Regarding the Uvalde school shooting, most of us have already cycled through the Seven Stages of Vicarious Grief. That’s the process that follows every mass shooting, when we pick our “why” from the list of seven approved mass shooting causes, and we criticize everybody who picked a different one.
Here’s the list; feel free to print it out for next time.
(1) Guns: The favored “why” among leftists. If only we had stricter, European-style gun laws, these things wouldn’t keep happening!
(2) Broken families: With so much divorce and single parenthood, what else do you expect but mass shootings?
(3) Untreated mental illness: If only we could lock up the loons, we’d be safe.
(4) Overtreated mental illness: Thanks to Big Pharma, parents warp their kids’ minds with unnecessary meds.
(5) Media: Violent vidja games! Violent movies! 4Chan! And the evening news, which glorifies shooters and creates copycats.
(6) Fail male: “Society” is failing our boys. Our villages no longer raise up men!
(7) Failed safeguards: Schools unguarded, tips unheeded.
Okay, which one do you love? Which do you hate? Which one have you pushed on Twitter? Which have you ridiculed?
Well, “here’s the thing” (I just coined that phrase; I hope it catches on in cable news): If we look at the mass shooting big picture, what we see is a machine with many moving parts. There’s no universal point of failure, just different flaws that interact with other flaws to cause a breakdown.
So let’s explore the complexities of each mass shooting “why.”
Guns: Of course gun availability influences the number of mass shootings. Cool down; I’m not saying abolish the Second! I’m just stating a simple fact. Americans brag about our Constitution being unique (especially the parts about free speech and gun ownership), but then we get defensive when someone suggests that our unique rights bring unique problems. Even countries with strict gun regulations have mass shootings. Our relatively lax controls (compared with other nations) mean we’ll have more. It’s just an inevitability.
Leftists who rail against free speech because it leads to “bad things” (“disinformation,” “hate speech”) have popularized the notion that the presence of a downside means a freedom must be curtailed. Don’t buy into that argument. Acknowledge the downsides, and admit that, to an extent, they’re always gonna be with us. Don’t emulate Club for Growth’s Andrew Follett and post bullshit studies claiming that America has fewer mass shooting deaths than Norway (which has had only one mass shooting, but because the death toll was so high, averaged out “per capita” it appears as if the country has a chronic problem).
Enforcing existing laws that in theory keep felons and the mentally ill from owning guns would certainly catch some potential shooters. But mass shooters aren’t impulsive street thugs; their crimes are not of opportunity but premeditation. They’re clever and determined; one way or another, they’ll get guns. Doesn’t mean we need to make it easy for ’em.
Broken families: The U.S. has the world’s highest rate of single-parent families, and that’s bad. Many mass shooters come from single-family homes. Also, though, a lot come from intact but abusive homes (alcoholic, violent dads). Hence a conundrum: Fatherless families are a factor, but so are families with bad dads. This is the problem with stats, we can see criminals who come from one-parent homes. What we can’t see (the unknowable) is how many people might have gone down a criminal path had their mom stayed with an abusive man (i.e., we can measure criminals with no dad, but we can’t measure those swayed from criminality by the removal of a bad dad).
In general, intact families are better. But sometimes leaving an abusive man is the best thing a mother can do for her kid(s). Martinet dads who live by the booze ’n’ belt strap are in the family history of a bunch of mass shooters: Charles Whitman (the “George Washington” of campus shootings), Edward Allaway, Patrick Purdy, Wayne Lo, Scott Pennington, Jamie Rouse, Jason Hoffman, Jeffrey Weise, Duane Morrison, Eric Hainstock, John Zawahri, Jose Reyes.
Anders Breivik, the Big Kahuna of mass shootings, was raised by a mentally ill mom. In a case like his, he’d have been much better off with his dad alone (not that father-alone is necessarily better: 13-year-old shooter Oliver Warmsley, McDonald’s McMassacre guy James Huberty, and several others were raised by single dads).
Still, some of the biggest names in mass shooting came from homes with no divorce and no reported dysfunction: Connor Betts, George Hennard, Jiverly Wong, Laurie Dann, Michael Carneal, Andrew Golden, Andrew Wurst, Kip Kinkel, Seth Trickey, Amy Bishop, Klebold & Harris (the Kolumbine Kidz), and VA Tech’s Seung-Hui Cho.
Single-parent family is a factor in many cases. But it’s not a universal trigger. Addressing the problem is good all around for American society, but it ain’t a panacea for mass shootings.
Mental illness (treated and untreated): Like dysfunctional homes, this is a factor heavily present in mass shooting cases. But here, too, we find a conundrum. Cho was so incredibly psychotic, you can look at him and say, of course he should’ve been institutionalized; the man threw up more flags than a magician who swallowed a mouth coil. But what of Eric Harris, the Columbine mastermind? He was bright and highly functional, but his (married, non-abusive) parents still sought psychiatric help for him for “depression,” and he was put on pharmaceuticals. Cho got no help. Did Harris get too much? Or the wrong kind? Or maybe he would’ve killed whether or not he was on Luvox.
The fact is, Cho’s an outlier; only 10 percent of mass shooters had what could be described as “major psychosis” (i.e., poo-flinging non-functionality). Most teen shooters with some type of mental disorder didn’t (pre-shooting) exhibit behavior that would qualify for institutionalization, even by earlier societal standards. Worse still, those who did experience psychotic episodes were often force-fed antipsychotics that brought on a period of lucidity. Thus, even those who were sent to a ward for observation “got better” and got released, as at that point there was no cause to hold them. Then they went off the meds and relapsed.
“Mental health advocates” downplay the role of mental illness in mass shootings with misleading stats about how the mentally ill are only responsible for “a small percentage of all violent crime.” But we’re not talking about “all violent crime,” just a specific subset in which mental health absolutely does play an outsize role.
Some shooter families, whether negligent (the hot stinking mess that raised the Uvalde shooter) or caring and involved (Klebold’s parents), find themselves saddled with a child who’s neither sane enough to be left to his own devices nor nutty enough for the nuthouse. Maybe meds will help, maybe they’ll make it worse. Maybe they’ll cause a psychotic break, maybe they’ll merely postpone one.
Rigorous parental oversight (what the Uvalde psycho lacked) is the best defense (though as proven by Harris, Klebold, Elliot Rodger, and others, it’s no cure-all). Common sense helps too; don’t buy your tard a gun or make guns available to them (Gendron, Lanza). And indeed, society must make it easier to lock away the poo-flingers (Lanza, Cho). But just as it’s legal for law-abiding citizens to own guns, it’s legal for teens to be depressed, sullen, angry, awkward, and even creepy. Indeed, such things are so common in teens, by themselves they fail as red flags.
And some teen shooters never exhibit any signs of mental illness at all. Jaylen Fryberg (football star, homecoming prince) was just pissed off about a girl. A hundred postmortems, and not a trace of diagnosable mental illness in his past.
Media: Setting aside superstitious nonsense about violent movies or videogames putting demons into kids’ souls (if that were the case, Japan would have the highest teen murderer rate on earth and I’d have been a felon at age 13), it’s 100 percent true that mass shootings come in clusters and many shooters claim to have been “inspired” by media accounts of previous ones. But what are we gonna do? Put U.K.-style media gags on crime stories? Can’t be done. Like with guns, it’s the bad that comes with the good of our inalienable rights.
