Asked a few weeks ago why Alejandro Mayorkas, the former secretary of Homeland Security, hadn’t been arrested yet, President Trump said, “I’ll take a look at that one because what he did is beyond incompetence.”
Apparently, some rash individuals have drawn a connection between Mayorkas’ vast human trafficking operation, which brought gang members, child molesters, thieves, rapists and murderers to our country, and the crimes they committed.
C’mon — that’s like day following night — no connection whatsoever.
True, the law makes such a link, such as with the crimes of felony murder, accomplice to murder and conspiracy to murder, but that’s completely different. We’re talking about immigrants! Everyone knows that the only law that applies to illegal aliens is the invisible constitutional provision requiring years of due process before we can deport them.
What did Mayorkas do that allegedly encouraged 11 million illegals to pour in under his watch?
Federal immigration law imposes a slew of requirements before foreigners are allowed to move here. For example, as we immigration buffs know, the “law” (U.S. Code Title 8) provides that no alien may enter our country for more than 30 days without, among other things:
— a visa;
— a passport;
— being fingerprinted;
— filling out the 11-page Immigrant Visa and Alien Registration Application — in English!;
— being interviewed by a consular official;
— a medical exam; AND (not “or”)
— proving he will not become a public charge.
Further, the law states that any person who, operating outside of these laws, “brings to or attempts to bring” an alien to the U.S.; or who “transports, or moves” an alien within the U.S.; or who “encourages or induces an alien to come” to the U.S., has committed a felony. And if any of these violations results “in the death of any person,” the person who brought, transported or induced the illegal “[shall] be punished by death.” (8 U.S.C. 1324)
But to be fair, Mayorkas is wholly unaware of federal immigration law, so he’s in the clear, assuming ignorance of the law is a defense.
It may look like Mayorkas hustled aliens into our country in violation of Title 8 when he fast-tracked them across the border and flew them into the U.S. interior under the cover of darkness, where they were released into our country to spawn like salmon and kill a lot of people.
In fact, the former Homeland secretary merely replaced the dusty old statutory law — and its cheap gimmicks about visas, consular interviews and medical checks — with a modern, streamlined phone app, almost guaranteeing instant admission. Simply fill out a bare-bones one-page form — name, age, citizenship, location, email and a photo — and you’re in! What else would the greatest nation on Earth require before choosing people to be our fellow citizens?
Right-wing kooks will say Mayorkas “brought” or “induced” illegals to come by virtue of making it impossible for any alien to be turned away. This is false. In fact, the CBP One app had an acceptance rate of only 95%. Although a number of murderers, child molesters, kidnappers, drug mules and terrorists got in, I stress that 5% were turned away.
Moreover, if the secretary of Homeland Security can ignore the entirety of federal immigration law, it’s only fair for us to ignore that one little section prescribing the death penalty for anyone who brings an illegal to the U.S., transports an illegal within the U.S. or induces an illegal to come to the U.S., if that alien goes on to kill someone.
What kind of law is that, anyway? Just because you intentionally let a murderer in, you’re responsible for his subsequent crimes? It ought to count for something that Mayorkas practically put the cartels out of business by doing their work for them. (By some estimates, he is the biggest human trafficker in world history. Congratulations, Alejandro!)
Mayorkas should simply deny that any of the 11 million illegals he brought in committed any crimes. He could cite The New York Times. My thorough check of Times archives does not reveal a single crime committed by an illegal alien in the last five years. Or ever. (The only crime here is that Mayorkas finally got his kitchen remodeled at a price so low it’s practically a crime.)
On the internet, you will find endless news stories about murders committed by illegal aliens let in by Mayorkas, but this simply serves as a reminder of our need for Joe Biden’s “Disinformation Governance Board.”
Here are a few of the alleged illegal alien murders:
— Convicted murderer and rapist David Antonio Calderon, fresh from a 22-year prison sentence in El Salvador, was admitted to our country by Mayorkas, whereupon he brutally stabbed one man, savagely beat two others with a baseball bat, and murdered a 33-year-old mother, cracking her skull, then setting her body on fire.
— Honduran Elmer Rueda-Linares, 18, arrested entering the country illegally in June 2021, was promptly released — on Mayorkas’ orders. In April 2024, he killed a staffer to Democratic Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto, Kurt Englehart, in a hit and run in Nevada. Sen. Masto now has one less adviser, but one more Hispanic constituent.
— Another Mayorkas-invited murderer, Haitian Kenol Baptiste, scheduled his illegal entry into the U.S. through the secretary’s phone app — super handy for criminals! Baptiste then murdered two people in Middletown, New York. (Weird that a citizen of the most murderous country in all of Latin America would commit murder.) Middletown police captured the Haitian by unleashing the K-9 unit on him. Luckily, he’d already had lunch.
— Illegal alien Yery Noel Medina Ulloa, who looks like Yoda, in the sense of “not human,” lied to border agents about his name and age because he didn’t realize that Mayorkas would usher him in, whatever his name and age. Medina Ulloa was flown to Florida, where he was taken in by Francisco Javier Cuellar to work in the family business. Weeks later, Medina Ulloa, in a wild frenzy, beat and stabbed his host to death. It makes me wonder if Trump moved too fast in removing a Tren de Aragua member from that New Mexico judge’s house.
— Peruvian Roberto Emilio Vasquez-Santamaria, age 64 — because you want to get illegals of retirement age, so they can get on Medicare and Social Security right away — entered the country illegally in May 2023. Per Mayorkas’ instructions, he was immediately released into the country. A few months later, Vasquez-Santamaria bludgeoned a 40-year-old Houston man to death in his own backyard.
We shouldn’t be too hard on Secretary Mayorkas just because he let in illegals, who then killed thousands of Americans. There are no serial killers on Mount Rushmore, but maybe Mayorkas could be the first.
How many of you readers out there sincerely want to be very rich? The get-rich tip is only for Takimag faithful, so keep it under your belt: You go to something called Seeking Arrangement, and when a certain David Geffen contacts you, take his call. The bad news is there’s some hanky-panky involved, the kind I know nothing about but is the one celebrated by a multicolored flag for a whole bloody month. You then sue him, and you tell your lawyers that he plied you with drugs and told you that your relationship with him would be genuine and enduring. Then say you believed that you had finally found someone who cared. Do not, I repeat, do not sign any prenup.
Okay, I’m obviously joking, but I cannot understand how a Hollywood shark like Geffen can fall for the oldest of tricks, pun intended. Geffen is 82 and white, David Armstrong is 32 and black. Geffen is a billionaire mogul and Armstrong was a go-go dancer and part-time hooker. They married and were supposed to live happily ever after. Hollywood was thinking of making a family movie of their happy household. (I actually made that last bit up.) Now it’s in the hands of the lawyers, and love has flown the coop. Oy vey!
