Over in Spain around this time of year, during Holy Month, a specially chosen prisoner is picked out for sudden early release by the ever-generous Spanish State and let back out into the wild as a kind of non-chocolaty Easter present to the nation, a tradition dating back to 1759.
To qualify for early release, a convict must first be nominated by a favored Christian order, that of Jesus El Rico, whose members deem his case deserving—or so it would initially appear. In fact, members of Malaga’s local government pick a few inmates with “the right profile” (i.e., no pedos), then instruct the monks to send a letter requesting their immediate pardon to the Spanish Ministry of Justice, whereupon the mandarins of the day pick out the candidate they deem most worthy.
Who gets chosen? During Easter 2024, it was the turn of Jose Manuel, previously serving three years for a strangely unspecified “crime against public health” (maybe he once went outside during Covid-19 without wearing a mask?), whilst last year’s winner was a completely harmless-sounding individual named Antonio Daniel, a 31-year-old convicted drug dealer. Apparently, “practically all” of those given early release under the scheme never go on to commit any further crimes—a good thing, as they have apparently included rapists and murderers in the past. How very reassuring that single word “practically” is there, then.
Is the Pope Muslim?
If the clergymen of Jesus El Rico wish to ensure a guaranteed genuinely harmless individual is released for Easter Month 2025, perhaps they should pencil in the name of another local holy man, Father Custodio Ballester, a 59-year-old Catholic priest who it emerged recently could face a $1,600 fine and three years locked away underground in a Spanish oubliette for supposedly committing some imaginary new modern class of offense known as a “hate crime.”
What did Fr. Ballester do? Lynch a local Blackamoor? Forcibly carve a swastika into a Murano Jew’s forehead with a rusty crucifix whilst calling him a Christ-killer? No, he just said some unacceptably accurate things about radical Islam.
In 2016, the Archbishop of Barcelona had written a public “Sunday Letter,” titled “The Necessary Dialogue With Islam,” in which he had argued that the “Necessary Dialogue” between Christians and Muslims of the future should go something like this: “Hello, please come and take over our societies completely en masse in the name of your Blessed Prophet, PBUH, and how much jizya tax would you like us to pay you each month from now on, Abdul?”
Of course, I paraphrase slightly. Actually, the Letter of Archbishop Apostate praised the current Pope Francis for saying things to that same basic effect, the Pope having just traveled to Egypt’s Al-Azhar University, generally considered the Muslim world’s chief seat of learning outside of the North Luton Islamic Center, where he had given a public hug to its Grand Imam Ahmad Al-Tayeb, the highest theological authority in all Sunni Islam.
This cheering public demonstration of interfaith public frottage was not necessarily taken overly well by certain Christians with functioning memory cells, however, as all such contact between the Vatican and Al-Azhar had previously been suspended following a minor incident in 2011 when Islamic extremists had peacefully car-bombed the Coptic Christian cathedral in Alexandria, killing 23 worshippers.
The then Pope, Benedict XVI, had used this as an opportunity to condemn the widespread persecution of Christians in Muslim countries—Christians are in fact the world’s No. 1 persecuted group globally these days, not obese black transsexuals, as the mainstream media would prefer you to believe—which did not go down terribly well in Egypt, with Al-Azhar University calling Benedict’s words “undue Western interference.”
But now, things were all A-OK between Christianity and the Muslim world, wrote the naive Barcelona Archbishop in his 2016 Letter, as the new Pope and the Grand Imam had spoken of their faiths’ “common commitment” to “peace in the world” and “the rejection of terrorism.” Did anyone tell the terrorists that when they planted their car bombs outside Alexandria Cathedral?
Papal Bullshit
Father Custodio Ballester read the Archbishop’s Letter and decided to publicly pen a Letter of his own, “The Impossible Dialogue With Islam,” arguing that his Catholic superiors, far from being Infallible, were talking complete cassocks: “Islam does not admit dialogue. Either you believe, or you are an infidel who must be subdued one way or another.”
That is what Fr. Ballester thought, anyway: “In countries where Muslims hold power, Christians are brutally persecuted and killed. So what dialogue are we talking about?” The one that tells us heathen folk we should supinely bend over and submit, I suppose; no true dialogue, just an immediate order. The Koran, Ballester said, is “indisputable and uninterpretable”; it places five key, nonnegotiable obligations upon the faithful: “Prayer, almsgiving, pilgrimage to Mecca, jihad and the extermination of the infidels!” Within this context, “a hug and a photo” between Pope and Grand Imam “mean nothing,” any more than a hug and a photo between Chamberlain and Hitler once did.
Jesus was “the Crucified One,” whereas Muhammad was “the warrior,” meaning the one would always inevitably try to conquer and subdue the other, the priest explained. “Nice difference, isn’t it?” he asked. Not to the contemporary Spanish State, it isn’t, as Fr. Ballester has just received a summons for prosecution from a provincial court.
As Ballester has pointed out, up until about five minutes ago criminal charges in Spain were reserved purely for use against those who “had actually done something.” “If I am convicted, this will no longer be Spain but Pakistan,” he added, “where you can be killed for blaspheming the Koran or Muhammad.” This was supposed to be the era of Spanish democracy, wasn’t it? Were we going back now to the bad old days of General Franco? Not necessarily, the persecuted padre explained—because, back then, he would actually have been treated rather more fairly.
Guardia Uncivil
Oh, how wonderful 21st-century Spanish “democracy” is, in a country where blatant left-wing prosecutors can now seek actual jail terms for priests who tell the truth or, in another recent gross miscarriage of justice, for sports administrators briefly kissing someone after they had just won an international soccer tournament. Franco once treated Marxists similarly, of course—but now that the Marxists actually have their hands on the levers of power again, maybe El Caudillo can be shown to have been absolutely correct to have done so, in the name of maintaining the wider social good.
General Franco is often portrayed these days by Those Who Rule Us as an evil fascist, who persecuted and killed people for no good reason, and whose Nationalist troops utterly destroyed democracy in Spain—with the active connivance of the equally evil Catholic Church. But is this really so?
From 1931, when Spain’s monarchy was abolished and the “democratic” left-wing Spanish Second Republic ushered in, the benign “democrats” in question began annulling inconvenient election results and cracking down on free speech and free thought by virtue of disingenuously labeling all conservative-minded opponents as “fascists” (sound familiar to any American readers today?), all whilst mercilessly persecuting the Catholic Church and its believers.
This became one of the main triggers of the subsequent Civil War, with churches being burned, worshippers shot, nuns raped, and thousands of the nation’s clergy tortured and martyred: Here’s a photo of a dead nun dug up and put on display to be mocked and spat on by those lovely #BeKind Commies. Given such “Red Terror,” as this strangely (i.e., deliberately) semi-forgotten religious genocide became known, it is hardly any wonder the Catholic Church ended up throwing its lot in with General Franco, is it?
For Fr. Ballester today, the leftist Red Terror has once again returned, just dressed up in “kinder,” more “progressive” clothing—that of “the official ideology of the European Union” and its complicit leftist member states. In “democratic” E.U. Spain, he said, we now “cannot speak of religious freedom, but of the dictatorship of the single thought.” The secularist E.U. dictatorship, he said, displayed a “revanchist eagerness” to act like the heirs of the Second Republic leftists:
“They dream of resuming the same revolution. Now they don’t need to kill [just to prosecute under ‘hate crime’ laws], although it doesn’t seem like they would mind either, judging by their war cry, ‘You’ll burn like in ’36!’”
The Reign in Spain
Oddly enough, though, today’s anti-Catholic Spanish leftists are actually surprisingly keen on at least one form of religion being spread throughout the country—that of Islam, which had once conquered the southern portion of Iberia wholesale. The former history of the Islamic Empires in Europe (unlike that of the history of the European Empires in Islamic lands, obviously) is henceforth to be officially hymned as one long peacenik lovefest of harmony and tolerance.
In March, an ancient astrolabe—one of those contraptions used to model the planets—was rediscovered in an Italian museum. Dating from the days of Al-Andalus, as Moorish Spain was once called, it contained engravings in both Arabic and Hebrew, thereby supposedly demonstrating how, contrary to the situation in today’s appallingly white supremacist world, back when the towelheads were on top in Al-Andalus, all faiths worked together in perfect cooperation, in a regime known as the convivencia, or “living together.”
