The Week’s Most Screwy, Gooey, and Jewy Headlines

BLACK/GAY/JEWISH HATE-CRIME HOAXER WALKS FREE
Just when you thought the arc of the moral universe was bending toward justice in the case of fabulist actor/hate-crime hoaxer Jussie Smollett, that arc bent over, grabbed its ankles, and was forcibly sodomized without lubrication.

Last Tuesday, the Illinois state’s attorney’s office abruptly announced that it was dropping all 16 felony charges against the disgraced actor who staged a fake hate crime against himself in a story that had more gaping holes than his body does. Mind you, there was no announcement that he had been found innocent—in fact, Joseph Magats, the Cook County attorney handling the case, said that he believed Smollett was guilty—but, hey, it’s time to heal and Mr. Smollett had no criminal record and should be set free to spread his ebony butterfly wings and continue flitting about the world even though his actions could have sparked a nationwide race war.

Magats had taken over the case after Kimberly Foxx—a state’s attorney who admitted she’d told Smollett’s family that she was trying to get Chicago authorities to drop this hot potato of a case and hand it over to the feds—recused herself after essentially committing a crime and walking free in this land of horrid white supremacy.

Their hides chafing, Chicago’s Fraternal Order of Police issued the following statement in the wake of the prosecutor’s giant puss-out:

The FOP is outraged by the decision to drop charges against Smollett, but not surprised….Since Kimberly Foxx has taken office, she has transformed the prosecutor’s office to a political arm of the anti-police movement. We renew our call for a federal investigation of her role in this case and expect the media to conduct a thorough investigation.

Tiny-fingered Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, in a possible act of sincere bravery or—which is much more likely—a cold political calculation—chastised the decision as well:

This is a whitewash of justice. It’s Mr. Smollett who committed this hoax. He’s still saying he’s innocent, still running down the Chicago Police Department. How dare he? How dare he? It is wrong. Full stop.

Er, we’re not sure that “whitewash” is the proper term here.

The City of Chicago sent Smollett a letter demanding that Smollett pay restitution of $130,106.15 for their costs incurred in the investigation of the bogus hate crime, adding:

Ultimately, the Chicago police investigation revealed that you knowingly filed a false police report and had in fact orchestrated your own attack….If the amount is not timely paid, the Department of Law may prosecute you for making a false statement to the City.

Wait just a cotton-pickin’ second: Didn’t they just drop 16 felony charges related to him making a false statement to the city? Do they think we’re gullible enough to believe they’d prosecute him for making a false statement regarding a promise to pay restitution for making a false statement in the first place?

Apparently so.

For his part, Smollett is claiming that the dropped charges represent a total exoneration and that his mama didn’t raise no liar, oh, no, she di’n’t.

Our hope is that the feds pick up the case and prosecute him for that thing he did where he mailed a letter to his office that contained white powder and a death threat. As far as we know, that’s against da law.

FACEBOOK BANS WHITE NATIONALISM
First they came for the white supremacists—all three of them—and you said nothing.

Now Facebook has announced that it is banning all iterations of “white nationalism” and “white separatism” because there’s really no difference between those things and “white supremacy,” despite the fact that there are clear distinctions between all three terms, because even though supporters of these ideologies hardly ever encourage violence, that’s what they’re really gunning for, and if we don’t silence them and put them in camps, who knows when they’re going to start gunning down poor old black ladies in wheelchairs and innocent Muslim chemo patients riding shotgun on those wheelchairs?

Equating white nationalism with “hate”—as these assholes are wont to do while expecting we can’t tell the difference—Facebook’s wormy spokespeeps explained:

Today we’re announcing a ban on praise, support and representation of white nationalism and white separatism on Facebook and Instagram….It’s clear that these concepts are deeply linked to organized hate groups and have no place on our services…over the past three months our conversations with members of civil society and academics who are experts in race relations around the world have confirmed that white nationalism and white separatism cannot be meaningfully separated from white supremacy and organized hate groups….People searching for these terms will be directed to Life After Hate, an organization founded by former violent extremists that provides crisis intervention, education, support groups and outreach.

Black nationalism? Not a problem.

Asian nationalism? It’s only natural.

Jewish nationalism? De rigueur.

White nationalism? Get the fuck outta here.

Slowly, we began to hate Facebook.

THE WANG OF YANG
Just because the average erect penis size of North Koreans is 3.8 inches and 4.3 inches for Chinamen doesn’t mean it’s OK to mock Mother Nature’s cruel underendowment of Oriental males.

It’s funny as all get-out, but that doesn’t make it OK.

The Washington Examiner just ran the following headline about Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang, and if there’s a funnier headline from now until Election Eve 2020, we’ll eat a box of condoms on live TV:

Andrew Yang ‘self-conscious’ about his wang

Last year in his book The War on Normal People, Yang recalled being taunted by non-Asian bullies in school about the astronomically high statistical possibility that he was packing a tampon between his legs:

‘Hey, Yang, what’s it like having such a small dick? Everyone knows Chinese guys have small dicks.’…I became quite self-conscious. I started wondering if I did indeed have a small dick.

He wondered? There’s only one way to find out. We thought Asians were good with things such as numbers and measurements.

BLACKS-ONLY POLITICAL EVENT IN GEORGIA
Because we are a nation driven apart by division and separatism and difference and disunity, we all need to come together as one, and in order to achieve this, we need to keep all the white people out, and if you don’t understand this, we’re going to report you to Facebook for being a white separatist.

Last week in the beautiful but crime-ridden coastal Georgia town of Savannah, a black church held a black meeting with black politicians and posted a “Black press only” sign on their welcoming doors of inclusion. According to the black people who attended, there was talk of inclusion and unity, but if you have a problem with excluding white people, you don’t realize that this country guarantees freedom of association for everyone but white people, you whitey-white bigot.

NON-OBESE MEN URGED TO CUDDLE WITH EACH OTHER WITHOUT ACHIEVING ERECTIONS
In order for men to shed their toxic veneer of masculinity like a bunch of snakes molting their skin in a serpentine circle jerk, they must come together and cuddle one another so long as they don’t have back problems, aren’t fat, and promise that they won’t get boners in the process.

This is the goal of the Men’s Therapeutic Cuddle Group, some squirrelly weekly get-together in suburban Philly designed “to provide a safe, structured, and platonic environment for men to experience ‘the three As’: Acceptance, Affirmation and Affection.” As long as you have a penis, they don’t care if you’re black, white, yellow, brown, or teal, but they warn that “men with back or knee injuries, or those suffering from obesity may find it difficult to fully participate.”

The group insists that all cuddling be nonsexual in nature and demands that all men shower before attending. However, they note that “most men experience some level or arousal during cuddling. This is completely normal…we’re all guys. We just ignore it. There is no shame here!”

That’s precisely the problem—there is no shame there. There should be.

VIBRANT IMMIGRANT SUSPECTED OF DISMEMBERING A WOMAN WHILE SHE WAS ALIVE
Because diversity is our strength and because illiterate Nigerian savages need to be imported to do the dismembering that Italians won’t do, it is no surprise that a Nigerian drug dealer with the hyper-ironic name of Innocent Oseghale is currently on trial for the murder of an 18-year-old Italian girl whom he also allegedly dismembered—while she was alive.

According to a witness in Mr. Innocent’s trial, the accused began stabbing indigenous Italian Pamela Mastropietro immediately after raping her and then, assuming she was dead, he left the scene to summon help in dismembering her. After they returned and started severing her foot, she allegedly cried out for help, spurring the vibrant migrants to stab her until she shut up forever.

If this is progress, we’d rather live in the Stone Age. People seemed more considerate back then.

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Every Monday, Jim Goad reads the previous day’s “Week That Perished” on his podcast.

