The Week’s Most Gender-Quack, Doll-Attack, and Hermione-Goes-Black Headlines
60 MINUTES TO MELTDOWN
Speechifying to students at North Carolina’s Wake Forest University on May 19, veteran 60 Minutes host Scott Pelley accidentally misread the place’s name as Woke Forest University and launched into an “unhinged” tirade against President Trump. Donald’s truth-twisting administration, Pelley alleged, aimed to “make criminals heroes and heroes criminals”—words that, uttered by a mainstream left-wing TV “journalist” in the week of the fifth anniversary of the death of St. George Floyd, do demonstrate a certain lack of self-awareness.
Some right-wing mainstream TV journalists show an equal lack of self-awareness themselves too, though. Pelley’s main gripe against Trump was that he aimed to destroy free speech across America. Livid Fox News anchor Kayleigh McEnany then went on air and demanded Pelley be immediately arrested to prove this was simply not true, and freeborn Americans could say whatever they damn well pleased. Except for saying that free speech was under attack, of course; you just shouldn’t be allowed to say that kind of thing.
At least viewers could actually understand what Pelley was saying, though: When many modern-day left-wingers open their mouths, all most normal voters hear spewing out is Stephen Hawking reading an antique copy of Pravda backwards.
Accordingly, a growing number of Democrats are decrying their fellow socialists’ excessive use of “Ivy League-tested terms” nobody non-android can compute. Arizona senator Ruben Gallego told journalists, “I’m going to piss some people off by saying this, but ‘social equity’—why do we say that? Why don’t we say, ‘We want you to have an even chance’?” Maybe because they don’t: They want blacks, gays, criminals, Muslims, and trannies to have more undeserved chances in life than other people do. Leftists just use the obscurantist phrase “social equity” to disguise this unpopular fact.
Michigan senator Elissa Slotkin even went so far as to suggest future Dem candidates open speeches by yelling out, “Hey, you motherfuckers!” to their audiences. Well, that’s another niche sexual demographic covered.
Another member of a niche sexual demographic, gay former Biden-era Transport Secretary Pete Buttigieg, agreed. “It’s so important for Democrats to have a vocabulary that can reach everybody,” said the big fat queer. Hey, we’re only following his own advice to call a spade a spade here…
DONKEY KONG COUNTRY
The USA is still a far freer nation than its old wartime enemy Japan. This week sees the launch of Nintendo’s latest console, the Switch 2, worldwide—but if you are an expectant videogame-loving mother who wishes to mark the exciting occasion by naming your newborn after one of Nintendo’s biggest characters, then you will no longer be allowed to, at least not in Nippon.
Tired of people giving their children ambiguously spelled “kirakira” names that could be weirdly pronounced to spell out the titles of various Pokémon (and also things like “Devil,” “Pudding,” “Poo,” “Hello Kitty,” “Nike,” “Hiroshima,” and “Tentacle Porn”), the Japanese government has just made it specifically illegal to christen your baby Pikachu.
Yet it is perfectly legal for American parents to name their kids after Pokémon—and many do, albeit generally only human-sounding ones such as Roselia or Eevee, not as yet Bulbasaur, Magikarp, or Beedrill. U.S. Social Security data shows a recent upsurge in Nintendo-named babies across America, with figures like Mario, Luigi, Link, Zelda, Kirby, Samus, Fox, and Peach being particularly popular…alongside Diddy and Donkey Kong.
Ethnicity-related data for these latter two monikers is unavailable, but if Shiloh Hendrix ever called a chimping-out black toddler something like that, she would immediately end up with yet more NAACP-led calls for legal action on her hands.
JESUS SAVES…BUT ERIC NETS THE REBOUND
An unborn Japanese child’s best bet to become a human Pokémon now is to convert to Christianity, become Pope, and quickly adopt the official pontifical cover name of Pope Pikachu I. The new Vicar of Rome chose to be redubbed Leo XIV, but perhaps he should have called himself Pope Eric; investigation by French genealogists shows him to be a cousin of noted former Manchester United and France professional soccer-ballist Eric Cantona. We now know why Eric was always so good with crosses.
Eric’s old club Manchester United lost the Europa League final last week, before posting a record-low Premier League finish to end a truly dismal season. Their only viable path back toward glory is to enter the transfer market and sign a whole raft of hitherto-ignored kirakira-christened players whose names would tend to suggest they may possess special, match-winning, Pokémon-like superpowers: players like Martin Squirtle, Adrian MewTwo, Johan Charmander, and Krabby Agbonlahor, for example. Or simply Yago Pikachu, a real Brazilian soccer player who plays for the Brazilian team Fortaleza.
As it is, United’s current underachieving squad seems to consist entirely of clones of a different aptly named Brazilian footballer: Rafael Scheidt. “I want this to be known as the Scheidt Year,” he told a newspaper in 2002. For Manchester United in 2025, it already is.
ACTORS ARE EXPERTS IN ACTING LIKE EXPERTS
The advent of June means the annual “Gays Are Our Gods Now Month” is here again, much to the delight of the assembled quacks of the U.K.’s British Medical Association. The Bender Month Allies of the BMA acidly reacted to a recent ruling from Britain’s Supreme Court of Physical Reality defining a woman as someone with a real vagina as being “scientifically illiterate” and “biologically nonsensical.” Many medical laymxn may think it’s the other way around—but, unlike the BMA “experts,” they aren’t qualified gynecologists.
Now, in equally erudite agreement, an entire A–Z of U.S. and U.K. Hollywood Z–A-listers, from Eddie Redmayne to James Norton, have signed a pair of open letters protesting against the evil judgment as medically and biologically false.
How would they know? They’re just unqualified thesps, artistes, and luvvies. What, precisely, gives some random, letter-signing script scribbler named Mark Haddon the deep anatomical knowledge to arbitrarily medically redefine what makes a woman a woman and a man a man now? The fact that his name is but one short letter away from being “Mark Hardon”?
By that rationale, the world’s greatest all-time celebrity expert on transgenderism must be Dick Van Dyke. At least Tinseltown’s most famous star accidentally christened after a butch Dutch lesbian with a strap-on actually played a doctor on screen on Diagnosis: Murder, unlike most of the above letters’ pretend-world signatories. A further giveaway those who signed them were not real doctors was that you could actually read their handwriting.
HARRY POTTER AND THE HALF-CASTE PRINCESS
One of the key signatories of the Hollywood gender-bending letters was Paapa “Do Preach” Essediu, a black actor currently contracted to play the previously white role of Severus Snape on HBO’s upcoming Harry Potter and the Great Replacement TV series. His signature drew ire from Harry’s original ink-mother J.K. Rowling, who is noted for refusing to believe that humans can magically shift their biological sex just because pseudo-medical La-La Land activists say they can.
And yet, Rowling is quite happy to uncritically believe in equally impossible Hollywood cases of humans magically shifting their race whenever they feel like it. Not only was J.K. unconcerned at Paapa Plainly-Not-A-Doc playing one of her previously Caucasian characters on the new TV show, she also lent her delighted approval to HBO’s casting this week of a mixed-race black child named Arabella Stanton in the old Emma Watson role of clearly 100 percent white girl/wizard Hermione Granger.
While delighted by the presence of a real-life Magic Black Woman in the new adaptation, what Rowling doesn’t realize is that, if you examine photos of the two, “Arabella” actually appears to be none other than well-known queer British Olympic diving champion Tom Daley following a quick sex change and six hours on a faulty sun bed.