A myth of “The Andalusian Paradise” has since arisen in which Moorish Spain is imagined as having been…well, a multicultural paradise, much as Malmo, London, Marseilles, and Brussels surely are today. See? The Moors of old were not barbarians like the justly Commie-killed Catholics were; instead, they were merely olden-days versions of classic 21st-century NYT or Guardian readers, goes this utterly delusional line of thinking, as “proven” by the astrolabe.
Unfortunately, the Moors ruled Spain for hundreds of years, and, besides all those oh-so-tolerant multilingual astrolabes, you can also find equally as many instances of Christians and Jews being slaughtered, forced to convert, made to pay the jizya tax, and more. Black Africans were enslaved there. Churches were demolished or forcibly turned into mosques. There were beheadings and pogroms. Laws from Seville in 1100 declared a Muslim “must not clear [Jews’ or Christians’] rubbish nor clean their latrines” in a primitive caste system; during that same century, the Catholics of Malaga and Grenada were ethnically cleansed by the thousands into Morocco. How is the mass expulsion of Christians “living together” with them?
Just as these same historically blind E.U.-era Spanish progressives falsely imagine Second Republic-era Spain to have been one long leftist kumbaya wet dream, so they imagine Al-Andalus to have been just the same; somehow, all those dead, exiled, enslaved, dhimmified, and mutilated Christians, blacks, and Jews manage to remain invisible to their blinkered eyes. It’s El 1619 Proyecto all over again.
Back in 1492, after several solid centuries of warfare, the Spanish finally managed to throw the Muslim imperialists out forever (or so they thought). Today, Islamic extremists from organizations like ISIS promise that, thanks to E.U.-enabled mass immigration, they will return and reconquer the place anew. The current persecution being handed out against Fr. Custodio Ballester demonstrates clearly that, in their frenzied eagerness to destroy the West’s Christian heritage forever, our current quisling left-wing politicians will only aid them in this task.
Oh, Ferdinand, Isabella—why did you ever bother?
The Week’s Most Fussing, Trussing, and Exodussing Headlines
HOLLYWOOD MAGIC, HOLLYWOOD TRAGIC
The anchor of the Universal Studios Hollywood theme park is the legendary tram ride, which used to feature several “practical effect” attractions, including an animatronic King Kong that would shake a rickety bridge as the tram crossed, an animatronic Jaws that would attack the tram on a rickety bridge, and the rickety bridge attraction that was just a rickety bridge.
When the park was built, the bosses obviously got taken to the cleaners by a traveling rickety bridge salesman.
Ten years ago, the Universal powers-that-be ditched any attractions that physically jolt attendees, partly out of concern for lawsuits. So, out with animatronic King Kong, in with a “3D movie experience.” Out with animatronic Jurassic Park dinosaurs, in with a “3D movie experience.”
Because nobody can get hurt watching a movie in a tram as it crawls at 5 mph.
Unless the driver is, like, stoned, bro.
Last week, as the tram was crawling at a snail’s pace through the backlot, the driver poorly negotiated a turn, and the last car became hooked on the edge of a safety guardrail, which performed the exact opposite of its intended function. As the driver, not realizing why there was a “drag” on the tram, kept gunning it, the guardrail edge sliced through the last car, crushing some passengers and ejecting others through the air.
Thankfully, there were no deaths, but over fifteen injuries, one critical.
Studio Boss: “Who the hell was driving that tram?”
Lackey: “Our new employee, Dumbass O’Herlihy.”
Boss: “Why the hell did we hire someone named Dumbass O’Herlihy?”
Lackey: “He came highly recommended by our HR director, Idiot Boy.”
Boss: “Oh, okay. Idiot Boy does good work.”
Facing lawsuits, Universal’s lawyers are claiming that the entire thing was part of the park’s new attraction celebrating the studio’s biggest hit of 2023: Oppenheimer—The Ride. “Collide like a particle, be split like an atom!”
THE DARK AT THE END OF THE TUNNEL
Sticking with Hollywood…
Last week, the town’s black impresario made a stunning admission: He’s run out of new stories to tell.
Kenya Barris, creator of Black-ish, told People that he’s focusing exclusively on remakes. “I feel like there’s really no new stories if we’re gonna be honest, know what I’m saying?” he told the magazine, displaying the dazzling wit that’s made him a billionaire.
Barris has a point. Nearly every “black” story’s been told, especially when it comes to “the first black person to…” biopics. First black in space, first black congresswoman, first black Oscar winner, first black TV star, first black Nobel laureate, first black banker, first black judge, first black supermodel, all of these are actual biopics produced over the past year alone.
So is Barris correct? Are there no more “first black person to…” movies left?
Nonsense! Coming in 2024:
The first black dog groomer: A Dream De-Furred, starring Don Cheadle.
First black cattle rancher: Grazin’ in the Sun, starring Forest Whitaker and Don Cheadle.
First black man to eat frozen fish: Sole on Ice, starring Jeffrey Wright (with Don Cheadle as “Gorton”).
First black beekeeper: Lift Every Voice and Sting; Terrence Howard (cameo by Don Cheadle).
First black woman to make Chinese food: Long Wok to Freedom, with Viola Davis, Awkwafina, and Don Cheadle as a dumpling.
First black man to tell a nurse he has chlamydia: Misses, I Pee Burning, starring Jaden Smith, Taraji Henson, and Don Cheadle as “lymph node.”
And finally, the first black woman to cover her body in suet and run through the National Aviary asking birds for economic advice: The Maxine Waters Story, starring Octavia Spencer.
No Don Cheadle in that one, but Mayim Bialik is getting rave reviews as a toucan.
BOO DISSED MONK
Across the nation, students at “elite” universities are protesting Israel’s Gaza war while “glamping” in designer tents with Uber-delivered food.
Sissies! The recent spate of self-immolations has raised the bar on how to protest with guts!
Charbroiled guts.
Max Azzarello, the most recent immolator, stated that his goal was to expose fraud.
And maybe he did.
For decades, Buddhists have claimed that the discipline exhibited by the monks who immolated to protest the Vietnam War was due to meditation! “Motionless and quiescence was the fundamental meaning expressed by the burning monk, the epitome of a profound behavior due to numerous hours of meditation.” (Cogent Psychology, 2019)
Bullcrap! Aaron Bushnell managed to stand perfectly still for 45 seconds while totally engulfed (standing, not sitting cross-legged like those lazy monks); Azzarello stayed upright for 30 seconds. Turns out it’s got nothing to do with “meditation.” As the L.A. Times points out in a piece explaining the phenomenon of people staying motionless after immolating, “Once the burn becomes severe, it’s burned down to the nerves so you don’t have any sensation. Then the adrenaline kicks in.”
Meditation? Buddhist frauds! It’s just nerve damage and adrenaline. And Western men would’ve figured that out earlier, except until now none of them were stupid enough to pour gasoline on themselves and light a match. But an insane blond airman and a shaggy hippie pulled back the curtain, and the free ride is over, Dalai Lame-ah.
All those begging bowls filled by gullible whites in awe of your “mystical powers.” All those adulatory films and TV shows. For nothing.
“Grasshopper”? More like “kiss-my-asshopper.”
America lost Richard Gere to your hokum.
Okay, you get points for that; please don’t give him back.
PITCH IMPERFECT
In April 1976, as the Cubs played the Dodgers in L.A., two filthy hippies ran onto the field to burn an American flag. Fielder Rick Monday charged the protesters and saved the flag, to thunderous applause. He received a congratulatory call from President Ford, and one from Truman Capote, who misheard “Rick Monday saved a flag from being burned” (he didn’t hear the “l” in “flag”).
How things have changed! These days, it’s the players, not the hippies, who need fire. Last week, a Harlem high school soccer game had to be abandoned when a group of 30 African migrants wouldn’t leave the pitch. The migrants had set up camp on the field, and when the coaches tried to explain that they’d reserved it for their game, one of the migrants told them, “We don’t have to leave; we can do whatever the fuck we want.”
That’s when you need Rick Monday with a flamethrower.
After a half hour of arguing, the teams called off the game; the coaches feared that there was too much risk that the “peaceful enrichers” would take violent revenge against the participants.
Nice going, Mayor Adams. Hard to believe that man was once a cop. One gets the impression that the side of his squad car was emblazoned not with “To Protect and Serve” but “Feets Don’t Fail Me Now.”
