The Economists Got 2025 All Wrong

He stumped the chumps. The “chumps” in this case were the “blue-chip” academic and financial economists whose consensus forecast this time last year was of high inflation and low economic growth. Wrong on both counts.

As you’ve probably heard, the GDP growth for Q3 came in at a red-hot 4.3%, following 3.5% for the second quarter. Some 90% of professional economists got it wrong — all underestimating the strength of the Trump economy. QED: These weren’t random errors. These were “hate Trump” errors.

They also predicted inflation of above 3% for 2025. It’s going to come in at closer to 2.7%, with the last two months trending down to the Fed inflation target of 2%.

“One would have thought that the academics and media would have learned from their mistakes of always underestimating Trump on the economy.”

To quote the inimitable special agent Maxwell Smart, “Missed it by that much.”

This isn’t the first time the whiz kids whiffed on the Trump economy. These are the same Keynesian economists who warned at the start of Trump’s first term that we would see a stock market crash. The stock market is today at record highs on all three indices. Paul Krugman, who won a Nobel Prize in economics and wrote regularly for The New York Times for years, famously feared a second Great Depression if Trump policies took hold.

Krugman and others all thought Trump’s tariffs would ignite runaway inflation. There’s no doubt tariffs did cause a rise in aluminum, coffee and beef prices — commodities that got hit by tariffs as high as 50%. But the economic pundits failed to take account of the disinflationary effect of pro-growth Trump policies like deregulation, tax rate cuts, and pro-America energy policies. These counteracted the impact of tariffs on prices overall.

One would have thought that the academics and media would have learned from their mistakes of always underestimating Trump on the economy. But they seem incapable of self-correcting.

The latest blue-chip forecast for economic growth for 2026 is a measly 1.9% even though the economy has been growing 50% faster than that of late.

This raises the question: Why are they persistently wrong? It could be that they are so afflicted with Trump Derangement Syndrome that they can’t see or shoot straight. No one likes their theories and core beliefs proven wrong. It was John Maynard Keynes who once famously said, “When the facts change, I change my mind — what do you do, sir?”

If these blue-chippers had any integrity, they’d admit that they don’t know what they are talking about and send back their Ivy League PhDs.

Fat chance that will ever happen. Instead these prophets of doom will continue to give the entire economics profession a black eye. No wonder it is known as “the dismal science.”

America did not lose its factories because the Chinese outworked us, the Mexicans undercut us, or the robots replaced us. It lost them because we decided to. More precisely, a ruling class decided that making things was vulgar, while moving numbers around a screen was sophisticated—and then built an entire political economy around that assumption.

The postwar United States once treated industry as a national asset: steel, autos, machine tools, shipyards, chemicals, avionics—things you could point to, touch, ship, and, in a pinch, turn into tanks. Then, beginning in the 1970s and accelerating through the Reagan–Clinton era into the globalist sugar high of the 1990s, we slid into a new faith: that finance was not merely a service to the real economy, but the real economy. The factories could go. The spreadsheets would remain.

This transformation had a name—financialization—and it reordered incentives with surgical cruelty. Corporate America stopped behaving like producers and started behaving like hedge funds with logos. Long-term investment gave way to quarterly theatrics. By the 1960s, a chief executive typically earned twenty times the pay of the average worker. Today it is closer to 300—sometimes 400. The gap did not widen because CEOs suddenly became twenty times more brilliant. It widened because the system stopped rewarding production and started rewarding extraction.

“Trump is not Lee Kuan Yew. Anyone pretending otherwise is either unserious or auditioning for cable news.”

So we sanctified “shareholder value” as if Milton Friedman had brought down tablets from Mount Sinai. Executives were paid to “beat expectations,” not to build capacity. Corporations became cash-extraction devices: buybacks instead of investment, mergers instead of R&D, consultants instead of machine shops. General Electric—once a symbol of American industrial muscle—mutated under Jack Welch into a bank with a nostalgic attachment to turbines, its profits increasingly derived not from engines or appliances but from financial engineering. Welch himself retired with a $400 million farewell bouquet.

Other countries chose differently. Germany protected its Mittelstand and treated skilled trades as an honor, not a fallback. Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan built developmental states using coordination, export discipline, and relentless focus on production. Even China, with all its distortions, grasped one basic truth: You do not remain a great power by specializing in apps and debt.

America’s alternative path hollowed out not only industrial capacity but also national seriousness. Reindustrialization is not a slogan or a branding exercise. It is a long, disciplined campaign—and one that requires saying no to Wall Street.

Which is why the current fashion for invoking Singapore is so irritating. The Davos class treats it as something you can bottle, label, and ship to Cleveland. Add a light dusting of “best practices,” sprinkle in some bike lanes and ESG jargon, and—voilà!—a Midwestern city is reborn as an Asian marvel. This is nonsense, but it is fashionable nonsense, which is why it persists.

What this managerial cargo cult misses is that Singapore was never a model in the abstract. It was a response to contingency. Its success cannot be reduced to policies, metrics, or governance frameworks because it was not assembled from interchangeable parts. It was imposed, under pressure, by a particular man at a particular moment—one uniquely suited to a small, exposed city-state with no room for error.

Born Harry Lee Kuan Yew in 1923 to a British-educated Straits Chinese family, Lee was neither a mystic nor a romantic. He was a lawyer—Cambridge-trained, razor-minded, and unsentimental—who came of age watching empires collapse, communism metastasize, and multiethnic societies tear themselves apart. When Singapore was expelled from Malaysia in 1965—suddenly independent, resource-poor, ethnically volatile, and strategically exposed—Lee inherited not a nation but a problem set. No hinterland. No army. No natural resources. No margin for error. Failure was not an option; it was extinction.

For three decades as prime minister, and decades more as the regime’s guiding intelligence, Lee built Singapore into a first-world state by rejecting every fashionable illusion of postwar liberalism. He imposed the rule of law where chaos beckoned, merit where patronage tempted, and long-term planning where short-term sentiment intruded. He crushed corruption, enforced public order, demanded educational seriousness, and made economic competence—not ideological virtue—the sole test of legitimacy. Under his leadership, Singapore transformed itself from a humid trading post into one of the four Asian Tigers: a manufacturing hub, financial center, and logistical artery whose per capita income now exceeds that of its former colonial master. This was not accidental. It was administered.

Lee did not believe history bent toward justice. He believed it bent toward entropy unless someone pushed back—hard.