At this industrial rate of race- and gender-blind casting, come the time for the next inevitable future TV reboot of the same tired old shite in 2035, the show will be set in India and called Hari Potter and the Prisoner of Her Own Body.
SHOW ME ON THE DOLL EXACTLY WHERE HE TOUCHED YOU
The chief slogan of Pride Month 2025 is set to be “Protect the Dolls!”—such dolls being purportedly “vulnerable” transgender teens. But are certain dolls the real dangers in and of themselves?
Annabelle is a haunted Raggedy Ann doll usually kept locked safely away inside the Occult Museum of a now-deceased husband-and-wife team of all-American demon hunters called Ed and Lorraine Warren. The figurine self-IDs as being possessed and was acquired by the Warrens in the 1970s from its owner after it began moving of its own accord and attacking people.
Now the devil doll has been released from its prison for a national tour, causing much foreboding. So dangerous is the item said to be, its current owner only ever dares handle it while wearing “gloves with crosses on them and saint medals in the fingertips,” like a masturbating priest.
But was the true demon here actually Ed Warren? According to rumors, Ed was a bit of an incubus himself, who shacked up with a 15-year-old girl whose bus he drove for extra money when he was in his mid-30s (hunting demons doesn’t generally pay that well), before shipping her into his family home, impregnating her, and forcing her into an abortion, all with Lorraine’s explicit knowledge.
Yet did Ed’s victim truly terminate her illicit child as ordered, or just spirit the tot safely away somewhere in hiding to escape Ed’s wandering hands? Look again at Annabelle in her usual Occult Museum jail, a specially constructed glass-fronted sarcophagus shaped like a miniature church, doused in holy water.
Staring wide-eyed and terrified out through her locked protective window, a big sign commands all comers, “WARNING: POSITIVELY DO NOT TOUCH.” Was that message actually aimed not at the foolish museum-going public, but at Evil Ed himself? A young mother disguising her baby as a demonic moving doll just so she wouldn’t end up getting poked and impregnated by Ed Warren too seems like an extreme measure to resort to, but these were extreme circumstances.
It’s okay. You can take your Raggedy disguise off and come out now, Little Baby Ann. Uncle Eddie is dead now. And if you do it this month of all months, there are thousands upon thousands of people out there who’ve got your back at the moment. Look, they’re all busily mincing around the nation at gay parades and openly approaching confused children while dressed in pink sparkly shirts saying “Protect the Dolls!” on them just to prove it. People like that definitely aren’t any dangerous, child-grooming pedophiles like Uncle Ed was!
A BLAIR IN THE SKY
A much less pedo-related paranormal artifact with potential for future display in the Warrens’ Occult Museum has just been captured in Colombia: a silvery metallic sphere recorded on camera flying over the town of Buga before landing and being retrieved by a passing ufologist. Locals claim it is of ET origin, albeit covered in letters from ancient human alphabets.
Using AI, “scientists” determined that the alien message read as follows: “The origin of birth through union and energy in the cycle of transformation, meeting point of unity, expansion, and consciousness—individual consciousness.” That seemed essentially meaningless, so the ufologists called in the true experts in the speaking of indecipherable nonhuman languages: Democrat Party politicians. “I think it means ‘Hey, you motherfuckers!’” explained Sen. Elissa Slotkin, cautiously.
As for how true this whole story is, meanwhile…it should be noted the report on the UFO in the New York Post was written by someone called Anthony Blair. The last time the world listened to someone called Tony Blair about some alien power’s strange military technology, we ended up knee-deep in a senseless war in Iraq. If you were a journalist and you wished to possess some real credibility to your name, you’d be better off having been christened Pikachu.
For the first time in my life, I have been a shopkeeper—admittedly for no more than a few hours, but I found it a curiously intense experience.
It was not an ordinary shop, either, but that of Chinese antiquities and furniture, as well as of carefully selected ornaments and knickknacks, chosen with care by the owners. They are friends of mine, and they asked me to look after the shop when they had to go to a funeral.
Naturally, I was rather worried that I would make a mess of it, for example entering the wrong sum in the credit card machine and thereby causing the owners a great loss. I needn’t have worried: I didn’t make a single sale. In a shop like theirs, most people who enter are just looking, and you have to live in hope that someone will come in and buy the most expensive item on a whim.
I sat behind the counter with a book, but the need for alertness somewhat interfered with my concentration on it, an extended essay on the way in which, in the modern world, we have sacralized the victim rather than the hero. I suppose the reason for this is our increasingly democratic sentiment, or at least protestations of democratic sentiment. After all, everyone can be a victim, but few can be a hero. Besides, we like to elevate ordinary people who are just like us, as we like to pull down those who are clearly our betters. Feet of clay are gold dust to biographers.
I was not looking after the kind of shop that people enter for mundane or essential items. There was not a single item in the shop that anyone could call essential or that he truly needed, such as soap, and most of the items were not even useful, except in the sense that the decorative is useful (man does not live by utility alone). No one pops out of his house just to buy an antique Chinese lacquered chest or an 18th-century print of tropical fruit, as they do to buy a loaf of bread or a pint of milk.
So I was stuck behind the counter while idlers, with nothing better to do, sauntered round, picking things up in desultory fashion and turning them round in their hands, or approaching a picture and peering at it as if examining it for bedbugs. I was terrified that one or more of them would turn out to be a shoplifter, and that when I handed the shop back to my friends the stock would have diminished but no cash would have been taken. At the same time, I was afraid of making false accusations against would-be customers, for in this life there are always false positives as well as false negatives.
Should I approach them and ask if they needed my help? What if they asked me about the age and provenance of that decorated red lacquer chest over there? Should I tell them the truth and avow my ignorance, or should I make up a preposterous story (“It comes from the reign of the emperor Li, who reigned from 1357 to 1373 and was murdered by his eunuchs”) on the assumption that they knew no better themselves? The nearest I came to a sale was when someone wanted two of an item of which there was only one, “a unique piece,” in our shopkeeper’s jargon.
I have never thought much of shopping as an activity, let alone as a pastime. I remember the panic of some of my patients when I asked them what interested them, and they would cast around in their minds for something to say, before replying (after much soul-searching) that they liked shopping, which I came to define as the impecunious in search of the unnecessary.
In the days when great crowds would shop in person rather than spend hours on the internet scrolling down for something unnecessary to buy (unnecessary except in support of the poor suffering GDP, that is), I found them sad to observe. The joy of possession is at best fleeting, even where there is no buyer’s remorse, for possession of something is soon taken for granted by the possessor, while the debt incurred lasts much longer.
Inveterate shoppers seem never to learn that the joy, even mere satisfaction, of purchase rarely or never lasts long. In this respect, experience teaches them nothing: They are like gamblers who hope for a killing next time, no matter how many times they have lost in the end.
I had never before observed shoppers from the other side of the counter. How easy it is to become misanthropic! What a pitiful parade appears before you!
Some people smile and say good morning to you, but others have special eyes that work rather like the neutron bomb is supposed to work: They see things in the shop but not the person behind the counter, as the neutron bomb kills people but leaves buildings and objects intact.
How badly people dress, how few of them make the best of themselves! They squeeze into clothes that are too small for them, dressing for the size they would like to be rather than for the size that they actually are. It is not only their size for which they dress inappropriately, but their age. Almost no one these days dresses older than an adolescent. What do they see when they look in the glass? People do not want to remain forever young, but forever adolescent.
I was particularly appalled by the way women of 50 or 60 bared their shoulders (it was a warm and sunny day) to reveal a stupid butterfly or dragon tattooed on their shoulder. This was not done when they were young, but rather when they were in middle age. I wanted to berate them for their idiocy and bad taste. They were old enough to have known better.