As destitute illegals continue to pour into NYC, giving Harlem not so much a renaissance but a lumpenaissance, Democrats fear no electoral consequences. Based on the photos in the press, many of the dispossessed soccer kids were Asian, and Asians literally have their teeth knocked out daily by blacks without ever rethinking their Democrat allegiance. A recent Daily Mail piece reported that IQs in the U.S. are falling for the first time in recorded history. Well, crush Asian skulls every day, that’s what you get.
Echoing the Rick Monday affair, President Biden called the African migrants to congratulate them on holding their ground. Reporters listening to the call said it was hard to comprehend what was said, because of the bizarre, incoherent, primitive Third World clicks and grunts.
They said the Africans were hard to understand, too.
OW, CANADA
It’s ain’t just Harlem having trouble with immigrants. North America’s endearing simpletons are finding out the hard way that opening their borders to the world’s detritus wasn’t the greatest idea. Canadians are like a retarded boy who gets a bag of candy and decides, out of sheer goodness, to share it with the neighborhood kids, who proceed to steal the entire thing and kick him in the face.
Things have gotten so bad in Canada regarding immigrant crime, a housing crisis, and a strain on the nation’s beloved cradle-to-grave social services programs, that last week anencephalic man-child Justin Trudeau confessed that he has no choice but to shut the door, at least temporarily, on the flood of Third Worlders he welcomed into his country because Australian aborigines are the only people on earth who make him look intelligent in comparison.
Over in British Columbia, aka “California but with nonstop rain, frigid beaches, and even dumber politicians,” the authorities in charge of investigating international drug trafficking (the C.I.-Eh?) have identified the immigrant kingpin responsible for importing billions of dollars’ worth of meth into B.C. (that’s billions of Canadian dollars, so roughly $1,100 USD).
Chi Lop, a Canadian-raised immigrant, has a Myanmar-to-Vancouver meth pipeline. And authorities have vowed to shut it down. In a lengthy piece in the Vancouver Sun, head constable Gordy McGordonson declared that he’s going to ask Lop very nicely to stop bringing in the meth. And if that fails, he plans to scowl at him. Severely.
BTW, the Chi-Lops are an underrated R&B vocal quartet. They have a string of catchy singles, including “Have You Seen Her (She Has My Meth),” “Oh Girl (Gimme Back My Meth),” “Give More Power to the People (to Smoke Meth),” “I Want to Pay You Back (for the Meth),” and “Homely Girl (Looks Better After Meth).”
As reported by the WaPo, Indian and African immigrants say they’re beginning to feel unwelcome in Canada.
So, no different from everywhere else.
Plagiarism is the highest form of flattery, and many authors ought to be flattered to be plagiarized, considering what rubbish they write. Such, at any rate, were my first thoughts on reading the allegations of plagiarism against Dr. Natalie J. Perry, brought against her by Christopher Rufo, the investigative journalist who has exposed many a case of such plagiarism in the higher reaches, or lower depths, of university administration.
Dr. Perry is something called the “Cultural North Star Lead” (by their job titles shall ye know them) of the UCLA School of Medicine. It is possible, I suppose, that some ill-informed readers will not know what a Cultural North Star Lead actually does, or what the Cultural North Star actually is, so some description might help them. According to the medical school’s website, the Cultural North Star:
helps us build and maintain an inclusive, mission-driven culture by mapping our decisions, actions, and interactions to a shared framework.
I am not sure that this brings us much closer to an understanding in concrete detail of what Dr. Perry does when she arrives in her office on Monday morning—if, that is, she’s not working remotely, or on sabbatical, or on maternity leave, or on one of the many other ways of absenting oneself on full pay from one’s position. To judge from a photo easily found on the internet, she is a very happy person, as I would be if I were paid a large salary for the not disagreeable job of forcing people to agree, at least in public, with my point of view.
I rather fear, however, that Dr. Perry might be both sincere and hardworking; and no busybody is busier than the one who thinks that he or she is engaged in God’s work. A cynical careerist is far preferable, though it is possible that we have created—I almost said built—a culture in which true belief and ruthless careerism are happily conjoined.
Whether the charges of plagiarism against Dr. Perry are justified, I leave to others to decide. It is, besides, a rather minor question compared with the deep mystery of how the original passages allegedly plagiarized came to be written and published in the first place (if Dr. Perry is a plagiarist, she is at least an accurate one). I quote:
Leadership that addressed diversity issues and concerns in higher education is highly multidimensional and complex. Substantively, it is much more than a simple response or adaptation to demographic representation—it is about the intergroup dynamics that characterize colleges and universities, in both structure and culture. Leadership that addresses diversity issues and concerns in higher education is identified as diversity leadership. Diversity leadership primarily uses organizational values such as competition and success to incorporate diverse people or groups and enhance the organizational success in a changing environment.
Suffice it to say that if I were a plagiarist, this is not a passage that I would choose to plagiarize (though I admit that diligent search might find worse), for the passage is not one that I should have been proud to have originated. I am not sure, however, that I could have originated it; for try as I might to imitate such verbiage, meaning keeps breaking through whatever I think, say, or write. Academics of a certain stamp, though, fight against meaning and triumph in the struggle; for meaning is their enemy, as it would expose the vacuity or banality of their thoughts.
As Richard II said, though, mock not flesh and blood, for though we may laugh at the absurdity of an academy in which drivel such as I have quoted is not only written but rewarded, yet it has a distinctively sinister effect and menacing tone. For example, it implies that the Zhdanovs and Vyshinskys of diversity, equity, and inclusion will not be satisfied with mere demographic equal representation between groups, for if they were, they might easily work themselves out of a job, which would never do. Such equal representation might at least be attainable (whether it would be desirable is another question entirely, of course), but if it were the sole target to be reached it would carry the risk of rendering the pullulating Zhdanovs and Vyshinskys of the academy redundant. Something less definite is required that they might keep themselves in employment forever, and nothing is better suited to this than the continuous surveillance of “intergroup dynamics,” especially when everything has been done to ensure that everyone is as sensitive as possible to the slightest disobliging remark or suspect facial expression. In Romania, they used to say that a change of rulers is the joy of fools; in universities, spontaneous good humor or friendship is the despair of Cultural North Star Leaders.
A leader, or would-be leader, who maps our decisions in a mission-driven culture; such is the person whom Mr. Rufo now accuses of plagiarism. But the plagiarism is a small and insignificant matter compared with the overweening ambition of which she is, so to speak, a mere foot soldier. It would be no better—in fact, it might be worse—if she were not a plagiarist (I assume that Mr. Rufo has his facts right, and I apologize in advance if he has not). For if she were not a plagiarist, she would be of marginally higher standing than she is as a plagiarist; and the last thing we want is for people of slightly higher standing to aim at evil.
For evil a mission-driven culture mapped by functionaries is, or would be if it ever came about. It aims at an enforced unanimity and uniformity, not only of thought but of feeling. To ensure this, it is prepared to institute a permanent ideological inquisition of the type that Elizabeth I rejected as her purpose nearer five than four hundred years ago.
I mistakenly thought ten years ago that at least medical schools would remain free from the posturing and power madness of the ambitious mediocrities who seem now to be turned out in such large numbers by institutions supposedly of higher learning. There is a rare genetic syndrome called the Lesch-Nyhan syndrome, among whose symptoms is uncontrollable self-harm such as the biting of the sufferer’s own flesh, as well as mental retardation. It sometimes seems as if the whole of the West is now suffering from a kind of cultural Lesch-Nyhan syndrome.
Theodore Dalrymple’s latest book is Ramses: A Memoir, published by New English Review.
Democracy may not be the silliest idea concocted by man, but for anything larger than a small town, it is crackpot. It consists in the idea that a public, on average knowing almost nothing, can choose leaders in popularity contests among provincial lawyers who know little more and are required to know nothing except how to get elected.
In a democracy, this ignorance is both a protected quality, like motherhood, and a valued resource. By common consent, the ruled do not look too closely at the mentality of elected rulers, and the rulers speak solemnly of the wisdom of the people, who have none. Reporters will ask, “Senator, what are your views on Afghanistan?” but never, “Senator, where is Afghanistan?” or “Can you spell Afghanistan?”
