“The British political class has offered to the world an astounding spectacle of mendacious, intellectually limited hustlers.” This is a direct quote from last week’s New York Times, a newspaper that is known for being anti–heterosexual white male, anti-Christian, and now anti–British ruling class. Mind you, normally when someone attacks the British I smile, and more often than not I mumble that no one hits the Brits ...
Everyone’s rather angry nowadays. Women, gays, lesbians, bisexuals, blacks, Hispanics, American Indians, people with special needs, college students, college professors, Hollywood stars, Democratic politicians—you name them, they’re angry. The Donald seems to have finally united the United States. Everybody hates Trump and, of course, men. Toxic masculinity has replaced the evil Nazis and their goose step, and Trump the ...
Asked how he was feeling as he was about to give a speech to a ladies’ group, Mark Twain looked horror-stricken and said: “How do you expect me to feel? Shakespeare is dead, Goethe is dead, and I have a terrible cold.” Alas, I’m no Twain, but I feel worse than the Mississippi sage ever did, that I’m sure of. Having gone cross-country skiing underdressed in bone-chilling temperatures didn’t help. I now sneeze about ...
It is normal in the hyperbolic times we’re living in to call people iconic or legendary. Both “hyperbole” and “iconic” are Greek words, and they were coined in order to separate the normal from the legendary. The trouble is that today the word “legendary” is overused. Untalented performers, bandy-legged footballers, even silver-tongued crooked politicians are referred to as legends by flacks and PR enablers. ...
Do any of you know what a cisgender is? I just found out. A cisgender is a term describing someone whose gender identity matches the sex they were assigned at birth. Amazing isn’t it, that we now need a pleonasm for saying someone’s a man or a woman? I sometimes envy my Spectator colleague Jeremy when I read about his conversations with normal people while living inside a French cave. I can no longer converse with anyone ...
Funny thing is, I was in school with a man named Ted Widmer, and I recently read that one Ted Widmer is a “distinguished lecturer” at a New York university and is senior fellow at the “Council for Ethics” in international affairs. The Ted I knew was anything but ethical, and dressed rather strangely, if you know what I mean. Never mind—whether he was a schoolmate or not, Widmer has written a treatise about 1919 and ...
GSTAAD—My annual end-of-year party in the Bagel was a bust. Too many people brought their friends and I ended up asking men and women to please leave my bedroom, especially my bathroom. I had some very pretty young things drop in and some even overstayed, and—surprise, surprise—there were even some items missing after the cleanup the next day. But that was then. I’m now in Gstaad for the duration. The good news for ...
The demise of The Weekly Standard was a pleasure, not because I like to see print magazines go down the drain—to the contrary—but because of its parentage, William Kristol and John Podhoretz. These two unpleasant neocons are known as the “Poisoned Dwarf” and “Four Pizzas,” respectively, and rarely have I seen two bigger con men get away with more stuff than this pair. They are smarmy, loquacious, and incompetent ...
Let’s begin 2019 with some truths and a few admissions: We humans have been evolving for some time now, but not really. Only a few decades ago we were certain that the oldest human fossil was a small-brained female by the name of Lucy. Lucy was known as Australopithecus afarensis, and she had existed from about 3.85 million years ago to about 2.95 million years ago. Human evolution, it is believed, took a direct path from ...
Sometime during the 1920s, at an exclusive party at Count Boni de Castelanne’s, a great French lady felt herself beginning to die at the dinner table. “Quick, bring the dessert,” she whispered to the waiter. She was not overcome by greed. She simply wished to hurry dinner along so as not to drop dead before the party rose from the table. In other words, she did not wish to cause discomfort to those present. Needless to ...
Here we are, once again writing for Takimag’s Christmas issue. Like every birthday of our Lord Jesus, this is a special one, so I want to make it count. In my sporting days, trying too hard was as counterproductive as not trying hard enough, so let’s see if this principle also applies to the written word. Eighty-five thousand Yemeni children may have died of hunger, while 10,000 men, women, and children have been killed ...
Father Munkelt is a New York City-based priest who is as intelligent and well-read as anyone I’ve known, and he wrote most of this essay for Takimag under my byline. (Journalists are expert cheaters and plagiarizers, but when it comes to a man of God, I cannot speak with forked tongue.) I asked the good father why the Catholic Church is in such turmoil and about the sex scandal. Since the end of the classical pagan world, the ...
NEW YORK—At times I used to think the place was real. The New York of films, that is. The reality is an urban agglomeration of millions, most of them with a disinclination to speak English, and then there’s the celluloid city of 42nd Street, Annie Hall, Dead End, Rear Window, and King Kong. This is the dream city I keep writing about, the one that stabs you in the gut because it’s gone, and it gets worse when you accept ...
They will finally have their way: In the year 2044, only a short 26 years from now, white Americans will become a minority—hooray, yippee, viva The New York Times and all the left-wing scum who write for it. So says the Census Bureau, whose graphics show a demographic change that has white Americans becoming a minority. Although some people think that the United States is a nation preoccupied by race, this is normal for a ...
What I should have done is gone out and bought a lottery ticket. I’ll explain: The snow suddenly came down in buckets, icing the city and bringing gridlock like I’ve never seen before. The traffic cops in the Bagel are all Hispanics, to a man and to a woman around four feet tall, and all weigh over 250 pounds. The moment the white stuff started coming down they left their posts and headed for their casas. Bagelites went ...
NEW YORK—A little Austrian count was born to my daughter last week in Salzburg, early in the morning of Nov. 9, 2018, becoming my third grandchild. Through modern technology I was flooded with pictures of a blond-fuzzed and pink little baby boy less than a day old. Flying in from Gstaad, the mother of my children did not make it on time, which was just as well. Like most women, she tends to overreact where babies are ...