NEW YORK—This place feels funny, a bit like Beirut, where Christians, Muslims, Druze, and encamped Palestinians live together but separately, with one or two million Syrian refugees completing the mix. Over here the once-ruling WASPs are dead and buried, having moved to their country clubs in the suburbs and irrelevance. The Jews are in like Flynn, ruling Wall Street, the real estate market, and the television networks. The Chinese are creeping up, having bought more real estate in Manhattan alone than ISIS has lost in Syria and Iraq. (I now get nuisance telephone calls in Chinese.) On the bottom of the ladder are the Hispanics and the African-Americans, the former doing all the heavy lifting in the construction business, the latter, sadly, being the majority in city jails. The Koreans are sort of hunky-dory, working 25 hours per day and then some, but their Stakhanovite work habits do not include language skills.

Still, like in Beirut, there is a malaise about the place, with an enveloping fog of uneasiness, the city no longer a melting pot but a tense landscape seething with frustrated hopes and dreams. The only happy people I see are Midwestern tourists gaping openmouthed up at the sky, and people with ten-gallon hats from Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona. When I was young there was Germantown uptown, and Chinatown downtown, and Little Italy in between, and Hell’s Kitchen where the Irish were on the West Side. But everyone mixed fine, and the gangsters who were uptown and in the Bronx killed each other and never us. And there was Harlem and the Cotton Club and Spanish Harlem, too, crime scenes in the past, now residential boroughs with even some yuppies thrown in for good measure. So, what makes with all the angst?

Why do so many feel like strangers in a strange town? Many New Yorkers have cut themselves loose from the ties that bind them to the customs of their parents and the people around them. Others have become trolling sociopaths whose frustrations one can see on their faces and in their body language. The latest manifestation of this malaise is men—either Hispanic or African-American—openly masturbating in crowded subway trains. Thirty-nine of these onanists have been identified, photographed, and publicly shamed but only two arrested and then immediately freed. Mayor de Blasio is the worst, or second-worst ever, spending like mad without results and with the murder rate going up daily.

The great sociologist professor Taki claims that all this angst derives from the fact that many New Yorkers are confused as far as their role in modern society is concerned. Globalism, multiculturalism, and socialism have done the trick: destabilized traditional family values with all these new mores like same-sex marriage, gender-neutral bathrooms, and prepubescent transgender rights. But basically people feel mocked and set aside by the elite who run this town, those in City Hall, the media, and the hatchet-faced women of glossy magazines. Pseudo-lefty-trendy magazines like The New Yorker fail to address the fact that Hispanic, Chinese, Korean, even African-American societies are conservative by nature. These phonies pretend to speak for the underdog, but converse only with each other.

Otherwise, always according to the good professor, New Yorkers attached too much importance to dreams that were destined not to be, the American dream and all that. My friend Mark Brennan has just written a brilliant piece in Chronicles about his Mexican maid, and how she escaped her country for the land of plenty and is now scared to death that after forty years of hard work her daughter might be slaughtered by illegal-immigrant gangs that are running wild on Long Island. The trendy media types ignore the gangs and their victims because their archenemy, Trump, has made it part of his campaign to get rid of them. Feelings of personal powerlessness and a sense of futility make for a strange-looking bunch of Big Bagelites.

And yet, the U.S. has more rich folk than any other country, including China, which leads the world in billionaires. There are more rich people in America than the total population of Greece and Portugal. Just think, 12 million households in the United States have a net worth of more than $1 million. Three percent of Americans are millionaires; 250,000 became millionaires only last year. Yet there’s a wealth of evidence that earnings don’t produce happiness. Some say yes, others without it say no.

My oldest wrestling teammate in school, Anthony Maltese, was undefeated and among the best-ever wrestlers in the country. We’ve been close friends for 65 years and Tony, a very rich man, is as generous as they come. He and his wife endured the worst fate ever—they lost a son in his athletic prime to cancer—yet they have never passed their grief over to friends. They remain cheerful and helpful to everyone, and Tony finds reasons to send me gifts nonstop just because we were on the same team so long ago. The point I’m trying to make is, intelligent people can overcome any disaster, especially if they have religious faith. New Yorkers are in trouble because the phonies they listen to on TV and the scribblers they read are agnostic lefties who know as much about the common workingman as I do about advanced algebra. Start reading conservative stuff and happiness will follow. Yippee!

I suppose that if I had to select a single figure as the preeminent intellectual influence of our time, it would have to be Marie Antoinette. She, you remember, played at being milkmaid or shepherdess while actually she was Queen of France. She had at least the excuse that being Queen of France was extremely boring, such was the stiflingly formal nature of court life. By contrast, Mark Zuckerberg, when he dresses in jeans and a T-shirt and pretends to be an average adolescent slob reluctantly attending college for lack of any idea what else to do, has no such excuse.

And then there are all those people, some of them not even very young anymore (except in tastes and intellect), walking around in carefully and expensively torn jeans, presumably in solidarity with the homeless of Kinshasa and Ouagadougou, etc. It infuriates me when I think of the effort that poor Africans make to turn themselves out well, often in circumstances in which even the water in which to wash clothes cannot be taken for granted. It is only if you think that Marie Antoinette was paying a real compliment to milkmaids that you will think that torn jeans represent anything other than spoilt-brattery.

Then there are people such as Justin Trudeau, that is to say Trudeau II or Trudeau fils, and Jacinda Ardern, the Pasionaria of New Zealand Islam, who can’t wait to don fancy dress in their effort to proclaim their multicultural goodness, and who both exude the kind of unctuous righteousness that makes you want to wash afterward and leaves a trail of moral slime behind them.

Trudeau and Ardern are two of a trinity of leaders whose photograph I cannot bear to look at even for a second, Anthony “Call Me Tony” Blair being the third. I turn over the page, or exit the website, as soon as I catch so much as a glimpse of any of them. Honesty compels me to admit that this is not because, objectively, they are the worst leaders in the world, which alas they are not, but they are certainly the smuggest, and there is something in their smugness that is more offensive to me than mere wickedness. Wickedness is at least interesting, while smugness is not. Their problem is that, in their own estimation at least, they were born with Original Virtue, unlike everyone else.

Smugness is not one of the seven deadly sins, but it is certainly a close relation to the greatest of them, namely pride. It is perhaps worst, most fulminating, most highly developed, in the case of Blair, in whom it appears to be allied to a very serious mental condition, that is to say delusions of honesty. A delusion is a fixed false belief that is impervious to reason, evidence, or argument, and notwithstanding his record Blair seems genuinely to believe that he is an honest man. I hesitate to call him a liar, however, because a liar must at least have some concept of the truth other than the words that come out of his mouth, and in any case only he is party to his own thoughts.

It is said that we get the leaders that we deserve. I am not sure whether this is true, but it is likely that our leaders do not emerge fully formed like Venus from the sea in Botticelli’s painting. Their relationship to the population they lead is a dialectical one: They both reflect and form that population. (The French radical politician of the 19th century, Ledru-Rollin, is said to have said, “I must follow the people because I am their leader.”)

If we get smug leaders, therefore, it is because smugness is a characteristic of at least a considerable part of the electorate, and being smug themselves, they like smugness in others; or alternatively it is because people are tone-deaf, as it were, to smugness, in the way that many people were and perhaps still are tone-deaf to the obvious fraudulence of TV evangelists such as Jimmy Swaggart. If you don’t see the fraudulence or the smugness straightaway, then you never do see it; you don’t deduce it from other characteristics, you see it at once if you see it at all.

This is not a matter of intelligence, for intelligent people are frequently deceived by the fraudulent and the smug, and in fact are the more dangerous when they are so deceived, for they have more influence on and in society. I remember some years ago attending a conference in which a well-known Islamic preacher, said to be moderate, modernizing, and reformist, spoke. I spotted at once that he was a crook and a liar, but to my astonishment several well-known intellectuals seemed to have been completely taken in by him. There are none so blind as will not see.

The BATs of this world—the Blairs, Arderns and Trudeaus (or should it be Trudeaux?)—are growing more numerous; for in politics, as in many other things, demand creates its own supply. Our children seem to be increasingly indoctrinated into unthinking and sickly high-mindedness, into a kind of magical thinking in which expressing a wish to do good is nine-tenths of actually doing good, just as possession is nine-tenths of the law.

