Notwithstanding their evident differences, Britain and France are very similar in their juridico-political idiocies.

Perhaps idiocy is not quite the right word, insofar as there might be method in the madness. The plan, if there were one, would be as follows: for the juridico-political elite so to provoke the anger of the population that it controls that part of the latter, namely the least educated and most inarticulate part, turns to riot and brutality. The elite will then be able to claim, “Either us or barbarism.”

I do not claim that such a plot exists, only that it might as well exist and could hardly be more effective if it did. Two cases, one in Britain and one in France, illustrate this almost to perfection.

In Britain, a man called Shah Rahman has just been released from prison for a second time, largely because a “special” psychologist considered that he no longer represented a threat to the safety of the public. He—or, more probably, she—has managed to convince him that plotting to blow up the London Stock Exchange and the American embassy, and to kill Boris Johnson and two rabbis, which is what he would have done if the police hadn’t stopped him, is wrong. Presumably, Rahman had a moral Archimedean moment: “Aha! I now realize that one should not, after all, blow up buildings and murder people!”

In France, the mayor of Béziers, Robert Ménard, could be sentenced to five years’ imprisonment and/or a fine of 75,000 euros, as well as disqualification from holding public office, for having refused to marry an Algerian illegal immigrant, who had a criminal record, had been in prison, and was under a deportation order, to a French woman, supposedly contrary to present law, which considers it an unconditional human right for an illegal immigrant to marry in France (and thereby, of course, provide himself with a right of residence). There could hardly be a case better suited to provoking insensate rage in a discontented population.

But let us return to the case of Mr. Shah. When he was first found guilty, he was sentenced to twelve years’ imprisonment. He was released after five years, in accordance with normal practice. In other words, when the judge said, “I sentence you to twelve years’ imprisonment,” he was lying, because he knew full well that he was doing no such thing, and that the man he was sentencing would be released long before that period had elapsed. If he had said, “I sentence you to five years’ imprisonment,” knowing that the man would “serve” five years (the word “serve” in this connection has always struck me as odd, for whom would he have been serving?), he would at least have been saying something true, though it might well have resulted in a public outcry. Only five years for having plotted to kill possibly hundreds of people and been prevented from doing so only by the vigilance of the police! What is the state thinking of? In the absence of the death penalty, it would not have been unjust if such a man had been imprisoned for the rest of his life (if he couldn’t be deported) without possibility of release. By allowing the judge to say twelve years, when five was meant, the whole criminal justice system was turned into an elaborate and very expensive charade, from which many people make a good living. It is an equivocation that surely encourages dishonesty in people inclined to dishonesty: For if even judges are dishonest, why be honest oneself?

But this is not all. Such a case as Rahman’s induces a state of despair in a large part of the population, and despair in the minds of those who are either inarticulate or lacking in self-control induces a propensity to lash out blindly, stupidly, and viciously—as we have already seen.

Now we come to the question of parole, a system that is completely against the rule of law. To see this, let us conduct the following mental experiment.

Let us suppose that there are two Rahmans, Rahman I and Rahman II. They are associates, and from the point of view of plotting, they are exactly the same, that is to say equally guilty. They follow precisely the same path; they are both released at five years and are both subsequently re-imprisoned for having committed the same act forbidden them, namely the concealment of a bank account that might be used to finance terrorism.

However, the “special” psychologist, and others involved in the granting or withholding of parole, assess them differently. The psychologist deems Rahman I to be no further threat to society, whereas Rahman II is not so deemed, and must therefore stay in prison.

In effect, Rahman II is being punished not for what he has done, but for what he might do in future. Speculations on future conduct are inherently uncertain and, at the very best, statistical in nature. Again, let us suppose that the psychologist and others have come to the conclusion that there is a 95 percent chance that Rahman I will not re-offend, whereas there is a 75 percent chance that Rahman II will re-offend, and should therefore be punished more that Rahman I.

Rahman II, in effect, is not being punished for something beyond reasonable doubt, but on the balance of probabilities, and it is also on the balance of probabilities that Rahman I is being released. This is inherently arbitrary.

The basis of our law is that a man is not to be punished unless he has been found guilty beyond reasonable doubt, and not for what he might do in the future. The system of parole upends this principle completely and is unjust in two directions.

Let us suppose that Rahman II (the one not released on parole) would not in fact re-offend if released. Has he any ground of complaint? No, not if his original sentence was not in itself unjust; his only ground of complaint could be that his equally guilty partner in crime was being treated more leniently.

This is not to say, incidentally, that gradual release from prison after a long sentence is not a good idea, so that the prisoner may re-insert himself into society, with or without assistance. But such gradual release should not be considered as parole, but as an inherent part of the punishment, to be carried out irrespective of the speculations of psychologists and others. It would have the effect, perhaps, of making initial sentences more realistic, which is to say more just.

Theodore Dalrymple’s latest book is On the Ivory Stages (Mirabeau Press).

I gotta admit, Joy Reid was indeed blindsided when she was fired from MSNBC this week. How could she possibly have seen this cancellation coming? Sure, by the end, she was down to 11 actual viewers nationwide, eight of them in hospital ICUs, their charts indicating coma protocol.

Of her remaining three viewers, one was a gentleman named Nelson, sitting in a Detroit gastropub, who kept screaming at the bartender, “What is this shit? Dude, turn the f-ing channel. Damn! Bitch crazy.”

Data seem to indicate that the remaining two viewers were at a Frontier Airlines departure gate, where “The ReidOut” was being broadcast without sound. It’s unclear whether these two were traveling as a couple or did not, in fact, know each other.

But how was Joy to deduce from all this that her show was in trouble?

Fortunately for Joy, there is no truer Friend-of-Black-People than her erstwhile MSNBC colleague Rachel Maddow, who lives in a town, Cummington, Massachusetts, that is “0.0%” black. (I wouldn’t mention this, except liberals pioneered the art of counting the number of black faces at any conservative gathering in order to call them racist. Oh, who am I kidding — yes, I would.)

Here are the highlights of Rachel’s self-aggrandizing, on-air tribute to Joy on Monday night:

“[Joy] is leaving the network altogether. That is very, very, very hard to take.

(Do we think three “very’s” is enough? If she really meant it, wouldn’t there be six or seven?)

“In all of the jobs I have had in all of the years I have been alive, there is no colleague for whom I have had more affection and more respect than Joy Reid. I love everything about her. I have learned so much from her. I have so much more to learn from her.”

“(Goddamn it, this may cost me my career but I’m going to speak up for a black person and let chips fall where they may!)”

“Personally, I think it is a bad mistake to let her walk out the door. … ”

(Clarification sought: Did Joy really “walk out the door”? Are we absolutely sure she wasn’t lifted up and dragged to an elevator by security? I guess we’ll have to wait for the Zapruder film.)

In any event, Rachel has spoken. She came down from the mountain with her tablets and made her ass-kissy pronouncement. Perhaps she can take some solace in knowing that one of the Democrats of Color taking over Joy’s time slot, Alicia Menendez, has a father in federal prison.

This is how white liberals talk about black people, as if there’s a Race Stasi ready to turn them over to authorities if they’re not effusive enough. But Blubberbutt Maddow stands out in a field with stiff competition.