“Can I help you?” I asked. I am quite good when I try at being unctuous and servile.
“Lovely things you have in here,” came the reply.
“Why don’t you buy them, then, instead of just looking at them?” I wanted to say. But instead I said, “Please do come back, the stock changes all the time.”
What a good thing insincerity is, how important it is not to speak your mind! What a boor a totally sincere man would be!
Theodore Dalrymple’s latest book is On the Ivory Stages (Mirabeau Press).
The anniversary of George Floyd’s death this past weekend was marked by claims that the country’s attempt to finally deal with its systemic racism had been brushed aside with “the resurgence of old power structures” — as put by University of Connecticut professor Manisha Sinha, who represents the NEW power structure where Indian immigrants get all the good affirmative action jobs.
Inspired by a crack addict’s death, the Racial Reckoning required, among other things, putting black women in charge of everything. The plan was foolproof. It literally had no flaw. Unburdened by what has been, there was no telling what these scrappy gals could do.
This column will be part 2 of a continuing series that I call “Black Women in Charge.”(The last one was in 2023, then other news intervened.)
Elected after the summer of BLM terror, President Joe Biden put more black females on the U.S. Courts of Appeal than all previous presidents combined. Half of his U.S. attorney nominees were black. Given that only 5% of the nation’s attorneys are black, for the past four years, every black lawyer in the country had a decent shot at becoming a federal prosecutor or judge. (Hence, the expression, the “affirmative action to federal bench pipeline.”)
Among the nominees was Rachael Rollins, Biden’s choice to be U.S. attorney for Massachusetts. But things are never easy for a black woman. As put by Charles Pierce, Esquire’s political reporter, two “asshat” senators decided to “demagogue” a “Perfectly Qualified U.S. Attorney Nominee.”
Specifically, Sens. Ted Cruz and Tom Cotton opposed Rollins on the grounds that she supported decriminalizing a slew of crimes, such as shoplifting, malicious destruction of property, drug possession with intent to distribute and resisting arrest. (No word yet on how those policies have played out in cities like San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, Seattle, etc.)
The Senate split 50-50 on Rollins’ nomination.
In a transcendent moment of Black Girl Magic, the first black woman vice president cast the 51st vote to make Rollins the first black woman U.S. attorney of Massachusetts. Upon Rollins’ confirmation, Sens. Ed Markey and Elizabeth Warren praised Rollins for “transforming the criminal justice system.”
And, boy, were they were right! Within two years, Rollins had “transformed” her office into a personal revenge racket, leaking government secrets to harm a political opponent, among other wildly illegal acts. Biden’s own Office of Special Counsel informed him that her violations were “among the most egregious transgressions” the office had ever seen.
She resigned before any further action could be taken against her and is currently weighing offers from several Ivy League universities.
Atlanta, known as the Black Mecca, is home to a great number of black millionaires. There’s Shelitha Robertson, former assistant city attorney of Atlanta turned lifestyle podcaster, who is so rich she sported a 10-carat diamond ring and drove a Rolls Royce. How was she able to afford such luxuries on an assistant city attorney’s salary, you ask? It turned out all her bling was purchased with the $15 million she stole from COVID-19 relief funds on behalf of her nonexistent 400 employees.
In addition to the swag, Robertson used her stolen money to make a campaign donation to Fani Willis, whose name may ring a bell. Immediately upon her election to Atlanta district attorney, Willis announced a fishing expedition against Trump and his allies, accusing them of a criminal conspiracy for engaging in standard, everyday politicking. If Trump’s challenging the results of Georgia’s presidential election constitutes a RICO violation, then Al Gore should be hunted down and given the death penalty for the 2000 election. (Is there a solar-powered electric chair yet?)
To assist her office in pursuing the crackpot charges, Willis did what a child would know is wrong. I know! I’ll hire my boyfriend and then he can take me on vacations with all the money I’m paying him!
Even Stacey Abrams was saying, “Oh c’mon!”
For her comical corruption, the Georgia Court of Appeals removed Willis from the case. No other D.A. showed any interest in pursuing the charges, suggesting some flaws in Fani’s theory of the case. (At least Gore can rest easy.) Willis’ office was later ordered to pay about $75,000 in fines and attorneys’ fees.
Just last week, Charlotte, North Carolina, city council member Tiawana Brown was indicted, along with her daughters Tijema Brown and Antionette Rouse, for stealing at least $124,165 in COVID relief money and spending it on luxury goods, including a $15,000 birthday party featuring a horse-drawn carriage and a throne. (Legal tip: If the criminal complaint against your client includes the words “horse-drawn carriage” or “throne,” start negotiating a plea.)
Far from contrite, Brown seems a tad miffed that anyone would expect her to resign because of the multiple felony-charging indictment, saying, “Why would I resign? I haven’t been convicted of anything.”
My final entry in this week’s installment of Black Women in Charge is Dr. Karen Johnson, who describes herself as “World Changer,” “History Maker” and “Visionary,” proving how systemic racism crushes black people’s self-esteem. (I’ve been unable, so far, to determine which medical specialty Dr. Johnson practices but I’ll keep digging.)
In March 2021, Dr. Johnson was appointed director of Washington state’s first-ever Office of Equity. Getting off to a great start, she told a local NBC news affiliate, “No Black person in their right mind … wants to be leading this kind of work, convincing white people they want to do something they have no intention of doing.”
In short order, a third of the office had quit over Johnson’s sexism, racism and fat-shaming. At one point, she announced, “I generally distrust Mexican people.” Denying it was racist, she said, “That was not my takeaway from the conversation.” After two years promoting “equity,” Johnson was fired.
But there’s never a shortage of jobs for black women accusing everyone else of racism, so Dr. Johnson is now executive director of the Texas Center for Justice and Equity, and this Black Women in Charge series may never end.
Okay, sports fans, here it is, straight from the horse’s mouth: The year was 1957 or 1958 or perhaps even later. Those were the days of starched shirts, good manners, white rather than yellow tennis balls, and wooden rackets. The tournament was in New York City, and I was playing against Yale No. 1 Richard Raskind. He had a big left-handed serve that he used to come up to the net with, and an even bigger left-handed forehand. The match was on a fast cement court that favored his aggressive net play. I remember thinking that Raskind would have been putty in my hands were we playing on slow European clay, my best surface. Dick Raskind won that day, and as we shook hands at the net he looked the depressed loser. I remember almost commenting on that but did not. I found him unfriendly, almost unpleasant. Many years later I think I understood why. Raskind was obviously suffering from what today is known as “gender dysphoria,” although that particular definition did not exist back then.
Many years later Raskind surfaced yet again on the tennis tour, this time playing as a woman called Renée Richards. My first thought back then was that I had lost to a female. Well, not quite, but you know what I mean. While on tour for many years my favorite hitting partner was Althea Gibson, the first black woman to win Wimbledon, in 1957. Althea and I obviously played many sets against each other, and we were about even. But she was No. 1 in the world, whereas I was way down the rankings back in those halcyon pseudo-amateur days. Which brings me to the point I wish to make: Even in a nonviolent sport like tennis, men have an enormous advantage—speed, strength, endurance, you name it, we’ve got it.
By the time Raskind declared himself a female he was already fending off Father Time. As a woman, Renée Richards won a tournament but became far better known for transitioning than hitting a tennis ball. He/she was also a very good ophthalmologist and is still with us at 90. I turned her transition into a joke by telling all my tennis buddies that I had lost to a woman while at my peak.