The BATs are followers, whether they know it or not, of Marie Antoinette. They are politicians and seekers after power who play at being saints. There was an African leader, Julius Nyerere, who died in 1999, who is actually undergoing canonization at the moment (the Catholic Church, as an equal-opportunity employer, desperately needs a few African saints). One of Nyerere’s miracles was the extraction of billions of dollars of aid from Western countries without any obvious benefit to his population; on the contrary, he used the money to enable him to collectivize the agriculture on which 90 percent of the population depended, producing an economic disaster. Another of his miracles was staying in power for 25 years at the head of the single party that locked up opponents. A third miracle was that, unlike Marie Antoinette, he died in his bed, or at least in his hospital bed (in London, incidentally, not in Africa). But he did a very good saint act, and that was enough to fool the world. He was ahead of his time, but not as far ahead as Marie Antoinette.

According to journalist Paul Brian,

[Brent] Tarrant’s perceptions and actions are the outgrowth of years of rhetoric that’s portrayed immigrants as “invaders” and the paranoiac tendency to point to numerically small minority communities with high birthrates as somehow to blame for declining European and white birthrates…. It is, of course, a stupid theory, but its very illogical and reactionary nature somehow makes it even more convincing to lost young men with axes to grind.

These words are from Brian’s article “The Weak Men of the Online West,” published at The American Conservative’s website on Tuesday. Heavy on indignant rhetoric, and light on serious, contextual analysis, the work leaves one wishing Brian had tried to understand the problem of immigration and native citizens.

Let me try, then, to shed some light on this important subject. I will relate it to the dominant Western idea of what nations are—or rather, what they are supposedly for—that is, the so-called proposition nation. For these subjects are closely related, and to understand them we need to see through certain delusions.

To begin with, Brian appears to reject the word “invaders,” yet it is surely true that groups who enter nations illegally in large numbers are precisely that. Nor is this changed because, in some cases, immigrants fled tragic circumstances. Immigration laws are not negated, or made unnecessary, as a consequence of human suffering.

On the other hand, I agree with Brian: It is paranoid to believe, as many in the alt-right do, that immigrants intend to dispossess and replace native citizens. What immigrants are trying to do is improve their lives, and that involves leaving poorer and less developed nations for richer and more materially advanced ones. There, people can find better jobs and enjoy higher-functioning political and legal systems generally.

Still, there is a straightforward labor issue that Brian doesn’t perceive. Even wealthy nations are beset by excessive low-skilled labor, which keeps wages down for native citizens (and other immigrants), so that it’s harder for them to raise families and reproduce. Although we don’t hear it from today’s identity-politics left, both Booker T. Washington and Martin Luther King Jr. strongly opposed Hispanic immigration through the southern border, because they realized that the excessive low-skilled labor would be bad for working-class blacks.

The current immigration problem in the U.S., with peoples from around the world all seeking to make a life here, is similar to the ethnic conflicts that occurred in this country in the last century. At first, the majority of early-20th-century immigrants came from Northern and Western Europe. Once greater numbers of Irish had emigrated, as well as Italians and Jews from Southern and Eastern Europe, the conditions for ethnic hostility and conflict were in place, native citizens and immigrants alike recognizing increased competition for limited material resources. Just as whites now resent Mexicans with whom they compete to survive (including enjoying the goods of the welfare state), so German-Americans and others once resented Italians, Irish, and Jews for the same reason, with the traditional British prejudice toward the Irish easily being applied in America.

To be sure, it would be inaccurate to attribute “declining European and white birthrates” as such to immigration, because this phenomenon has several causes. One is women joining the workforce en masse, a change that resulted in fewer births over time. Increased wealth had the same effect.

The biggest cause, perhaps, is the decline of religion, and related to it, the strange belief that the purpose of marriage is “happiness” or “personal fulfillment” (as if it were wise to expect either value). From courtship to marriage and reproduction, the relations of the sexes used to be determined by religious and patriarchal customs, which were born of hardship and necessity. Marriage and the family were essentially practical, the point having been to survive and to reproduce.

Throughout the U.S. and much of Europe, all this has been superseded by individual autonomy. In many instances, therefore, marriage and the family are like a game whose players are too self-interested to succeed. Where men and women once had certain distinct roles to fill and a kind of script to follow, they now rely on their own reason and desires. But compared with the collective, organic wisdom of the species, nobody’s reason and desires are worth much.

Although some in the alt-right are rather crude in their conception of ethnic group conflicts over material resources, Brian is mistaken to attribute the terrible acts of men like Brent Tarrant to anti-immigrant rhetoric, as if there were nothing more to these phenomena. Ethnic groups naturally resent those who threaten their vital interests, nor is it obvious that they are wrong to do so. Brian, however, seems not to have considered how ethnic groups function. The plain truth is that people tend to unite with others in their ethnic group to realize individual material interests. Hence, in practice, talk about “the common good” is often subordinated to the ethnic group good—and good luck to anyone who would change moral psychology, as if it were a rational thing, as fixable as a broken carburetor.

From local politics up to Congress itself, various ethnic groups seek to realize certain ends. Whose ends? Not everyone’s. Those of their ethnic group. So it is also in the culture in general. In a convenient alliance of envy, women, blacks, Hispanics, and other groups work together to gain at the expense of white men (and to a lesser extent, white women). Too many white men in the physics department? Solution: Hire more women and people of color. Too many white men at the top of Google? Solution: Hire more women and people of color. And so on and so forth. You see, many people are unwilling to accept equal opportunity when their group is “underrepresented.”

Meanwhile, the irony is that the more we follow liberals, neocons, and Jaffaites in treating America as a “proposition nation”—whose fundamental values are “equality,” “universal human rights” and other lofty delusions—the more competing groups use this as a pretext for manipulating us and each other.

No doubt there are well-meaning persons who want mankind to rise above in-group bias, which, after all, is conducive to racism and other evils, although such evils don’t follow from nativism or ethnocentrism of necessity. The danger is that such a goal becomes a liability when, as is likely to be the case, your fellows don’t do the same.

Besides, although it is easy for intellectuals, who tend to live insular, bookish lives, to overlook the discomfiting reality, friend-enemy relations—or group-versus-group struggle—are the essence of politics. Whatever your ends may be, it’s a safe bet that you must compete against others to obtain them, and success at obtaining certain ends requires cooperating with others in order to prevail over other groups.

Thus politics is like the family in that it presupposes in-group bias. To endeavor to get rid of such bias in the political domain is to endeavor to get rid of the political itself. The whole of politics is a fundamentally brutal and, from a detached point of view, sadly ridiculous game. But recognizing this does not mean we have the power to significantly change it for the better. That said, we should resist acquiescence to the status quo.

America has entered a post-national era, lacking a coherent body politic and the political will to affirm its heritage. For all that, it remains true that nations grow out of ethnic traditions. They exist to serve this group, rather than that one. If you take ethnicity off the table as a political value and justification, you are left with the “proposition nation.” But that proposition is either true everywhere and in all times or not at all. Like the concept of the “proposition nation” itself, “universal human rights” derive from specific, Anglo-European traditions, and so are commonly viewed with skepticism and disdain by the Russians, the Chinese, and others. Nor are peoples interchangeable machine parts, such that their values can be applied any and everywhere.

By now, that should be manifest from America’s disastrous interventionist follies. And yet, conceiving of the world as one vast universalist proposition justifies endless intervention in sovereign nations, whose violations of “human rights” and other normative beliefs require perpetual “correction.” Of course, such interventions all too often serve as a ruse for the material interests of the military-industrial complex.

Last July, in an essay for Jacobite Magazine, I wrote:

[W]e have seen in America that many foreigners are able to assimilate to our way of life. Still, there is a deep historical connection between ethnicity and culture, and it is difficult to have cultural homogeny without a fair amount of ethnic homogeny—unless, that is, there is cultural assimilation, now, alas, widely believed to be “racist.” Nor should we believe that cultural assimilation, very valuable though it is, is some kind of magic formula: some values are just not assimilable, just as some are not compatible with each other. In such cases, it would be best for people to simply leave each other alone. And to call this belief racist or whatever is not only cheap; it is also lazy and ignores the intractable difficulty of the issue.

