As the elderly black female homeless Trump supporter was curled in the fetal position on the sidewalk while street swine jeered at her from all sides, a black man leaned over and told her that she’d brought it all on herself:
Didn”t I tell you about five minutes ago that somebody’s gonna walk by here and no, I would not defend you? “Cause you spewed hate, and you got hate. You got exactly what you were dishin” out. I told you. I warned you on that.
The woman, still unidentified, had taken it upon herself to protect Donald Trump’s star on Hollywood Boulevard a day after “millionaire activist James Otis” had violently destroyed it last Wednesday morning with a pickaxe in a hissy-fit over news reports that Trump was, like, mean to women or something.
Not only was this woman a Trump supporter, she expressed as much in handmade signs she displayed along with all of her earthly belongings:
20 Million Illegals and Americans sleep on the streets in tents. Vote Trump.
Obama threw our black asses under the bus, he owes the Clintons, flip this script (get off the Clinton plantation).
But a series of three short videos (here, here, and here) show that she did not get exactly what she was dishing out. In reality, she got far worse. Her act of “hate” was attempting to protect a public landmark from further destruction while expressing a rather poignant political opinion”she lived in a country that coddled illegal aliens while she lived on the streets. But in response, she had her signs ripped up and was apparently knocked to the ground by a mob of hateful, dysgenic cretins.
She was only “spewing” opinions. In response, she got pure hate. In the twisted ethical constellation of the modern progressive hivemind, words are not only considered worse than harmful actions, they are frequently mistaken for harmful actions. And if the thoughtcrime is deemed harmful enough”despite the fact that it likely caused no measurable harm at all”any level of retaliatory nastiness is justified.
Sickeningly hypocritical anti-Trump violence committed in the name of fighting some nebulous, dimwitted, and unquantifiable notion of “hate” has become so tiresome that one might be excused for feeling a temporary flash of desire to respond with unforgiving and grievously excessive force.
There was the recent firebombing of a GOP office in North Carolina. Reports of lawn signs being destroyed, cars being vandalized, and people being physically attacked merely for expressing support for Trump have become as routine as eggs for breakfast. There were also two direct attempts to physically harm Trump himself at rallies”one in Ohio and the other in Las Vegas.
And throughout this year there has been apocalyptic anti-Trump mob violence at rallies in Albuquerque, Tucson, Anaheim, San Diego, San Jose, St. Louis, Houston, Orlando, Costa Mesa, Eugene, Asheville, and New York City“all of which the mainstream media saw fit to blame on Trump’s words rather than his opponents’ deeds.
Many had long suspected that these endless waves of violence had been carefully orchestrated by forces sympathetic to the Democrats; recent revelations have proved that these suspicions were justified. In a video recently released by James O’Keefe and Project Veritas, a proud lisping AIDS-bomb named Scott Foval explains how he worked in tandem with the Clinton campaign to foment violence at Trump rallies. These are the words of a man so power-hungry and unmoored from reality, he apparently believes it is possible to “stage” protests that are “very authentic”:
So one of the things we do is we stage very authentic grassroots protests right in their faces at their own events. Like, we infiltrate….The aggressive bird-dogging. What I call it is “conflict engagement.”…We”re starting anarchy. And he needs to understand that we”re starting anarchy….The key is initiating the conflict by having leading conversations with people who are naturally psychotic. I mean honestly, it is not hard to get some of these assholes to pop off. It’s a matter of showing up, to want to get in the rally in a Planned Parenthood T-shirt. Or Trump is a Nazi. You can message to draw them out and message them to punch you….I”m saying we have mentally ill people that we pay to do shit, make no mistake. Over the last 20 years, I”ve paid off a few homeless guys to do some crazy stuff…. It doesn”t matter what the friggin” legal and ethics people say, we need to win this motherfucker….
The same tapes show DNC operative Bob Creamer, who’d previously been imprisoned for bank fraud, verifying everything that Foval said and stating unequivocally that Hillary Clinton was fully aware of the shenanigans they were pulling at Trump rallies. “Bob Creamer is diabolical, and I love him for it,” Foval enthuses as if he’s gargling a throatful of cum.
Jack Chick is dead, alas, and along with him any hope for new additions to his corpus of strangely endearing Evangelical scare tracts.
Even those who aren”t aficionados might have encountered Chick’s work (known as “Chick tracts”) at some point or another. Little 3-by-5 Bible tracts featuring either simple, MAD Magazine-like artwork or more polished, fine-lined work. He had at least one ghostwriter, who did the latter format, though some have speculated that “Jack Chick” ended up being a conglomerate of Christian artists. The basic stories are more or less the same: Accept Jesus Christ as your Lord and long-term personal savior or burn in hell for all eternity. Along the way, you”ll encounter the occult, personal hubris, and a vast Roman Catholic conspiracy whose tendrils include Freemasonry, Islam, and Communism. The Southern Poverty Law Center branded Chick Publications as an active hate group, something that can easily be worn as a badge of honor.