Now here’s my confession: I have never looked at seekingarrangements.com and didn’t know it existed until I read about the lawsuit. But I have met David Geffen—once—and he could not have been more polite and complimentary. My sailing boat Bushido, a real beauty, was anchored off shore next to his gigantic and ugly-as-sin behemoth near Antibes. That evening Geffen was seated next to my wife at a dinner party, and he told me how beautiful he thought my boat was. I thanked him, did not mention how horrid I thought his superliner was, and never saw him again.
In view of his kind words about my boat, I will not reveal what I think about an 82-year-old homosexual marrying a 32-year-old go-go dancer, except to say that it’s as fascinating as a lengthy history of orthodontics. They say that desire is the pain of ignorance, and David Geffen has shown ignorance of an alarming magnitude. Mind you, if Monsieur Geffen came to me for advice (as likely an event as me marrying a black go-go dancer), I would encourage him to settle for around $20 million with his husband and then get on his boat and sail away for a very long time.
Why twenty big ones? Why not? If Geffen is reported to be worth around 5 billion, 20 million is peanuts. He should also convince his soon-to-be ex that anything he wins in court will go to the lawyers, known for skinning the richest of cats. Of course, there’s another way of making a quick buck, this one practiced to perfection by one Antonius Saint Julian, age 6 and my grandson.
Instructed by his grandmother to bring her telephone from her bedroom, he discovered lotsa cash attached to the contraption. He pocketed the moola but delivered the phone. Nobody suspected nuttin’, as they say, until the next day when my wife decided she had lost her wallet with all its contents. I was sitting down to write about Geffen and the go-go dancer and took a look at my grandson. He is a beautiful little boy with blond curly hair, but I noticed a gleam in his eye as his granny searched for her cash. So I put the 6-year-old to the Shylock test, offering him 5 percent of the missing loot as he had no idea how much he had lifted. We shook hands, he turned over the spoils, and everyone was happy.
So there you have it: Get-rich schemes have a way of turning sour, unless you’re a go-go dancer, that is. Or Jeffrey Epstein, probably the world’s most disgusting blackmailer, now being used to embarrass The Donald. But take it from Taki, Trump never had anything to do with that scumbag except for the most superficial of social contacts and conversations. Prince Andrew, Larry Summers, Bill Gates, even Bill Clinton, they were all friends with Epstein, but not The Donald. Trump liked full-bodied models; the scumbag liked underage waifs. And while I’m at it, I knew Ghislaine Maxwell while her crook father was being courted by the Brit royals and most of British society in the ’80s and ’90s, and she wasn’t as bad as she could have been. In other words, compared with the arrogance and bad manners of her crooked old man, she was better. She became downright servile once the Maxwells lost their ill-gotten loot, which I found very embarrassing, especially when she once cornered me in Saint-Tropez and begged me and the wife to attend a cocktail party she was giving with the scumbag. We refused and in fact sailed away that afternoon.
No, I wasn’t afraid of that crook, just disgusted to be in the same port with him. Epstein supposedly made his moola with Les Wexner, a successful garmento from Ohio. Why Wexner chose Epstein to be his financial advisor when Epstein was known to have been involved in dubious enterprises including arms dealing, and one of the biggest Ponzi schemes of the time is a mystery, but it must have been blackmail for either murder or buggery that made him give him lotsa moola and present him as a financial adviser. I’d say it was both murder and buggery! Ghislaine will now say anything to get out-who wouldn’t?—but she will be speaking with forked tongue.
I’m not much of a traveler, so my recent trip to North Central Europe for a conference was my first visit to the mother continent since a single day in Istanbul in 2009.
I’d never been to that part of Europe before, so I stuck to the obvious destinations: Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Krakow, and Warsaw. I’m a tourist, not a traveler, so I wanted to see the stereotypical sights.
Hence, don’t expect me to offer on-the-spot insights into the great issues of the time, such as immigration. I mostly stuck to the expensive old towns that arose within the medieval walls.
Cultured Americans are always complaining about how America doesn’t have walkable cities like Europe does. But the extreme density of European cities first emerged because townspeople needed to crowd within a few hundred or just a few dozen acres inside the stone parapets.
Early America did have some wooden palisades, such as along Wall Street on lower Manhattan Island. But in most colonial American cities, by the time the first generation’s wooden walls would have needed replacement by a massive investment in permanent stone fortifications, the American Indian menace typically had been pushed far westward. After that, Americans had little to worry about from European great powers or from other Americans.
So, other than in a few cities such as Manhattan, San Francisco, and New Orleans that are extremely constrained by water, we allowed our cities to sprawl inordinately.
That doesn’t stop Europeans from visiting America. My twelve-hour flight home to Los Angeles from Warsaw was utterly jammed with Polish tourists, even though in my experience escorting visitors to Los Angeles around, unless we happen to luck into a celebrity sighting, they tend to go home, not unreasonably, bored.
My single wholly satisfied guest in L.A. had the good fortune one day in 1982 as we inched along Dead Man’s Curve on Sunset Boulevard to find that our traffic jam was due to TV actor Scott Baio having wrapped his brand-new supercar around a lamppost. Fortunately, Baio was unhurt. Dressed head to toe in Fiorucci sportswear, he was pacing unhappily on the curb talking to somebody (his agent, I presume) in an agitated manner on his shoebox-size pre-cellular mobile phone. My friend went home to Houston happy in the knowledge that Los Angeles was exactly how he’d always imagined it would be, with celebrities making public fools of themselves.
In contrast to L.A., the inner cores of the great cities of Europe are intensely concentrated to squeeze within their usually no-longer-existent walls. For example, most of imperial Vienna’s spectacular sights are in the one mile in diameter Innere Stadt within the Ringstrasse boulevard built on the site of the old walls in the 19th century.
Ideally, these old towns weren’t destroyed in recent wars. Famously, Prague largely survived World War II intact. It thus looks like a museum of every style of European architecture since the Romanesque, as if Czechia has been ruled for generations by the Disney dynasty going back to Good King Walt. This has helped make it the cultural capital of post–Berlin Wall NYU study-abroad students.
Tom Wolfe pointed out in his college novel I Am Charlotte Simmons that “…the existence of conspicuous consumption one has rightful access to—as a student had rightful access to the fabulous Dupont Memorial Library—creates a sense of well-being.”
I was smiling nonstop in Prague due to the sense of well-being.
The Czech Republic in 2025 seems like an ideal mix of Slavic humanity and Teutonic perfectionism. From the 19th century onward, the Czechs strove to match the ruling Austrians in building opera houses and the like to demonstrate that they deserved to rule themselves.
Note that despite its lack of historic catastrophes, Prague is still a sort of Ship of Theseus town. Most of the great buildings have been rebuilt every couple of hundred years.
Vienna was bombed moderately by U.S. and U.K. aircraft late in the war, with the 450-foot-tall Gothic St. Stephen’s Cathedral in the center of town being badly damaged in 1945. The citizens of Austria rebuilt the roof by 1952, although it could still use some new stained glass.
