The most affecting e-mail I ever received was from a distinguished philosopher of my acquaintance. “All is well,” he wrote, “except that I am dying.”

He was not the kind of man to write such a thing unless it were true, and he did indeed die three months later, of cancer. He was a few years older than I, and died seven years younger than I am as I write this. He died without fuss, in a dignified fashion, as I hope to die; the ars moriendi, the art of dying, is not much studied these days.

Nature does not always award longevity like a medal for meritorious service. I, for example, have done nothing to deserve at least seven years more of life than my philosopher acquaintance, nor did he do anything to deserve at least seven years less. “Why me?” is a question that people who have been careful of their health, in particular those who have followed the latest dietary advice (and moreover imbibed often heroic quantities of turmeric, blueberries, fish oil, nuts, broccoli, vitamin C, etc.), ask when struck down, seemingly at random, by some fatal disease. They have always lived healthily and yet are unjustly attacked by fatal disease! The only answer that can truly be given in the present state of knowledge to the question of “Why me?” is “Why not?”

I have been close to death on a few occasions, but on the whole have been lucky. There are people who seem to attract bad luck as jam attracts wasps. I have had at least two examples recently. One was a former colleague of mine who died, again at an age seven years my junior, whose wife had developed rapidly advancing dementia at an early age and whose daughter was mentally handicapped. The son of another acquaintance of mine has just died in his 40s of a second cancer, his first having been in early childhood. Her husband had died in his 50s of a brain tumor, and she is left alone.

No doubt there is a normal distribution of good and bad luck of this kind that disregards desert. Of course, there are those who go out of their way by their inadvisable habits to make themselves ill, but the strictest adherence to health-giving nostra (which, of course, are liable to change, according to fashion if not to evidence) does not guarantee long survival. Above all, it is advisable, though this cannot be arranged by those who might benefit from it, to be born to long-lived parents, for longevity—and its opposite, early death—runs in families. We have to learn to distinguish between what can and cannot be altered, for though the frontiers of the unalterable recede gradually, and what once seemed inevitable is so no longer, these frontiers, unlike those of the Schengen Agreement in Europe, will never altogether cease to exist. Acceptance of what must be borne is as important as not to accept as mere fate an avoidable evil. The difficulty is in distinguishing the avoidable from the unavoidable, to do which requires both knowledge and wisdom, which are not always found together.

Be that as it may, when I come across one of those persons who seem to attract serial misfortunes through no fault of their own (how often I met them in medical practice!), I felt a peculiar kind of guilt, not that I was responsible for any of their misfortune, but that I continued to complain, sometimes bitterly, of the minor inconveniences consequent upon human existence.

Years ago, my wife and I traveled to Haiti. It was my second time in that tragic country, and though it had seemed scarcely possible to me during my first visit, general conditions had deteriorated in the meantime. By all accounts, they are infinitely worse now.

On my first visit, I met an American missionary doctor, Dr. William Hodges, who was also an amateur but accomplished archaeologist who, among other things, had found an early landing site of the Spaniards on Hispaniola, and had founded a small museum of early artifacts. Dr. Hodges had devoted his life to Haiti.

I had turned up at his mission uninvited and unannounced, but he and his family offered me generous hospitality, and the next morning, Dr. Hodges showed me round the museum. On my second trip to Haiti, I thought it would be a good idea to visit him again.

It was not a good idea. Dr. Hodges, now 70 years of age, had hoped to retire, but so desperate was need now that we found him surrounded by hundreds of patients, from whom he was trying to select those in most urgent need of attention. Our arrival was an unwelcome intrusion, and we retired from the scene, somewhat embarrassed by our own levity.

Dr. Hodges looked thoroughly, chronically exhausted by his work, gray under the tropical sun, and, alas, had not long to live, dying of a heart attack I assume brought on by overwork at an advanced age (though less advanced than mine now).

I did not share his religious convictions, but I admired his work and his self-sacrifice, and I was outraged when I read in a book about Haiti a casual accusation that he was an American agent. How easy it is for those who do not sacrifice anything for the sake of others to accuse those who do so of ulterior motives!

When we returned from Haiti to resume our normal lives, my wife and I would say to each other, “Remember Dr. Hodges!” when we were faced with some irritating little problem. This would put the matter into perspective for a moment, and we would feel ashamed of the ridiculous strength of our emotional response to something trivial by comparison with Dr. Hodges’ problems. Though remembering him had a salutary effect, it lasted only a moment and there would always be a next time when we would have to remember Dr. Hodges all over again.

It is difficult—impossible would probably be a more accurate way of putting it—to be always counting one’s blessings, however great they might be. Nevertheless, it is important to try to do so at least intermittently, or else one would lose sight of them altogether and give in to self-pity, one of the few emotions that can, and often does, last a lifetime.

Theodore Dalrymple’s latest book is Ramses: A Memoir, published by New English Review.

Talk about bad luck! What are the odds of the Nashville school shooter being a transgendered person who is ALSO mentally ill?

Arguably, there were hints.

In a form of modern Lysenkoism, young transgenders overwhelmingly come from homes with signs that say: “In This House, We Believe: Black Lives Matter, Women’s Rights Are Human Rights, No Human Is Illegal, Science Is Real, Love Is Love, Kindness Is Everything.”

Specifically, a study of adolescent and young adult transgenders found that the adults in the home who identify as “parents” were 91.4% white; 70.9% had a bachelor’s degree or higher and 85.9% favored gay marriage. Parent respondents were 91.7% female.

This is a weirdly specific profile. Only about a third of Americans have B.A.s; a third of the population is white and female, and about a third supported gay marriage (until it was made a capital offense to oppose it — changing even Barack Obama’s mind!).

How many other biological conditions are correlated with political ideology?

I guess there’s “long-haul COVID.” So there are two biological FACTS where the main vector is: Liberal White Women. And of course, innumerable studies have shown that mental illness is far more prevalent in liberals than conservatives, which may be the umbrella condition.

On the other hand, counterfactual self-identifications are popping up all over. For example, the media are currently self-identifying as purveyors of information, and Trump is self-identifying as a bad-ass tough guy who can get the job done.

For nearly two weeks now, the media have produced wall-to-wall coverage of … a rumor started by Trump himself. On March 18, he posted on his social media site: “THE FAR & AWAY LEADING REPUBLICAN CANDIDATE & FORMER PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, WILL BE ARRESTED ON TUESDAY OF NEXT WEEK. PROTEST, TAKE OUR NATION BACK!”

Tuesday came and went without his supposed antagonist, New York District Attorney Alvin Bragg, making any arrest, but the media can’t stop talking about Trump. (You ever get the impression that Trump and the media are working together?)

In response to the press’s flood-the-zone coverage of a rumor started by someone they call a liar, Trump has been self-identifying as a total stud, the hero who built the wall and kept the country open while others quaked in the face of COVID!

Last week, he posted a picture of himself — carefully selected for its bad-assedness — swinging a baseball bat next to a photo of Bragg.

What justifies this tough-guy image?

I agree 100% with the issues Trump ran on in 2016, but this is the guy who claimed to have a bone spur in his foot to avoid actual military service.