Fail male: This one’s pretty weak. Claiming that we’re “not promoting healthy masculinity, purpose, and goodness for boys and men” sounds fine on paper. But 28.5 percent of adult mass shooters were military guys (including some of the worst, like Hennard and Essex), and quite a few adult and teen shooters came from military families (Harris, Wong, Lo, etc.).
And regarding “masculinity,” Harris was, in fact, a total alpha, a leader of boys—sociable, charming, and pathologically narcissistic. Breivik rebelled against his domineering mother by becoming a ripped, manscaped Viking warrior. No question, our society is feminizing and marginalizing boys, but school shootings predate that trend, and many shooters are plenty “masculine.”
Failed safeguards: To me, this is the one to focus on, because it dispenses with the “whys.” It cuts through the debate. Whatever the “why,” just stop it from happening. Iron Dome doesn’t care why a missile was fired.
Ever since Oct. 1, 1997, when vice principal Joel Myrick stopped the Pearl, Miss., high school shooting by holding his Colt .45 to the teen shooter’s head, the second best way to stop a school shooting has been well-known. The first best is prevention. The Pearl shooter had leaked his plan in advance to his friends (as 48 percent of shooters do), but they told no one.
Armed professionals on campus and tips to law enforcement are not panaceas, but they’re the intelligent response of a society dealing with a phenomenon with no single cause (and after Covid, leftists have totally lost the right to say “we can’t terrorize schoolchildren just to keep them safe”). Still, armed guards and law enforcement tip lines don’t work when the armed professionals bumble like the Keystone Cops and the FBI puts shooting threats on the back burner as it devotes its resources to politicized witch hunts.
As we marvel at the police clusterfuck in Uvalde, remember that during Columbine, cops waited two hours before they entered the building where the shooting took place, and it took another hour to find the killers dead in the library. Following the outcry over the slow response, police nationwide were supposed to train regularly for such shootings. Apparently, the Uvalde cops did train, but poorly. If every police department in the country can be monitored for “diversity,” perhaps the quality of school shooting response training can be monitored too.
Also, it’d be great if the FBI could pause the partisan political ax-grinding for at least a few minutes a day to follow up on shooting tips.
And maybe we should stop arguing about the “whys,” because while they all may be to some degree valid, none is a magic bullet.
Pushing ideologically pleasing fixes makes for some damn fine tweeting…but in terms of real-world helpfulness, it’s of limited value.
The Week’s Most Flaying, Spaying, and Memorial Daying Headlines
OKAY, WHO CAUSED A TEMPORAL PARADOX?
In the Bizarro 1980s (an inverted-reality dimension), Philip Michael Thomas became an A-list movie star after Miami Vice. Bobcat Goldthwait launched the most successful sitcom of all time (“a show about screaming about nothing”). Haysi Fantayzee sold more records than any group in history, and while a movie about a robot assassin from the future flopped at the box office, killing the careers of its bodybuilder star and egocentric director, The Perils of Gwendoline in the Land of the Yik-Yak broke box office records, launching lead actor Brent Huff into superstardom.
Bizarro ’80s is more than comic-book fiction; it’s pretty much what’s happening today. Case in point: In the real 1980s, leftists were against racial apartheid and war with Russia.
But not in the Bizarro ’80s!
Last week, Netflix announced the end of its racial-preference apartheid. The streamer, rapidly imploding due to “woke” programming and racial hiring caps and quotas, liquidated its black, Hispanic, Asian, and LGBT programming departments: Strong Black Lead (weak black ratings), Con Todo (no can-do), Golden Asia (yellow? Goodbye!), and Most (LGBTFU).
Needless to say, leftists are furious that a racial apartheid is ending!
Par for the course in the Bizarro ’80s. As is the fact that musicians are now clamoring for war with Russia, with Pink Floyd’s pro-Ukraine war anthem topping the charts. In the actual 1980s, Pink Floyd released anti-war songs, including “The Fletcher Memorial Home,” which gleefully depicted Reagan and Thatcher being murdered. But now, war’s, like, cool, man!
So have a New Coke and a smile, courtesy of Bill Cosby (and because this is the Bizarro ’80s, rest assured there are no quaaludes in it).
AND SPEAKING OF THE NINETEEN-AIDEES…
Here’s another resuscitated ’80s relic: a highly contagious African-origin gay disease.
Behold, monkeypox!
Gregg Gonsalves is an epidemiologist and “global health activist” at Yale. He rose to prominence in the 1980s fighting AIDS, and by “fighting it,” he means “getting it.” Yes, Greg with an extra “g” (for gay) saw friends and family die of AIDS in the 1980s and—by his own admission—he knew everything there was to know about the disease: how to get it, and how to not get it.
But still, in 1995, he got it. Even though it was (at the time) a death sentence, he couldn’t control his behavior enough to avoid one of the most easily avoidable deadly plagues in history.
Thankfully, his diagnosis came right as the first generation of Magic Johnson’s AIDS-B-Gone super-drugs were approved, so Gonsalves survived. And over the past two years the man who couldn’t control his pecker when it was life-or-death has been one of the prime COVID-scolds in America, lecturing the great unwashed on how they must sacrifice everything—their jobs, their kids’ education and mental health, their elderly parents’ companionship–in the name of controlling COVID.
Few argued harder than Gonsalves to keep churches closed during the pandemic; in November 2020 he tweeted: “If you think filling up churches and allowing congregants to get infected is in the name of God, you worship something far grimmer than most.”
Said the man who’s only alive today because he inadvertently timed his baneful buggering to coincide with the availability of protease inhibitors.
But now that monkeypox is here, spread via close contact among gay men, Greggay has changed his tune, tweeting “The answer isn’t shut down all these parties, tell gay men to stop having sex at them or dancing in close proximity to each other. It won’t work.” Yes, now that the plague’s gay, social distancing is homophobic.
Gregg Gonsalves: a life defined by screwing. “Screw your kids, screw your parents, screw your life, just don’t screw with my ability to screw.”
HOIST BY THEIR OWN SPANIARD
In 1989 David Ramirez, an Arizonan of obvious Aztec ancestry, did some DIY pagan sacrificing by butchering his girlfriend and her 15-year-old daughter. He stabbed both women two dozen times in the neck, back, abdomen, and eyes. And as the daughter lay dying, he raped her repeatedly. According to neighbors, this went on for thirty minutes.
Ramirez’s guilt was never in question. At trial, his attorney appealed to the judge: “You need drywall, señor? We do drywall.”
Ramirez was sentenced to fry. And refry, like all good beans.
His post-conviction lawyer was no more effective during appeal (“you want leaf blow? We blow leaf”).
In the decades since, Ramirez’s case has attracted the attention of the nation’s finest left-wing lawyers (from the firm Nebbish, Schmendrick, and Schmuck), who argue that Ramirez’s previous attorneys didn’t stress the extenuating circumstances that totally excuse their client’s behavior. “He was an abused child!” “He never got over the cancellation of Chico and the Man!” “He was just trying to film his version of Apocalypto!”