This was long ago, and now, finally, the U.S. has acknowledged the truth: Sex change treatment endangers children. The Department of Health and Human Services issued the world’s most comprehensive report on the topic—something I knew from day one, and I am someone who has trouble putting on a Band-Aid. Over in that crowded rainy place called Britain, transgender women will be barred from playing for women’s soccer teams after the Brit Supreme Court ruled that Britain’s equality laws were based on biological sex and that trans women did not fall within the legal definition of women. Again, I could have told them this, and I don’t know how to read a legal brief about a parking ticket.
The irony is that I don’t even know what these terms are—transgender, agender, nonbinary—but what I do know is what nonsense is. Nonsense is wasting our precious and finite energies on trivial issues such as “What is a woman?” Maybe we should allow this issue to collapse under its own absurdity. This nonsense, as few of us call it, counts a lot only where sport is concerned. Let’s begin with women entering men’s sporting competitions: There are none and never will be. Enough said. The men entering women’s competitions are cheaters when posing as women. The entire fiasco is based on lies and opportunistic cheaters. You cannot change sex.
So, how should a parent feel seeing their daughter get knocked out almost immediately in an Olympic boxing competition by a trans woman who hits like the proverbial mule and looks very much a man? Or watching their daughter left half a swimming pool behind by someone who until recently was swimming for the men’s team? I know what I would do. I would enter the ring and try to stop the match. Or jump into the pool and get in the way of the cheater. But the Olympic Committee is as cowardly as they come, as are universities, with coaches too scared of the trans lobby to throw the cheaters out and keep the girls competing against girls.
Perhaps now these cowards who have allowed these outrages to take place will finally react and ban the cheaters. But the incessantly complaining, self-pitying trans lobby is well funded and supported by Hollywood types like that awful trio of Eddie Redmayne, Emma Watson, and Daniel Radcliffe, all three trying to cash in while advancing injustice against female athletes. But leave it to The New York Times to devote a very long and incredibly boring article on the trials and tribulations of a San Jose State University volleyball player, a trans, and how she was eventually “outed” as an ex-man by some magazine.
Never mind. Trans women should compete against other trans women in sport, but not biological women. In the meantime, I have joined the victims of trans women competing in women’s sport by outing myself as having lost to Renée Richards. I lost to Dick Raskind, but unknown enemies say I lost to Renée.
Here’s an economics lesson that belongs in the textbooks.
Student loan debt soared to more than $1.5 trillion during the Biden presidency, and the response by Washington was to “forgive” hundreds of billions of these unpaid loans by deadbeat borrowers and let the taxpayers pick up the tab. It was never clear why the universities that charge exorbitant tuitions that have reached more than $75,000 a year at many elite schools shouldn’t bear the cost of the program — but that’s another story.
Those of us who watched these events unfold predicted that one result of this policy would be that many college graduates would stop paying back their loans. And guess what?
Just like clockwork, this headline from Bloomberg recently told the whole story: “Student Loans Drive US delinquency Rate to Highest Since 2020.”
Gee, who — except a bunch of head-in-the-sand politicians in Washington — would have ever thought that forgiving as many people from paying their student loans as possible would increase future nonpayments?
Well, the Biden administration, for one. Now that the Department of Education is honestly reporting the data, we find that serious delinquency rates are over 10 times what the Biden Department of Education said they were.
There is an old saying in physics and economics: Every action in the universe has a reaction. How many students in the future will pay back unpaid student loans when the next forgiveness program is right around the corner? So people who did the right thing and paid back their debts now have to pay more for the people who refused to pay back the money they owed.
In Washington, we love to reward vice and punish virtue.
As we said many times last year: Expect student loan defaults to remain sky-high for many years as deadbeat borrowers wait for the next student loan amnesty program.
Fortunately, in the House of Representatives’ “big, beautiful” tax bill, there are new caps of $50,000 on student loans for undergraduate students and $100,000 for grad students. This cap should help slow the stampede of higher tuition prices, which have grown two to three times the rate of overall inflation over the last 30 years. The availability of cheap student loans only fueled this stampede of tuition prices. The Wall Street Journal calls this move “The End of the College Free Lunch.”
The bad news is that we should anticipate bigger stashes of student loans to pile up at taxpayers’ doors in the years to come. The good news is that this scam has reminded us that in life, incentives matter. This episode brought to light the financial foolishness of debt forgiveness programs, and so hopefully we will never do this again.
Except that politicians have very short memories.
Now that Texas and South Carolina have passed school choice bills, parents will be able to choose the best school for their kids in 17 states.
Why not all states?
After all, competition improves services.
The Post Office couldn’t get it there overnight. Then FedEx showed it can be done. Quickly, UPS and DHL did it, too, and now even the Post Office does … sometimes.
Consumer choice is a big reason capitalist countries outperform socialist ones.
But in most of America, parents have little or no choice when it comes to which school their kids attend. Bureaucrats decide, based on where you live.
Live in a neighborhood with lousy schools? Too bad for your kids.
Some parents, desperate to get their kids out of a bad school, are jailed for lying about where they live.
All parents should get to choose which school their kids attend.
But in most states, government school bureaucrats won’t let them.
Sometimes, it’s because they get big political donations from teachers unions. Unions don’t want competition.
Years ago, New York City’s teachers union staged a protest outside my office because I did a TV special about school choice. I’d confronted union boss Randi Weingarten about how hard it was to fire even a terrible teacher. Instead, principals sneakily transfer them to another school. “Dance of the lemons,” they call it.
Weingarten just replied, smugly, “We’ll police our own profession.”
Her protesters then picketed ABC News headquarters, shouting, “Shame on you, John Stossel!”
“They don’t want people to be able to take their kids somewhere else because they know that they’re failing your children,” says education researcher Corey DeAngelis in my new video. “Money doesn’t belong to the government schools. Education funding is supposed to be meant for educating children, not for propping up and protecting a particular institution. We should fund the student, not the system.”
Then, parents can take education funding to a charter or a private school. Schools get better when they have to compete for your kids.
A recent study found that “more education freedom is significantly associated with increased NAEP scores.”
Florida’s math and reading scores were once among the worst in the nation. After they expanded school choice, says DeAngelis, “They ranked #1 … And it’s not a money issue. They spend about 27% less than the national average, and they’re knocking it out of the park.”
A study on Florida’s expansion of school choice found “benefits include higher standardized test scores and lower absenteeism and suspension rates. Effects are particularly pronounced for lower-income students.”
When there’s choice, public schools get better, too. Twenty-nine studies looked into the impact of school choice on test scores; 26 found a positive effect.
Wait. I shouldn’t call them public schools. They’re government schools. They’re less “public” than a “private” supermarket. Markets are often open 24/7. Anyone can enter. Try that with a government-run “public” school.
School bureaucrats and teachers unions say that “choice takes money away from public schools!”
But that’s not true. Government schools now spend about $20,000 per student. School choice vouchers average just $8,200.
So, when a student leaves and takes voucher money with them, government schools are left with more money per student!
As DeAngelis puts it, “They get to keep thousands of dollars for students they’re no longer educating.”
Ignorant media leftists insist that schools are underfunded. “If we want our public schools to get better, we can’t take money out of the system,” says a “View” anchor.
But no one is taking money out of the system! Inflation-adjusted funding per student doubled over the past 40 years.
“Government schools in the United States now spend around $20,000 per student per year,” says DeAngelis. “That’s about 60% higher than average private school tuition!”
$20,000 per child. Where does that money go?
“To administrative bloat,” says DeAngelis.