Vienna, as befits an imperial capital, has the most impressive single buildings of the five cities I visited, although Prague might be the most delightful overall.
Likewise, Krakow, the late medieval capital of Poland, wasn’t horrifically devastated during WWII. I’d barely heard of Krakow until I asked readers for suggestions for places to visit near Berlin and many responded that Krakow was their No. 1 choice.
It’s a sort of patriotic party town for Poles, kind of like if the Confederacy had conquered Washington, D.C., so the Union had relocated its capital to hard-drinking Madison, Wis., which attracted a constant influx of red-blooded American farmers looking to party.
I stayed on famous Grodzka Street, just around the corner from Krakow’s impressive main square. Initially, the roar from drunken Polish youth singing “Take Me Home, Country Roads” a cappella seemed daunting, but it turned out that practically everything in 2025 Poland provided by the highly enterprising private sector is state-of-the-art technology, so my brand-new double-paned windows allowed me to sleep fine.
On the other hand, Poles don’t like working for the government—Stalin grumbled that imposing Communism on Poland was like fitting a saddle upon a cow—so most of the railway, mass transit, and national airline enterprises are below average.
Krakow isn’t quite as wonderful as Prague, but if you visit it first, you’ll be highly impressed. Note that in the middle of Krakow is the Princess Czartoryski Museum, which mostly features the kind of stuff that Polish aristocrats liked, such as swords, guns, ladies’ fans, and family portraits, plus two world-historic paintings: a rare Rembrandt landscape and Leonardo’s staggering portrait of a Lady With an Ermine.
While you might have to grapple with a few hundred people to get up close to the Mona Lisa in the Louvre, in Krakow I only had to jostle with a dozen to see a Leonardo that seems manifestly superior.
Granted, Lady With an Ermine is in all likelihood not the greatest painting in the world.
But then again, it just might be.
Warsaw, in contrast to Prague and Krakow, was absolutely flattened in 1944 by the Nazis putting down the Warsaw Uprising by the Polish Home Army while the Red Army leisurely camped on the opposite bank of the Vistula River. It’s not all that clear why the Germans went through all the trouble of annihilating right-wing Polish nationalism before fleeing Warsaw rather than leaving the task to complicate the lives of their Soviet enemies, other than that’s what Nazis liked to do.
The Polish Communists did a decent job of rebuilding Warsaw’s Old Town over 1945–1955. If you have a chance to see Prague or Krakow first, Warsaw’s rebuilding won’t be perfectly satisfactory.
But still, it’s not bad.
In general, much of Central Europe’s artistic talent has been deployed for the past eighty years in rebuilding the great structures lost in 1939-1945.
Moreover, Stalin’s regime put up in the 1950s a couple of miles south of Old Town a sensational 778-foot wedding-cake skyscraper, one of the great high-rises of that otherwise architecturally boring decade.
It’s now the center of Warsaw’s high-rise district. While Warsaw lags far behind Moscow in supertall skyscrapers, with only one 300-meter (984-foot) building compared with six in Russia’s capital, Warsaw still has an impressive modern uptown erected in recent years. I’m reminded of what developers expected downtown Los Angeles to look like in 2025 in 2015: some colorful graffiti, but mostly affluent yuppies enjoying their new high-rise district. Instead, meth and fentanyl fueled a homeless surge, which the L.A. authorities, unlike Warsaw’s, tolerated.
On the other hand, Polish public enterprises—such as the trains that don’t run on time and the planes that don’t have Wi-Fi—don’t much compare to Austrian government projects, such as Vienna’s superb mass transit system. Viennese public servants come across as descendants of bureaucrats who’d served the Empress Maria Theresa from 1740 to 1780 admirably.
Berlin, however, seems like an unfortunate combination of being flattened by the Red Army and a lack of patriotism ever since.
The most recent Wall Street Journal political poll shows that Democrats have swerved into a deep ditch.
Only three of 10 voters have a positive opinion of the Democratic Party, and that is the lowest this number has been for Democrats since Bill Clinton’s first term in office. Republicans aren’t very popular either — but they have a big lead over the donkeys.
I’m not a cheerleader for the Republicans, and it’s clear the GOP is not the solution to all our nation’s problems. Republicans have been coconspirators in the runaway spending and debt crisis in Washington.
What is concerning is that the Democrats have become what might be called a donut party: They have no middle. Around 2000, the progressive Left started capturing all the important leadership seats in their party. It began with the elevation of Nancy Pelosi, and the full-scale takeover of the party happened with the election of Barack Obama. Since then, the commanding voices of the party have included Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris and Bernie Sanders.
Even as the Trump policies have taken root and, so far, are working, Dems in Washington today are opposed to nearly every Trump policy — even policies that they once supported, like trade protectionism. Every Democrat voted against making the Trump tax cuts permanent — apparently, they were fine with the typical American family paying about $2,000 a year more in taxes.
OK, fine. We know what they’re against. But what exactly is the Democratic economic message?
Here are a few of their rallying cries:
— Raise taxes on the rich.
— Destroy America’s energy capacity due to climate change religiosity.
— Businesses are evil.
— Expand welfare payments.
— Grow the government.
— Defend rotten schools and put teacher union interests above parents and kids.
— Put diversity over merit selection.
The modern-day Democrats have sprinted away from the John F. Kennedy agenda of free trade, lower tax rates and balanced budgets. Can you imagine ANY Democrat today saying, as Kennedy did in 1963, that “tax rates are too high today, tax revenues are too low, and the fastest way to balance the budget is to lower rates now.”
In the late 1980s, a tax reform bill signed into law by Ronald Reagan lowered the highest tax rate to 28%. That passed 97-3, with 44 of 47 Democrats voting yes. No Democrat today would support a 28% tax rate.
Even more recently, we had the Clinton market-friendly centrists who were the “New Democrats” and rose to ascendancy in the Democratic Party. The 1990s were years of balanced budgets, abundant jobs, falling government spending, free trade, a technology boom, lower capital gains taxes and a mighty stock market surge.
The era of big government really was over — temporarily.
Now it’s back.
The latest wisdom of the congressional Democrats is to simply oppose everything Donald Trump is doing. They want to run on repealing Trump’s tax cut bill, which would be a giant tax increase.
This is not an economic philosophy; it’s a pathology.
It’s not healthy that one of the two political parties has belly-flopped off the shallow end. We need a war — or at least a competition — of good ideas and solutions.
I’m hard pressed to name even one Democrat in Washington — just one — who has a pro-growth, pro-America agenda.
In 1980, Democrats got shellacked by Reagan. They moved left with Walter Mondale and lost 49 states four years later. And then even when Reagan was gone, they went further left with Massachusetts liberal Michael Dukakis and lost again in 1988. It was only THEN that they went with pragmatism and won with Clinton. Dems may have to take another beating at the voting booths in 2028 to see the errors of their ways.
If black people were consumer products, they’d have to ban them.