Unfortunately, Ramirez’s team was prevented from presenting these arguments at the federal appeals level, thanks to the 1996 Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (AEDPA). So the attorneys went to SCOTUS demanding an AEDPA exemption.
Last week, SCOTUS, in a 6–3 decision, upheld AEDPA and sent Ramirez back to death row, much to the righteous rage of every leftist in America.
How dare the racist court send an abused Mexican to his maker!
But here’s the irony: AEDPA was passed following the Oklahoma City bombing as a tool against white supremacist terrorists! It was supported by Democrats, and signed by Bill Clinton.
Today, the Biden administration is trying to curtail civil liberties in the name of fighting white supremacist terrorists. You think they’ll learn a lesson from the Ramirez case about how these kinds of crusades can boomerang in unexpected ways?
Naw! That would require introspection. No time for that. Not when there are Mexican necrófilos to free and anti-CRT white parents to imprison.
BLACK SPARROW
Last week was the second anniversary of smothered brother George Floyd’s grand exit. Second anniversaries are symbolized by “cotton,” so even in death poor George is mocked by racism (next year will be better; the symbol of third anniversaries is fentanyl).
Unfortunately for those who turned Floyd’s passing into an excuse to defund cops and launch a national crime surge, America isn’t in much of a “defund” mood these days. After two mass shootings in a row, Americans have soured on the notion that crime can be stopped by social workers dispensing daisies.
So the commemorations for Cotton Floyd were rather muted.
It’s tempting to view the “defund” crusade as America’s version of China’s 1958 “smash sparrows campaign.” That was when Mao Zedong—a man so imbecilic new research suggests he wasn’t Asian at all but just a white guy with severe Down syndrome—ordered his people to kill every sparrow in the land because the birds were “eating the grain.”
So for an entire year, China became Auschwitz-Beakenau, as sparrows were genocided left and right. And then it turned out the sparrows hadn’t been eating grain but the bugs that infest the grain. And with all sparrows dead, an unprecedented plague of locusts caused a famine that killed millions.
Kill bug-eaters, you get more bugs. How can a people that good at math not understand 2 + 2 = 4?
At least the BLM Mau Maus who out-Mao’d Mao have an excuse for not understanding “remove all cops and crime will increase” cause and effect: They can’t read, write, or reason beyond a kindergarten level.
History always repeats itself, and when it comes to “great leaps forward,” BLM’s defund disaster proves that blacks can’t jump any better than Chinamen.
THROWING THE FAITHFUL A BONE
In religion news, last week was all about trad vs. rad, honor vs. on-him.
The Catholic Church has always been tolerant with Nancy Pelosi. Sure, the far-left Democrat rarely respects church teachings. She loves abortion so much she once tried to replace her speaker’s gavel with a curette. She’s so pro-gay she tried to force priests to conduct baptisms in bathhouses. And she threatened to withdraw tax-free status from churches that don’t allow trannysubstantiation.
Still, the Vatican kept her around, because what’s goth cathedrals without a gargoyle?
But now it looks like Pelosi’s luck has run out. Last week, Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone of the San Francisco Archdiocese issued a decree banning Pelosi from receiving Holy Communion “until she repents of her public pro-abortion stance.”
Poor Nancy now has to sneak down to San Jose to get back-alley Communion from a vato named Miguel (Pelosi generally avoids Mexican Catholics, as they often mistake her for a Guanajuato mummy). The Catholic Reporter denounced the archbishop, claiming that even though abortion is indeed a sin, Pelosi herself never had one—she only ensured that millions of other women have.
So it’s all cool, then.
As Archbishop Cordileone continues to prove himself incorruptible, across the country another Christian leader is proving himself in-your-rumptible. Eighty-three-year-old pastor Norm Self, of Moon Hearth Ministries in Asheville N.C., has decided to expand his ministry through gay porn. No, not watching it. Or selling it. The elderly pastor has decided to become a gay porn star himself.
Last week Self told The Sun that he “plans to keep starring in erotic films until society removes ‘sex-negative norms’ from its vocabulary.”
To which society replied, “Whatever you say, gramps! Just put your damn clothes back on.”
On his “church’s” website, Self offers “private sessions” for “sliding-scale donations based on session length and your gratitude.”
50 percent refund if you catch monkeypox.
And he’s raking in the bucks, mainly from fatties who’ve found in the pastor the ultimate appetite suppressant.
“Since seeing him naked, I’m nauseous 24/7,” said one satisfied customer.
NEW YORK—A couple more weeks in the Bagel and then on to dear old London. I’ve had a very good time partying with young friends here, but the place reeks, literally as well as metaphorically. Violence is creeping up, gangs shooting at each other even on 59th Street and Fifth Avenue, right where the poor little Greek boy grew up. Where a commemorative plaque of young Taki’s residence should have been put up long ago for services to American women, there was a corpse. Next day it was forgotten, as an 11-year-old was gunned down in the Bronx.
What used to be extreme radicalism is now the reigning ideology of every major American city. Speech patterns have changed, and words are now perceived not in the way they were intended; everything is politicized and crime rates have gone through the you-know-what. Racial and political differences egged on by the internet threaten major cities in the U.S., as contempt for the police and American institutions in general has become the default stance of the ruling elite. I’ve never seen it this bad, even during the height of the Vietnam conflict, when Black Panthers were openly shooting at cops and Hollywood and the left were rooting for them. Now it’s much worse, and only Rupert Murdoch’s newspapers and TV network stand between total chaos and some semblance of the past.
And speaking of Rupert Murdoch, his Fox News is the most popular cable network by far, something the left simply cannot abide. So what do they do? They openly fabricate and associate his commentators with any crime du jour, as in the recent outrage in Buffalo, where an 18-year-old white madman gunned down 10 black people and three whites after immersing himself in racist content easily found in internet forums.
Not content with innuendo and libelous hints, subversive know-nothings employed by the Bagel Times then quote some obscure left-wing professor who blames a Fox star commentator like Tucker Carlson for inflaming the killer moron. Mind you, when the black equivalent of the white moron attacked and killed something like 15 white Christmas marchers in Wisconsin late last year, he was described by the lefty media as being momentarily mentally impaired. So I ask you, what do you think the white 18-year-old was when he killed 10 black people in cold blood, Albert Einstein?
About ten years or so ago, before he became a star at Fox, I had lunch with Tucker Carlson and we exchanged numbers, but have never communicated since. I found him to be a very polite and well-informed young man, with good manners, something that is almost unheard-of among American journalists. At present the Bagel Times is running book-length stories about him, singling him out as the prime mover behind the great replacement theory, which claims that sinister elites, especially Jews, are deliberately bringing in immigrants to displace white Americans. The theory had its origins in France, when Renaud Camus used it as the title of his book back in 2012. When the so-called white supremacists used the slogan in Charlottesville, Va.—where a young Taki went to university and where no plaque commemorating that event is to be found—Tucker Carlson did not have a nightly program at Fox, so the hysterics linking him by Bagel Times ignoramuses are wrong. What is worse, however, is what lies behind the organized attack against him:
At a very chic dinner party last week, a lady lamented what would happen if 90-year-old Rupert were no longer around. I assured her that he was in excellent health and that there is more of where he comes from that will continue his legacy. Which is why the left in America is trying desperately to silence Fox, The Wall Street Journal, and the N.Y. Post. Link Murdoch’s media to white supremacists and replacement theory and—abracadabra—you have the excuse for discrediting his media empire. Link Tucker Carlson with the Buffalo madman and—abracadabra—Carlson is toast. The fact that the madman’s 180-page manifesto doesn’t mention Tucker is irrelevant. As is the truth, where the left is concerned.