To plumb the depths of democratic puzzlement, we might, by means of polls, ask how many voters can name three cities in China apart from Beijing, Shanghai, and Hong Kong. Or how many can name even those cities. Or how many know even one date in Chinese history, or can name a single province. Yet they know that China is perfectly dreadful and dangerous.
Ask what countries border on the Caspian or Black Sea. Or, seriously, how many have ever heard of the Caspian. In today’s politics, these are not quiz-show trivia but influence Washington’s choice of our next war.
See how many have heard of the Minsk Accords. If they have not, they lack a hamster’s grasp of the Ukraine war. What they think they know probably comes through CNN and MSNBC, assiduous hawkers of the not so.
Gallup: Twenty-one percent of Americans believe the sun revolves around the earth.
Fifty-four percent of Americans read below the sixth-grade level.
A good bet is that the lower third in intelligence of the population know nothing at all of international affairs and exceedingly little of national. Given the appallingly poor schools in the cities, another good bet is that the proportion of blacks cognizant of international geography or politics is vanishingly low. Since Latin American cardiac surgeons and system programmers do not swim the Rio Bravo to pick oranges in Florida, the Hispanic percentage is unlikely to be greatly better. Taken as wholes, none of these three groups is remotely qualified to vote.
Representative Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Texas) stunned attendees at a high school solar eclipse event Monday by claiming the rock-solid moon is a “planet” that is “made up mostly of gases”—before adding she still wants to be “first in line” to learn how to live there.
I suggest sending her. She is the former top Democrat on the House Science Committee’s space subcommittee.
While little more than a third of respondents (36 percent) could name all three branches of the U.S. government, just as many (35 percent) could not name a single one.
In reading, 628 Patterson High School students took the test. Out of those students, 484 of them, or 77 percent, tested at an elementary school reading level. That includes 71 high school students who were reading at a kindergarten level and 88 students reading at a first-grade level. Another 45 were reading at a second-grade level. Just 12 students tested at Patterson High School were reading at grade level, which comes out to just 1.9 percent.
While people who read political columns online are likely of intelligence above the average, I wonder how many who rail against capitalism, socialism, fascism, racism, and terrorism can define the words.
I recently checked the bios of the members of the House committee on China to see how many read, write, or speak Chinese. None. Thus do we make policy regarding the most important foreign country on the planet.
A friend, a former U.S. senator, once estimated, dead serious, that 90 percent of the Senate doesn’t know where Myanmar is. If you and I, dear reader, do not know this, it probably doesn’t matter. The Senate engages in foreign policy.
It is important to note that intelligence does not by itself confer the capacity to vote. I know people way into the upper percentiles who do not have the time or the interest to worry about foreign policy, for example. There are engineers, neurosurgeons, mathematicians, journalists, musicians, and artists whose minds just don’t run in political directions, especially involving obscure countries on the other side of the world. Neurosurgeons have families who merit attention, journals to read to keep up with their fields, perhaps a hobby or two, and don’t have much left over to worry about a new Russian pipeline across Mongolia, wherever that is.
People I have met of IQ 190 or better, maybe four (of whom I assuredly am not one), have had the memory and analytical capacity to, I think, approximate an understanding of politics, history, and so on. These people are so rare as to be almost nonexistent. The rest of us at best can know bits and pieces.
For example, my knowledge of Caucasian politics consists entirely in the fact that Washington wants to put military bases in Georgia to help surround Russia. I am blankly ignorant of Congressional and state politics, agricultural policy, or much about what Blackrock is doing around the world. There is too much to know, and too little wit to know it with.
If we ignore exceptions and degrees, the public can be regarded as a vast semicomatose polyp that knows only whether it is comfortable or cold and wet and has enough to eat. If the economy is good, people will vote for incumbents, whether these have any responsibility for the prosperity or not. If wars can be fought without inconveniencing them, in places not actually within their visual horizon, they will pay scant attention. They will not concern themselves with education as long as their children get good grades, however unrelated to anything learned. Their interests are local, though they can be stirred up over this football team or that, this Trump or that Biden, or morality plays about police brutality or the righteous heroism of Ukrainians.
Taking into account the aforementioned poor education, controlled media, and American anti-intellectualism—Americans seem to dislike the obviously intelligent—and you have a polity utterly incapable of anything approaching functional democracy. Rev the people up over the Super Bowl or morality tales about the Ukraine or Russia and they will do anything desired. Roll over. Bark. Beg. Nothing to it.
Between the kangaroo court show trials of Donald Trump, the continued persecution of the J6 political prisoners, whose fates (and most likely ours too) are tied to his, and the constant barrage of depredations that are tearing this country apart, it’s way too easy to become inured and numbed by it all. Yet, the explosion of virulent and increasingly violent anti-Semitism across college campuses nationwide is something that even with all of the aforementioned I just cannot fathom, let alone accept. It hits way too close to home for me for a couple of reasons. First and foremost, my being a Jew and the son of a Holocaust survivor. But worst of all, scenes reminiscent of what happened nearly 100 years ago in Germany are being played out in New York City, arguably the most Jewish city on the planet outside of Israel post–World War II. The New York City that I was born and raised in. Except that New York City, for a host of reasons, like the prewar Eastern Europe chronicled through the lens of Roman Vishniac, is now a vanished world.
What is happening at Columbia and NYU, and I fear soon to hit (if it hasn’t hit already) my alma mater Brooklyn College, is the nail in the coffin. Looking back, even a place like NYC that is so identified with Jews, liberalism, and multiethnic communities living cheek to jowl and even intermingled was never immune to racial and ethnic tensions. In fact, human nature made those tensions inevitable. Most infamous was Al Sharpton’s inflammatory rhetoric that set Crown Heights ablaze in 1991 and Freddy’s Fashion Mart four years later in Harlem. Both incidents involved the blood libeling of Jews for imaginary crimes against blacks. Despite the horror Sharpton wrought, we all managed to greater or lesser extents to put it behind us in order to live and let live. Rose-colored glasses? Perhaps.
Nevertheless, ten years after that, with the ruins of the World Trade Center still smoldering, the Al Sharptons of this world, both black and white, blamed Israel and spread the insane lie that Jews were warned ahead of time to stay away from the buildings on 9/11/01. Still, decent, sane folks outnumbered the crazies, and life went on as before. On the surface, anyway.
On that day, what should have been obvious to anyone with eyes to see was the true, bloody nature of Islam. Instead, America and much of the world set their gaze directly on their navels. The cries of “What did we do to make them so angry as to want to do this to us?” came from far and wide. Most disappointingly from our own government, in the form of George W. Bush declaring that we weren’t at war with Islam. Of course, most vociferously from the more radical corners of the Democrat Party that have always had a hate on for Israel along with America itself. Worst and loudest of all from America’s colleges and universities.
Yet 23 years on, it’s stunning to me how so many people, most dishearteningly my fellow Jews, are shocked—SHOCKED!—at why this sudden eruption of campus Jew-hatred in the wake of the savage 10/7 Hamas attack on Israel happened. Of course, it’s neither shocking nor stunning nor sudden when all of the signs taken in context with actual history have been in one’s face for decades.
I guess the perfect illustration of the dichotomy of being book smart, intellectual, worldly, etc. with that of woefully lacking in plain old common sense comes from none other than the estimable Alan Dershowitz:
Dershowitz expressed profound disappointment in his party’s failure to address the pro-Palestine demonstrations at Columbia University that have been ongoing since last Wednesday.
“We’re hearing nothing from Democrats. We are hearing nothing from Chuck Schumer,” Dershowitz explained. “We’re hearing nothing really direct from [sham] President Biden. He made a very disappointing statement. In the same breath, he talked about the demonstrators in passing and he said, ‘but you have to understand the Palestinian situation.’ No, you don’t have to understand the Palestinian situation. When people are calling for rape and murder and beheading. The Democrats are an extraordinary disappointment.”
“I am no longer presumptively voting for Democrats,” he added. “I’m gonna vote for whoever is the best candidate, that may include Democrats, but I have no loyalty anymore to the party.”
Dershowitz criticized college admissions practices and Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) policies, which he argued have contributed to the recent issues observed at prestigious universities.
“Many of the students [protesting] today are unqualified students,” Dershowitz said. “They were admitted because of DEI. They were admitted because Qatar and other Arab countries are paying for foreign students. These are not the best and the brightest students, they are the loudest students, but they’re certainly not students who are looking out for the best interests of America.”