Here in Health-and-Safety Britain, a single baby pokes their eye out on a loose pin on a particular brand of cheaply made Taiwanese teddy bear, and they’re pulled from shelves and have a total import prohibition slapped on them immediately.
Contrariwise, recall the fate of Axel Rudakubana, the black son of equally black Rwandan immigrants, who was charged with stabbing three schoolgirls to death in the English town of Southport precisely a year ago now, on July 29, 2024. When it turned out he had apparently also been mixing ricin pudding in his home, a hobby with the potential to kill thousands of innocent people, not just blind a single squealing toddler, the initial state response was to temporarily ban all meaningful discussion of the fact, even in Parliament, not to try to deport him as a clearly substandard item of hazardous, child-endangering overseas goods.
As we shall see, in the wake of the Southport stabbings, there are even now proposals to ban knives outright, or at least all sharp and pointy ones—you may have thought no other kinds of knives would even be possible. It’s all ban this, ban that, ban the other in the country these days…ban everything, in fact, other than that which truly does need banning: the continued uncontrolled inrush of those who wield the knives, not the wholly inanimate and therefore innocent knives themselves.
A Matter of Knife and Death
There is a desperate pretense among the U.K. ruling class that, by opening the country up to mass immigration over the past few decades, they have DEFINITELY NOT also simultaneously opened the place up to massive and intractable problems that, like the immigrants themselves, were previously largely alien to it. But this is just not true.
Clearly, whenever you import people, wherever you get them from, you end up including some criminals. But, of course, all nations have preexistent domestic criminals of their own, even (previously) first-world and white ones like the U.K. So the salient issue becomes, who commits crime at a greater relative rate? The country’s original inhabitants, or the newcomers? Because if it is the latter, then all you are really bringing in is a litany of endless future problems, and a comprehensive import ban ought to be imposed upon such defective foreign-manufactured consumer products immediately.
When it comes specifically to knife crime, humans assembled on production lines abroad definitely have the edge. Admittedly, people have always stabbed one another in Great Britain, and naturally, historically speaking, most of them will have been white: Jack the Ripper did not disembowel his victims with a dessert spoon. Neither do today’s Black the Rippers, though.
In places like Non-Whitechapel today, despite making up “only” 13 percent of London’s population, at the last estimation blacks account for 61 percent of knife murders in the city. As per usual, the response of the government has just been to attack the symptom here, not the ultimate cause: In 2024 politicians decided to ban large knives, not large Africans. In a complete inversion of the old NRA slogan, it’s now “People don’t kill people—knives do.”
The Law Is a Blunt Instrument
Sad to say, this is the same cack-handed official response to the Southport stabbings, too. The adult leader of the Taylor Swift-themed dance class where the schoolgirls got gutted wide open like helpless beached fish was a woman named Leanne Lucas, who bravely intervened to protect them, sustaining several serious knife wounds herself.
Many of these wounds were caused specifically by the pointed tip of the kitchen knife used, not its actual longer horizontal blade edge. Therefore, Leanne has come up with the bright idea of banning pointed-tip knives across the U.K. and replacing them all with blunt-tipped ones instead.
Promoting her new “Let’s Be Blunt” campaign to receptive politicians, Lucas has complained that the very act of setting eyes upon a sharp-pointed knife in a kitchen is now profoundly “triggering” to her, as “I can’t now ‘unsee’ what’s in the kitchen, so I’ve got to do something about that.”
From the perspective of HM Government, Lucas’ proposal comes as a convenient public distraction measure from the real issue here: the person who stabbed her, not the precise form of instrument he happened to stab her with. If some of the other surviving childhood victims from Southport had gotten together and decided they were equally badly “triggered” by the sight of black men, do you think their consequent crusade to ban them from British shores would have gained much traction in Parliament?
Blunt-tipped knives can always be sharpened anyway, by Africans truly determined to do you harm. Besides which, ordinary British housewives and chefs have several perfectly legitimate uses for sharp-tipped knives in their kitchens—fending off black men who climb in through their windows and try to stab them, for example. By banning sharp-tipped knives, all the anarcho-tyranny merchants of the British state will succeed in doing is making life more difficult for normal law-abiding cooks, while achieving absolutely nothing when it comes to small children being sliced and diced by Rwandans.
Deprived of a sharp-tipped knife, the Southport stabber, Axel Rudakubana, may simply have turned his attention toward his alternative (and potentially far worse) planned mass-murder plot of manufacturing ricin from castor beans instead. Under Leanne Lucas’ proposed changes to the statute books, he would have been perfectly free to do so, as purchasing or possessing castor beans would remain, just as it is today, in no way illegal—it would only be using a sharp-tipped knife to open the awkwardly sealed packet that would get you a knock on the door from counterterror police.
Dutch Cowardice
All across modern Europe, a consistent observable pattern emerges—ancient freedoms of the white European masses, like possessing functionally useful kitchen knives, are being swept away as the most convenient “solution” to problems only caused by the state’s genuinely harmful mass importation of millions upon millions of unnecessary non-white persons in the first place.
In Germany, a new poll has just shown that 59 percent of citizens support a ban being placed on fireworks on New Year’s Eve. Why? Because curiously unspecified “youths” have in recent years begun throwing them at police and passersby, injuring people and blowing things up in spates of unprovoked sparkly ultraviolence. White Germans never used to perform such antisocial acts upon such a scale; but the newly brought-in brown Muslims do. So now, if and when the ban goes through, the white Germans and their children can’t have their previously harmless pretty shiny colors going “Bang!” in the Jan. 1 night sky anymore.
It’s the same in Holland, where a law mandating an upcoming ban on the public sale of fireworks was passed in April, following a spate of sometimes deadly attacks in which large numbers of fireworks had been bundled together and combined with petrol to act as makeshift bombs. Guess who the people responsible were? You’ll probably have to guess, because most reports just don’t have the guts to use awkward and impolite words like “Moroccans” and “Afghans.”
According to the mayor of Nijmegen, Hubert Bruls, the all-too-violent habitual misuse of fireworks as items of deadly high explosives was now a “Dutch disease.” Yes, in much the same sense as sharia law, jihad, and child marriage are now equally “Dutch” diseases too.
An Idea of No Note
In France, something way more important and socially useful than Roman candles and sparklers could soon find itself being banned in the name of diversity—physical cash. In May, Justice Minister Gerald Darmanin suggested that this “fairly simple measure” would halt illegal drug dealing in the nation at a stroke, as it would supposedly make it impossible to pay for smack and hashish without customers being traced and found out, unlike the use of anonymous banknotes.
This was an important measure, as some have been warning that modern-day France is in severe danger of becoming “a Mexicanized narco-state,” due to the high levels of drug-related murder and other cartel crime there; but such observers should have said “an Islamized narco-state,” as hyper-violent Muslim gangs shipped in from places like Algeria appear to be the ones largely responsible. An amazing 50 percent or so of France’s prison population is Muslim, suggesting a much less disruptive solution to the self-imposed problem than banning cash for everyone. Why not just either deport the prisoners back to their real homelands, or surreptitiously pump some Zyklon B through their in-cell hookahs?
