Of all the people I don”t envy, of all the unfortunates who labor away at the type of dirty jobs that would make Mike Rowe throw his hands up in frustration, the ones I pity the most are Muslim apologists. Sisyphus has nothing on these poor bastards. Muslim apologists are like children who rejoice at ebb tide, building sand castles and declaring victory over the ocean itself, only to watch in disbelief as the tide returns and buries the day’s work. Believing the flood tide to be a fluke, the children happily begin anew at the next ebb.
I suppose the best I can say is that Muslim apologists are like Sisyphus without the curse of retention or cognizance. After every incident of Muslim terror, the apologists reassure us that there is no pathology, no pattern, no problem. That café could have just as easily been shot up by the Amish; the folks at that Christmas party would probably have been butchered by Buddhists anyway. By an arbitrary role of the dice, by pure random chance, this time it was Muslims committing the crime.
I”ve written about the apologists before, but in the past few weeks, there’s been an interesting new addition to their canon. We”re already familiar with the apologists” first two mindlessly repeated articles of faith:
(1) There is nothing uniquely Islamic about Muslim terror. The Muslim community is no more predisposed to committing acts of terror than any other religious, ethnic, or racial group.
(2) In the U.S., the real terror threat comes from Christian white guys, but everyone is too racist to see it because something something Fox News something something Koch brothers something something Bush.
Been there, heard that. Over and over again.
Here’s the new talking point, repeated again and again by newsmakers over the past two weeks: Donald Trump is the top recruiter for ISIS. We heard it from Hillary Clinton, Andrew Cuomo, Ted Koppel, and Tom Brokaw, among many others. The gist is, Trump’s “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States” comment is “making” Muslims join ISIS. Trump’s suggestion of a blanket ban is enough to make Muslims say, “To hell with my life, my family, my job…I”m going to join ISIS, because Donald Trump made a sweeping, indiscriminate generalization devoid of nuance.”
So much for the “Muslims are as afraid of ISIS as we are” talking point. Apparently, all it takes to get Muslims to sign up for a life of terrorism is one speech by a wealthy reality-show star who holds no office. I mean, joining ISIS is no small commitment; it’s not like changing your vote come Election Day, or registering for a different party. The political and media elites really want us to believe that all it takes to get Muslims to devote their lives to ISIS is a speech by Donald Trump.
The notion that average Muslims teeter so precariously on the brink of “going jihad” that one speech by a businessman-politician could cause them to chuck their normal lives and throw in with a bunch of murderous sadists reflects, at its core, a truth“one that the apologists have for years been trying to avoid: “Ordinary” Muslims become radicalized far more readily and with greater frequency than the rest of us. Again and again we hear of Muslim terrorists who “only recently” embraced jihad, often with such speed that friends and family members barely had time to notice. In a previous piece, I likened the ease with which Muslims can become radicalized to the ease with which the elderly can get pneumonia. It doesn”t mean that only the elderly get pneumonia, or that all elderly people get pneumonia; it just means that they are more likely to get it.
It’s like having a compromised immune system, but rather than compromised immunity, Muslims appear to have compromised stability. They can, and do, go jihad at the drop of a hat. Physician, psychiatrist, soldier, rich man, poor man, husband, wife, father, teen; there’s no single profile for the ones most likely to snap, other than that they”re Muslim.
Last week, as endlessly repeated chants of “Donald Trump the ISIS recruiter” danced in my head (a welcome respite from the seasonal sugar-plums), a thought occurred to me. An epiphany, if you will. If the three main apologist talking points are correct”if Muslims are no more predisposed to terrorism than other people, if white Christian terrorists pose the greatest threat to the U.S., and if a blanket generalization by Donald Trump is enough to turn Muslims into terrorists”then blanket generalizations about white Christians must be even more dangerous. If Muslims are no more terror-inclined than white Christians, and if Muslims can be “recruited” to terror by hearing or reading blanket condemnations of their group, then by logical extension, so can white Christians. And if white Christians constitute a greater threat than Muslims, then surely those who recruit them to terror via blanket condemnations must be stopped at all costs. That is the logical conclusion if the apologists” talking points are to be believed.
I decided to reach out to the authors and editors of some of the most infamous recent blanket condemnations of white people. Amazingly, I found them all at Salon.com (how very convenient). I sent each of them this email:
Do you think it might be a possibility that the various pieces (by you and others) that make blanket criticisms of whites (“White guys are killing us,” “The plague of angry white men,” “Let’s deport all white males,” “White men must be stopped,” “White men are the face of terror,” “The plague of angry white men,” “Deal with your shit, white people,” “Why is it always a white guy: The roots of modern, violent rage,” to name just a few) might help white hate groups recruit new members? I”m not looking to debate the veracity of the criticisms of white America expressed in those pieces; I”m only asking if you think that, possibly, such blanket condemnations assist white hate groups by serving as recruitment tools.
A fair question, respectfully posed. Salon editors David Daley, Pete Catapano, Peter Finocchiaro, and Ruth Henrich refused to reply. Because something something “tolerance” something something Bush. All but two of the authors of the pieces in question refused to reply.