The complete opposite of his image on “The Apprentice,” barking “You’re fired!” at hapless employees, the real Trump couldn’t fire anyone. He asked former campaign aide-turned-lobbyist Corey Lewandowski to fire his attorney general, Jeff Sessions.

A slew of other Trump administration employees were fired by tweet — just the way George Patton did! These include: White House chief of staff Reince Priebus, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and Secretary of Defense Mark Esper. He fired his FBI director, James Comey, by handing the dismissal letter to the White House press corps before telling Comey, who found out by watching TV (in this one case, style points to Trump).

Sitting with Democrats and Republicans at the White House, Trump wimped out on the Second Amendment, announcing that he supported a whole laundry list of anti-gun proposals, including taking arms away without due process. He even mocked Republicans for being “afraid of the NRA” — unlike him, the tough guy willing to swing a baseball bat at a photo. The NRA, he said, has “power over you people, but they have less power over me.”

A few days later, the NRA stopped by the Oval Office — and Trump retracted it all, tweeting out his unwavering support for the Second Amendment.

He released prisoners because Kim Kardashian told him to, bombed Syria because his daughter told him to, and shut down the country because a scaredy-cat cable news host told him to.

This is the guy who sells superhero NFTs of himself? Where does he get the idea that people see him as a macho fighter, as opposed to a spaghetti-spined nitwit who couldn’t stand up to girls like Ivanka and Paul Ryan? (Hey, whatever happened to that wall?)

As soon as there was blowback on the ridiculous baseball bat meme, here was Trump, backpedaling as fast as his bone-spurred feet would let him. He told some cockamamie story about how he never even noticed the picture! (Because Trump isn’t at all obsessed with his own image.)

I’m not allowed to offer a professional opinion without conducting an examination, but based on the symptoms, there’s a good chance that Trump is a liberal white woman.

George McGovern, the Democratic Party’s 1972 presidential nominee, was a liberal icon. During many years in political office, including as a U.S. senator from South Dakota, McGovern successfully championed loads of regulations, taxes and mandates in the name of the public good. But as a businessman, he was held back to the point of failure by the same sorts of burdens he had once earnestly promoted to achieve lofty goals.

For today’s most overzealous politicians, McGovern’s story is worth retelling.

In 1988, seven years after leaving the Senate, McGovern took over the lease of the Stratford Inn in Connecticut. For the first time, this former politician experienced what it meant to operate a business while obeying government dictates and shouldering business taxes designed by people with little firsthand experience in the marketplace. In the end, the inn failed, leaving McGovern with many observations about the disconnect between politicians’ dreams and business owners’ realities.

In a 1992 Wall Street Journal op-ed titled “A Politician’s Dream Is a Businessman’s Nightmare,” McGovern recounted how, as a senator, he didn’t realize just how costly regulatory compliance is. He was unaware of how well-intentioned regulations often produce bad outcomes, how taxes dampen investment and how mandates make it harder to innovate or survive, especially during recessions.

As McGovern wrote, “the concept that most often eludes legislators is: ‘Can we make consumers pay the higher prices for the increased operating costs that accompany public regulation and government reporting requirements with reams of red tape.'” He added: “In short, ‘one-size-fits-all’ rules for business ignore the reality of the marketplace.”

Indeed. A well-functioning marketplace requires rules — institutions such as property rights, an unhindered system of profit and loss and a fair and stable law of contract. It also requires an abundant level of freedom within the confines of these institutions. Fundamentally, most government interventions into the market tinker with these institutions and hamper that freedom.

One example is requiring that companies provide their employees with child care benefits. Sounds great, but this requirement interferes with the contractual negotiation between employees and employers about what the right mix of wages and benefits should be. Because employers cannot dispense benefits for free, and because every firm and individual is different, mandating higher benefits means mandating lower wages. It’s that simple.

Mandating that companies always use U.S.-made materials in their infrastructure projects is another example. It subjects factories to burdensome permitting processes that raise costs and increase the time required to complete construction plans. At some points, even when companies have the necessary financial and physical capital, the extra costs dissuade them from pursuing their original goals. Other businesses — as McGovern learned the hard way — are brought to their knees by the costs.

Excessive government interferences in the market also get in the way of politicians’ dreams financed through spending. The higher cost of building infrastructure, for example, means that each dollar spent on a new school or clean energy project doesn’t go as far as it otherwise would. Sometimes promised projects don’t even get built.

This government-created inefficiency, unsurprisingly, affects things like the Inflation Reduction Act, a $400 billion statute meant to build green energy. Now, some people are worrying that this plethora of regulations could get in the way of building anything. This worry is justified.

As the Wall Street Journal reported, government spending is flowing at a time when “new wind installations plunged 77.5% in the third quarter of 2022 versus the same period the year before, according to S&P Global Market Intelligence. New utility-scale solar installations likely fell 40% in 2022 compared with 2021(.)” The culprits? Overregulation, tariffs meant to ban sourcing from China and opposition by NIMBYs to building.

The same will be true of any industrial-policy objectives that politicians pursue, such as the CHIPS Act with its $52 billion in subsidies to build microchips. Factories will have to be built in an already overregulated environment, and the administration just added mandates that subsidy beneficiaries provide child care, buy American, cease stock buybacks and more.

The administration claims it’s doing this for workers, but it’s not considering ramifications like, for example, how subsidizing companies’ child care centers could exacerbate provider shortages in nearby centers, which, due to state regulations, cannot hire capable workers without college degrees.

Politicians today could learn from McGovern’s epiphany and honesty. An excessive amount of government will only stifle entrepreneurs and prevent long-term policy goals from ever playing out. It will also get in the way of the government itself.

Mass shootings represent masculinity at its most toxic.

Hence, we shouldn’t get carried away trying to discern important societal trends in the sample size of a single woman-bites-dog mass shooting in Nashville, in which a troubled young woman shot up her old Christian elementary school.

Moreover, I’m writing before the Nashville shooter’s manifesto or the name of the other school she had planned to attack is made public. All I know at present is that the police chief said that she had “some resentment for having to go to that school.”

Still…this was at least the third school or workplace public shooting of the past half decade to feature a real-life female who claimed to be male, as the Nashville shooter did intermittently. Another F-to-M shot up a Colorado school in 2019 because the kids made fun of her desire to be a man, and a third killed four coworkers in Maryland in 2018.

(In case you are wondering, I can’t find any reporting on whether any of these shooters were shooting up with testosterone.)

The only thing amusing about this tragic incident is that The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the Associated Press all strenuously avoided using any pronouns, masculine or feminine, when referring to mass shooter Audrey/Aiden Hale. Nobody can accuse the Gray Lady of misgendering a mass murderer!

In recent years, the liberal media have warned us repeatedly about the menace of “stochastic terrorism.” The idea is that if Tucker Carlson invites Christopher Rufo on his show to complain about the bizarre fad for “drag queen story hours” for children, then somewhere at some time somebody will murder a transgender person in a hate crime.

After all, we all know there’s a genocidal epidemic of murders of black transgender “women,” no doubt committed by white Carlson fans with their scary rifles.

