I must say I agree with Taki’s recent assertion on these pages that nobody reads anymore: It certainly explains my own books’ dismal sales figures. Further confirmation of this lamentable observation arrived in the shape of a March survey finding 40 percent of people in the U.K. had not read a single book during 2024. And the other 60 percent had just read Harry Potter, which is worse.
According to the poll, a mere 13 percent of citizens finished more than twenty books in the previous calendar year, this supposedly rendering them as “hard-core readers,” even though this is hardly a rate of toughened ink-consumption to compare to that of Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
Why might this decline in mass readership have occurred? Books just aren’t “accessible” enough to today’s potential readers, we are constantly told: The initialism “TL;DR,” or “Too Long; Didn’t Read,” is often applied by millennials even to particularly extended pieces of graffiti etched upon toilet cubicle walls, so much have contemporary attention spans atrophied in our insidious era of smartphones and social media. But might remedial attempts to make novels, poetry, and nonfiction more accessible actually be part of the whole problem here?
The Unread and the Black
One key barrier to books being accessible often identified by do-gooders relates to ethnicity: Reputedly, many minority groups in the Anglosphere just don’t find our literature all that appealing to them, possibly because it rarely happens to be printed in Swahili, Spanish, or Urdu. White philanthropists tried setting the presses rolling to pump out whole shelves’ worth of racially rejigged rewrites for the popular market, like Diary of a Wimpy Yid, Fifty Shades of Melanin, or Brown Father Investigates, but some casual readers took retitling A Man Called Noon as A Man Called Coon in the wrong way.
As such, the solution preferred by the U.K. government to get non-whites reading was to fund an organization bearing the ironic name of the Good Literary Agency (GLA), which demonstrably wasn’t. The GLA launched in 2017 and parasitically hoovered up £1.3m of taxpayer largesse from unwilling cash pigs like me over the next seven years, before suddenly announcing it was being forced to close down forever at the end of March.
State funding came at second hand, via the quango Arts Council England, which called the GLA a “pioneering force for change,” as it vowed to “blow open the pipeline” for ethnic minority writers by “platforming under-represented voices” in a world that in actual fact was already full to bursting with vastly overpromoted books by talentless non-whites anyway (I discussed one particularly egregious example previously here).
The whole point of the GLA was to open doors for minorities by denying literary representation to majoritarian authors (i.e., me) and trying to sell on the culturally valuable works of Eritreans, Pakistanis, queers, crips, loonies, hobos, “abuse and trauma survivors,” etc., to publishers for profit instead. Then, Arts Council mandarins presumed, by seeing themselves “represented” in the names of authors just like them on front-cover jackets, minorities would be encouraged to put away their phones, knives, and needles for a brief moment and huddle down in their tents and caravans with a ripping good yarn about life amongst legless transgender crack addicts in North Yemen or something instead.
Quite apart from this meaning the Arts Council apparently thought non-white readers were all so bigoted as to choose what books they consumed primarily based upon their authors’ race (that’s just Oprah Winfrey), I also have to question how disabled, homeless, or raped people would even know published authors were also able to be classified as being such, just by immediately looking at their names. Maybe another minority group being targeted by the GLA was clairvoyants?
If the Good Literary Agency truly wanted to begin “platforming under-represented voices” in the publishing industry today, they should have tried signing up some people who can actually write.
Charge of the Shite Brigade
GLA cofounder Nikesh Shukla was previously known for editing a 2016 essay collection called The Good Immigrant, whose subject matter I can only presume did not include himself.
In 2021, the demonstrably shunned-by-high-white-society Shukla turned down the honor of a prestigious MBE award from HM the Queen on account of the fact the letters “MBE” stand for “Member of the British Empire.” However, “I cannot think of anything I want less than to be a member of that Empire,” he said, despite continuing to live and work in the hated Imperial capital rather than in India where his ancestors came from for some strange reason. Instead, Shukla got up on his Empire-funded soapbox to piously declaim: “Time will eventually consume those people who are proud of Britain’s bloody, colonial history. I am happy to watch them crumble and fall.”
I was very happy to watch your Shitty Litty Agency crumble and fall this year, too, Shukla—especially given the fact it meant more of my tax money might now go toward funding useful things like nurses, teachers, schools, and hospitals. Shukla says he is a big fan of a poetry collection called Fuck/Empire. I’m a big fan of one called Fuck/Off, Then.
It is extremely telling that the Good Literary Agency was pulped once and for all after, so it says, “feeling the effects of [publishers’] investment in authors becoming more and more stretched and squeezed each year we’ve been operating,” as this would tend to indicate its authors, once signed up and spewed out onto bookstore shelves, were not actually terribly popular or profitable in the main—at least, not enough to cover the agency’s running costs. In a valedictory statement, the GLA did claim to have generated millions of pounds for its 200 or so lucky Eskimo-Arab nonbinary authxrs and authxresses, but not all publishers are so lucky as their wonderfully diverse authors are.
Previous investigations have discovered that an industry-wide wave of young, BLM-worshipping staff members at publishing companies signing up random minoritarian authors on absurdly overgenerous contracts in the wake of the 2020 death of George Floyd cost the industry massive sums of shekels due to pathetically poor sales. One particularly bad instance was a “queer, feminist Western” called Lucky Red by Claudia Cravens. Despite Cravens getting a $500,000 advance, it sold only around 3,500 copies, nowhere near enough to make the firm its silver dollars back; googling its title, the No. 1 U.K. result was for Lucky Red Chinese Takeaway in Leeds! Maybe sales would have been better if they’d called it Gay Out West? Ride ’em, cowboy—no, wait, not like that…
Goodnight Uncle Tom
This whole idea inevitably extends to hooking readers on woke identitarian trash young, hence another U.K. agency specializing in kids’ books, Ash Literary, advertised online to receive a desired manuscript of the next Goodnight Mister Tom (a popular U.K. children’s novel about a child evacuee escaping from Blitz-era London to the safety of the English countryside) like so: “We are not interested in stories about white able-bodied WW2 evacuees but would welcome that [same] story from a disabled, LGBTQ+ or BIPOC [Black or Indigenous Person of Color] perspective.”
So if, for example, you pen a semi-pornographic children’s novel about a 12-year-old West Indian lad who gets his arms and legs blown off by a Nazi V-2 and then is shipped off to rural Wiltshire, where the old man who “kindly” takes him under his roof turns out to be a 55-year-old Afghan pederast who takes advantage of the black boy’s immobility to molest him in his spine-supporting bed harness each night, then that’s the kind of thing that would get you taken on—NOT racist heteronormative filth about healthy, able-bodied white kids enjoying jolly japes in the Lake District with catapults and sailing boats far away from Hitler’s bombs!
Or would it? Not necessarily, because, Ash Literary adds, every bit as confused by the difference between autobiographies and fiction as Misha Defonseca once was, “If your book is about an identity that is not yours, we will not be a good fit. This includes books based on the experiences of family members or friends.”
So, if you are not currently a gay, black, 12-year-old limbless WWII refugee yourself, don’t even think about sending in such a piece of blatant cultural appropriation. How was Ash Literary expecting to receive submissions for this specified 1940–45 scenario, precisely? Via time machine? (Actually, the firm only accepts manuscripts through an online portal named “QueryManager,” surely a misprint for “QueeryManager.”)
AI-sop’s Fable
It gets worse. In apparent violation of antidiscrimination law, numerous U.S. literary journals are now charging white people to submit stories or poems, whilst letting non-whites do so for free. Another way of putting this would be “forcing whites to pay for non-whites to get something for nothing” (see also the welfare benefits system).
Unsurprisingly within such an environment, there are now cases on record of disappointed white people posing as Chinese when submitting their work, thinking this the only plausible way to get it accepted; there’s a piece about this in The New Yorker by a journalist called Hua Hsu, whose real name, I suspect, is actually Brian O’Leary. Ironically, another exposé in Compact magazine recently revealed that The New Yorker itself has not printed a single piece of fiction by any white male born in America after 1984; no wonder Mr. O’Leary felt the need to go to such lengths to get himself published there.
Yet the whole trend is every bit as pointless as Sisyphus endlessly pushing that boulder up the hill in Albert Camus. You don’t need to artificially discriminate against whites to get good books by other ethnicities in print. There are plenty of genuinely all-time classic old texts out there written by Jews, like American Pastoral by Philip Roth, by Hispanics, like One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, by Muslims, like the Koran by Allah, and by blacks, like The Protocols of the Elders of Zion by Candace Owens.
Most sane and literate people choose their reading matter based upon quality of plot and prose, not the skin color, number of limbs, or obscure and niche sexual preferences of the author. And those who do are idiots: Even artificial intelligence says so.
