President Donald Trump’s record as the deregulation president is nearly unparalleled. In his first 100 days in office, he has already identified hundreds of billions of dollars of potential deregulation savings in the areas of energy, education and housing.
Hooray.
But some of his new regulators in the Justice Department and at the Federal Trade Commission apparently didn’t get the memo. The new FTC chairman, Andrew Ferguson, is pushing forward with lawsuits — some left over from the Biden administration — that could hobble U.S. businesses.
It wasn’t supposed to be this way. Former President Joe Biden’s antitrust warriors, led by the notorious super-regulator Lina Khan saw a monopoly in any business that dared make a healthy profit.
She tied into knots dozens of iconic American companies — from banks to credit card companies to our globally dominant tech sector — with harassment lawsuits. She even cheered on European regulators when they brought hostile legal actions against U.S. companies.
In most cases, there was scant evidence of price gouging or any harm to consumers. In most cases the prices for their products were FALLING.
The Trump FTC so far has been as active on antitrust actions as Biden’s. The FTC just recently blocked a $14 billion merger between Hewlett Packard and Juniper Networks. The efficiency gains from mergers and acquisitions are one proven source of efficiency gains by American businesses.
The law firm Mayer Brown recently reported to their clients that the “Federal Trade Commission and U.S. Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division said this month that they will continue to use Biden-era merger guidelines, contrary to predictions that the Trump administration would relax antitrust enforcement.”
Google is fighting three separate antitrust lawsuits for uncompetitive pricing/advertising practices. They are supposedly harming consumers.
Really? The consumer surplus provided by Google is estimated to be in the multitrillions of dollars. Google invests $40 billion a year on research and development while employing tens of thousands of Americans at six- and seven-figure salaries.
Meta is accused of driving up online advertising costs. The cost of online advertising has gone DOWN by more than 25% — more than newspaper and TV advertisements.
Similarly, Uber faces cutthroat competition from Lyft as well as local taxi services in major cities that are adopting similar speedy cost-competitive pickup and delivery technology.
“The Trump-Vance FTC is fighting back on behalf of the American people,” Ferguson boasted in a press release. It’s not clear which American people he’s talking about, because most of us love using Google and Uber and Facebook.
On balance, the only people who benefit from antitrust enforcement are lawyers. But that may be only partly true. The other huge beneficiaries are the Chinese, who might as well be hiring Ferguson as a secret agent to do their bidding.
Can anyone imagine regulators in Japan bringing antitrust lawsuits against Honda, or Beijing suing Alibaba for anticompetitive behavior?
For our own government to hogtie great American companies with frivolous multibillion-dollar lawsuits is the height of economic masochism.
Trump should fire the whole lot at the Justice Department and the FTC, and hire people who will deregulate, not reregulate, the marketplace.
“Climate change will make earth a living hell!” claims popular astrophysicist Neil DeGrasse Tyson.
I don’t believe him.
The media say, “All Arctic ice will soon melt away! Polar bears are dying off! Global warming causes food shortages!”
Bunk, bunk, bunk.
They are addicted to scaring us.
My new video covers four more myths about climate change:
Myth 1: It’s worsening droughts.
The Environmental Defense Fund wins donations partly by claiming, “climate change is worsening drought!” Media morons parrot the claim.
It’s just not true.
The EPA: “The last 50 years have generally been wetter than average.”
Globally, there’s been no increase in drought.
Heartland Institute Research Fellow Linnea Lueken notes, “The media … completely ignore previous years where there were record-low amounts of drought. Every individual drought that occurs in the United States, or anywhere in the world, is not evidence of catastrophic climate change. It’s weather.”
Myth 2: Climate change is worsening wildfires.
During California’s wildfires, silly people at NBC News ranted, “Climate change, creating infernos larger than ever!”
Bunk.
U.S. Forest Service data shows fires burned much more in the 1930s.
But the climate has gotten warmer! Doesn’t that dry trees out and cause wildfires?
No, laughs Lueken. “One degree of change does not dry out all of the brush … The real driver of these issues is land management.”
Poor land management. California restricts clear cutting — removing almost all trees in an area. And they don’t allow small fires to burn like they once did, naturally. So, overgrowth builds up and fuels bigger fires.
Also, today’s wildfires affect more people not because of climate change, but because there’s more suburban sprawl. More people build more houses in the path of grass fires.
Myth 3: Sea level rise will soon cause catastrophic damage.
In 2004, The Guardian wrote, “A secret report … warns that major European cities will be sunk beneath rising seas … by 2020!”
By 2020 …
Last I checked, European cities were OK.
“Sea level rise is absolutely occurring,” says Lueken, “but it’s been slow. … About a foot per century. There is no way that people wouldn’t be able to adapt to it.”
Exactly. More than 100 million people already live below high-tide sea level thanks to dikes like those Holland built years ago. And the Dutch built them without the modern equipment we have.
Adjusting to rising water makes more sense than recent environmental policy: moves to ban gas-powered vehicles, giving money to politically connected windfarm developers, etc.
That costs a fortune, but it will make no noticeable difference.
Climate change is real and may cause real problems.
But we can adapt to them, rather than getting hysterical about myths.
One last myth: Coral reefs are disappearing!
The BBC writes, “Coral islands in Australia at risk of disappearing.”
According to New York Public Radio, “Scientists Say The Great Barrier Reef is Officially Dying.”
It’s just not true.
“2024 actually saw record coverage for the Great Barrier Reef,” says Lueken. “Corals thrive in tropical conditions.”
Between 2019 and 2024, coral coverage more than doubled.
I’m embarrassed for my profession. They pump out nonsense.
“It drives me absolutely batty every time one of these claims is made,” says Lueken. “All it takes is a quick Google search to pull up publicly available data on any of these conditions.”
“If the good news is so obvious, why would they keep reporting bad news?” I ask.
“Good news doesn’t grab headlines … (and) research funding and grants.”
That’s key.
It took me years of reporting before I realized that scientists who gave me the best, most alarming and interesting quotes were often just … wrong. It isn’t that they lie on purpose; it’s just that the more you study a problem, the more you worry about it.
On top of that, a scientist who says it’s not a problem, or it’s a manageable problem, doesn’t get attention. Or those big government grants.
If you want money and attention, you need to scare people.
This week marks eighty years since the death of Mussolini on 28 April 1945. All the more surprising, then, that he is currently Italy’s reigning Man of the Year.
The prestigious honor was bestowed by right-wing Italian newspaper Libero, which placed Musso’s image proudly on its front page on the final day of December 2024, albeit only in jest. The paper was satirizing the way Italian left-wingers, desperate to undermine the nation’s present anti-immigration PM Giorgia Meloni in any way possible, constantly refer to the Melon-Woman as being little more than Il Duce in drag. An accompanying editorial jibed that, in the absence of any coherent arguments against Meloni’s actual policies, the left “cannot do without the Duce” as a cartoon scarecrow to warn the more gullible and easily spooked portion of the electorate away from her.