While Chick’s anti-Catholic conspiracism definitely makes for good reading, Chick’s work stands out from the pack because of his strong and compelling storytelling. I challenge anyone to read The Last Generation, a tale of the biblical end-times, and not be riveted by the twenty little pages. A one-world government is going after Christians. A family must escape to a remote cabin. Little Bobby, called “The Monster” by his own grandfather, will be the first second-grader you want to see spend an eternity in hell. One page, featuring postage-stamp-size illustrations of what will happen to the oceans during the apocalypse, is the stuff of nightmares. There’s also the small treat of the campy, cone-headed uniform of the “healers,” a sort of Gestapo-cum-priesthood of the nightmarish one-world government of the future.
I”ll never forget the first Chick tract I received. It was at a Wednesday-night market, sometime in the mid-“90s in my little hometown. A very Evangelical-looking man approached me and handed me This Was Your Life!, Chick’s signature tract. The work was translated into over 100 languages and specifically adapted for black, Muslim, and female audiences. It contains every leitmotif of Chick’s work: giant angels, “HAW-HAW” as an onomatopoeia for laughter, false Christians getting comeuppance as they”re thrown into the Lake of Fire, and righteous believers received into the arms of Our Lord.
It was a year or two later that I found out, through an older friend’s girlfriend, that Chick tracts were a whole cottage industry. People collected and traded them. Ever since then, I”ve had friends and family on the lookout. I”ve spent countless hours reading his tracts and long-form comics, the latter of which allowed him to detail the nuances of his anti-Catholic conspiracy, mostly gleaned from the musings of Alberto Rivera, a self-proclaimed former Jesuit priest. I wouldn”t say I like them ironically. As I said, the man can spin a yarn. But it’s worth wondering just how many people have read Chick’s work in total sincerity and credulity and how many were bratty little punk rockers looking for a laugh and a scare.
Every Chick tract contains a little microcosm of life and death, salvation and damnation within. The reader never knows until the ending whether the protagonist will give up their wicked ways, accept Christ, and lead a new life. Just as often as characters are saved, so are they thrown into the pit, either for stubborn rejection of Christ or choosing the wrong flavor of Christianity (which includes not just Catholics but also Jehovah’s Witnesses and Mormons”and Chick seems to not have cared much for corporate megachurch Evangelicalism, either). Protagonists run the gamut from renegade Catholic priests to Christian-rock bands to little kids. Very few walks of life don”t get at least a cursory Chick treatment. This makes the little pamphlets easy to get lost in for hours if you have enough of them to go around. If you go to his website, you can see each and every one, including those that have long been out of print.
On some topics, Chick is actually quite prescient. Doom Town retells the biblical story of Sodom, but also features a powerful and entrenched gay rights movement as a backdrop. Doom Town dates to 1989. The Gay Blade, from 1972, opens with a homosexual wedding. He originally penned The Last Generation in 1972, though it got an overhaul in 1992. Alongside The Beast, another end-times yarn from way back in 1966 (revised in 1981 and 1988″Jack was fond of rewriting his own tracts, getting a new copyright, and pulling the old ones out of circulation), Chick was crafting terrifying and compelling Christian apocalypse horror stories long before Left Behind. Allah Had No Son features a Muslim bragging about impending global dhimmitude way back in 1994.
The Week’s Most Phallic, Gallic, and Microcephalic Headlines
HILLARY GETS SCHLONGED BY WEINER
After a week that had already seen her lead over Donald Trump in the polls rapidly shrinking, Friday’s news that the FBI was reopening its investigation into Hillary Clinton’s private email server was, as purple-haired DNC chairwoman Donna Brazile described it, “like an 18-wheeler smacking into us.”
And what better time for an 18-wheeler to smack into the Democratic Party than 11 days before a presidential election that may alter the course of American history more than any of its predecessors?
Hilariously, the emails that triggered the new investigation were not retrieved from Clinton’s infamously private server, but from the laptop of the chicken-faced serial pervert Anthony Weiner, who is under investigation for allegedly sexting a 15-year-old girl pictures of what is presumably his severely hooked penis. Weiner is the estranged husband of Clinton’s confidante and presumed lesbian lover Huma Abedin, whose father sympathized with the Barbary pirates and supported sharia law.
The FBI announcement came on the heels of further Wikileaks dumps that revealed that the robotic DNC propaganda machine Media Matters is part of a pro-Clinton money-laundering scheme. This adds to a mountain of previously damaging Wikileaks revelations proving that Barack Obama lied about Clinton’s private server, that Clinton told Wall Street execs that she dreams of “open borders,” that she distinguishes between public policy positions and private ones, that the DNC paid people to incite violence at Trump rallies, that she prayed for the shooters in last fall’s San Bernardino massacre to be white, that she was happy to find a case where a black man was murdered by a white man, and of extensive collusion with major media outlets to sculpt a ceaselessly pro-Clinton propaganda onslaught.
MOBS OF UNIDENTIFIED YOUNG PEOPLE ASSAULT STUDENTS AT TEMPLE UNIVERSITY
Echoing a spate of violent flash mobs that pockmarked Philadelphia five years ago, last Tuesday night a swarming group of 150-200 “teens,” “youngsters,” and “juveniles” randomly attacked students and passersby at the Temple University campus in notoriously dangerous North Philadelphia.
Pundits and police were so quick to proclaim that the attacks had nothing to do with race, it was the verbal equivalent of premature ejaculation”despite the fact that all known assailants were black and all known victims were white.