Take Maddow’s hilariously extravagant introductions of Melissa Harris-Lacewell, the half-black, DEI star performer, who has been given one fabulous job after another, few of which pan out after about a year — and who pretty much created the tampon earrings look. (I’ve been on the liberal patronization beat for some time. For the Box Set, go to: LiberalNoblesseOblige.com.)

Here are a few standard intros:

“Joining us now is a woman who couldn’t sound stupid if she practiced it for a week, Melissa Harris-Lacewell …”

“Melissa Harris-Lacewell, associate professor of politics and African American studies at Princeton University. You’re wicked smart.”

“Melissa Harris-Lacewell, Princeton professor, MSNBC contributor, of which we are very proud.”

“Melissa Harris-Lacewell, Princeton professor, MSNBC contributor, and one of the smartest people I’ve ever talked to about anything, anytime, anywhere.”

“Every Tuesday, you’ve been doing this to me, Melissa. Every Tuesday my whole adult life.”

She’s such a pro, I can’t believe Rachel forgot to call Harris-Lacewell “articulate.” Black people love that.

For comparison, here’s how Rachel introduces a white guest: “Joining us now is the chair of the Senate Rules Committee, Minnesota Senior Sen. Amy Klobuchar. Senator, it’s great to see you.”

Liberals have leapt way beyond “the soft bigotry of low expectations” and are now showcasing “the suffocating, smug bigotry of wildly, hysterically overpraising average individuals just because they’re black.” If a straight white male talked to any presentable-looking female on the air like Rachel talks to black women, he’d end up in HR.

To the eternal misfortune of black Americans, the left decided to take them as pets, then patronize them to death.

This is for you poker players out there: Trump appears to be conceding far too much to Russia, but it could be part of a plan. In poker, the strong hand plays it cool at the start. The weak one bluffs, pretending to be strong. Trump could be bluffing giving away too much, but perhaps that’s the only way to get Vlad involved and talking. Let’s face it: Ukraine has no cards to play with, and Europe is a busted flush. So why not make sure you deal with the only player in the room? If Europe, especially Britain—whose impotents are screaming their heads off at the Trump sellout—had any cojones, it would have dropped leftist idiocies such as net zero, slashed taxes, and deregulated. Also increased the size of its armed forces and embraced modern warfare and free speech, thus repositioning itself as America’s partner and comrade-in-arms. Instead Europe has done the opposite, with the exception of Poland and Hungary.

See what I mean about Trump playing poker and drawing Putin to the table? He did the same thing with the proposed Gaza Riviera, n’est-ce pas, cher amis? Now Egypt, Jordan, and the Gulf types are getting together and planning to save the cemetery that is Gaza from what Trump plans to turn into the new Monte Carlo (God forbid). That’s what makes me think that rootin’ for Putin and the Gaza Riviera are both bluffs by the dealmaker Trump. If I’m wrong, my punishment will be internal exile to Monte Carlo, a fate far worse than death or moving to Gaza.

Mind you, I’m only guessing. The Donald hasn’t shown me his poker hand, despite the fact that I happen to be his closest friend. Actually, I’ve met him only once, and just for a brief moment. It was a long time ago, at a black-tie party given by Lord Black for his wife, the writer Barbara Amiel, and The Donald was the guest of honor. I was seated on the left of Melania and across from an unpleasant journalist whose name I’ve forgotten. (Actually, I think he has since died.) Back then NATO was bombing the hell out of the Serbs, and Melania, being a Slovenian, was interested in what I had to say. I was against the bombing and pro-Serb, and the jerk across the table kept interrupting a private conversation. After the third interruption I warned him that if he continued he would get punched rather hard in the kisser. He discontinued.

After dinner and well in my cups, I noticed a large orange figure approaching. It was you-know-who. He stuck out his hand, told me I was a great man, and went on his way. It was the first and last time I saw either of them. Melania had obviously told him that I almost punched out the hack, and The Donald must have liked that. On such brief moments great friendships come to be. Oh, well!

The out-of-touch but overpaid columnists and TV personalities foaming at the mouth in Britain and the U.S. have not bothered to think about this due to their social commitments. The entrenched illiberal left that makes up a great part of what is called the media no longer seems able to think due to shock. The fact that hundreds of millions of dollars have disappeared in the Ukraine has never been raised. But The Donald knows about it and will bring it up when he meets with the Ukrainian president. Just as the media disagree hypocritically with the free-speech values they claim to uphold, so they fail to mention the corruption of the Ukraine leaders.

As I write this, I am watching a British TV program and am struck by the smugness of the ill-dressed and even worse-looking participants. They live in a world of their own and spend their time trying to impose their values on the rest of us. And they lack a sense of humor, to say the least. The day Trump and JD Vance demanded the Europeans up their budget for defense, the Brits—who no longer have an army except for parades—announced that their Department of Defense had just hired a DEI tsar for the armed forces. You could not make this up. The Americans demand more spending for NATO by each member, and the Brits say they cannot afford it but hire a Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion tsar at an I-hate-to-think-of salary.

I’m afraid that all that Europeans have to offer—except the brave Poles and Hungarians—is reality avoidance and then some. Putin must be laughing out loud. In the meantime the lefty media have rediscovered an old hate figure and are calling him new bad names. The fact that he’s splitting the China-Russia affiliation has not entered their minds.

Last week’s column was written during my recent health scare; this week’s is being written as I’m recuperating, sober, and thus in a terrible mood. So to make it easier on myself, I’m going to dispense with three different rants. Maybe there’s a connecting theme, maybe there isn’t.

We’ll see as we go.

MAGA-Morph Activate!
A running theme of mine is the similarity between MAGA and the worst of black America. I’ve covered this ground before, especially regarding the J6 rioters. MAGA squealed excuses for them in the same language as a black thug caught by the poe-leece.

“They didn’t do nuffin’! They wuz set up! The cops wuz violent, not us!” And when finally confronted with video evidence, “Okay, maybe we wuz violent, but dat’s da language o’ d’oppressed!”

Ditto how the right’s adopted “we’ze victums” as a blanket excuse for bad behavior and self-pity. Remember last year’s “Dave word of the year”? Overcorrection, and the example I gave was how forty years ago there were few female movie action heroes, and actresses had every right to complain. But now we have an overcorrection in which female action heroes are damn near all there is.

Similarly, during the Bush and Obama years, conservatives shied away from getting too racial when it came to things like affirmative action and open borders. You could criticize those policies on principle, but never race. And now we have an overcorrection in which white rightists have become so racial, they’re aping the whininess of blacks. “We’ze bein’ genocided! We’ze shutted out of jobs! We can’t get wives! We can’t have kids! We’ze bein’ replaced!”

Slow down, okay? Whites were getting the short end of the “grace and favor” stick for decades. But nobody’s being genocided. Disfavor toward whites is not helped by overstatement.

I mean, has any black radical making the genocide claim ever swayed you?

You can rattle off to the average black guy every “grace and favor” blacks get in government, academia, and the job market, and they’ll still claim they’re being genocided. Because once your brain goes there, that mindset becomes like dopamine. You need it, regardless of your actual reality.

So now, the final act in the “MAGA goes black” tragicomedy.