Mussolini Re-Dux
It would be more reasonable for today’s Italian leftists to smear a different national politician as a direct political descendant of Benito, namely Alessandra Mussolini, Il Duce’s literal flesh-and-blood granddaughter. A former actress and model, Alessandra became the first woman to lead an Italian political party in 2004. Just like the editors of Libero, she also accuses today’s Italian left of bearing an unhealthy obsession with her granddad.
In 2019, when Rome-based Italian soccer club Lazio lost 2–1 to Glasgow Celtic in the Europa League knockout tournament, the game was marred by Lazio fans goose-stepping through the Scottish city giving fascist salutes. Celtic fans retaliated by unveiling a huge banner depicting Benito Mussolini hanging upside down dead from a lamppost, his real-life fate at the hands of commie partisans in 1945, together with the slogan “FOLLOW YOUR LEADER.”
Alessandra Mussolini responded with a mocking tweet after Celtic soon lost to their fierce local rivals Glasgow Rangers in a domestic matchup, leading one Celtic fan to retweet Alessandra the score line upside down, with the mocking message “Edited the result so your grandfather could read it, hope it helps.” Alessandra reacted by labeling this as a new form of hate-crime incident she dubbed “Ducephobia,” defined as being “a crime which doesn’t yet exist, but which I propose to include in our judicial system.” Why not? Every other minority group gets one.
Roman Holiday
Far from Ducephobia, many contemporary Italians seem to labor instead under a state of Ducephilia. In 2017, the beachside resort of Chioggia, near Venice, suddenly began marketing itself as a Mussolini-themed holiday destination, with regular hard-line political messages broadcast over a speaker system and signs referring to gas chambers and special new “Anti-Democratic Zones” popping up all over the place. This predictably led to parliamentary calls for such glorification of fascism, even if made only for novelty tourist purposes, to be banned.
Yet this may be difficult. Unlike in Germany, where citizens have been lectured into such crippling shame about their Nazi heritage that the entire volk is currently engaged in the process of systematically abolishing itself in the name of boosting demographic “diversity,” Italian reeducation about their fascist past is hazy, with many citizens having only a vague impression of Mussolini as a model of energetic industry, a big fat bastard in a funny feathered hat who got things done, unlike many corrupt and lethargic Italian politicians today.
Thus, his birthplace of Predappio is also now a tourist destination, with souvenir shops selling themed ashtrays, mugs, shirts, wine, and even underpants, all bearing Il Duce’s imposing image, his face in this latter instance not intended simply to be farted on.
Mussolini calendars, meanwhile, are perennial bestsellers nationwide, depicting him as a literal pinup model, heroically clutching a gladiator sword or giving the fascist “Roman” salute. The year printed upon them may as well still be 1925 as 2025.
Blood on the Tracks
Hero worship of Benito is nothing new. Cole Porter’s classic 1934 stage musical Anything Goes originally featured a catchy number with the lines “You’re the tops/You’re the Great Houdini/You’re the tops/You’re Mussolini,” indicating how, during his first, pre-WWII decade in power, Musso was widely admired as an efficient strongman leader who followed through on his promises. Like Hitler, he was even once Time magazine’s Man of the Year, making Libero mere imitators in this respect today. Ironically, Mussolini’s later archnemesis Winston Churchill was also an early fan, gushing in 1933 about the “Roman genius” being “the greatest law-giver among living men.” He was certainly better than today’s ECHR.
Even peace-loving Mahatma Gandhi once visited Mussolini in pre-WWII Rome wearing his usual big white bedsheet, whilst Hollywood silent-screen stars Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks were quite happy to be photographed giving fascist salutes in his honor. Another celebrity fanboy was Charlie Chaplin, who opined with many other pundits of the prewar era that, whatever his other flaws, at least the real-life Great Dictator “made the trains run on time,” reforming the previously notoriously unreliable Italian railway system for the better. Unfortunately for the allegedly Jewish Chaplin, some of them were later to head directly toward final destinations like Auschwitz.
In fact, Mussolini’s reputed expertise as a timetable-fixing Fat Controller is untrue. There are plenty of accounts from fascist-era travelers of trains being late, with Mussolini only truly improving a few major lines, selected for easy propaganda purposes when important foreign guests used them.
Nonetheless, the myth of universally punctual trains became a symbol of Il Duce’s alleged restoration of law and order to a previously failing and chaotic post-WWI Italian state, and the lie caught on and stuck. It’s much the same way that, whatever people think about Pol Pot today, they still tend to immediately remember how his innovative, roundabout-based traffic-calming system in Phnom Penh was amazing.
Rome Wasn’t Rebuilt in a Day
No matter what his many flaws, it is indisputable that, just as in his own 1920s and ’30s heyday, many people still find Mussolini fascinating—not unreasonably so, because, unlike most of today’s drone-like Western politicians, he was demonstrably an interesting individual, like one of the more psychopathic, Caligula-style Roman emperors returned from beyond the grave.
Indeed, Mussolini’s chosen title of Il Duce was derived from Dux, an old Latin term meaning “leader” or “dictator,” and he was always eager to pretend he was the 20th-century incarnation of an old Roman Caesar, restoring Italy to its former imperial glories. In 1932 he had a 300-ton Trajan-echoing obelisk erected in Rome, together with a time capsule containing propaganda about his time in power. His Italian fascists financed archaeological digs to uncover ancient Roman relics, and it was intended that, one day, their own buried treasure would be excavated by future scholars, revealing Mussolini’s genius as equal to that of the emperor Augustus.
Together with golden coins was an inscribed Latin text, the Codex Fori Mussolini, portraying Il Duce as a god on Earth, as many emperors had once also claimed to be. During WWI, “by some divine command and will a MAN appeared,” the Codex said, in whose “divine mind” a plan emerged to restore Italy back to being “a light for the entire world”—this “MAN” being Mussolini, and his holy plan fascism. If some total gray non-eminence European politician like Keir Starmer or Olaf Scholz tried doing something like that in 2025, people would just laugh.
Castor or Bollox?
As befitted a man who idolized the era of the gladiators, from an early age one of Mussolini’s favorite hobbies was stabbing people. As a schoolboy, he was expelled more than once for jabbing fellow pupils and their teachers alike with a penknife he was supposed to be using to sharpen his pencils with; his story is soon to be retold anew in the second upcoming series of Adolescence. Benito later entered teaching himself but kept on attacking his pupils’ parents, too.
Following WWI, the future dictator exploited a postwar fashion for political duels to position himself as an iron-willed hard man, fighting so many that his wife, Rachele, complained of the cost of buying him new shirts to wear for each new combat (no self-respecting Italian would ever consider dying in anything less than the latest of Milan fashions).
Whilst a youthful newspaper editor, Benito had already gone against recommended HR practices by forcing his employees to settle their petty differences via sword fights. Dodging the police, Mussolini openly insulted political rivals to place them in a position of either challenging him to a rapier duel or being publicly dishonored; the consequent gladiator sessions drew blood from both Mussolini and his adversaries, necessitating the purchase of yet more clean shirts. Once he seized power in 1922, Mussolini felt constrained by the pressures of public life to abandon his old pastime, much to his annoyance. From now on, he would have to kick the shit out of opponents by other means.