Frank Joyce, the author of “White men must be stopped,” did reply. However, Joyce, an old-school Detroit labor activist, seemed more interested in apologizing for the title that Salon gave his essay: “As you probably know, authors don’t write headlines, editors and headline writers do. Their interests aren”t identical. Authors may want to gently persuade. Editors want to “sell newspapers.”” Frankly, it never occurred to me that Salon’s hate-filled race-baiting has grown so extreme that even some of its own authors are appalled by it.
Regarding my actual question, Joyce would only say, “It’s a good question that deserves a thoughtful reply,” but he replied only in very general terms: “The question of how to help people see very emotional issues differently is anything but easy. Decades of psychological, neuroscience and market research leave us with still a long way to go in understanding how humans change their mind about anything.” Joyce concluded by stating that the risk of making people angry is “not a reason to stop trying to change hearts and minds.”
“I believe in the Golden Rule”the man with the gold…rules.”
“Mr. T
Precious-metals expert Ned Naylor-Leyland is an investment manager at Quilter Cheviot, London, who frequently comments on the subject via the international TV-news networks of the less mainstream variety. Ned’s professional position has been in favor of buying gold since before gold became an appeal, (even briefly) a growth asset class, once again, in the second half of the “00s. Certainly Ned was researching the situation since before gold’s decadelong rally began”moving from $300 in 2002 to a peak of $1,750 in 2012. Despite the decline of gold’s spot price in the past few years, Ned’s as bullish about gold as ever, possibly even more so. Why?
A colleague of Ned’s, Jan Skoyles”CEO of The Real Asset Co. (TRAC)”explains her own love affair with gold (and silver): “Ned and I started discussing potential topics for my dissertation…. Ned suggested I do it on precious metals, and quickly drew one of his manic diagrams, showing me the role of money over the last 1,000 years”which I seem to remember started with Christ. That was how it all started off,” says Skoyles, somewhat cutely, of her enduring love for yellow bricks. She points out that it was the role of precious metals in the monetary system, over time, that got her intellect hooked on the future potential of gold. See, gold may yet return to the major leagues, in yet another repeat of history, this time precipitated by a monetary crisis. The gold play depends on a sea change occurring in the world economy, and on its timing; and the rest is easy. Stay with me and you”ll soon see why.
Skoyles is one of many gold believers, a.k.a. goldbugs, infected by the sheer enthusiasm of “resident expert” Naylor-Leyland (N-L). The passion fueling his personal evangelism stems from a core idea, first of all, that “there isn”t just one form of economics.” N-L feels sufficiently strongly about this point to repeat it.
“The financial system has become very homogenized,” N-L said early in 2015. “But there isn”t just one form of economics. The current model is based on a deficit spending model that governments rely on”it doesn”t mean it is right, or that it’s the only option.”
So why does gold matter to the noninstitutional investor?
Quilter Cheviot published a kind of manifesto in 2015 that squarely answers the question while clearly articulating the investment opportunity for the uninitiated like myself. The following is a paraphrase of the whole document. Direct quotations are included as and when they reveal key selling points of gold. The same goes for any crucial factors regarding gold’s potential as a benchmark or standard in the future monetary system or global economy, when China will most likely take the lead where previously the USA took the leadership initiative.
So here it is. The case for investing in gold:
Discovered by the Egyptians in 3500 BC, gold”as well as its sister metal, silver”has consistently been of great desire to humans. With their scarcity value, both materials have remained in constant demand. However: “Unlike ordinary money, which has its worth determined by the markets, gold is something [tangible]. It has limited counterparty risk [i.e., of a default] and its value can never go to zero.
“While demand for gold might be accelerating, especially in countries such as China, India and Russia, the volume of newly discovered gold has reached a record low. For example, during the 1990s approximately 100 million ounces of gold was discovered annually. In the past 10 years, this has reduced to just 30 million ounces. The fact that the “easy” gold has already been mined, allied with rising production costs means that “new” gold is harder to come by”an obvious formula for higher prices in the future.”
Scarcity on the supply side has not diminished the demand for gold, above all in the Asian markets. China and India together represented 23% of world gold demand in 2002. By 2012 the gold demand from India and China combined had more than doubled, to 47%. Today, all the gold mined each week across the globe is being withdrawn, in bullion bar form, in Shanghai”a remarkable trend indeed.
This strong demand is reinforced by the growth of the middle classes all across Asia, a development still in its early stages. According to the Wolfensohn Centre for Development, China’s middle class will reach 670 million by 2021″double the number of the entire U.S. population. The Economic Times predicts, meanwhile, that the middle class in India could reach 267 million by 2016. These middle-class growth numbers are of interest not only because of what they tell us about the shift of global wealth from West to East but also in what it means for the world’s gold markets and how they may develop in the future.
N-L argues that the increasing popularity of gold”certainly in China’s case”may be a sign that the precious metal is beginning to be reintegrated* into the monetary system in a more formal way (by the Chinese authorities).
[*The gold standard is a monetary system where a country’s currency or paper money has a value directly linked to gold. This was the case historically in most nations until they abandoned the standard at various points in the 20th century.]