What is more interesting, and far sadder, is the fact that 30 people in Philadelphia and 27 in New York were shot on the day that 13 died in Buffalo. But it was all black-on-black crime, hence not in the equation of discrediting Fox & Co. The fact that Schumer, the senator from New York, a man who would sell his own mother for publicity, and deliver her also, tried to tie Tucker Carlson to the Buffalo case illustrates the depth of Democratic corruption and dishonesty. These so-called elites really take the rest of us for less than numbskulls, dunderheads who believe the tale that slaves sold by Arabs built the wonder that once was America. There is something warped about the left’s vitriolic attacks on truth and refusal of facts. Bile and malice against whites do not alter the fact that 13 percent of the population commits 55 percent of the crimes. Nor does it alter the fact that whites will be in the minority in the U.S. by the year 2050. Is it a wonder, then, that some American citizens believe that there is a conspiracy to replace them? There is no conspiracy, but when a Bagel Times editor, Sarah Jeong, calls for the disappearance of white men and is cheered by fellow clowns at the paper, some whites feel justified to worry.
Douglas Murray’s opus The War on the West has just been published, and it’s a doozy. He is a friend and fellow columnist in the London Spectator, the oldest magazine in the English-speaking world. It is a book about what happens when the good guys—those on the side of democracy, reason, and rights—prematurely surrender. As he writes in his preface, “Every schoolchild now knows about slavery. How many can describe the great gifts that the Western tradition has given the world?” The war that he writes about is carried out across the media and networks, and from as early as preschool. All major cultural institutions are now willingly distancing themselves from their own past, and the very top of the American government has called for the dismantling of the systemic racism prevalent in American life.
Personally, what I have yet to understand is, who is behind this war? As Murray points out, “the culture that gave the world lifesaving advances in science and medicine, and a free market that has raised billions of people around the world out of poverty, is interrogated through a lens of the deepest hostility.” All much too true, I’m afraid. Everywhere we now look, all we see and hear about is white privilege and racism. We no longer discuss Bach, Bernini, Michelangelo, Leonardo, and so on, not to mention Shakespeare, but are deluged by our so-called cruelties against African-Americans to this day. Is it some kind of a collective urge for suicide, or are there dark plotters aiming to benefit from our self-inflicted wounds?
Murray does not deal with that last question because as of now none of us can answer it. The closest I can get is that it is a political project aimed directly at the white race, a witch hunt using state and cultural power at their disposal against perceived enemies. Who is behind this war against us? I wish I knew. What I do know is that it’s a crusade, a slanderous campaign against our institutions, especially education. My wife, who lives in Europe, thinks it’s the academics. I’m not so sure. The only thing they are capable of corrupting is young minds, something television and the movies have already accomplished. A black British academic by the name of Kehinde Andrews claims that the whole system in the West needs overturning. When Murray asked him what he really meant, the so-called academic answered, “I mean simply revolution.” That’s old hat, as far as I’m concerned, clapped-out 1968 hippy talk that helped bring two great presidents to power, Nixon and Reagan.
Racism equals capitalism, according to many academics, whose race-baiting is far superior to their intellectual prowess. What amazes me is that so many in the media and the arts refuse to admit that those growing up in the West today remain among the luckiest people in human history. This is the bad news. The good is that if you thought comedy was dead due to political correctness, you were wrong. Another friend and colleague in The Spectator, Rod Liddle, has had to include me in one of his columns, declaring me a black man in order to justify “Britain’s dimmest university efforts to decolonize mathematics.” Let me explain:
Staff at Durham University in Britain were encouraged—read forced—to find brilliant mathematicians from beyond the West. They looked through Google and found plenty of Chinese, and even some Arabs, Indians from the subcontinent, but none whatsoever from sub-Sahara. Nor were there any Aborigines. So what were they to do, all those lecturers who were told to find mathematicians from Africa in order to decolonize mathematics? Easy, according to my colleague from Britain: Declare that the Greeks were black, starting with Taki, “or at least a kind of stepping stone between the putrid whiteness of Western Europe and the vibrancy of and dignity of true blackness.”
Mind you, I didn’t mind a bit when I read that I qualified as black—both my parents were blond, as is my brother, but who cares? It allows the academics recourse to Pythagoras, as well as Archimedes and the father of geometry, Euclid. (And I am rather suntanned the year round hanging out on sailing boats and ski slopes and stuff like that.) Hence I decided to ask one of my editors to alter a picture of me to make me look a bit like Al Jolson, but for some reason I doubt that my request will be granted.
Joking aside, America is becoming a very sad place to live in, especially if one is a Christian. The fact that gay pride symbols and BLM slogans are allowed in schools, but a white high school football coach is fired because he took a knee and prayed on the fifty-yard line after the game—the case has reached the Supreme Court—makes the good old US of A not only sound ridiculous but also appear to have a death wish. Teachers promote transgenderism, white guilt, and the totally phony 1619 Project, but prayer is now seen as the kiss of death. Thank God my children live in Europe, and I will make sure my grandchildren stay away.
Ideology is political religion, said the conservative sage Russell Kirk.
And what is the defining dogma of the political religion, or ideology, of America in 2022?
Is it not that, “All men are created equal”?
Yet, as with every religion, a basic question needs first to be asked and answered about this defining dogma of liberal ideology.
Is it true? Are all men truly created equal? Are all races and ethnic groups equal? Are men and women equal? Are all religions equal? Or do we simply agree to accept that as true — and treat them all equally?
All Americans, we agree, have the same God-given rights to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” the same constitutional rights in the Bill of Rights, and the same civil rights, enshrined in federal law.
But where is the historic, scientific or empirical proof of the defining dogma of American democracy that “all men are created equal”?
Thomas Jefferson, the statesman who immortalized the words, did not believe in equality, let alone equity. How he lived his life testifies to this disbelief.
When he wrote the Declaration of Independence that contained the famous words, Jefferson was a slave owner. In that document, he speaks of the British as “brethren” connected to us by “ties of our common kindred,” ties of blood.
But not all of those fighting against us were the equals of the British.
There were, Jefferson wrote, those “merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.”
In an 1815 letter to John Adams, Jefferson celebrated “a natural aristocracy among men. The grounds of this are virtue and talents … The natural aristocracy I consider as the most precious gift of nature for the instruction, the trusts, and government of society.”
Jefferson was an aristocrat, not a democrat.
Abraham Lincoln opposed slavery but did not believe in racial or social equality. Though he cited Jefferson’s “all men are created equal” at Gettysburg, he had conceded in an 1858 debate with Stephen Douglas that, “We cannot, then, make them equals,” adding that the white race in America should retain the superior position.