So it was that Mussolini supposedly began to use castor oil, a known laxative, as a tool against his enemies—albeit some sources deny this ever happened, calling it a mere attempt to blacken (or embrown) Benito’s previous good name. Blackshirt thugs would tie opponents to chairs, force open their mouths, and pour an entire bottle of “the golden nectar of nausea” down their throats. For the next few days, the victim would effectively be imprisoned on their own toilet, unable to move away without soiling themselves.
Humiliation was the main consequence, but major health problems could also follow. Extended diarrhea can lead to serious dehydration and, in theory, death. Even today, Italian politicians accused of abuse or coercion of opponents are figuratively said to “use castor oil” against them.
Far-Wrong About the Far-Right?
So you can see why fascination for Mussolini endures, both at home in Italy and abroad: He was a genuinely interesting man. As such, instead of smearing Giorgia Meloni as one of his disciples, if the Italian left were truly wise, they would instead try to co-opt him as one of their own. Unexpectedly, this would not actually be too difficult, as Mussolini began his career very much as a man of the left.
Fascism is usually seen as the most far-right of far-right movements possible, but its origins inside its original home country, Italy, lie firmly within the left-wing trade union movement. Mussolini himself grew up in a far-left household, was a member of the Italian Socialist Party for fourteen years, and made an early living writing and editing various workers’ newspapers. His socialist father christened him Benito after Benito García, a socialist president of Mexico. Musso even knew and corresponded with Lenin, founder of the not notably overly conservative Soviet Union.
Mussolini’s close associate Giovanni Gentile, chief philosopher of Italian fascism, openly declared that “fascism is a form of socialism, in fact it is its most viable form,” a totalitarian ideology in which all public life and business was subordinated to the interests of the centralized corporatist state, like today’s U.S. Democrats, U.K. Labour Party, and transnationalist E.U. also dream of bringing to pass.
So perhaps it’s no wonder Mussolini couldn’t actually make the trains run on time after all. If my own past experiences with British Rail and their constantly delayed transport fleet down the years can teach us one thing, it’s that socialists never do.
The Week’s Most Nappy, Crappy, and Meals-That-Are-Happy Headlines
PAMPERED INFANT
Given that the age of criminal responsibility in the U.K. is 10 years old, shouldn’t it be illegal to prosecute a baby there? Not when said “baby” is in fact a 46-year-old man named Martin Tarling, who simply self-IDs as a female baby named Abbi Taylor. Sort of, anyway. The whole thing is very confusing.
While actually aware he is a fully grown human, Tarling also admits he is an “adult diaper lover” who, via acts of psychologically healing “age regression,” seeks to reenter the “gentler, more carefree time” of his childhood…by soiling nappies (as diapers are called by Brits) and then leaving them lying around outside actual children’s nurseries across the North East of England, where he also enjoys coating the walls and toddlers’ baby bottles with what must be supposed, or at least hoped, is his own shit. He also finds “comfort” in climbing into clinical waste bins, presumably considering them giant metal wombs of some kind. It was this particular habit of Tarling’s that led to his legal downfall, when puzzled North East nursery staff found his “legs sticking out of a bin” on their site in 2023.
Appearing in court last week upon charges of illegally dumping “toxic materials,” Tarling’s defense lawyer insisted upon referring to his client as a woman, a charade also colluded in by various supine media outlets and the rather pathetic court itself. Tarling’s representative made the actual plea that his client should not be sent to prison, as, being a sort-of baby, he would be “vulnerable” to mistreatment by other, more gender-intolerant adult inmates there.
Yes, we’re sure he must be shitting himself. Fortunately he wears a nappy, though, doesn’t he?
URINE SANE
Tarling is not the only trans weirdo determined to inflict his sickening scatological obsessions upon the general British public at the moment.
In response to a landmark new judgment from the U.K. Supreme Court finally legally defining what a woman was (i.e., “a woman,” surprisingly enough), Britain’s serried ranks of extreme trannies decided to protest by threatening to stand in front of Parliament and engage in an act of mass revenge urination dubbed “#PeeForMe.” This was designed in order to demonstrate that “We’ll piss where we want,” in relation to such freaks potentially not being allowed into female toilets from now on.
Yes, that’s right. In order to “prove” they were women, a bunch of men proposed to get their dicks out and then wave them all around, spraying fluids from them directly onto the lenses of waiting TV cameras for everyone sane to see. As far as toilet habits go, that’s almost as dead a giveaway you’re actually male as leaving the seat up afterward would be.
If the #PeeForMe clown-show people really were “women,” then transgenderism must represent the most hideous form of Cronenbergian body horror since the Fly turned into Jeff Goldblum.
THE TURD DEGREE
Attempting to bring down a government by evacuating yourself in public doesn’t exactly fit in with the greatest civil rights campaigns of the past. During his long campaign to eject the British from India, Mahatma Gandhi didn’t stage a mass “shit-in” whereby his many hundreds of nonviolent acolytes all just squatted down and squeezed one out in the middle of the street. After all, if he’d done that in India, nobody would have even realized it was a protest, just another ordinary day in the streets of Hyderabad.
Or maybe a passing university professor would gratefully have scooped up what the hallowed Mahatma had Ma-shat-ma and smeared it all over the nearest wall in a futile attempt to keep cool in the harsh summer heat in a land where, as Noël Coward once famously observed, only mad dogs and Englishmen ever dare go out in the midday sun, to have a dump or otherwise? That was what Pratyush Vatsala, the principal of Delhi University, did this week with piles of cow dung, plastering the brown stuff all over student classrooms with her bare hands as a desperate alternative to paying for the place to have any actual air-conditioning installed.
Vatsala claimed this was a “scientific experiment” to see if the ancient Hindu belief that blessed dung from the religion’s literal holy cows possessed magical abilities to alter the surrounding ambient temperature, as implied by scriptural tradition. If so, the “experiment” soon provided conclusive results: that if you smear animal feces all over an enclosed teaching space within temperatures of 40C-plus, the place will soon start to stink to seventh heaven and start making everyone inside there vomit, keel over, and die.
Outraged degree students subsequently picked up piles of cow dung themselves and painted the wonderful substance all over Vatsala’s office, too, in order to enable her to better continue her investigation there.
Once he has been released from prison, Martin Tarling is going to emigrate to India, tape his dirty diapers to a big broom handle, and apply for a job as caretaker painting the walls with it at Delhi University. It won’t even matter if he really is a baby over there, the Indians have no problems with employing child laborers.
WHAT’S RFK JR.’S BEEF?
Once safely in India, where even national heroes like Gandhi wander around wearing adult diapers, no questions asked, the only flaw in his new life Mr. Tarling may face is that the local french fries may not taste as nice. It is noticeable that, since their 1980s heyday, the gustatory quality of such items has declined badly. The reason for this is that, at many leading outlets like McDonald’s, they are no longer cooked in delicious beef tallow—or “beef dripping,” as it is sometimes known—but in seed oils.