In May 2020 I wrote about the young black thugette who was a driver for DoorDash in the Oakland/Berkeley/San Francisco Bay area:

After being buzzed in and handing the food to her customer, the DoorDasher, now alone in the lobby, gathered the packages piled under the residents’ mailboxes and calmly walked out with them. Most of those packages were Christmas gifts. The thief’s image was caught clear as day on the security cameras; she hadn’t even attempted to hide her face. More than that, her identity and her vehicle’s make and plates were on file with DoorDash.

But nobody cared. DoorDash didn’t release her name, and the cops never asked for it.

Oh, you rightists! You were as outraged as I was. And you knew damn well that when thugette realized she’d gotten away with it, it was nuthin’ but high fives from her ghetto pals. She likely became a local hero.

How very black!

And how very MAGA. Steve Bannon just pleaded guilty to defrauding MAGA in the “Build the Wall” embezzlement scheme. This is the crime for which he was pardoned by Trump as his coconspirators went to prison. But he couldn’t be pardoned from state charges, so a few weeks ago he admitted his role in the fraud, got zero jail time in a plea deal, and on his podcast and at CPAC it was all high fives and sieg heils.

He’s a hero!

He stole way more than a few packages and he got away with it. And for that you love him.

At least thugette stole from whites and Asians, not “her people.” But Bannon stole from you. That makes your adulation worse. And whatever your rationale for still supporting Bannon, it’s the same rationale as blacks who support their thieves. The exact same.

I can never write a story like that May 2020 one again. I can’t muster the same outrage anymore. Pig to man, man to pig, pig to man…I can’t tell the difference anymore.

Cabrón Credits
Not that I don’t still seek new ways to slam the left. This one caught my fancy recently. Elon Musk is being courted by politicians in his birth country of Ungabungaland to bring Tesla and SpaceX to a nation where the average worker is paid in chewing gum wrappers. But there’s a hitch: South Africa (the Anglicized name of Ungabungaland) has an official “black empowerment policy.”

“At least 30% of the South African operation of any Musk-owned company would have to be sold or donated to black locals.”

Christ…enough SpaceX rockets explode as it is. Can you imagine the outcome with blacks in charge?

But here’s the fun part: Musk wants to do business, and SA’s corrupt leaders want him to do business. So it turns out the government has a work-around for just such a situation: the “equity equivalent.” That’s the actual term. “Equity equivalent” allows white foreign investors to pay their way out of the 30% requirement. Just give free shit to the Bungas in charge, in the name of “social investment,” and voilà, you don’t have to give black locals any stake in your company.

It’s carbon credits. You remember carbon credits, right? Governments and NGOs established “emissions caps” because apparently “the world is on fire” so fossil fuels and electricity and natural gas must be eliminated. Sure, it was easy to seize inhalers from elderly asthmatics and ban plastic straws, but billionaires were not about to give up their private jets and luxury yachts, and they sure as shit weren’t gonna stop heating their mansions in winter.

So the “carbon credit” system was invented. Rich people send money to the environmental czars and NGOs as a “tax” for continuing to live luxuriously; Al Gore flies his private jet around the world, but he pays a carbon credit fee likely no steeper than restaurant tip money.

Of course, if you really believed “the world’s on fire,” you wouldn’t let the people causing it pay their way out. The carbon credit scam exposed the emptiness of climate change hysteria. The climate alarmists just want money.

And that’s SA’s “equity equivalent.” The SA leaders don’t give a damn about “the locals.” The “30% black stake” requirement is a shakedown, a way to get white billionaires to gift the ruling party a new cannibal grill for the backyard.

BTW, negotiations between the SA leaders and Musk regarding the size of his “donation” are not going well. If you noticed Musk recently tweeting a lot of critical stuff toward SA leadership, that’s why.

Sorry if you thought it was “white patriotism.” Nope…just business.

Guile Hitler
Speaking of blacks…

Let’s take a trip back to October 2022. That’s when Tucker Carlson had his BOMBSHELL interview with Kanye West.

Remember that?

According to Tuck, it was the most important interview he’d ever done! But oddly Tuck doesn’t talk about it anymore.

Wonder why?

Well, maybe because Tuck told you, the loyal viewers, how the interview proved that Ye is NOT CRAZY! Indeed, Tuck mocked the very notion that anyone might think West is mentally unstable. Tuck dismissed such talk as the deceitful whispers of WOKE LEFTISTS furious that a PROUD INTELLIGENT BLACK MAN had unapologetically crossed over to the right.

Yep, if there’s one thing Ye isn’t, Tucker declared, it’s crazy.

Of course, as would soon come out, Tucker edited out the parts of the interview in which Ye was acting batshit. And while Tucker was assuring you that Ye was of sound mind, knowing full well that he wasn’t, who was telling you that Tuck was lying, and that Ye was on a downward spiral and his instability was gonna get worse and worse?

Me. I said that. But where’s my parade?

And I’m curious, as so many of you love Tuck, worship Tuck, follow his every word…does it bother you? Does it bother you that in October 2022, mere months before Ye started his “I love Hitler, enslave the Jews” padded-room routine, Tucker told you with a straight face that Ye’s the sanest man he’s ever known?

Because Tuck was either lying to you, or he sincerely believed what he said even having viewed the edited-out footage, meaning that Tuck can’t identify crazy when he sees it.

Those are the only two options. Tuck’s either a liar, or a man of such preternaturally poor judgment that his opinion on anything should be dismissed out of hand.

My guess is that most of you prefer to memory-hole the Tucker/Ye episode rather than face the ramifications of thinking about it too hard.

I pick on Tuck a lot, so I want to make a larger point. Tuck went down that Ye road for two reasons. Obviously, the interview was an exclusive and Tuck would interview Hitler’s charred dick for an exclusive (hell, I’d want that interview too). But the other reason was the right’s compulsive desire to have a black best friend. Rightists bitch all the time about blacks, but nothing lights up a rightist’s eyes like a black buddy. Tucker gets that. He knew that the moment Kanye wore a “White Lives Matter” shirt, you guys would become the old blind man from Bride of Frankenstein: “So long have I prayed for a friend. My loneliness is over!”

But that whole “fawning over any black who smiles at you” thing makes rightists come off as thirsty. Desperate. If you’re the majority, as most rightists believe they are, don’t take scraps. That includes blacks and Nazis. It makes you look like the school nerd hanging out with the school retard because you can’t find a friend anywhere else.

Tuck cynically edited out the crazy stuff knowing that he faced no consequences. He knew that if Kanye went batshit, you guys would memory-hole Tuck’s involvement.

As you did.

And here I find my shared theme across all three of this week’s segments: the insincerity of it all. Perceptive left-leaners like Alexander Cockburn saw “carbon credits” for what they were: a scam. It led him to question climate change entirely. Cockburn’s long dead, but I think he’d see South Africa’s “equity equivalent” the same way. I doubt he’d cheer it.

And it’s getting harder for me, purportedly a right-leaner, to “cheer” in this column. You want another piece about black crime? Why? To deflect from the right’s current love affair with rioters and cop-beaters and its own Al Sharptons (and that’s all Bannon is, right down to the flamboyant hair)? You want insincerity, and I’m not gonna play to that. I’m not Tuck. My lede in that Ye interview would’ve been “Black celeb has mental issues.” But you wouldn’t have wanted such honesty.

Of course, by “you” I don’t mean all of you. My core readers appreciate honesty, and they’re who I write for.

And very happily so.