With the Brown v. Board of Education decision desegregating public schools in 1954, and the civil rights acts of 1964, 1965 and 1968, a national effort was undertaken to bring about the social and political equality that Jefferson’s words of 1776 seemed to promise but failed to deliver.
At Howard University in 1965, Lyndon Johnson took the next step, declaring: “Freedom is not enough … We seek … not just equality as a right and a theory but equality as a fact and equality as a result.”
Yet, over half a century after the civil rights revolution, incomes and wealth are not equal. Nor is there equal representation in professions like law, medicine and higher education.
President Joe Biden’s people have pledged to Black America that they will mandate and deliver that equality of results. If equity does not now exist, the Biden administration will impose it.
And why not?
If all men (and women) are created equal, the most reasonable explanation for a consistent inequality of riches and rewards between men and women, and black and white, is that the game has been rigged. An inequality of riches and rewards exists because “systematic racism” coexists in American society alongside “white privilege.”
The remedy is also clear. As Ibram X. Kendi, author of “How to Be an Antiracist,” told The New York Times‘ Ezra Klein: “Racist policies are defined as any policy that leads to racial inequity … intent of the policymaker doesn’t matter. It’s all about the fundamental outcome.”
Thus, a policy that ensures an equal place at the starting line but consistently fails to deliver an equal place at the finish line is, de facto, racist.
If Asian and black kids start kindergarten in the same class, and Asian kids in 12th grade are studying calculus while most black kids are still trying to master algebra, racism alone, by Kendi’s rule, can explain such a regular result.
The solution to persistent inequality?
Mandate equity; mandate equality of results; mandate equal rewards for black and white. Compel the government to produce policies that deliver an equality of results.
But what if inequalities have another explanation?
What if Asian Americans are naturally superior in mathematics?
What if an inequity of rewards in society is predominantly a result of an inequality of talents and abilities?
What if it is more true to say that, based on human experience, no two men were ever created equal, than to say all men are created equal?
As Kirk said, ideology is political religion.
What we witness today is the refusal of true believers in egalitarian ideology to accept that their core doctrine may not only not be true, but may be demonstrably false.
What we are witnessing in America is how true believers behave when they realize the church at which they worship has been erected on a bright shining lie and reality must inevitably bring it crashing down.
There is nothing a strong government likes more than a weak people; and therefore, whether consciously or not, everything is done to render the people ever feebler. Not physically, of course, we are raising up giants of a size and strength never before seen, as can be seen on any sports field, but psychologically—which is why psychology is the handmaiden of soft authoritarianism, it teaches people their vulnerability.
The more vulnerable people can be induced to believe themselves to be, the more they need assistance to keep themselves going. Such assistance (which is self-justifying, though never sufficient, or indeed even partially effective) requires a vast legal and other infrastructure, put in place and regulated by the government. The government is the pastor, the people are the sheep.
A man in England has sued the company that employed him for sexual harassment because one of its employees, whose work he was criticizing, called him “a bald c—” and threatened to attack him. You might have supposed that the latter was the more serious complaint, but you would be wrong: What really upset him was the insult, after which he went crying to Mummy, that is to say an employment tribunal that upheld his claim. Being called bald (which, in fact, he was) amounted to sexual harassment because men are much more inclined to baldness than women.
Are men now like sugar that dissolves in the slightest moisture? It seems so. Surely at one time men could have withstood or laughed off an insult or two without bursting into tears or seeking compensation for the terrible trauma to their ego that such an insult did. Of course, where a perceived harm is actionable at law, more such harm will be perceived. It is an established fact that in countries in which whiplash injuries as a result of car collisions are not legally actionable, people do not suffer from the kind of whiplash injuries that they experience when there is the possibility of compensation. The real cause of whiplash, then, is not accident but tort law, and it is the lawyers whom the sufferers from it should be suing, not the people who ran into the back of their cars.
The more lawyers we train, the worse things get. As the French Revolution amply proved, underemployed and disgruntled lawyers are a very dangerous class, and they therefore have to be employed somehow. What better way of doing so than by promulgating a constant deluge of ever-changing regulations and ensuring that a population is made of eggshells? The proliferation of helplines (most of which are exceptionally busy today, that is to say whenever you ring them) indicates this.
In parallel with it is the encouragement of the population to inform on one another. I first noticed it about 25 years ago in the prison in which I worked. In the room in which visitors waited was posted a notice that said “Rat on a rat,” a picture of which was helpfully provided for those who did not know what a rat was.
The rat to be ratted upon was a person who was claiming social security to which he was not entitled, as, for example, when he was continuing to work and receiving social security benefits. There was a number for the rats to ring—confidentially and anonymously, of course.
Needless to say I am not in favor of social security fraud, at least not in the abstract, though the whole system seems to me to have been set up with the express intention of corrupting the population that resorts to it while denying assistance to those who really need and deserve it. Whenever I met someone who was on social security and who was cheating the system, which was often, I felt secretly rather admirative: At least that person had the good sense not simply to vegetate on a pittance, slouching on a sofa watching television while consuming junk food and drinking either cheap strong cider or luridly colored liquids of no known natural content from a can. On the contrary, by cheating the system (all it was fit for), he demonstrated that he had at least some spirit, guts, or initiative left.
But even if I had not felt this secret admiration for the cheats, I still would not have approved of the informing to which the poster called me. Better a society of cheats than one of informers. The fact is that informers are not thinking of the betterment of society but of settling scores with those they inform upon, or they take a malicious pleasure from inflicting discomfiture on others.
In England, in practically every railway station, and in the trains themselves, a horrible female voice, halfway between that of a slut and a harridan (if it is permissible these days for a woman to be described other than as a genius or a saint), intones the following over the public address system: “If you see anything that doesn’t look right, tell the staff or text the British Transport Police.” And then Ms. Slut-Harridan utters a slogan, of which presumably the uncouth dimwit inventor is probably very proud: “See it. Say it. Sorted.”
I have no idea how many reports the British Transport Police receive as a result, and of those how many they “sort,” to use Ms. Slut-Harridan’s term, but I should think it is very few indeed, to judge by the utter and willful incompetence of most British public employees.
The message is not only an incitement to denunciation, however, but an attempt to instill anxiety in the population, so that it comes to believe that (a) it cannot undertake even the most banal of journeys without both imminent and immanent danger to itself, and (b) fortunately for that same population, a wise, powerful, and benevolent public service is looking after its interests, in much the same way that not a sparrow falls without God’s benevolent attention. I am the last to deny either the prevalence of seriousness of crime nowadays, but in all the thousands of miles I have traveled on the railways I have never seen anything “that doesn’t look right” in Ms. Slut-Harridan’s sense, though I have seen many people whom I could have wished dressed or behaved differently.
Such qualities as resilience and fortitude are the deadliest enemies of any modern government bureaucracy.
Theodore Dalrymple’s latest book is Ramses: A Memoir, published by New English Review.
Liberals are screwing over African Americans again, sublimely confident that whatever they do, Democrats will never get less than 90% of the black vote.