That’s good for the cow-lovers of India, where no sacred animals will have to suffer and die in an abattoir to add taste to your Happy Meal, but not for disappointed consumers in the U.S. and Europe, where today’s fries are every bit as limp, tasteless, and flaccid as a distressed female penis on Parliament Square has been of late.
Fortunately, a heroic new taste-buddy is at hand in the shape of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Donald Trump’s chosen Health Secretary, who in his quest to “Make America Healthy Again” has launched a dubious-sounding crusade to claim that seed oils are inherently unwholesome, leading to consumers being “unknowingly poisoned” by them. Kennedy said seed-fried fries were “betraying” the nation’s children, calling seed oils “one of the most unhealthy ingredients” kids could ever have in their foods. He can’t have seen the kind of things Martin Tarling tries to slip in their baby bottles.
Despite his words’ apparently evidence-free nature, fast-food chains across America are rapidly heeding RFK’s message and reverting back to frying their sliced potato products in snake oil seed oil as a canny new health marketing tactic. “We’ve RFK’D our fries!” national burger joint Steak ’n Shake proudly announced earlier this year. Given how bad they taste at the moment, “We’ve FK’D our fries!” would be a more honest slogan in response from McDonald’s themselves. That line could probably even be taken literally if Martin Tarling happened to work there.
PLANE WRONG ON 9/11
Cooking shitty fries is hardly the worst crime McD’s has been accused of down the decades. During the 1980s, a strange myth arose in the United Kingdom that McDonald’s was secretly funding the Irish Republican Army, the pro-Irish independence paramilitary terror group better known as the IRA. The apparent reason was that, in American payroll lingo, “IRA” means “Individual Retirement Accounts,” an obscure form of employee pension payments, and McDonald’s tax documents with the letters “IRA” printed on them were seen by British observers and then badly misinterpreted by paranoid idiots who thought Hamburglar was really Gerry Adams in a smaller balaclava than usual.
At least the people peddling this particular crackpot terrorism-related theory were just ill-informed Ordinary Joes, though. Less excusable is the opinion of Republican senator Ron Johnson, who has just appeared on the TV talk program The Benny Show (not to be confused with The Benny Hill Show, which was ultimately far more serious) to claim 9/11 was some kind of huge mega-conspiracy in which the U.S. government had played a nefarious secret role.
Johnson cited suspicious reports of “molten steel” at the scene of THE GIANT, JET-ENGINE-FUELED HIGH-TEMPERATURE EXPLOSION as evidence something strange had been afoot in the Twin Towers that tragic day in 2001. Committed denizens of the online conspirasphere may recall one of the key lines tried out to undermine the standard narrative of 9/11 at the time was that the fireballs unleashed by the planes exploding into the side of the skyscrapers shouldn’t have been of a high enough temperature to melt the buildings’ supporting steel-frame superstructure, thereby causing the Towers’ collapse in the first place.
The girders certainly wouldn’t have melted if they had been coated all over in the correct protective layer of heat-regulating cow dung during construction first, as recommended by both the Federal Division of Building Standards authority and Pratyush Vatsala. So what went wrong? Someone must have painted them with a cheaper, similar-looking, similar-smelling, but far inferior and worse-tasting substitute material instead, like McDonald’s has long been doing by cooking their fries in seed oils rather than beef tallow. Who could this malign individual possibly have been?
Who other than Martin Tarling? He has a known prior criminal record of smearing suspicious toxic substances over buildings without the owners’ permission, does he not? Never mind Senator Johnson calling for congressional hearings into the U.S. government’s alleged role in the Twin Towers’ collapse, how about him just starting extradition proceedings to get the U.K. diaper perv flown over in chains and an orange jumpsuit to face full justice for his evil crimes on American territory?
During his TV interview, Johnson further vowed to work with former Republican representative and conspiracy theorist Curt Weldon, in order to ask him “to expose what he’s willing to expose.” For God’s sake, don’t ask that of Martin Tarling, too, when he finally appears in a federal courtroom; you never know what he might whip out in front of you to prove that he’s really a woman.
Once he’s over here on U.S. soil, the feds should seek the death penalty for Tarling immediately. Let us hope the bastard fries. Preferably in beef tallow.
I confess (if I may use the word in this context) that I had little regard for the late pope. I took against him, as it were, early in his papacy when I saw his reaction to some Muslim outrage (or outrage committed by a Muslim), whose precise nature I now forget.
The pope was in an airplane on the way to or from an international papal visit. He said that if someone insulted his mother, you would expect him as a son to strike him back, and he made a gesture as if to punch that person.
This might be true as a generalization of what we expect of the world as it is, but, though I am no theologian, it seemed to me not to be fully in accordance with the doctrine of the organization of which he was the head. It also seemed to me to oscillate between explanation and endorsement. In fact, I thought what he said both cowardly and stupid, and many of his pronouncements since in the realm of public policy seemed to me shallow and complacent.
That said, I was saddened by news of his death, as I am saddened (increasingly) by the news of any old person’s death; and particularly as he had suffered a prolonged illness but nevertheless adhered to his duty by appearing in public on the very verge of death. One cannot but respect him for that.
But I noticed in the wake of his death that he was praised for having modernized the papacy (though some criticized him for not having gone far enough in that direction). I found this interesting and, in a way, revealing, for it gave to modernization an automatically positive valency irrespective of any possible result.
But modernization is an intrinsically hazardous process for an organization that claims to be in possession of transcendent truth. As the Islamists well understand, once carping criticism of the supposedly indubitable is permitted, there is no knowing where it may lead: for example, rejection of the whole doctrine—lock, stock, and barrel—or, if I may be allowed a slight change of metaphor, a throwing out of the baby with the bathwater (assuming that there is a baby in the bathwater in the first place).
To modernize ritual, liturgy, and ceremonial is extremely dangerous from the point of view of any church that does it. Not only does it encourage the rationalist criticism that can easily undermine faith—why is any of it necessary, and why have we been following it for so long?—but, given the present state of our language and everyday comportment, modernization will lead inevitably to the complete banalization of the church. You have only to compare the King James Version of the Bible with the largely sniveling, completely jejune modern versions to see that this is so.
I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help.
My help cometh from the Lord, which made heaven and earth.
He will not suffer thy foot to be moved: he that keepeth thee will not slumber.
Compare this with:
I lift up my eyes to the mountains—where does my help come from?
My help comes from the Lord, the Maker of Heaven and earth.
He will not let your foot slip—he who watches over you will not sleep.
Now, as it happens, I don’t believe a word of it, but the first version at least makes me wish that I did. If it is objected that people do not speak in the language of the first version, it ought to be pointed out that they never did. No one ever said, even in the 17th century, “Good morning, Mr. Smith, I ask you why take ye thought for raiment? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin: and yet I say unto you, that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed as one of these.” (In modern versions, “Why take ye thought for raiment?” becomes “Why are you anxious about clothing?”—to which the reply would surely be, “Because my socks have a hole in them,” or, “My shirt is missing a button,” or, “Other people will laugh at me.”)