Conclave is a (non-action) thriller set inside the Sistine Chapel during the election of a new pope, starring veteran acting luminaries Ralph Fiennes, Stanley Tucci, and John Lithgow as cardinals conspiring to sit on the throne of Saint Peter while still laboring to appear less ambitious than they really are. It’s the kind of solid mid-budget drama for grown-ups that Hollywood used to make frequently, but it now seems so remarkable that it has a serious shot at winning the Best Picture Oscar.

The movie, which is primarily in English, but also in Italian, Spanish, and Latin, is a straightforward adaptation by German director Edward Berger (Deutschland 83 and the latest All Quiet on the Western Front) of Robert Harris’ 2016 novel. There was an old saying that mid-century Hollywood films were movies about Protestants made by Jews for Catholics. Conclave is a return to the brief era of films such as The Exorcist about Catholics.

A former Fleet Street journalist turned author of well-researched political fiction in the tradition of Frederick Forsyth (The Day of the Jackal), Harris has had quite a few of his upper-middlebrow page-turners filmed. Perhaps the most notable was Roman Polanski’s 2010 thriller The Ghost Writer, with Ewan McGregor as a hack hired to compose the memoirs of a former Labour prime minister (Pierce Brosnan), modeled on Harris’ ex-friend Tony Blair, who, Harris asserted, sold out the United Kingdom’s national interest to back George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq. Robert Harris is a sort of left-of-center English patriot in the vein of George Orwell, a notorious bigot against Irish Catholics (e.g., the final boss in 1984 is named O’Brien), but he works harder than Orwell to be sympathetic to Catholic politicians like the cardinals (although Blair’s post-office conversion to Catholicism perhaps upset Harris).

Conclave carries on in this tradition of good-but-not-quite-great Harris adaptations. Movie versions of Harris’ books aren’t as informative as his originals, but he does provide a framework of functional plots and intelligent dialogue. And Berger has a good feel for the look of the sensible but vaguely paranoid methods that have evolved over the centuries so that nobody can tamper with your ballot for Cardinal Borgia or Cardinal Medici.

While in Rome in 2013 during the election of Pope Francis to research his fine trilogy of historical novels on Cicero’s rivalry with Julius Caesar, it occurred to Harris that the closest thing to the Roman Senate today is a papal conclave.

Personally, I like Italians more than Romans because they now occasionally feel twinges of guilt about their ruthless opportunism. Thus, in Conclave, the job of the pope seems to be to scold the cardinals that they aren’t living up to their high ideals, and the aspirant who makes the other clerics feel most ashamed wins. That seems like a moral improvement over Roman times.

Conclave opens with the death of the old pope, a Francis-like liberal.

In case you are wondering, no, none of the cardinals murdered him. Conclave is a more subtle thriller than that.

Also, unlike the 2015 Best Picture winner, the decent but undistinguished Spotlight, Harris’ story treats the Catholic priest sex abuse scandals merely in passing as yesterday’s news, one of the unfortunate events inevitable in a 2,000-year-old institution.

My view was that the entertainment industry had enough of its own problems with the sexual abuse of the young to not congratulate itself quite so heartily on exposing the Catholic Church’s troubles:

The movie and television industry’s point of view tends to be: Hey, at least we’re not the music industry.

Harris doesn’t seem to disagree. As a frequent collaborator with Polanski, who has been on the lam from prison in the United States for 47 years for drugging and raping a 13-year-old girl, Harris isn’t going to cast the first stone over that.

Fiennes plays the author’s stand-in, a reasonable, left-of-center English cardinal appointed by the last pope to chair the next conclave. He would be angling for the throne himself, except he has recently come down with Doubts, and thus explains to cardinals who offer to vote for him that he lacks the “spiritual depth” to be pope.

Fiennes wishes to get Tucci’s progressive American cardinal elected, or, at worst, Lithgow’s oily Canadian moderate. A dark-horse candidate is a saintly Mexican liberation theology leftist who has been too busy building hospitals in the Congo for victims of sexual violence to have assembled a coalition in the college. (And Ingrid Bergman’s daughter, Isabella Rossellini, who is so fondly remembered from later 20th-century movies, returns as the Mother Superior who helps Fiennes uncover scandals.)

One goal of Fiennes and Tucci is to keep out the homosexual-hating African candidate (modeled on Cardinal Sarah), although the liberals feel conflicted about blocking the first black pope. Most of all, they loathe an Italian reactionary, who wants, horrors, to bring back the Latin mass.

Harris’ heroes are clearly on the side of Vatican II. When Fiennes accuses him of ambition, Tucci notes that every cardinal has already picked out the name he would be known as when pope. Fiennes’ papal name, for instance, would be John XXIV.

A reader once suggested to me that the prime mover of the vast cultural revolution of the later 1960s, which in America is often attributed to the Pill, the electric guitar, the baby boom, the Vietnam War, or the assassination of JFK, was instead Pope John XXIII’s unforced decision, at the peak of the Roman Catholic Church’s prosperity and strength, to convene a council of reform:

Ever since 1789, the West, broadly, had sought a happy medium between the poles of Revolution and Reaction, and the Catholic Church represented the latter pole. In Vatican II, the Church seemed suddenly to leave the field, or indeed, seemed to throw itself on to the other pole.

But, as usual in Harris’ tales, even the bad guys get smart things to say: The right-wing Italian villain drops by the left-wing Anglo-American heroes’ lunch table to point out to the leftist English-speaking cardinals that because not even cardinals can comfortably carry on a conversation in Latin anymore, all the tables are divided up by language, unlike in the good old days before Vatican II (rather resembling Charlton Heston’s famous anecdote about how lunch on the set of Planet of the Apes was segregated by species).

Conclave is a good movie, but the big plot twist at the ending is a groaner, way too 2013 for today’s tastes. I won’t spoil it, but let’s just say: Lower your expectations.

Harris no doubt felt brilliant when he came up with his Shocking Revelation a dozen years ago. But by this point in cultural history, I’m merely reminded of Lisa Simpson’s rejoinder to gay pride paraders chanting, “We’re here, we’re queer, get used to it!”

“We are used to it. You do this every year.”

If there was a street near you that was filled with Muslim immigrants raping all the women, who would you blame? The Muslims, or the street?

The French city of Nantes is currently in the grip of what is generally known as an “immigrant crime wave,” a phrase that obscures which particular groups of immigrants tend to be most responsible—i.e., probably not the Koreans. In 2004, Time magazine described Nantes as “the most livable city in Europe.” Time must have an awful lot of African, Middle Eastern, Balkan, and Levantine readers who liked the sound of that, as it is now one of France’s top three destinations in numbers of illegals.

Nantes today is led by a council of loony left “No Borders” types, who have actively facilitated a mass invasion by aliens possessed of such unbridled reserves of vim and vibrancy that, by 2023, illegal immigrants accounted for more than half of all street criminality there. The traditional French honor of harassing strollers in the street with elaborate close-quarters hand movements used to belong to the mime artists. Now it belongs to the rape artists.

The Road to Hell Is Paved With Good Intentions
By 2021, there were 562 reported cases of sexual assault, harassment, and rape in Nantes, leaving women increasingly scared to go out after dark. If their most likely assailants decided to simply don sunglasses and not smile, they appeared invisible, making escape literally impossible.