Well, actually, whenever anybody (such as Rod Dreher in 2019) looks up the news reports behind the famous list of murdered transgenders kept by the LGBT lobby Human Rights Campaign, they often can’t find any hate-crime murders, at least not in the fifty states. (Puerto Rico, though, might have a problem with this. Transgender people were about eighty times more likely to be killed in P.R. than in the U.S. in 2021.)

A Twitter user called Ttroopsx looked up the 38 U.S. cases reported by HRC for 2021.

There’s no information on the race of the perpetrator in fifteen cases:

—There are no suspects yet in ten cases
—Another two were killed by police
—One killed in jail
—One by a juvenile of unstated race
—And one by another trans of unstated race

But:

—Twenty perpetrators were reported to be black
—Three perps were Hispanic
—And zero perps are known to be white

Among the 38 transgenders killed in 2021 in the fifty states,

—Eight of the victims were white
—Four Hispanic
—And 26 black

In the 23 cases in 2021 in which we know both the race of the transgender victim and the race of the perp, there were:

—Five black-on-white killings
—One Hispanic-on-white
—Zero white-on-anybody
—Two Hispanic-on-Hispanic
—And 15 black-on-black killings

In other words, transgender murders are a lot like the rest of the murders in America: a whole lot of black-on-black violence, usually for knuckleheaded reasons, often involving prostitution and/or drugs.

In contrast, this latest school shooting sounds like a classic case of stochastic terrorism.

Well, we shall see.

One reason for this microtrend of mass shooters who are girls pretending to be guys is because of the social contagion of the Establishment-endorsed transgender mania over the past decade.

There is always a lot of unhappiness and mental illness floating around, but what a culture theorizes that the cause is constantly changes. For example, a century ago the most fashionable people knew, as Freud expensively explained to them, that their discontent was due to the damage done them by their toilet training.

Now every adolescent girl has heard that her moodiness might be due to her having been “assigned” the wrong gender at birth.

Which idea is stupider? Toilet training or gender assignment?

Talk among yourselves.

But it’s not always the case that the more things change, the more they stay the same. Young women in America are significantly less happy today than they were in the, apparent, Good Old Days of 2011 before the transgender mania.

In a big federal survey of high school students, in 2021, 57 percent of girls report “persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness during the past year” compared with 36 percent in 2011. Similarly, 24 percent of high school girls claimed in 2021 to have made a suicide plan in the previous year versus 15 percent in 2011.

Who knew twelve years ago that someday 2011 would seem like a halcyon era of happiness?

Multiple public intellectuals have taken a crack at explaining why American girls are in such bad shape mentally lately.

Covid lockdowns definitely didn’t help, but the current negative trend was already clearly visible in this survey by 2019.

Psychologist Jonathan Haidt is writing a book on the collapse of teen mental health. He has largely come around to Jean Twenge’s view that the emergence of the smartphone and social media were a disaster for adolescent girls.

That seems highly plausible.

My guess is that the damaging effects of social media running on smartphones (so you can never get away from them) in turn contributed to the Great Awokening around 2012–13, which only made girls unhappier.

I came up with a hypothesis about the specific mechanism behind this interaction. But I don’t know anything about teenage girls anymore (if I ever did). So, when a young woman journalist asked me if I planned to write up the idea I’d tweeted, I told her that she would do a better job writing that article than I would.

We’ll see what she finds.

Matthew Yglesias notes how depression is recently worse among teenage girls who see themselves as Democrats and progressives. He points out that when he suffered from depression, he found help through cognitive behavioral therapy. CBT seems to work the best of the many talking cures. It’s a hardheaded approach that says: If your patterns of thinking are bad for you, then learn better patterns.

To Yglesias, much of the current woke mindset sounds like the absolute opposite of CBT: 2020s progressivism trains you to obsess in self-defeating ways about your oppression and victimhood. Our current culture encourages people to dwell endlessly on their schooldays slights, as the Nashville shooter seems to have done.

I’d add that the rise in female power and prestige has coincided with the decline of female happiness. A simple explanation is that, on the whole, women don’t like it when the men in their lives act defeated and withdrawn.

Here’s a brainteaser:

Was Samuel Byck a would-be assassin?

To refresh your memory, here’s his story:

Sam Byck was a miserable failure. Born to a Philadelphia Jewish family, Byck was the child they didn’t brag about. A failure at business, a failure at marriage, a failure at life in general.

In 1974, after being rejected for an SBA loan, rather than blaming himself for his previous business disasters, Byck blamed NIXON! He became obsessed with putting Nixon out of office. Nixon was destroying the country with high taxes, social unrest, and racism. He’d damaged the nation’s prestige with Watergate.

The man had to go!

First, Byck tried peaceable means: He picketed the White House dressed as Santa Clause demanding that Nixon step down. When that didn’t work, he realized, “What other option do I have but to kill him?”

On February 22, 1974, Byck drove to Baltimore/Washington International Airport armed with a .22 pistol. His plan? Hijack a jet and crash it into the White House. He approached a gate where a Delta flight to Atlanta was finishing embarkation.

Here’s Byck himself (from an audio “last testament”) describing his brilliant scheme:

I’ll try to get the plane aloft and fly it towards the target area, which will be Washington, D.C. By guise, threats, or trickery, I hope to force the pilot to buzz the White House—I mean, sort of dive towards the White House. When the plane is in this position, I will shoot the pilot and then in the last few minutes try to steer the plane into the target, which is the White House.

He thought that would work. He thought he could use “guise” to “trick” the pilots into buzzing the White House.

“Hey, I know I’m just a passenger, but, uh, I promised my dying grandma I’d see the White House from above! Could you let me fulfill that promise?”

“Sure thing! I can take this baby anywhere you wanna go; after all, I’m the pilot!”

Byck shot his way through security, killing an airport cop. This caused Byck to jettison “guise” for “threats.” He ordered the pilots to take off. When they told him the plane wasn’t ready—the chocks were still on the wheels—he shot them both. He then tried to figure out how to fly the plane himself, but by then an army of cops had caught up and he was gunned down (severely wounded, he shot himself dead).

Okay, here’s what we can say with certainty about Byck’s plan:

(1) It failed.

(2) Byck was an idiot whose plan was so badly conceived, it would’ve been laughable had innocent people not died. Byck was no skilled assassin; he was a loser who had no idea what he was doing.

(3) There’s no way in hell the plan could’ve worked. Even if Byck had managed to threaten the pilots to take off, and even if he’d forced them to fly through restricted airspace toward the White House, Nixon would’ve had plenty of time to be evacuated by the Secret Service (ironically, air security over D.C. had been increased a week earlier after a disgruntled soldier landed a Huey on the White House lawn). Bottom line: Byck could not have accomplished his objective. Period.

(4) The objective was vague and stupid: Killing Nixon wouldn’t have resulted in Byck getting a loan (he’d be dead anyway), and it wouldn’t have cured any of the societal ills he railed about.

Okay, there’s the story. Now answer the question. Should Sam Byck be considered a would-be assassin, alongside Richard Lawrence, Giuseppe Zangara, Squeaky Fromme, and Sarah Jane Moore?

Every list of would-be presidential assassins includes Byck.

