations day one”; robbed of their defining tool, Mexicans are already marching back over the border. This is like when Hitler banned Jews from banking.

Exodus, meet Mexodus.

BEAU JEST
Can we go one Trump victory without a “Hitler salute” controversy?

In 2016 it was Richard Spencer and his “hail Trump” and sieg-heiling followers.

Spencer’s the guy in the room who always has to kill everyone’s buzz. The “can’t leave a good thing alone” dude. Cousin Oliver, but he’s with the show from the start. The shark, but it’s in the Happy Days pilot. Two and a Half Men, but the first line of episode 1 is “I have AIDS from whores.”

And now, with Trump II: Trump Harder, we have Elon Musk making a gesture that resembled a sieg heil even though that may not have been his intent. And while rightists blame the media (of course), it’s an unfortunate fact that even Musk’s own people don’t know what their boss intended.

Andrea Stroppa, a “close confidant of Musk who’s acted as a middleman between the billionaire and far-right Italian PM Giorgia Meloni,” claimed that Musk was doing the “Roman salute.” Stroppa then deleted that post and blamed the “salute” on Elon’s “autism.”

With Musk, it’s impossible to know if he’s trolling, being serious, or being retarded…a kind of Schizödinger’s Cat with multiple outcomes, none of which seem befitting a man influencing a president.

Upon seeing Musk’s mess, a bunch of Australians replied, “Hold me Foster’s.” The crew of a Melbourne-to-Hobart cruise ship shocked passengers as they marched across the deck dressed in KKK robes and hoods.

Worst Love Boat episode ever.

Captain Stubing: “I hear you’ve been stealing ice.”

Isaac: “Yeah, those fifty lashes hurt like hell.”

According to the cruise company, the crewmen were dressed as “upside-down snow cones.”

Yes, from Coldstonewall Jackson Creamery (made with Emmett Tillamook).

The Aussie press is backing the crewmen, claiming that the KKK is unknown in that country (and remains so, as Django Unchained was banned there due to Tarantino’s accent).

To be fair, Australian racists never needed a KKK; give the aborigines a piece of string to play with, they end up accidentally lynching themselves.

THE SURE-STANK REDEMPTION
Robert Keith Packer, an old-timer inmate, sits before the parole board. The lead interlocutor asks Packer if he feels he’s been rehabilitated.

Packer speaks.

“Rehabilitated? Well, now, let me see. You know, I don’t have any idea what that means.”

(Very long pause)

“I mean, I really don’t. I’m illiterate.”

After being told the meaning of the word, Packer continues…

“To me, it’s just a made-up word, like the Holocaust or the moon or the globe. Am I sorry for what I did? There’s not a day goes by I don’t feel regret for storming the Capitol wearing that ‘Camp Auschwitz: Staff’ hoodie. Because I forgot the ‘Juice Deserve a Noose’ cap that comes with it.”

Last week Packer was able to collect his sweatshirt and go home, along with every other J6 rioter, including the ones who beat the crap out of cops.

Trump claimed that pardoning the violent felons was the first step toward “reconciliation.”

He then added, “To me, that’s just a made-up word.”

While all J6 rioters were allowed to simply walk out of prison, many didn’t, preferring to tunnel their way out by digging a hole behind their poster of Candace Owens.

Packer: “I remember thinking it would take a man 600 years to tunnel through that wall…but I’ve already been here four just trying to figure out which end to hold the rock hammer.”

Still, some of the rioters freed by Soros (oops, sorry—Trump) did manage to tunnel out…most ending up in Mongolia.

Here’s to the J6ers, who crawled through a river of shit and came out clean on the other side of the world because they lack basic common-sensory skills like knowing up from down or north from south.

Most people are inclined to suppose that if there were justice in the world, they would be better off. This, of course, is the merest prejudice. Hamlet was, perhaps, nearer the mark when he said, “Use every man after his desert, and who shall ’scape whipping?” If this is itself an exaggeration of the truth, I can at least think of many people to whom it would apply. Luckily for them, justice is not the only desideratum in human affairs: Mercy, humanity, understanding, decency, kindness, and compassion all have (within limits) their claims, limits that are always a matter of judgment. We are rightly horrified by the title of an 18th-century pamphlet, Hanging Not Punishment Enough: There must be a limit to the severity of the punishments that we are prepared to inflict, whatever the deserts of the punished.