The whole point of religious language, liturgy, and ceremonial is not that it should imitate daily life, but that it should sacralize it. Language that is appropriate to shopping in the supermarket (the kind that modern translations of the Bible tend to employ) is not appropriate to worship—I am aware of the difference even though I am an atheist, which increasingly clerics seem not to be. The fact is, however, that we refuse to recognize that what is fitting in one situation is not fitting in another. How you dress for relaxing on a Saturday afternoon, for example, is not fitting for a funeral. In the name of some kind of equality, authenticity, or sincerity, we demand that our language, our dress, our comportment should be the same in whatever situation we find ourselves.
There is also something odiously complacent about the use of the word “modernization.” It assumes that what is modern is best, and therefore that we, the moderns, have reached an unprecedented state of enlightenment. In some things this may be true; no one would wish to go back to the anesthetic practices of the 1930s, for example, let alone those of the 1850s.
But that is not to say that we are the best or most enlightened in everything. To modernize is not the same as to improve. Jeff Koons is undoubtedly more modern than Donatello, but it would be a very strange judgment indeed that the more than half a millennium between them brought about uninterrupted sculptural improvement, resulting in the greatest works ever produced.
The word “modernization” as an unthinking term of approbation is one of what Francis Bacon called “the idols of the marketplace.” “Men,” says Bacon, “believe that their reason governs words; but it is also true that words react on the understanding.” We are mesmerized by our astonishing progress, and thus we come to think that the more in accord with our current ideas an institution is, and the more it changes, the better it must be.
If is not careful, the Catholic Church will be improved into a state first of schism, and then of extinction.
Theodore Dalrymple’s latest book is On the Ivory Stages (Mirabeau Press).
Amid the boredom of a non-Christian pope’s death and the media’s obsession with the Signal messaging app, I found myself reading about Pearl Harbor this week. It seems that as hell rained down, Marines, sailors, firemen and civilians grabbed their guns and began firing wildly in the sky at the Japanese planes.
And none of those pilots was given due process.
Obviously, the traditional history of Pearl Harbor is all wrong. It’s not about a sneak attack on the U.S. Pacific Fleet. The real story is that there was ZERO due process. Americans just shot at the pilots on the theory that they were enemy aliens, but with no proof, certainly no proof that would satisfy a New York Times editor.
Not only that, but none of the Japanese pilots was given a lawyer, and there were no hearings whatsoever and no official adjudication of their guilt. I’m sure one or two of those pilots was “Maryland Man,” “Tennessee Man” or “Ohio Man.”
Where’s the ACLU? They’ve been asleep at the switch for decades on this denial of constitutional rights. Let me tell you, if Chris Van Hollen had been alive, he would have raised bloody hell.
That was the day democracy died.
At least we can count on Harvard University to stand on its constitutional rights. As President Trump revs up a fleet of Brinks trucks to take away all of Harvard’s money, I came across some documents proving that the Framers anticipated the exact situation Harvard is in right now.
I’m going to be making the documents public soon, but it’s blindingly clear that both James Madison and Alexander Hamilton were insistent that if an educational institution with a $50 billion endowment, teaching anti-white history and being led by a beclowned plagiarist president, asks for multiple millions of taxpayer dollars, that request shall not be denied.
The accidentally deleted 11 1/2th Amendment would have read: “Harvard University shall be given as much money as it wants,” and be colloquially known as the “Unf-ngbelievable Entitlement” clause.
Debate over the 11 1/2th Amendment led to some of the biggest brawls in Philadelphia (until the Eagles won their first Super Bowl), with Hamilton arguing that such a provision would be the dictionary definition of “chutzpah,” and Madison countering that Harvard would be so steeped in Jew-hating that it wouldn’t know what the word meant.
This is precisely the argument Harvard has made in its brief. Not merely that they are insisting on our money, but that they have a “constitutional” right to it, referring to the college’s “defense of its own constitutional freedoms,” and accusing the government of “punish[ing] Harvard for protecting its constitutional rights.”
Yes, exactly. It’s right there in the 11 1/2th Amendment.
The “Unf-ngbelievable Entitlement” clause doesn’t spell it out, but, as I know (and Harvard knows), under no circumstances does it apply to Christian colleges, like Bob Jones University. Only committed anti-white universities, like Harvard. Because of Bob Jones’ appalling, fundamentalist reading of the Bible and the Tower of Babel to prohibit interracial dating, the school was stripped of its tax-exempt status in 1970, and the IRS’s ruling was upheld by the Supreme Court, 8-1.
The court found that, “underlying all relevant parts of the [IRS] Code, is the intent that entitlement to tax exemption depends on meeting certain common law standards of charity — namely, that an institution seeking tax-exempt status must serve a public purpose and not be contrary to established public policy.”
Meaning, of course, that Harvard may openly discriminate against whites, promote mediocrities based on their not being white, hire incompetents and reject qualified applicants, entirely on the criterion: “white or not-white?” — and none of that is contrary to established public policy. Do not bore me with citations of the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution. Inapposite! We’re talking about Harvard.
As Sen. Van Hollen — surely, the Democrats’ current leading candidate for president — has demonstrated, it’s not that hard to stand on principle. You just need unparalleled courage and a Mad Libs booklet.
I will fight for …
[horses, my friends, the Knicks, MS-13 gang members]
Van Hollen: MS-13 gang members!
because they are …
[deserving, pretty, undemanding, domestic violence abusers]
Van Hollen: domestic violence abusers!
who are in …
[trouble, love, the doghouse, our country illegally].
Van Hollen: our country illegally!
In the face of Trump’s approval rating soaring with every planeload of illegals he sends to El Salvador, Democrats have hit on the perfect response.
Okay, history buffs, I write this on April 19, 2025, exactly 250 years from that most famous of midnight runs, that of Paul Revere and William Dawes to warn fellow patriots that the British army was on the march. Popular legend has it that Paul warned them by yelling, “The British are coming, the British are coming.” Not true. He yelled, “The regulars are coming,” as back then both sides thought themselves British.
Joseph Warren, a Founding Father, had tipped off Paul Revere and Willy Dawes to the British plans. The ride was immortalized by Henry Longfellow’s poem and has been reenacted in Massachusetts streets ever since. The Brits sent a contingent in secret out at night to capture weapons stored by anarchic locals at Concord. Paul and Willy warned them, and the war was on. Actually there was very little fighting. The local militia in Lexington was not looking for a fight. No one has ever proved who was the first to shoot. Nevertheless it became known in America later on as “the shot heard round the world.” After that shot a little hell broke loose. The Brit regulars fired volleys and charged with fixed bayonets. Eight local defenders died. Then the colonials retaliated. That’s when the Brit regulars fled. Victory has many followers, and more and more colonials joined, eager to fight.