But even that is only half the story. The other half—the half politely ignored whenever Singapore is held up as a model—is demographics and social capital. Singapore was not built on magic dirt. It was built on people: a Chinese-majority society alongside Malays and Tamils, organized not as an accident of history but as a matter of statecraft. Lee understood, from the race riots of the early 1960s onward, that a multiracial state dominated by ethnic politics would not survive—and that stability required a clear demographic center of gravity. “In a multiracial society,” he once remarked, “if you let numbers alone determine outcomes, you will get paralysis, not harmony.”

Since independence, Singapore has therefore maintained a Chinese majority hovering around three-quarters of the population through deliberate, state-managed immigration. This mattered. Chinese Singaporeans had—and still have—fertility rates far below replacement. The state did not leave demographics to chance.

Critics denounce this as demographic engineering, even racial hegemony; Lee was unapologetic. “I do not believe you can mix different cultures and expect it to work out by itself.” In the West, we prefer to pretend everyone is interchangeable and culture is merely cuisine. Lee preferred reality.

America’s own rise followed the same pattern. It was not, despite the children’s books, a geographical accident. Plenty of nations enjoy fertile land and navigable rivers and have managed to make a spectacular mess of them. What distinguished America was the people who built it: predominantly Anglo-Celtic settlers—the four British folkways David Hackett Fischer maps in Albion’s Seed—reinforced by Germans and Dutch, who brought habits of self-government, legalism, Protestant work discipline, and a stubborn insistence on order before indulgence. They built institutions that worked because the population broadly shared the cultural software required to make them run. Lee understood the same truth generations later.

Which brings us, inevitably, to Donald Trump. Trump is not Lee Kuan Yew. Anyone pretending otherwise is either unserious or auditioning for cable news. Lee was austere and disciplined; Trump is theatrical and impulsive. Lee ruled like a mandarin general; Trump governs like a demolition crew with a bullhorn. And yet—this is where the modern West struggles—Trump is necessary.

Trump’s role is not to be the builder. It is to be the disrupter—the man who kicks over the polite furniture and forces the room to acknowledge the smell. He forced immigration and the border back into the realm of enforcement rather than abstraction, shattering the taboo around demographics and sovereignty and returning them—against elite protest—to the national conversation. America is not going back to the 1970s demographically, or pretending it can. What he did was insist that numbers matter and that a nation has the right to decide who enters it.

A true American Lee Kuan Yew would look very different from Trump. He would be quieter—and far more feared. He would understand that reindustrialization is not a slogan but a program, and that mercy without order is cruelty. He would not confuse tolerance with surrender.

Whether America can still produce such a figure is an open question. Civilizations do not summon reformers on demand; they earn them through necessity. Trump may not be the man. He may only be the moment.

Singapore did not become great by being nice. It became great by being serious. America, if it is to recover, will need the same rude awakening.

It being the Christmas season, I considered what might be the most uncharitable, Scrooge-like argument I could possibly make in this column in order to thereby mark the traditional festive period of absolutely no charity and ill will to all men—and then Donald Trump beat me to it by saying Rob and Michele Reiner deserved to get stabbed.

According to a social media post of Donald’s, put out while the Reiners’ blood, reportedly spilled by their disturbed-sounding druggie son Nick, was still warm and sticky:

It’s that final “rest in peace!” at the end there that really gets me; almost as if the Enola Gay had dropped a nice little Hallmark sympathy card down onto Hiroshima after the bombing, saying, “Sorry for your loss.” And that jaunty little exclamation mark, too—I must confess, that’s one piece of punctuation I’ve yet to see appear on anyone’s gravestone.

Adding Insult to Injury
In the wake of Trump’s tasteless but amusingly self-obsessed post, even fellow members of the Republican Party expressed their disgust. Kentucky congressman Thomas Massie defied anyone who ordinarily supported Trump, even up to the level of Vice President J.D. Vance, to be able to coherently defend it:

“The Obamas will be attending the Reiners’ funeral. I had rather hoped it might be the other way around.”

Personally, I have no previous animus against Rob Reiner or his less famous wife whatsoever. Being English, I was barely even aware of him. To me, All in the Family was just the shit lefty agitprop version of the far superior U.K. original Till Death Us Do Part “let’s all laugh at the stupid bigot!” sitcom, and I was not even aware Reiner had appeared on it. I knew the name and was able to associate it with past movies I’d enjoyed, like This Is Spinal Tap, and past movies I had studiously avoided, like When Harry Met Sally…, but if you’d asked me what I thought about his political activism, I would only honestly have been able to reply, “What political activism?”

Rob was not that well-known across the Atlantic. When news of his stabbing first broke, I guarantee the mistaken reaction of at least 75 percent of the British population will have been, “What, that gay judge off the telly?” (That Robert Rinder joke will make about as much sense to the average American as a Rob Reiner joke will to the average Brit, thereby making my point; click on the link if you don’t understand it.)

So, I have zero prior kitchen knife to grind against Mr. or Mrs. Reiner, and no genuine views about the departed pair either way, but shall do my best to help Mr. Vance out if he should ever find himself compelled to respond to Mr. Massie’s stimulating wager nonetheless, needing to demonstrate compliant public fealty toward his Big Orange Overlord.

Traditionally, opinion columnists are supposed to write columns containing opinions they actually hold (except Candace Owens, unless she actually is that mentally ill), but in this specific instance, as a special Christmas present to the VP, I thought I’d make an exception.

Rob the Rich
As may or may not be well-known to you depending upon which side of the pond you are reading this, Rob Reiner was the archetypal Hollywood lefty, a major Democrat donor and campaigner, who played key roles in getting Obama and Biden elected, not to mention passing gay marriage laws in California. He also enjoyed decrying Donald Trump as a “Nazi,” reflecting the fact that Reiner and his wife were both Jewish. Apparently, such pure Democrat royalty was he, the Obamas will be attending the Reiners’ funeral. I had rather hoped it might be the other way around.

In 2003, Rob appeared in a memorable episode of the adult cartoon South Park, where he was mercilessly lampooned for his continual offscreen efforts to ban smoking, including (in the cartoon, not in real life) plotting to kill a child and then pass it off as being due to infant lung cancer contracted from an illicit underage 10,000-a-day cigarette habit.

Exposed as a fascist who wishes to steal away ordinary working people’s free will, like all such Hollywood “liberals” do, Reiner ends up being stabbed to death by his intended victim at the episode’s end, something some excited commenters today have viewed as an uncanny prediction of his genuine 2025 demise at the hands of his own knife-wielding child (albeit on South Park, Reiner is actually murdered with a sharp fork, so the cutlery is inaccurate).