From the point of view of justice, though, dismissal of persons employed in Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion is not enough. If justice were done them, they would have to disgorge all that they had been paid (not earned) during their employment and furthermore compensate their companies, institutions, public services, etc., for all the harm that they had inflicted upon them and upon society in general.

No doubt at some time in the distant past—what counts as the distant past these days is a shorter and shorter time ago—some of these persons meant well, or thought that they did. That history is full of the most terrible injustices can hardly be denied, though those who concentrate on them are apt to overlook the achievements of the past, which are taken for granted in a way in which injustices are not.

But the goodness of good intentions tends to disappear when they, the good intentions, are turned into career opportunities by bureaucratic alchemists; and I think that malignity always lay lurking in the minds of those who wanted to right the wrongs of the past. They saw an opportunity and seized it.

The very term “DEI” is one of the most perfect examples of newspeak in current usage, in which words are made to connote the very opposite of what, in practice, they mean. Alas, connotation often triumphs today over denotation. Perhaps it always has triumphed but seems to do so with ever greater frequency in the information, or misinformation, age.

Diversity means uniformity, in precisely the same way as freedom meant slavery in Nineteen Eighty-Four; if, that is, the only diversity worthy of a university’s consideration, in a country in which citizens are equal before the law, is diversity of thought. It is perfectly obvious that there cannot be positive discrimination without the negative variety, and if the grounds for positive and negative discrimination are racial, say, then the discriminators are at least racialist if not racist.

There is in theory a difference between a racialist and a racist. The latter thinks that there are inherent differences between human races that place the races on a hierarchy of desirable and undesirable qualities or characteristics, and that, as a consequence, individuals of races ought to be treated as representatives of those races, not as individuals. The former, the racialist, need not place races in a hierarchy but believes that racial categories should play a role in determining proper policy. This, perhaps, is a slender difference, but it exists.

I think that DEI is, in practice, racist, and not merely racialist. He or she suspects or fears in the recesses of his or her mind that there is a race, or there are races, that without their supposedly benevolent intervention would remain underrepresented in the higher ranks of society for inherent reasons. This is precisely what the racists thinks, though more openly.

Such people do not rejoice to learn that many formerly impoverished groups prosper when legal obstacles to their advancement are abolished, even when a degree of social disdain or prejudice against them persists, at least for a time, and is not reinforced by legal disabilities. This suggests to them the dangerous thought, which they must instantly repress, that differences in outcome between groups in an open society cannot be explained simply by the kind of discrimination that it is their ostensible goal to eliminate. Of course, they do not really want to eliminate it, for to do so would do them out of their jobs, their income, and their power, so they find it everywhere in the way that a paranoid person finds evidence of persecution everywhere he looks. The parallel with the witch-finders of old is close.

The DEI discriminators mean by equity not fairness but the kind of cosmic justice that Thomas Sowell has so acutely analyzed. This cosmic justice is inherently totalitarian, for it would not require only the fair treatment of every person, but that every person should have an identical genetic endowment and past starting point, for all differences not derived from, or by, his own effort would be inherently unfair. The equity of DEI could not be achieved until all humans are clones of the same embryo and raised in identical hatcheries. In other words, it is a job for as long as mankind survives.

Inclusion in the DEI sense would be destructive of all human association whatsoever, for associations, by definition, both include and exclude. If they have no power to exclude, they have no power to exist and are not associations at all. I presume that even those most in favor of sexual inclusivity would not wish Jeffrey Dahmer or Dennis Nilsen—who found sexual release or pleasure in serial murder—to join them. There is no inclusion without exclusion.

It does not require much reflection to understand the obvious deficiencies of DEI as a social philosophy. They are so obvious that even recent university graduates should be able to see them. I suspect that, at some level of their minds, those employed in departments of DEI know that they are engaged in a kind of elaborate fraud, one that is far from harmless or victimless. In the circumstances, suspension of full pay such as Mr. Trump has decreed for federal officialdom engaged upon it, presumably as a prelude to dismissal, is singularly lenient.

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

Who was Monday worse for? MSNBC, The Wall Street Journal or people on the streets of D.C. selling M.L.K. merch?

I say the Journal. MSNBC hates Donald Trump and opposes him no matter what he says. He could come out against sinkholes and MSNBC would have to be for sinkholes. Monday was just another day at the lunatic asylum.

But the Journal is supposed to be a Republican newspaper and, for decades, its most impassioned advice to Republicans has been: more wars and, above all, more immigrants!