The British regulars stood and fought back in Lexington. The so-called Americans at the time surprised the Brits by fighting in formation and with courage and discipline. The British regulars were driven back to Boston, having suffered 300 casualties compared with 100 of the resisting locals. This, then, was the first day of that most incredible birth of a country now dominating the world, the United States of America. The Concord and Lexington battles may have been small beer in comparison with what ensued, but like Thermopylae 1,500 years before, they signaled great things to come. Like the Ancient Greeks, the Americans warned the all-conquering British that they were not about to lie down and be good little British subjects. Pay taxes without representation. Be looked down upon as simple colonials. Like it or not, and they didn’t like it and still don’t, the Brits were taught their first lesson. I lived in London for close to 35, perhaps 40, years, and I know what I’m talking about. The Americans are admired by many but also seen as loud and vulgar and too rich. But let’s put our cards on the table. Basically the Brits are jealous. The Yanks, as they call them, not only beat them on the field, they also prospered in an unimaginable way.
Perhaps I exaggerate. I’ve been torn between the two countries’ history, changing my mind about them time and again. Writing this on the date it all began puts me on the side of the Americans. My favorite general was Benedict Arnold. And still is. Gentleman Johnny Burgoyne, the Brit general who came to fight in Saratoga with 40 trunks of clothes and his mistress along, was another favorite. And did you know that Alexander Hamilton had led the last charge down south before General Cornwallis surrendered? What do any of you think would have happened had the Howe brothers captured Washington before he snuck out of Brooklyn and into Manhattan and eventually New Jersey? What kind of nation would this part of the world be had America lost the war?
And now for some gossip about how the locals found out that the army was on the move against them and scored that first all-important victory. How did Joseph Warren know about the move and warn Paul Revere? Well, as in all mysteries, a woman was involved. Mind you, this could be vicious Brit gossip, because the lady was an American beauty. She was married to Gen. Thomas Gage, who ordered the army to move against the locals. Margaret Kemble Gage was a very rich local lady who married the Brit general when she was 24. After the outbreak of the war she sailed to England, and her hubby followed after a few months. Thus the stage was set for a fable that suited the British establishment as well as the American revolutionaries. She had extracted her husband’s plans to attack and passed them on to a fellow American. The myth pleased everyone. The British were happy that their loss was due to a betrayal. The Yanks were pleased that an American had chosen her country above her husband. The London set was also pleased because Margaret was a looker and the London gals were not.
Last but not least, by the great society arbiter Taki: An 18th-century lady of her standing did not exactly call on gentlemen she hardly knew and extract secrets from them. The Brits did not take the upstarts seriously enough, no matter the bull Hollywood puts up every so often. The Howe brothers, both great gentlemen and feeling that the Yanks were their naughty cousins, did not truly pursue George Washington in Brooklyn. They dined and wined instead. Margaret Gage was a loyal wife who was snubbed for the rest of her life for something she didn’t do.
Directing a film is a little like coaching a football team—both are jobs for natural leaders of men—but strikingly few auteurs played serious team sports after age 18.
Ron Shelton, director of the baseball movie Bull Durham, played five years of minor-league ball. Richard Linklater pitched in college until an injury switched his career trajectory from the athletic to the aesthetic. And Ryan Coogler, director of the giant Marvel hit Black Panther and now Sinners, caught 112 passes over four seasons as a wide receiver at mid-tier Sacramento State.
Coogler brings a jock’s conservative, focused mentality to his features, such as Creed, in which he deftly revived the Rocky franchise and gave Sylvester Stallone his best role since the original, by casting his serviceable leading man Michael B. Jordan, a theater kid who played basketball in high school, as the son of Rocky’s late rival and friend Apollo Creed.
Coogler’s next project is rebooting the right-coded The X-Files.
Granted, the hoopla during the Great Awokening over Black Panther’s portrayal of a comic-book black utopia was absurd. The New York Times proclaimed:
To the politically minded, the Wakanda of ‘Black Panther’ offers an almost too perfect rebuttal to President Trump’s comments in January in which he referred to African nations with a disparaging expletive.
Still, in extolling the virtues of an absolute monarchy tempered only by the right of other princes of the royal blood to challenge the king to a duel to the death, it was perhaps the most reactionary movie of the decade.
Coogler’s new <Sinners is, in many ways, an admirable film: a lavish, stylish, ambitious horror musical based on that rarity in 2025—original intellectual property. It’s gotten adoring reviews and made a respectable amount of money in its opening weekend. It will be of interest to white fans of the blues guitar.
Sinners is set in 1932 in Clarksdale, Miss., at the crossroads of Highway 61 where the legendary black blues guitarist Robert Johnson is said to have sold his soul to the devil, or perhaps to Papa Legba, the West African ioa of crossroads, for more skill with his instrument.
In reality, there’s no mention of any Faustian bargain in Johnson’s “Cross Road Blues,” which Eric Clapton famously covered in the 1960s. But somehow the story got started, and it’s been popular source material ever since, such as in the Charlie Daniels Band’s “The Devil Went Down to Georgia.” For instance, in Walter Hill’s 1986 movie Crossroads, Ralph Macchio wins a guitar duel with a metal guitarist, who’d sold his soul to Satan, by relying upon his classical training.
In Coogler’s reimagining, which seems to borrow from Charlie Daniels’, Legba is instead an Irish demon who wants to steal the musical genius of the black guitarist.
Sinners takes place over a single day as identical twins Smoke and Stack (with Jordan playing both roles through use of what Charlie Kaufman’s identical twin Donald in Adaptation calls “trick photography”) roll back into their hometown after seven years of bootlegging for Al Capone in Chicago’s Bronzeville. Loaded with cash, which they may have stolen from the Outfit, they open a juke joint and book their young cousin, a Robert Johnson-like blues prodigy, to play that night.
Usually, movies portray identical twins as having radically different personalities to let actors show off their range (e.g., Nicolas Cage’s Charlie Kaufman is brilliant, neurotic, and unlikable, while his Donald Kaufman is dim, happy-go-lucky, and lovable). Sinners’ twins are more realistic: highly similar in affect, but not exactly the same. Smoke is more responsible and Stack is more raffish.
Coogler, an audience-friendly director, considerately gives Smoke a blue cap and Stack a red fedora to help you tell them apart, but it’s still a fair amount of work keeping track of which twin is which when trying to follow the plot. Combined with the old-fashioned black accents, which took me about an hour to get familiar with, you might well want to wait for Sinners to appear on streaming with subtitles.
The first hour is a fairly solid drama as the prodigal twins drive around town spending lavishly to get their nightclub ready for its grand opening. Nothing too exciting happens, but I like well-made movies about entrepreneurs launching a business.
Then it turns into a vampire-zombie movie, with the devil speaking sometimes with an Irish brogue for unexplained reasons.
So, why doesn’t Sinners quite live up to its potential?
First, Coogler doesn’t have much of a sense of humor. In Sinners, only Delroy Lindo as a drunken old blues man is much fun.