N-L clarifies today’s market situation: “Up to 2008 you could not buy gold in China”it was outlawed. There are now over 100,000 bullion outlets in China. This may be a coincidence, but when you consider that they are the major creditor nation and they are putting gold in the hands of the public”through the equivalent of a “help to buy” program for gold, rather like the one we have for property here”one has to wonder if there is actually something much more significant going on?
“There are many who are tempted to ignore this trend”and say that it’s an anachronism and will have no impact on investors in the West”but we must remember that we are the debtors. The creditor nations seem to be taking a different view here, and are incentivizing the ownership of gold by the public as a hedge against the dollar,” N-L concludes. It’s clear which trend he’s backing anyway. (And it’s not property “help to buy.”)
More recently on television, while reminding viewers that gold is not a growth class, N-L advised investors to buy gold and silver “as an insurance policy…” Insurance against what, though?
Property, for one thing”as N-L explained it”is a debt-backed asset class, whether or not you own your house. Given that a large-scale debt crisis is widely expected to cause the next banking crisis, it’s even more important to hold gold as a hedge against all the other fluctuating markets, he says”implying the debt-backed markets especially, where the risk of the ground falling out beneath your feet always remains, as does the systemic risk.
As a Christmas present, I received the book version of The Hard Problem, the latest play by Sir Tom Stoppard. It’s the great Tory playwright’s first new work for the stage since his Rock “n” Roll in 2006.
Granted, it’s perfectly reasonable to complain that a playwright who is best enjoyed in two stages”first reading the book at home, then watching the play in the theater”is too much work for what is supposed to be a relaxing evening out. Still, Stoppard has been an ornament of our civilization for a half century (his Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead debuted in 1966), and he works awfully hard to make his plays as simple as possible. (But, as Einstein said, no simpler.)
I”ve been reading Stoppard’s plays for forty years now. Despite the new work’s seemingly foreboding highbrow subject matter”the title refers to the “hard problem of consciousness“ formulated by philosopher David Chalmers”this may be the most lucid and serene of all of Stoppard’s works. It’s not as ambitious or as emotionally resonant as Stoppard’s 1993 masterpiece Arcadia, but then what play is? Nonetheless, it offers the most straightforward introduction to Stoppard’s work since his 1982 romantic dramedy The Real Thing, which preceded his turn toward science as subject matter in the late 1980s.
The bickering neurobiologists of The Hard Problem return to the moral philosophy questions”Does God exist? What is virtue? How can free will be reconciled with the study of nature and nurture? Can altruism exist without consciousness?“that were argued with such manic wit by rival academic philosophers in his 1972 farce Jumpers.
That was the play that cemented Stoppard’s reputation for almost inhuman cleverness. It took Stoppard a couple of decades to live down the impression generated by Jumpers and Travesties (an amazing 1974 anti-Marxist comedy with Lenin as the heel) of having more head than heart.
Among the major writers of our time, Stoppard may take criticism more seriously than anybody else (in part because as a playwright he has actors financially dependent upon the popularity of his work; in part because the author, who is perhaps the world’s most reasonable man, can put himself in other people’s shoes so well). Thus, the prodigy’s career has proved remarkably enduring.
Interestingly, Stoppard’s views on God (he thinks He sounds more plausible than the alternatives) and mother love (a virtue, not just an instinct) don”t seem to have changed much since 1972.
As in Arcadia, where his heroine was modeled on Lord Byron’s daughter Ada Lovelace, the legendary 19th-century computer-programming theorist, Stoppard assumes that a lovely ingenue who is also a scientific prodigy is a winsome combination on stage.
I”ve suspected since Arcadia that one of Stoppard’s regrets in life is that he hasn”t had a daughter. On the other hand, he is not the kind of man to dwell on what luck he’s lacked because Stoppard, who was born Tomáš Straüssler in Czechoslovakia in 1937, is grateful for all the good luck he’s enjoyed since his widowed Jewish mother married a British Army major in a refugee camp in Asia. Upon arrival in his stepfather’s homeland after a hellish early childhood during WWII, Stoppard immediately became a patriotic English boy.
A natural loyalist, Stoppard became an enthusiast not only of his adoptive country, but of his Slavic homeland. He was one of the very few English-language literary figures to be actively concerned about Communist rule, writing at least ten original plays protesting the subjugation of Eastern Europe.
Among the things that have changed since Jumpers is that Stoppard’s tone is mellower and his stage tricks are less attention-seeking.
The ideological landscape has altered as well. In Jumpers, the left was dominant, plaguing the hapless protagonist, a traditionalist moral philosopher. In The Hard Problem, set in England in the first decade of the new century, his similarly old-fashioned heroine is beset instead by the self-confidence of her neo-Darwinian colleagues. The left is intellectually nugatory, and all the energy resides with the disciples of the late biologist William D. Hamilton, such as Richard Dawkins and Matt Ridley. Stoppard explains that the play grew out of an argument he started with Dawkins over his 1976 book The Selfish Gene.
On Jan. 1, 2002, the day that euro coins and banknotes entered into circulation, my column, “Say Goodbye to the Mother Continent,” contained this pessimistic prognosis:
“This European superstate will not endure, but break apart on the barrier reef of nationalism. For when the hard times come, patriots will recapture control of their national destinies from Brussels bureaucrats to whom no one will ever give loyalty or love.”