Since 2000, student enrollment rose by 5%, but the number of administrators increased by 95%.
“The best solution to this problem is to make the funding portable,” says DeAngelis. “Let funding follow the child. Then maybe administrators will have an incentive to up their game. … Competition is a rising tide that lifts all boats.”
The Premier League football (as in “soccer”) season has just ended, with the title of champions of England 2024/25 going to the team I support, Liverpool FC, whose star Egyptian forward-cum-winger, Mohamed Salah, has also ended up with the Golden Boot award for the competition’s top scorer.
As you might be able to tell from his name, Mohamed is a Muslim—and the fact that he bends down on the pitch in the classic bum-in-air, head-on-floor, sujood pose of praise toward Allah every time he scores would be an even greater giveaway. His surname “Salah” even means “prayer” in Arabic. Likewise, one of his daughters is named “Makka,” after “Mecca,” albeit most Liverpool fans probably think it’s after Steve McManaman.
Ours being an innately propagandistic and officially Islamophilic age, due to all of the above, Salah has naturally been acclaimed as an admirable “ambassador for Islam” across the U.K., whether he wants to be or not, in a way a white English footballer named Christian Worship playing in the Saudi Pro League probably would not.
Dodgy Reasoning
Superb in the first half of the season, once Ramadan arrived, Mo’s goals output began to slump noticeably, something some brave commentators suggested might be linked to him being religiously obliged to fast, starving individuals rarely making the best sportsmen (although the Ethiopians do okay at long-distance running—particularly if they can smell food cooking in the distance).
Such dissent from the general Islamophilic narrative surrounding Salah is rare, however, with adoring Liverpool fans developing several Koran-tastic terrace chants for their hero, calling him (to the tune of “You Are My Sunshine”) “Mohamed Salah/A gift from Allah.” More elaborate is the following doggerel, modeled after the catchy summer hit “Good Enough” by 1990s Britpop band Dodgy:
If he’s good enough for me, he’s good enough for you,
If he scores another goal, I’ll be a Muslim too!
If he’s good enough for you, he’s good enough for me,
He’s sitting in the mosque, that’s where I wanna be.
This sounds like mere terrace humor…until you read a ridiculous story from The Guardian headlined “How Mohamed Salah inspired me to become a Muslim,” reading that inspired me to give up all faith in the existence of any God whatsoever, Islamic or otherwise. The piece tells the tale of footie fan Ben Bird, who once possessed “a hatred of Muslims,” thinking they were all “evil people who carried swords” and being completely ignorant about the faith. Naturally, Bird then chose to do a degree in Middle Eastern studies; perhaps he was so ignorant, he didn’t realize any Muslims lived there.
Bird’s course was at the University of Leeds, where the phrase “to study Muslims” simply means to go outside, so his cluelessness was soon cured; the local tea towels carried no swords, simply the Word of Allah. But what really turned Bird fully toward Mecca was his choice of dissertation topic. Stumped for what to discuss—Sunni vs. Shia? The Islamic Golden Age? The Palestine question?—Bird’s “dyslexia tutor” suggested, “What about the Mohamed Salah song?”
That’s the profound standard of knowledge that is now studied at British universities: terrace football chants. It won’t be long before someone comes out with an entire PhD thesis titled “You’re Shit and You Know You Are: Comparative Epistemologies of Decline Between the Ottoman Empire, 1845–1918, and Fenerbahce’s Disastrous Turkish SüperLig 10th-Place Finish Season of 1980/81.”
Writing his dissertation, Bird realized that “Mohamed Salah was the first Muslim I could [ever] relate to,” something that ultimately led him toward conversion. Has there ever been a more trivial reason for a man finding religion? Bird didn’t even support Liverpool, but Nottingham Forest!
Pharaoh Foul?
Some rival fans, of course, prefer to derisively chant, “Salah is a bomber” at the Egyptian King as he bombs down the wing before unleashing yet another high-explosive shot using the Semtex in his boots. Others, more sycophantic, pump out rather overoptimistic tweets saying things like “Mo Salah [is] doing more to end the clash of civilizations than anyone else in the world” and “Mo Salah is gonna stop Islamophobia.” I wouldn’t mind, but that first tweeter was Samuel P. Huntington.
A 2021 scientific study even purported to demonstrate that Liverpool’s 2017 signing of Salah correlated with—and thus supposedly caused—an 18.9 percent drop in hate crimes in the surrounding Merseyside region, whilst the team’s fans roughly halved the number of anti-Islamic tweets they made following Mo’s appearances on the pitch.
Surveys further showed Salah’s performances boosted the belief of Liverpudlians that Islam was inherently compatible with British values and culture; the fact that the next big Islamist bombing incident on the British mainland took place in Liverpool’s archrival footballing city of Manchester probably only helped reinforce this idea.
The extrapolated logic was simple: If every big-city Premier League team has a brilliant Muslim player on it, all anti-Muslim prejudice across England will vanish, and the nation will voluntarily sign itself up to become but a province of the neo-caliphate immediately. You’d think Europe’s many Muslims might be pleased by that…but no. Some of them just never are.
Christmas Tree Formation
One of the chief non-sporting reasons Salah has been taken to Liverpudlian hearts is that he is a genial individual who does not go around constantly trying to convert the white natives. Instead he tries to fit in, one example being that, every festive season, he publishes friendly photos of himself and his family celebrating beneath a Christmas tree—before, equally traditionally, large numbers of Muslims send him mountains of electronic abuse for doing so.
Angry messages about his “shame pose” like “Delete this right now,” “We Muslim people look up to you and you do this in return,” and “Mark my words, you won’t score any goal till end of the season, for disrespecting our beloved prophet,” rather suggest that, whilst Salah’s presence on Merseyside may indeed have helped reduce anti-Muslim hatred from whites, it may have helped increase antiwhite hatred from Muslims in an equal ratio.
The way Mohamed’s name is often shortened simply to “Mo” may be taken by most as a sign of affection—but not to the mindset of the professional Muslim malcontent, one of whom, freelance journalist Timo “Don’t call me Tim!” Al-Farooq, condemns it as only a “liberal white supremacist exercise in forced assimilation and de-Arabization.” This is Timbo’s honest opinion of fans’ only ostensibly complimentary chant about Mo-Mo, which is nothing but insincere “performative Islamophilia”:
Mohamed Salah’s influence on Western perceptions of Islam is entirely subject to the capricious whims of the white (all too often drunken) football fan, not exactly the kind of person one would want to tie one’s fortunes to or be at the mercy of…. At least the Salah song was honest about the conditionality of its Islamophilia, just take a look at the lyrics again:
“If he’s good enough for me, he’s good enough for you,
If he scores another goal, I’ll be a Muslim too.”Not when he scores a goal, if he scores a goal. Meaning: the Western Islamophile who wishes to convert to Islam will only do so as long as Salah keeps scoring, thus illustrating a fundamental lack of altruism behind his professed motivations and debunking the conditional and purely symbolic Islamophilia of the humorous Salah song as pure hokum, from which one should not derive societal trends.
Well, maybe we should indeed not draw too many wider socioreligious conclusions from trivial epiphenomena like jokey football chants. Given the nature of the previous highest-profile Muslim player to (dis)grace Liverpool’s Anfield Stadium, if the general public really did take all their cues toward the faith from exposure to its most prominent on-pitch proponents, then all of Merseyside’s mosques would have been burned to the ground by angry white mobs twenty years ago.