One person who explicitly mentioned the race of the attackers, yet who declined to say race was a motivating factor, was 50-year-old Joe Lauletta, who posted on Facebook about how his 19-year-old daughter got caught in the flash mob’s savage undertow:
Every part of her body is badly bruised. It makes me cry just thinking about it….She went down in the fetal position and then they pinned her,” he said. Her back is really, really cut up….I find out that her and her 2 male friends where badly beaten by a group of 30-40 black teenagers on their way home from the Temple football game….These sick animals held her down and kicked and stomped on her repeatedly.
If history is any indication, the “racist” tag will not be used against the sick animals but against the man who used the term “sick animals.”
ALEX JONES FINGERS THE “JEWISH MAFIA”
Because he so frequently acts insane, it is easy to dismiss Alex Jones as insane, despite the fact that he and his cohorts at Infowars often dig into legitimate stories that the mainstream media would be terrified to research because it would implicate them in wrongdoing. It is this toxic combo of insanity and “speaking truth to power” that make some suspect that Jones is a government plant designed to gaslight anyone who questions government power as a lunatic “conspiracy theorist.”
Because he rarely mentions Jews by name in his endless attacks on globalism, Jones is accused by those whose antenna are always pointed toward Jews of being a “Zionist shill.” But on Tuesday’s episode of The Alex Jones Show, the apopleptic chubster fingered a “Jewish Mafia” and blamed it for maliciously meddling in American affairs:
I mean it’s not that Jews are bad; it’s just they are the head of the Jewish Mafia in the United States. They run Uber. They run the health care. They”re going to scam you. They”re going to hurt you…I mean it’s, like, if being against Jews that are weirdo Nazi collaborators and gangsters makes me anti-Semitic, then fine…I”m not against Jews, but at a certain point, when you people call you out, I”ve been called out in hundreds of newspapers in the last month, as being anti-Semitic, because I talk about a global, corporate combine.
Singled out for Jones’s scorn were the exceptionally unattractive George Soros, Madeleine Albright, and tiny-fingered baby lizard Rahm Emanuel.
Who would be a politician? It is like living in permanent fear of ambush, with everyone waiting to pounce on the first stupid thing that you say or do. To be a politician, therefore, you must be prepared to endure a thousand humiliations large or small for the sake of power. Which is one of the reasons, of course, why good people so seldom rise to the top in politics.
A man who hopes to be a candidate in the forthcoming French presidential elections, Jean-François Copé, was recently ambushed during a broadcast interview. The interviewer asked him the price of pain au chocolat, and of course he hadn”t the faintest idea: He hazarded a not-very-good guess at ten or fifteen centimes.
The question was designed to elicit precisely such an answer, to demonstrate that he was completely out of touch with the life of ordinary people and was therefore unsuitable for the presidency.
The answer was terrible because, as detractors soon pointed out, practically nothing these days costs ten or fifteen centimes. To go to the lavatory at Nîmes station, for example, costs seventy centimes. To make matters worse, M. Copé’s special area of expertise, or at least attention, is the economy.
It is not quite true, however, that you can buy nothing for ten or fifteen centimes. Though not motivated or driven by the strictest economic necessity, when I am in England I sometimes go down to my local supermarket just before it closes to see what items are on sale for next to nothing because their sell-by date expires an hour or two later and they would otherwise be thrown away. I may not particularly want pita bread, for example, but I find my desire or appetite for it suddenly stimulated by a price of two cents for ten. When I reach the pearly gates I shall not be able to point to many good deeds qualifying me for the kingdom of heaven, but I shall be able in all truth to say that I once bought two kilos of chicken legs for fifteen cents that made soup that lasted a week. In this way, I helped to save the planet.
Poor M. Copé! He said by way of explanation of his ignorance that he never bought pain au chocolat because he was careful of his figure. When prominent politicians are asked such questions as a test of their in-touchness, they should routinely multiply by ten the first figure they think of, as being the increase in prices since the last time they paid for a meal for themselves, or saw anything of the city in which they live other than from the back of an official car. Multiplying by ten should save them from ridicule.
Further and more detailed investigation showed, however, that M. Copé was more correct, no doubt by accident, than his sarcastic critics had supposed. It is true that if you buy pain au chocolat at a proper bakery it will cost about ten times more than the figure given by M. Copé, but the industrially fabricated version in cheap supermarkets costs about 20 centimes each, provided that you buy a packet of eight. What this revealed was that the interviewer had no more knowledge of the world of cheap supermarkets than had M. Copé of the price of pain au chocolat in boulangeries, though I doubt that M. Copé was familiar with the world of cheap supermarkets either.
Some ignorance of prices, therefore, is acceptable, while other ignorance is not. By their knowledge of prices shall ye know them. Perhaps it would be possible to rank politicians (or people in general) by the prices of which they are aware. Those who know the price of an Aubusson tapestry, for example, but not that of a pain au chocolat would be of aristocratic or industrialist conservative type; those who know the price of a pain au chocolat but not of a McDonald’s hamburger would be of good cultivated social democratic type; while those who know the price of Coca-Cola but not of fennel would be of the proletarian populist type. Political debates should be replaced by lists of goods of which the candidates estimate the current price.