The column described what was already happening.
“Europe is dying. There is not a single nation in all of Europe with a birth rate sufficient to keep its population alive, except Muslim Albania. In 17 European nations, there are already more burials than births, more coffins than cradles.
“Between 2000 and 2050, Asia, Africa and Latin America will add 3 billion to 4 billion people—30 to 40 new Mexicos!—as Europe loses the equal of the entire population of Belgium, Holland, Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Germany.
“By 2050, the median age in Europe will be 50, nine years older than the oldest nation on earth today, Japan. One in 10 Europeans will be over 80. And who will take care of these scores of millions of elderly, before the Dutch doctors arrive at the nursing home?
“Immigrants is the answer, immigrants already pouring into Europe in the hundreds of thousands annually from the Middle East and Africa, changing the character of the Old Continent. Just as Europe once invaded and colonized Asia, Africa and the Near East, the once-subject peoples are coming to colonize the mother countries. And as the Christian churches of Europe empty out, the mosques are going up.
“Yet, even as great nations like France, Germany, Italy and Spain grow weary of the strain of staying independent, sovereign and free, the sub-nations within are struggling to be born again. In Scotland, Wales, Ulster, Corsica, the Basque country and northern Italy are secessionist movements not unlike those that broke up Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union into [24] independent nations.”
What was predicted, 14 years ago, has come to pass.
Migrants into Germany from the Middle and Near East reached 1 million in 2015. EU bribes to the Turks to keep Muslim migrants from crossing over to the Greek islands, thence into the Balkans and Central Europe, are unlikely to stop the flood.
My prediction that European “patriots will recapture control of their national destinies,” looks even more probable today.
Prime Minister David Cameron, who almost lost a referendum on Scottish secession, is demanding a return of British sovereignty from the EU sufficient to satisfy his countrymen, who have been promised a vote on whether to abandon the European Union altogether.
Marine Le Pen’s anti-EU National Front ran first in the first round of the 2015 French elections. Many Europeans believe she will make it into the final round of the next presidential election in 2017.
Anti-immigrant, right-wing parties are making strides all across Europe, as the EU is bedeviled by a host of crises.
Europe’s open borders that facilitate free trade also assure freedom of travel to homegrown terrorists.
Mass migration into the EU is causing member nations to put up checkpoints and close borders. The Schengen Agreement on the free movement of goods and people is being ignored or openly violated.
The economic and cultural clash between a rich northern Europe and a less affluent south—Greece, Italy, Spain, Portugal—manifest in the bad blood between Athens and Berlin, endures.
Northern Europeans grow weary of repeated bailouts of a south that chafes at constant northern demands for greater austerity.
After decades of bitterly partisan acrimony, a consensus has been forged. Americans on all sides of the political compass finally agree on something: Donald Trump is a “fascist.”
And they say our country is too divided politically to see eye to eye on anything.
Liberals, who are more apt to liken someone they disagree with to Hitler than any other group, get their rocks off pinning the fascist label on Trump. The Week‘s Ryan Cooper is the biggest perpetrator of this linguistic stratagem. He’s written numerous articles on why Trump is a fascist threat to the nation. Democratic presidential hopeful Martin O”Malley is also fond of calling the Donald the F-word.
Fascist-mongering is not exclusive to the left. A national security advisor for illegal-alien-loving Jeb! Bush is guilty of the verbal slander. One of Ohio governor John Kasich’s super PACs is subtly linking Trump to fascism by comparing him to Nazi Germany. Marco Rubio’s war cheerleader Max Boot called Trump a fascist while admitting it’s not a term he “uses loosely or often.” Libertarian writer Jeffrey Tucker says that Trump’s ideology “is best described as fascism.”
With all this fashy talk, one might get the idea that the two sides of the political establishment are working in cahoots to take down the candidate who best represents all those Middle American Radicals. You might also think that Donald Trump is an anomaly”that his creeping fascistic style is new to American politics.
But what does “fascism” even mean? The way commentators toss around the word, you”d think it came with a precise definition. And you”d think that Mr. Trump embodies that definition in his unpredictable, fuck-you-style campaign.
But, of course, you”d be wrong to assume such veracity on the part of the media. The problem with the word “fascism” is that it’s used so much it has lost all meaning. Basically, pundits use “fascism” to describe anything or anyone who goes against their ideology. With Donald Trump rampaging Godzilla-like through all the political establishment’s sacred idols”political correctness, porous borders, the aversion to criticizing any race or religion besides white Christians”it only makes sense that he’s been attacked as an überfascist.
In the mid”20th century, fascism actually meant something. The Old Right journalist John T. Flynn described the governing philosophy as a capricious, power-mongering dictatorship. “First we must note one important difference between Communism and Fascism which becomes clear here,” he wrote. While socialists and communists had a “definite philosophy,” fascists, on the other hand, “improvised as the movement went along.” Citing Benito Mussolini’s governing style in Italy, Flynn deduced the “essential ingredients of fascism.” They include a government unrestrained by constitutional limits, a dictator who makes it his job to lead the nation to full vitality, an economy that is overseen by a vast bureaucracy, and a society that is highly militaristic and dependent on an imperialist complex.