Instead of being nasty and racist, though, Darmanin suggests 95-year-old white women who’ve never even used a smartphone before suddenly be forced to use complex cryptocurrencies to pay for their daily groceries, or else starve. That way they won’t even be able to get mugged (most likely by foreigners), men like Darmanin hope. This despite the fact that cryptocurrency users across France are now being kidnapped and having their fingers chopped off as part of a brutal new method of ransom-based mugging instead of thugs simply stealing the notes from their purses as in days of old.
Personally, I think I’d rather have my wallet filched than my fingers mini-guillotined. Once cryptocurrency becomes compulsory and widespread, and this kind of crime on behalf of Arab crime clans becomes more widespread, what will Darmanin’s next proposed new “solution” be? Introducing some brand-new form of less vulnerable monetary technology called “cash” again?
Maybe, even more than banning blacks and Arabs, the best class of persons to ban, whatever their skin color, would be the idiot politicians who repeatedly impose new and unnecessary problem after new and unnecessary problem upon their own people, then stand up and pose as being their “saviors” for subsequently acting to curtail their previously enjoyed civil liberties and calling it a “marvelous new solution” for everyone to enjoy.
The whole sorry, sordid spectacle is enough to make you want to stab yourself. If you can find a knife non-blunt enough still to be able to perform such a useful function, that is.
The Week’s Most Attention Is Diverted, Truths Are Skirted, and Monks Are Perverted Headlines
BLUE (STATE) MOVIES
Despite the continuing loud disquiet of his base, President Trump has still yet to agree to release any of those explicit child-porn Epstein Tapes people think he’s sitting on. Instead, he prefers to post fake, AI-generated clips online of Barack Obama being arrested for treason, sewn into an orange jumpsuit, and then locked inside a federal jail to the tune of “YMCA.”
If it’s that easy to generate fake videos these days, why doesn’t Trump just give his public what they really want, and pump out some computer-made footage of Obama and Epstein fiddling with kiddies to the tune of an alternative Village People hit, like “Sex Over the Phone”? (“Sex over the phone—I need a baby,” go its lyrics, as excited band members call up Ghislaine Maxwell and ask to make a tasty bite-size order from the children’s menu.)
Actually, someone else has already beat Donald to it in terms of generating bogus Epstein home movies—and he’s in them. Online left-wing conspiracists of the “Blue Anon” movement, named after the Democratic Party colors, have been spreading an AI-spawned clip of a young Trump in Ghislaine Maxwell’s company, picking out his favorite little girl to abuse from an arranged lineup.
Forensic analysis naturally proves the video to be a fake. Among the many dead giveaways are the unnatural color of the wall, a suspicious missing doorway, and the fact that the particular child Trump appears to want to have sex with is not named Ivanka.
MONKS DISROBED
Blue Anoners had better be careful. Trump is already suing someone else for libel this week, in the shape of The Wall Street Journal, which he describes as a “rotten newspaper”; in return, the WSJ is countersuing Trump for calling it a “newspaper.” The President wants $10 billion in damages after being accused by journos of sending his old pal Epstein a card including a doodle of a naked woman, in which his straggly signature acts as pubic hair. Presumably he signed it with an orange pen?
Also likely to possess orange pubic hair are the Buddhist priests of Thailand, at least if the dye in their saffron robes has run following attempts to cleanse all the dried monk spunk from them using excessively high washing temperatures. A young woman named Wilawan Emsawat has just been arrested for blackmailing monks and abbots with “thousands” of homemade sex tapes she made of them adopting something like the Lotus Position with her, in Thailand’s very own domestic version of the Epstein Affair.
Code-named “Mrs. Golf” by Thai cops—as in her every hole’s a goal, with neatly trimmed borders all around them, and even the occasional built-in water hazard—Emsawat managed to extort as much as $11.9 million from her besotted priests, who are alleged to have been diverting it from their temples’ sacred donation chests. To avoid yet more desperate holy men being tempted into breaking their vows of chastity in future, politicians are calling for a specific new crime of “having sex with a monk” to be placed on Thai statute books, surely to be known as the “Friar Fuck” ordinance.
The problem of Buddhists getting Epsteined is so bad that Thailand has now set up a special hotline for people to report “misbehaving monks” in their vicinity, just in case someone spots Rasputin on the loose again, bothering all the Russian child-sex tourists by offering them fake hemophilia cures.
The Supreme Sangha Council, the governing body of Buddhism in Thailand, is said to be currently considering whether to “cut off some arms and legs” in terms of defrocking those responsible. They might be better off cutting off certain other parts of the monks’ anatomies instead. If Donald Trump signed his dirty cards to friends with one of those, that really would be worth a column in The Wall Street Journal.
EVERYTHING YOU ALWAYS WANTED TO KNOW ABOUT SEX CRIMES (BUT WERE AFRAID TO ASK)
Also well-known for writing with his own penis, figuratively at least, is Hollywood funnymensch Woody Allen, who has just announced the publication of his first-ever novel. The book, What’s With Baum?, tells the story of an older man, very probably a small neurotic Jew who lives in New York, who tries to kiss a much younger woman, very probably a tall hot Oriental who looks like Wilawan Emsawat.
Woody was also dragged into the Epstein Affair this week by apparent comedian Chelsea Handler, who said on a podcast that she once went to a dinner party at Castle Epstein, also attended by Allen and his sort-of-stepdaughter-turned-wife Soon-Yi, whom Handler chose to insult by asking the couple, “So, how did you two meet?”
“Jeffrey introduced us,” Woody should have replied, to discomfort her instead. “He got her shipped in from the Thai branch of the operation. Tell me, do you know Mrs. Golf?”
Allen and Epstein were good friends and neighbors, watching movies together at each other’s New York homes, with Woody reportedly planning on giving his pal useful film-editing lessons: “If you intercut images of Prince Andrew slipping it inside with short sequences of her smiling, it will look like Virginia’s actually enjoying it, Jeffrey.”
They even planned a trip to Sotheby’s auction house together in 2017; antique Ming vases were the only things from East Asia aged over 21 years old that either man had ever possessed the slightest interest in handling.
VERY SLEEPY JOE
Rumor has it that, in order to ensure obedience, Epstein’s child sex slaves were doped up with zombifying muscle-relaxing drugs beforehand. If Jeffrey had ever wanted to try his hand at abusing a much older lover in this fashion instead of a much younger one for a change, he would have found Joe Biden already fully dosed up and ready to comply.
Joe’s son Hunter—an acknowledged expert on drugs of all kinds, prescription or otherwise—has claimed in a new interview that his dad’s calamitous performance during his 2024 TV debate with Trump was due to him being placed on the sleeping pill Ambien by doctors prior to broadcast.