What was it about Reiner’s activism that made so many children want to stab him? According to South Park, it was his immense, aloof, privileged hypocrisy. Confronted with the “immoral” sight of a sawmill employee lighting up in a bar after a soul-destroying twelve-hour shift working his hands to the bone, Reiner bursts into a self-righteous libtard rage; if the primitive prole must relax after work, why can’t he just fly out to his Malibu beachfront holiday home like Reiner himself does?

The Nick of Crime
Reiner was particularly interested in promoting educational causes for schoolchildren. In 1997, he funded a program in California called “I Am Your Child,” all about informing parents of the immense importance of bonding with your baby during its early years—prior to its launch, nobody had ever known such facts before, most parents tending to lock their children inside darkened ovens full of spiders until they reached the age of 18 and could legally be thrown out of the house.

Yet, some daring critics-cum-sociopaths have asked, who was Rob to preach on this? Was he a good father himself? I don’t know, but his son Nick, now 32, has stated that his dad failed to bond with him in his own infancy, something linked, rightly or wrongly, to the way he spent so much of his spare time showily campaigning for the well-being of other people’s children while hypocritically neglecting that of his own, like Dickens’ Mrs Jellyby. Perhaps this was part of the reason Nick became a teenage meth head, going into rehab aged only 15?

In the wake of the Reiners’ murders, a spoof tweet (apparently written by a satirist) went viral, implying the “true” reason Nick wielded his knife was because he was a mentally ill tranny who had been encouraged to go down that route by his show-off parents to help burnish their liberal credentials:

Presumably the satirist’s point in spreading this wholly invented rumor was, “Beware how MAGA will exploit this lethal family tragedy to push their own false policy agenda.” But would such a described policy agenda really be false?

Maine Character Syndrome
Another loony American child who stabbed his parents—and their pet Chihuahua—to death was “Andrea” Balcer, a “trans woman” (as in, an emotionally disturbed man) who did the deed back in 2016. Andrea/Andrew/Whatever-the-Fuck said he did it because his parents, and presumably even their transphobic pet dog, had refused to acknowledge he was now a woman, primarily because he wasn’t. In the back of the police van after being arrested, this completely sane individual even sang a Pavarotti song: Real women can’t be tenors, only sopranos.

Rather more accommodating than his dead family were the authorities in Democrat-controlled Maine, who #BeKindly sentenced Balcer to forty years behind bars—in a women’s prison. Ultimately, then, the Democrats actively rewarded a mad parent-slayer with public affirmation of “her” preferred gender here, for all the world to see. That’s what the Rob Reiners of this world would call “kindness.”

This April, however, Donald Trump’s administration intervened to strip Maine’s prison system of all “non-essential funding” (if it’s “non-essential,” why were they getting it in the first place?) unless and until they submitted to simple physical reality and placed Balcer inside a prison for “persons with cocks” instead. That’s what the Rob Reiners of this world would call “fascism.”

At some big Hollywoodland “Well Done, Everyone, for Being So Gay Awards” bumfest thing in 2019, in his sainted role as a pro-trans activist, Rob Reiner made a speech saying the following, subsequently re-jizzed all over lefty media after his slaying:

Try making that same speech via Ouija board in Lebanon, Rob. Or, indeed, in what still remains of the Balcer household. “It’s no more complicated than that.” Except it clearly is, isn’t it?

Like Picasso once said about art, the fake tweet about Nick Reiner supposedly being a cross-dresser was (inadvertently) a lie that told the truth: that Hollywood liberals like the Reiners are always quite happy to ruin the family lives of little people like the Balcers, just so long as they can ponce around polishing their halos in front of superstar political “greats” like the Obamas, as that fine old episode of South Park once implied. Donald Trump was wrong: Rob and Michele Reiner didn’t have TDS, Trump Derangement Syndrome, but SDS, Self Deification Syndrome.

So, there you go, J.D.: If you really are ever asked to publicly defend your boss about what he just idiotically tweeted, vomit all that back out, just in your own words and shorn of all the giveaway Anglicisms, obscure literary and pop-culture references, swearing, and dick jokes.

The Week’s Most Racial Facial Blank, Palestinian Anne Frank, and Trump’s Trolling Plaque Prank Headlines

PREDICTABLE FAILURE
At last, 2026 is here, which means it’s time for the latest batch of annual predictions from renowned dead psychic Baba Vanga, which this year include the forecast that mankind will make its first public contact with aliens…much like she also predicted would occur last year, in the middle of a live, televised sporting event. But still no aliens. Unless she thought Dennis Rodman was going to be making a comeback?

Vanga was an elderly blind Bulgarian mystic who supposedly lost her sight aged 12 “after being caught in a tornado.” Fate compensated Vanga for her vanished vision by enabling her to see into the future instead—but, annoyingly, she didn’t bother to ever write any of her prophecies down, which means we must now rely upon her niece “remembering” them for us, apparently very inaccurately.

Baba’s vague divinations work much as Nostradamus’ once did; phrased in cryptic riddles, they can be interpreted however you want, like a doctor’s handwriting. The following prophecy, for example, is supposed to have predicted the 2008 election of Barack Obama: “A black man will come to a white house and leave chaos and destruction in his wake.” It could just as easily have predicted O.J. Simpson.

THERE’LL BE BLACK BIRDS OVER THE WHITE CLIFFS OF DOVER
If you thought Baba Vanga’s cases of mistaken racial identity were bad, at least she had the excuse of being blind. Less easily forgivable were the bizarre “mistakes” of British scientists all too pathetically eager to “prove” their land had always been a nation of immigrants by credulously misidentifying the remains of a 2,000-year-old white woman as those of a 2,000-year-old black woman instead, after discovering them at Beachy Head, down the coast from the White Cliffs of Dover—or the Jimmy Cliffs, as the scientists said they were called.

Beachy Head Woman was a mere skinless skeleton by the time she was dug up, so archaeologists sent her off to some silly Scotswoman called Prof. Caroline Wilkinson at the “University” of Dundee to bung loads of clay all over her skull, at which point she squinted and said, “Oh, it looks like an African.” Of course it did, clay is brown. If she’d done it with plaster of Paris instead, would Dr. Wilkinson have thought it was a Moomin?

“And what was Mr. Pancake behind bars for in the first place? Getting violent one day and flattening his father.”

More precise modern DNA testing has now displaced the evidence of Dr. W’s tub of Play-Doh, however, demonstrating this supposed “African” actually had white skin, blond hair, and blue eyes, meaning a large plaque specifically identifying her as being “Of African origin,” erected there after she was mentioned in a book by activist black BBC historian David Olusoga, had to be removed. They should nail it to Olusoga’s head next, it would be more accurate.