Gee, don”t those all sound eerily similar to the federal gargantuan we call Washington today?
Certainly, Donald Trump is running on a fascist campaign platform. He’s using the sheer power of his celebrity to drown out all opposition. He talks about using the Oval Office as a tool to get the country winning again, and not as a solemn duty. Plus, he boasts recklessly about bombing the shit out of our enemies.
The critics are right, Donald Trump’s campaign is based upon fascist principles. But here’s the thing: What campaign isn”t?
Former first lady, senator, and secretary of state Hillary Clinton is running for president based solely on her personality and connections to the country’s elite. She wants the government to play an even larger role in people’s personal lives than it does now. In a recent debate she declared, “The American president has to both keep our families safe and make the economy grow in a way that helps everyone”not just those at the top.” Control freak, much?
Florida senator Marco Rubio is no different. The boy wonder has based his entire campaign on a muscular foreign policy and his reputation as a great communicator. He has his own plan to create an “economic renaissance in America.” And he speaks glowingly about restoring America’s leadership in the world.
I’ve noticed a trend: The more that white people apologize, the more they get mocked. The more they concede, the more that is demanded of them. The more frequently they make gestures of goodwill, the more they get emotionally sandblasted with malicious rhetoric about how “whiteness” is a poison that needs to be uprooted and eradicated. And what’s bitterly funny is that these well-meaning but fatally clueless Caucasoids can’t seem to figure out why this is happening.
The reason is simple: Self-hatred is never attractive, neither individually nor collectively, no matter who’s expressing it. It didn’t reflect well on blacks when movie clowns such as Mantan Moreland was bugging his eyes out and saying “Feets don’t fail me now!,” nor was it appealing when the heavy-lidded Stepin Fetchit played a shuffling, servile black idiot in every appearance.
Yet the default Virtue Mode these days for any white person who doesn’t want to be forever banished beyond the Pale”or should that be into the Pale?”is to bend over, grab their ankles, wince, and scream, “Pleeze, Massa, don’t hurt me!” They are sheltered and stupid enough to see such behavior as a virtue rather than a weakness. They appear to view it as a survival strategy rather than an invitation to murder.
The groups they’re trying to appease, though, aren’t nearly so naïve. Since people are animals”especially ones who’ve been encouraged their entire lives to view you as a natural predator who’s constantly seeking to kill, maim, defame, and oppress you”they tend to smell blood with every escalating gesture of compassion. It emboldens them to bite the hand that meekly holds out the olive branch.
Of course the clueless white ethnomasochists wind up getting hurt. It’s as if they’ve willingly allowed a giant KICK ME sign to be painted on their backs.
As was seamlessly documented in Howard Bloom’s The Lucifer Principle, most kings throughout history were overthrown not at the height of their despotism, but after they’d grown soft and started trying to make amends.
They say white people deserve to hate themselves for all the pain and death they’ve wrought. I say white people are loathsome these days because they’re uniquely susceptible to such idiotic guilt-tripping. That’s the problem with white people”not that it was so easy for them to conquer the world, but that it’s so easy to make them feel bad about it.
I sure as hell hate white people these days”they are by far my least favorite racial group”but not because they’re innately worth hating. It’s because they already hate themselves far too much, and they don’t wear it well. I have far more respect for all other groups because they respect themselves, whether it’s deserved or not.
It’s been a long process, but huge swaths of the globe’s Caucasian population have been snookered and hoodwinked and bamboozled into thinking that being history’s winners should be a matter of shame rather than celebration. You don’t see such servile self-abnegation among any other racial group on Earth. Has there been a demographic cluster in world history more thoroughly brainwashed into cheering its own demise than modern white people?
As our culture is currently dictated to us, white ethnomasochism is the only form of ethnic self-hatred that is currently deemed a virtue. Nonwhites are ritually scolded if they aren’t openly proud of their heritage, whereas whites are publicly reprimanded if they dare to notice anything in white history beyond slavery, colonialism, and the Holocaust.
Look with disgust upon these squirming white worms with their endlessly tacky public displays of self-flagellation, exulting in the idea of their own wickedness, trying to drown their historical sins in a cleansing wave of softly genocidal immigration. Afflicted with a perverse sort of racial body dysmorphia, they would crawl out of their white skin if they could only find a way.
This is the sort of thing that happens in the late stages of a crumbling empire, when the fat, lazy, and pampered have grown so soft they’ve blinded themselves to the wolf pack waiting at the door that’s eager to tear them to pieces.
Believe this”if white people actually held such iron-fisted power and were remotely as ruthless as they are portrayed, there would be no such mocking. People would be scared beyond belief to insult whites, because they’d be forced to deal with drastic consequences”you know, just as any white person these days is publicly destroyed for saying anything remotely unkind about nonwhites.
We are constantly lectured that there was nothing good about the “good old days,” that it was one giant charnel house of rape and plunder and exploitation.