In January, Fable, some pointless online thing where people log the books they have read all year and then publicly share their list with others to show off about how great and clever they are, used AI to issue users with an end-of-year “wrap” of all the titles they had showily consumed during 2024, intending to lend them helpful suggestions for further reading material. Amusingly, though, it went rogue, like HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey, but much more sensible, and told several more racially obsessed Fable readers to put down their Ibram X. Kendi and Toni Morrison for five minutes and “Don’t forget to surface for the occasional white author, okay?”
Taki’s recent lament was that, by putting proper scribblers out of work and so acting to “kill good writing,” AI might herald the end of the entire publishing industry. It sounds to me like it may be its savior.
The Week’s Most Drooling, Cooling, and April Fooling Headlines
CONSTIPATION CAMP
Last week saw a Chicago-to-India flight that was forced to abort because the toilets became clogged and feces flooded the aisles.
Well, as the old saying goes, it’s feast or famine. Sometimes there’s too much poop…and sometimes there’s not enough.
This week on a United flight from Mexico to Houston, an Orthodox Jewish passenger apparently had a severe bout of constipation. Like, really severe.
Forget “brace for impact”; this flight had to brace for impacted.
As Yisroel Liebb of New Jersey struggled in the restroom, hoping to start a Tal-mudslide of Doo-teronomy Old Testament-style but only proving the New Testament correct that you can’t pass a camel through the eye of a needle, his fellow passengers were disturbed by the melodic screams emanating from the restroom.
When it came to expelling his waste, Liebb wasn’t so much a Cantor as a “Can’t-or,” and the restroom became a syna-gag as Liebb wrestled with the largest stone a Jew’s encountered since the one they’d used to block Jesus’ tomb.
In terms of Liebb’s anal tissue, this was the Shroud of Tearin’.
Not a joke: After thirty minutes of the entire cabin listening to Liebb try to escape from Poochenwald, the pilot kicked in the bathroom door and dragged Liebb, pants down and genitalia exposed, back to his seat.
Ironically in second class…the perfect spot for No. 2.
Liebb has, of course, filed suit. And if any good’s come from this, it’s proved once and for all that Candace Owens is wrong about Jews eating babies, because you can’t get constipation from a diet that high in fiber.
SCISSORED SISTERS
This year’s been a difficult one for Los Angeles’ lesbian fire captains.
Mind you, it’s been a bit harder for the 16,000 Angelenos displaced by the February wildfires. And harder still for the 29 Angelenos burned to a crisp. But this is L.A., and if you don’t see your initials in the LGBT acronym, you don’t matter.
So the other LGBTs—“Lit, Grilled, Burned, and Toasted”—can go ahead and shut up.
Back to the real victims: the lesbians. Last month L.A. mayor Karen Bass fired the city’s lesbian fire chief Kristin Crowley for not ensuring that there was adequate water in the city’s hydrants and reserves.
As if a dyke wasn’t gonna hold back water. It’s right there in the name.
Though dismissed from her top spot, Crowley’s union insisted that she retain a position at the LAFD. Apparently, you can’t fire a lesbian. Something to do with the Mufft-Hartley Act.
Meanwhile, last month L.A. fire captain Rebecca Marodi was stabbed to death by her wife, Yolanda. Turns out Yolanda had previously been convicted in the stabbing death of her husband, James Olejniczak, but she served less than a decade because a court ruled that the stabbing was justified as nobody should ever have to adopt a last name no human can pronounce.
So Marodi, the fire captain, married Yolanda, the murderess, and expected a different outcome. She married a woman who’d dealt with marital strife by filleting her spouse, and she was like, “I’m sure our domestic disputes won’t end the same way.”
And that’s why L.A. burned down. Not because of lesbians, but because of the dumbest lesbians on earth.
Needless to say, after their first domestic clash, Yolanda pulled out the ol’ rug cutter and stabbed Marodi multiple times. The dying captain is heard on the Ring cam pleading, “Yolanda, please! I don’t want to die!”
Which normally works on killers. Odd that this time it didn’t.
Yolanda went on the Yo-lam-da, but last week she was arrested in Mexico. She was immediately extradited to the U.S., making history as the only Mexican to actually want Trump to keep her out.
MARVELIN’ HAGGLER
Tranny-mania has made life difficult for celebrity hag wives. In the old days, if a handsome or successful male celebrity married a withered old bag, the talk would center on the husband. Maybe he’s gay. Maybe she has money. Maybe he’s such a man of character that he can find beauty in even the most shopworn of leather.
Take Ted Danson. When he came to fame in the early 1980s—tall, good-looking, personable, talented—Hollywood couldn’t get over the fact that he was married to the woman who lost out on the “where’s the beef” role because Wendy’s feared that her withered visage would put people off their food.
So, sure, Danson’s wife took a lot of shots from the press. But at least people were willing to cede that she was a woman. An ugly-ass Methuselah-looking old bat, but a biological woman.
And when Danson ended up leaving her for Whoopi Goldberg, everyone was like, “Oh, okay, he just likes ugly chicks.”
But again, the haters at least acknowledged that the chicks were chicks.
Ditto Matthew Broderick. Dude went to Easter Island, dug up one of the monolithic giant-headed statues, named it Sarah Jessica Parker, and married it. And while Parker does occasionally have to fend off Rapa Nuis who continually place offerings of fruit at her feet, the world, at least, acknowledges that she’s a woman.
But now, with trannies having blurred the line between what’s a woman and what’s not, ugly old hags are bearing the brunt of this new era of sexual suspicion. As per The Telegraph last week, the conspiracy theories surrounding Brigitte Macron, the zombified scarecrow taken as a bride by French president Emmanuel Macron, have become so widespread thanks to rightist “influencers” like Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson who claim that the French First Lady is trans, the beleaguered Ms. Macron is no longer seen as an ugly old female gorilla, but a man of rather refined features.
So is that better…or worse? A woman so homely she could be a man, or a man so delicate he could be a woman?
This is the struggle. Godspeed, hags.
THE BJ NO MAN WANTS
Everyone knows Ben & Jerry’s as the hippy-dippy left-wing overpriced purveyor of guar gum, carrageenan, and soy lecithin sweetened with chocolate and vanilla extract.
Always the first to virtue signal, B&J has routinely released special ice cream flavors to take advantage of a moment of progressive social upheaval. This has included Gorge Floyd (dark chocolate sprinkled with benzodiazepines to inhibit breathing), Pisstachio (in honor of Diddy and his sexual kinks), Dulce de Lecherous (in support of immigrant sex criminals from Guatemala), and of course Salines ’n’ Cream, an ode to abortion released after Roe was overturned.
But all is not well in Ben & Jerry-land. The company’s accusing its corporate parent, Unilever, of having fired the B&J CEO for his outspoken views. That CEO, David Stever, was removed and replaced following a series of pro-Palestinian and anti-Israel tweets, as well as tweets in support of Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian welfare-taking ingrate who was booted from the U.S. following multiple calls to exterminate Jews.
Because isn’t that what ice cream’s all about? Genocide?
The decision to remove Stever was Unilever’s to make, right or wrong. Maybe the hippies who run B&J shouldn’t have sold the company to a faceless British conglomerate in the first place. Still, while the choice of CEO might be Unilever’s, B&J retains all rights to decide which new flavors they manufacture.
So in honor of Khalil, next month the company will be unveiling Allahu Snackbar—baklava-flavored ice cream with just a hint of Semtex—and Martyramisu, a coffee-flavored pipe bomb.
Additionally, to make a statement against the brutal Jewish state, B&J will be releasing Cookies ’n’ Creamation, an Auschwitz-themed sherbet topped with crumbled Gestaporeo cookies (served in vanilla, chocolate, or Sobiberry). And of course Flan Frank, a creamy custard that has a habit of hiding undetected in your colon after you’ve consumed it. But don’t worry—a few scoops of Dutch chocolate will flush it out…though you may be saddled with the diarrhea of Flan Frank.
THE DEVIL, YOU SAY?
Remember when the IRS, under Trump, granted the Satanic Temple full 501(c)(3) protection as a recognized tax-exempt religious institution?
No?
Well, it happened, and satanists are thanking Trump by launching “hail Satan” clubs in schools nationwide.
Conservatives are urging Trump’s new IRS commissioner to reverse the 2019 decision. But some on the right are concerned that if the administration reneges on its deal with the devil, Steve Bannon will rapidly begin deteriorating like Dorian Gray, becoming a hideous mound of pussy pustuled deformed fatty flesh hanging loosely from a moldy cadaverous skeletal frame.
Wait…looks like the Devil never honored his part of that deal in the first place.
Meanwhile, in other school news…
At Beverly Hills High, blacks comprise only 2.5 percent of the student body. Following Trump’s victory in November, students in this red, heavily Persian city held pro-Trump celebration rallies in the middle of campus.
And how did Principal Drew Stewart respond? By mandating that in 2025 the white and Persian students would no longer be able to “congregate, circle up, shout, jump, etc.”