Second, the acoustic Delta blues (and even their postwar descendant, the electric Chicago blues), while vastly influential on 1960s–70s rock, aren’t really that entertaining. (Trust me, during my eighteen years in Chicago, I tried to get into the blues but just couldn’t.) In movies, the blues rely inordinately on reaction shots of listeners grooving to the sound because what you can hear is pretty ho-hum. What 1960s white musicians like Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin were able to do with this rather rudimentary style remains remarkable.
Third, Sinners is a horror movie that just isn’t scary.
I don’t review many horror movies because I don’t like being frightened. (Your tastes may be less wimpy.) But I was fine with Sinners because it’s not fear-inducing at all.
Sure, a lot of gory stuff happens during the horror part of the movie, but none of it is in the least bit terrifying.
Why not?
For one thing, vampires are intensely European and aristocratic, so they don’t work well in a rural African-American movie.
On the other hand, Haitian zombies would seem more congenial subject matter. After all, a major reason that Haiti has so much more of a self-destructive culture than other Caribbean countries like the Dominican Republic or Jamaica is that it obtained its independence before the end of the Atlantic slave trade in roughly 1807–1830. This allowed its neighbors, and even some West African countries, to more thoroughly Christianize over the course of the 19th century after being deprived of the fresh flow of voodoo practitioners from West Africa long before independence solidified their cultural matrix.
So, Haiti has stayed more superstitious.
For example, the key figure in 20th-century Haitian politics, the black-power dictator Papa Doc Duvalier, was able to use his resemblance to the demon Baron Samedi to convince the masses of his occult powers. But Duvalier, an M.D. with a public health degree from the U. of Michigan, believed in voodoo himself. Fearing that a rival could transform himself into a black dog, in 1968 Duvalier had his Tonton Macoute bullyboys kill all the black dogs in the capital.
So there are horrifying (if also comic) aspects to West African superstition.
But Coogler, a racial loyalist, isn’t going to go there. Hence, there’s nothing terrifying in Sinners. For instance, Smoke’s ex-wife sells hoodoo fetishes, but she only uses her roots and spells to protect the community, not to let her customers hex their rivals.
And finally, Coogler, for all his directorial skill, is a little too much of a healthy-minded all-American football-hero type to get the most mileage out of this material.
Then, after the vampire zombie attacks are over, Coogler tacks on a perfunctory scene in which the Ku Klux Klan attacks. But Coogler is more pro-black than antiwhite, so this part is uninspired (unlike, say, Jordan Peele’s Get Out). Fortunately, there’s a fun post-credits scene involving 88-year-old Chicago blues guitarist Buddy Guy, so stick around.
What I would have done with Sinners’ premise is throw out all the horror nonsense and instead have Al Capone follow Smoke and Stack home to get his money back. Just as the Chicago gangsters point their tommy guns at the heavily armed black revelers, the Klan arrives. But the KKK can’t decide whether they hate uppity blacks or alien Catholic mobsters more, leading to a triangular Mexican standoff in the tradition of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.
Anyone remember back in 2008 when the housing market collapsed and the stock market crashed, with many tens of millions of Americans seeing their lifetime savings nearly wiped out?
Apparently the politicians in Washington are suffering amnesia — even though it was the worst crash since the Great Depression.
What else has been conveniently forgotten inside the swamp is that the institution that lost the most money and required the biggest tax bailout wasn’t any of the major banks that teetered on the verge of bankruptcy but Fannie Mae — the government-guaranteed enterprise that insures federal mortgages and was supposed to NEVER fail. Fanny received nearly $200 billion of taxpayer rescue funds.
Fannie Mae, which now resides in one of the glitziest nearly 1 million-square-foot high-story office buildings in the Washington, D.C., area, is still in conservatorship. Hopefully, the Trump administration will move toward setting it free and severing all its federal strings.
Instead, Fannie and the housing lobby wants to expand its power by forcing taxpayers to take on tens of billions of dollars of new risk by effectively eliminating title insurance on federally backed loans and replacing it with … ta da: Fannie Mae as the de facto insurance provider on hundreds of billions of dollars of homes. What could possibly go wrong?
Title insurance ensures that when you pay $100,000 or $1 million for a new home, you are not the victim of a fraudster, and you have rightful ownership. Private title insurance typically costs a one-time fee of 0.5% to 1% of the purchase price — which is hardly price gouging.
In the last months of the Biden administration, Fannie Mae proposed a federal takeover scheme under the guise of bringing down the price of buying a home. It should have received a ceremonial burial when Kamala Harris lost the election, but Fannie and the housing lobby are powerful and relentless. They say it won’t cost the taxpayer a dime.
Uh-huh. This is what Fannie and the Federal Housing Administration said when it facilitated the low down payment loans in the early 2000s that enticed Americans into homes they couldn’t afford. Shortly before the 2008 crash, Fannie was even touting studies that concluded the possibility that Fannie would go bankrupt was one in a million. Whoops!
Make no mistake: This Fannie Mae scheme is privatization in reverse. It runs a well-functioning private insurance market out of business, replacing it with government subsidized insurance coverage.
Not only would this greatly expand Fannie Mae’s charter, but it intrudes on the traditional state oversight that ensures safety and soundness of the industry. The Trump administration is about turning power back to the states, not seizing power from them.
Congress and the Trump administration, with oversight of federal housing policy, should end this sham. Taxpayers have already been taken to the cleaners by Fannie Mae, and to quote the rock band The Who, we won’t get fooled again.
When I was still a boy, there was a saying, now rather out of fashion, used by critics to blast politicians or other figures of authority whenever they had formulated yet another foolish policy, to the effect that “Next they’ll be wanting to bring back Hitler!” As Easter Sunday this year happened to achieve the rare feat of falling upon the Führer’s birthday of 20 April, the idea of Adolf being literally resurrected from the dead sprang inescapably to my mind. Was it possible this calendrical “coincidence” happened to portend the imminent resurrection of Hitler from his grave, just like had happened to that equally capable leader of men Jesus Christ one Easter Sunday 2,000 years ago?
I am not the only one twisted enough to have thought such a feat of miraculous revivification possible, it would appear. This rather strange idea also seems to have entered into the mind of an even more deranged individual named Luis Ramirez, a 23-year-old nutcase from Utah, who was arrested last month and charged with allegedly planning a terror attack against a New York synagogue under the seemingly sincere impression he was the reincarnation of Herr Hitler. “The Jews killed me in my past life,” Ramirez complained. That makes another biographical similarity between Hitler and Jesus, then.
Thrown out from military cadet training in Virginia for what were termed “psychological reasons” (e.g., thinking he was Hitler), Ramirez reportedly made a series of lunatic online posts claiming to have been the Nazi leader “in a past life” and threatening to kill “as many Jews as I killed” last time he was down here on Earth. That must have been quite a big synagogue, to have held 6 million people. Or does this all stand as indisputable proof from beyond the grave that this particular number of dead really was a vastly inflated figure after all? Expect Mr. Ramirez to turn up being cited by Darryl Cooper as a reliable historical source upon this very matter on a podcast near you someday soon.