Oh, counselor, with all due respect, get your head out of your rectal orifice and wake the hell up! You haven’t heard from Schumer? Not even two weeks ago he and most of the party, that despite what you say you still bitterly cling to, attempted to foment a color revolution to overthrow the Netanyahu government during wartime. And as for your railing against unqualified students from Muslim countries infiltrating academia, you completely disregard the capture of American academia by our own native-born terrorists with doctorates and tenure whose mission is the brainwashing of America’s youth to hate and overthrow this country. The loudest voices at these near pogroms are those.
Forget Israel and Jews for a moment. Since at least the end of World War II, American colleges and universities have been focused on dismantling this nation, its culture, Western civilization, and Judeo-Christianity, erasing the accomplishments of 1,000 years of human development achieved slowly and painfully at times and taking us back to what will be the darkest of dark ages. And that rot can be found now in pre-K through high schools.
To not have seen the likes of Edward Said, Rashid Khalidi, Theodore Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, William Ayers, Ward Churchill, and thousands upon thousands just like them, less well-known but no less infamous for the raping of the American mind, is to have been willfully blind. While I’m loath to criticize someone as prominent as Dershowitz for saying generally what needs to be said at this time, which of course should be encouraged, my castigation stands. Unless and until you deprogram yourself from no doubt decades of propaganda that you’ve been stewing in that Democrats are the good guys, who are for the downtrodden and the little guy, and Republicans are the Nazis, better you should just keep quiet. All the equivocation you spout in a desperate attempt to preserve the fictitious image about a party and political movement that you idolized and dedicated yourself is an exercise in radioactive turd-polishing.
Give it up. Let it go.
And ditto for multibillionaire Robert Kraft opening his eyes as to what all his multimillion dollars of donations to Columbia has bought.
Kraft, 82, called for academics with secure jobs at the Ivy League school to be held accountable for incendiary remarks and lectures that some argue have indoctrinated students to hate Israel.
“We have professors who, instead of teaching how to think, are trying to tell our young people what they should think,” the billionaire former Columbia University donor told Fox News host Sean Hannity. “I think one of the biggest problems that we have to do something about is really tenure at these universities,” Kraft added. “Where people can do things and don’t have accountability.”…
Kraft said he was dismayed by the level of antisemitism he’s witnessed on college campuses since Oct. 7, 2023.
“I never thought I’d see what’s going on in America, what’s happening right now, and it really pains me to see it,” he said.
Really? I seem to recall Robert Kraft being a team owner about the time that a Brillo-headed scrub named Colin Kaepernick got a whole bunch of players around the league to take a knee during the playing of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” In all fairness, I don’t know what his reaction to that was, and I’d like to give him the benefit of the doubt that he was equally disgusted. But what did the coaches and the owners do back then? IIRC, not a whole hell of a lot to discourage that behavior.
I thought Kraft and his ilk were savvy businessmen. Perhaps the image of the ivy-covered walls of academia got him bamboozled, but look what’s been going on with his and his colleagues’ money in his own business, right under his nose.
The left-wing nonprofit that bailed out anti-Israel protesters who blocked bridges and highways across the country last week was a multi-year partner of the NFL’s “Inspire Change program” whose work is still promoted on the NFL’s website.
Community Justice Exchange set up a “bail and legal defense fund” for those arrested during last week’s A15 protests. The protests targeted major airports, highways, and bridges in dozens of U.S. cities including San Francisco, Chicago, New York City, and Philadelphia. Their explicit goal was to disrupt economic “choke points” to maximize financial disruption, as explained on their website.
The partnership appears to have since lapsed—the nonprofit wasn’t on the list of grantees announced in May 2023. The NFL’s “Inspire Change” website lists Community Justice Exchange under “Previous Grant Recipients” and still includes a link to the group’s website.
The NFL’s promotion of the left-wing group underscores the extent to which anti-Israel groups have been propped up by major donors and institutions in the United States. Community Justice Exchange is also a project of the Tides Center—a left-wing dark money network funded by George Soros and other prominent liberal billionaires like Pierre Omidyar. The Tides Center serves as a hub for a variety of left-wing groups, channeling substantial funds from affluent donors and functioning as a “fiscal sponsor,” enabling them to sidestep IRS registration.
To paraphrase Robert Frost, the rot is ugly, dark and deep. And if you’ve decided to return to watching the NFL just because Kaepernick has vanished from the scene, you’re stupid.
While Sen. Josh Hawley has called on Joey Sponge-Brain Sh*ts-Pants to activate the National Guard to ensure the protection of Jewish students at Columbia U, Eric Adams, the mayor of the completely rotten apple, belched up this hideous equivocation:
But I also look back to Little Rock, AR, and what it meant for African Americans to be escorted on campuses because they were afraid for their lives. And that is what I see when I see Jewish students going through this at this moment. There is no place for hate in this city. I don’t care if it’s antisemitism, Islamophobia, anti-Sikhism. We don’t have a place for that, and I don’t want to be, and I won’t be the mayor where you have to take off your hijab, your yarmulke, or your turban when you enter a place of higher education or use our transportation system or walk our streets.
The pathetic attempt to both condemn the assault on Jews, and downplaying it with false equivocations of virtually nonexistent Islamophobia and anti-Sikhism, to try and preserve the votes of those instigating the pogroms, is disgusting. But it’s typical. Funny he brings up Little Rock because it was the Democrat Party that instigated a Civil War to preserve slavery, that created the KKK as a terrorist organization to intimidate freed black slaves, that instituted Jim Crow laws to keep them down, that opposed civil rights legislation and created a gigantic welfare state that has committed genocide against blacks and kept them as virtual slaves to Big Government. And he has the unmitigated gall to invoke Little Rock?
Speaking of Rashid Khalidi, as bad as Eric Adams was, Barack Obama desecrated the Passover holiday by equating “Palestinians” with Jews in bondage to Pharaoh. That was the thrust of his Passover message.
I’ve asserted that as a nation, we are arguably more divided now than we were in 1860, on the eve of the Civil War. Today the divide is no longer about two sides disagreeing about an issue or issues, even ones as existentially serious as slavery. It’s about one side’s hatred of the nation it allegedly is a part of, and its obsession with destroying it, and the other side that seeks its preservation.
Are we willing to do whatever is necessary to preserve our freedom? The other side has clearly demonstrated what it is willing to do to take it away. That requires self-preservation “by any means necessary.”
It is a sad state of affairs that owing to 100 years of the overturning of the Constitution because of the will to power of several generations of our so-called elites, as well as the societal dissolution that has erased morality and ethics of not only the aforementioned but at far too many of our erstwhile fellow citizens, we must now fundamentally re-transform America. Either back to the way it was or to some other state wherein those who destroyed it in the first place are never, ever in a position to do it again.
As Allen Ludden or Bert Convy might say, the password is Revolution. And like seeing New York City “fundamentally transformed” into Nuremberg-on-the-Hudson, contemplating such a thing is also unfathomable. So far.
Picture your ideal Republican candidate. Would they look something like this?
1. An “anchor baby” (technically, “illegal immigrant”);
2. Parents were illegal aliens from Syria, who avoided being deported only because of their “American citizen” anchor baby, i.e. “the candidate”;
3. Father indicted for firebombing a synagogue (charges dropped when co-conspirators refused to testify against him);
4. Supported Sen. Marco Rubio’s amnesty;
5. Was thrilled that President George W. Bush gave a speech at a mosque on 9/11;
6. Constantly demands that Americans become entangled in foreign conflicts having nothing to do with our country;
7. Has been driven to a cursing rage at me for mentioning that immigrants commit a lot of crime.
No? Well, that’s Abe Hamadeh, the Trump-endorsed candidate for Arizona’s 8th congressional district. (I happen to notice Hamadeh because he’s running against the excellent Blake Masters, who actually is the ideal Republican candidate.)
Like many on-the-go immigrants, Hamadeh immediately abandoned all of his previous positions the moment he saw an advantage to doing so. What do I need to say to fool the rubes?
He’s the Alexander Vindman of the right, the Dinesh D’Souza of the Muslims, the immigrant credit card fraudster of electoral politics.