The Week’s Most Bumptious, Scrumptious, and Presumptuous Headlines
FEAR AND SCHLONGING ON THE CAMPAIGN TRAIL
Donald Trump, who according to rumor is secretly planning to name our Solar System after himself before he dies, launched an “Astonishingly Sexist Attack” on the diminutive and lovable Hillary Clinton last week while speaking before a crowd of nearly 10,000 rabid bigots in Grand Rapids, MI.
In the midst of yet another one of his gloriously meandering improvised speeches, Trump used the word “disgusting” three times within six seconds in reference to Clinton’s much-ballyhooed extra-long bathroom break during the most recent Democratic debate”her second such break in three debates.
In the process of defaming Clinton, Trump made the comment that will forever be known in global politics as The Schlonging:
She was going to beat Obama. I don”t know who”d be worse. I don”t know. How does it get worse? She was favored to win and she got schlonged. She lost. She lost.
People screamed in outrage, accusing Trump of wielding a huge phallic symbol with which to beat the frail, vulnerable Clinton upside the head. Some saw an even more sinister meaning in Trump’s statement, alleging he fed into stereotypes about rampaging black male sexuality and their demonstrated statistical propensity to rape, asserting that the “schlong” in question belonged to Barack Hussein Obama.
No sane person would doubt that if the general election came down to a contest between Trump and Clinton, a masterful needler such as Trump would get under her skin and thoroughly schlong her every time the twain locked horns.
HISPANIC GRANDMOTHERS REMIND HILLARY CLINTON THAT SHE’s NOT A HISPANIC GRANDMOTHER
The “racial dialogue” that we’re supposed to be having is so tilted and one-sided, Republicans constantly get accused of racially pandering to white people, although it’s difficult”perhaps even impossible”to find even one example of a Republican explicitly making an appeal to white group interests.
Democrats, on the other hand, are always openly and shamelessly reaching out to nonwhites. There’s Bernie Sanders pandering to the dusky urban community by chumming around with his big fat black rapper pal, Killer Mike. And Hillary Clinton recently festooned her Twitter page with an openly pandering image of a solidly black wall of Clinton supporters.
But Frau Clinton’s recent outreach campaign to Hispanics has blown up in her face like a loud, wet, post-Taco Bell fart.
Clinton’s website recently featured an inane listicle titled “7 things Hillary Clinton has in common with your abuela,” the latter term a synonym for “grandmother” used widely among those vibrant brown peoples from south of the American border whose mean IQ is perched roughly between that of American whites and blacks and who enrich our nation in so many ways, people find it hard to articulate exactly how.
The article apparently chafed the overworked inner thighs of countless Hispanic grandmas and inspired a severe online backlash accusing Miz Clinton of “Hispandering.” Self-described Latinas called Clinton an out-of-touch privileged and clueless white woman trying to use their racial struggle as a political prop.
This sort of thing is quite delicious to observe, just as it’s always a source of sublime pleasure to watch a clueless white progressive get eaten alive by the exotic pet animals they’ve imported into the country in a blind quest to untangle the Gordian Knot that is their personal ethnic guilt complex.
FEDERAL COURT ALLOWS A GROUP OF SLANTS TO CALL THEMSELVES “THE SLANTS”
Last week a US appeals court overturned part of a federal law that had banned “offensive” trademarks, which may help the Washington Redskins retain their respectful and attractive logos featuring a noble and mighty Red Man.
Specifically, the decision vacated the Patent and Trademark Office’s refusal to register the name of The Slants, an all-Asian rock quartet from Portland, OR.
Other trademarks formerly ruled disparaging that may get a second chance at life after this ruling include AmishHomo, Heeb, Abort the Republicans, Stop the Islamisation of America, Sex Rod, Marriage is for Fags, Fagdog, N.I.G.G.A. (Naturally Intelligent God Gifted Africans), Dangerous Negro, and Stinky Gringo.
It is truly a wondrous day for free speech in this great land of ours.
Credit where credit is due: President Hollande”who until then had never seemed à la hauteur, as the French say, of his exalted position, appearing more like the deputy head of a lycée in Limoges than a head of state”made an excellent speech before both houses of the French parliament after the terrorist attacks of Nov. 13. It added, temporarily, cubits to his stature.
But one speech doesn”t make a policy; and one knew, of course, that the unanimity expressed by the standing ovation with which his speech was received could not last. Luckily, indeed, our countries are not given to lasting expressions of unanimity, the deliberate preservation of our peaceful divisions being what the struggle with Muslim fundamentalism is all about. The Muslim fundamentalists, like other would-be dictators, have a one-eyed or cyclopean view of what life is all about, and believe moreover that everyone else is blind. Their stupidity is matched only by their arrogance.
However, it does not follow from the fact that we are, as we should be, divided about many things that our governments” policies should be incoherent and vacillating. One of President Hollande’s promises in his speech was that French nationality would be withdrawn from convicted terrorists with dual nationality, French and other, even if they were born in France.
No one could suppose that this measure would solve the terrorist problem, or even make a major contribution to its solution. A man who is prepared to blow himself up is not likely to be deterred from detonating himself, and for “every suicide bomber there must be many terrorists and organizers of terrorists who are not quite so keen on losing their lives, and for whom the threat of the withdrawal of their passport might be more serious, since they could then be deported to the country of their other nationality, and it seems that few Muslim fundamentalists brought up in the West want to live permanently in a Muslim country.