Yet disappointed U.K. Afrocentrists need not despair, there was still some evidence of black people’s presence in Roman Britain to be found lurking amongst the bones—the woman had a large stab wound in her leg.

KOREA SWAPS
Even more racially confused was whoever illustrated an endorsement quote from noted black Texas Democrat Jasmine Crockett (Empty Head Woman) on the website of an allied California Democrat named Esther Kim Varet with a photo of a completely different black lady with an Afro (Bushy Head Woman) by mistake. Asked for a comment, Crockett herself generously forgave her East Asian colleague the slipup, saying, “I love Lucy Liu!”

This photographic error is ironic, as Esther Kim herself keeps on getting mistaken for her rival California Republican candidate, Young Kim, who herself keeps on getting mistaken for that little fat murdering guy who runs North Korea. Actually, Esther Kim is the one who is of North Korean background, whereas Young Kim is of South Korean background. Both, however, claim somehow to be Americans.

Certain people doubt it, though, with Esther Kim alleging Young Kim has terrible trouble disguising her ancestral accent, implying she is not truly American at all. Esther Kim has further insulted her other racial foes with similar tweets, telling Christian Martinez, a national Hispanic campaigner for the Republicans, to “prove that you’re a REAL Latino,” as she herself was clearly a real American.

To which Martinez immediately replied, “Try to say the words ‘REAL Latino’ out loud and I might believe you.”

Why can’t these people all just calm down and apologize to one another? For Koreans, solly really is the hardest word.

PLAQUE CAUSES TRUTH DECAY
More historically misleading plaques were erected this week by noted scholar Donald Trump, who took the opportunity to alter the captions beneath his predecessors’ portraits on the White House Walk of Fame, in particular that of Joe Biden, now depicted by a stock image of an autopen signing his name, and disrespectfully described in tweet-like terms as follows:

Trump may have scurrilously substituted Sleepy Joe’s photo with an autopen, but what will his own portrait one day be replaced with a disparaging likeness of by his future enemies? Baba Vanga predicts it may be a condom.

POTUS ON YOUR PENIS
Alarmed by its falling birth rate, to mark the New Year, China has placed a prohibitive new tax on condoms from 1 January, aiming to make them far too expensive for most reluctant parents to purchase. Just wait until they see how much an actual child costs them.

America, also suffering a low birth rate, conceived a different condom-related tactic: Print Donald Trump’s face on them, to discourage purchase that way. For added prophylactic effect, the capitalized slogan “DON’T FORGET TO USE PROTECTION OR ANOTHER ONE OF THESE MIGHT BE BORN” is also printed on the packet.

Shocking new photos released from inside Jeffrey Epstein’s sex dungeon show boxes of extra-large, jumbo condoms with the President’s grinning face on the tip; the harder you get, the more bigly he balloons. If Trump ever rolled one over onto his own penis, he’d probably immediately try to crouch down and suck it.

Still, having your head on a dick is always much better than having a dick on your head. Like Barack Obama soon will, once Trump finishes drawing his new official Hall of Fame portrait for him, too.

FRANKLY MISLEADING
Trump was very busy in the lead-up to Christmas, not only writing insulting captions for his predecessors but also signing into law rules banning Palestinians from entering the U.S., due to their strong “terrorist presence” and “extremist activity”—a measure that would be bad news indeed for Anne Frank. How come? Yet another case of mistaken racial identity.

Despite being the best-known Jewish female since Mrs. Moses, the Nazis’ most celebrated victim was herself the subject of a deliberately disingenuous and belittling new portrait this week, being depicted not as an autopen or a novelty condom commissioned by a dead pedophile, but as a devout Muslim. Anne Frank famously lived in an attic. But now, she’s had a sudden loft conversion.

A Potsdam museum has unveiled a controversial new painting of Anne, from Italian dauber Constantino Ciervo, depicting her sat at a desk in her Amsterdam hidey-hole wearing a typical Palestinian keffiyeh tea towel scarf, thus making her a probable member of Hamas.

Holland’s Jewish community said they strenuously objected to this offensive artistic exploitation of their people’s most well-recognized and visible face, and demanded it be immediately removed. To which Signor Ciervo replied, “No problem, I’ll just repaint over her in a burka instead.”

THE HUNGER GAMES
Besides everything else, Anne Frank was also famous for the efficacy of her late-life diet plan. Might this mean she really was Palestinian after all?

In the U.K., a group of five pro-Pally hunger strikers (there were originally seven, but in the end two snapped and “ate a fucking sandwich,” as one man with a real job helpfully advised them to grow up and do on camera here) are well on the way to starving themselves to death in prison, to what they fondly imagine is the massed admiration of the entire nation, whereas in actual fact most people are just laughing at them as a bunch of stupid, overprivileged, Keffiyeh Patch Kids.

Uniquely in the entire annals of hunger striking, one of them is only refusing food every other day. That’s not a hunger strike, it’s a diet.

Another non-prison-based supporter, a female councillor in the lefty London borough of Islington, has gone on a 24-hour hunger strike: not as in refusing food, 24 hours a day, until she dies like Gandhi did (albeit of a different cause), but refusing all chickpeas and hummus for 24 hours in total. She probably just wanted to lose a few pounds for the office Christmas party.

The group has made several unrealistic demands of the government if they are to stop their starvation, including the release of all Palestine Action terror-group supporters from jail, the closing down of Israeli arms manufacturers on British soil, and a personal meeting with Justice Secretary David Lammy. This final petition is made purely for the sake of keeping up morale. One glimpse of Fat Boy Lammy in the room, and the rebels’ determination to diet would never end.

FLATTENING TO DECEIVE
One dangerous criminal who will certainly never starve to death in prison is Eric Thomas Pancake, a 38-year-old Palm City felon who, if he ever felt too hungry to bear it anymore, could always simply eat himself after applying a small squeeze of lemon.

And what was Mr. Pancake behind bars for in the first place? Getting violent one day and flattening his father. Who was also called Pancake. How much flatter could the guy get?

If Eric ever runs out of tasty Pancake flaps to chew, he could always try contacting a fellow new prisoner, big fat bastard Cedric Lodge, sentenced to eight years behind a single bar (he’s so wide it’s all they’d need, like an anti-parking bollard) for abusing his role as a morgue manager at Harvard Medical School to steal tasty body parts and sell them to anyone who wanted some, “as if they were baubles.” Hanging a pair of actual balls on your Christmas tree would certainly be an excellent way to celebrate your successful transition. Human intestines would make some good bright-red tinsel wrap, too.