His plan was vague (with no concept of how to actually achieve the objective), badly conceived, and poorly executed. It failed, and—most important—it could not possibly have succeeded. Yet everyone everywhere still refers to him as a would-be (or failed) assassin.

What say you?

Hold that thought…

It’s high time, past time, to let go of January 6th. Because you’re the only ones obsessing about it anymore. The left took its shot with the committee hearings, which laid an egg with the public. 1/6 was a national embarrassment, and citizens of a nation typically prefer to forget national embarrassments. But the right won’t allow that. Rightist media superstars, influencers, and politicians have decided to turn 1/6 into the Alamo—a battlefield loss but a long-term win. A rallying cry.

The smart move after 1/6 would’ve been to say, “It was inexcusable, those who took part in it committed criminal acts, let’s move on.” But rightists never make the smart move; there’s usually a better con to be found in the wrong one. So now the scam is to turn something in which rightists were the bad guys into something that proves the existence of a grand conspiracy to frame and destroy the right. Two years on, 1/6 should be a memory. Instead, it’s become the Cadillac in the right’s showroom of “proof you’re being oppressed.”

A bunch of rightists riot and commit numerous crimes, and then complain that the fact they’re being prosecuted is proof that “the man” is keeping them down. It’s the greatest magic trick in American political history: Trump turned his followers black. “Why you hasslin’ me? All I wuz doin’ wuz breakin’ shit. Besides, man, dem cops framed me!”

Lee Atwater harnessed the “angry white male” to lead GOPs to victory after victory. Trump took the angry white male and made him the whiny black male, leading to defeat after defeat (it’s hilarious how these Groyper types started the Trump era with “Helicopter rides! Physical removal” and ended it with “No fair! They no treatin’ us fay-yuh!” Pathetic little bitches).

The morons at Fox, the high-follower rightist influencers on Twitter, and the vegetative statesmen in the GOPs MAGA wing are trying to craft a wholly false portrait of 1/6 in which a few lovable MAGAs strolled peacefully into the Capitol, no violence was committed, and anything bad that did occur was all feds feds feds. They want you to stay obsessed with 1/6. They want 1/6 to become your Gulf of Tonkin, your Kuwaiti incubator babies, but in reverse: the claim of a hoax, not an actual hoax, utilized to inculcate the gullible with righteous fury. The hucksters want you to cling to 1/6 as proof that an all-powerful “they” orchestrated a lie of unprecedented magnitude just to keep you down.

Last week, Tucker Carlson declared, “January 6 is, I think, probably second to only the 2020 election as the biggest scam in my lifetime.” The grifters have moved beyond wanting to merely play down 1/6 violence. They’re now denying not only the violence but the entire event (in terms of MAGAs as perpetrators). And I hate to say this, but I know the topic all too well: They’re following the Holocaust denial playbook. It’s the exact same scam. Deniers purposely misrepresent innocuous photos from non-extermination camps (POW camps, labor camps, ghettos) and say, “Well, you don’t see any Jew-killing here! So therefore there wasn’t any.”

A meme currently circulating on Twitter shows a photo from the Nováky camp swimming pool. Nováky was a fascinating place (not that anyone cares about history anymore): a WWII Slovakian camp/ghetto coadministered by Slovaks and a Jewish committee. The inmates were Slovakian Jews whose labor skills had exempted them from Nazi deportation. And yeah, it had a coed pool. And a school. And arts and crafts.

So deniers use this photo of a Slovakian/Jewish-run camp and say, “This means no Jews were killed anywhere. Even Auschwitz had a pool” (a true claim, but it was in the penal/political prisoner camp, not the Jewish internment camp).

What deniers will never show you is the mound of evidence for the Reinhard extermination program.

Deniers: “See this no-context photo? It proves the Holocaust is the biggest scam of my lifetime. Sure, Jews were put in labor camps, and that wasn’t cool. But the Nazis have been slandered with lies that they did worse.”

Tucker Carlson: “See this video of nonviolent guys strolling around the rotunda? It proves 1/6 is the biggest scam of my lifetime. Sure MAGAs did trespass, and that wasn’t cool. But they’ve been slandered with lies that they did worse.”

Meanwhile, Tuck never shows the hours and hours of footage of how the rioters got inside: the beating of cops, the hand-to-hand combat, the bear spray.

Gosh, I wonder why people thought Brian Sicknick died after being hit on the head with a fire extinguisher. I dunno; maybe because there’s footage of 1/6ers hitting cops on the head with fire extinguishers.

“Well, yeah, we dun dat, but not to that particular cop. Quit oppressin’ us, homes.”

I’m not comparing MAGAs to Nazis; I’m making the point that hoax-hoaxes (falsely claiming that a genuine event was a hoax) follow the same pattern in terms of how they’re constructed, even if the specifics and goals are different.

The main purpose of the 1/6 hoax-hoax is (first and foremost) to rake in ratings, views, clicks, and money. But there’s a second purpose: to further distance the right from reality.

“If they can fake 1/6, they can fake anything! You want proof that nothing is real, here it is!”

This Alex Jones “it’s all a simulation” reality-detached craziness is what’s killing the GOP electorally. It’s what alienates voters who want to hear about issues that matter to them. It’s what leads to idiot gubernatorial candidates who tell potential voters, “I don’t want your vote,” and then, after they lose, wail, “Why you no vote fo’ me? The election must’ve been rigged!”

If the fraudsters can lighten you of a few IQ points, that’s the best guarantee they have that you’ll support the next Lake and Mastriano (and, of course, Trump himself).

The fraudsters want you to have an emotional reason—a personal reason—to never let go of 1/6. Because they gain from you not letting go of it.

Let go of it.

The 1/6ers were violent thugs. They (not all, but enough) were genuinely trying to overturn a lawful election. That was their goal. They loudly and proudly announced it going in. They forced the entire Congress to flee. They kicked in doors and ransacked offices looking for government “intel.”

Their plan was vague (with no concept of how to actually achieve the objective), badly conceived, and poorly executed. It failed, and—most important—it could not possibly have succeeded.

Were they “would-be” or “failed” insurrectionists? That’s not for me to say. But if your answer to that question is different from the one you gave regarding Byck, ask yourself why.

And by the way, “We wuzn’t hurtin’ nobody; we wuz just playin’” is the standard response of black kids caught red-handed assaulting a classmate. Trump turned his followers not into whiny black men, but whiny black children.

1/6 is not a win for the right. Don’t let the con artists convince you otherwise.

President Joe Biden recently issued his first veto since taking office on Jan. 20, 2021.

Biden rejected a bipartisan bill that would have required investment fund managers to take politics out of their investment decisions and to stay focused on providing the best return to their clients as much as possible.

Why should you care? Because Biden was, in effect, saying it was permissible for fund managers, who have control of trillions of dollars in pension accounts, to take into consideration a company’s ESG score (related to how it stands on racial justice, climate change and LGBT issues) when they decide where to invest the money.

Workers and retirees are angry about this decision — as they should be. ESG is effectively a tax on your retirement funds, and it means you will have a smaller nest egg when you retire than if the money managers simply bought the top-performing stocks. Workers don’t want politics diluting the returns on their 401(k) plans and other pension accounts.