Before running for office in Arizona, Hamadeh deleted his Twitter feed and suddenly became more Trumpy than Trump. On immigration, he said: “We got to start rebuilding that wall on state land. We got to start enforcing state prosecutions, going after the human smuggling and all the drugs coming in, and prosecuting the illegal immigrants as trespassers.”
This from the amnesty-supporting anchor baby.
At least Trump seems to actually believe what he says about immigration; he’s just too lazy to do it. Back in 2013, when Rubio nearly destroyed our country with amnesty, Trump relentlessly attacked the bill, saying, for example:
— “Immigration reform is fine — but don’t rush to give away our country! Sounds like that’s what’s happening.” (Jan. 30, 2013)
— “Amnesty is suicide for Republicans. Not one of those 12 million who broke our laws will vote Republican. Obama is laughing at @GOP.” (March 19, 2013)
— “TRUMP: IMMIGRATION BILL A REPUBLICAN ‘DEATH WISH.'” (Breitbart, June 3, 2013)
Meanwhile, Hamadeh was touting Rubio’s amnesty as a “fix” for what we have now. Which is no amnesty. For good measure, he called Rick Santorum a “racist,” and me a “BITCH.”
Despite court records to the contrary (partially reprinted in The Arizona Republic), and his father’s admission that he was in the country illegally (according to a contemporaneous news article on the synagogue bombing 30 years ago), Hamadeh told the Republic: “My parents proudly came to the United States LEGALLY in 1989 and were rewarded for waiting in line LEGALLY with U.S. citizenship in 2007 and 2009 by the United States Department of State.”
Also like many immigrants, Hamadeh has a keen interest in the old country. From 2012 to 2018, he tweeted incessantly about the Middle East, especially Syria.
A non-exhaustive list:
“I’ve given credit to the Brits, at least they’re debating action in Syria. Where’s our Congress?”
“I’m optimistic with the new council adopting a pro-freedom liberal approach in Syria. Now hopefully they have sway with #FSA rebels”
“Haass is right: US Must Respond to the Atrocities in Syria.”
“You can’t say ‘I’m against Bashar, so I’m with ALL of #FSA.’ This isn’t a sports game. Must be for a pro-freedom agenda. #Syria.”
“Syria is in our national security interest.”
“If Assad falls this week, FSA needs to take the higher ground by not targeting Alawites & other minorities.”
Are Arizona’s voters similarly fixated on Syria’s internal politics? How many know or care what “FSA” is? Alawites?
Naturally, Hamadeh also longed for war with Russia, tweeting: “We cannot allow [Russia] to take over Ukraine.” We? How many wars are these immigrants going to make us fight?
But now Hamadeh wants us to believe he’s an America First patriot.
That’s when the dogs start growling. What’s the matter, Scout? Why are you barking? That’s just a regular American.
Another flashing red light blaring SCAMSTER! is that Hamadeh not only embraced Trump’s “stolen election” claim, but took it 10 times further. After losing the 2022 attorney general race by a coat of paint (280 votes), Hamadeh wouldn’t let it rest, bringing not one, not two, but three utterly frivolous lawsuits demanding that the courts make him attorney general.
All three lawsuits were tossed out of court — including by a judge appointed by Gov. Jan Brewer — finally ending with sanctions against him.
Anyone who knows anything about politics knows you never contest an election, even if it was stolen. Voters reward graciousness and punish sour grapes. Why would Hamadeh make such an ass of himself?
Because that’s how you get Trump’s endorsement.
As you may recall, in the last election cycle, Trump endorsed candidates who’d spoken at QAnon rallies, who said women having their rapist’s baby can be “healing,” who’d left a string of illegitimate children across the South, who denounced the sitting Republican governor as a “Chinese communist sympathizer,” who said women who have abortions should be prosecuted for murder.
What was their mysterious appeal to Trump? Only one thing: They refused to accept the results of the 2020 election.
Surprising no one, all these Trump-endorsed, less-than-ideal candidates suffered spectacular defeats on Election Day, handing the U.S. Senate and a few governorships to the Democrats. Whether Trump wins or loses in November, the key to avoiding national catastrophe is for Republicans to win Congress, and you ain’t gonna do that by relying on Trump’s endorsements.
You may be counting the days until you can vote for Trump again. But before you give any credence to his advice in other races, try to remember how you felt the day after the 2022 midterm election, when the “red wave” turned into a Republican bloodbath.
You’d be better off trusting Scout.
Capitalism and racism go together?
I hear it all the time.
“Racism is intricately linked to capitalism,” says famous Marxist Angela Davis. “It’s a mistake to assume that we can combat racism by leaving capitalism in place.”
“Anti-racist” activist Ibram X. Kendi says, “In order to truly be anti-racist, you also have to truly be anti-capitalist.”
This is just silly.
In my new video, Swedish historian Johan Norberg explains how free markets discourage racism.
Capitalists make a profit by serving their customers. The more customers they please, the more money they might make. It hurts the bottom line to exclude any groups.
“Look around the world,” says Norberg, “The least racist societies with the fewest expressions of racist attitudes are the most capitalist countries.”
Norberg’s new book, The Capitalist Manifesto, highlights a Journal of Institutional Economics study that found a correlation between economic freedom and “tolerance of ethnic groups.”
“Capitalism,” he says, “Is the first economic system where you only get rich by opening up opportunities for others. It pays to be colorblind. It pays to be open to willing customers and workers who could enrich your company no matter what religion or race. … It doesn’t mean that every person will be colorblind. There will always be idiots. But in capitalism, it’s costly to be an idiot.”
He reminds us that in the Jim Crow South, businesses fought racism, because the rules denied them customers.
“It’s often forgotten that owners of buses, railways, streetcars in the American South didn’t really segregate systematically until the late 19th century,” says Norberg. “It was probably not because they were less racist than others in the South, but they were capitalists. They wanted money, they wanted clients, and they didn’t want to engage in some sort of costly and brutal policing business in segregating buses.”
Even when segregation was mandated, some streetcar companies refused to comply. For several years after Jim Crow laws passed, Black customers sat wherever they wanted.
Norberg adds, “Those owners of public transport, they fought those discriminatory laws because they imposed a terrible cost. … They tried to bypass them secretly and fight them in courts. They were often fined. Some were threatened with imprisonment.”
The streetcar company in Mobile, Alabama, only obeyed Jim Crow laws after their conductors began to get arrested and fined.
Those business owners may have been racist — I can’t know — but they fought segregation.
“We got Jim Crow laws,” says Norberg, “Because free markets weren’t willing to discriminate.”
Capitalists cared about green — not black or white.
Free markets all over the world coordinate and cooperate. Many don’t know of each other’s existence, and if they did meet, they might not get along. But they work together in search of profit.
It’s odd that socialists now call capitalism racist, when the opposite is more often true.
The Soviet Union invited African students to study science in major cities. But “Soviet citizens often treated the Africans in their midst with disdain and hostility,” New Lines Magazine describes. Russian children’s books portrayed Blacks in animalistic ways. Name-calling was common.
Today, China and Cuba claim to have “zero-tolerance” for racism, but during the Covid pandemic, authorities forcibly tested Blacks and ordered strict isolation. Landlords evicted African tenants. Businesses often refused to serve them.
In Cuba, Castro insisted he would eliminate racism. But “Racism persists,” reports France 24, saying it’s “banned by law,” but “alive on the streets … In local jargon, a white woman with a black boyfriend is … ‘holding back the race.'” Cuba’s government is still instituting programs to “combat racism.”
It’s capitalism that makes people (less racist.
I feel funny about the old lady, Miss Liberty, or Miss US of A, whatever you wish to call the United States, once upon a time THE No. 1 in everyone’s books. The country looks ancient and worn, with corruptive wealth having become an obsession in the republic. Consumers have obliterated idealists, the latter now the butt of jokes in corporate rooms. The culture is too impressed by fame and fortune; materialism is so deeply entrenched that it applies even to the way people use words. We have the wrong people on top showing the rest of the peasants the way. Some fool wrote a long, boring article about how gullible Americans are. They’re gullible because they watch TV, and TV is paid for by false advertising, so it doesn’t take a genius to figure it out: In the modern world everyone lies for profit, starting with the bumbling old boy in the White House, the public relations hacks who lie for a living, the advertising flacks who sell lies for a living—I could go on, but I won’t. I might be mistaken for a cynical old chap, which I am not.