In the first flush of enthusiasm, no one opposed the proposed law (which required a constitutional change), until the government prepared to legislate it into actual existence. Then the opposition, principally among its own supporters, began in earnest. The proposed law was supported not only by the respectable parliamentary opposition, the Republicans of Nicolas Sarkozy, but by the Front National, the kind of party for which nobody knows anybody who votes, but which nevertheless gains about a quarter of the suffrages.
In the face of opposition by its own supporters, the government vacillated. Would it, or would it not, enact the provision? The minister of justice, Christiane Taubira, announced on a visit to Algeria that it would not, only for the prime minister, Manuel Valls, to announce immediately afterward that it would.
The opposition to the proposed law by the government’s own supporters was, as usual, phrased in the language of the highest abstraction and principle. The proposed law, it said, was an attack on the fundamental human rights for which the French Republic (give or take a genocide or two) had always stood. The law risked creating two categories of French citizen, those who might have their nationality withdrawn and those who might not. And in practice the law would inflame passions without contributing to national security.
The only sensible argument is the last of these, though the desire not to arouse passions can easily be taken to the point of appeasement. The law would clearly be of symbolic importance, even if it achieved little else. It seems to me not so much principled and scrupulous on these grounds to worry about the withdrawal of nationality of those who hold two nationalities”to one of which they have shown their enmity by their actions”but frivolous and decadent. There is one other slight objection to which I have seen no one draw attention: Although the law envisages the withdrawal of nationality only from those convicted of terrorism by a proper court, there is always the possibility of a miscarriage of justice, however conscientiously a case is tried. And to exile an innocent person would indeed be a serious fault. But fear of such fault cannot (in my judgment) be allowed to paralyze action in a matter so serious.
The Christian holiday based on the birth of Jesus and made even more kid-friendly by Northern European folklore is upon us. The odds are pretty high you”re one of the nearly 100 million Americans who traveled to spend it with family, and the odds are even higher you”re going to have a disagreement about politics while you”re there.
I”m in Madison right now, which is the Berkeley of the Midwest, but the holidays have also included Chicago and New York with plenty of visitors from all over in each place. It’s been an interesting sampling of the country (albeit with a fairly liberal skew). I”ve seen a heartening trend with millennial males where they”re into far-right black guys such as Tommy Sotomayor, E.T. Williams, and Taleeb Starkes. I guess it’s the only way to be non-liberal and still get laid these days. Among landowning fathers I”m seeing a lot of socially liberal fiscal conservatives who are libertarian on everything but open borders and will be against foreign intervention right after we take care of ISIS (nobody likes ISIS). Women, minorities, and young people tend to be incredibly left-wing and even more uninformed, which seems irrelevant until Michael Moore points out that they represent 81% of the population. Here’s what they”re saying.
(1) “[Trump] wants all the Muslims out.”
This was said by a thirtysomething white woman at a Manhattan holiday party where presents were exchanged and someone brought a Trump board game ironically. I was given the game by the person who won it because she didn”t really want it. I asked this woman to name one specific thing wrong with Trump and she said the above quote (I heard others joke, “He wants to get the difference out”). In their world, Trump didn”t just call for a temporary immigration ban on Muslims immediately after a terrorist attack”he wants all 12 million Muslims to be escorted off the continent. When I explained what he really said and why he really said it, she didn”t seem to care. When you hear politicians described as “idiotic” and “insane” their critics are usually extrapolating from cartoon premises that the politician never said and when that cartoon bubble bursts, they just move on to the next one.
(2) “Why don”t we just kill Obama’s kids?”
This hair-whitening statement came from a Madison mom and inspired today’s column. When asked if I prefer Trump or Cruz, I said that’s like choosing between Superman and Batman and she was furious I didn”t hate Cruz. The premise of her statement goes: Ted Cruz is an evangelical and their credo is racism. They don”t believe black lives matter, therefore black people being murdered will be met with a tsunami of shrugs from the establishment.
I can just see Cruz standing at the podium for the inaugural address and smiling like Mr. Burns as Malia and Sasha meet the same fate as J. Christopher Stevens. The fictional world liberals create for the GOP is alive and well in the Middle East, but they prefer cartoons to reality.
(3) “I think I”m losing a friend, you guys. She’s pretty out-there with the lip piercing and the mohawk but the other day she told me she’s not a feminist.”
This was another thirtysomething, but this time she was from L.A. Her friend had let her down by jumping ship and when all the other women in the room heard it, they didn”t understand. “How can she say that?” one said, and we heard the horrible woman quoted above had also said she likes the idea of the patriarchy and would love to be taken care of. “That doesn”t mean you”re not a feminist,” the ladies chimed in. “You can be a stay-at-home mom and still think women deserve equal rights.” Not only did these women not understand why someone would deny being a feminist, they didn”t understand what the word means. By definition, to be a feminist means you believe women are “systematically and seriously oppressed.” If you think this applies to American women in 2015, you don”t think much. We also learned the lady with the pierced lip was a wage-gap denier. At this point, I couldn”t help but jump in and explain that the wage gap is a myth. Instead of this clarification being met with derision, all the women agreed with my logic. It became clear that the discussion wasn”t really about facts. It was about feelings.