Had blacks at any school been told they can’t “congregate,” “jump,” and “shout,” Governor Newsom would’ve sent in the National Guard. The black students would’ve argued that banning shouting is denying them their birthright.
The Beverly High “shout, jump” ban was spearheaded by two black school officials, Bella Ivory and Laura Collins-Williams, who are both suing the district for “racism.”
So as of now at Beverly High, white kids can’t jump. Nor can Jews.
No word if the handful of blacks can at least jump the broom. After all, it’s tradition.
In his autobiography, John Stuart Mill describes an important moment in his life, a kind of intellectual and moral epiphany. Until that moment, Mill had devoted himself to various schemes of political, economic, and social reform, but suddenly he asked himself whether, if all the reforms that he advocated were to come to fruition, he would have found complete satisfaction in life: to which the resounding answer was “No.”
In an instant, he had come to the realization that such reform was not the key to a perfect existence, that something else was needed in human life other than the perfection of political, economic, and social arrangements, even if such perfection were attainable. This realization had a devastating effect on him, for it suggested that he, who prided himself on his rationality, had been living until then in a kind of dreamworld.
Mill was an exceptionally clever and upright man, though perhaps not one overendowed with humor. If you look at G.F. Watts’ moving portrait of him (good portrait painting conveys something of the inner man), you will at once see that he was a man of granite integrity, and that if he made mistakes, it could not have been through dishonesty. It is not surprising, then, that he of all people had had his intellectual and moral epiphany.
The great majority of mankind is not capable of this, however, and there is probably a larger number of people than ever before who believe that in reform is to be found human perfection and the whole purpose of existence—because not to believe it would upset their worldview. When their reforms fail to bring about the promised land, when life fails to respond positively to their nostrums, they simply dream up further nostrums to bring the world nearer to perfection. They are like people in the desert who crawl toward their mirages without ever realizing that they are mirages. Failure does not discourage them; rather it spurs them on. It would be admirable if it were not so often destructive.
If anyone thought that if the transsexual movement obtained all its goals there would be a moratorium on demand for changes to sexual morality, he or she would be sadly mistaken. What will be the next thing after transsexualism? For that there will be a next thing once everyone has been bored into submission on this subject is certain. I think incest is a distinct possibility, now that all the “rational” arguments against it have been overcome or made redundant by technical developments such as intrauterine DNA testing. But it might just as well be something else.
The dismantlement of art galleries and museums is another field for those who find in reform the meaning of their lives. Quite recently there has grown up something of a movement, as yet small, to forbid the display of ancient Egyptian mummies in museums on the grounds that the persons interred in this way, or their close relatives or descendants, never gave their consent to be so displayed. The human rights of the ancient Egyptians are therefore not being respected.
Now, it is certainly true that human remains are to be respected, and it is shocking, at least to me, when they are not treated with a kind of reverence. I was once in friendly correspondence with an American doctor, much older than I, about many subjects. I had known him—by correspondence, never in person—for a few years when he was diagnosed with an inevitably fatal illness. He was a highly intelligent, well-read, and cultivated man, and it shocked me when he told me that he would not mind if his body after his death was rendered for fertilizer or for some other useful purpose, even that of being fed to the pigs. After all, once dead, what would it matter to him? He said it was not rational to worry about the disposal of one’s own body, or for that matter the disposal of anyone else. Perhaps so: But if so, then so much the worse for rationality. It might not have been rational of Shah Jahan to have built the Taj Mahal as the tomb of Mumtaz Mahal, but I can’t help being glad that he did so.
Displaying Egyptian mummies is not disrespectful and tends rather to inspire awe in visitors to museums than, say, derision or contempt. And I cannot help feeling that no one can truly feel concern for the human rights of people who lived 4,000 years ago, and therefore that it is not such concern that motivates them. It is, rather, the desire to eviscerate museums as such that drives them forward, museums having previously been all but untouchable.
In fact, or perhaps more modestly I should say that I surmise that, it is their desire to reform their society to death, until no institution is left, that motivates the friends of the mummies.
Let us suppose that they have their wish, and that mummies are removed from all museums throughout the world in the name of some kind of human right, or removed in that part of the world that is constantly discovering new human rights. The militants would simply switch their attention to something else, let us say to portrait paintings or even photographs. The subjects of portraits or photographs, after all, never gave their permission for thousands of unknown people to look at them: They ordered their portraits and photographs for far other purposes. To expose portraits, therefore, to the gawping multitudes in the Uffizi, say, or the Prado, is morally illegitimate and demeaning. The subjects of them never gave their permission to be looked at in this way, and until such permission is found (which it never will be), the portraits or photographs should be hidden from public view. The fact that the portraits may be only 400 years old rather than 4,000 does not alter the principle. Let us never forget that the only person who can give permission for a portrait to be displayed is the person portrayed.
And what of the poor dinosaurs, whose skeletons excite children in museums round the world? Wasn’t it bad enough for them to go extinct without being exposed to the oohs and aahs of idly curious children, and this without the dinosaurs’ permission having even been sought?
Theodore Dalrymple’s latest book is On the Ivory Stages (Mirabeau Press).
For a totally different angle on the encrypted app story, I thought that instead of discussing how plans for bombing the Houthis were leaked, I’d discuss the bombing of the Houthis.
Including any journalist in a top-secret discussion of war plans demonstrates shocking incompetence. But the fact that National Security Adviser Mike Waltz included The Atlantic‘s Jeffrey Goldberg — though not technically a journalist — is a big middle finger to President Trump.
Forget that Goldberg is responsible for the disgusting lie — featured nightly on MSNBC — that Trump called American soldiers who died in war “suckers” and “losers.” Both Waltz and Goldberg represent the dominant foreign policy establishment that Trump expressly ran against. Instead of “Make America Great Again,” they think the government’s job is to “Make the Middle East Great Again.”
This train wreck will be a test to see: 1) if Trump has an ounce of self-respect and will fire a national security adviser who has an anti-Trump zealot on speed dial; and 2) whether Trump intends to betray voters on his clearly stated opposition to Forever Wars.
Because right now, his foreign policy team is looking like John Bolton without the ridiculous Wilford Brimley mustache. Since Trump keeps hiring these people, it’s a good time to remind him that, in 2016, he won more primary votes than any Republican in U.S. history (as well as the election) by saying things like this about a war that had a million more justifications than his recent bombing of the Houthis:
“Obviously, the war in Iraq was a big, fat mistake. … We spent $2 trillion, thousands of lives … George Bush made a mistake. We can make mistakes. But that one was a beauty. We should have never been in Iraq. We have destabilized the Middle East.”
So why does Trump keep surrounding himself with tinhorn cowboys who think it’s America’s responsibility to drone, bomb, invade and occupy other countries whenever and for whatever reason they want?
The one person in that chat within shouting distance of Trump’s idea to put America first was Vice President JD Vance, who briefly interrupted the drums of war to say:
“I think we are making a mistake. 3 percent of US trade runs through the suez. 40 percent of European trade does. There is a real risk that the public doesn’t understand this or why it’s necessary. The strongest reason to do this is, as POTUS said, to send a message.”
Naturally, The Wall Street Journal put Vance’s remarks through the Murdoch 2000 computer and came out with an editorial as stupid as it was snarky, claiming that the vice president was being disloyal to Trump. In fact, he was about the only one in that group chat being faithful to Trump’s avowed policy.
The single counter argument given by the warmongers was “deterrence,” the endlessly malleable excuse for killing anyone, anywhere, anytime.
While I understand the satisfaction of having random bad guys’ heads blown off — and much as we all enjoyed the Israeli exploding pager affair — it’s hard not to notice that incessantly bombing the rest of the world has not made America safer. This is why I strongly support Trump’s decision to remove Secret Service protection from his first term’s version of Waltz: Bolton and Mike Pompeo.
First, I want to make clear that, after much careful consideration, I am against Americans being killed by terrorists.
But the reason Bolton and Pompeo received full-time protection was because of their insistence that Trump assassinate Qassem Soleimani, a high-ranking Iranian official, in January 2020.
Soleimani was a bad guy, but not nearly as bad as some of our dearest allies, like Jared Kushner’s BFF, Saudi Crown Prince “Bone Cutter” Mohammed bin Salman. And he was in the process of meeting with an Iraqi official — at the U.S.’s request — to strike a truce with Saudi Arabia. And he was beloved by the Iranian people, who credit him — not Trump — with wiping out ISIS.
But assassinating Soleimani made Bolton and Pompeo feel like Masters of the Universe. Who cares if they stirred up a hornet’s nest in a not-especially rational part of the world? Iraq was enraged, Iran vowed retaliation, and Americans in the region were warned to leave because of the inevitable reprisal. No Secret Service protection for them!
What is usually enraging about reckless policies that endanger innocent Americans is that the people who implement them remain comfortably insulated from their effects. No-bail laws, open borders, Obamacare, gun control, TSA, actually having to watch Nicolle Wallace — somehow the people responsible for these policies always have a work-around.