I would add that excluding ethnicity as a political value and justification implies that the state is to be nothing but a vulgar business network. Indeed, this is the problem with a merit-based immigration system and with the idea that race and gender should be irrelevant to college admissions criteria. What happens, then, to cultural balance and the national good? Would it aid family formation for women to get 70 percent of college degrees? (Note that many men don’t do well in academe and formal education generally owing to nonacademic reasons.) Should Asians and Jews dominate our elite universities?

If America is to be regarded as a “proposition nation,” where anyone can be a citizen so long as he values “equality,” “liberty,” and the rest, then the logic of the marketplace entails that the “best citizens” would be those who create the most wealth and earn the highest incomes. It follows that we should, if possible, replace our working class with the world’s best engineers and computer programmers. Yet would such a nation be worth living in? Would it be a nation at all?

Few people find life worth living without values that transcend the marketplace—namely, the particular, affective bonds we share with friends and family, as well as religious beliefs. Why should our nation be any different?

NEW YORK—So after two years of Mueller Reporting, what we know is:

(a) Everything worth knowing was leaked to The New York Times in real time and so we already heard it months ago.

(b) There are insane people among us who are disappointed that the president is not a conniving traitor and is merely a conniving businessman and a conniving politician.

(c) It’s exactly what it looked like from the beginning. Trump seemed like an attractive target for Russian Intelligence and they played him like a balalaika.

I don’t care about the cries of “Mueller Report! In its entirety! Free the Mueller Report!”—because, first of all, it does probably deal with national-security secrets, and, second, its principal subject is a man who always tells us in advance what high crimes and misdemeanors he’s thinking about committing.

No, what I want is the Ames Report. I don’t know which Russian intelligence officer wrote it, and I don’t know that his name is Ames, but I’m naming it in honor of Aldrich Ames, the guy who worked 31 years as a CIA counterintelligence officer until we discovered that—whoops!—he was actually working for the KGB all that time. Espionage fans like to argue “Who was more evil? Ames or Hanssen?”—referring to Robert Hanssen, the other KGB mole who, as an FBI agent, gave Russia so much information they had to fly it out on 747s. It’s sort of like the way horror fans say, “Who’s more awesome? Freddy Krueger, Jason, or Michael Myers?” But Hanssen spent only 22 years betraying America, so Ames was the cooler customer, passing not one but two polygraph exams with flying colors. Ames is the gold standard for telling Russia what’s really going on in the U.S.

So the Ames Report would read something like this:

March 2006: American businessman D.T. hosting Ukrainian oligarchs at his casinos, hotels, and New York apartment buildings. Craves rubles. Recommendation: Send Agent Boris to suggest Moscow deal. Uses: Will repeat anything we tell him in confidence. Disinformation.

August 2013: Previously sourced businessman D.T., now a television celebrity on a fake reality show, will be in Moscow for Miss Universe Pageant, one of his properties. Recommendation (from Agent Svetlana): Send Agents Olga, Nadia, and Tatiana to his hotel room with instructions to follow procedure for a penis at Level 3 Ease of Manipulation. (Note from Svetlana: Don’t go too fast.) Uses: Kompromat.

“Ames is the gold standard for telling Russia what’s really going on in the U.S.”

July 2014: Various relatives and lawyers attached to previously sourced businessman and TV celebrity D.T. likely to offer Russian president $50 million apartment if construction of Moscow tower allowed to proceed. D.T. scheduled to visit Moscow and desires meeting with president. Recommendation: Send Agents Olga and Tatiana but not Nadia as it is believed she is responsible for early termination of previous kompromat session. Uses: Corporate counterintelligence.

June 2016: Met with Agent Natalia on deep-cover “lawyer” mission, dispatched her to Trump Tower for meeting with feeble D.T. son, previously ruble-enhanced Manafort, son-in-law Kushner to discuss Hillary emails acquired by Agents Ivan and Sergei in Saint Petersburg to be used in ridiculous presidential campaign. American media believes previously sourced businessman, TV celebrity, and horndog D.T. unlikely to win, but agent of chaos for U.S. Recommendation: Offer to do all his IT work for the campaign from our station in Novosibirsk. Uses: Random divisive strife among American electorate.

December 2016: Met with Kushner and “national security advisor” Flynn to discuss a back-channel hookup so that previously sourced businessman, TV celebrity, horndog, and president-elect can build four times larger real estate project in Moscow while negotiating nuclear arms treaties. Recommendation: Give him Agent Alexei’s cell number. Uses: Foreign head of state reliant on secret Russian income source.

January 2017: Received Director Bortnikov’s cable asking whether previously sourced president-elect could be recruited as actual agent. Recommendation: Yes he could, but he’s an idiot with a big mouth. Strongly advise against. Uses: He’ll destroy everything on his own.

In other words, collusion was never in the cards because the agents of the FSB—successor to the KGB—are too good at what they do. They would have known from the first contact that Trump can’t be trusted.

What they liked about Trump is that he was a loose cannon. Republicans were not the only ones who hated Hillary—the Russians weren’t crazy about her either. You don’t hire a loose cannon, you simply nudge him in the direction you want him to go. There’s a reason that the Molotov cocktail, one of the most unpredictable street weapons ever invented, unlikely to kill but likely to start fires and explosions, is named after a Russian. Trump was a Molotov cocktail with a hair helmet.

Putin, a former KGB agent of the first order, knows that you don’t have to recruit a fanboy. You just give him a little encouragement and he falls all over himself trying to please you.

It was a bad week for polite society’s most respectable conspiracy theories, with the debunking of the Trump-Putin collusion allegation and more implosions among the conspiracy-theory-mongers at the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Shortly after suddenly firing Morris Dees, the SPLC’s living-legend cofounder, president Richard Cohen, himself quit unexpectedly.

Why?

There’s the macro reason: As has been repeatedly documented by disillusioned SPLC employees, Morris is basically a Southern TV-evangelist type, but one who long ago figured out that rich Northern liberals have more money to give him than do poor Southern fundamentalists.

But the micro reason explaining why now, after all these decades of impunity, remains obscured.

The New York Times, which has long conspired with the SPLC to promote hate hysteria, such as in its ill-fated “This Week in Hate” column, dispatched ten reporters. They returned with a decorous account of modest #MeToo mesoaggressions: Morris has occasionally put his hands on the shoulders of female staffers and once supposedly said, “I like chocolate” in the presence of a black woman.

One conspiracy theory is that the current purges of the SPLC’s Old Guard are the result of a conspiracy by unnamed parties to get their hands on the nearly half-billion dollars in assets that supersalesman Dees has piled up in the SPLC’s onshore and offshore accounts over his 48 manic years of always-be-closing fund-raising.

Which is getting us deeper into conspiracy theorizing than even I want to go…

So let’s step back and think about “conspiracy theory” in the current conceptual vocabulary.

The term “conspiracy theory” is largely a pejorative about the social standing of those offering the theory.

After all, very little gets done in this world without people plotting together to take action, contrivances that at least some hostile outsiders would consider nefarious. So conspiracies, broadly defined, are everywhere.

Interestingly, powerful insiders, such as Hillary Clinton, tend to see conspiracies, narrowly defined, everywhere.

In 21st-century America, however, to call something a “conspiracy theory” is to say that the kind of person to whom the idea appeals, such as Randy Quaid’s not-quite-right-in-the-head Vietnam-vet character in Independence Day (or Randy Quaid in real life lately), is disreputable.

Not all cultures associate conspiracy theorizing with addled burnouts. In Turkey, for example, he who comes up with the most byzantine conspiracy theory is admired for being the most intelligent.