Everything seems broken, or so it feels to many of us who are among the good guys. Trump is known for telling whoppers about himself, but Biden tells bigger ones about important matters, and no one among the so-called Fourth Estate will call him out on it. The language itself is being manipulated to the extent that holding any right-of-center view is now deemed fascist. Crushing debate and silencing critics is the name of the game at present. Monotonous, pompous, and verbose, The New York Times continues to subvert America, whose natural tendency is to believe the mind viruses spread by Sulzberger, Kahn & Co. America used to be about power and freedom, but the former has the upper hand now, and just look what it’s doing to Trump, who dared challenge it. Modern Democratic politics remind me of totalitarian communism, without the violence.
And it’s not only the US of A that is slowly but surely turning into a 1984 type of superstate. Brussels showed her true colors recently when they tried to ban a meeting of European conservatives like Nigel Farage, who as speaker managed to raise hell with the E.U. commissars. Encroaching on people’s freedoms in the name of the greater good is the trick. Tiny Rishi Sunak, the British prime minister, is trying to pass a law that will ban smoking forever for those born after a certain date. Who the hell does tiny Rishi think he is? Just because he married a billionaire’s daughter, and just because he managed to stab his benefactor Boris Johnson in the back and dump him from his prime ministerial stoop, does not give him the right to tell my grandchildren they can never smoke. If that’s not George Orwell stuff, once again, I’m a banana.
Americans are dissatisfied with the direction of the country, so Biden forgives student loans as if the money they owe was his to give away. Slowly but surely, it is turning into a state-run world. Here in America, the cultural era is stacked with blusterers, wheeler-dealers, and con men and women who are selling woke and other such bull to a pliant public watching TV commercials. Hollywood types attempt to convince everybody that only people with lesser intelligence are for Trump, and these types are supported by mainstream media that expresses it openly, i.e., that only “Deplorables” are for Trump.
Although the First Amendment protects homophobic, sexist, transphobic, even antiblack and anti-Muslim speech, only fools and provocateurs dare hint at anything resembling hate speech. The media have managed to label anything it doesn’t approve of as hateful, hence the central challenge of the age is freedom of speech or not. Yet national identity is the most powerful force in politics today.
Or is it? Our lives are circumscribed by a fear that invisible authorities have in their sights. The federal government has made an alliance with private companies to collect data on its citizens. Telephones and computers give off a thick exhaust of information about the people who own them. Although intelligence agencies are not permitted to engage in domestic spying, they can buy available information, and they do. Does this remind you of something called the deep state? Mass surveillance has become the norm in a country that was begun by Europeans yearning to be free. Some freedom.
Conservatives are described as arrogant, ruthless, parasitic oligarchs built on a foundation of Christianity and God-ordained permanency. Funny, but I always suspected that our Lord Jesus would end up being blamed for everything the left despises. Perhaps it’s because of what he did to the moneylenders, but all I know is Christianity is a red flag to the woke. Never mind. America is still No. 1—I don’t see many illegal migrants trying to sneak into China—but what once defined Americans no longer exists. Over the next few decades, America will become a minority-majority country, and history tells us that no other nations have managed such a transition and still held together. White identity has become a dirty word thanks to the academy, the media, and the entertainment industry. The left is succeeding in diversifying the country, but where it will fail, and fail spectacularly, is in unifying the nation. Annie, get your gun ready.
If the economy is so good, why do small business leaders feel so bad?
The latest Small Business Optimism Index from the National Federation of Independent Business could hardly be more depressing. It finds that the men and women who run our 33 million small businesses and hire more than half of American workers are in a somber mood. The survey finds that small-business confidence has reached its lowest point in 12 years.
Amazingly, small company CEOs are even more fearful of the future today than during the COVID-19 pandemic, when most businesses were shuttered. The confidence numbers have decreased every year President Joe Biden has been in office. Here are the numbers, according to NFIB:
March 2020 – 102.0
March 2021 – 98.2
March 2022 – 93.2
March 2023 – 90.1
March 2024 – 88.5
Why are small-business owners feeling so dour even at a time when the GDP is growing? I asked that question to David Malpass, former World Bank president and U.S. Treasury undersecretary under former President Donald Trump. Malpass has observed all over the world what factors make small businesses successful and put their owners in a frame of mind to expand.
“Smaller businesses are being crowded out by complex regulations and direct competition from the $35 trillion national debt,” Malpass concludes. “The Treasury borrowed $23 trillion in 2023 alone, much of it in the expensive short maturities needed by smaller businesses for working capital.”
The NFIB data is merely a survey, and sometimes business owners and investors act differently than they say they will. But there is more real data on how small companies are expanding.
The latest Federal Reserve data through March shows that commercial and industrial loans, a key resource for small business dynamism, fell over 5% in the last year in nominal terms, down over 8% after adjusting for inflation. Yikes. Without investment, it’s hard for businesses to grow.
I asked Alfredo Ortiz, president and CEO of the Job Creators Network, which represents tens of thousands of small-business owners, what he sees in terms of the business climate.
“Our members feel as though Biden has declared war on small businesses,” Ortiz says. He also mentioned they’re worried that a second Biden term would mean higher taxes, more regulations and a continuation of high prices.
Meanwhile, the Biden administration seems frustrated and even indignant that more businesses aren’t supporting the White House program. But remember: neither Biden nor nearly any of his top officials have ever started or even worked for a small or medium-sized business. They don’t have any feel for how their own policies impact the nation’s employers.
As an example, the Biden administration wants to put in serious jeopardy the franchise model where thousands of small entrepreneurs can start their own McDonald’s, Arby’s or retail store representing well-known and trusted brands. They want the parent companies to be on alert that they can be sued for violations of labor laws, EPA edicts or federal “diversity” requirements, or can be on the hook for lawsuits against their franchises.
This could be the death of thousands of small, independent-owned franchises. The Labor Department wants small businesses to allow unions to run their stores.
What is so sinister here is that the franchise model for opening new businesses is an almost entirely unique American model of business growth. Entrepreneurial immigrants can come into the country, pool money as a family, then own and operate a Popeyes or a clothing store.
Biden also wants to nearly double the capital gains tax, which will scare away angel investors in small startup companies. If owners of a small or medium-sized business put the profits back into the company so it can expand, Biden would tax the “unrealized capital gains” on that investment.
Meanwhile, Biden is happy to give a big head start in the form of billions of dollars of grants and low-interest loans for large corporations such as General Motors and chipmaker Intel so they can expand their operations on the taxpayers’ dime. These corporate welfare programs tilt the playing field in favor of the sharks, not the small-business minnows.
It’s no wonder that men and women who put their life savings on the line to build their businesses from scratch feel they’re under assault. They are being taxed and regulated to death while too often inflation eats away their modest profits.
No one in Washington is going to be “forgiving” their loans when the business conditions get rough and high interest rates make it tough to get emergency loans. There is no safety net — and no “too big to fail” aid package — for the heroes of our economy, who have become the punching bag of big government.
In a column last December, I pointed out that whenever some schizo shoots up a place, and it’s revealed that he left a trail of “red flags” behind, rightists indignantly say, “Hmmph, why wasn’t the FBI on top of that? The crooked politicized FBI is so busy harassing Trump and the J6 peaceful protesters, they neglect their actual job, which is to keep us safe from violent criminals.”
And remember what I said? You guys would never tolerate the FBI proactively policing the words of potential mass shooters. You’d see it as an attack on freedom.
Well, guess who turned out to be right? A few weeks ago a video went viral on rightist Twitter (which I miss less and less every day) showing the FBI paying a visit to a woman’s house to ask a few questions about her Facebook posts. With zero information to go on, some of the largest-following rightists on Twitter—Richard Grenell, Alex Jones, Libs of TikTok, Robby Starbuck—decided (again, with no evidence) that the woman’s “crime” was posting “fuck Joe Biden.”
That was, of course, false. MAGA did not, of course, care.
Mr. Dana Loesch—aka Chris Loesch—aka the dumbest SOB I met during my GOP years—declared, based on the context-free video, “The FBI needs to be dismantled from the top down. An agency that had lost its way.”