Similarly, self-imagined geopolitical chess players can carelessly risk American lives by ticking off the rest of the world and inviting payback, secure in the knowledge that they, personally, will have 24-7 Secret Service protection for the rest of their lives.
Instead of MAGA having to constantly remind Trump what the first “A” stands for, why not incentivize the people who keep dropping bombs on people’s heads to adopt a more humble foreign policy by removing their Secret Service protection?
Trump can be enraging, maddening, frustrating. But like the Coca-Cola recipe, he’s at his best when he sticks to the original formula. We don’t want Trump Lite, “As Inspired By” Donald Trump or Trump-adjacent. He was very clear about what he wanted, he won the presidency, and there’s a good chance he’ll be on Mount Rushmore. There’s no chance Mike Waltz will be.
“I’ve often wondered why conservative Christians remain the most faithful friends of American Jews but have their friendship repeatedly spurned in favor of a Jewish alliance with the cultural and political left.” So wrote Paul Gottfried, editor of Chronicles magazine, a conservative monthly. The recent war in Gaza began with the butchering of 1,200 innocent Israelis, but as of this moment the response has been more than 55,000 dead Palestinians and over 80,000 wounded—a number of civilian casualties that would mortify Genghis Khan. The slightest mention of these innocent deaths caused by indiscriminate Israeli bombing has the neocons and AIPAC, not to mention my favorite newspaper, the New York Post, claiming the Nazis are back and a new Holocaust is about to begin. Only last week, 463 dead and 600 injured Palestinians were dismissed as if an exterminator had gotten rid of unwanted insects in a housing area. Anyone protesting is more likely to be called a Nazi than to be heard. In Britain, The Daily Telegraph and the Daily Mail, two conservative papers, hardly mentioned the casualties of the bombing. Columnist after columnist extolled Israel’s restraint in the face of 1,200 dead, as if the number 1,200 vastly exceeded the number 55,000.
Are Jewish lives far more precious than Palestinian ones? In America and Britain it is a given that Black Lives Matter. Well, they do in America and Britain, but they do not matter at all in Africa. Nor do Palestinian lives matter, at least not enough to be mentioned in America and in Britain. History has been weaponized by Zionists, and the Holocaust is invoked to silence any criticism of Israel. As I write, another 85 flies—sorry, Palestinians—have been killed. Watching this on screen, I see a father holding a dead 2-year-old child and demanding to know: What has he done to Israel? He is guilty of what?
Netanyahu ordered food, fuel, and medicine to be stopped for 2.3 million Gazans just before the resumption of hostilities. If this wasn’t a major crime, my name is Adolf Hitler. Western media correctly describes the October 7 Hamas attack as sadistic barbarism. What angers me is the same media fails to decry the starvation, the atrocities, and the bombing of women, children, and old people by 2,000-pound bombs provided to Israel by Americans.
Any criticism of Israeli brutalities is immediately labeled anti-Semitic, this being among the oldest tricks of the neocons, those nice guys who gave us the Iraq War; people like the Podhoretzes, the Kristols, the Feiths, the Wolfowitzes, and the Kagans. They knew what they were doing. Dubious accusations of anti-Semitism were reserved for paleoconservatives like my friend Pat Buchanan, a great American patriot who was not fooled about what lay behind the war: Israel worried about Saddam and needed Uncle Sam to pull the rug out from under him.
And then there’s Mearsheimer and Walt, two brilliant intellectuals who criticized the Jewish lobby and wrote some terrific books about the lobby’s influence in America. The level of unhinged, ferocious hatred of their books, devoid of any proof that they are anti-Semitic, was hysterical and venomous. Had they been related to Hitler by blood, and had they partaken in putting Jews in concentration camps, the attacks on their persons would not have been worse. But what really bothers me is the media’s lack of interest where Palestinian deaths and injuries are concerned. We used to think that various human subjects, like Rome’s slaves, gladiators, and barbarians, were not worthy of moral consideration. Eventually we corrected that, or thought we did. Roman emperor Domitian spent his youth catching and killing flies. He became an elder tyrant and the cruelest of them all. At times I wonder if Bibi Netanyahu spent his youth pulling wings from insects.
Israel’s defenders are outraged at a “globally orchestrated campaign” against Israel’s war in Gaza. There is no campaign, just outrage at the violence and brutality against a defenseless people by the IDF. Israel has killed, blinded, and maimed thousands upon thousands of innocent women, children, and old people. If there was such a globally orchestrated campaign against Israel, the war would have been stopped long ago. No one cares about the Palestinians, and anyone who does is painted as an anti-Semite. Believe me, I am among the first to know.
Nothing remains but a desert of rubble. A graveyard if there ever was one. Oh yes, I almost forgot. There are also crippled orphans, the blind, and the homeless. A Palestinian Riviera, to be sure.
One of the more curious aspects of the second Trump administration is how, without warning to voters, the White House has suddenly become more pugnacious than James K. Polk at threatening wars of conquest in the frozen north. As Donald Trump recently ominously observed:
We need Greenland for national security and even international security. And I think we’re going to get it one way or the other.
For example, with Second Lady Usha Vance soon to visit Greenland due to her newly discovered fascination with dogsled racing, JD Vance told Fox News:
Denmark, which controls Greenland, it’s not doing its job and it’s not being a good ally. So you have to ask yourself: “How are we going to solve that problem, solve our national security?” If that means that we need to take more territorial interest in Greenland, that is what President Trump is going to do, because he doesn’t care about what the Europeans scream at us. He cares about putting the interest of America’s citizens first.
Of course, objectively, Denmark is a pretty good ally. It has let America build up our Thule Air Base (now renamed Pituffik Space Base), where my brother-in-law served in the 1980s, for free since 1951. During WWII the Danish government-in-exile endorsed the U.S.’s occupation of Greenland, and likely would in the case of WWIII unless America made itself too obnoxious.
Denmark has also fought alongside the U.S. in our post-9/11 wars. On a per capita basis, little Denmark lost three-fourths as many men in combat in Afghanistan as the U.S. did.
Denmark currently devotes 2.4 percent of its GDP to defense, less than America’s 3.4 percent, but above average for NATO and more than Britain, France, or Germany spends. It has committed to boosting military spending to at least 3 percent of GDP next year.
It’s been the world’s second most generous relative contributor of aid to Ukraine, following only Estonia, giving four times as much proportionally as the U.S.
And Denmark’s immigration restriction policies ought to have served as a role model for America over the past two dozen years.
In other words, Denmark is close to America’s ideal ally.
These are all reasons why nobody in America was sore at Denmark until Trump decided he was. Now, though, many are scrambling to come up with rationalizations for why Denmark deserves to have Greenland stolen from it.
Presumably, Trump doesn’t really want to go to war with Denmark, he just wants to extort a lower price.
But vindicating wars of conquest is one of the worst ideas imaginable in 2025. After all, Washington wants a Taipei that remains independent from Beijing. But America doesn’t have much of a legal argument for that, having recognized China’s legal claim to Taiwan since the 1970s…other than that aggressive wars are bad.
Which they are.
I realize that a bunch of kids on Twitter think that Nietzsche made modern war sound like great fun. But that turned out not to be true in World War I, due to the artillery and machine guns. And combat sure isn’t in Ukraine, what with all the flying death robots.
In contrast, proposing to buy Greenland from Denmark at a fair price was one of the more interesting initiatives of the first Trump administration’s fairly amiable foreign policy, which saw some unexpected successes, such as Trump charming Mexico’s leftist president Andrés Manuel López Obrador into cooperating with his effective Remain in Mexico plan for slowing the influx of Central Americans through the southern border.
Granted, the U.S. purchasing Greenland for a mutually agreeable price would have violated the unwritten rule of thumb since about 1960 that countries shouldn’t get bigger. (The main internationally recognized exception was India adding some territories, such as the Portuguese colony of Goa in 1962 and formerly independent Sikkim in 1975.)
I realize that paying attention to international recognition sounds wussy, but please notice that Vlad Putin is obsessed with getting recognition of his annexation of four Ukrainian provinces (three of which he hasn’t fully gone through the formality of conquering yet) recognized.
In contrast, Israel’s conquests in 1967, Indonesia’s occupation of East Timor, and Morocco’s of Western Sahara (both in the tumultuous year of 1975) were not widely recognized abroad (which cost Indonesia dearly in 1998).
But then the Trump-Kushner administration recognized Israel’s annexation of the Golan Heights. One could argue that Israel is special, but then, Trump-Kushner recognized mediocre Morocco’s invasion of Spain’s former colony of Western Sahara in order to secure Morocco’s recognition of Israel.
Did this encourage Putin to think his invasion of Ukraine might likewise be recognized?
On the other hand, it’s not clear if there really is a norm against territorial expansion by purchase. There clearly has been one against expansion by conquest since shortly after World War II, when the Soviet Union expanded a couple of hundred miles westward and the U.S. acquired a few Pacific islands (rather small acquisitions considering the colossal scale of the conflict).