But the city’s socialist and feminist mayor, Johanna Rolland, does not think this wave of anti-female violence is really a police matter at all. Reacting to the alleged street penetration of a local woman by two Sudanese rapefugees in 2022, Rolland explained that gendarmes “will never be able to prevent a street rape, however terrible…because it is not their job.” Whose job is it, then? That of Nantes’ in-house urban planning authorities, apparently.

You know that crude, age-old sexist phrase, used to insult an unattractive woman, that goes “I wouldn’t even cross the street to rape her”? Well, the “feminists” running Nantes appear to think this is how actual rapists’ minds work in reality, as their “solution” to local females continually getting harassed by loitering gangs of “certain people,” as they coyly put it, was…to widen the streets.

Yes, not even a black African penis can reach over to touch a white female walking safely on the other side of a pavement should the sidewalk consist of a five or six paving-slab width, rather than the usual two to three slabs’ worth, thus rendering the honor of Nantes’ fair maidenhood safe and intact once again. With walkways that big, the only non-white individual ladies could ever possibly be groped by in Nantes now was Mr. Tickle.

And, after consulting with local feminists from something called the “Non-Sexist City Network” on how to create “gender-sensitive” street layouts to combat “sexism in public space,” the Council further announced plans to place large plants in the middle of certain paths. Then any passing Frenchwomen targeted for unauthorized entry by entire imported villages from the Ivory Coast could enjoy a series of handy obstacles to run away around in super-speedy zigzag fashion, like in an old episode of Benny Hill, but with an even more unfunny final climax.

Greek Tragedy
In Nantes, so desperate are left-wing local authorities not to blame blessed foreigners for the things that ail them, the physical city itself is tarred with guilt for the rapes of its women, not the people doing the actual raping—by similar logic, Hiroshima must have dropped its own bomb and Stalingrad hid all the food. Do these idiots reckon Nanking raped itself?

Similar self-defeating logic pertains elsewhere across Occupied Europe, too, where the more showily left-wing and feminist an individual is, the more determined he or she seems to be to actively place women in ever greater danger.

In Greece, a formerly largely safe nation for women, there has been a recent influx of “refugees” from Pakistan, a largely unsafe nation for women. Immigrants now make up 10 percent of Greece’s general population, yet more than 50 percent of the prison population. They also lead the way on rapes, the busy 10 percent performing more overall (not merely proportionately, per capita!) than the lazy native 90 percent in some recent years on record.

Eager to help combat the patriarchal oppression that they themselves had blindly helped cause by foolishly campaigning for open borders were female members of Greek feminist pressure group “The Purple.” Observing that there was a big street party attended largely by Pakistani males in Athens’ Syntagma Square to see in New Year 2025, The Purple decided to attend and begin currying favor with their guests’ presumed ethno-religious allegiances by unfurling a big banner expressing solidarity with Palestine, thus to lure them toward the empowering enlightenment of feminism. To thank the particular feminist who led the banner-waving, the grateful Pakistanis immediately beat her up before publicly sexually abusing her.

Are these women called The Purple because that’s the color of their new bruises?

We Must Evacuate the Toilets
Ever since they first started flooding Europewards following the Arab Spring fifteen years ago, it is obvious what a disproportionate number of these people were going to be like. No sooner had refugee camps been established for Syrians on Greek islands than the adult inmates began creating in-house rape gangs to prey on small children there.

One mainland camp was established in a vacated toilet-roll factory in Thessaloniki—where, ironically, women and children ended up being so scared of being abused by male cubicle-dwellers, they refused to visit the camp toilets. Sounds like another potential Benny Hill sketch.

On the other side of the continent in England, which also shares a problem with carelessly imported Islamic rape gangs, another well-known British comedian, the left-wing Labour Party’s former Shadow Home Secretary, Yvette “Tommy” Cooper, demanded the then-Conservative government open the country’s borders and let the poor Thessaloniki-trapped kiddies in before they all got shafted into puberty ten years too early.

I guess Cooper’s logic here was that, if Britain shipped in all the Muslim kids from Greece and resettled them in, say, Rotherham (formerly England’s grooming-gang capital, but now the U.K.’s “Children’s Capital of Culture 2025”), then they would be safe because all the local Pakistani gangs only ever enjoyed raping ethno-religiously inferior white, Sikh, and Hindu children.

Cooper tried to solve the problem of Muslim child rape just like that, but her sleight of hand didn’t work. Now that the Labour Party of 2025 are in power in the U.K., however, Yvette is the genuine Home Secretary, not the mere substitute-in-waiting, so has actual responsibility for protecting domestic women and girls. Her chosen method for doing so? Refusing to order a statutory inquiry into the inconveniently Islamic groomers, whilst at the same time legislating to treat “extreme misogyny,” like teenage boys watching Andrew Tate videos, or not being sufficiently gay, as a form of “terrorism.”

The Vagina Monologues
As committed modern leftists, the Labour Party are very, very concerned about vaunting their feminist credentials for all to see. Why, only this month, their Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rachel Reeves, performed the incredibly important task of removing all publicly owned artworks depicting people with penises from the Treasury building and replacing them instead with abstract modernist pieces of shit that look like her own painted periods.

Yvette Cooper herself engages in similarly epoch-defining efforts, like compiling (i.e., copying and pasting) the 2020 anthology Women’s Speeches That Changed the World, From Pankhurst to Thunberg [But Probably Not Thatcher or Meloni], which argued women’s voices should never, ever be gagged. One female who might agree was the little white girl from Oxford whose fate was ably summed up by a British judge in the sentencing of one guilty Muslim mass groomer in 2013:

You, Mohammed Karrar, prepared [the victim] for gang anal rape by using a pump to expand her anal passage. You subjected her to a gang rape by five or six men. At one point she had four men inside her. A red ball was placed in her mouth to keep her quiet.

Nobody ever did that to Greta Thunberg. I’d particularly like to hear that ungagged now-adult victim give Cooper an impassioned speech about the recent case of a U.K.-based Pakistani pedophile convicted of grooming what he thought was a “barely pubescent girl” online, who had his deportation back to the Punjab halted by a judge on “human rights” grounds as, if his family back home found out about it, they may have disapproved. Unlikely, m’lud: They were Pakistanis.

Rap(e) Music
The “feminist” Labour Party and its equally “feminist” Home Secretary make a big song and dance about promising never to repeal any human rights legislation in the country, partly in order to protect women’s rights, so they say—but these very same laws also protect the “human right” of unwanted hyper-male excrescences like the above not to be deported.

I do note that Yvette Cooper once publicly promised to house a Syrian refugee in her own home about a decade back, but then singularly failed to do so. And yet, to be fair, she has taken refugees under her own roof in the years since—three white Ukrainian ones, a woman and her two daughters. Tell me, Yvette, what precisely was it about this latter trio that made you and your children feel safer living with them than you would have done with one with a name like Mohammed Karrar?

In 2017 the female Muslim Labour MP Naz Shah got in trouble after retweeting a joke message from the fake parody account of a famous left-wing journalist reading “Those abused girls in Rotherham and elsewhere just need to shut their mouths. For the good of diversity.” Shah rejects actually thinking this herself, said her retweeting was in error, and has successfully sued anyone who dares suggest otherwise, so I won’t dispute her denial. Regardless, the tweet does stand in as a good general microcosm for what left-wing “feminist” parties across Europe really do appear to think about inconvenient “white-trash” victims like the Rotherham girls who were selfish enough to have been abused by absolutely the wrong people.