Then along comes a New York Times-Ipsos poll — consistent with a half-dozen other polls over the past year — showing that Trump’s single most popular issue is his “mass deportation force.” And Trump’s second most popular issue is his promise to stop intervening in other countries’ wars — for example, by sending billions of dollars to Ukraine.

Both of these positions would be different from yours, Wall Street Journal.

Nearly 90% of Americans (87%) support deporting illegals who’ve committed crimes. About two-thirds (63%) support deporting the illegals who’ve come in the last four years under Joe Biden. A clear majority (55%) support deporting every illegal in the country — or as the Times puts it, “everyone living in the United States without authorization.” In other words, illegals just lost the Electoral College vote and the popular vote.

But since the 1990s, the Journal has been denouncing “the GOP’s anti-immigrationists” for sending a “cramped, pessimistic message,” and exhorting Republicans to be like Ronald Reagan, who “celebrated immigration.” (This was back when the illegal alien population was estimated to be about 2 million, compared to well north of 40 million today.) The paper routinely champions Republicans who adopt the WSJ/Ramaswamy position that any given immigrant is better than any given American. Then, they invariably go on to lose.

Trump, the biggest “anti-immigrationist” of them all, got more votes than pro-immigrationist John McCain. Today, more Hispanics want to deport illegals than voted for either Trump or McCain. Is it still the official position of the Republican Party that winning is preferable to losing?

Most recently, the Journal was flacking for the Democrats (and one idiot Republican from Oklahoma — what’s the matter with you, Oklahoma?) and their so-called “border security” bill that would have written into law the entire Biden policy on immigration. Which was to defy existing written law on immigration.

As is now conceded by pretty much everyone, the main reason Trump won all seven swing states, the Electoral College, the popular vote and “Employee of the Month” at McDonald’s was precisely because of Biden’s great idea to throw open the border and drag in more than 11 million illegals, many of whom were covertly flown to locations inside the U.S. under the cover of darkness, never to be heard from again until they were arrested for murder.

MSNBC’s approach to the poll is to deny reality, which is actually Item No. 2 in their correspondents’ stylebook. On Monday, Joe Scarborough cited the Times-Ipsos poll, but rushed to assure his viewers that an “overwhelming” percentage of Americans don’t want to deport illegals who’ve “played by the rules.” (Other than that one rule about not sneaking into our country illegally.)

By “overwhelming,” Scarborough means “a minority” or — for you math majors out there — “less than half.” Specifically: 42% think some illegals should be able to stay, compared with 55% who say they’ve all gotta go. To put this in perspective, more Americans want abortion to be illegal in almost all circumstances than want any illegals to stay.

Contrary to the Journal‘s cheerleading for our involvement in the Ukraine war, 60% of voters agree with the statement, “We should pay less attention to problems overseas and concentrate on problems here at home.” That includes 75% of Republicans.

Remember when the WSJ‘s Rapid Response Team slapped down Gov. Ron DeSantis for saying Ukraine’s “territorial dispute” with Russia was not as important as America’s own territorial dispute over its border with the entire rest of the world?

The Journal sneered at DeSantis’ “naivete” and warned that he would come to regret questioning whether Ukraine’s border is one of America’s VITAL NATIONAL INTERESTS. “[H]ow to explain [DeSantis’s] puzzling surrender this week,” the editorial asked. It then went on to cite a series of irrelevancies, such as the attack on Pearl Harbor, Robert Taft and “GOP isolationism.” Also Reagan, Reagan, Reagan. At the Journal, it’s always 1980, unless it’s 1939.

If DeSantis had sneered right back at the Journal, 75% of Republicans would have agreed with him. But instead, he semi-backtracked by floridly denouncing Vladimir Putin, then wandered off into digital currency, term limits, school choice, abortion, a constitutional convention and a million other micro-issues notable for not being immigration or ending foreign entanglements.

Reagan ran and won on two issues: winning the Cold War and cutting taxes. Trump ran and won (at least twice) on two issues: immigration and no more foreign adventurism. He didn’t run on the Cold War because that’s over, Wall Street Journal. Good news: We won. And he couldn’t run on immigration in 2020 because he hadn’t done anything about it. Here’s hoping his second term will be different!

I wish great Republican leaders like DeSantis would learn the good things about Trump — helpfully compiled in “In Trump We Trust”! — and not keep reverting to the standard Republican playbook, advanced by the Journal. (School choice, one of the Journal‘s favorite hobby horses, just lost 65% to 35% in Kentucky — a state that Trump won by 30 points. It’s not a winning issue, Republicans. Please stop taking political advice from the Journal.)