I was not on the winning side of the debate, despite giving it the old college try. Thank God for my South African friend Simon Reader, who coached me just before I went on. Mind you, my side felt a bit like Maxime Weygand, the French general who was happily smoking his exotic cheroot pipe back in Hanoi when he got the call to take over the French army in June of 1940. Trouble was, the Germans had already taken Holland and Belgium and had breached La Ligne Maginot, Gamelin had thrown in the towel, and Paul Reynaud had called for a fresh face to stop the mighty Wehrmacht. “Gee, thanks a bunch,” said Weygand, but took it like a real Frenchman and surrendered to the German army a couple of weeks later.
Two months ago, when I was kindly invited by The Spectator to defend The Donald, he was yet to do an Annie Oakley on his foot. But I’ve always loved lost causes, especially when up against a woman who, however inadvertently, will continue Obama’s strategy of destroying Western hegemony. I was happy to see Conrad Black again, who by the way debated without notes and wiped the floor with everyone. The one who didn’t get my motor racing was a boring American man who heads Democrats (Yawn) Abroad. He kept name-dropping locations he had been to during the campaign, as if any of us gave a flying fuck where he’d been.
So what else is new? Daniel McCarthy wrote in The Spectator that Hillary will push for globalist economics, and with the support of Beltway insiders—read neocons and other architects of the Iraq disaster—will be an interventionist and nation builder. All I can say is heaven help us. My only hope is that Saint Theresa does not do a Blair and follow that Clinton woman like a lemming.
What was fun was to be back in London for four days of partying that made me want to shout. One thing men no longer do in America is have fun lunches. Too busy chasing the mighty buck. There are only ladies who lunch, and they are mostly over-the-hill, pulled to the extreme, and widows. Not in good old London. Bellamy’s, for example, is as good a place to lunch and spend the early afternoon as any St. James’s club. Gavin Rankin runs it like a club; the service is impeccable, the food excellent, and I didn’t see the kind of lowlife from the Gulf one runs into nowadays in chic London establishments. I lunched there with my very old friend Timmy Hanbury, who had brought Zuleika Dobson along. Iona McLaren is the most attractive young woman in London, and she has brains to match. She is The Telegraph’s book editor, and boy, I wouldn’t mind turning into a tome as long as I ended up in her hands. She’s named after a Greek priestess who was loved by Zeus and changed into a heifer to protect her from Hera’s jealousy. Iona visited Prometheus and described her tribulations in Aeschylus’ play, and her story is also told by Ovid. From now on it will be told by Taki.
Perfect English-rose looks aside, she seemed unaware of that uniquely English upper-class pas de deux of meanness of spirit and snobbism. Instead, one gets an approachable and immensely welcoming air from a truly beautiful young woman. Lucky Timmy, unlucky Taki. Then there was a dinner by yet another Tim, Commodore Tim Hoare, followed by a Pugs Club do chez la princesse de Hanover to welcome two new Pugs members, making us 21 and closing the membership until one of us drops off. (I am apparently odds on to be the second club member to leave the club feet first.)
PALM BEACH, Fla.”Maybe you missed this little item, but last month Obama shut down 130 colleges in a single day.
That’s one-three-oh campuses in 38 states that failed to open for the fall semester even though everybody was already enrolled.
Correct me if I”m wrong, but I don”t think anything even remotely similar to this has ever happened in the history of the Republic. Education is the religion of the country. It’s the one thing that all politicians put on their list of bromides (always saying we need more, not fewer, colleges). Education ranks right up there with sick babies and flogged pit bulls for things people will donate money to. If Obama had shown up in, say, Dayton, Ohio, in 2008 and said, “By the way, part of my platform is that I might shut down 130 colleges,” I think he would have needed a security escort to get out of the Wright Brothers Banquet Hall.
So why are there no riots?
Because the victims of this Orientation Day Surprise are all students at the ITT Technical Institute.
ITT Tech is one of those for-profit chains that offer degrees in rarefied skills like automobile mechanics and refrigeration repair and medical billing”they”re not afraid to get specific with their curriculum”but historically it’s the Oxford of that group. It grew out of an Indianapolis company called Howard W. Sams that was a publisher of electronics textbooks and service manuals. Sams Technical Institute was formed in 1963 to teach electronics to students who wanted to forgo the typical liberal-arts curriculum of the day and learn how to work with emerging technologies, usually in the service end of the business, and it proved so popular that STI soon merged with Teletronic Technical Institute in Evansville, Acme Institute of Technology in Dayton, and another Sams in Fort Wayne, before being acquired in 1966 by ITT, the diversified international conglomerate that got started in the “20s by consolidating phone companies.
In the “60s and “70s these were sneered at as “trade schools” or “vo-tech schools,” but ITT turned them into actual colleges, a fact recognized in 1973 when the original ITT Technical Institute in Indianapolis became the first “nontraditional” school allowed into the federal tuition loan and grant program. It was considered good policy, since these programs were extremely popular with Vietnam War veterans trying to reenter society. ITT Tech expanded rapidly in the “70s, pulled back slightly in the “80s, expanded again in the “90s, then became publicly traded after the Starwood hotel group bought ITT and decided it didn”t want to be in the education business.
By that time ITT Tech’s curriculum didn”t look that different from any business-oriented college, offering degrees in industrial design, paralegal studies, hospitality management, a slew of engineering specialties, software development, various technology fields, information technology, criminal justice, project management, and business administration. These schools were not so “nontraditional” anymore, but they had nontraditional undergraduates”usually a little older, a little more burdened with responsibility, a little bit more anxious to “get on with it.”