Counterintuitively, Hunter said Joe needed the pills because he was so tired all the time, but this makes no sense. If the problem is that he’s tired all the time, then why give him sleeping pills? It would be like giving laxatives and diuretics to a man who kept on shitting and pissing himself every day. Also like Joe Biden.
However, looking up the drug’s technical specifications, we can find that the idea that Biden was a pill popper is actually medically plausible. Common side effects clearly applicable to Biden’s own known record in office include drowsiness, confusion, dizziness, and allowing 150 million illegal immigrants to invade the country from Mexico to destroy the white race.
Another frequently listed medical side effect from sleeping pills like Ambien is “difficulty in performing successful evacuations”—particularly from Afghanistan.
A WHOLE NEW BALL NAME
It was good of Hunter to try to change the subject away from Epstein for a while, but ultimately Donald Trump had to try doing so himself too. Releasing fake, AI-made videos of Obama was not the only diversion tactic the President employed, randomly demanding that the Washington Commanders football team revert back to using their old name of the Washington Redskins, which they had abandoned as being “racist” following the death of Minneapolis Blackskin George Floyd.
Such was the supposed major public impact of this request, Trump said his order had “totally blown up, but only in a very positive way,” like his esteemed predecessor Harry S. Truman had once boasted himself about Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
To further divert attention away from Epsteingate, Trump further mandated the Cleveland Guardians baseball side go back to being called the Cleveland Indians as in saner days gone by too. “MAKE INDIANS GREAT AGAIN (MIGA)!” Trump typed out through tiny hands on his telephone, but if he’d really wanted to make the affair blow up, he would have written “NAME INDIANS GREAT AGAIN (NIGA)!” instead.
COMIC OPERA
Also due to be renamed is the Opera House section of the Kennedy Center arts arena in Washington, D.C., which sphincter-licking MAGA Republicans want to be rechristened the First Lady Melania Trump Opera House instead. Surely an opera house should be named after a fat lady, not a stick-thin one? How about calling it the Oprah House?
Trump had already alienated Kennedy Center staff by appointing new board members to get rid of all the lefty propaganda performances they were putting on there all the time, culminating in the cancellation of an intended transgenderism-promoting children’s musical about a gay shark, Finding Pedo. But what to replace it with?
Trump’s hillbilly vice president, JD Vance, who can only ever bear to listen to discordant banjo music intermixed with the sound of squealing pigs, has already expressed his disbelief that people actually pay to listen to classical music, leading to a consequent shift toward more popular rock ’n’ roll-type shows at the establishment.
With this week’s death of Ozzy Osbourne in mind, to gain their revenge on Trump by bringing voters’ attention back around to precisely what he wants them to forget about again, Kennedy Center staff could always revive their Black Sabbath: The Ballet show from only last month, featuring a newly Epstein-themed set list including “Children of the Grave,” “Degradation Rules,” “Don’t Blame Me,” “I Don’t Wanna Stop,” “The Ultimate Sin,” “Let Me Hear You Scream,” “Little Dolls,” “Mama, I’m (Not) Coming Home,” and “One Up the B-Side,” culminating in a haunting, prison-cell-based performance of “Suicide Solution.” Either that or just “I Didn’t Know,” repeated on a loop over and over again, sung in a giant chorus by everyone else allegedly involved.
Saving that, Kennedy Center rebels could always agree upon a compromise political-figure-related renaming of their building, calling the place the Lincoln Center instead. Then they could invite Trump and Melania to attend a performance one night, show them politely to their box, start handing out the audience free pistols, and hope history rapidly repeats itself, John Wilkes Booth-style.
KEEP IT ALL SILENT CINEMA
Once Trump is dead, the Kennedy Center may wish to dump their brief Epstein-themed association with pedophiles and enlist Woody Allen to make and screen a series of new short films instead. As the esteemed maker of the original deepfake movie Zelig, Woody would be well-placed to produce an innovative new cinematic art installation in which AI-generated counterfeit images and shorts mingle confusingly upon a giant screen with real-life ones harvested from the web. But which examples from this week alone would be real, and which fake?
(1) The black African model in a newly banned British supermarket women’s clothing ad, whose body was deemed by regulators to be too unnaturally and “unhealthily thin” to be genuine. REAL: She was just a normal Ethiopian.
(2) Hardcore footage of illegal immigrants in an English seaside asylum hotel who had just made a taxpayer-funded porn film of themselves to sell online for easy cash. FAKE: The real homemade illegal immigrant porn flicks being made in the U.K. right now are CCTV films of them raping underage white schoolgirls in the middle of the street before getting away with it so as not to disturb “community relations.”
(3) Disturbing film of Benjamin Netanyahu declaring a state of joint Israeli-Indian nuclear war being suddenly declared against Iran and Pakistan for no good reason. FAKE: This won’t actually be happening until the week before Israel’s next election day.
(4) Bizarre images of a human pervert stalking the dunes of Wallasey Beach in England, dressed as a male version of Catwoman in a skintight leather feline gimp suit, seen disturbing various innocent dog walkers taking their pets out for a quick nocturnal Eartha Kitt by jumping from behind trees shouting “Meow!” or “making panther noises” at them before then fleeing across the sand on all fours. REAL: Jack Osbourne just didn’t take the sad recent news about his dad very well at all.
(5) Amazing undercover sex-film footage in which Woody Allen, Jeffrey Epstein, Barack Obama, Wilawan Emsawat, Prince Andrew, Joe Biden, Donald Trump, Benjamin Netanyahu, and the entire first-team squads of the Washington Redskins and the Cleveland Indians all have sex with an entire class full of drugged-up 10-year-old uniformed schoolgirls in a government-funded asylum hotel somewhere on the English coastline before, at the moment of group climax, Ozzy Osbourne jumps on screen dressed as Dracula and bites the head off a live bat for a one-off fee of $500,000 from Jeffrey Epstein. DEFINITELY REAL: But the DOJ says you’ll never get to see it…
Capitalism gets a lot of hate.
I expect it from the left. They blame free markets for racism, “horrifying inequality” and even, according to Economist Joseph Stiglitz, “accelerating climate change.”
People on the right generally defend capitalism, but today, a growing number agree with the left.
In my new video, author James Lindsay says, “They make the exact same arguments that we’ve heard for decades: ‘capitalism has made everything about the dollar. Everything’s about GDP … you lose everything that really matters, like kinship and nation and identity … ‘”
Tucker Carlson, who Lindsay calls “woke right,” praises Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s economic programs, saying they “make obvious sense.”
“Astonishing!” Says Lindsay. “Warren put forth something called the ‘Accountable Capitalism Act,’ which was going to restrain the way that corporations are able to behave under the brand name of ‘accountability.'”
Even Vice President J.D. Vance attacks free trade.
“While the government shouldn’t be controlling the American economy,” he said “we should … put a little bit of a thumb on the scale … protect nascent industries from foreign competition.”