Reportedly, clients wanted sliced cadavers for some pretty strange reasons, like binding books in human skin, or gaining a nice spare human face, “perhaps to be kept on a shelf.” Or perhaps to be glued onto the skull of Beachy Head Woman so woke scientists at the University of Dundee can pretend she wasn’t really a disappointingly local white British woman after all?

Award for dumbest criminal of the week, though, must go to Latoya Clark, a black lady (did you guess?) from Florida, due to appear in court on fraud charges. Yet she did not appear in the dock on time—as she had just been arrested and placed in a cell after attempting to drive to her appearance inside a stolen vehicle. Repeatedly getting yourself imprisoned so you can’t be imprisoned—is that really severe mental retardation, or a form of actual genius?

DISORGANIZED RESISTANCE
Muslim Anne Franks, POTUS condoms, Pancakes flattening Pancakes…Baba Vanga never foresaw any of this, thus clearly making her completely useless at her alleged job of “being very psychic.” Maybe Blind Baba could just blame her ADHD?

That’s what one British woman, Nicole Hogger, has just done. Hogger has won compensation from an employment tribunal after moaning that being called “disorganized” by her boss was a form of discrimination. An employee at God’s own publicity company, Genesis PR (the Vatican recently lost the contract), Hogger testified her disorganization was merely a symptom of her ADHD, thus making it a protected characteristic under ironically retarded disability rights legislation.

For someone so very unable to organize the proverbial piss-up in a brewery, however, Hogger did prove curiously able to organize herself some pampering massages and shopping trips—all when she should have been at work answering phones. She also demonstrated “poor organization, forgetfulness, and difficulty getting started on tasks requiring significant mental effort,” so her bosses took their cue from Donald Trump and tried to replace her with an autopen. Yet the tribunal judge said this was wrong, ruling that bosses had failed to propose any “practical steps to avoid a similar situation arising in the future.” Isn’t that precisely what they were doing by sacking the daft bitch?

On an end note, Baba Vanga has also predicted (as she does most years) that 2026 will be the year the world finally ends. Open your eyes, love, it’s already happened!

IMPORTANT INFORMATION: With Ms. Hogger’s tragic case in mind, The Week That Perished will now be taking a short 2026 break. REGULAR PROGRAMMING WILL RETURN SOON.

For most of humanity, I surmise, a porcupine is just a porcupine. There are, in fact, between thirty and forty species—zoological taxonomy is not yet a wholly exact science.

There are two families of porcupines (I use the word “family” in its taxonomic sense), namely the Old and the New World porcupines, and their taxonomic families are not closely related. They both have spines, but this is held by zoologists to be the result of convergent evolution rather than that of a close genetic relationship. A New World porcupine is more guinea pig, genetically, than it is Old World porcupine.

I noticed that a new species of porcupine has just been discovered in the jungles of South America—Colombia, to be exact. It is two feet long, lives in trees, has a prehensile tail, eats fruit, and is of a shy and retiring disposition. The article in which I read the exciting news (exciting, that is, for porcupinologists) had a picture of the animal, the first ever taken.

My initial thought was in its way revelatory of an increasingly distrustful modern mindset: Is this creature real, or the product or creation of artificial intelligence? It surely cannot be difficult for AI to invent new species or, rather, concoct plausible pictures of such.

“Is this creature real, or the product or creation of artificial intelligence?”

The first thing to remember is that there are a lot of people in the world, so that it is almost impossible to think of anything that someone would not be prepared to do. There is nothing so absurd, said Cicero, but that some philosopher has not said it; the same is true of actions. I used to go to my hospital thinking that I had heard everything, but I never had. For example, I had a patient who claimed to be HIV-positive in order to attract women—successfully, for there was a subset of women who found the claim to be HIV-positive as irresistible as moths find flames.

By these standards, inventing a new species of porcupine would be a comparatively rational thing to do. An academic, or academic team, might do it in order to advance a career or institution. Discovering a new species confers a kind of immortality on zoologists, at least among other zoologists. Fakery in science was prevalent enough before AI, but now it must be more tempting than ever.

There are the kinds of people in every field who do not so much want to advance themselves as make fools of others, either publicly or in private. In their own way, they may be gifted, erudite, and even admirable; for there is something in us that rejoices when fools are made of experts, provided that we are not one of the said experts.

Eric Hebborn, for example, was a brilliant draftsman and art forger whose forgeries fooled many experts. There are probably many of his forgeries still exhibited as genuine works because those who acquired them do not want to admit that they were duped (the vanity and amour propre of curators and collectors, to say nothing of art dealers, are on the side of the forger). As with the famous forger of Vermeer’s, Han van Meegeren, his motive—apart from financial gain—might have been to take revenge on an art establishment that had failed to recognize his talent when he painted under his own steam, if I may be allowed a somewhat inelegant locution. If such a forger can demonstrate that the art establishment was so easily and frequently taken in, doubt might be cast on its negative judgment of his own original work. (I possess a rather good forgery of a drawing by Francesco Guardi, though I frankly find it astonishing, indeed incredible, expert though I am not, that anyone could, even for an instant, have mistaken Han van Meegeren’s pictures for Vermeer’s.)

Now the kind of resentment that (if I am right) art forgers feel is not likely to be confined to the sphere of art but must exist in many fields of endeavor. The world is full of people who think that their talents have not been recognized and who would therefore welcome the opportunity to be revenged on “the whole pack of you,” to quote Malvolio. And artificial intelligence is made for such people.

This, of course, has a corollary, namely a decline in the level of trust in society, and even the promotion in it of a paranoid way of thinking. It is not that the decline in trust started with AI: When I was young, it was inconceivable to me, and I think to my elders and betters, that there should be widespread fraud in the scientific literature. But with the almost exponential increase in the number of researchers, all jostling for notice, and publication almost the sole criterion of academic success, fraud and malpractice have become so widespread that one is inclined to attribute any surprising result to them. AI can only accelerate the trend, making fraud and malpractice easier to commit, more tempting to employ, and harder to detect.

Most of our knowledge has always derived from authority, of course. Unless we are historians who examine original sources, we depend for our historical knowledge on the authority of a succession of authors; and even original sources may be doubted. I believe that the Battle of Hastings took place in 1066, not because I can prove it from primary sources or firsthand experience (I certainly couldn’t) but because I was always told that it did and had no particular reason to doubt it. Why would anyone try to deceive me about it? But just because you can’t think of a motive for deceit doesn’t mean that it hasn’t taken place. There are people who like to deceive for its own sake—disinterested deceivers, as it were.