Soon enough it emerged that the woman in question was Egyptian-American Muslim Rolla Abdeljawad of Stillwater, Oklahoma (Rolla from now on, ’cause I ain’t typing Abdebabdejaballywad again). While the exact reason for the FBI visit was not revealed, the Twitter account StopAntisemitism tweeted screenshots from Rolla’s Facebook in which she demands “nazizionist scalps” and wishes death on U.S. troops. The site BareNakedIslam found posts promoting “physical jihad.”
The revelation of the identity of the woman in the video caused a few rightists to walk back their initial condemnation of the FBI (one such back-walker was Laura Loomer, who, within three hours of the StopAntisemitism tweet, pilfered it and presented it as her own “research.” Jesus, is there a more foul human on earth?), but most stayed the course, including Loesch, who declared that the FBI was still in the wrong and Rolla deserves free speech.
Then he yelled, “Daaaaanaaaaaaa…my finger’s caught in the bathtub drain again!”
In one Facebook post the sleuths missed, Rolla, who boasts that she’s drawn many FB bans since October 7th, proudly refers to herself as a terrorist: “Now, if you want to call me a terrorist, know I have no problem with being your personal terrorist. Come to mama & I’ll show you terrorist.”
Facebook didn’t pull that one. And if that’s one of the posts FB didn’t ban, can you imagine how bad the banned ones must’ve been? It was probably one of those banned posts that was reported to the FBI, which was likely doing exactly what rightists claim they want it to do: checking on potential threats to public safety.
Yet rightists balked.
This is one of the reasons MAGA is so worthless as an issues-focused movement; there’s no directive to push for anything other than the opposite of what “the enemy” just did.
The FBI didn’t proactively investigate a shooter who posted something foreboding on social media: “You corrupt politicized bastards—why didn’t you interview that person before they killed?”
The FBI does proactively investigate a self-described terrorist who posted something foreboding on social media: “You corrupt politicized bastards—you’re trampling free speech!”
Rolla may not actually be a terrorist, but surely she’s a psycho. And psychos can be just as deadly. Yet way too many MAGAs rallied around her, proving again how useless they are on the psycho question.
Of course, there’s useless, and there’s harmful. If you cut your finger, singing to it is useless. Pouring sulfuric acid on it is harmful. It’s one thing to be worthless when it comes to dealing with psychos, it’s another to actively make the situation worse. Last Friday, America was favored with yet another politically motivated self-immolation: A 37-year-old named Max Azzarello stood in a public park across the street from the courthouse where the Trump “hush money” trial was taking place, doused himself with flammable liquid, and set himself ablaze. He died later that evening.
Unlike the hate-filled anti-Jewish airman who immolated himself in February to protest Israel, Azzarello seemed a harmless enough chap. He was an Alex Jones nut, a guy who’s been to the dry erase board one too many times (inhaling magic marker xylene isn’t good for your health). He was neither MAGA nor Democrat (like many disaffected young Americans, he had a brief flirtation with Bernie Sanders in 2016, only to become further disaffected for his troubles); his “research” (yes, he called himself an “independent researcher,” because of course he did) led him to believe that Trump, Biden, the Clintons, and the world’s billionaires are about to “fascist coup” the United States.
His act of sacrifice was intended to draw attention to this nefarious plot.
Prior to lighting his fire, Azzarello tossed a bunch of pamphlets in the air: his “manifesto,” a 14-page rant that begins with a phony Hitler quote (one of the “big lie” apocryphals), then proceeds to explain how the CIA controls everything. The Beatles, the Grateful Dead, and the Doors were CIA. Charles Manson, Peter Fonda, and Stanley Kubrick were CIA (all movies, TV shows, and cartoons are CIA). Zombie movies are part of the plot too (created by the CIA to make people comfortable with dystopias). Daytime TV, the reality show Cops, and UFO sightings are CIA. The internet is CIA, as are memes (well, now he’s gone too far!). Cryptocurrency too. All CIA.
If you’re familiar with the CIA conspiracy scene, which long predates Alex Jones, you’ll know that this material—from the fake Hitler quote to the Beatles, Manson, and Kubrick claims—is standard issue (with the exception of the zombie film thing…that’s a new one on me). There’s little original in the pamphlet, or in the online manifesto posted by Azzarello before he journeyed to his terminal BBQ.
I’ve known people like Azzarello for forty years. They’d read Brussell and Sutton in the 1980s, Carto and the Christic Institute in the 1990s, and from the aughts onward, whatever was on the internet. They’re generally harmless. At the NYPD/FDNY presser Friday afternoon, uninvited tick Laura Loomer shouted that Azzarello was there to “target Trump supporters.” Azzarello had posted online that he was going to commit suicide and he had no intention of harming anyone else. He chose an area of the park that assured he wouldn’t harm anyone else, and he yelled, “Get away!” to onlookers. And still Loomer had to claim it was an assassination attempt against MAGAs.
Yes, she is the most foul human on earth, no less insane than Azzarello, but far more harmful.
And all the other loons came out of the woodwork following Azzarello’s bake-off.
MAX AZZARELLO WAS FOLLOWING ME ON TWITTER The world is small, and if only I had been able to influence him to understand that it’s the Zionists who run the world.
Is it possible #MaxAzzarello set himself on fire in front of the Trump trial because he could no longer live with the things former president Bill Clinton did to him as a minor on Epstein Island?
Max Azzarello, identified as the man who set himself on fire outside the NYC courthouse, filed a lawsuit against the Clinton Foundation last year Do you believe in coincedences [sic]?
(Actually, Azzarello had filed a ridiculous federal lawsuit against 100 defendants, including the Clintons, Peter Thiel, Mark Cuban, Mark Zuckerberg, Richard Branson, the country of Saudi Arabia, and Ross Perot, who’s been dead for five years.)
Of course, these morons (including Loomer) are exceptions, not the rule. Most people on the right understood that Azzarello was just a mentally troubled individual, nothing more.
That said…
Because God loves symmetry, the exact same day Azzarello killed himself because he was convinced the CIA runs every aspect of American life and all politicians of all parties are being covertly manipulated, Tucker Carlson appeared on Joe Rogan’s show to declare that the CIA runs every aspect of American life and all politicians of all parties are being covertly manipulated.
This is Tuck’s new grift. He not only wants to play to the Azzarellos, he wants to make more of them on the right.
This world is filled with mentally and emotionally damaged humans. Yes, every now and then one of them goes off and shoots people. No, we can’t proactively lock ’em all up. No, we can’t police their every word. But for fuck’s sake, don’t help send them over the edge. Yes, it’s a great grift, a fine con, but these are human lives you’re playing with. You tell an emotionally unstable person that there’s a giant malevolent force behind everything wrong with the world, sure, they may give you all the likes, views, and shares you desire, they may write you a check, or they might set themselves on fire or shoot up a building.
Beyond that, Tuck’s message, Alex Jones’ message, neither of which deviates much from Azzarello’s pamphlet, is exactly what it takes to depress not just a person but a vote.
It’s all a controlled op, so why expend any effort to engage with a phony system? Why vote?
Just as so many blacks have convinced themselves, “The white man’s always gonna keep us down,” well…that’s Tuck’s message to you; just substitute CIA for “white man.”
Okay, I know, I’ve said all this before. But you’ll notice how the mainstream Democrat Party didn’t play to Azzarello’s mania, which is why he became so estranged from it. And you’ll notice that the Democrats have been on a pretty good winning streak lately by not sowing fatalism on the left.
Tuck is sowing fatalism on the right. And you think that’s gonna help the GOP? Based on what evidence?
Oh, sure—the same evidence that zombie films are a CIA plot: zero.
If there is a conspiracy against freedom, wouldn’t people like Tuck most likely be its agents? “The system’s rigged; give up hope, you’ve no free will, you can’t win.”
At the moment in L.A., things look good for November regarding defeating George Gascon. His opponent, the law-and-order candidate, has a commanding lead in the polls. If that holds up, it would mean that San Francisco—a ludicrously dysfunctional city—and L.A.—a ludicrously dysfunctional county—both kicked George Soros’ ass. Because, screwed up as we are, we got up and did something. We engaged the system; we didn’t sit around dreaming of slaying invisible dragons. Leftists are screwy, but they engage.
Red America can learn a thing or two from that. There’ve been too many immolations lately; don’t accept Tucker’s gasoline and matches.
When one person immolates, it’s a tragedy. When millions do, it’s apocalyptic.