In the Buffalo, New York, mass shooting 10 days ago, 18-year-old Payton S. Gendron drove 200 miles to a grocery store jam-packed with the descendants of American slaves and gunned down as many people as he could. But instead of this being an anti-black thing, the media have decided, no, it’s an anti-immigrant thing, based on the shooter’s belief in the “great replacement theory,” which holds that elites are deliberately replacing historic Americans with immigrants.
Trust us, it’s all in his “manifesto” — and no, you can’t see it. What? You don’t trust the media to tell you the truth about the shooter’s motive?
Still, I can’t help but notice that the shooter seemed really intent on killing black people. He drove 3 1/2 hours from Conklin, New York, to get to a city with remarkably few immigrants. Only 10% of Buffalo is foreign-born. But it’s 35% black.
Much closer to Conklin than Buffalo is, for example, Middletown, New York, which is 39% Hispanic and 16% foreign-born. In about half the time it took to get to Buffalo, he also could have driven to Utica, New York, which is 22% foreign-born. And he would have cut his driving time by more than an hour if he’d gone to Schenectady, New York, 17% foreign born.
So why are the media insisting that the killer hated immigrants, when it kinda looks like he mainly hated blacks?
For one thing, midterm elections are coming, and voters are poised to have a say on the fabulous things Biden’s done to our border.
Oh, you think we should have a border? What — do you believe in REPLACEMENT?
Moreover, Hispanics have begun to show a slight — very slight — willingness to vote for Republicans, coinciding with the Democratic Party’s enthusiastic embrace of Black Lives Matter, and thus, black criminality. (It turns out Latinos are generally opposed to getting beaten up and having their money stolen.)
Finally, of course, there’s the fact that Democrats know there’s nothing, absolutely nothing, that will stop black people from voting for them.
Now they’re just showing off. Yeah, Buffalo was a racist shooting — but watch this: We’re going to make it about immigrants, and we’ll STILL get the black vote!
After years of the media trying to turn every single event into proof that white people hate African Americans, at last there’s a monstrous crime where even skeptics say, Yeah, this one was totally about a white guy who hates black people. But the media decided that this week, they needed to juice the immigrant vote.
The madness, the wild upside-down insanity of the media pushing the “great replacement theory” as the motive for the Buffalo shooting, is this: If anyone’s being replaced by immigrants, it’s black people.
Black people have always been here! Heard of the 1619 Project? The thesis and details may be comically false, but it is a plain fact that blacks have been here since 1619. Historic America is not a monolithically white country; it is a biracial country — black and white — and remained so for two centuries, until Teddy Kennedy decided to change it with his 1965 immigration act.
Of the two racial groups that formed 99% of America from the 1600s to the mid-1970s, which one do you think is getting the short end of the stick? The white working class isn’t popping champagne corks over mass immigration, but black people get absolutely nothing out of it.
Rich people, mostly whites, are making out like bandits. Endless low-skilled immigration has finally solved “the servant problem.” By now, so many hardworking Latinos have come in that virtually every upper-middle-class white person has a maid, a nanny and a gardener.
It’s low-wage workers — mostly black men — whose wages have been annihilated by competition from the cheap labor being dumped on the country. Not only have working-class wages gone into the toilet, but a lot of jobs are totally off-limits to black people — because they don’t speak Spanish or Chinese or Tagalog.
For decades now, black professors, the U.S. Civil Rights Commission and ordinary African Americans have been pointing out how immigration hurts them. Democrats don’t care.
And that’s the story of how an unequivocally anti-black mass murder became a crime against immigrants.
More on the real “replacement” next week.
On this, the second anniversary of the death of George Floyd, the evidence is now overwhelming: American elites have blood on their hands for their hysterical response to a local police blotter incident that has since brought about many thousands of incremental dead bodies on the pavement. The Floyd fiasco has been the domestic policy equivalent of the Iraq invasion: a massive, self-inflicted national wound.
The proof is in the simultaneous eruption, once the great and the good turned sharply against the police during the mostly peaceful protests, in not just black-on-black shootings, but also in black traffic fatalities. It turns out that cops being made afraid to pull over black reckless drivers and jaywalkers leads more blacks to drive badly and/or pack a pistol.
Here’s a graph I drew up of the monthly per-capita rate of deaths by homicide from 2014 to 2020. I set the non-Hispanic white average of 2010–2014 to one so that you can easily see the racial ratios. Try to pick out when the “racial reckoning” that is being celebrated today began:
As you can see, according to the Centers for Disease Control’s WONDER database that tracks the causes of death written on all the death certificates in the country, the chance of an individual black dying violently at the hands of another human being was about 7 to 8 times the chance of a white dying by homicide back in relatively peaceful 2014.
(Unlike the FBI, the CDC measures who dies violently, but not who kills. Blacks commit a higher proportion of interracial murder than do other races, but most murders are intraracial, so measures of victims and perpetrators tend to go up and down more or less together. Also, the CDC does a better job than the FBI of disentangling Hispanics from whites.)
But then the Black Lives Matter movement began to win local victories over police departments, first in the St. Louis area, and then Baltimore, Chicago, and so forth. In the last two years of the Obama administration, the Ferguson Effect drove the black rate up to 8 to 10 times the white rate.
During the first few years of the Trump administration, this unfortunate trend was halted, but the black murder rate remained high.
Then the press and politicians went berserk in late May 2020, egging on rioters and depressing law enforcement. The Floyd Effect drove black homicides to skyrocket, peaking in July 2020 at over 15 times the white rate in 2010–2014, and remaining at an unprecedented ratio for the rest of the year.
Hispanic and white deaths by homicide also were unusually high in the second half of 2020, but not the murders of Asians (despite the Narrative that Trump’s March 2020 comments about the “Chinese virus” unleashed a frenzy of violence against Asians).
When the press is forced to admit that murders exploded in 2020, they blame it on Covid and leave George Floyd’s sacred name out of it.
No doubt, the pandemic contributed to the decline in policing that let slaughter run rampant: In March 2020, cops started social distancing from suspects and the authorities began letting criminals and crazy men out of prisons and mental wards.
Still, in March 2020, blacks were 8.7 times more likely to die by homicide than whites in 2010–2014, then 10.2 times in April, both in the normal range since the Great Awokening. With the huge eruption in violence in late May following Floyd’s death, the ratio hit 12.6 (the first time the black death-by-homicide rate exceeded 12 since 9/11), followed by 14.4 in June, a record 15.5 in July, and remained above 13 for the rest of the year.
As a million thinkpieces are saying today, something changed in May 2020.
We don’t have 2021 data from the CDC yet, but it appears to be similar. Rather than a murder “uptick” or “spike,” we seem to have reached a new plateau. Joe Biden doesn’t want to encourage more murder, but he also doesn’t seem willing to do what it takes to discourage it, either. So, the country appears stuck in a post-Floyd holding pattern.
That the Murder Boom is a by-product of the war on mass incarceration is the kind of thing that gets covered up because it would make important people look stupid. In contrast, nobody bothers to censor the fact that the Car Crash Boom is another offshoot of anti-police attitudes because, as far as I can tell, nobody noticed it until my Taki’s column last June.