Trust in authority and authorities is thus essential if we are not to be prey to a debilitating, continually contentious, enervating, exhausting, useless, uncritical, and paranoid skepticism about everything. Oddly enough, habitual skeptics about everything are apt suddenly to become convinced of something, often something preposterous. The ability to create verisimilitude at will might have a paradoxical effect: We shall believe nothing that we are told until a charismatic cult leader arises, upon whose every word we shall hang, in more senses than one.

For the moment, though, I still believe that a new species of porcupine has been discovered in the jungles of Colombia.

Christmas is a merry time up here in the Alps, but this year it was merrier because of something I read. I assume you’ve all heard of Keir Starmer, the British prime minister who is addressed as Sir Keir because the Brits are old hands at handing out titles in order to impress foreigners, innocents, and especially Americans. Impressing people with silly titles comes naturally to people with bad teeth and worse weather. They hang a title to a simple country lawyer such as Starmer—titles are also for sale to the rich and famous—and those poor unsuspecting Yanks think they’re old-world aristocracy. Never mind. The only ones who fall for this bull are gossip writers and social climbers, neither species employed by Takimag, and certainly not part of our esteemed readership.

What amused me went as follows: Sir Keir was being grilled by some horror woman about The Donald’s behavior, and Keir affirmed in his best stentorian voice that he would never speak to a woman, his wife, or a colleague in the way Trump spoke to a female journalist. That’s when my ears perked up. Left-wing American female journalists are not only a dime a dozen, some are also rather homely, promiscuous, lying, envious, bitter, and hateful of men. “Would you allow for someone to speak to your daughter, your wife, your colleagues in the way that Trump spoke to a female journalist?” asked a harridan. Had I been Starmer, I would have answered that no daughter, wife, or colleague of mine would have interrupted the President of the United States in the first place, and would not have asked a loaded question about Epstein whose answer was obvious.

“No wonder The Donald called her piggy.”

No wonder The Donald called her piggy. Reporters covering The Donald are desperate to make a name for themselves by getting him to lose his temper or insult them. They become the leading headline in the evening news. Such are the joys of the left-wing media in America. It used to be very, very different. Eisenhower, Kennedy, and LBJ were treated with great respect during press conferences. Then it started to go downhill with President Nixon and Watergate. Now it’s a free-for-all by lowlife reporters trying to make the headlines by getting into the Trump hair, no pun intended.

Of course, misogyny came up and remained on center stage. The Brit prime minister immediately folded by admitting misogyny was everywhere at Westminster, but how we got to rainy London, a very crowded place with lawyers and con artists, from The Donald’s Air Force One is a mystery to this poor little Greek boy. Personally I’ve never called a woman piggy, but if one watches any TV commercial about food, there are more piggies—male and female—featured in them than there are stars in heaven. Misogyny, needless to say, is the sine qua non of every female reporter, editor, or commentator in the land of the triple burger with fries. Stuck for an angle in a nonstory, press the misogyny button and there’s a headline in the making. Get caught in having invented a news story, press the misogyny button that now resembles the 7th Cavalry in a John Wayne Western. Get fired for incompetence and lack of talent, it was misogyny, pure and simple.

But enough of shrews and harpies. This is Christmas, and once upon a time there lived a man called Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart who does not belong with the geniuses like Beethoven, Haydn, and Schubert because he was a miracle. As some of you who do not watch TV must know, little Wolfie wrote his first symphony at 8 years of age. The other evening I happened to be listening to a Mozart program and heard the 8-year-old’s symphony for the first time. Had I not been told by the speaker, I would have never guessed it wasn’t a later work by the greatest Austrian ever. Then I stayed tuned to the greatest opera ever, again by Wolfie, Don Giovanni. That’s when piggy came back to mind. Once Donna Elvira finally realizes that the Don is a womanizer par excellence, and that she will never be able to tame him or keep him for herself, she sings the beautiful aria regretting having met him and telling the world how she has suffered and how much she hates him. But after each rondo Elvira sings out how she would take him back the second he beckoned. Aha, I said to myself, if only the piggy on The Donald’s Air Force One had a brain, she might be hating Trump because she secretly wants him.

Piggy will probably sue me if she reads this, but she really should listen to Donna Elvira. Actually it was a Venetian Jew who wrote all this, Lorenzo Da Ponte, a brilliant librettist who ended his life in Brooklyn teaching Italian. He and Mozart collaborated in all his operas. As everyone Christian knows, damnation is real, and Don Giovanni was given the chance to repent and save his soul but refused it, and down he went. But he sure had a good time while alive. He was the last alpha male, pun intended. A merry Christmas to all of you.

In honor of Christmas, this week we’ll discuss the worst advertisement for my religion: Christians. Sometimes it seems as if there are more fake, phony, fraud Christians than real Christians, but that’s because I read The New York Times (my North Star, which I believe implicitly).

While not dispositive, it’s at least a red flag when the Times writes respectfully about a person’s Christianity.

Last year, Lankford negotiated a secret deal with the Democrats that would have formalized our country’s surrender to open borders. The so-called “bipartisan border security bill” — Lankford is not only allegedly a “Christian,” but, also allegedly, a “Republican” — codified Joe Biden’s illegal and treasonous border policies, requiring all future presidents to continue admitting millions of illegal aliens every year, just like Biden did, in violation of existing law.

(What’s the matter with you, Oklahoma? How could a state like yours end up with a senator like this?)

“Christians have always stood apart from the bien-pensant, opposing accepted practices like polygamy, gladiatorial contests, sacrificial offerings to the gods, slavery, abandonment of widows, ostentatious displays of wealth, sexual degeneracy, etc.”

Naturally, the February 2024 Times article on this wonderful bipartisan border bill stressed Lankford’s Christianity, noting that he “previously ran the largest Christian youth camp in the country and has spoken often about how his faith guides his policy positions.” In this one case, the Times did not refer to Christians’ authoritarianism, homophobia, fear of “the other,” etc.

The photo that ran with the article showed Lankford piously praying with his family, eyes closed and heads bowed, in front of an audience. It’s the gayest photo I’ve ever seen. (At the Times, that’s a plus.)

In a May 2024 article about Christian parents nonplussed when their sons start wearing skirts and calling themselves “Tulip,” there could be no mistaking the good guys for the bad guys.