But, in contrast, there hasn’t been much interest in peacefully buying territory since, say, the U.S. bought Denmark’s Virgin Islands in 1917. Nor have there been payments to the losers in wars of conquest, the way the U.S. paid Spain for the Philippines in 1898 and Mexico for California in 1848. (After 2014, I’d idly pondered Russia trying to mollify Ukraine for its land grabs by offering, say, $100 billion for Crimea, but that idea didn’t seem to appeal to anybody else. On the other hand, how has not settling their dispute for cash worked out for all concerned? Modern war is expensive.)
One reason that payment for territory is out of fashion are ideologies associated with nationalism and decolonization. For example, when Imperial Germany bullied the Bolsheviks into relinquishing Ukraine at Brest-Litovsk in January 1918, Germany didn’t formally acquire Ukraine the way it had annexed Alsace and Lorraine after the Franco-Prussian war of 1870. Instead, Berlin sponsored an independent Ukrainian state (which, presumably, would have been an economic underling of Germany).
Hence, it’s likely that the U.S. would end up paying twice for Greenland, once to Denmark and then again to the indigenous Inuit population. To me, it sounds like a tedious imbroglio to take on responsibility for a bunch of drunken Eskimos who owe zero loyalty to America. But you can just do things, so what do I know relative to teenage Trump enthusiasts on X?
Yet another reason that you never hear anymore about payment for territory is because land, unless it has cheaply accessible oil and gas, isn’t all that valuable anymore, relatively speaking. For instance, you hear lots of chatter about Greenland’s purported vast wealth of rare earth elements, but the total revenue from all the rare earth elements mined in 2024 was a measly $4 billion.
Nations used to worry about their population expanding more than could be fed by their farmland, but since the development of the Haber-Bosch process for generating nitrogen fertilizer from the air in 1913, the supply side of the problem has dwindled. And lately the demand side of the problem is disappearing outside of Africa.
Another reason countries don’t bother expanding by purchase anymore is that, as Norman Angell pointed out in The Great Illusion just before the Great War, piracy and property rights don’t mix well:
If credit and commercial contract are tampered with in an attempt at confiscation, the credit-dependent wealth is undermined, and its collapse involves that of the conqueror; so that if conquest is not to be self-injurious it must respect the enemy’s property, in which case it becomes economically futile. Thus the wealth of conquered territory remains in the hands of the population of such territory. When Germany annexed Alsace, no individual German secured a single mark’s worth of Alsatian property as the spoils of war. Conquest in the modern world is a process of multiplying by x, and then obtaining the original figure by dividing by x. For a modern nation to add to its territory no more adds to the wealth of the people of such nation than it would add to the wealth of Londoners if the City of London were to annex the county of Hertford.
Angell is often laughed at as a poor prophet, but how well did the Great War pay off for his skeptics?
Similarly, what’s the benefit of Trump’s plan of making Canada the 51st state when it would get 55 electoral votes and give the Democrats one-party rule?
The main reason for territorial expansion is to increase the size of your population and thus your army so that you can expand some more.
But what’s the point for citizens, per capita?
The U.S. already owns the best parts of North America. That was President Polk’s insight: There were five great natural harbors on the west coast: Acapulco, San Diego, San Francisco, Seattle, and Vancouver. Let the Mexicans keep the southernmost and the British empire the northernmost and America will get the rest.
How did that work out for the United States?
Pretty great, in fact.
As Abraham Lincoln asked:
Shall we expect some transatlantic military giant to step the ocean and crush us at a blow? Never! All the armies of Europe, Asia, and Africa combined, with all the treasure of the earth (our own excepted) in their military chest, with a Bonaparte for a commander, could not by force take a drink from the Ohio or make a track on the Blue Ridge in a trial of a thousand years.
Since then, the fact that the United States could conquer Canada and Mexico but hasn’t, has contributed to the rest of the world more or less acceding to American world leadership. That America has such a fine piece of real estate that it doesn’t bother to bully its immediate neighbors suggests that it won’t attempt to pilfer the rest of the world.
Yet, Trump’s elderly thought pattern seems to be to pull America back from commitments overseas in order to tyrannize the inferior regions of North America. Hence, his bizarre insistence on renaming the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America after 475 years.
Of course, being the global alpha male is moderately expensive—the U.S. ranks 25th out of 166 countries on military spending—but it’s a lot cheaper than being the world’s bitch.
What do you do when your entire identity has been built around a “they” that’s oppressing you, but “they” don’t actually seem to be oppressing you?
You’ve taken on “victim” as your identity, but you’re not being victimized enough. So you’re forced to live vicariously through “Hitler the victim.”
Ah, Darryl Cooper again. My least favorite person of 2024. Professional falsifier of history who misrepresented my work to get on Tucker Carlson’s podcast and introduce a hundred million people to bad Holocaust historiography.
I did my best to fight back in September, and I failed. Of course I did. Cooper gets platformed by Tucker Carlson and now Joe Rogan. Me? I have Ann Coulter on my side, and for that I’m grateful (she highlighted my refutation of Cooper on a podcast last year). But few have her integrity; not in an era in which Holocaust/Hitler revisionism is the leprechaun that leads influencers to social media gold.
Cooper never responded to my refutation of his work, because of course not.
On the J. Burden podcast several months ago, Cooper said:
If you were over here in any school in America, elementary, middle, high school, whatever, and you’re talking about World War II and you raise your hand and say, “Teacher, I was looking on the internet and this stuff that they’re saying about these concentration camps, these death camps and stuff, yeah, I don’t think so. I’m not so sure about that. Like, you know, I was reading this guy named David Cole or such and such and, yeah, I just don’t think any of that happened and you know, it wasn’t like that.” You’re not just gonna get corrected. You’re gonna get in trouble for saying that. Like, you’re gonna be disciplined for that.
No. 1, I’ve never said the Holocaust “never happened,” but No. 2, no child in any school has, to my knowledge, ever been disciplined for citing me. Cooper straight-up invented that claim.
But wait, maybe Cooper knows better than I. So I messaged him, and I asked him, “Can you provide me a few examples to back up that claim?”
He refused to reply.
Cooper lies. About world history, and my history.
Still, the question is, why does he lie?
Well, because he knows it’ll get him on Tucker and Rogan.
But again, why? Why do Cooper’s lies resonate with MAGA to the extent that he’s such a profitable guest?
Cooper’s thesis, that Hitler was a well-meaning white man who wanted to feed starving Jews but the villainous Churchill made it impossible so Jews sadly died in Nazi care but not by Nazi malice, resonates with you. Hitler’s become a proxy for you, the benevolent white man wronged by warmongers in his time and “court historians” and the LAMESTREAM MEDIA after his death.
Hence why Cooper invented that story about how mentioning my work will get students disciplined in school. He knows how important it is for you to see not only yourselves as victims, but your children, too. “They” aren’t coming just for you, but for your kids as well.
This is you being victim by proxy. You’re so not victimized, you need to live via the imaginary victimization of others (funny enough, by appropriating my fictional victimization and exploiting it in the name of Hitler rehabilitation, you’re the ones actually victimizing me. That’s some heavy meta right there).
You guys want to feel besieged, even though things are actually quite good for you right now. You got to riot in D.C., beat cops, storm the Capitol, and you got pardoned. Steve Bannon embezzled from you, and you did the whole battered woman “I know he beats me but I LOVE him!” routine so Bannon got pardoned, too. If you deny the Holocaust, the moon landing, or round earth, Big Tech boosts you, as the government of New Zealand apologizes to Candace Owens for denying her a visa because maybe she’s right about Jews eating Christian babies. Hey—she’s just ASKING QWESTCHINS…oh, wait, no, she’s not. She’s stating as a fact that Jews exsanguinate Christians for Passover rituals and the Kiwis are like, “Cool, that’s a legitimate claim to debate,” and Hollywood could easily throw its weight around to protest the Owens visa decision, as New Zealand makes billions from “runaway production,” but that ain’t happening because “the Hollywood Jews” care way more about cheap production than suppressing the insane views of a mentally retarded schizophrenic ghetto whore.
See, that’s your problem. You’re just not being oppressed enough at the moment. You’re no longer oppressed by Big Tech, or by “Hollywood Jews,” or by the “vote stealers” who robbed you of a victory in 2020 but oddly missed doing the same last November (did they sleep in that day? Don’t you hate it when that happens? You’re gonna steal an election but you forget to set your alarm). You’re not being rounded up to fight in a Middle East war or in Ukraine. Your guns were not grabbed, bird flu didn’t lead to new lockdowns, and Trump dodged a bullet because the reason “they” slept in on November 5th is because they’d become so sleep-deprived they couldn’t even shoot straight during their assassination attempt.
Things are going great for MAGA and lousy for the other guys, and they can’t fucking stand it!