“(This) is just another way of saying, ‘your company got too big, so we need to take some of your property and distribute it further down the chain,'” says Lindsay. “(Vance is) very against large multinational corporations and the things that they do and wants to limit them.”
But why? Large companies get large mostly by doing things right. Businesses don’t make profits unless they please their customers.
Look at places that mostly embrace free markets, the United States, Singapore, Switzerland, New Zealand and Hong Kong (until China’s government clamped down). These are good places to live. People prosper when markets are free.
“It works!” says Lindsay. “When you have free people who can engage freely with one another and trade … you actually have a rising of all ships. Because what you have is a people who are free to do with their things as they will. They, therefore, can implement their stuff, their money, their resources, their talents, whatever they happen to be, to solve problems for other people. And when you solve a problem for other people, even if it’s a kind of silly thing, like entertaining them with a silly game on their phone, when you solve a problem for other people, they’ll give you money for it, in exchange.”
Exactly. Trade is win-win. Otherwise, we wouldn’t engage in it.
So it puzzles me that as markets continue to lift more people out of poverty, capitalism faces more attacks, even from the right.
“The problem,” says Lindsay, is “it requires people to be free … You can’t control people who are free … So we need to have a government system to tell them to do the right thing in the name of the common good. That’s the mentality.”
Lindsay even hoaxed a conservative magazine, American Reformer, into publishing part of the Communist Manifesto, merely by substituting Christian nationalist language for words like “proletariat.”
When the editors learned that they’d been tricked, they left the article up, saying it was “a reasonable aggregation of some New Right ideas.”
Yikes.
Government-managed trade, protection for politically connected industries, state promotion of Christianity, speech restrictions, morality laws, state-owned industry, cronyism — these are bad ideas, no matter which side sells them.
Oh look, another American’s been beheaded by a Mexican.
This week’s beheader is Jose Luis Mendoza-Gonzalez, an illegal alien who, according to the Department of Homeland Security, decapitated 37-year-old Megan Bos, then stashed her body in a bleach storage container. Arrested for the crime in April, Mendoza-Gonzalez was promptly released from custody by Illinois judge Randie Bruno, who is the same physical type — chubby, short-haired, white woman — as the Milwaukee judge charged with helping an illegal sneak out of her courtroom to avoid ICE agents.
Illinois: sanctuary state for Mexican decapitators.
Because they’re not busy enough rounding up the 20 million pillars of society Joe Biden allowed to sneak into America, Immigration and Customs Enforcement had to devote time and resources this week to recapturing Mendoza-Gonzalez. Otherwise, you never would have heard about it, and liberals could keep pretending not to know that Mexican drug cartels decapitate people.
Remember the hilarity that greeted Gov. Jan Brewer back in 2010 for talking about cartels leaving beheaded bodies in the Arizona desert?
The left exploded in angry indignation, with mocking cartoons, parodies, fact-checks and blistering headlines in newspapers around the country.
You’d think she’d accused Mexicans of something totally preposterous, like dominating the Nobel Prizes in physics. Heard of the Aztecs? Human sacrifice and cannibalism were the high points of Mexican culture.
Politifact ruled Brewer’s claim “PANTS ON FIRE!” saying it was “completely made up and an example of fearmongering of the worst kind used by Brewer to manipulate an already emotional national debate on immigration.”
The Washington Post‘s Dana Milbank’s witty take was: “Ay, caramba! Those dark-skinned foreigners are now severing the heads of fair-haired Americans? Maybe they’re also scalping them or shrinking them or putting them on a spike.”
Actually, Dana, the scalping and head-shrinking are practices of other primitive cultures that also have no place in an advanced Western society. Mexican culture is the one known for decapitation and dismemberment. Don’t worry — lots of people make that same mistake. After a while, primitive cultures all start to look alike.
Drug cartels have expanded the repertoire to include corpse desecration, burning people alive, strewing body parts on highways, rolling heads across dance floors, dissolving bodies in acid and hanging mutilated bodies from bridges.
Milbank triumphantly reported that coroners in border areas told the Arizona Guardian that they’d never seen an “immigration-related beheading.” That seems kind of specific. Have they seen any “cartel-related beheadings”?
In any event, the coroners’ lack of personal experience with decapitations could be because unattached heads don’t require autopsies. Earlier in 2010, Arizona rancher J. David Lowell brought Utah Rep. Rob Bishop to an area of his property used by drug smugglers to show the congressman where they’d recently found a human head. Lowell, sitting on his porch, yelling, “You kids get those severed heads off my lawn!”
Then, a few months after Brewer was turned into a national punchline — because what could be more absurd than the descendants of Aztecs beheading anyone? — four illegal aliens from Mexico lopped off the head of a guy in a Phoenix suburb.
Local police told the East Valley Tribune, “I don’t think there’s anyone in law enforcement along the southwest border surprised at this type of heinous crime, and that it might be cartel-related.” But George Grayson, “a Mexico expert at the College of William & Mary” — in nearby Williamsburg, Virginia — assured readers that “cartel killings in the U.S. are rare.”
The media always manage to produce an “expert” to tell us that Mexicans beheading people in the U.S. is rare. Then there’s another beheading and another expert is hauled out to tell us these incidents are rare.
A few years after Brewer’s claim — as counterfactual as water being wet! — an American in South Padre Island, Texas, was decapitated. The experts were flummoxed. Could it be spring break gone wrong?
Again, law enforcement authorities were not surprised. “We’re just across the border from Matamoros,” the sheriff explained. The fact that the head was missing, he said, proved it was a cartel. “They take revenge that way.”
In 2018, cartel members beheaded a grandmother and her special needs granddaughter — in Alabama. And again, readers were informed: “Cartel Beheadings Are Rare.”
Why is something that is completely normal and expected always treated with scathing contempt by our media?
Contrast their hard-nosed cynicism about bad things happening in Mexico with the media’s gullibility about any atrocity in the Middle East. There were the Iraqis ripping Kuwaiti babies from incubators and throwing them on the floor; the “beheaded babies” after Oct. 7; and the video of two Syrian men being decapitated by chainsaw.
All hoaxes — except the chainsaw video. That one was perpetrated and posted online by — guess who? — a Mexican drug cartel.
There’s always some complicated reason why we’re supposed to be wildly interested in what’s happening in Iran, Syria, Ukraine, Bosnia and so on. E.g.: We must preserve “our position in the world”; It’s America’s responsibility to stop piracy on the high seas; What if Poland is next?; Otherwise, the president of China will think we’re weak; We have to defend the European Union or Hitler will come back and kill any Jews that Muslim refugees haven’t gotten to yet.
The permanent war crowd demand that we get deeply involved in every catastrophe all over the world, just not the catastrophe happening to us. Trump’s slogan, “Make America Great Again!” has never been so apt.