The appalled parents, according to the Times, are “afraid of change,” expressing “anti-trans fear and zeal,” holding “deeply ingrained notions of masculinity and femininity,” who have “mocked, kicked out and denied communion” to transgenders. (Editor’s note: The “deeply ingrained notions” are also known as “reality.”) These people leveled “vociferous opposition to everything from drag shows to hormone treatments.” (What squares.)

By contrast, the pro-trans Christian counselors are “expert voices,” trying to create “a space of curiosity as opposed to judgment,” who say things like, “we have to allow for questions” and instruct parents of trans kids to use their preferred pronouns “as a form of hospitality.”

(They’d also appreciate it you’d all stop “dead naming” Jesus’ parents. All hail the Blessed Virgin Harry and their life partner Josephine.)

Pretending a boy is a girl and a girl is a boy isn’t nuts, it’s a “celebratory embrace of new identities.” Just sign right here, and we’ll celebrate by whisking your son off for his penilectomy.

Notwithstanding the happy face the Times tried to put on teenage mental illness, the Goebbels-like fad of poisoning and mutilating kids seems to be falling out of favor. If so, one line from the article is looking pretty good: “In many ways, conservative Christians have become the face of the American anti-trans movement.”

I know about Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt’s peculiar version of Christianity not from the Times‘ extravagant praise, but from his burbling on about what a big Christian he is whenever he’s about to ignore the cries of crime victims.

When commuting the death sentence of Julius Jones, who committed the minor infraction of murdering businessman Paul Howell in front of his family, then stealing his car, Stitt said, “I grew up in the Christian faith since attending church in my mother’s womb. I memorized the books of the Bible when I was 8 years old … I served as the song leader for my hometown congregation …,” and on and on.

Earlier that same year, in January 2021, Stitt had released multiple felon Lawrence Paul Anderson from prison, cutting a 20-year sentence down to three years. A month after being sprung, Anderson killed his neighbor, cut out her heart, cooked it and served it to his family with potatoes. Then he killed most of them, too. (You don’t serve potatoes with a human heart; you serve rice.)

Only God knows what is in a person’s heart, blah, blah, blah, but these people are ridiculous.

No, Sen. Lankford, Christianity does not call on us to destroy the last Christian country on Earth. And no, Gov. Stitt, the loftiest Christian goal is not to release black men from prison. (Or white men, but that’s not what gives fake Christians their self-righteous glow.)

As for those Christians who are “the face of the American anti-trans movement,” perhaps you’ve heard of the last 2,000 years of human history? Christians have always stood apart from the bien-pensant, opposing accepted practices like polygamy, gladiatorial contests, sacrificial offerings to the gods, slavery, abandonment of widows, ostentatious displays of wealth, sexual degeneracy, etc.

Understandably, this imperviousness to popular opinion is upsetting to the Times, the mouthpiece of organized liberal hectoring.

The prophet Isaiah says, “Woe to those who call evil good, and good evil.” That ought to be the Times‘ motto, “Calling evil good, and good evil.” Praise from these degenerates is as good as the mark of the devil.

I’ve been shocked that Americans are in such a grumpy mood as reflected in all the public opinion polls.

What a paradox: At the same time, we have peace and prosperity, including more income, more wealth, more of almost everything that we want to buy (yes, except for housing), Americans seem to think we have an “affordability crisis.” In 2025 the median household income in the United States has risen to more than $86,000 a year — an all-time high.

Every income group and every ethnic group is richer today than ever before. Hispanics now have a median household income above $70,000, which would make them rich in most countries where they or their parents came from.

“This is not a “rich getting richer, poor getting poorer story.” It’s a “rising tide that lifts all boats” story.”

This upward slope of living standards has been the norm throughout our history as a nation, but this past year has been one of the blockbusters, with incomes rising almost twice as fast as inflation.

It hasn’t happened by accident. It’s happened because at the start of 2025 we had a regime change in Washington. In Donald Trump we have a president whose common-sense economic, education, energy, environment and financial policies have worked.

I don’t agree with all the policies, such as some of the high tariffs, which are a mixed bag at best.

But few presidents have recorded more achievements and positive results in one year than Trump.

Incomes of the bottom 25% have risen after inflation. This is not a “rich getting richer, poor getting poorer story.” It’s a “rising tide that lifts all boats” story.

The wealth of the average family in their 401k plans is UP by an average of $21,000 — reversing a more than $20,000 real decline under Joe Biden.

As many as 1 million additional families will have access to higher-performing schools thanks to Trump’s education savings accounts.

No tax on tips and overtime starts on Jan. 1, 2026, for millions of American workers.

The federal budget deficit — a clear and present danger — was down by roughly 2.5% in 2025 and is already down by another 170 billion in the first two months of fiscal year 2026, despite the Trump tax cuts.

Our servicemen and servicewomen received a well-deserved $1,776 end-of-year bonus.

Through the first half of the year (according to the latest numbers available), crime in cities is way down. Gun assaults were down 21%, aggravated assaults were down 10%, sexual assaults were down 10%, and carjackings were down 24% compared to levels under Biden.

The United States is producing more oil and gas than at any other time in American history.

Gas prices, which approached $5 a gallon under Biden, are down to $2.89 a gallon today.

The swamp in Washington is being drained: Federal employment is down by nearly 300,000.

A record 400+ intrusive regulations have been eliminated, including repealing racial quotas in hiring, reversing Biden rules mandating that Americans buy electric vehicles, and allowing more drilling for critical minerals.

The stock market reached all-time highs on all three major indices: the S&P 500, the Nasdaq and the Dow Jones Industrial Average.

There’s much more to celebrate, and there are also some bad things happening in our country that Trump hasn’t fixed (yet), like our corrupt and outlandishly expensive health care system and declining test scores in our public schools.

Yet young people in particular are grim in their outlook. They’re oblivious to how blessed they are to be in America at this unique moment of peace and unprecedented prosperity, to have a future with all the economic signs pointing north. They still don’t get it.

I feel like the angel Clarence in the iconic 1946 film “It’s a Wonderful Life,” who convinces Jimmy Stewart at the end of the movie: “You see, George, you’ve really had a wonderful life.”

America no longer rewrites its history; it simply swaps it out. Last week, beneath the echoing domes of the United States Capitol, Congress unveiled a statue of Barbara Rose Johns, the 16-year-old Virginia schoolgirl who led a student strike in 1951 against the crumbling, segregated conditions of her high school.

But statues are not awarded for moral hygiene alone. And this one arrived by way of eviction. Johns’ bronze now occupies the spot once held by Robert E. Lee, whose statue had stood in the Capitol since 1909 before being summarily removed in 2020, amid the national nervous breakdown that followed the death of George Floyd.