Let’s step back a minute. Social investment funds have been around for decades. I’m fine with it. As a matter of conscience, if people want to avoid investing in pro- or anti-abortion causes, divest from products made with child labor or avoid owning any fossil fuel companies, gun manufacturers, plastic companies or firms that don’t have enough transgender bathrooms — it’s a free country. These funds normally underperform the market, but that’s a decision of personal conscience.

I try to be a socially conscientious investor myself. I don’t like the politics of Ben and Jerry’s, for example, so I try not to buy their ice cream. But to be honest, I love their ice cream, so sometimes I give in to temptation. The Left tried to stage boycotts against Chick-fil-A because of some of the owner’s social policy views, but the chicken sandwiches are so popular that the crusade failed miserably.

But this new fad of ESG investing is entirely different and more nefarious. ESG stands for environmental and social justice governance. The idea is to promote racial equality, save the planet from climate change, and advance gay rights and a whole host of other related trendy and mostly left-wing causes.

ESG investing is perfectly appropriate when the investors are making their own decisions with their own money on where and what to invest in. But the scandal arises when fund managers that make investment decisions with other people’s savings, or pension plans start injecting their own political biases into the investment portfolios and choose company stocks they should or shouldn’t buy.

Fund managers, such as Fidelity and Blackrock, that pool their clients’ investment dollars and pick (hopefully) high-performing stocks have what is called a fiduciary duty. They are legally required to get the best return they can. Their duty is not to save the planet.

Biden said in his veto message that ESG is good for investors and offers high returns to workers and pensioners. Wrong.

A recent analysis by Bloomberg found that last year, ESG funds severely underperformed the market — in some cases by well more than 10%. Many ESG funds were divested from oil and gas companies, even though Exxon, Conoco Phillips and others were among the highest-return stocks. In other words, if you bought the stocks that ESG funds sold, and sold the stocks that ESG funds bought, you’d have made a lot of money in recent years. And by the way, given that more than 70% of our energy now comes from fossil fuels, how does it advance our well-being as a nation by closing these energy sources down?

Another study by Boston College professors in retirement policy examined the performance of ESG funds and found “the average annualized return for those with a state ESG mandate would be 20 basis points lower than for those without a mandate.”

My estimate is that ESG has cost the public billions of dollars of reduced returns on their retirement nest eggs. This comes atop the $30,000 or so that people have lost on average in their 401(k) plans after Biden came into office, and the combination of high inflation and lousy stock market returns overall.

The good news is that more than a dozen Republican governors are fighting back to protect pensions from “political influences.” They are telling fund managers in their states that ESG is a violation of their duty to workers whose money has been placed in their trust. ESG should only be allowed with the explicit approval of the investor.

In other words, politicians and community activists aren’t very good stock pickers. So keep your grubby hands off our pensions.

A teacher I know was once accused by a black mother of teaching her daughter appalling racist slurs in class. The angry parent complained that her little girl had come home the previous evening full of excited yet obscene talk about how all butterflies were born from “coons.”

A 5-year-old mistaking the word “cocoon” for its close phonetic twin is perhaps understandable, but an alleged adult doing likewise suggests the cretin in question’s understanding of the magical life cycle of the caterpillar could best be described as being “superficial.” Yet, if you were to describe her highly limited knowledge of Nature using this particular word, then you really would be guilty of racist language: It’s official, the United Nations says so.

A Dark Day Indeed
According to an uppity black American female lawyer and member of the U.N.’s “Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent” named Dominique Day, who enjoyed a ten-day “fact-finding mission” (or “free holiday”) in the U.K. during January, the country she had so traumatically deigned to visit was full of “structural, institutional and systemic racism.” The U.K. government—led then as now by someone Klansmen with speech impediments might feel minded to describe as a bit of a cocoon himself—responded by calling Day’s U.N. preliminary report making this allegation a purely “superficial analysis.”

My dictionary defines the word “superficial” as likely to mean “not capable of serious thought; shallow,” “not careful, thorough or deep,” or “not significant; trivial.” Put simply, the U.K. government thought Day’s report a load of inaccurate, poorly argued crap. Day’s own internal dictionary, however, defined the word “superficial” rather differently, as a “familiar racial trope” that for her “recalled the surreality of confronting anti-Blackness, bodied as I am.”

In response, during a later March Parliamentary Select Committee Hearing, the government’s admirably non-woke Business and Trade Secretary, Nigeria-raised Kemi Badenoch, said she was “almost certain” the U.N. Working Group had “written the report before they had come here,” bemoaning its “slightly disturbing” way of “looking at us [i.e., cocoons] as homogenous,” something that only led to a “very superficial analysis.” There’s that hideous word again! Like so many Nigerians, Kemi must really hate black people.

Badenoch Was Right!
According to Kemi, “The fact is that every single country [the Working Group] visited, they found to be racist, and all those countries happen to be Western countries. They do not go where there are actually serious problems [with racism].” What evidence might Kemi have that the minds of Day & Co. were possibly made up about Britain being irredeemably racist prior to them arriving there? How about Day’s previous assertions that:

(1) White motherhood was “indispensably” racist, with its “covert, even intimate acts of caring” somehow helping “perpetuate institutional racism.”

(2) Caucasian male Apple store employees offering to help customers with purchases reflected the “chief weapon” of “the patriarchy handbook” in terms of reinforcing the false “belief that white male voices/leadership are always necessary,” even when buying small, overpriced telephones.

(3) Canines are racially discriminated against too, as “shelter dogs…with Black-sounding names [like the now-censored black Labrador of Guy Gibson from the “Dambusters”?] are adopted slower.”

“Folks just run on racism,” Day has argued. Does that include her? It depends on what you define as racism. Her Twitter handle is “Dominique Day fights racism,” but she seems to do this in the way Salem preachers fought witchcraft—by seeing it at work absolutely everywhere. According to her U.N. report, “From the perspective of people of African descent, racism in the UK is structural, institutional and systemic,” like diabolism in the eyes of Puritan Fathers.

The report bemoaned “Racialized acts targeting people of African descent,” but what if such “racialized acts” merely constituted random white families not wanting to adopt a dog called Malcolm X? “Will this ever end?” one black British victim of the “trauma” of white supremacism “lamented” during Day’s visit, to which the answer is surely “No, because it is never supposed to.” If racism becomes defined purely as something experienced “From the perspective of people of African descent, and if such individuals are methodically trained up to become professional victims who spot bigotry even in the nomenclature of innocent baby butterflies, then racism essentially now means “Whatever one of its alleged victims arbitrarily says is racism, even if it clearly isn’t.”

And what might the “solution” to this deliberately engineered problem be? How about instituting a highly racist solution, and then simply abusing the dictionary once again to redefine it as being anti-racist in nature?

Lazy Thinking
Day’s U.N. Working Group was particularly critical of the U.K. government’s plan to foster racial equality by “focusing on equality of opportunity and not equality of outcomes,” an idea described by Day as being like “twisting” reality into the shape of “a pretzel.” What this means is such persons wish to sneakily substitute the word “equity” for “equality”—that is, by replacing equality of opportunity with equity of outcome, on racial grounds.