Spitting Mad
El-Hadji Diouf was a Senegalese Muslim who played in the same rough position Salah does today, a hideous, metal-mouthed Morlock who signed for Liverpool for £10M off the back of a few decent games at the 2002 World Cup before proceeding to spend the next few seasons playing abysmally, spitting at people, and generally acting like an absolute bleach-haired shaytan.
Diouf ended up with six goals from eighty appearances, two of which came in his first league game for the club, one of the rare occasions when he looked as if he could actually be arsed to do anything. Where most professional footballers have entries on Wikipedia with headings like “Trophies Won” or “Career Statistics,” Diouf has one headed “Controversies,” which contains details like these:
On 13 March 2003…he spat at Celtic fans during a televised UEFA Cup quarter-final…. In November 2004 while on loan to Bolton, Diouf was charged by the police for spitting at an 11-year-old Middlesbrough fan during a 1–1 draw. Then, on 27 November 2004, Diouf spat in the face of Portsmouth player Arjan de Zeeuw…. On 20 September 2009, Diouf was questioned by police after allegations he had made a racial slur to a ball-boy during a match at Everton, telling him to “fuck off, white boy.” Diouf defended his actions by saying the ball-boy had thrown the ball to him “like a bone to a dog” and that Everton fans were racially abusing and throwing bananas at him. Police found no evidence of this.
As this suggests, whenever anyone criticized Diouf, they were automatically “racist.” In various biographies, genuine Liverpool legends Steven Gerrard (710 games, 186 goals, seven major trophies) and Jamie Carragher (737 games, seven major trophies) criticized Diouf as an arrogant dickhead, leading Diouf to reportedly respond by saying, “Gerrard has never liked black people.” Are you sure it wasn’t just one black person in particular? Worse, “Gerrard is jealous of me. He hasn’t achieved what I have done in football [i.e., nothing]. When I came to Liverpool, I came up with the status of boss.”
“Jamie Carragher, I hate him,” Diouf has since added. “I found him useless.” He found you useless too, El-Hadji. One online profile calls Diouf both “Liverpool’s Most Hated Ex-Player” and “a bell-end.” If Salah converts spectators to Islam, Diouf turned them immediately toward apostasy.
Glasgow Kisses
Yet, to be fair, just like Mo Salah, during a later stage in his career spent with Glasgow Rangers, El-Hadji Diouf did successfully demonstrate Islam’s innate compatibility with certain aspects of British life—by enthusiastically embracing sectarian hatred. Glasgow Rangers are traditionally Protestant, and their cross-city rivals Glasgow Celtic traditionally Catholic, making the two sets of supporters hate each other’s guts and repeatedly attempt to violently attack one another. This led Diouf to speak admiringly of the place thus:
Apart from that [once being sent a letter bomb, possibly by Jamie Carragher] I loved Glasgow. It was the pinnacle of footballing cities…. Glasgow is more than just football, it’s a war of religion…. At the first press conference, a journalist asked me, “You know that here, football is a religion?” I told him, “I am aware of this and from today I am a Muslim Protestant!”… When I left Glasgow, half of the city wanted to cut my head off!
I take it all back, he really had converted them all to Islam.
Life in Scotland did cause Diouf to reassess certain regrettable aspects of his previous poor conduct whilst in Liverpool, though: “Spitting [on people] is something I have [since] regretted…. Today I am more mature, I would punch rather than spit.”
You know when Mo Salah purportedly halted all those anti-Muslim hate-crime incidents in Liverpool, post-2017? Don’t you think it’s possible El-Hadji Diouf might have caused them all in the first place?
The Week’s Most Steroid-Rich, Fat-Bronze-Bitch, and Trump’s-a-Witch Headlines
CRACK-AND-FIELD
To mark five long years since the death of George Floyd, white British schoolchildren are now being taught that black people built Stonehenge, at least according to a negrophilic new “textbook” called Brilliant Black British History.
Ever since the ancient monument was first discovered by O.J. Simpson in 1976, the volume continues, the explanation of how its antediluvian Afro-headed creators had managed to transport the giant sarsen stones into position had remained a mystery…until now. Surely, being black, they were all just on performance-enhancing drugs?
This particular revisionist theory may well be endorsed by Aron D’Souza, the Silicon Valley transhumanist entrepreneur, who announced this week the final arrangements for the first-ever edition of a special new global athletics contest, the Enhanced Games: or “The Olympics on Drugs,” a valuable educational exercise in the effects of speed upon speed.
Traditionally, Olympians are disqualified from competing due to issues around drugs. Who can forget the entire Jamaican team being recalled home in disgrace in 1984, for example, after shaming their whole nation by sensationally testing negative for cannabis?
Aron D’Souza wants to make such fiascos a thing of the past by making the ingestion of drugs compulsory for all entrants, in the hope coked-up athletes will thereby shatter the previous world records held by boring old non-enhanced competitors like Usain Bolt. Who knows, via such means, one day a white man may actually win a track-and-field medal of some kind—as well as the million-dollar prize money D’Souza is offering.
The drugs’ side effects could prove sportingly beneficial in other ways, too. Anabolic steroids can cause male athletes to grow milk-producing breasts: ideal for long-distance marathon runners, who can thereby produce their own in-built hydration during races. If a similar uncontrollable enlargement effect can be produced for human penises, D’Souza can even organize a pole-less pole-vault competition.
D’Souza suggests that, rather than traditional national groups like TeamUSA or TeamGB, squads of literal drug runners could be named after each country’s premier drugs experts in high-profile sponsorship deals. He has companies like AstraZeneca U.K. in mind, but TeamSinaloa could well end up bringing back every last one of the medals for Mexico. They’ll certainly be strong favorites for the shooting events.
THE BLOW MONKEYS
If Aron D’Souza really wants to rake in the viewing figures, he should try putting various different species on drugs and then making them compete against humans in the stadium. A good candidate for the first breed of animal gymnast to be allowed to do its thing on the monkey bars would be the humble spider monkey, a baby example of which has just been seized from a suspected meth dealer’s home in California, along with $26,000 of illegal drugs. Put the two together, and D’Souza has his next entrant for the Enhanced Games gymnastics events right there.
Being cute, spindly mini-primates with adorable big staring black eyes, infant spider monkeys are popular status symbol pets amongst modern California drug dealers, with another one being pulled out of a speeding Rolls-Royce in January, together with “copious amounts” of marijuana and five cell phones. The monkey in this instance was dressed in a pink onesie, making it perfectly plausible they could be also outfitted in spangly skintight leotards to mount the pommel horse.
Illegally imported into America across the border from Mexico (much like most Mexicans), how are such animals captured in the first place? One expert explained:
“Infant spider monkeys in the pet trade are often the result of their mothers and family members being shot down from the trees to capture the baby. Many times, the baby is killed or injured due to the fall.”
Oddly enough, that was precisely how Simone Biles was once captured by her abusive coaches, too.
THE COLOSSUS OF RHODESIA
Not all athletic primates are teeny-tiny like Biles, of course. Another possible explanation for how the Neolithic niggas of ancient Albion built Stonehenge is that prehistoric black people were all twelve feet tall, thereby enabling them to simply lug the items around effortlessly on their shoulders, like Obelix with his menhir.
That is the conclusion one must draw from the sudden (but mercifully temporary) appearance in Times Square of a much-derided bronze statue that precise same size depicting a big fat ugly black woman dressed casually in items of ill-fitting clothing, standing with her hands on her hips like a colossal street-corner hooker in search of passing clientele outside the Brooklyn Home for the Functionally Blind. This egregious effigy is the work of black British sculptor Thomas J Price, whose sheer range and variation of work is truly astounding.