Well, they won”t be getting on with it anymore, because on Aug. 25 the Secretary of Education invoked something called the “Gainful Employment Rule,” decreed in 2014, invented out of thin air, designed to punish schools offering courses in “occupations for which there are simply no job opportunities,” leading to “crushing student loan debt.” Students at the 130 schools of ITT Tech would no longer be eligible for federally backed student loans or federal scholarships. ITT would be required to put up hundreds of millions in cash to cover the possibility of future loan defaults. Decreed. Done. Over.
The next day the stock price of ITT Tech plummeted. A few days later the company declared bankruptcy and told its student bodies there would be no fall semester. After 53 years, the school was dead.
So what were the mortal sins of ITT Tech? According to the government, there were two of them.
First, grade inflation. ITT was giving out too many A’s and B’s. In the opinion of the Department of Education, this was an attempt to keep the students eligible for federal aid and scholarships. It was fraudulent. How could that many students at ITT Tech be doing that well?
And yet, if you want to seek out the most notorious grade-inflated school in America, you would go to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where a faculty member asked the Dean of Undergraduate Studies at a famous 2013 meeting, What is the median grade at Harvard?
“I don”t mind telling you,” replied the dean. “It’s an A-minus.”
Let me put this in perspective. There is no A-plus”Harvard doesn”t award those. So if you distribute A, A”, B+, B, B”, C+, C, C”, D+, D, D”, and F along a grading curve that assumes a 65 is failure, you have eleven passing grades from 66 to 100. That would make an A-minus, at the least, a 96. This is the average grade at Harvard, so obviously John Houseman’s performance in The Paper Chase was totally bogus. It’s easier to make an A at Harvard than at Chico State. Where’s the Secretary of Education? Strip these fakers of their $288,000 scholarships at once! (And I”m not making up that number. The cost of a year at Harvard is $72,000. With 70 percent of the student body receiving financial aid, who’s more likely to have “crushing loan debt”?)
And then there’s the second reason for shutting down ITT Tech: The recruiters at the various campuses “misled students about their job prospects.”
People graduated and didn”t get a job. Many of them are now suing ITT Tech to get their money back, or their loans wiped out, or some combination of the two.
I have to say, I”m appalled that ITT Tech didn”t have the courtesy to post a Daddy Warbucks in the wings of the auditorium so that students could be hired as they descended the commencement stage. And in solidarity with the now-forever-screwed alumni, I am this week formally filing suit against my own alma mater, Vanderbilt University, which, now that I think about it, not only didn”t get me a job, but didn”t train me for anything remotely resembling a marketable skill.
I”m not gonna tell this to the court, but I partly blame my freshman roommate, a hippie from Muscle Shoals, Ala., who talked me into joining him in a political-science course called “The Soviet Political System” and, to make sure we were both enmeshed in insanely abstruse pursuits, a 16-hour-a-week ordeal called, simply, “Russian 101.” I lasted only two weeks trying to draw the Cyrillic alphabet before I exploded one night at Rotier’s beer hall and said, “George, this is madness. We can”t go to Russia, there’s no one to speak Russian to, and I can”t sit eight hours a week in a lab making those terrible sounds.”
By that time George had taken up Mandarin as well as Russian, so I branded him a borderline lunatic and dropped the course. I continued, however, to puzzle over the annual photograph of the Politburo so I could write dense papers about the suppression of twelve-tone composers caused by the elevation or demotion of various apparatchiks in the Kremlin.
There were some 50,000 casualties in the three-day Battle of Gettysburg, more than 8,000 killed, more than 25,000 wounded, many of whom subsequently died, others missing or taken prisoner. (The figures for the Union side are well enough recorded; for the Confederates, conjectural.) According to the historian Bruce Catton there was only one recorded civilian death.
War today is different. In Iraq and Syria more civilians than combatants have been killed. Large areas of cities have been destroyed by bombs and rockets, but intense military engagements result in comparatively few deaths: comparatively, that is, with the death toll in the two World Wars. Many more British soldiers were killed in the first half hour of the Battle of the Somme than in years of engagement in Afghanistan and Iraq; likewise more Americans on the first day of the Normandy landings in 1944.
Politicians and journalists still call for military intervention in the world’s trouble spots, and initially may have public support when they do so. The support soon withers when casualty figures mount, even though, by historical standards, these are very low. Every death is of course tragic for family and friends. Yet it’s the public’s intolerance of casualties that is new and remarkable. Names of the dead on First World War memorials in two or three small villages in my native Aberdeenshire outnumber all British servicemen and -women killed in a dozen years in Afghanistan. No bodies were brought home for burial from the Somme; only a telegram for the bereaved families.
I don”t believe that either the U.S. or Britain could again engage in a major foreign war. Public opinion wouldn”t accept it. I doubt if Americans would tolerate another Vietnam, the last American war fought by drafted men. Our wars are again fought by professional forces; the British Army is smaller than at any time since the 18th century, and even so it has difficulty in recruitment and in retaining men and women beyond their first or second term of enlistment. Scotland used to be fertile recruiting ground. It no longer is. The historic regiments have disappeared, the remnant swallowed up in one infantry regiment”the Royal Regiment of Scotland. Scotland is now pacifist. The Scottish National Party has opposed every British military intervention this century.