Imagine a black child and a white child both sit the same exam. The white child studies hard and passes with an A. The black child does nothing but lie in bed and sleep, and fails with an F. That’s equality of opportunity. Equity of outcome might involve marking the white kid down and the black kid up so both come out with a middling C.

This, in reductio ad absurdum terms, is what Joe Biden seeks to achieve with his current “Further Advancing Racial Equity” Executive Order, an appalling exercise in implementing black race-radical Ibram X. Kendi’s mendacious prescription that “the only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination.” This is “equity”—which sounds handily close to “equality,” but isn’t, so could easily be mistaken for it by a cack-handed, cocoon-confused flicker through a dictionary—which would allow our hypothetical lazy black student to get a C when he doesn’t deserve it.

This might at first seem unjust or unequal, but as Dominique Day also explained when her report was savaged by Kemi Badenoch as being “lazy,” this latter word is also inherently racist when used against blacks like her (even if used by other, more intellectually industrious, blacks like Kemi).

Perhaps Day got this idea from Devon Price, author of the 2021 volume Laziness Does Not Exist, a book that sadly does. Devon links “the Laziness Lie” back to the days of early colonial slavery, when white Americans had to “find ways to ideologically justify” forcing blacks to labor all day on cotton farms. They did so, Devon says, by rationalizing that slavery saved their field Negroes from their alleged natural indolence and thereby eased their path into Heaven after death, on the key Puritan principle that “The Devil makes work for idle hands to do,” particularly colored ones.

Well, doubtless it would indeed be racist to still say all blacks are lazy today: Samuel Little certainly wasn’t. But what about individual ones? Laziness is a personal personality flaw possessed by individuals of all colors, at least some of whom will inevitably happen to be black. Redefining racism to mean calling a lazy person lazy is extremely dubious, but dictionaries these days seem increasingly dubious by design.

Stealing the Words From Our Mouths
In 2020, America’s leading dictionary, Merriam-Webster, agreed to update its definition of racism, prompted by Kennedy Mitchum, a woke young black woman outraged that, whenever she kept on accusing people of racism in the lazy and superficial manner of Dominique Day, they were able to quote Merriam-Webster’s time-honored definition of this quality back at her to prove they were not. Mitchum complained that Merriam-Webster allowed dissenters to claim you were only racist “if you believe your race to be superior to another,” the old commonsense meaning of the term.

Yet Witch-Finder Mitchum believed in “systemic racism,” the idea that white Western society was ordered in such a fashion that, regardless of whether its white inhabitants personally acted as if other races were inferior to them or not, the civilization of which they were a small but necessary cog operated in an inherently racist fashion anyway. So, the traditional definition of racism—consciously thinking other races lower than your own—was now in itself redefined as a form of racism.

For a white person to deny they were racist—indeed, for a white person not to actually be racist—now became the very definition of white racism. White people not being racist and treating everyone equally was only another way they unthinkingly perpetuated racism, as, within a systemically racist culture, non-racist equality of treatment was just another form of racism in itself. What was needed instead was Joe Biden-style equity, or treating people differently according to their race: something which, in an old-style dictionary, would have counted as the very definition of racism. “Activism changes the language,” as one Merriam-Webster editor told the press.

Confusingly redefining racism as anti-racism, and anti-racism as racism, places the white Western citizen in an impossible quandary: When asked if they are racist, would it not now be considered racist of them to say “no”? So what are they supposed to do, then? Just say “yes,” climb a tree, and lynch themselves in the name of “equity”?

Why can’t these awful people just let everyone call a spade a spade?

In January of this year, Peter Thiel gave an Oxford Union address in which he advocated a return to classical liberal education. During the Q&A, an audience member asked: “Why isn’t the right producing more great art?” The relation to education was not immediately clear, but it was a good question nonetheless. After all, many on the right think of politics as being downstream from culture, and an impressive thinker like Thiel who has been deeply involved in right-wing politics for many years was likely to have an interesting insight or two. But Thiel appeared blindsided, admitting that he didn’t have much idea.

It should not be surprising that screenplays and other literature, like most creative endeavors, are dominated by liberals and their values. In our age, artistic themes often suggest change, and change, especially social change, falls within the province of progressives. This phenomenon derives in part from an artistic ideological divergence that had become evident in the decade leading up to World War II. In 1941, George Orwell, in his essay “The Frontiers of Art and Propaganda,” wrote:

The writers who have come up since 1930 have been living in a world in which not only one’s life but one’s whole scheme of values is constantly menaced…. In a world in which Fascism and Socialism were fighting one another, any thinking person had to take sides…

After Fascism disgraced itself and Communism did not receive the equivalent scorn it deserved, the lopsided influence of the far left began to be felt in universities. In 1951, William F. Buckley urged reforms to the irreligious and collectivist values of academia in God and Man at Yale. A generation later, classics professor Allan Bloom wrote of problems with cultural value relativism in his 1987 book The Closing of the American Mind. Today some on the right still advocate using reasoned argument to reform academia. This may have a strong intuitive appeal, but such past attempts have failed because illiberal leftist ideology, in accordance with its own teachings, does not respect reasoned argument. The many past attempts to engage it have only resulted in greater problems for subsequent generations.

Perhaps the most pernicious result of the left’s growing generational dominance of the university system has been postmodernism, an anti-Enlightenment philosophy applied across academic disciplines that produces new graduates with new grievances every year. Postmodernism rejects innate human nature, objective truth, knowledge, reason, and the individual, replacing them with socially constructed identity groups, cultural and value relativism, ideologies, and indistinct categories. In doing so it has extended itself into unworkable nonsense. Wokeness is the application of this nonsense in real-world contexts, like publishing.

In a January 2023 article, Pamela Paul, editor of The New York Times Book Review, lamented the canceling in January 2020 of white author Jeanine Cummins’ book tour to promote her widely praised novel American Dirt, about Mexicans immigrating illegally to the U.S., marking this as the point where a far-left-wing woke orthodoxy had decisively established its dominance over publishing and cowed nearly all its critics. One of wokeness’ main goals is to dismantle oppressive “whiteness” by, in this instance, objecting to a white author developing characters of color because she lacked their “lived experience.” An interesting juxtaposition to this is a white male writer who confided to me that he started submitting work written from the perspectives of minority female characters, under a minority female name, and received glowing praise. (Note: White men discovered employing this literary device generally receive something other than glowing praise.)

My own experience as an online submissions editor, and as a satirist, is that of the hundreds of submissions I have read, only one satire openly mocked woke pieties, and perhaps one essay thematically contravened woke values. I had expected to see more anti-woke satire, but I suspect that the humorless atmosphere on college campuses, which many comedians have complained of for years, might explain why I have not. Woke campuses could easily be intimidating fledgling conservative writers into disarming themselves of their best weapon. In his book The Better Angels of Our Nature, Stephen Pinker explains the power of satire:

Humor with a political or moral agenda can stealthily challenge a relational model that is second nature to an audience by forcing them to see that it leads to consequences that the rest of their minds recognize as absurd…. [T]he butts of a joke may be all too aware of the subversive power of humor. They may react with a rage that is stoked by the intentional insult to a sacred value, the deflation of their dignity, and a realization that laughter indicates common knowledge of both.