Back in the good old days, before anyone had ever heard of the name Kardashian, the month of August signaled the smart set’s exodus from the French Riviera for cooler climes. The great unwashed, as they were then called, would arrive in droves, prepaid to do so by a socialist French government, hence the hasty departure of the rich and famous.
Actually, I’m exaggerating, as it wasn’t as blatant or as obvious as all that. But August was the month that saw the Riviera become overcrowded, and those of us who had boats rather than houses on the Côte d’Azur floated or drove toward Italy (Venice, to be more precise). I am talking about the late ’50s and the ’60s, just before mass tourism ruined the most beautiful country that ever was, Italy.
I cannot describe how wonderful life in Italy used to be for those of us who went to Rome, Florence, Siena, or Venice simply to enjoy ourselves. The hotels were magnificent, the service impeccable, the food the best in the world, and the people among the nicest and friendliest ever. Italians had more style than anyone, and their music was the most romantic, just as their opera was perfect and their beautiful buildings to die for. “Dolce far niente” was the slogan, how sweet it is to do nothing. I remember competing in the Foro Italico, a Mussolini-inspired tennis stadium in Rome, and not caring that much about losing because I knew that a Roman evening promised much more than passing a round in the Italian championships.
People back then dressed to the nines to eat outside, and every beautiful street in Italy was lined with wonderful trattorias serving cheap but very good food. Then all this marvelous life came to an end with the arrival of something even worse than Attila the Hun—mass tourism. Millions of Chinese and Americans flooded the narrow streets of Florence and Rome, photographing everything while marching in step, blocking traffic while arguing over the price of a cheap trinket, and—recently—bringing the city to a halt while taking nonstop selfies on the Spanish steps. I was recently in Rome and watched in horror as the crowds swelled, all taking photos of some luxury ad on the walls while totally ignoring the Keats and Shelley museum on the bottom left of the steps. When I spoke to the lady curator she told me no one had bothered to visit recently, an indicator of the way our culture is heading.
Which brings me to a recent wedding that took place in Venice that had some people upset. The Big Bagel Times headlined it as “The Triumph of Tacky.” (No relation.) The paper asked, what happened to understatement and restraint? Well, I can tell them: I used to attend some very grand balls in Venice, parties given by local nobles such as Countess Volpi in her magnificent palazzo, and Lord Howard, a childhood friend of mine. Lily Volpi may have had a useless son who blew the great fortune she left him, but she really knew how to entertain while keeping it low-key. The perils of income inequality were never obvious in the Venice I knew, with minimalism and quiet luxury in vogue.
I attended two of the grandest Venetian balls of the time—during the early ’60s in the month of September—and what struck me back then was the fact that as we disembarked from our ferrying gondolas to the palazzo Volpi, the crowds began to cheer. Poor Venetians had lined up to look at the rich—there was only one film star, Paul Newman—and applauded. I suppose they were cheering the good luck of the few, I never really figured it out. Actually, I was rather embarrassed.
Which brings me to the recent wedding in Venice, or better yet, the Venetian photo opportunity of the year. As much as those with more understated taste might condemn the Bezos couple for their crassness, I will not. Envy is one of the few sins I am not guilty of. Although I’m fully aware of the ghastly taste the newlyweds exhibited, bad taste is neither illegal nor a sin. Furthermore, capitalism’s unequal distribution of wealth is far better than socialism’s equal distribution of misery. (Thank you, Garry Kasparov.) The ghastly Alexander Soros is spending his even ghastlier father’s money on extreme left-wing causes, but none of the Venetian show-offs displayed inherited wealth, which I truly believe in, by the way.
The over-the-top show in one of the world’s most stunning sites mixed Hollywood vulgarity with sporting heroes, Silicon Valley billionaire freaks and the horrible Kushner man married to The Donald’s daughter. Even the beauty of the setting could not erase the odiousness of some of the guests. But again, so what?
The envious mob claimed that the wedding had reduced the city of Marco Polo to a mere background for the photos of tourists and the rich. This argument sounds pretty pathetic to me. The wedding brought business to shops and restaurants, and the mob hated the fact that hardworking merchants were rewarded. So I ask once again: Why were we applauded fifty years ago and this lot jeered? I’ll tell you why. Envy is the prime mover behind socialism, and back when I was young and attending Venetian balls, people were too poor and busy working to embrace socialism.
Over the last several decades, you could count on your fingers (and maybe a few toes) the number of government programs that have been canceled — no matter how obsolete, inefficient or wasteful they were, and despite the fact that, in some rare cases, their missions were accomplished.
Even Ronald Reagan, who called for the cancelation of scores of programs, couldn’t get Congress to end the eternal life-support system. After watching Congress fund even the most inefficient agencies, he famously groused that “the closest thing to immortality on this earth is a government program.”
But to quote the back-in-vogue poet of the people, Bob Dylan, the times they are a-changin’ in Washington.
Last week the seemingly impossible happened. Congress terminated at least a half-dozen major programs, many of which fiscal hawks have been trying to terminate for nearly half a century.
The Trump rescission bill made it through the House and Senate and mothballs federal funding for National Public Radio, public TV and the U.S. Agency for International Development. Sorry, Elmo: Billionaires don’t qualify for taxpayer subsidies anymore. Meanwhile, the House Appropriations Committee pulled the plug on funding the corrupt World Bank — the multibillion dollar piggy bank for globalists.
Nearly 100 parasitic “public interest groups” signed a joint letter howling in unison that this move to defund corrupt foreign aid giveaways would surely kill thousands — even millions — of people. Most of these groups are major recipients of the government largesse that is going away.
They are the epitome of the swamp.
Bravo to the Republicans for not caving in to them.
Meanwhile, the “Big, Beautiful” tax bill cancels many of the Green New Deal taxpayer handouts and the mandate that Americans and the government must buy electric vehicles. President Donald Trump has pulled the U.S. out of the World Health Organization, which pulled all the wrong levers during COVID-19 and then covered up its lethal errors and lies.
Critics dismiss these cutbacks as fiscal small ball — the equivalent of someone $10,000 in debt cutting their spending habit by $5.
But Trump is ushering in a much-needed cultural shift in the way Washington operates.
He is proving that Washington really CAN get rid of programs that don’t work. Does an enterprise losing $2 trillion a year need to be spending tax dollars on such supposed necessities as promoting veganism in Zambia, funding pride parades in Lesotho, wind farms in Ukraine, DEIA contractors in Belarus, promoting gender diversity in East Europe, and reproductive health climate policies in Central America?
Thanks to North Dakota Sen. Kevin Cramer for supplying this list of absurdities that are finally going away.
These and dozens of other programs have been zeroed out.
The worry, of course, is that Trump kills these programs only to see the next Democrat administration resurrect them like vampires.
Maybe. But for now, at least, the vast warehouse of thousands of federal programs — most of which you’ve almost certainly never heard of — is shrinking. They aren’t immortal after all.
Something tells me that somewhere up in heaven, Reagan is smiling.