In 1970s Hollywood movies, sexy rebels played by Warren Beatty and Robert Redford battled malevolent conspiracies. Up through the winter of 1992, when it looked like Oliver Stone’s JFK might sweep the Oscars, the cultural prestige of conspiracy theorizing persisted. But the serious press lashed back at JFK, and ever since conspiracy theories have been seen as the province of the lower orders.

Hence, the theories about conspiracies between Trump and Putin to steal the election from poor Hillary that were endlessly offered by well-groomed talking heads on CNN and MSNBC couldn’t possibly be “conspiracy theories,” because, well, because they don’t let conspiracy theorists on the better sort of networks.

Similarly, Dees’ lucrative conspiracy theory about how America is under siege from an ever-vaster shadowy network of “hate groups” is seldom labeled a “conspiracy theory.”

After all, Dees is vastly respectable. He holds nearly two dozen honorary degrees, has been played by Corbin Bernsen in a TV movie, and is a member of the Direct Marketing Association Hall of Fame. And, no doubt, not all of Morris’ four ex-wives hate him quite as much as some of them do.

In reality, though, rightist hate groups are close to the least of our troubles.

America does have a problem with Lone Wacko shooters, some of whom have rightist motivations. But virtually none of the right-wing terrorist attacks after Oklahoma City in 1995 involved more than one criminal. They didn’t have anybody to conspire with.

Rightist Lone Wackos do tend to be more effectual at racking up big body counts than do leftist Lone Wackos, like the gay-rights terrorist who tried to shoot up the Family Research Council after reading on the SPLC’s website that the FRC was a hate group. The gay-marriage gunman shot the front desk guard, Leo Johnson, in the arm, but Johnson still wrestled him down one-handed.

In contrast, some cities in Blue State America have had an ongoing problem with sizable, violent Antifa hate groups who attempt to beat up dissidents demonized by the SPLC, such as Charles Murray. After a leftist hate mob attacked Murray in 2017, hospitalizing a woman professor, the Associated Press reported that Murray had it coming because:

The Southern Poverty Law Center considers him a white nationalist who uses “racist pseudoscience and misleading statistics to argue that social inequality is caused by the genetic inferiority of the black and Latino communities, women and the poor.”

After all, as comic-book writer Ta-Nehisi Coates has proved, American history is an immense conspiracy among people who think they are white to plunder black bodies.

In this era of video and facial-recognition technology, it’s not particularly hard for the police to deter would-be Eric Clanton-style masked marauders by enforcing old anti-KKK laws against wearing masks in public. These days, if you wreak violence on your political enemies unmasked, you will likely be identified, as Zachary Greenberg recently found out.

But in some towns, such as Berkeley and San Jose, the politicians are on the side of the SPLC and the violent hate groups, and thus keep the cops from keeping the peace.

“Projection” was one of Freud’s best insights: It’s tempting to accuse our enemies of our own foibles. For example, the SPLC has been ranting for decades about how an ophthalmologist in Petoskey, Mich., named John Tanton is the evil “puppeteer” who manipulates American citizens into having any doubts at all about immigration.

My guess is that Morris’ minions project their own guilty awareness of the truth about Dees, a roguish junk-mail genius, the Elmer Gantry of liberalism, onto Tanton.

It’s often argued that conspiracy theories couldn’t possibly be true because once somebody inside the organization leaked the truth, the whole world would instantly know.

But it doesn’t actually work that way. For instance, Theranos had scores of disillusioned ex-employees. But for a decade the world wanted to believe that Elizabeth Holmes was proving that a sexist conspiracy was all that held women back from making their deserved billions in Silicon Valley.

Similarly, various investigative reporters have revealed the ignominious truth about the SPLC for a quarter of a century now, going back to the in-depth Montgomery Advertiser series in 1994.

But virtually nobody noticed. Instead, millions wanted to believe that Morris Dees was a hero single-handedly battling the rising tide of Hate for us.

Bogus as the SPLC is, its mythmaking is extremely useful to the Democratic Party, furnishing the KKKrazy Glue that holds the Coalition of the Fringes together by telling them that a vast right-wing conspiracy, from the KKK to Charles Murray, is holding down everyone who isn’t a straight white male.

Hence, the SPLC has recently gone from one triumph to another, taking in heaps of money ($129 million in contributions and grants in fiscal year 2017, $70 million more than it spent) and conspiring with tech monopolies such as Amazon to decide who would be denied service due to their political views.

Amazon, by the way, is run by the world’s richest man, who recently accused the National Enquirer of conspiring with Trump and Saudi Arabia to obtain pictures of his shortcomings.

But it turned out that the source was Mr. Bezos’ girlfriend’s brother.

You see, not all conspiracy theories are true.

Several weeks ago I mentioned, somewhat in passing, my years working as a Tea Party activist. My intention was to point out the advantages we had back then, compared with today’s pro-Trump ground-level activists (what one might call the activist base…the people who are more than just voters but not at the level of paid, professional pundits; the boots-on-the-ground agitators and online warriors).

During the Tea Party years, we had two things going for us. The big one was that we had the full backing of the GOP machine and the big-money donors behind it. But we had another advantage…we were smart. Now, to be fair, we weren’t trying to climb the mountain that Trump grassroots activists were faced with in 2016. Our issues were old-timey GOP stalwarts: low taxes, no socialized medicine, etc. And in those years we had the benefit of being insurgents united in opposition to Obama. Acting against a common enemy makes coalition-building easier.

The Trump activist base doesn’t have it so easy. Those poor bastards have to deal with opposition not just from the left but from mainstream conservatives, the GOP machine, and big business. And “leading” this base is a president who’s surrounded himself with people who want to torpedo his agenda. How do you prevail when the entire establishment is against you, and even your own “God Emperor” seems less than enthusiastic about actually acting on his most daring promises?

You’d have to be exceptionally smart to accomplish anything significant under such conditions. And the ground-level Trump activist base is strikingly not smart. Actually, “not smart” is too weak a term. I could throw around a few others (massively incompetent, uniquely unskilled), but instead I’ll just illustrate my point with a few examples.

Notice how no one talks about the “alt-right” anymore. Wasn’t it only two years ago that everyone, friend and foe alike, was speaking of this new “force” on the right? Well, that tiger turned out to be more paper-thin than an elderly Jap’s origami sculpture.

What went wrong?

To begin with, the Trump activists absorbed the worst aspects of their leader. Not his business savvy or his ability to look good on TV. No, they assimilated his ugly side—his love of insults and trolling, and his strategy of dealing with internecine squabbles by employing personal attacks against real or imagined foes (“Ted Cruz? Your wife’s ugly. I win”). Trolling will only get you just so far. Trump didn’t win because of his insults, he won because of his agenda.

Next problem? Following Trump’s 2016 victory, the energized alt-right began acting like a bunch of first graders choosing sides for a softball game:

“On MY team, I don’t want no fags! And anyone who lets fags onto their team ain’t true alt-right!”

“Well, I don’t want no JEWS on MY team. Fags is fine. Some of the best nationalists I know is fags!”

“Hey—that sounds like FAG talk to me, you faggot!”

“Fuck you, Jew-lover.”

They were so busy squabbling over their draft picks, they forgot to actually play the game.

Another handicap: The Trump grassroots activist base is too top-heavy with the gullible. When you already have so many trolls, adding morons to the mix is a recipe for disaster. Rather than sticking with real-world issues, Trump activists quickly became lost in “QAnon” and Pizzagate-style hoaxes, almost all of which originated from their own side. A bunch of easily fleeceable dolts comprising one half of a movement, and a bunch of “some men just want to watch the world burn” Joker cosplayers comprising the other. The base ate itself.

Speaking of the stupid and the gullible, I’ve noticed recently that many of my most fervent “God Emperor Trump” friends have started warming up to socialism. “Ocasio-Cortez may be dumb as a brick, but she’s onto something!” “Protect Maduro from the evils of the free market!” This line of thinking has even made its way up the ladder to top-level talking heads like Tucker Carlson. Indeed, the normally nimble Carlson recently struck out while trying to cozy up to a far-left socialist who flummoxed the host to the point where Carlson used an expletive and called off the interview. Why? Because the socialist had a consistent worldview, whereas Carlson, in trying to be kinda capitalist and kinda anti-capitalist, had birthed a thalidomide baby of an ideology, a malformed mess that couldn’t live outside the womb.