Most interesting, the Times-Ipsos poll found that Trump is not even especially popular. He is viewed “more negatively than any other president about to take office in the last 70 years.” But his issues were a runaway hit! So much for the “cult of personality.”

Trump’s a good negotiator. How about he makes this deal with the Journal: His mass deportation force will allow one illegal alien rapist to stay for every WSJ editorial writer who self-deports?

How do we recognize artistic merit today? What relation does it have with popularity? How important is fame in measuring the artist? Why is merit often unmatched by success, whereas the latter and mediocrity are almost one and the same? All one has to do is look at Hollywood and its products of nonstop horror films, but I’m not going there, the place is a burned-out case, pun intended.

The vexing question implicit in my quest is how do we recognize artistic merit? Everyone knew that Mozart was a miracle and that Beethoven, Bach, Schubert, and countless others were geniuses. Their merit stuck out; just think of poor old very talented Salieri. Among poets Keats is the greatest, but you couldn’t get Byron to agree. He badmouthed the dirt-poor and dying Keats because deep down inside he must have known his Byronic verses to be inferior. (Not many will agree with me, but unlike the Brits who adore the mad, bad and dangerous-to-know philhellene, I’m a romantic, and Keats is number one.) Music, painting—the greatest of all is Edward Hopper, the worst the late Picasso—and poetry aside, writing is the art that most intrigues me, an art that can easily be faked, or so it seems at times when I read modern fiction. (Which I admit I never do past a page or two at most.)

Regular readers of yours truly know all about Hemingway and Fitzgerald and how they are the two writers I can never get enough of. The third one is an Englishman, almost unknown today, but he was the richest and most famous of his time, Somerset Maugham. The Bloomsbury literary elite put him down, as they would, their experimental crap being unreadable, they being mostly homosexual, frustrated, and pretty ugly to look at. But Of Human Bondage, Cakes and Ale, The Moon and Sixpence, “Rain,” The Letter, The Razor’s Edge, and countless other stories are superb, psychologically deep, imaginative, technically superior, and precise.

Maugham called himself three-quarters homosexual, but he had fathered a daughter, Lisa—whose beautiful daughter is a friend of mine and is now Countess Chandon—with Syrie Maugham, who by all accounts was a ballbuster. Somerset had at one time four plays running simultaneously in London, and his books were all bestsellers. He was rich and famous and generous, but the English and the critics never went overboard, and I think I know why. Envy is the English disease, and Maugham chose to live in the grand style and visit places most Brits had never heard of.

Is genius originality? I’m not so sure because there are too many con men and con women out there faking the original. Maugham created the perfect human being in Larry Darrell, which is quite a feat for a novelist. Max Kelada, hero of “Mister Know-All,” is annoying, a braggart, a drunk, and a womanizer, but as it turns out more of a gentleman than anyone else on board. Once you’ve read Maugham the mostly feminine auto-fiction of today becomes unreadable. Critics of the time had reservations about him, most likely due to envy and the fact the writer examined pure artistic desire unmotivated by outside influences. Maugham was always extremely humble about his talent, always putting his writing down, but it was not a pose. Like all great writers his passion had chosen him, not the other way round. His books became bestsellers from day one, yet another reason for the envious critics to find fault.

Writing about people of his class didn’t make him many friends. But Maugham’s novels and short stories were wonderful and so interesting because they had little to do with everyday life. His novels and short stories were redolent with moral questions and touched upon inequality of talent rather than the banality of economic inequality. Elites in any field are more interesting than the common man, and his stories were about places and people off the beaten path. He adored meeting and writing about murderers on Devil’s Island, where he was allowed to roam free and mix because of his fame. Reproducing the atmosphere of our everyday life was not for him, thank God. Yet his technical skills that were always praised by critics were equal to his psychological depth. Larry Darrell’s search for meaning in The Razor’s Edge was most likely also the author’s, Larry being a messianic figure entirely self-sufficient.

I had an opportunity to meet the author a couple of years before his death in 1965. A friend of Maugham’s, a flamboyant homosexual, had asked me to lunch at Maugham’s magnificent Villa Mauresque in Cap-Ferrat, on the Riviera, but I chickened out. I’ve always regretted it, but it was the author who had first warned us about the Riviera: “A sunny place for shady people.” Maugham sure got that right, among many other things.