And that’s why Cooper’s popular, why you love him. He’s your BLM. He tells you you’re oppressed when you’re not. He tells you you’re under siege when you’re not.
The BLM-MAGA analogy was made crystal-clear a few months ago when The Blaze dropped a BOMBSHELL that the DEEP STATE fired mind-scrambling rays into the J6 crowd to turn a peaceful protest violent.
Everyone who assaulted cops was under the spell of the SCRAMBLE RAY!
Odd how J6 apologia went from “no cops were assaulted” to “yes, cops were assaulted, but by FBI plants” to “okay, we assaulted cops, but our minds were in the thrall of an invisible death ray!”
More important, The Blaze asserts that the Scramble Ray was first tested out on the BLM rioters during Floyd Summer. Yes, those poor innocent blacks would’ve never been violent! The MURDER RAY is what made their peaceful protests fiery. And you people lap it up because if there’s one thing perpetual victims love doing, it’s commiserating with other perpetual victims. So that, along with MAGA sentimentality regarding blacks (“we’re winning the black vote! That gives us legitimacy!”), is why The Blaze concocted the riot ray story.
Oh sure, MAGA makes a big performative deal about “race realism” and Steve Sailer and bell curves and such, but as the viral response to that Blaze piece has demonstrated, if the matter is put to you in a way that affirms your victim mentality, you’ll kick Sailer to the curb in favor of “blacks aren’t more inherently violent than any other group. It’s the Deep State shooting riot rays at us! Black violence merely shows how effective those rays are, which proves that our violence on J6 wasn’t our fault; we were the victims of mind control just like our black brothers.”
Cut to a black guy saying, “Sheeeeiiiit, even Farrakhan ain’t never said nothin’ that crazy. But hell, if it means Trump releases more of us from prison, yassuh, we’ze been death-rayed too!”
My God do I hate it here. Do I hate this stupid time, this stupid place. Rightists are saying that “riot rays” caused BLM violence, when not one black BLM apologist has ever gone that far. MAGA is making excuses for black street violence that are too bizarre even for blacks themselves.
Pre-MAGA conservatism was heavily flawed. But those neocons were correct when they’d claim that blacks hurt themselves and their community by screaming “oppression,” by exaggerating wrongs done in the present (“poe-leece dun kill a thousand of us a day”), by finding identity in wrongs of the past (“slavery is why I don’t pay child support”), and by excusing the thieves in their own community (“BLM steals our money, but better stolen by them than whitey”).
Post-MAGA conservatism has adopted that model. Wronged in the present (“the FBI dun SET US UP and made us violent with INVISIBLE RAYS!”), wronged in the past (“Hitler was just fighting for white rights and he only tried to feed the Jews!”), and defending thieves who “look like them” (“Bannon dun stoled from us, but he family! He us!”).
MAGA’s decided to emulate the most unhealthy demographic in the country.
Bravo. You’re employing the black formula but expecting a different outcome.
Brilliant.
What’s frightening about Darryl Cooper is not that he’s a Holocaust denier (and to be clear, he’s more a Holocaust dumbass than denier—a guy who not so much denies but distorts), but a Hitler rehabilitator. His message—“Hitler wasn’t perfect but gosh darn it he did his best and ‘they’ destroyed him because he had the guts to go against ‘they’ regarding the security of the white West”—is just what you need to hear right now…to get you to identify with Hitler.
It’s poison. And you’re primed to drink it.
I’ll go even further. This poisoning of the white mind, this identification with Hitler as a tragic victim, this desire to excuse violence by claiming things that not even the most extreme BLM would ever claim (like “riot rays”), scares me more than immigration. No African bunga, no Indian budbud, no Mexi bean, frightens me like a white person who’s given his mind over to schizophrenia or Nazism.
The No. 1 problem with the victim mentality is that it blinds people from asking, “Are we the baddies?” No BLM, just like no J6er, has ever asked that question.
Victims can’t be baddies. They can be tragic heroes, but not baddies.
But they are indeed often the baddies.
Next week I’ll go into the specifics of Cooper’s Rogan interview. So get your vapes ready, Roge-heads, because you’ll zone out after the first paragraph, duuuuude.
As a small child, one of my favorite cartoon characters was that brave sword-fighting shell-bearer Touché Turtle, whom I used to prance around the garden pretending to be, hitting other equally violent neighborhood kids with toy plastic blades as I went. It now transpires this habit made me innately qualified for a fulfilling adult career as a valued American public health professional.
A self-professed anarchist named JD Holt, who also goes by the name of “JD Terrapin” on Facebook, has just been roundly mocked for turning up to an online board meeting and introducing herself to her fellow participants by announcing that “I use they, them, and turtle for my pronouns,” reportedly because she self-identifies as being an actual marine reptile.
Disturbingly, the board meeting in question was held by the Oregon Health Authority (OHA)—and specifically dealt with the medical subarea of mental health. Myrtle the Turtle was acting as a public lay-member of the committee, whose role was to help determine best practices and policies in mental health for the state going forward. Apparently, it was vital to have people with “lived experience” of having “experienced behavioral health challenges” on the medical board, this being a polite euphemism for quite literally letting lunatics take over the asylum.
Previous OHA mental health board members included a man named Luke, who seemingly self-ID’d as being “A Shooting Star.” The OHA’s regular two-year budget, by the way, stands at $35.8 billion. Maybe the man/elephant/turnip who OK’d that particular eye-watering sum self-identified as an accountant.
Homos in a Half Shell
How common is it to flop around the place on all fours naked but for a giant green-painted cairn of egg boxes sellotaped onto your back, gently emitting ping-pong balls from your anus, squawking, “Look at me, I’m a giant turtle”? It could be more common than you may initially have expected.
Alongside all the usual made-up genders and sexual identities we are so familiar with from the world of Queer Studies these days, like transgender, pangender, lesbian, and suchlike, there are also now things out there called “xenogenders,” meaning the identities adopted by people who self-ID as being things wholly other than human, like elves, ghosts, extraterrestrials, fungi, or animals.
One of these is “turtlegender,” often described as being interchangeable with “tortoisegender.” There are actually substantial morphological differences between turtles and tortoises, but if mentally ill gender benders think people with penises can really be people with vaginas and vice versa, they’re probably not going to be overly concerned that, for example, turtles live primarily in the water and usually have flippers, whilst tortoises are primarily land-based and have feet. Turtlegenderists even now have their own special gay-flag, created in 2021: It’s just a standard queer rainbow one, but with the black bird’s-eye silhouette of a turtle superimposed over the top.
A brief bit of research indicates that mental health professionals these days are actively encouraging patients to go around pretending to be turtles as a simple stress-coping mechanism. A characteristic example might be the handy online guide “Stress Management the Turtle Way: Balancing Your Protective Shell and Relationships,” which advises persons with anger- or stress-management issues to “Try to be like the turtle—at ease in your own shell.”
Such guides do not literally advise mad people to self-ID as turtles or tortoises, just to metaphorically imitate them by retreating into their figurative emotional shells for their own psychic safety whenever confronted with difficult personal situations they find it hard to cope with, rather than just lashing out at everybody nearby with a large blade, Touché Turtle-style, as they may have done previously.
Shell Shock
Problem is, this idea has now spread to the nursery-age classroom and kindergarten, where tiny tots really are being encouraged to imagine they are anthropomorphic turtles. Child psychology guides such as “Turtle Time! A Calming Technique” advise teachers to always have a cuddly turtle puppet on hand in the schoolroom, and to ventriloquize through its beak a special educational “turtle technique” to calm their pupils’ fury whenever they feel a temper tantrum building.
As soon as they begin to feel angry like the Hulk, kids are exhorted to visualize themselves as being a different green entity instead—a turtle. Then they are to immediately envision retracting their head deep inside their imaginary shell, and calm down in there. It is even suggested every classroom should from now on possess a special “Turtle Time Space” to act as a metaphorical “shell” into which furious kiddies should be trained to retreat and act out pretending to be tortoises just so they don’t stab one another in the face with broken milk bottles anymore.
A “scripted story” book designed to be read aloud to students, Tucker Turtle Takes Time to Tuck and Think, about a “terrific turtle,” now exists too, designed to get kids to “think like a turtle” and tuck their anger safely away inside their armored carapace—despite its title, I can assure readers it has absolutely nothing to do with me.
Possibly the idea has some merit when applied to managing the behavior of some very small problem children. But, taken too far, can this kind of exercise end up making some of the more mentally unstable kids grow up to become actual wannabe humanoid turtles like JD Terrapin thinks she is? No less an individual than Vladimir Putin would say yes.