The pro-Trump socialist sympathizers have arrived at their position because they’ve taken Trump’s incessant (and not wholly unwarranted) swipes against “globalists” as a call to “soak the rich!” “The globalists are the enemy! Let’s tax them into oblivion.” This myopic view of economics misses a key point, which is that it’s never about who you’re soaking, but where the fucking money is going. Stop looking at who’s losing, and start looking at who’s gaining. All the money “soaked” from the rich will go to the things the Trump base supposedly hates—foreign wars, the welfare state, and a larger and more powerful federal bureaucracy.

Hey, far-rightists…when has big government ever favored you? If your dream is to live on yer land with yer hounds and a thousand guns, why exactly do you want to feed the federal-government beast? Ask Randy Weaver how that “big government” thing worked out for him.

Moreover, you cannot be in favor of the wall and be in favor of any measure of socialism. The core belief of socialism is that every societal ill can be cured by throwing money at it. That’s the heart of socialism. Failing schools crammed with low-IQ kids who lack the attention span to learn the alphabet? Throw money at it! A permanent U.S. underclass plagued by single-parent homes, absentee fathers, welfare dependency, and neighborhoods run by street criminals? Throw money at it! Regardless of whether the problem is nature- or nurture-caused, money will solve it!

Remember—even if the wall went up tomorrow, the main driver of U.S. demographic change would still be internal (birth rates of people already here). So by all means, rightists, grow that welfare state and get more babies from folks who can’t afford to have ’em! And when you’re robbed and stabbed in an alley by one of those kids sixteen years from now, as you lay dying you can comfort yourself with the knowledge that paying for your murderer’s upbringing at least helped to “soak the rich.”

If you believe that throwing money at a failing inner-city school will turn those kids into brilliant scholars, then by logical extension you also have to believe that throwing money at every tattooed Honduran and Salvadoran gangbanger who waltzes across the border will turn them into model citizens. If you truly think that government money can overcome inborn or ingrained problems, forget the wall…give each illegal thug a big fat check!

A disjointed and contradictory worldview is always a recipe for failure.

The last factor is the one that annoys me the most: popcorn! You know those “I’m just here for the popcorn” memes that folks on social media post in a thread to show how much they’re getting off on spectating a good donnybrook? That, to me, is the epitome of what the Trump activist base, especially that ill-defined “alt-right” segment of it, has become. Unable to effect real change, shut out of the God Emperor’s palace, these bozos have taken to feuding with each other, enjoying the popcorn as they attack their own.

These creeps are like incels who go gay because any guy can get laid in a bathhouse. Unable to “score” real victories, these blue-balled losers act out in the only place that still pays attention to them: their own circle. This alt-right site attacks that alt-right site. This anonymous YouTuber goes after that anonymous YouTuber. “Ooooh, did you hear? BakedLobster is feuding with PillPopper! Where does Styxen666en stand? I’ll get the popcorn!”

This is how a movement that probably never had any real promise dies…with sparsely viewed flame videos.

Here’s the best example I can give of this pathology. Last October, I hosted Ann Coulter in L.A. for a book-signing event. I’ve written about this before, but I’m bringing it up one final time to make a point. I was tipped off a week in advance that a disgruntled incel former friend with a personal grudge was planning to sabotage the proceedings by rallying Antifa to bust up the venue and harass attendees. Old story, who cares. But what I also found out was that his accomplice in trying to get Coulter and 240 local conservatives assaulted by Antifa was an alt-rightish fellow named Matt Forney. Forney is an American expat living in Eastern Europe. I interviewed him for my column in August 2016. There’d never been any bad blood between us. We’d never even met in person. And yet here he was trying to bring Antifa down on 240 people (plus one of the most important voices the Trump agenda ever had). And why? No reason. Literally no reason. The guy just likes sowing discord for the sake of it.

Did Matt Forney ever actually stand for anything? He must’ve. Slate covered him in 2016, around the same time I did. Leftist protesters used to target him at rallies (occasionally aided by Forney’s troubled relationship with gravity). At one time, he must’ve had beliefs. He must’ve had opinions on matters of political or societal import. Not anymore. Now his entire thing is feuds with other rightists. That’s literally all he does; flame-war YouTube videos. Nothing else.

Two months after the Coulter event, and humiliated that I’d discovered his role in the failed Antifa plot, Forney tried to bait me into getting into one of his beloved public squabbles. “You’re like every other Jew: you have a big mouth and no balls,” he emailed, daring me to make a video about him, before adding, “I know where you live. Don’t push your luck” (Forney also recently threatened to dox Jim Goad).

Forney represents the tattered, pathetic detritus of the movement that used to be called the alt-right. Infighting, trolling, and flame wars are all they have left. Trump’s 2016 activist base is syphilitic and dying. For his sake, I hope white, blue-collar voters stick with him, because he’s going to get precious little help in 2020 from his online agitators. They’re too busy popping corn and pretending to be James Holmes pretending to be the Joker.

The question that interested me when I started this piece was, the Tea Party had clever activists, the support of a party machine, and the backing of the big-money establishment. So of course we were effective. But could a group of grassroots activists score victories with none of those things? No party support, no corporate money, no brains. Could the odds be defied?

Find out next week in part 3 of this series!

Just kidding. This isn’t The Walking Dead; I don’t do cliff-hangers.

The answer is no. G’night, folks!

“The Special Counsel’s investigation did not find that the Trump campaign or anyone associated with it conspired or coordinated with Russia … to influence the 2016 US presidential campaign.”

So stated Attorney General William Barr in his Sunday letter to Congress summarizing the principal findings of the Mueller report.

On the charge of collusion with Russia, not guilty on all counts.

After two years of hearing from haters in politics and the media that President Donald Trump was “Putin’s poodle,” an agent of the Kremlin, guilty of treason, an illegitimate president who would leave the White House in handcuffs and end his days in prison, we learn the truth.

It was all a bright, shining lie.

Reeling from Trump’s exoneration, big media are now scurrying to their fallback position: Mueller did not exonerate Trump of obstruction of justice.

But Mueller was not obstructed. No one impeded his labors.

As for Trump’s rages against his investigation, they were the natural reaction of an innocent man falsely accused and facing disgrace and ruin for a crime he did not commit, indeed, a crime that had never been committed.

The House Judiciary Committee may try to replicate what Mueller did, and re-investigate obstruction. Fine. This would confirm what this whole rotten business has at root always been about: a scheme by the deep state and allied media to bring down another president.

The Mueller investigation employed 19 lawyers and 40 FBI agents. It took two years. It issued 2,800 subpoenas. It executed 500 search warrants. It interviewed 500 witnesses. And it failed to indict a single member of Trump’s campaign for collusion with Russia to influence the 2016 election.

Which raises this question:

If Mueller could find no collusion, after an exhaustive two-year search, what was the compelling evidence that caused James Comey’s FBI and Barack Obama’s Department of Justice to believe that such collusion had occurred and to launch this investigation?

Sunday, after Barr’s summary of the Mueller report became public, Trump aired his justified anger: “It’s a shame that our country had to go through this. To be honest, it’s a shame that your president has had to go through this. … This was an illegal takedown that failed.”

Is there not truth in this?

Millions of Americans still believe what is now a manifest falsehood — that their president collaborated with Putin in cheating Hillary Clinton out of the presidency. The legal bills of Trump, his family, his campaign aides and his White House staff must be huge. Careers, reputations have been damaged.

The nation has been distracted and bitterly divided over this since Trump’s first days in office. He has had a cloud over his presidency since he gave his inaugural address. Any ability the president had to fulfill his campaign pledge and negotiate with the largest country on earth, Russia, a superpower rival, has had to be put off.

Is it unfair to ask: Who did this to us?