There is little reason to think that the radical leftward drift of art and the academy will abate much unless a great deal of coordinated effort is exerted to reverse it. A combined top-down and bottom-up approach is needed. In concert with legal strategies such as those ongoing in Florida—passing laws to roll back ideological capture of academia, regulating teacher certification, and withholding public funds from woke universities—government oversight bodies should be established to which students and professors can directly appeal if they are prevented from pursuing ideas in their studies, teaching or research, for which there is empirical support. I also suggest inverting woke values by brazenly building a grassroots artistic culture. Online journals that are willing to publish literature with anti-woke themes and perspectives should prominently announce this willingness on their websites’ landing pages. A central online listing of such magazines would help writers find them. These journals can establish their own presses, using online independent publishing platforms to make profits as they meet market demand. At the same time, they can convert any woke campaigns directed against them into self-promotional material—proof that they are fulfilling their artistic mission. Meanwhile conservative and classical liberal writers must generate new creative energies that draw upon the comical slumbering value-confusion that is woke morality. Perhaps they can publish as minority females and share the results…

The Week’s Most Toxical, Paradoxical, and Equinoxical Headlines

WAIL, WAIL, THE GANG’S ALL HERE
Remember when America’s “backyard” mattered? When people were obsessed with nations like El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Panama?

Well, who needs that anymore? Not with Ukraine being the new center of the universe.

But just because the world’s forgotten about El Salvador doesn’t mean El Salvador’s forgotten about the world. Salvadoran president Nayib Bukele is trying to teach the world a lesson.

The lesson? George Soros should be shot out of a cannon into the sun.

Bukele is the anti-Soros, the anti-Bragg, the anti-Gascon. He governs with an iron fist and one iron-clad rule: If you permanently imprison violent offenders, societal violence decreases. Over the past year, he’s rounded up hordes of Salvadoran gangbangers—terrorists who for decades have murdered their own with impunity and sometimes murdered here with impunity—and he’s shut ’em away for life in Supermax-style prisons, pledging that they’ll never get out for any reason. No appeals, no new trials.

There’ll be no Salvadoran retried beans.

A whopping 65,000 Churly Browns have been locked away, and a new Supermax has just opened, capable of holding 40,000 more.

And the result? In less than a year El Salvador’s murder rate fell 57 percent.

And leftists are sad indeed. The Guardian admitted that though the crackdown has “broken the gangs” and brought “extraordinary change” and “peace” to what was once known as “the most violent place on earth,” the paper claims that “the cure is worse than the disease.” Bukele has abrogated the “human rights” of murderers by taking away their right to murder.

Don’t laugh; Soros makes that exact argument in dozens of U.S. cities.

With El Salvador no longer “the violentest place on earth,” that title will now go to Disney World due to constant brawls in the Magic Kangdom.

THE INVISIBLE HAM
And speaking of fast-food aficionados…

In The Shawshank Redemption, Andy tells Red, “Remember, hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things, and no good thing ever dies.”

To which Red replies, “Yeah, but fries can get cold. Where’s your hope now, Dufresne? Where’s your precious hope now?”

In this week’s edition of “Hold the pickles, hold the lettuce, special order, don’t upset us. If you do you will regret us: We’ll blow you away,” we start in Cocoa, Florida (a name that kinda asks for trouble), with Quavi Young, who, based on her mug shot, may actually be Lori Lightfoot in exile.

Quavi pulled up to a McDonald’s drive-through and demanded food that’s not on the menu. Perhaps she was confused about where she was, or maybe she’d attended one-too-many “diversity seminars” and saw herself as so magical, her wishes alone could conjure up cooking.

Probably that, because when the cashier informed Quavi that they didn’t carry what she was looking for, the irate customer displayed her black girl dreckcellence by pulling out a gun and threatening to shoot everybody. She was mollified when the cashier gave her an empty bag and assured her that the food was in there, she just couldn’t see it.

The tragic part? The invisible fries were cold.

Meanwhile, six young traffic light inventors at a juvenile detention center in Washington rioted last week. Armed with shanks, the “children” (including one doing time for second-degree murder) took over their sleeping “cottage,” barricading the doors and threatening to set fire to mattresses to burn the place down (with them inside…now, there’s the genius that gave us peanut butter).

The rioters’ sole demand?

McDonald’s. That’s not a joke.

As the standoff dragged on, cops flew in Quavi Young to tell the kids that if you’re gonna use violence to demand food, make sure it’s invisible food.

The kids complied, conjuring up imaginary McDonald’s.

And once again, the fries were cold.

Some races can’t catch a break.

CANDY-COATED CAVERNOUS CRANIUMS
Remember when government-backed cracked-eggheads tried to convince Americans that the rise in crime in 2020–2021 was due to Covid, not police defunding and Soros DAs? And remember when they tried to convince you that the BLM riots had reduced Covid spread?

You probably thought it couldn’t get dumber than that, right?

Folks, it can always get dumber.

The governmental child abusers who stopped all schooling, forced children to be masked for two years, tied masks to babies, called kids “disease vectors” whose presence would kill teachers, shut down parks and playgrounds, criminalized outdoor play dates, kept kids locked at home, and shot them up with unneeded vaccines, have decided that the surge they’re seeing in children with mental health issues has nothing to do with them!

Yes, the perpetrators of pandemic atrocities—the child-tormenting government, teachers’ union, and “child psychologist” hacks—have a new mascot: “Not Me” from Family Circus.

School districts in some of the most lockdown-heavy states, including California, New York, and Washington, are filing suit against social media companies for causing the child mental health and behavioral issues crisis the nation’s experiencing.

Take a moment to appreciate that: The people who barred children from school, forced them online, and locked them in their homes with their gadgets and platforms, are now blaming the gadgets and platforms and not the fact that children were prohibited from healthier activities.

It can’t get dumber than that, right?

Folks…

Welcome to California, where legislators are about to ban Skittles because they claim the red dye is what’s causing child behavioral problems.

This is the same California where the largest school district showed children a video by a lunatic black “nutritionist” who claims candy’s just as healthy as vegetables, and saying otherwise is racist.

But now it’s the Skittles’ fault!

Trayvon Martin died on the grass for your right to eat Skittles. Perhaps BLM can burn down the CA legislature and for once do something constructive.

JOY VEY!
Good news for Jews! A new poll shows that “Judaism is the most favorably-viewed religion in the United States.”

The poll was conducted by the Béla Kun-Eugen Leviné Institute for Shooting Anyone Who Doesn’t Like Jews, so the results aren’t surprising.

Just kidding…the poll of 10,588 U.S. adults was conducted by Pew.

Jews were No. 1, with a favorability rating of +28. Catholics and mainline Protestants were next in the likability factor. Rounding out the bottom with the lowest favorability numbers were Mormons, atheists, and Muslims.

The poll’s author wanted to add a disclaimer, explaining that Muslim unfavorability comes from racist disinformation about Muslims being violent and intolerant, but a Muslim beheaded him before he could write it.