Close Encounters of the Furred Kind
“Lycanthropy” has been a well-known psychological disorder for millennia. Literally, it refers to mad people who think they are wolves, this being the core presumed origin of the old werewolf legend. But in a modern-day clinical sense, the word just refers to people who think they are animals of any kind. Cases are on record of people thinking they are snakes, crocodiles, gerbils, rabbits, even bumblebees. Conversely, “anthropy” is the clinical term used to describe the condition of an animal who wrongly thinks he is a human being, as with the actual turtle in a suit who went around pretending to be Republican Senate Leader under the adopted name of “Mitch McConnell” until quite recently.
Until about five minutes ago, the universal opinion of psychiatrists about such persons was that they were complete loonies. Now, as the sad case of JD Terrapin suggests, certain susceptibly woke-minded head-doctors in America and Europe seem more minded to affirm sufferers in their therianthropic delusions as yet a further new manifestation of the unquestionable modern-day religion of queerity.
Not in the Russkiy Mir, though, where a bizarre social panic has recently arisen. Following Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the idea has grown that the West, unable just to attack Mother Russia directly for fear of being nuked straight back, has instead cunningly decided to attack in a more underhand fashion by attempting to encourage the flower of Russia’s previously innocent youth to turn into werewolves, weredogs, and werecats in the name of spreading gayness.
The scare seems to have begun in nearby Uzbekistan last year, when incredibly strange images of a woman taking her son for a walk on a leash, with the child scrambling around on all fours dressed as a cat, went viral, raising many questions—not least, who walks a cat on a leash?
Rather than being a weird one-off, it transpired this was part of a wider pattern, with other Uzbek animal-children reportedly causing chaos by roaming the country in quadrupedal form, demanding passersby pat their heads, tickle their chins, and stroke their fur, before biting those who refused. Uzbekistan’s Interior Ministry began considering plans to fine the parents of any children who went outside dressed as animals the equivalent of $150, around 200 years’ annual wages for the average local Borat.
Insanity Claws
What was going on? The actual answer seems to be that kids across the Russosphere had latched onto a niche Western trend called kvadrobing in native Russian, known as “quadrobics” over here. This is a mere simple exercise trend, invented by Japanese sprinter Kenichi Ito, an expert in running down racetracks on all fours. Ito noticed monkeys can run on all fours faster than humans can, so he tried copying their techniques, speeding to the finish line in record-breaking time by adopting the rough ambulatory mannerisms of an ape in a hurry.
Impressed, some Westerners in search of a novel new form of workout routine copied Ito’s idea, as running on all fours helps build muscles and flexibility in all your limbs—the practice has even been profiled in Vogue.
The idea gained its fans in Russia, too, especially amongst the young, some of whom started off a fad of dressing up as your favored animal whilst exercising, too, primarily cats, dogs, wolves, and foxes (no traditional Russian bears, oddly enough), and filming themselves dancing to music in costume. The whole thing seemed perfectly innocent, but then, in Uzbekistan, some teenage tearaways began taking it way too far, leading many Russians to guess kvadrobing was really just a weaponized imported offshoot of the Western queer xenogenders phenomenon, as with JD Terrapin.
Top Russian teen pop singer Maria Boyko made headlines after a lost 8-year-old girl dressed in a cat mask was ushered up onto her stage to be reunited with her worried parents, before Boyko took one look and asked, disgustedly, if she was “God forbid, a kvadrobic?” Being answered in the affirmative, Boyko publicly humiliated the child, stating, “Today a kitty, tomorrow a doggie, and the day after tomorrow she will decide she is now a boy,” at the behest of the Pentagon.
Kvadrobe Malfunctions
Putinista politicians are equally concerned, proposing any and all child kvadrobers be forcibly removed from their parents and placed inside kennels and catteries immediately, whilst compliant Orthodox priests and Cossacks have been marched into schools to lecture the students on the perils of one day pretending to be a puppy, the next day booking a vet’s appointment to get your dick spayed by an undercover American agent, all covertly funded by USAID.
Vyacheslav Volodin, Russia’s Parliamentary Chairman, explained the “true” origin of the craze thus:
“Washington and Brussels are losing their dominance. In order to continue ruling the world, they are implementing the ‘Dehumanisation’ project. Offering to [allow naive Russian children to] try themselves in the role of animals, fictional characters, mythical creatures. Such manifestations only at first look like a game and a joke. Behind this lies a serious program of rejecting humanity and everything human.”
“Ha ha ha!” say Western media like the BBC, when mockingly exposing such overexaggerated misinterpretations of a simple, innocent novelty exercise regime. “Aren’t those primitive, socially conservative Russkies all doped up on turps and vodka, thinking gay Western groomers are out to turn their kids queer by encouraging them to pretend to be transspecies animal-people? What a bunch of bigoted, far-right loonies!”
And then the Russians turn on their TV sets, see some footage of a mad leftist queertard woman in Oregon who’s allowed to help run a mental health board despite the fact she thinks she’s a turtle, and conclude Mr. Volodin must have been correct in his claims after all.
The Week’s Most Boxing, Doxing, and Equinoxing Headlines
JET BROWN
There’s an old joke about a white man who’s flying from an impoverished African nation. On the plane with him are a bunch of illiterate villagers. As the plane nears its destination, one of the engines flames out. But the villagers don’t seem to mind; they stay calm and collected.
Then another engine flames out, and the plane nose-dives.
The white man’s panicked, but still…the villagers are unfazed.
As the pilot attempts a landing, the tires blow out. The plane’s skidding on metal. Sparks fly everywhere, the sound is deafening, and all the white man can do is pray that the fuel tank isn’t ruptured by the metal shards.
But still, the African villagers are just smiling and chattering, not bothered in the least.
The plane comes to rest and everyone’s evacuated. And the white guy sees an older white man who was also a passenger.
The white guy asks the older man, “Why didn’t the Africans panic?”
And the older man says, “Because they’ve never been on a plane before, so they assume this is how you land one. You explode the two engines, blow out the tires, and skid to a halt.”
An old joke, but relevant to last week’s incident aboard an Air India flight from Chicago to New Delhi. Several hours into the flight, the plane was forced to return after every single bathroom became clogged with “rags, clothing, and plastic bags,” forcing passengers to defecate in the aisles.
To the native Chicagoans, this was a nightmare! They’re the ones who demanded that the plane turn around. But the Indians? This is just how you fly. You shove your clothes down the toilet and poop in the aisle.
Many of the Chicagoans were heading to Delhi for a “spiritual experience.” Hopefully their “spew-it-tual experience” persuaded them to rebook for a better country.
BURNED MEMBERS ONLY
Remember Sheila Liebeck? She was the 79-year-old biddy who, in 1992, held a cup of hot McDonald’s coffee between her legs while a passenger in her grandson’s Ford Probe. Of course the coffee spilled all over her privates.
“Woo-hoo,” Liebeck exclaimed, “I haven’t been this hot and wet since Van Johnson kissed my cheek in ’42! That hunk was all man!”
In fact, Liebeck suffered severe burns (and the Probe’s leather seat needed counseling). A jury would end up awarding Liebeck $3 million in her suit against McDonald’s (Liebeck v. Grimace, 1994). The judgment sparked nationwide debate over “tort reform” (this is the term foes of frivolous lawsuits prefer over “frivolous lawsuits,” proving that they’re the dumbest a-holes to ever draw breath).
Well, if you thought $3 mil was bad…
Last week an L.A. jury awarded delivery driver Michael Garcia $50 million because he spilled scalding-hot Starbucks tea on his privates while receiving an order at a drive-through. Garcia’s attorney claims that the employees of the Starbucks failed to firmly secure the tea in the takeout tray, and the jury agreed.
The jury also awarded $1 million to the customer who was awaiting the order, who received a text from UberEats stating “We’re sorry—your order of one chamomile tea will not be arriving because it just melted a Mexican’s penis. Please accept this $5 credit.”
According to his attorney, Garcia’s beanstalk is permanently damaged and completely unusable. So that’s at least one L.A. Mexican who won’t be changing the demographics of the city.
President Trump has ordered hot Starbucks tea served to every Venezuelan who crosses the border.
As for Garcia, he says he plans to use the $50 million to stuff a mattress so he can lie in bed and weep about how now that he can finally win any woman he wants, it’s a pointless endeavor.
There’s no such thing as a “hard-boiled bean,” but in Garcia we find a soft, boiled one.
Better a wetback than a wetfront.
EGG-SELL-ENT
Trump didn’t exactly beat inflation “on day one” as promised.
And the ghost of Jerry Ford shook his head, declaring, “I told you: Without buttons, it just can’t be done.”
But by not whipping inflation now, Trump may have inadvertently scored a greater victory. Eggs are in such demand, Mexican smugglers have switched from black-market drugs to black-market eggs.
That’s not a joke. As per The Telegraph, “More eggs than fentanyl are being seized in border crackdowns. Trump wants customs officers to detect smugglers bringing in opioids—but they are more often finding poultry products.”
The border drug problem may not have gone away, but it’s certainly gone huevo.