Who led the Justice Department into believing Trump conspired with the Russians? Why did it take two years to discover there was no collusion? Who gave Putin and the GRU this victory by helping to tear our own country apart?

Our establishment is forever demanding apologies. Where are the apologies for the outrageous accusations that Trump was guilty of something next to treason?

Sen. Joe McCarthy did not do a fraction of the damage to the reputations of Dean Acheson or George Marshall that the elite media have done, unjustly and maliciously, to the reputation of Donald Trump.

Years after French Artillery Capt. Alfred Dreyfus was convicted of colluding with the Germans in the late 19th century, and was sent to Devil’s Island, evidence against another officer emerged.

Soon, it was Dreyfus’ accusers who were in the dock of public opinion.

That needs to happen now. The instigators of this investigation, launched to bring down a president, have damaged and divided this nation, and they need to be exposed, as do their collaborators in the press.

The roots of Mueller’s investigation go back to the Clinton campaign’s hiring of the opposition research firm Fusion GPS to dig up dirt on Trump. Fusion GPS hired ex-British spy Christopher Steele. He had sources in Russian intelligence who provided him with the contents of his infamous dossier. This was delivered to a grateful cabal at the FBI, which used it as the basis of a FISA court warrant to surveil the Trump campaign.

The dirt in the Steele dossier, much of it false, would be secretly shared with Trump-haters in the media to torpedo his candidacy; then, when Trump won, to destroy his presidency before it began.

Now that Trump has been exonerated, the story of how his accusers, using the power of the state, almost murdered a presidency with lies, propaganda and innuendo, needs to be brought out into the sunlight.

For democracy dies in darkness, and this can’t happen again.

“No one here gets out alive!” the immigrant driver allegedly yelled to a bus full of 12- and 13-year-old schoolkids near Milan last Wednesday while barreling down a highway and plowing through a police roadblock.

He had taken a detour en route to a sporting event and, according to what detectives say he later told them, was headed to an airport so he could fly back to his homeland of Senegal. Although he also allegedly told authorities that he intended to hurt no one and was only using the children as human shields, he had taken the precaution of removing all the tiny hammers from the bus that were normally used to shatter windows and escape in case of an emergency.

According to witnesses, he had also instructed the three teacher’s assistants on the bus to surrender their phones and force all the children to do the same. Then he told the adults to bind the students’ hands with plastic ties.

One teacher’s assistant was able to contact police without the driver noticing. One student concealed his phone and pretended to pray in Arabic while he called his father and told him to contact police.

The driver plowed through a few cars but wound up getting stuck on a guardrail, whereupon he shouted, “I want to be done, deaths in the Mediterranean must be stopped!” before dousing the floors with gasoline, setting everything ablaze, and hopping off the bus.

Police smashed through the rear windows and evacuated the three assistants and all 51 students before anyone died, although 14 survivors were taken to the hospital for smoke inhalation. The driver, who suffered burns, was also hospitalized.

A 12-year-old schoolboy who survived the ordeal told reporters:

He said he had lost three children, that many children die at sea, so we should die too, by being burned. I was afraid I would die.

A young female survivor told the press:

He was threatening us, saying if we moved he would have poured the gasoline and set a fire. He kept saying that people in Africa die and it is the fault of [Italy’s Deputy Prime Ministers Luigi] Di Maio and [Matteo] Salvini.

An unnamed male student told reporters:

We were all very afraid because the driver had emptied the gas canister onto the floor [of the bus]. He tied us up and took all the telephones so we could not call the police. One of the telephones, belonging to a classmate, fell to the ground, so I pulled off the handcuffs, hurting myself a bit, and went and picked it up. We called the Carabinieri [Italian military police] and the police.

Teacher’s assistant Tiziana Magarini told TV reporters:

He blocked all the doors with chains. He showed me a knife and told me to tie up all the children….Fortunately, with some looks, I made some of the children in the back understand to keep their phones. And I turned mine on without being seen. We saw the first cars arrive ahead, on the sides and behind. He started to ram into them, and he hit an officer on foot. I heard a blast of glass from the back, and in two seconds there was a formidable team that in no time pulled everyone out.

A BBC article about the incident identified the suspect in their headline only as an “Italian driver” and noted only that he’d been convicted of “assault.” In contrast, Italy’s stubbornly anti-immigration Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini called the suspect, 47-year-old Ousseynou Sy, “a Senegalese with Italian citizenship.”

Mr. Sy was born in Senegal and was granted Italian citizenship in 2004 after marrying an Italian woman. Then, to show his gratitude, he up and got himself convicted of drunk driving in 2007 and assault in 2010—but to be specific, it was a sexual assault against a female minor. Still, despite what he claims are murderous Italian policies toward African immigrants, this convicted drunk driver and pedophile was permitted to make a living as Italian schoolchildren’s vehicular chaperone.

Authorities say that Sy told them he “heard voices” of African migrant children who’d drowned en route to Europe in the Mediterranean, spurring him toward his flagrantly failed attempt at mass murder. The following is patched together from several news reports alleging what Sy told authorities:

I heard the voices of the children in the sea who were telling me ‘do something spectacular for us without hurting the children.’… I wanted to get to the runway at (Milan’s) Linate airport using the children as human shields and from there head to Africa by plane…It was my personal choice, I could no longer see children torn by sharks in the Mediterranean, pregnant women and men fleeing from Africa. I want to end it, the deaths in the Mediterranean must be stopped…it was something I had to do and would do again, 100 times. Why did I do it? To send a signal to Africa.

Sy also allegedly told police that he hated white people for “invading” and “colonizing” Africa. He also reportedly told them that shortly before his foiled rampage, he posted a video to YouTube telling friends in Italy and Senegal to take action. The words he said he used were, “Africa—arise.”

That’s all well and good, I suppose, but why does Africa always seem incapable of “arising” unless Africans party-crash Europe? When you compare Italy to Mr. Sy’s splendiferous African homeland of Senegal, one realizes that Italy’s per-capita yearly income is more than 23 times higher and the life expectancy is about 25 years longer. And yet they still see fit to come and bitch about allegedly rampant Italian racism, the ingrates.

According to the UN, last year nearly 2,300 Africans drowned to death in the Mediterranean en route to Europe. Last June, Di Maio and Salvini’s populist coalition came into power and effectively shut down the coming hordes of boat people. This year so far, there have been only 282 drowning deaths in the Mediterranean. If current trends continue throughout the year, African-migrant drowning deaths will have plummeted by 50% compared to last year—almost solely because of the immigration policies that allegedly sent Sy on his lunatic spree.

Although it may be unpleasant to hear, it bears repeating—Africans simply aren’t very good at math.

Muammar Gaddafi warned that this would happen. In a 2010 visit to Italy, he prophesied that if the EU didn’t shell out $5 billion yearly in extortion money to Libya, his country would cease acting as a buffer zone and that Europe would “turn black”:

We don’t know what will be the reaction of the white and Christian Europeans faced with this influx of starving and ignorant Africans….We don’t know if Europe will remain an advanced and united continent or if it will be destroyed, as happened with the barbarian invasions.

According to Sy’s lawyer, his client merely desired to “draw attention to the consequences of [Italy’s] migration policies.”

He succeeded. Ousseynou Sy is the direct consequence of Italy’s migration policies. Although he failed to kill anybody, it’s still unclear whether anyone will get out of this alive.

The Week’s Most Grueling, Mewling, and Befooling Headlines

TROUBLE AT THE POVERTY PALACE
The Southern Poverty Law Center is misnamed for the following reasons:

1) SOUTHERN: Despite the fact that its headquarters are located in Alabama, it is aggressively anti-Southern by dint of the fact that it views Southern history as one giant stain against all things good;
2) POVERTY: Its endowment is close to a half-billion dollars, dwarfing that of the NRA and even the ACLU;
3) LAW: It is very selective in what laws it deems worthy of defending: For example, it equates the enforcement of current immigration laws with “hate.”