There’s an old saying: “Give the Jews heaven and they’ll hang pictures of hell on the walls.” Here’s a newer one: “Give a Jew a free five-course meal at a deli and he’ll sigh, ‘You couldn’t spare a few more pickles?’”

The ADL responded to the poll’s good news by claiming that the results are skewed because anyone who answered “not sure” regarding their views of Jews is obviously a Nazi and anyway “having positive feelings about Jews would not preclude a person from holding ‘dark beliefs’ about a Jewish cabal or global conspiracy.”

So that +28 favorability rating is likely much lower.

You gotta admit, it’s refreshing to see a Jewish org actually try to reduce inflated numbers for once.

The ADL pledged to “work together” with Pew on the next poll (which means “We’ll run it”), so that Americans will appear more Nazi, to which Pew replied, “Why do we even bother trying to make Jews happy?”

“Mormons got terrible news and they brought us green Jell-O and thanked us for our hard work!”

Regarding political parties, Jews got better ratings from Republicans than Democrats.

When asked why the numbers weren’t broken down by race, which would likely explain the disparity, the president of Pew yelled, “I give up!” and jumped out a window.

PLAN B (SHOT)
Sometimes you work on a plan for days…weeks…years. You meticulously seek out flaws, anything that could possibly go wrong.

And then you have it—the perfect plan!

Or…

American schools are experiencing “honor student” issues. In Virginia last January, a 6-year-old boy kept telling his white teacher that he was going to murder her. First he wanted to set her on fire, then he decided to shoot her. Oh, and he was also beating up other kids. The child has not been identified, but Reddit sleuths claim he’s black. And one day, the kid brought a gun to school, the admins knew it, and they did nothing. Assistant Principal Ebony Parker (guess her race) was like, “Dat boy just espressin’ his’self.”

And the kid shot the white teacher in the face.

Gary Killman in Diff’rent Trigger Strokes.

Then, in February, in Florida, a 6-foot-6 270-pound “child” head-stomped his white female teacher into a coma for taking away his videogame in class. In that case, the school, knowing the developmental giant’s proclivity for violence, had enrolled him in “special ed” to quell his killer instincts.

Didn’t work.

So this month, when 17-year-old Colorado cool cat Austin Lyle started making gun threats to his classmates (he was already on probation for gun crimes), his school was like, “We’re not gonna make the mistakes of Virginia and Florida.”

They came up with the perfect plan: Every day when Austin arrived at school, he’d be patted down by two unarmed deans.

There’s literally no flaw in that.

Oh, wait, Austin had a gun. He drew it and shot the deans.

The deans survived, but Austin dispatched himself to Wakanda in a nearby field.

The school’s pledged that all future troubled-student pat-downs will be done by armed officers.

Now, that’s a plan.

GSTAAD—As everyone knows, the balder, shorter, and more repellent the seducer, the more lavish the lunch he produces for the dumb blonde. Lunch is that symptom of decadence and dalliance for which there is no longer room in today’s functional world. In today’s rare civilized lunch, there are only two purposes: the seduction of a lady or the exchange of serious ideas.

The latter was achieved last week in an outdoor lunch with impeccable service and views of snowcapped mountaintops. My friends John and Irina Mappin chose a fresh sunny day and civilized surroundings to discuss Ukraine and introduce me to a blonde, blue-eyed 26-year-old beauty—an AFAB, as we woke folk call a person with a cervix nowadays.

Eva Vlaardingerbroek is what used to be known as the type bishops would throw a rock through a stained-glass window for, and she’s as brainy as she’s beautiful. I immediately asked her to marry me, but she agreed to an engagement first—“as we have plenty of time.” (I’m glad she thinks so.) Eva is a political and cultural commentator, as well as a legal philosopher. She’s a regular on Fox News in America and GB news in Blighty, as well as many other outlets across the world. Leonidas Goulandris, the other guest, couldn’t believe her looks, her brains, and her niceness, and rhetorically asked where has she been all our lives? (Hitting the books, instead of nightspots, like us fools, that’s where.)

Eva recently led a 50,000-strong march of Dutch farmers against a government that demands farmers sell their lands to the state. The threat is sell or we’ll expropriate, and all this in order to please those numbskulls who glue themselves on motorways and wish to outlaw oil. Under the guise of a nonexistent nitrogen crisis, Dutch farmers are about to be screwed by climate warriors and E.U. bureaucrooks who plan to cut nitrogen emissions. The Netherlands are the second-largest exporter of agricultural products in the world, hence the food supply will suffer, but so what? The eco-warriors come first.

Never mind. Surrounded by brains and looks, and partaking in an intelligent discussion, I for once felt not being lunched against—as most times I do in New York—but actually lunching. Irina is the descendant of a Russian-Tartar prince, a Kazakh, and John is an old Wykehamist. His father and I used to solve the world’s problems at Eagle club lunches. Both John and Irina have repeatedly pointed out the folly of the West and NATO in originally instigating the conflict by covertly funding far-right nationalist groups in the Ukraine that precipitated the conflict with Russia.

The harsh reality is that Putin has much more support in Russia than the Western media accord him. I like to think that I’m not a total fool, but I’ve always suspected that turning Zelensky into a saint was a smart move by those in Washington who lobby for nonstop war, the military-industrial complex and the neo-cons. The other evening, while flicking through the TV channels, I heard someone making supposedly funny but rude remarks about our Lord Jesus. Had he made fun of Zelensky he would have been off the air, and for good. So what’s going on here?

My tea leaves tell me that the West will regret making Zelensky the new Messiah. The indispensable demand that Putin must go—some warmongers even insist on the dissolution of the Russian Federation—makes the Versailles Treaty seem to be pro-German. I understand and accept that neither Ukraine nor Russia can accept defeat. Except for the fact that Russia has the ultimate knockout punch, and Ukraine does not. The answer is to sit down and start talking. But Zelensky’s advisers are opposed to talking, and as soon as new Abrams-class tanks are delivered, he demands new F-16s. Arms manufacturers and merchants in the U.S. and the West are greedy. The Messiah is doing their bidding, so why sit down and talk when to fight is far more profitable?

Biden and Blinken are like Abbot and Costello, two comedians playing roles unsuited for them. They don’t care that Uncle Sam will have to assume responsibility for supporting and defending a bankrupt state with borders that were arbitrarily drawn up by Lenin. The Europeans will look elsewhere when the bills have to be paid. Boris has hitched his wagon to Ukraine, so maybe he can come up with some cash from his books and speeches to upgrade Ukraine from a totally bankrupt and ruined nation.

Let’s face it, hypocrisy rules. Saudi crimes in Yemen are okay because Newcastle is playing well and could end up in the top four. Qatar persecutes gays and lesbians but owns most of London, so that’s fine. Netanyahu will most likely bomb Iran before the summer, but calling him a warmonger is anti-Semitic. The ICC has declared Putin a war criminal, but Russia is neither the Sudan, nor Libya, which makes the ICC commensurate to the mouse that roared. Last but not least, why should anyone believe anything the government tells us after the Covid fiasco? Ukraine and Russia have to sit down and talk, otherwise there will be no more weapons and moola. Why is it that I feel the poor little Greek boy is the only man left with any sense?

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