A terrible war has been raging in Syria for years. The West has largely watched from the sidelines. Admittedly the politics have been confused, devilishly confused. Intervene against whom? On whose behalf? President Assad was first seen as the villain, but there was no appetite for an invasion to overthrow him as we destroyed Saddam Hussein and his regime. When, as prime minister, David Cameron sought parliamentary approval for bombing Assad’s forces, the House of Commons refused to grant it. President Obama said the use of chemical weapons would be a “Red Line,” but they were used, and the Red Line evaporated. In any case the question of whether there really was a moderate opposition deserving our support proved unanswerable. So our intervention has been restricted to the limited use of Special Forces and bombing and missile raids against the murdering fanatics of ISIS. In opposition politicians may clamor for action; in office they shrink from it. They do so, understandably, not only because war is by its nature terrible and in outcome uncertain, but because they know that even if there is at first public support for military intervention, that support will seep away when the body bags come home. The specters of recent wars haunt the Oval Office and number 10 Downing Street. So we dare not use even our small professional armies. In 1733, having kept out of the War of the Polish Succession, the British prime minister Sir Robert Walpole was happy to declare: “50,000 men slain in Europe this year and not a single Englishman.” Today Western politicians might make a similar claim, but not perhaps so complacently.
I thought it would be a bigger deal. Last week marked the 70th anniversary, to the day, of the hanging of the Nuremberg trial defendants, and I have to admit, I was expecting to read a lot more about it in the press. After all, with only two weeks to go before an election in which “literally Hitler” is the GOP candidate, I expected the media to use the Nuremberg 70th as an excuse to dredge up fond nostalgic memories of the “noble exercise in justice” (well, I”ll be damned…I typed that line with a straight face) that concluded with ten nasty Nazis dancing at the end of a rope (not counting the one who, in the words of every uninspired narrator to ever give voice to a World War II documentary, “cheated the hangman”).
But no, the anniversary celebrations were muted. Maybe everyone is just too busy covering the upcoming election. Perhaps there have been too many “Trials of the Century” over the past hundred years to bother making a fuss over the anniversary of Trial of the Century No. 7 (or is it 8?). Or it could be that Holocaust mavens are a bit wary these days in the wake of the revelation that the “landmark” commemorative Nuremberg documentary from ten years ago, Nuremberg: The 60th Anniversary Director’s Cut, turned out to have been produced by a then-closeted Holocaust revisionist (me).
Or it might just be that what used to be considered Nuremberg trial “revisionism” has seeped into mainstream history to enough of an extent that no one who actually understands what went on in the year preceding the executions has any great desire to jump for joy.
There are three uncomfortable truths that those “in the know” generally accept about the Nuremberg trial, even if the news has yet to trickle down to those who get their World War II information from the History channel. To begin with, Nuremberg was not a “Holocaust trial.” This is a simple fact that most historians fully understand. Nazi atrocities real, exaggerated, and imagined were indeed covered during the proceedings, but only in the service of securing convictions based on much broader charges. As UConn School of Law’s Richard Ashby Wilson pointed out in his 2012 book Writing History in International Criminal Trials, many of the top scholars in the field of Holocaust history “maintain that the International Military Tribunal did not adequately address the most important Nazi crime of all”the mass extermination of European Jews. The trials left an incomplete and impoverished historical record because crimes against humanity were subordinated to crimes against peace and conspiracy to wage an aggressive war.”
When I was raising money for Nuremberg: The 60th Anniversary Director’s Cut, I absolutely took advantage of the fact that the average dunderhead mistakenly thinks of Nuremberg as a “Holocaust trial.” Preying on the ignorance of the lightly informed, I was able to attract the attention of a pretty diverse crowd of “helpers” in my quest to raise money for the project, including Mark Cuban, Terry Semel, Whoopi Goldberg, Oliver Stone, and hotshot entertainment lawyer Matt Galsor, all of whom were already quite thoroughly convinced, long before I encountered them, of the fact that the Nuremberg trial was all about “proving” the Holocaust. I fed them no lies; I just somehow forgot to disabuse them of their misconceptions. Had I been David Cole instead of David Stein at that particular moment, I would have quoted the aforementioned Professor Wilson: “Many historians have concluded that the Nuremberg trials did not present an authoritative historical account of the Holocaust and the trials may even have distorted the record for future generations.”
And that brings us to uncomfortable Nuremberg trial truth No. 2: Its contribution to the historical record is really quite crappy. The Nuremberg “record” was assembled not by meticulous historians pursuing accuracy, but rather by vengeful governments and grandstanding prosecutors who saw the trial as nothing more than a convenient means to a political end (even if sometimes that end differed among the victorious Allies). Robert Wolfe, chief of the Modern Military Branch of the U.S. National Archives, summed up the situation well in an essay for the book The Liberation of the Nazi Concentration Camps:
For the discovery of the Holocaust, the Nuremberg Trials were both a boon and a bane. No mere historical research could have mustered the costly five year effort in staff and resources that were commanded by the proclaimed Allied policy of punishing war criminals. Documents were thus quickly uncovered that we might otherwise still be hunting 35 years later. But documents were also often irretrievably torn from their context, carelessly excerpted, poorly translated, duplicated under various unrelated designations, and incorrectly assembled in artificial folders in a manner that muddles their meaning and taints their authenticity.