Despite its relentless posturing as an anti-“hate” organization, it seems propelled by a cancerous hatred toward all things white and male. And most disturbingly for anyone who believes that objective journalism is not only desirable but somewhat achievable, the mainstream press unquestioningly reprints SPLC press releases as if they were gospel truth. The SPLC also advises huge tech companies on exactly what constitutes “hate” and why it should be banned.

But despite its leaders’ savviness regarding how to make millions by exploiting modern taboos, they seem unaware that there is no end to “social justice” and that merely by having light skin and being male, their own witch-hunting would ultimately turn the witches on them, too.

On March 13, the SPLC—which has been linked to at least two terrorist shootings—announced that it had fired its co-founder Morris Dees, a lawyer and direct-marketing millionaire who once campaigned on behalf of George Wallace and received money from the KKK to defend people who’d assaulted Freedom Riders at a bus station in Montgomery, AL. It would also surprise the SPLC’s seemingly endless pool of gullible donors to learn that as recently as 1994, Dees—by then a multi-millionaire—claimed, “probably the most discriminated people in America today are white men when it comes to jobs.”

According to Dees’s divorce papers, his stepdaughter Holly accused him of trying to molest her with a sex toy when she was 18:

He was in his underwear and he sat on the bed where Holly was lying on her stomach facing away from the door. He touched her on the back and woke her up. He told her that he had brough [sic] her a present, and he presented her with a vibrator. He plugged it in and said he had brought it to her. He proceeded to rub it on her back and said ‘Let me show you how to use it.’…[H]e started to place it between he [sic] legs when she raised her voice and said no loudly….About two hours later, she had fallen back asleep and he came back in….He brought the vibrator with him, plugged it in and said again, ‘Let me show you how to use it.’ He tried to show her again by putting it between her legs, but she raised her voice again and he stopped. He took it and left.

One day after Dees was fired, the Los Angeles Times reported that two dozen SPLC staffers had signed a letter protesting “mistreatment, sexual harassment, gender discrimination, and racism” at the organization. Hilarious!

On Friday, SPLC president Richard Cohen resigned his position “in order to give the organization the best chance to heal.”

Last Wednesday—published before Cohen’s resignation and possibly a contributing factor to it—the New Yorker ran an essay by former SPLC staffer Bob Moser that did a bang-up job of shaming the shamers at their own shame game:

For those of us who’ve worked in the Poverty Palace, putting it all into perspective isn’t easy, even to ourselves. We were working with a group of dedicated and talented people, fighting all kinds of good fights, making life miserable for the bad guys. And yet, all the time, dark shadows hung over everything: the racial and gender disparities, the whispers about sexual harassment, the abuses that stemmed from the top-down management, and the guilt you couldn’t help feeling about the legions of donors who believed that their money was being used, faithfully and well, to do the Lord’s work in the heart of Dixie. We were part of the con, and we knew it.

Incoming female staffers were additionally warned by their new colleagues about Dees’s reputation for hitting on young women….The work could be meaningful and gratifying. But it was hard, for many of us, not to feel like we’d become pawns in what was, in many respects, a highly profitable scam….

Outside of work, we spent a lot of time drinking and dishing in Montgomery bars and restaurants about the oppressive security regime, the hyperbolic fund-raising appeals, and the fact that, though the center claimed to be effective in fighting extremism, “hate” always continued to be on the rise, more dangerous than ever, with each year’s report on hate groups. “The S.P.L.C.—making hate pay,” we’d say.

We pray for the day when, due to the relentlessly reduction ad absurdum nature of the “social justice” biz, the only person left working at the SPLC is a cancer-stricken, one-limbed, polysexual transgender mulatto Jewish dwarf infected with all known strains of HIV. Then, and only then, will justice roll down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.

BARACK OBAMA’S BROTHER ASKS IF MICHELLE IS A TRANNY
It’s truly none of our business whether or not Barack Obama and Rahm Emanuel used to frequent a gay bath house in Chicago, nor should it matter to use whether or not his alleged wife Michelle is actually a man.

Regarding the latter contention, Joan Rivers floated the idea that Michelle is a man, and according to Alex Jones, she may have been murdered by Michelle for spilling the beans.

Now comes word that Obama’s half-brother Malik—who wears a MAGA hat, once promised that Barack would “be a good president for the Jewish people, despite his Muslim background,” and in 2017 tweeted an image of what is reputedly Barack Obama’s real birth certificate from Kenya—asked the following pointed question on Twitter:

Is Michelle Michael?

We have no desire to examine Ms. Obama’s genitals for a definitive answer. All we know is that Barack Obama has referred to her as “Michael” at least twice.

BARBARA STREISAND: MICHAEL JACKSON’S “SEXUAL NEEDS WERE HIS SEXUAL NEEDS”
Barbra “The Anteater” Streisand, recently released from her cryogenic chamber while it receives a spring cleaning,defended dead King of Pop Michael Jackson not specifically against sexual abuse allegations, but about whether what he was accused of doing was bad. Interesting angle there, Babs.

In an interview with The Times, the chanteuse who has a bigger proboscis than any other female singer in history said that his accusers are “absolutely” telling the truth, but what’s the big dillio?:

His sexual needs were his sexual needs, coming from whatever childhood he has or whatever DNA he has. You can say ‘molested,’ but those children, as you heard say, they were thrilled to be there. They both married and they both have children, so it didn’t kill them….I feel bad for the children. I feel bad for him. I blame, I guess, the parents, who would allow their children to sleep with him. Why would Michael need these little children dressed like him and in the shoes and the dancing and the hats?

Wait a minute—the hats? We didn’t know about the hats. He’s lucky he died when he did, because if we’d known about the hats, we would have killed him.


BLACK SEMINARIANS AT PRINCETON SEEK REPARATIONS
We’re not certain whether or not Princeton Theological Seminary uses the same racial handicapping system regarding admissions as Princeton University does, but if so, black students they are already rewarded 280 SAT bonus points compared to Asians and 230 points vis-à-vis whites.

Still, obviously much more needs to be done and countless more boatloads of dollars need to be spent if we ever hope to see black students and Asian students reaching intellectual parity at Princeton—or anywhere else, for that matter. (A recent racial scandal erupted when it was revealed that New York City’s most elite high school, operating on a merit-based system regarding student selection, is 74% Asian and only 1% black.)

Black students at Princeton Theological Seminary, alarmed to learn that since Princeton was founded long before the Civil War and some of its benefactors owned slaves way back then, are demanding that the school set aside over $5 million yearly to help “make amends” for things that happened at least 154 years ago.

Prediction: They could toss $10 trillion yearly on scholarships for blacks, and 154 years from now, Asian students would outperform them to the same degree that blacks currently outperform Asians in the NBA.

Another prediction: Within 154 years, Asian scientists will be able to graft detachable and machine-washable 10-foot legs onto Asian humans, enabling them to outperform blacks in the NBA.

WHITE MEN REMOVED FROM “AMERICAN POLITICAL THOUGHT” SYLLABUS
Imagine teaching a course on “German Folklore” that excludes German folklorists. Or picture a class on “Lesbian Flemish Painters” that covered everything but lesbians, Flemish people, and painters.

A course called “American Political Thought” at the University of Colorado purposely ignores every white male who ever had a political thought. According to the syllabus provided by instructor Chad Shomura—who is possibly male but is definitely not white:

This course aims to develop an understanding of American political life from the margins. Rather than surveying traditional figures of American political thought, it attends to historically marginalized voices at the crossings of race, gender, sexuality, and nation. It explores issues such as intersectionality, antiblack racism and the American Dream, ordinary life, borderlands and migration, public feelings, mental health, and settler colonialism. The materials we examine also exceed the usual genres of American Political Thought. They include, among other things, poems, an ethnography, academic articles, a novel, and a hacked tarot card set.

There is no mention of the Founding Fathers or any of the presidents, at least not all the white ones.

It’s obvious that white males need to secede from America.

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Every Monday, Jim Goad reads the previous day’s “Week That Perished” on his podcast.

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