But if you plot the CDC’s motor vehicle accident death stats by month (with everybody once again compared to whites from 2010–2014), it’s comparably undeniable:
The black per-capita traffic fatality rate used to be lower than the white rate (whites drive more miles per capita, and the most problem-prone whites tend to live where they need to drive a long way to get anywhere, while the most troublesome blacks tend to live in the inner city and take public transit).
But blacks pulled slightly ahead during the Ferguson Effect. Then in June 2020, the black rate exploded and stayed extreme for the rest of the year. As I pointed out last June, in the seven months following George Floyd’s demise, black road fatalities were 36 percent higher than in the same period of 2019, compared with a 9 percent increase among the rest of the population.
The connection between the mostly peaceful protests against law and order and the rise in murder and road mayhem is obvious when you stop and think about it: An active police presence discourages bad behavior.
But, two years ago today, practically nobody at the top of our society stopped to think.
Leftists love to paint Tucker Carlson as a racist, a Klansman who grows strange fruit in his backyard.
If so, he’s the first Klansman in history who hates discussing race.
There are many examples; here’s one of my favorites. In February 2021, Tuck launched a bizarre narrative about how the media’s hatred of whites and adulation of black criminals is a sinister psy-op by bankers!
An interesting theory comes to us from a researcher called Zach Goldberg. Goldberg looked at every time the term “racism” was used in America’s largest newspapers and noticed a trend. There was a noticeable spike just after 2011, which not coincidentally was right around the time of the Occupy Wall Street movement. When people are starting to talk about what Wall Street actually does in public, all at once journalists agree that the real problem with America is racism.
Got it? All that racial demagoguery, the 1619, the CRT, is not about race. It’s banksters trying to distract us from their economic chicanery!
Funny enough, back when Occupy Wall Street (OWS) was actually happening, Tuck never once said a good thing about it. In fact, he hated it. I’m curious when he realized that it was such a beneficial, important movement, the nation’s Rothschild T. Rockefellers needed to stir up racial hatred to sabotage it.
But Tuck’s conversion to OWS-loving tree hippie aside, let’s look at that Zach Goldberg research. In fact, it shows the exact opposite of what Tuck says it does. On his program, Tuck ran a doctored version of a Goldberg graph (the x-axis details were deleted), and the Fox transcript of Tuck’s monologue doesn’t link to the graph. But here it is. It actually demonstrates that media mentions of race declined during and immediately after OWS. The skyrocketing began in 2014, with Ferguson (if you read my colleague Steve Sailer you’d have been able to figure that out on your own).
Still, the fact that Tuck’s evidence for his “Wall Street psy-op” theory is a graph airbrushed to invert its meaning hasn’t stopped him from repeating that talking point again and again.
On April 29 of this year, Tuck stated that the Biden administration’s war against “white supremacy” is just a ploy “to get you to stop thinking” about “Occupy Wall Street.”
Wow, something that’s been dead for over a decade is still so prominent in the public’s mind that we have to be hypnotized to stop thinking about it?
Tuck, understanding the incurious nature of his audience, has even rejiggered his conspiracy theory, knowing full well that nobody will notice. From April 20:
Since that time—2008–2009—our leaders have been telling us over and over again, many books have been written about it, that the central divide in America, the seeping wound, the original sin, is race. Consider the timing. At exactly the moment the U.S. government bailed out Wall Street, not a popular move, use of the terms “race” and “racism” in ‘The Washington Post,’ ‘The New York Times,’ and ‘USA Today’ jumped by more than 700 percent.
Wait, so now it’s the ’08/’09 bailouts, not 2011 OWS? What happened to the Goldberg graph?
On March 17, Tuck did a segment about how Biden’s border policy was creating a crime wave in Houston. He showed police body-cam footage of a shoot-out with an unseen perp armed with an automatic rifle. Tuck claimed the perp was an illegal alien, adding, as the video rolled:
Open borders did this, Houston didn’t do it to itself; this was done TO Houston and not just to Houston, to so many places across this country where millions of illegal aliens have flooded in during Joe Biden’s presidency.
To be clear, open borders absolutely bring crime. But in this instance, Tuck was straight-out lying. The gunman in the video was cop-killer Deon “Baby D” Ledet, a black man born and raised in Houston.
Yes, Houston indeed “did it to itself.” The Ledet case has nothing to do with Biden or the border and everything to do with the fact that a 30-year-old black felon with a fifteen-year criminal history including evading arrest, narcotics trafficking, aggravated assault of a family member, aggravated assault with a deadly weapon, and car theft was not only still walking the streets but out on bond with no ankle bracelet.
If there’s a “lessen” in the Ledet case, it ain’t about the border. It’s about how heavily black cities (even in “red” states) will invariably be high-crime. But again, Tuck misrepresented the facts to avoid mentioning race.
Even regarding immigration, Tuck routinely evades race, repeatedly claiming that his opposition to open borders has nothing to do with the quality of the entrants but rather their political affiliation (“Democrats are importing new Democrats!”) and “lack of space” in the U.S. (in January he declared that even if all new immigrants were Nobel Prize winners, we still wouldn’t have room for them).
I’m focusing on Carlson because of his high profile, but this is a problem with the right in general. Most rightists with a national soapbox bend over backwards to remove race from every contentious issue. It’s “the Democrats are the real racists” made manifest in the right’s response to everything. “The Democrats make immigration racial, but it’s not racial to us! We’re just worried about overcrowding. Why, we’d turn away a Danish Nobel winner as quickly as a Somali rapist.”
“America has no racial problems! Just banksters and racist Democrats trying to divide us!”
In 2016, Trump’s greatest effrontery to Con Inc. was that he dared to acknowledge that nonwhite nations were sending screwed-up migrants. You’re not supposed to admit that!
Worse still, you’re not supposed to win after admitting that. Be like Rich Lowry instead, who explained last week that there are in fact two “great replacement theories”: the “anti-Semitic” one that involves race (Americans foolishly worried that importing Third Worlders might turn America into a Third World nation), and the respectable one that involves party affiliation (Americans wisely worried that immigration might bring in more Democrats!).
Because we all know that when white Americans are house-hunting, they’re never concerned with things like whether a neighborhood is 90% Honduran immigrant and the school district 90% Spanish-speaking. No, they look for how many Democrats live nearby!
Of course these issues are racial. Crime, immigration, the dumbing down of education, the abandonment of merit in hiring, are all racial issues.
The left has gifted the right with these issues that score well with the core (if increasingly neglected) GOP base of blue-collar whites. Yet rightists feel like they can’t use the gift. They’re scared to.
Sometimes that fear is nonsensical. Like the fear that if you broach race, leftists will call you a Nazi. Well, the left’s gonna do that anyway. None of Tucker’s artful sidestepping has ever made a difference to his critics.
But sometimes the fear is understandable. The Tucker types who come close to broaching race—they dip their foot in the pool, then run away giggling “tee hee hee” like a schoolgirl—do so in part to avoid alienating the right-leaning whites who become uncomfortable when things get too racial. Yes, these whites probably take race into account in their private lives. But they likely don’t boast about it, and they may shy away from politicians or pundits who force them to confront the role of race in key political controversies. That’s why the left does race more effectively than the right. Today’s leftists have been raised to be vocally and unapologetically racial; to be openly hostile to “whiteness.” But moderate and conservative-leaning whites generally don’t embrace hostility toward blacks. They don’t seek racial discord, so when it’s thrust upon them, they tend to gravitate toward solutions that are grounded in nonracial rhetoric.