The third generally accepted truth (among historians) that probably contributes to the queering of anniversary festivities is the understanding that all of the main actors at the trial were foul. The Soviets merely wanted a show trial, the British would have preferred summary executions of the captured German leadership, and the Americans? Well, the Americans did what Americans often do in wartime”torture, torture, torture! In one of the greatest ironies of the trial, the most corrupt and vile of the presiding governments”the Soviets”were the only ones with an actual case when it came to prosecuting Germany for waging “aggressive war.” Russia was indeed invaded in a treaty-violating surprise attack, and Hitler did indeed pursue a “war of extermination” on the Eastern Front. Conversely, the “civilized” British and French charged the Germans with starting a war that was declared by…the British and French. At Nuremberg, everyone was a bad guy. It was like a production of Return of the Jedi that was all Empire and no Ewok.
So sure, it makes sense that observations of “big number 70″ were somewhat muted.
That said, all last week I kept thinking about how pleased Julius Streicher would be, were he alive today. For the uninitiated, Streicher was the most absurd of the Nuremberg defendants. He was the publisher of Der Stürmer, a publication about which the term “anti-Jewish” seems like too much of an understatement. Streicher hated Jews, and he showed it by employing what passed for memes back in his day”ugly, over-the-top, hate-filled cartoons and caricatures, coupled with what can be considered the 1930s version of clickbait”fake news stories with sensational headlines (“Two Jews encounter an Aryan girl in a dark alley…you won”t believe what happens next!“). As a human being, Streicher was a boob, a laughable buffoon despised by pretty much every high-ranking Nazi except Hitler (a man known throughout the war for his, ahem, “exceptional” judgment).
Among the men in the Nuremberg dock, Streicher stood out for his low IQ. Whereas most of the defendants had high or even genius IQs (by the Allies” own assessment), Streicher was the only one with a low-average IQ. And what a simpleton he was. Before the war, when he transitioned from publisher to political functionary as the gauleiter of Franconia, his corruption and general imbecility led to his removal from power after a Nazi tribunal found him “unfit for human leadership.” He spent the war under a rather generous version of Nazi-ordained house arrest at his Nuremberg farm.
Streicher should not have been executed at Nuremberg. Indeed, it can be argued that, like Fritzsche (one of only three defendants to be acquitted), he didn”t deserve to be on trial alongside men who”d held real power during the war. Vile as Streicher was, he was a tabloid publisher. The fact that he did, for a time, wield political influence in Franconia does of course make him more than just a cartoonist. Norman Finkelstein’s moral equivalence between Streicher and the Charlie Hebdo publishers is moronic; Streicher did a lot more than just doodle. Yet still, it was his cartoons that got him executed, and that was a travesty of justice. As Dr. Michael Salter of Lancashire Law School noted in his scholarly paper “The Accidental Birth of Hate Crime in Transnational Criminal Law,” “Julius Streicher was the first journalist to be convicted of international crimes stemming from his media activities.” Streicher was indeed a journalist (a reprehensible journalist is still a journalist), and nobody should ever be executed for mere words or cartoons.
This election is going to have unprecedented political infidelity. A good 20 percent of husbands for Trump predict their wife won”t vote with them. This is wrong for a number of reasons but the biggie is, a family is supposed to be a cohesive unit. He can”t have his better half canceling out his vote. Even if a husband wants to vote badly”say, for Hillary”his wife should stand by her man and make the same mistake. Nobody’s saying there can”t be discussions and women shouldn”t have their own political beliefs, but the final decision comes down to the guy paying the bills and she should abide by that. This is counterintuitive because we live in a feminist fantasyland, but it’s really the same as deciding where your family is going to live. A married couple agree where they”re going to go based on what’s best for the kids. If he gets an amazing job offer in Cleveland but she’s a city gal from Manhattan, she needs to accept that Ohio is best for the future of their family. Voting is the same. You”re deciding where the country is going to go based on what’s best for future generations.
Unfortunately, this is not happening. A map of America “if just men voted” is almost completely red, whereas a map of America “if just women voted” is almost completely blue. The maps don”t differentiate between married and single, but judging by this massive split in what gender likes what candidate, we can assume the married map would be similar. Single people are a lost cause anyway. The women vote almost exclusively out of spite. They are voting for Hillary because she has a pussy, they hate Trump because he grabbed one, and they elected Obama because he makes theirs wet (they elected Trudeau because he is one). As for single men, I”m not convinced they even vote. There are also stay-at-home dads and situations where the woman is the breadwinner. This is awkward, but if you”ve made her the patriarch then her husband (a.k.a. wife) needs to vote with her. For the most part, however, we”re talking about a home where the father makes the lion’s share of the money and the woman’s contribution is using her magic powers to make babies. They have a symbiotic relationship where they”re both utilizing their greatest strengths. Patriarchs are best at driving, so he’s the helmsman. He doesn”t want to fight about it because he doesn”t want to rock the boat, but for her to turn starboard while he’s going port is to split everything in half and now the whole family is drowning. Voting against your husband is a tiny divorce.