Last month, the Labour Party were forced to apologize after inadvertently releasing a PR video containing a catchy backing track from a Brazilian rapper whose Portuguese-language lyrics later turned out to enthusiastically endorse acts of organized sexual violence against young girls.

Monolingual Labour staffers did not realize it featured lines strongly encouraging a “naughty young girl” to smoke marijuana until she became “addicted,” at which point the youngster should immediately “sit” upon the rapper’s “pot-crazy dick” like a good little “bitch,” a blend of sex and drugs and cock ’n’ roll the aspirant abuser deemed a “perfect combination.” The track concluded with a repeated refrain in celebration of the man ending his highly enjoyable evening by providing his weed-addled Lolita with “just a punch in the young girl’s pussy.”

One Conservative MP sought to capitalize by asking Labour’s hapless Home Secretary the following question: “Do you think it’s acceptable, Yvette Cooper, for your party to put out videos with lyrics encouraging young men to get girls on drugs so they can have sex with them, and celebrating punching them in their vaginas?” Well, why not? It sounds like tacit left-wing government policy right the way across Europe nowadays anyway.

If these really are Europe’s feminists, I wouldn’t like to see its misogynists.

The Week’s Most Handy, Sandy, and Ramadandy Headlines

WE ARE THE CHURLED
The devastating L.A. fires that raged from Malibu to the Hollywood Hills affected hundreds of the entertainment industry’s greatest talents, the creative minds that gave you Madame Web, Snow White and the Seven HR Grievances, and of course the Sound of Music remake starring the cast of Moonlight as the von Trapphouse family.

The fires have cast a pall over this year’s Oscars. Voting was extended to give displaced Academy members time to differentiate Cynthia Erivo from the Alien: Romulus monster, and most Oscar parties have been canceled.

So of course Hollywood A-listers are doing what they do best: recording a benefit song…for themselves.

Do They Know It’s Oscar Time?

It’s Oscar time, there’s no need to be afraid.
At Oscar time, we yell and scream at our Latina maid.
And on this night of ego,
Our acceptance speeches denounce Trump.
Throw on your best designer dress,
At Oscar time.

But say a prayer, pray for the elite few,
Our mansions proved, so well, that we’re better’n you.
But now a fire’s wrecked the value,
Of our land in Tinseltown.
Our property values are like Kamala,
They just keep on going down.
Our open-borders advocating,
Would give America a browner hue.
But tonight we’re dispossessed, instead of you!

And there won’t be golden statuettes this Oscar night,
No cocaine snorting in the bathroom stall.
Our swag bags burned to ash,
With our MDMA stash.
Do we know it’s Oscar time at all?

Donations will be split between the Hollywood fire rebuilding fund and the Antifa fire restarting fund.

SCREAMING YOURSELF HORSE
There’s an old saying, “You can pick your friends and you can pick your nose, but you can’t pick your friend’s nose.”

Well, if you’re Florida Man Donald Calloway and your best friend’s a horse, that rule does not apply.

Following the widely mocked footage of Trump recoiling in horror as Elon Musk’s son picked his nose in the Oval Office, Calloway said, “Hold my boogers.”

After being called by an understandably flummoxed witness, cops in Lake Wales, Fla., found Calloway in a field, naked and attempting to insert his penis into a horse’s nostril.

Nasophilia is the clinical word for nose fetish. Thanks to Calloway, there’s now a fetish called neighsophilia.

Suffice to say the horse was confused; normally the carrot gets inserted into its mouth.

According to the police report, the 53-year-old Calloway, who, based on his photo, should be called “Sicko Mortensen,” told cops, “It was a dumb decision,” adding, “I haven’t had any sex in probably two months…maybe it was just a sexually frustrated moment.”

Glad he added that “maybe”; it leaves open the possibility that perhaps there was a “better” reason.

Upon hearing that Calloway was only two months sex-deprived, incels across the nation walked just a little taller, proud of the fact that, though far more deprived, they haven’t sunk that low.

“I may masturbate to the Where’s the Beef lady after using AI to make her look like an anime schoolgirl with tentacles, but at least I’m not a freak like Calloway,” one incel told the AP.

According to TMZ, Calloway was booked on one count of sexual contact with animals and one count of robbing officers of their appetite. Speaking from a coin-operated mall airplane ride that he’d mistaken for his flight back to Delaware, Biden expressed regret that he couldn’t put Calloway in charge of the nation’s nuclear energy policy. Or at least the Camp David stables.

PEER-BATTERED WOMEN
Last week the city of Worcester, Mass., declared itself a “sanctuary city” for trannies.

From now on, trannies can come to Worcester and do whatever they want with no consequences.

So, just like every other city in the U.S.

Funny enough, the same week that Worcester gave sanctuary to fake women, trannies in Canada were invading the sanctuary of real women.

To properly understand the Canadian mindset, one must understand the nation’s defining TV show of the 1970s. CBC execs wanted to copy the gritty, cutting-edge sitcoms of the U.S. at the time. And the CBC brain trust decided that it needed a Canadian All in the Family.

CBC McCEO Gordon McThompson: “Oh, eh, we need somethin’ hard-edged and current, like them Norman Lear shows.”

CBC McCFO Gordy McKenzie: “Yeah, like tacklin’ racial matters. But we don’t want any racism, eh?”

CBC McCOO Marilyn McCoo: “We gotta be nice. Hard-edged but nice, and nothin’ hard-edged.”

The result was King of Kensington, about Larry King, a blue-collar white who loves all the races and the gays. Literally, that’s the premise. Each episode saw Larry bonding with African immigrants and cross-dressing paper boys. This was Canada’s Archie Bunker. The opening credits show Larry walking through Kensington as minorities call his name and say, “We love you!”

It was Canada’s top show of the 1970s, repeated endlessly in syndication. And that’s how we got the mess of cowardly weaklings up north.

It’s also how we got the still-unfolding “Mika Katz” scandal. Katz is a tranny who looks like Jeremy Piven with hair plugs. And he’d been “identifying as a woman” to gain access to Edmonton women’s shelters so he could rape the women (you know, that “right-wing myth” that supposedly never happens but always does).

After the first two rapes, Katz was released “on conditions.” The judge literally said, “Now, don’t you go rapin’ in any more shelters, eh?” And of course Katz went raping in more shelters. His victim count is up to four that authorities know of; they think it’s higher.

The “Kink of Kensington” is awaiting trial.

One day Canada will learn that real women don’t have “hosers.”

POP GOES THE MEASLE
“Prism Reports” describes itself as “a journalistic community of people of color truth tellers.”

“People of color truth tellers.” That’s when the black guy introduces himself, tips his cap, says, “Yes, I am going to rob then shoot you,” and, as he’s leaving, adds, “And I feel no remorse. Good day to you, sir.”

Last week Prism reported that Doctors Without Borders (aka “Doctors With Gardeners”) is dealing with a plague of psychological depression among “migrants” trapped on the Mexican side of the border by Trump’s reinstated “Remain in Mexico” program.

Yes, beans are suffering severe depression from being trapped among beans. Wonder if any “truth teller” will explain why, if being immersed in beans causes clinical depression, the U.S. should be expected to take in more beans.