Hence Tuck’s popularity and why he isn’t held to account for flat-out lying about the Goldberg graph. Hence how frauds like Newt Gingrich can exploit conservative sentimentality about race to whore for Soros.
On the other hand, 2016 Trump flirted with race unsentimentality, and he won swing states.
It’s a delicate balancing act, to be sure.
Complicating matters, and I say this as someone with decades of experience on the rightist fringe, the people on the far right who gleefully and aggressively embrace racial hostility are downright scary. It’s not a constituency a wise man pursues. Endless, constant social engineering, telling whites that the worst, most evil thing they can be is antiblack, has engendered a situation in which unstable, antisocial, “transgressive” whites are drawn to racially inflammatory rhetoric. Yet while antiwhite race-haters on the left can find mainstream outlets for their aggression, their antiblack rightist counterparts can’t. So they sit and seethe, sometimes popping off violently, becoming just the monsters the SPLC needs.
It’s a dynamic I saw play out with Holocaust revisionism in the 1990s. While every corner of society—all political parties, academia, and the media—denounced revisionism as the worst thing to inflict upon Jews, a small band of reasonable people, like Mark Weber of the Institute for Historical Review and myself, and a small group of respectable allies like Christopher Hitchens and John Sack, tried to maintain a rational center, a sound historiography that rejected the ADL screechers on one end and the denier cranks (the sociopaths who were attracted to revisionism specifically because they believed it was the worst thing you could inflict upon Jews) on the other.
And we, the rational ones, failed. The reasonable revisionists were chased out of the field via censorship, prosecution, threats of violence, and career-killing accusations of Jew-hatred, and the resulting void was filled with the denier nutcases who welcomed the conflict.
With the center gone, the two extremes thrived because they fed off each other (the ADL that seeks bogeymen and the deniers who want to be bogeymen).
In theory, this could happen on the right regarding race. The people I’d describe as the right’s “rational racial center” (men who neither run from the issue nor approach it like trolls), Sailer, Peter Brimelow, and Jared Taylor (all of whom thoroughly eschew sentimentality), have almost no platform as it is, and eventually they’ll be completely silenced, slandered, and aged out of existence. Just as the rational revisionists of the 1990s used facts, reason, and sound methodology to explain and address flaws with WWII historiography, the race-rationalists on the right are doing the same to explain and address societal ills.
What happens when that center collapses? You’ll be left with the two extremes: troll hunters and trolls, both sides in it for the joy of the game, with no desire to explain or address anything.
Issues like crime, the border, affirmative action, and CRT are electoral winners. But navigating those issues while kinda acknowledging the racial aspects but kinda rejecting them as well is such a minefield, such a maze, the right often fails to profit politically as much as it should.
Maybe Tuck’s one-toe-in-the-pool coy-little-schoolgirl disingenuousness is the best the right can do at the moment.
If so, that’s not good news.
For half a decade now, America’s media elite have been obsessed with former President Donald Trump and the Republican Party’s conversion to Trumpism.
Press and TV are daily consumed with his actions and prospects and the future of the party he captured in 2016.
Perhaps it is time to consider the prospects of President Joe Biden and the political future of his embattled presidency.
What are the odds that Biden, like Bill Clinton and Barack Obama before him, will run again in 2024, win reelection, serve out a second term and transfer his office to the 47th president on Jan. 20, 2029?
My guess: The odds of that happening are roughly the same as the odds that last-minute entry Rich Strike would win the Kentucky Derby, as he left the starting gate at Churchill Downs at 80-1.
Consider the first hurdle Biden faces on the way to renomination in 2024 — the midterm elections five months off.
Since the Dow Jones Industrial Average and S&P 500 reached record highs in January, both have seen eight weeks of wipeouts of trillions of dollars in value as we approached bear-market territory by the end of last week.
Stock portfolios, pensions and retirement benefit plans have been gutted. These massive market losses are also a lead indicator pointing to a recession right ahead, just as voters pass judgment on a Democratic Party that controls the White House and both houses of Congress.
But even before we reach recession, Americans have already been living with a Biden inflation of 8% that has lasted for months and affected all the necessities of normal life, such as groceries and gasoline.
And the worst seems yet to come.
The Federal Reserve has reversed course from its easy money days and begun to raise interest rates to squeeze the Biden inflation out of the economy. What lies ahead may remind people who were around then of Jimmy Carter’s “stagflation,” where interest rates hit 21% to kill an inflation that reached 13%.
As for the crisis on the southern border, it is deeper than ever. Some 234,000 migrants were caught illegally entering the U.S. in April alone, with thousands of others evading any contact with U.S. authorities.
This is an invasion rate of some 3 million illegal migrants a year.
Shootings, killings, carjackings, criminal assaults, and smash-and-grab robberies in record numbers are the subject of our nightly news.
And the latest national polls suggest the country is holding Biden responsible. The president’s approval rating is down to 39%, and only 1 in 3 Americans think he is doing a good job handling the economy and that the nation is headed in the right direction.
Now the omicron variant of COVID-19 is making a comeback; infections are again over 100,000 a day.
Biden might find consolation from how his predecessors overcame midterm defeats. Clinton in 1994 lost 54 House seats and won reelection easily in 1996. Obama lost 63 House seats in 2010 to come back and win handily over Mitt Romney in 2012.
Why cannot Biden ride out the anticipated storm in this year’s midterms and come back to win election in 2024, as did Clinton and Obama?
Age has something to do with it. Clinton was 50 in his reelection year 1996. Obama was 51 in his reelection year 2012. And both were at the peak of their political powers.
Biden, on election day 2024, will be two weeks shy of his 82nd birthday. Should he serve out a second term, he would not leave the White House until he had turned 86. Biden has been America’s oldest president since the day he took office.
Alexander Hamilton in the Federalist Papers wrote of “energy in the executive” as being an indispensable attribute of good government.
Does Biden, with his shuffling gait, regular gaffes, and physical and cognitive decline manifest that attribute of which Hamilton wrote?
The likely scenario for Biden?
His party sustains a crushing defeat in November comparable to what Clinton and Obama suffered. But the party does not immediately rally around Biden as present and future leader, as it did with Clinton and Obama. Critics inside the Democratic coalition begin to blame Biden for the loss.
Ambitious Democrats, sensing disaster if Biden tops the ticket in 2024, begin to call for him to stand down and give way to a younger candidate, a new face, in 2024.
One or two progressives declare for president, and the pressure builds on Biden to avoid a personal and political humiliation in the 2024 primaries by standing down, as Harry Truman did in 1952 and Lyndon Johnson did in 1968.
By early 2023, Biden will have adopted the line that dealing with the challenge of China and Russia and, at the same time, coping with recession and inflation require his full attention. And these preclude a national political campaign for reelection.
And then President Joe Biden announces he will not run again.