In 2022, he erected Moments Contained at Rotterdam Centraal Station, depicting a big fat ill-dressed ugly black woman standing with her hands in her pockets. In 2020, he erected Reaching Out at Three Mills Green in East London, depicting a big fat ill-dressed ugly black woman standing with her hands out of her pockets, staring vacantly at her cell phone. In 2021, just to add a bit of diversity, he erected Signals in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, depicting a bald thin ill-dressed ugly black man standing staring vacantly at his cell phone. Also in the V&A stands his 2008 piece Tasman Road, Figure 2, which looks like Bigfoot with alopecia.
Yes, what George Stubbs once was to horses, Thomas J Price is to giant ugly black people—and his latest Times Square sculpture, Grounded in the Stars, is no exception. According to New York City authorities, the piece “amplifies traditionally marginalized bodies” and “challenges who should be rendered immortal through monumentalization”—i.e., no longer people who have ever done anything worthwhile in life, but random black females wearing their hair in braids and looking as if they’re about to complain they freakin’ fries be cold yet again.
Allegedly, “the contrapposto pose of her body and the ease of her stance is a subtle nod to Michaelangelo’s David.” In reality, the whole thing looks much more like an all-too-open nod toward the Venus of Willendorf.
BORN IN THE USA…BUT DEPORT HIM ANYWAY!
One man far too white ever to have Thomas J Price cast him sycophantically in bronze is Joe Biden’s old pal Bruce Springsteen, who interrupted a concert in the English city of Manchester to deliver a wholly unasked-for anti-Trump tirade, apropos of nothing:
“There’s some very weird, strange, and dangerous shit going on out there right now. In America, they are persecuting people for using their right to free speech and voicing their dissent. This is happening now…. They are removing residents off American streets and, without due process of law, are deporting them to foreign detention centers and prisons. This is all happening now.”
At this point, someone white and British in the crowd stood up and said, “Got anything to say about Lucy Connolly, then, mate?” at which point Bruce finally shut up speechifying and just sang his only two good songs like the crowd had each paid about £250 to see him do, before everyone went home happy and humming “Dancing in the Dark.”
Trump quickly responded to this uncalled-for insult in the only way he knew how—by going on Twitter and deploying his usual series of UtterlY RaNDom CapitalizATIONS:
I see that Highly Overrated Bruce Springsteen goes to a Foreign Country to speak badly about the President of the United States. Never liked him, never liked his music, or his Radical Left Politics and, importantly, he’s not a talented guy—Just a pushy, obnoxious JERK.
Then, to demonstrate the Boss was wrong about there being no such thing as free speech or regular immigration laws in America anymore, The Donald seemingly threatened to have him arbitrarily arrested at the airport or deported for saying bad things about him abroad:
This dried out “prune” of a rocker (his skin is all atrophied!) ought to KEEP HIS MOUTH SHUT until he gets back into the Country, that’s just “standard fare.” Then we’ll all see how it goes for him!
Possibly the reason Springsteen’s prune-like epidermis now resembled his hero Joe Biden’s most cancerous testicle is because, simply by criticizing politically dissenting pop stars online, POTUS 47 apparently now has the awesome witch-like ability to immediately render them highly sexually unattractive. “Has anyone noticed that, since I said ‘I HATE TAYLOR SWIFT,’ she’s no longer ‘HOT?’” Trump gloatingly added, like the hideous orange warlock he so clearly is. Christ only knows what Keith Richards and Madonna must have been saying about Donald lately, then.
COWBOY CARTA
Beyoncé, too, needs to beware. Trump says Springsteen’s fellow Democrat-lovin’ pop star was likewise involved in some kind of pro-Bidenista financial scam involving her appearance at preelection rallies for Kamala Harris in 2024:
According to news reports, Beyoncé was paid $11,000,000 to walk onto a stage, quickly ENDORSE KAMALA, and walk off to loud booing for never having performed, NOT EVEN ONE SONG! Remember, the Democrats and Kamala illegally paid her millions of Dollars for doing nothing other than giving Kamala a full throated ENDORSEMENT. THIS IS AN ILLEGAL ELECTION SCAM AT THE HIGHEST LEVEL! IT IS AN ILLEGAL CAMPAIGN CONTRIBUTION!
With looks-ruining magic Trump curses against Beyoncé that potent being deployed, it won’t be long before Thomas J Price is knocking on her door begging to make a statue out of her.
Can Trump really arrest or deport popular singers like Bruce and Beyoncé just for appearing at opposition rallies? Evidence indicates his administration doesn’t truly understand the law in such areas. After suggesting habeas corpus might be suspended across the nation, Trump’s Homeland Security Thing Kristi Noem was asked if she even knew what habeas corpus meant. She didn’t: “Well, habeas corpus is a constitutional right that the President has to be able to remove people from this country,” she answered.
No, it just means the right not to be arrested for no good, publicly stated reason, one that has pertained across the English-speaking world at least since the Magna Carta. In habeas corpus’ original home of England, though, a new, even more advanced development in the concept has now arisen—habeas kurdus, the automatic right for random invading Muslims to stay in the country illegally for no good, publicly stated reason instead.
A 32-year-old Iraqi Kurd who smuggled himself into Britain in the back of a truck disguised as a small meth-addicted spider monkey was reported this week as having given officials the following completely-on-the-record justification for seeking asylum: “I don’t have a real reason to be here, give me some time and I will make up a reason.” A senior judge has just given him leave to remain anyway.
It seems Kristi Noem is not the only mentally retarded Western official who doesn’t understand the full nuances of immigration law at the moment. The Kurd didn’t even have the wit, when asked why he should be allowed to live in England, to reply, “Because my granddad built Stonehenge.”
The poet A.E. Housman once wrote a poem about the impossibility of ignoring reality by means of permanent intoxication. The short poem ends:
But men at whiles are sober
And think by fits and starts,
And if they think, they fasten
Their hands upon their hearts.
In other words, everyone is aware of the tragic dimension of life.
Everyday or banal situations give us reason to think about questions of political philosophy and psychology that might strike us at first as abstruse or distant; but we are never in actuality very far from them.
Last week, I was waiting for a train in a large modern station in France. The covered space was light and airy, the very opposite of cozy. About a hundred people were sitting in this space waiting for their trains, and there was a quiet susurration of human conversation. Those who were talking did so sotto voce, so as not to disturb others.
As is now the fashion in many stations, the train company had installed an upright piano for people—passengers or passersby—to play upon if they were so inclined. I have been surprised by how many people play Chopin or Schubert reasonably well, sometimes even very well; but also, unfortunately, by the number of people who do not mind exposing their bad playing to the public, apparently indifferent to (or perhaps deluded about) their abilities and effect on the public.
The pleasant quasi-silence in the station was broken suddenly by a young man who sat at the piano and began to bang out some chords while intoning words (singing would be too generous a word for it) at a high volume and out of tune. It was truly horrible, but when he paused at the end of what he no doubt would have called a song, one or two people applauded slightly—whether from lack of musical taste or pity for him, I do not know. I was appalled that he should be encouraged in this way, but it was the last time. When he paused again, no one applauded, but lack of applause did not discourage him.