BTW, the technical term for a depressed Mexican is a “somberero.” The technical term for the depression he’s suffering is “Juannui.”

As Doctors With Fentanyl dispatches 105 psychiatrists to the border (ciento-cinco shrinkos) to treat the moody Mexis (gauchos on couchos), the U.S. press is doing its part to mitigate the Hispanic-attacks by blaming the current Texas measles outbreak not on immigrants (which is where it actually came from) but rather on unvaccinated white Mennonites!

For those of you who don’t know, the Mennonite sect was named for a dude named “Menno Stevens.” Good thing the dude wasn’t named Cosmo, or Texas would be crawling with Cosmonites. Mennonites love Baháʼís because their god is named Báb (pronounced “Bob”). Having a god named Bob is the only thing dumber than having a sect named Menno.

The Mennonites are denying that the measles outbreak started with them, although to be fair many sect members have recently transitioned from healthy to ill. But remember, it’s phobic to attack transmennonites, so perhaps it’s best to keep the blame focused on the Mexicans, whose depression might actually be psychosomatic.

After all, as Freud reputedly said, sometimes a sí-gar is just a sí-gar.

CALL ME IMA’AM!
With Jews and Muslims at each other’s throats daily in the Middle East, maybe it’s time to remind members of both groups that they’re brothers…not in DNA, but in astounding bouts of stupidity.

As evidenced by two separate episodes last week.

First, the Muslim. Muhsin Hendricks decided to become the first-ever openly gay imam. Known as the “minaret mincer,” Hendricks is very pro-LGBTQuran.

You know your imam’s not holy when his name is literally “muh sin.”

“Ghayb” is an Arabic word that means “unseen.” Whereas “ghayboy” is something that cannot be unseen. “Jizya” is a tax non-Muslims pay in Muslim lands. “Jizz-ya” is what happens if a handsome young male goes to Hendricks for counseling.

So having decided to come “out” in a religion that forbids homosexuality and a populace that’ll kill you over a doodle, where did Hendricks decide to set up shop? South Africa…a country with so many murders each day, nobody even tries to solve them. And when Hendricks was, of course, shot dead in his car last week, authorities had no way of determining if it was a targeted political assassination or just blacks practicing the national pastime.

Hopefully in his final moments Hendricks’ faith gave him comfort. Don’t kafir the Reaper.

Now to the Jew…

Last week 27-year-old Florida mensch Mordechai Brafman saw what he thought was a car full of Palestinians driving through Miami’s upscale Kvetch District. Outraged, Brafman, who was carrying a handgun (no waiter’s gonna bring him dry brisket), opened fire at the car.

Turns out the car was full of Israeli Jewish tourists.

At the police station, Brafman told detectives, “I don’t understand how I could’ve made that mistake. They had their window down; I could see and hear them. They were loud, abrasive, hairy, and generally unpleasant-looking. What else could they be but Palies?”

He then glanced at his reflection in the interrogation room mirror.

“Oh my God…”

I tried meat grown in a lab.

It tastes like … well … meat.

I guess it is meat, but it’s not grown the normal way.

Scientists extract meat cells from an animal and then grow them in a bioreactor, much like ones you see in a brewery. There, the cells divide again and again until you get … meat.

If you want to try some, you’ll soon be able to.

But not in Florida or Alabama.

There, politicians banned it. Other states now may ban it, too.

“We appreciate that ban,” says Bill Bullard. He lobbies for cattlemen. In my video, he argues, “If not for Alabama and Florida (banning) it, then the meat packers would have the ability to pass it off to unsuspecting consumers as if it were indeed a meat product, which it is not!”

I push back. “But they don’t conceal it! They say (on the label), this is ‘cultivated’ meat.”

“It’s not produced in the same manner!” He replies.

So, what?

But cattle lobbyists won over narrow-minded politicians.

Nebraska Gov. Jim Pillen says, “Fake-meat, petri-dish-meat folks, they’re not going to have a place in Nebraska. ”

Why should politicians get to decide for everyone? If I want to try something, it should be my choice.

An artificial chicken company sauteed some chicken for me. After I tried some, I took the rest outside and offered it to people. It was my unscientific blind taste test: lab-grown versus “farm-raised” chicken from Whole Foods.

Everyone liked both. A few preferred the lab-grown. They said it was “juicier.”

So why can’t consumers in Florida and Alabama (and, if short-sighted politicians get their way, Nebraska, Arizona, Michigan and Tennessee) try it?

Florida’s Agriculture Commissioner wrote me, “If other states want to allow their citizens to be used as guinea pigs for lab meat, they have the freedom to do so. Our consumers will be protected until there is more evidence that this ‘frankenmeat’ is safe.”

Why does he get to decide? Artificial meat is safe enough that the USDA and FDA both approved it. Don’t we own our own bodies? It should be my choice!

I ask lobbyist Bullard, “Why bribe politicians to ban it?”

“It will threaten the viability of our food production,” he responds. “Government has a legitimate role ensuring that we have an abundant, affordable and safe food supply.”

Wow, another silly argument.

Lab-grown beef would make our food supply more secure because there’d be more sources of meat!

By his logic, cars should have been banned to protect the horse and carriage industry. Computers … to protect typewriter makers. And so on.

Melissa Musiker of Upside Foods, which makes lab-grown chicken, points out that they can “make the equivalent of millions of chickens.” With less waste: “No beaks, no feet, no feathers.”

And no animals are killed.

“A lot of people (have an) issue eating animal protein,” Musiker continues, “This is a way for them to literally vote with their plate.”

Exactly. We should be able to use our money to “vote with our plate.” We should get to decide for ourselves if lab-grown meat (or anything) is something we want.

Maybe we won’t like it. Then we won’t buy it.

But it’s wrong for politicians to forbid us to try things.

Desperate to protect government employees who are paid upward of $100,000 a year to surf porn all day (or do something even more disgusting, like funnel money to USAID), Democrats are beside themselves about Elon Musk. His Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) clearly violates the very letter and spirit of government work.

Fourteen states and dozens of “civil servants” (useless government employees) have sued to stop this madman. Luckily for the media, there are stables of law professors ready to assure the public that the lawsuits are based on solid legal theories, just like the Russian collusion investigation, Alvin Bragg’s criminal prosecution of Donald Trump, Colorado’s attempt to keep Trump off the ballot and so on.

The gist of their argument is that Musk has been given enormous power and therefore requires Senate confirmation.

What kind of president would give massive authority to an adviser who hasn’t been confirmed by the Senate? Only every Democratic president who’s ever lived.

The difference is that their advisers are unconfirmed because they’re progressive lunatics who couldn’t be confirmed in a million years. The other difference is the Democrats’ unconfirmed advisers proceed to do things the American people don’t want and didn’t ask for — as opposed to Musk, who is doing something the voters definitely do want and did ask for.

Neither voters nor the Senate voted for Soviet spy Alger Hiss to be President Franklin Roosevelt’s top adviser. But he sat at the president’s side at Yalta, as FDR cheerfully condemned tens of millions of people to live under communism.

(Just think of the havoc Musk could wreak!)