Austrian Becomes Australian
A surprisingly large number of people have thought they were really Hitler reborn down the decades since the real thing’s suicide in the Führerbunker back in 1945—in the sense that I find any number of persons above the number “zero” to be surprising in this particular matter.
An Australian teenager named James William Gibson suddenly began suffering the very same delusion as James Ramirez on Good Friday 2015. It appears Gibson’s father had died in some bushfires, giving his son access to $230,000 in compensation cash, which he chose to spend upon buying what newspapers no doubt accurately called “lots of drugs”—so much drugs that he began thinking he was Adolf Hitler.
Reincarnated in a new body, and being mind-controlled by a secret hidden Nazi regime that broadcast messages from his television set ordering him to kill, Gibson smashed a fellow drug user’s head in with a baseball bat, after he claimed “messages in smoke” had told him his victim was the man responsible for starting the fire that had burned his dad.
Gibson ended up being sentenced to fifteen years behind bars for his crime, but that was in 2015, just before the whole transgender craze began to blitzkrieg its way across the entire Western world. If he appeared in the dock professing to self-ID as being Hitler today, would sympathetic identitarian-minded judges just be minded to take Gibson at his word and compliantly start addressing him by his chosen er/ihm pronouns?
In the 2020s, we would come much closer to finding out. To be “transhitler” is now a whole legitimate queer gender identity, it would appear.
Felix Culpable
Felix Cipher is an extremely unusual transgender Jewish TikToker and fantasy novel author from Colorado who went every bit as unpleasantly viral as typhus in Auschwitz back in 2023 after claiming to self-ID as the reincarnation of his former all-time greatest ethnic enemy. Events began when Felix posted a (now deleted) video online showing off his new nose ring, which was actually a black metallic disc split into three separate sections by a trio of silver arms, but which in practice looked a bit like Hitler’s mustache, intentionally or otherwise. As Cipher also possessed a Hitler-like comb-over and oversize circular Heinrich Himmler-style glasses, and sometimes wore what appeared to be a jacket bearing an image of the Reichsadler, or German Imperial Eagle, some viewers presumed he was posing as a Nazi for some reason.
Playing up to this, Felix the Twat then posted a second video announcing that “I am very in tune with my past lives. My last just happened to be a very infamous one…” He then pointed portentously toward some kind of scar or birthmark on his head, claiming this represented the regenerated bullet wound from where he had shot himself in his Berlin bunker back in ’45. Cipher had been suffering nightmares of murdering himself in this fashion since he was 5 years old, and with his present-day birthmark scar, he pronounced, “You can see right where I shot myself.”
Their interest and outrage piqued, bemused web users soon dug up evidence from Felix’s other online activities to piece together a wider picture of a very curious man indeed. For one thing, he appeared to possess a reputed “egg-laying kink,” defined as being a sexual fantasy in which a person desires to pretend to be an alien, insect, reptile, amphibian, mutant, devil, or other such monster, and then lay eggs into someone, or possibly the other way around; being an avid snake keeper, Felix may actually have easy home access to reptile eggs. Cipher had supposedly compiled an online playlist of appropriate egg-related songs to listen to whilst thinking about such matters. I must confess, the only entry I can currently think of to be included on it would be “I Am the Egg Man” by the Beatles. Or possibly “Lay, Lady, Lay” by Bob Dylan.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, it was also alleged that Felix had “visited mental health facilities.” More surprisingly, it appeared he had since been allowed out of them. Following his queer public “coming out” as a transhitlerian, some traitorous online Gestapo informer told Felix’s then-Axis allies-cum-employers at Tokyo Joe’s fast food chain about his antics, who were then said to have sacked Cipher due to the fact that his status as a Nazi “does not align with our values.” Fortunately, he quickly soon found an alternative position working for Elon Musk.
However, thankfully this was not the Jew-hating Führer of old, whose spirit had, after all, now reincarnated itself within an actual Jewish person’s body, but an entirely new and reformed one, reborn morally as well as spiritually. According to Felix, he did not “believe in racist values like everyone assumes” anymore, being a fan merely of eugenics and “not genocide.”
Rather going against this narrative, though, were Cipher’s actions when a Jewish Holocaust survivor named Gidon Lev, hearing about the weird transboi’s antics, posted an online video commentary criticizing them. In response, Felix directly contacted Lev as follows: “Haha, it’s me! Sorry my men had you in a camp, ol’ pal, but I’m back for a reason.”
Don’t forget, readers, there is no clinical evidence whatsoever that transgender people are ever just mentally ill.
Hire Hitler
Under rare circumstances, it is even possible to make an entire living out of claiming to be the reincarnated avatar of Adolf Hitler. This was the path in life followed by a Kosovo Albanian named Emin Djinovci, who should really have blacked his face up with tarmac and begun calling himself Idi Emin if he wanted to march around pretending to be a dead dictator.
According to Der Daily Mail, Emin specifically “believes he is the Kosovan reincarnation of Adolf Hitler,” but it is unclear whether the man was speaking figuratively here or maybe just using this as an advertising line for his services as a Hitler look-alike for hire. Photos do show a man who looks uncannily like the Führer, but this is largely because he has grown an appropriate mustache and cut his hair in Hitler’s style; saying Emin looks like Hitler is equivalent to saying Charlie Chaplin did when playing him in The Great Dictator.
Djinovci considers the original Hitler his “friend,” because, he says, both hated Serbians and tried to kill them. A former member of the paramilitary Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), Emin fought against Serbs during the region’s bitter 1990s breakup of Yugoslavia, whilst Hitler allowed Albanian partisans to ethnically cleanse Serbian civilians during WWII. As many of his fellow Kosovans also hate Serbs and want to massacre them, Emin established a series of Nazi-themed restaurants with names like Pizzeria Hitleri following the Yugoslav civil war’s end, until NATO peacekeepers forced him to rebrand them less fascistically.
But Djinovci is still able to earn ein Kruste by wandering around the Kosovan city of Mitrovica carrying a copy of Mein Kampf, sieg-heiling to locals and tourists and selling swastika badges and necklaces—although, he says, he never enters any Serbian-occupied areas of town without carrying a gun, presumably a standard-issue Luger.
Apart from the Serbs, most locals reputedly react to Emin’s presence positively. “Girls like to touch my face,” he says, and he successfully charges $60 to have his photo taken alongside curious passersby. He is even able to hire himself out to attend funerals dressed as Hitler in full Nazi uniform to add a further layer of dignity and class to proceedings, although “That sometimes has a negative effect because those who’ve come to mourn stop crying and talk to me instead.” Surely he can reassure mourners that, just like Adolf himself, their dead relatives will also one day return to comfort them from beyond the veil.
With the above very odd individuals in mind, maybe we could do with Adolf Hitler’s immortal soul engaging in a supernatural seasonal act of imitatio Christi and returning to our Earth plane to cleanse our planet of untermenschen subhuman filth once more this Easter time after all? He could start by killing off this little lot.