Mexican cartels are not taking care to keep the eggs from going bad in the 100-degree-plus temps at the border. In Europe, eggs generally don’t have to be refrigerated, because the European style is to keep the natural skin, the protective coating or “cuticle,” on the egg. In the U.S., the cuticle is shorn so that the egg can be properly washed. So basically, Europeans and Americans treat their eggs as they treat their penises. Intact and slimy, or snipped but clean.
This does make American eggs more deadly if left unrefrigerated, and the influx of bad eggs is leading to food poisoning incidents nationwide. Last week comedian and SNL alumnus Tracy Morgan, sitting courtside at a Heat-Knicks game at Madison Square Garden, had a bout of food poisoning so bad, the entire game had to be paused for the court to be cleaned.
Again, not a joke.
Morgan initially had a fit of vomiting that propelled him backwards three rows, followed by explosive diarrhea that blasted him forward like the Rocketeer, shooting him onto the court, bouncing from player to player like a pinball, before smashing into the end line, a steaming pile more dung than man.
Few in the crowd cheered…except the Indians who’d been on that JetBlue flight.
AIDS-DE-CAMP
American society has progressed so far from when AIDS was everyone’s greatest fear, there’s a generation that doesn’t recall the 1980s when lispy gays were banned from parties due to concerns that the saliva spewed from their mouths when they said, “Thteven Thondheim is thtupendous with his thcore for Thweeney Todd” would kill everyone in the room.
Back then, AIDS was quite literally the worst thing you could have. The AIDS virus made cancerous tumors go, “Damn, he’s good.” It was a bad time for gays. The toll taken on Broadway alone, in terms of dead dancers and choreographers and a shortage of human performers, was so severe that the 1986 revival of A Chorus Line was just a bunch of monkeys skittering across the stage throwing feces at one another, leading to speculation that the African green monkeys that gave humans AIDS in the first place did it on purpose to win a Tony.
Yet according to British television producer Russell Davies, speaking to The Guardian last week, Donald Trump is “the greatest danger to gay society I’ve ever seen.”
Davies is best known as the showrunner for Doctor Who (that sentence could be rephrased as “Davies is least known in the U.S. as the showrunner for the cheap-ass, imbecilic, yet bafflingly iconic British television program in which a dude fights large traffic cones that scream EXTERMINATE”), and apparently he finds Trump a greater threat than the disease that turned half the world’s gay population into mummies.
Yet in the Guardian piece, Davies doesn’t provide one single example of why Trump is “the greatest danger” gay society’s ever seen. Not one. He only cites a rise in “hate speech” on X.
One wonders, if Davies could climb into Doctor Who’s TARDIS and travel back to 1985 to ask some poor gay bastard shriveled up in a hospice and dying in pain and purulent drainage if he would trade his lot for being physically healthy but having to live in a world in which there was a repulsive online forum that you could just choose to ignore, what the shrivelly, mucousy AIDS zombie would say in response.
The ultimate irony: The dude who writes about traffic cones screaming EXTERMINATE can’t differentiate actual extermination from online hurty words.
HUDDLED MESSES
One of the best rules in life is, “Whatever the French do, do the opposite.”
The French hold a revolution in which everybody slaughters everybody else when it’s over?
Don’t do that.
The French trust the British to have their backs against Hitler?
Don’t do that.
The French don’t bathe? Then you should bathe, and often.
The French worship Jerry Lewis? Then you should despise Jerry Lewis. The French decide to import the Third World? Well, then, definitely don’t do that.
Last week Raphaël Glucksmann, of the leftist French political party Place Publique, called for the return of the Statue of Liberty, claiming that the U.S. under Trump no longer deserves it.
“Raphaël Glucksmann”? Not only is the dude’s nation colonized by foreign invaders, his name is.
Funny enough, though, Glucksmann’s anger at the administration isn’t primarily about immigration or deportations, but rather Trump’s halting of aid to Ukraine and his “mistreatment” of Zelenskyy. And to be fair, the original plaque on the Statue of Liberty did read “Give me your tired, your poor, your wacky Jewish Eastern European leaders yearning to receive billions of dollars never to account for it.”
Trump responded to Glucksmann’s demand by agreeing in principle that the statue would be returned, as long as every Puerto Rican and Dominican in NYC would go with it.
To which Glucksmann excitedly replied, Mais oui!
The Week That Perished wishes Zoe Saldaña the best in her new tenement home in the Paris slums.
No doubt it is rather peculiar, but whenever I see a grain of rice left on a plate, or a few crumbs scattered on a tablecloth, I think of those who were taken prisoner by the Japanese during the war and nearly starved to death. One day, I think, I might be glad of that grain of rice or that scattering of crumbs. I have an almost visceral aversion to waste of food.
This is odd, because I have never had to go without food myself, except once when I suffered from hepatitis and had no appetite for it anyway, and once when I was crossing Africa by public transport and there was nothing available for me to eat for three days in the Zairean jungle.
But this peculiarity of mine is of long date, going back to an account when I was very young given me by an older second cousin who had been a prisoner of war, and who had suffered horribly from deprivation. It was reinforced some years later by meeting Dr. J.E. Nardini, an American doctor who had been a prisoner of the Japanese taken in the Philippines at the outset of the war in the Pacific. Half of his unit died of starvation, and when he was liberated, he himself was suffering severely from the nutritional disease beriberi. He was only a fraction of his normal weight, and it was not certain that he would survive even after liberation. Six years later, he wrote an important paper, “Survival factors in American prisoners of war of the Japanese,” in The American Journal of Psychiatry.
He said something to me that has stayed with me for more than forty years. In the context of his whole life, he said, he was glad to have lived through so terrible an experience because it gave him a standard of comparison by which all other suffering was trivial, and this in turn had allowed him to meet difficulties with equanimity. Nothing that he was likely to suffer again was remotely comparable.
He did not, of course, recommend such an experience as a means to achieve equanimity, or fail to recognize the sheer horror of what he had witnessed and lived through; he did not mean to imply that the death of half his unit was worthwhile so that he might attain his stoic calm, only that he had found the experience of some use for the rest of his days, in the way, perhaps, that Charles Dickens’ experiences in the blacking factory as a child were a source of both pain and inspiration to him for the rest of his life.
I think of Dr. Nardini when I see my grain of rice or scattering of crumbs, but also when I am losing my temper over some minor bureaucratic idiocy by which I, like everyone else in the modern world, am sometimes plagued. It is not an invariably successful technique, but it does sometimes help to calm me down. The fact is that bureaucrats, even the most stupid ones, are human, and have their sorrows and troubles.
Last week, I went to the doctor’s office for an appointment. My doctor is a member of a group practice. My wife arrived a few minutes later, but the receptionist wouldn’t tell her where I was because I hadn’t signed a form giving consent for the receptionist to give out this information, even though she recognized that my wife was my wife and she, the receptionist, knew where I was.
The philosopher Immanuel Kant said that one should not tell a lie about a person’s whereabouts to someone who asks for it, even if one knows that that person is intent on murder. This, of course, is an absurd view, but the receptionist in the doctor’s office took an equally absurd view, perhaps because she thought my wife might have come to murder me, which goes to show that often the opposite of absurdity is not good sense but a different absurdity.
My wife was able to locate me by telephone, and the recollection of Dr. Nardini helped me to laugh at the absurdity rather than be angry at it, as I might otherwise have done. And this in turn assisted me to put myself, or to try to put myself, in the position of the receptionist, whose job consisted largely in the application of rules and procedures that she did not lay down herself and from which she did not dare deviate—a situation in which a large proportion of humanity finds itself.
By yet another association, I realized how fortunate I had been in life. I have never had merely or thoughtlessly to follow other people’s rules in my life, as the receptionist had to do, but have always had a liberal dose of self-determination: not total, of course, but with a greater dose than befalls the lot of most people. The wrong turnings in my life have been largely of my own doing, my miseries of my own making, which I suppose is one definition of freedom. I have never been oppressed and have never been denied anything in an unjust fashion. I have failed to take opportunities that came my way, and knowingly done things that were, if not quite self-destructive, at least not to my ultimate advantage, but I cannot blame anyone else for this. I have never been made to suffer anything remotely comparable to what Dr. Nardini suffered.
I feel grateful, though I am not sure to whom or to what. Whether you can feel grateful without being grateful to some responsible being I am not sure; can you really thank your lucky stars? I have been writing, in very desultory fashion, a memoir of the dead whom I have known, that is to say the people whom I have known who have died. I doubt that I shall ever publish it (the list is growing and accelerating in length); but one thing that has stood out for me is how fortunate I have been in my personal acquaintances. I cannot recall ever having been the victim of human malignity and, on the contrary, have received much kindness. I have known terrible people, but not close up enough to affect me.
Of late, I have thought of what I should like my epitaph to be: perhaps “He was not a nuisance.”
Theodore Dalrymple’s latest book is On the Ivory Stages (Mirabeau Press).