Then there was Hillary Clinton, who was put in charge of remaking America’s entire health care system. She wasn’t confirmed; her only authority came from being the president’s wife. Hillary promptly hired the unconfirmed and unconfirmable Ira Magaziner, and together, they assembled a “task force” with more than 600 members, who not only weren’t confirmed, but whose names were hidden from the public. (Many, it later turned out, had a financial interest in the plan.)

So beloved by the public was Hillary’s task force that it helped usher in a Republican landslide in the next midterm election.

Moving from domestic calamities to international menaces, Susan Rice, President Obama’s secretary of state nominee, withdrew her name because she was facing certain rejection by the Senate for repeatedly lying about the attack on our diplomatic compound in Benghazi. (Rice, along with Hillary and Dana Perino, loudly blamed the Sept. 11, 2012, attack not on the terrorists, but on an American who’d made a video saying mean things about Muhammad. Liberal motto: Always blame Americans first!)

Instead, Rice became Obama’s unconfirmed foreign policy adviser. Among other catastrophes, she enflamed the president’s already difficult relationship with Benjamin Netanyahu by blowing him off during the Iran negotiations. Because, really, what possible interest would Israel have in our talks with a regime whose sole interest is the total eradication of Israel?

This was according to Obama’s Middle East adviser Dennis Ross, who also quoted Rice’s warm remark about Netanyahu, sneering that he did everything but “use the N-word in describing the president.” At least that Iran deal was a huge success!

Obama’s secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, took as her main adviser the unconfirmed Sidney Blumenthal, whom Obama had expressly refused to hire. Fully one-third of her emails on Libya were from Blumenthal, as he guided her into the most disastrous foreign policy mistake in U.S. history, with the possible exception of Yalta: the removal of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddhafi.

This self-aggrandizing idiocy resulted in two world-changing fiascos, including the destruction of Europe.

Gaddhafi was crazy, but after our invasion of Iraq, he became America’s bitch, terrified that we’d invade him next. Nine months after the war began, he voluntarily gave up his nuclear weapons program, invited in weapons inspectors, and finally admitted his role in the Lockerbie bombing, paying billions of dollars to the victims.

(Despite the blindingly obvious timeline, there’s loads of revisionist history out there claiming Iraq had NOTHING to do with it and Gaddhafi had been thinking about giving up nukes for years. Yes, and Ronald Reagan didn’t win the Cold War: It was the brilliant groundwork laid by Harry Truman that finally came to fruition a half-century later. Liberals are frantic revisionists.)

But Hillary, egged on by Blumenthal, wanted a foreign policy win of her own in anticipation of her next presidential run. For no geopolitical reason whatsoever, she pushed a reluctant Obama into approving NATO bombing raids over Libya until Gaddhafi was driven from power.

The deed nearly done, on Aug. 22, 2011, Blumenthal emailed Hillary: “First, brava! This is a historic moment and you will be credited for realizing it.” Telling her to “go on camera,” he instructed, “you must establish yourself in the historical record at this moment.” Finally, he gloated, “You are vindicated.”

As soon as Gaddhafi was murdered in the desert, Mrs. Clinton cackled to a reporter, “We came, we saw, he died.”

The fall of Gaddhafi had two devastating consequences: 1) Libya instantly became a training ground for Islamic terrorist groups like ISIS; and 2) It led directly to the migrant crisis enveloping Europe to this day.

A decade before his death, Gaddhafi had warned European leaders that their continent would turn “black” and “Europe might no longer be European,” unless he blocked the millions of “starving and ignorant Africans” from moving there. European leaders happily paid him billions of dollars to stop the invasion. No Gaddhafi, and now no Europe.

When Elon has created tragedies on four separate continents, give me a call.

Ah, the beauty of language! The English one is as rich as they come, with words such as “osculation,” “verbigeration,” “concupiscence,” “mithridatism,” and “onomatopoeia.” I could go on forever. The latest to be added to an already bulging dictionary is “Toobin.” For any of you unfamiliar with what doing a Toobin is, it is something most young people, especially boys, do while dreaming of sex with a girl. Doing a Toobin became part of the language after Jeffrey Toobin, a left-wing writer for CNN and The New Yorker, was caught masturbating on camera while talking to his editors at the magazine. The New Yorker has become so woke nowadays that masturbation, I would think, is a sine qua non for its writers. He was nevertheless suspended, but doing a Toobin is now part of the language, and if some of you oldies out there have forgotten all about it, turn on CNN and you’ll see Toobin raging against Trump and—hopefully—not masturbating.

When I was at boarding school during the ’50s, a Toobin was referred to in manuals as self-abuse. Not many of us agreed with that depiction, but I’m getting away from the point of my story, which is about language, and the importance of language. Control of language is the most important part of a totalitarian regime. Those nice guys who gave us political correctness knew what they were doing. The natural continuation was woke and the forbidden words in order to get us all thinking and speaking the way they wanted us to. Threats to freedom of speech by woke adherents became the closest Uncle Sam had ever come to a dictatorship, with the media, the academy, Hollywood, and some very big corporations in cahoots. Censoring free speech by The New York Times—and altering history with its false 1619 theory—now lies in ruins thanks to The Donald and chaps like a rich man with twelve children called Musk. Yippee!

Mind you, it’s still much too early, but I can’t help celebrating. DEI is not dead, and rats like Zuckerberg will switch back against Trump the moment he stumbles. But at least we’re talking like human beings once again: We can now buy things rather than purchase them. I can get help rather than obtain it. I can write about my parents rather than my father and mother, and talk about the manpower we lack at times rather than the people who are absent. And my kids can tell me about their husband, wife, boyfriend, or girlfriend rather than their partners.

My friend of more than sixty years, the actress Joan Collins, refused throughout the PC terror period to call herself an actor. “I am an actress,” she corrected those who called her an actor. Good for you, Joanie, and that goes for other terms as well, such as “hero,” “God,” and “chair” to refer to women. De-gendering our way of speaking is supposed to empower the weaker sex, the one I always refer to as the fairer one. It did nothing of the sort. It simply confused the issue and made it possible for the dwarfs of the media to play big shot.

A similar impulse has guided efforts by the PC dictators to popularize inclusive language about race and gender. Engineering how people speak is a totalitarian regime’s dream come true. When I told someone I hardly knew that I was nearly blind in one eye he corrected me: “You mean you’re visually handicapped…” I told him to go and reproduce himself but used a word that begins with the letter F.

Just imagine the kind of world these bums were planning for us where we replaced older terms with newer, more sensitive ones. One was no longer crippled, they were handicapped, the latter word used by sensitive people in the first place. Nothing wrong with being “disabled,” in fact it is far superior to the ghastly woke term of “differently abled.” What a world these people had in store for us. “Unhoused” rather than homeless, the latter already being a euphemism for bum or bag lady.

Inventing euphemisms in order not to wound sounds nice, but it was nothing of the sort. Calling a Walkman a Walkperson is as dumb as those mini-Nazis who tried to control us through language. A female reporter for an English rag took umbrage when I referred to an airline stewardess as a, well, stewardess. Apparently I should have called her an attendant or something like that. (I thought attendants were those men in male bathrooms who gave you a towel after you washed your hands.) All these euphemistic terms came about so ugly-looking people could take umbrage with their betters. They called for inclusive language, which in reality was controlling language. I only hope that the next four years will see female-marked terms return with a vengeance. And while I’m at it, Toobin should always wash his hands.

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