It’s become perfectly normal, even cool, to vote the opposite of your significant other and that may be because we”ve lost all faith in the political process. I happen to think it’s very significant. Why should voting be any different than, say, religion? People convert all the time to get married. Trump’s oldest daughter became an Orthodox Jew so she could marry Jared Kushner. This is because they need to be going to church together and their children need to be on the same page. Families often share the same sports team and this too is linked to the children. How can you be cheering for the Yankees at Citi Field next to your son whose a Mets fan? “Sucks for you, kid, but I”m going to the World Series!” The same goes for this ridiculous idea of not taking your husband’s name. It may make you feel progressive to have a different name, but now your kids are stuck with a hyphen. What happens if they meet another child of self-indulgent people? Does that kid have four last names? We keep reinventing marriage and fracturing the family to make ourselves look modern, but families make communities and communities make countries. If the head of the family isn”t deciding who runs the country, there’s no country.
If you want to understand Hillary Clinton’s campaign for president, a good place to start is the current libel trial against Rolling Stone for publishing Sabrina Rubin Erdely’s ridiculous hate hoax article, “A Rape on Campus: A Brutal Assault and a Struggle for Justice at UVA.”
As I pointed out in Takimag on Dec. 3, 2014, Rolling Stone posted Erdely’s 9,000-word blood libel on Nov. 19 about how a U. of Virginia freshman coed named Jackie had been gang-raped on broken glass by seven fraternity brothers as part of an initiation ritual.
That night a mob of Social Justice Warriors reenacted their own Kristallnacht, smashing the windows of the Phi Kappa Psi frat house. (No one has ever been arrested for this hate crime.)
The fraternity’s litigation against Rolling Stone is upcoming, but the current trial is over the $7.85 million case brought by Nicole Eramo, the UVA bureaucrat who counseled Jackie Coakley. Erdely portrayed Eramo as a sort of sonderkommando in charge of covering up all the young women raped by the vicious blond white male Republican power structure at UVA.
That the people who knew Coakley best at UVA didn”t take her ever-changing lies seriously just convinced Erdely that they were all part of the rape-culture conspiracy too.
In reality, Eramo is a typical campus administrator with the usual feminist attitudes. But Erdely was so curdled with rage at the very existence of a college founded by arch-WASP Thomas Jefferson that she seized upon even such an unlikely villainess as Eramo.
Although merely a modest staffer, Eramo has a difficult legal hurdle to overcome in winning justice from Rolling Stone because the judge declared her to be a “limited purpose public figure.”
(Bizarrely, the judge also ruled that hoax artist Jackie Coakley is only to be identified by her first name, and he merely required her to give a deposition on tape”on which she repeatedly claimed memory loss due to post-traumatic stress disorder.)
If Eramo had been deemed a private figure, she would just need to prove that the “defamatory falsehood was negligently published.” But as a limited purpose public figure, Eramo must present “clear and convincing evidence“ of “actual malice,” which means either awareness of publishing a lie or at minimum a “reckless disregard for the truth.”
Granted, Erdely’s article was howlingly implausible. For example:
One man flung a bottle at Jackie that broke on the side of her face, leaving a blood-red bruise around her eye.
Yet the libeled Eramo will have a hard time getting justice because Erdely may have been a true believer in the nonsense that Coakley concocted. Here are excerpts from a taped conversation between Coakley and Erdely in which the well-matched pair egg each other on. Indeed, the coed seems like the more dominant personality, glibly validating whatever academic anti”male chauvinism the nerdier Erdely suggests.
The bigger picture is that we live in a culture where a liberal Jewish feminist journalist like Erdely is paid well to vilify as haters those she hates, and is seldom asked to recognize that she’s projecting her own racist animus upon the victims of her bigotry such as Eramo and Phi Kappa Psi.
Because of how much insight it offers into Hillary Clinton’s America, here’s the key thing to remember about the Haven Monahan hoax: Virtually every single professional journalist in the country believed (or at least submitted to) the Erdely-Coakley bad craziness. The New York Times, for instance, treated it as gospel.
The first journalism professional to question this lurid clusterfake was financial editor Richard Bradley on his blog five days after publication. The next day I posted a few comments on his site, such as:
Wouldn”t the rapists get cut by the broken glass all over the floor, too? I guess they were such sex-crazed animals that they didn”t notice the glass cutting their hands and knees for the first three hours.
I came back a few days later to find nobody else had yet posted a comment, at which I point I added:
Sorry to keep coming back to this, but I”ve done some more thinking and here’s where the story falls apart: pitch darkness _and_ broken glass on the floor. The glass table is smashed, but nobody turns on the light to see what happened or where the broken glass is? Instead, each man, having heard the glass table get smashed, still gets down on the floor covered with shards of broken glass, risking not only his hands and knees, but also pulling out an even more personal part of his anatomy, one that he only has one of.
Really?
I finally dared link to Bradley’s post on my iSteve blog on Nov. 29, which opened up the floodgates of public skepticism.
Eventually, it turned out that the handsome but cruel (and nonexistent) upperclassman named Haven Monahan was a figment of Coakley’s imagination intended to make jealous a freshman boy she liked named Ryan (who, sensibly enough, kept telling her they ought to just be friends). Coakley went to some trouble to catfish Haven into digital pseudo-existence by plagiarizing extensively from her favorite sappy TV shows, such as Dawson’s Creek.