Well, I”ll be damned. The mainstream media has finally discovered the Jewish Defense League. And only a decade or two too late. But why nitpick? Any old fool can condemn a terrorist group while it’s actively threatening and murdering people, but CNN didn”t get where it is today (the basement) by being rash and foolhardy (you know, like nearly going on air with the false announcement of a president’s death). Like a cobra with Down syndrome, CNN knows that the best time to strike is when the target is dead and motionless.
Because of my own history with the JDL (CliffsNotes version: The group tried to kill me), some of my friends understandably thought I”d cheer the clips they emailed me of CNN’s Ashleigh Banfield lecturing a Donald Trump supporter about how Jews are supposedly just as bad as Muslims when it comes to terrorism in the U.S.:
You know what? I”m going to tell ya something. There’s a guy named John Pistole, who just recently was running the TSA. Uh, real venerable guy. He, before that, was with the FBI. He was an executive assistant director for counterterror and counterintelligence and he sat before Congress in 2004 and he testified”and this is to your point about there are no Jews coming to hurt Americans”he testified about, from a period of 1980 to 1985, there were 18 terrorist attacks in the United States committed by Jews. Fifteen of them by members of the Jewish Defense League. The head of the Jewish Defense League was in jail awaiting trial on charges of trying to bomb a mosque in Culver City, trying to bomb Darrell Issa’s office, an Arab-American. What are you talking about?! There have been Jewish terrorist attacks! Should we therefore ask no Jews to please apply for a visa?… I”m telling you that there have been that many terrorist attacks committed by Jews and no one’s suggesting for a minute that all Jews should be wiped out of this country from visiting. It’s the same thing.
Banfield left out the anticlimactic coda. In December 2001, JDL forzitser Irv Rubin was arrested, along with his right-hand man Earl Krugel, for plotting to blow up Muslim targets in Southern California in retaliation for 9/11. He died in L.A. County lockup awaiting trial, and Krugel was murdered by a fellow inmate after pleading guilty to the charges. By 2005, Rubin and Krugel were dead, and the JDL existed in name only. JDL violence (in the U.S.) went the way of New Coke, the rotary phone, and Gallagher.
Frankly, I find CNN’s sudden “discovery” of JDL terrorism offensive and disingenuous. During the years that the group was terrorizing people like me, mainstream news organizations were dead silent. CNN especially. Prior to the December 2001 arrests, CNN.com didn”t feature one single story about JDL “terrorism.” In fact, when mentioned at all, the JDL was described only as an “activist group,” and the JDL website (the one that contained a death warrant calling for my violent demise) was routinely featured as a “related site” link in stories about the Middle East.
Now that the JDL in the U.S. is no longer a threat, all of a sudden JDL terrorism matters, but only as a weapon to be wielded against critics of Islamic extremism. This is cowardly and cynical. The fact is, as long as the JDL was attacking the “right” victims (real or perceived white racists and anti-Semites), the media turned a blind eye. Hell, worse than a blind eye. Rubin was a popular talk-show guest, his “terrorism” conveniently forgotten. Then”KABC talk show host Larry Elder even attended the man’s funeral, telling the L.A. Times, “I thought of him as a courageous champion for what he believed in. I thought of him as a hothead who often led with his mouth, but not someone who would kill people” (ironically, Elder would end up becoming my business partner during my years as a GOP organizer, never knowing that he was working with a man Rubin had indeed tried to kill).
Mainstream left and right ignored JDL violence because Rubin was going after the “white fringe”: Holocaust deniers, white nationalists, people with strong anti-Jewish views, and people like me, who were not deniers, racists, or anti-Semites, but who were tarred as such by the press. In July 1984, when the JDL firebombed the warehouse and library of the Holocaust revisionist/denial publishing house the Institute for Historical Review, the silence from the media moved Pulitzer Prize-winning author and historian John Toland to pen a letter condemning the blackout:
When I learned of the torching of the office-warehouse of the Institute for Historical Review I was shocked. And when I heard no condemnation of this act of terrorism on television and read no protests in the editorial pages of our leading newspapers or from the halls of academia, I was dismayed and incensed. Where are those defenders of democracy who over the years have so vigorously protested the burning of books by Hitler? Are they only summer soldiers of democracy, selective in their outrage? I call on all true believers in democracy to join me in public denunciation of the recent burning of books in Torrance, California.
Alexander Cockburn expressed similar sentiments in his March 20, 1989, “Beat the Devil” column in The Nation. Slamming Western intellectuals for their hypocrisy in championing Salman Rushdie while turning a blind eye to the persecution of those who “blaspheme” Western orthodoxies, Cockburn wrote: “The outfit in the United States that does publish material belittling generally accepted accounts of the Nazi extermination of the Jews is called the Institute for Historical Review. I don”t recall much fuss when its offices in Torrance, California, were firebombed in July 1984. Perhaps this is what [Norman] Mailer meant by “sophistication” in handling such heterodox opinion.”