He gave every indication of being very moved by his own performance, of giving vent to his deepest feelings. I began to feel a little sorry for him. Perhaps his dearest ambition was to be a performer, and perhaps no other occupation would interest or satisfy him. There are people who have utterly mistaken their vocation and have set their heart on being what nature never gave them the ability to be. I have known such cases (Somerset Maugham has a short story, “The Alien Corn,” on this subject). It is tragic. I remember my first acquaintance with the worst poet in the English language, William McGonagall, when I lay on the grass and howled with laughter until I was too weak to stand; but when I learned of his biography—the son of illiterate and impoverished Irish immigrant factory workers to Scotland—I ceased to laugh, and if I had been the tearful type, I would have cried. His background notwithstanding, he somehow conceived the ambition to be a Shakespearean actor and poet, which brought him nothing but the ridicule of the educated and deep impoverishment; but it was a remarkable and noble ambition all the same.
Perhaps the young man was in the same case. I had a natural reluctance to hurt his feelings by telling him how bad he was and by asking him to stop. It is cruel sometimes to deprive a man of his illusions (though also sometimes necessary).
But there was another question that came to my mind. I was far from the only person who found his performance not merely bad, but painful. I tried earplugs that I happened to have with me, but they were as much use as tissue paper in a monsoon; his noise would have escaped a soundproofed room. It was impossible to ignore and was destructive of all attempts to read.
Many of those present would have wished him to stop. Did they have the right to tell him to stop? Suppose six out of ten wanted him to stop. Or six out of ten wanted him to continue. Who would have the right to carry the say? How could they enforce their right in either direction?
He was doing nothing illegal. The piano had printed on it in large letters the words “For you to play on.” But who was this “you”? No qualification appeared to be necessary. If I had complained to the station authorities, no doubt they would have replied that it was all a matter of taste, why should my opinion have prevailed? Besides, most people who play this piano do so quite well, and we (the station authorities) have had compliments about our generosity in providing a piano for them to play on. It is surely worth having an occasional duffer for all the pleasure that others have given…
Of course, I did not complain to the station authorities (it would have been almost like informing), and no one else asked the young man to stop either. In any case, if someone had complained, what would the man have replied? He might have slunk away hurt, but more likely he would have referred to his perfect right to play the piano that had been put there precisely for such as he to play.
This very simple scene raised several interesting questions, none of them easily answerable:
(1) What was going through the mind of this young man as he played and sung or intoned his heart out?
(2) Was he in the grip of self-deception, and if so, what exactly is self-deception, which after all is a slippery concept, the deceived and the deceiver being one and the same?
(3) What prevented any of the hundred people present from saying anything?
(4) Who had the right to tell him to stop? A majority of those present, and if so, how large a majority? What if only a single person found his playing painful and abominable and wanted him to stop? Does such a person’s wish for silence trump other people’s desire for noise? Should we use the logic for noise that we use for tobacco smoke?
(5) How far should legality and illegality determine our conduct?
It has been said that, in any large city, we are never very far from a rat. In life, we are never very far from a psychological puzzle or a philosophical question.
Theodore Dalrymple’s latest book is On the Ivory Stages (Mirabeau Press).
Possible article in The New York Times:
For more than a century, most scientists and researchers have agreed that smoking has nothing to do with lung cancer. But now, the fringe theory that smoking is bad for your health is being promoted by an obscure German dictator named Adolf Hitler — the same dictator who would later preside over the murder of 6 million Jews.
Maybe liberals have been doing this forever and I only recently noticed, but there’s been a rash of supposedly serious news outlets trying to discredit conservative arguments by attributing the argument to the most embarrassing right-winger they can find.
Today’s Weakest Link trick comes from the Times‘ Abbie VanSickle, who claims John Eastman is the originator of the idea that the 14th Amendment is about freed slaves, not illegal aliens. In case you’re not sure what to think of Eastman, VanSickle quickly identifies him as “an obscure California law professor … [who provided] Mr. Trump with legal arguments he used to try to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.”
Further proving that this was Eastman’s idea all along, there’s an 8-by-10-inch photo of him accompanying VanSickle’s story, titled, “At Supreme Court, a Once-Fringe Birthright Citizenship Theory Takes the Spotlight.”
Upon publication of VanSickle’s article, every journalist on TV became an expert on the issue, regurgitating her preposterous claim that Eastman is the brains behind the idea — oh, and by the way, this is the guy who tried to overturn the 2020 election.
So I guess you don’t have to know anything more!
I’m not comparing Eastman to Hitler, except in the sense that Hitler was not the first person to come up with the idea that smoking is bad for your health — just as Eastman is not the first person to argue that the 14th Amendment has nothing to do with anchor babies. Why falsely identify him as the originator of that view (which happens to be correct) unless you’re trying to discredit the argument without ever having to explain it, much less refute it?
This is like ad hominem by proxy. You find someone who’s easy to attack, then designate that person as the sole purveyor of an argument you don’t like.
But just to be extra sure that Eastman is the inventor of the “wacky idea” that the 14th Amendment has nothing to do with illegal immigrants, VanSickle checked with Eastman himself. And guess what? He’s delighted to claim full credit. (So in addition to being “obscure,” Eastman is also what’s known as “a delusional narcissist.”)
E.g.:
— “Mr. Eastman said that the president did not directly consult him about the birthright citizenship order but that several of his friends … ‘knew that my scholarship was kind of at the forefront of this.'”
— “Mr. Eastman said Mr. Trump was ‘likely’ referring to him [when he cited many lawyers who agreed with him on anchor babies].”
Is this really how the Times determines authorship? Ask the person claiming credit: Tell the truth. Is this your idea? (Glad they weren’t on the Claudine Gay plagiarism investigation.)
According to VanSickle, Eastman first made the argument in a 2004 amicus brief to the Supreme Court. The case had nothing to do with anchor babies, and Eastman’s brief was not read by the court — much less by Donald Trump — but let’s take 2004 as our marker.
Here are just a few people whose scholarship on the issue far preceded Eastman’s.
In 1985, Yale professors Peter Schuck and Rogers Smith — no slouches — published a book, “Citizenship Without Consent: Illegal Aliens in the American Policy,” making this inarguable point:
“The parents of [illegals] are, by definition, individuals whose presence within the jurisdiction of the United States is prohibited by law and to whom the society has explicitly and self-consciously decided to deny membership. And if the society has refused to consent to their membership, it can hardly be said to have consented to that of their children who happen to be born while their parents are here in violation of American law.”
Schuck and Smith simply take it for granted that anchor babies are not mandated by the 14th Amendment. They write that the debates “establish that the framers of the Citizenship Clause had no intention of establishing a universal rule of birthright citizenship.” (In VanSickle’s telling, this description of the debates doesn’t appear in the Yale professors’ 1985 book: It’s just a “claim” made by Eastman.)
In the summer of 1996, Dan Stein and John Bauer published an article in the Stanford Law & Policy Review, also arguing that the Constitution does not mandate anchor babies: “Interpreting the 14th Amendment: Automatic Citizenship for Children of Illegal Immigrants?”
Then, in 2003, the late Richard Posner, 7th Circuit Appellate judge, wrote a concurring opinion in Oforji v. Ashcroft for the express purpose of demanding that Congress stop “awarding citizenship to everyone born in the United States.” He said he doubted that this was the meaning of the 14th Amendment and pleaded with Congress to pass a law and “put an end to the nonsense.”
Say you’re a reporter for the Newspaper of Record, trying to fairly summarize the debate over the 14th Amendment and anchor babies. Do you cite Posner, the most-cited federal judge, regularly called a “genius” by his peers — including the late Justice Antonin Scalia — and one of the 100 judges listed in Great American Judges: An Encyclopedia? Two Yale professors? A Stanford legal journal?
Or do you cite a disbarred, debunked “obscure California law professor” who helped Trump try to overturn the 2020 election?
The choice is obvious. You cite the kook.