And there you have it: the great lie of our age—that historical significance is determined not by scale, consequence, or endurance, but by ideological usefulness.

“This is not about honoring the past. It is about disciplining the present.”

Lee shaped the course of American history whether one approves of him or not. He commanded armies, decided battles, altered the fate of a continent, and remains studied in military academies around the world, not unlike Pompey, who fought for a doomed order and lost yet still commands a chapter in every serious history of Rome. You may condemn Lee’s cause—and many do—without pretending he was a footnote. History is not a participation trophy.

Barbara Rose Johns lived a worthy life. So do millions of Americans who never receive statues in the nation’s Rotunda. But the claim that she belongs there while Lee must be purged tells you everything about how history is now curated, not by magnitude, but by moral fashion.

The message is blunt. Power, sacrifice, leadership, and tragedy count for nothing unless they flatter current orthodoxy. Obscurity plus moral signaling now outrank greatness plus complexity. The smaller the footprint, the safer the symbolism.

The ceremony itself, held on Dec. 16, 2025, was a master class in modern American theater. Emancipation Hall was packed with dignitaries, relatives, and professional clappers. Mike Johnson, the Louisiana Republican allegedly sent to Washington to resist such nonsense, opened proceedings by praising Johns as a “true trailblazer” who “embodied the American spirit.” One could almost hear the speechwriters congratulating themselves.

Virginia governor Glenn Youngkin followed, solemnly intoning that “you can’t tell the story of Virginia without telling the story of Barbara Rose Johns.” This is true, just not in the way he meant it. You also can’t tell the story of Virginia without Jamestown, Jefferson, Washington, Lee, or the Civil War. But those chapters have become…inconvenient.

Youngkin spoke movingly of the “tar shack” classrooms Johns endured at Moton High School under the Jim Crow fraud of “separate but equal.” Quite right. Johns’ strike mobilized 450 students, lasted two weeks, and caught the attention of NAACP lawyers. Her case later became one of five consolidated into Brown v. Board of Education. She was brave, resolute, and morally correct.

Then came Hakeem Jeffries, fresh from explaining that America’s real problem is not inflation, crime, or border chaos, but insufficient enthusiasm for progressive racial catechism. He drew the loudest applause by denouncing Lee as a “traitor who took up arms against the United States to preserve the brutal institution of chattel slavery.” Full stop. No nuance required. History, reduced to a slogan.

But let us not inflate Johns’ role beyond recognition. She was not the architect of Brown. She did not dismantle segregation single-handedly. She did not reshape the Republic. Honoring her does not require pretending she belongs in the same historical tier as Washington, Lincoln, or even Lee.

Lee, after all, remains studied at West Point, where he once served as superintendent. His victory at Chancellorsville, outmaneuvering a force twice his size, remains a case study in operational brilliance. This does not absolve his cause. It simply acknowledges reality.

An 8-to-11-foot bronze of teenage Johns stands at a lectern, hoisting a tattered book faintly evocative of Moses with the tablets. The pedestal bears Isaiah 11:6—“a little child shall lead them”—alongside her famous line: “Are we going to just accept these conditions, or are we going to do something about it?” It is tasteful. Earnest. Unobjectionable.

The left understands something that most mainstream conservatives no longer do: that Lee was not “just” a statue. Symbols matter. They carry memory, and memory is dangerous to those who want to rewrite the present. This is why the statue had to go. The Civil War was not a Marvel movie, and Robert E. Lee was not a cartoon villain. He was a man of immense personal honor, who opposed secession, detested slavery, yet could not bring himself to raise arms against his home. His choices were tragic, not evil.

Earlier cultures understood tragedy as the collision of irreconcilable duties, not the triumph of moral purity. A tragic figure is not absolved, but neither is he reduced to a slogan. Our own culture once understood this too, when it was confident enough to acknowledge that history is shaped by flawed men facing impossible choices. We have since lost that confidence. In our current climate, the distinction between tragedy and villainy is unforgivable. Nuance is heresy.

We are told, inevitably, that “it was just a statue.” This from the same people who treat rainbow bunting on lampposts as sacred iconography. The flutter of a Pride flag is defended as inviolable, but a century-old bronze monument to one of the most consequential figures in American history is declared too dangerous for modern eyes. Our culture now reacts to the past not with understanding, but with reflexive revulsion and a demand for ritual cleansing.

Monuments are not built to make you feel “safe.” They are built to remind you of your place in a story larger than yourself, a story of sorrow and sacrifice, of greatness and failure. Lee’s statue was not a celebration of slavery; it was a solemn reflection on the cost of a war that tore a nation apart, when Americans quite literally fought Americans, and victory and defeat alike carried a permanent wound. But we no longer teach people to understand the past. We teach them to judge it, and then to destroy it.

And erasure, once begun, has no limiting principle. If Lee is beyond redemption, why stop there? Close West Point, where he once served. Empty Arlington, which sits on his former land. Rename Washington and Lee University. When purification becomes policy, nothing is ever pure enough. History offers no shortage of warnings. From revolutionary France to the Soviet Union, from Mao’s China to the jihadists dynamiting Palmyra, iconoclasm always proceeds under the same banner: moral renewal through destruction. The targets change; the impulse does not. Memory itself becomes the enemy.

In the end, this exchange tells us far more about 2025 America than about 1865 or 1951. A nation that cannot tolerate its complicated ancestors is a nation that has lost confidence in itself. Statues may come and go, but history keeps score.

And when future Americans look back on this era, they may wonder why a civilization once capable of producing giants became so eager to replace them with saints, provided the saints were suitably small.

Everyone loves cute, harmless, furry little donkeys, right? The Germans don’t—possibly because the Germans aren’t always really Germans at all anymore, but Syrians, Afghans, Somalis, Turks, Iraqis, Eritreans, etc. But what in the name of all that’s heilig have imported Muslims got against donkeys? The fact that donkeys are known Christian collaborators, that’s what.

Unlike giraffes, narwhals, unicorns, or wildebeests, all of which are left conspicuously unmolested right across the nation, you often see donkeys participating in traditional Christmas Nativity scene displays in German town centers, thus making them potential targets for attack by angry Islamist butchers. The best way to repel such criminals may be to fill the stables up with pigs instead.

One pair of unfortunate asses were happily chewing straw next to Baby Jesus in the small town of Erbach earlier this December when the fake stable in the place’s annual Christmas Market was invaded under cover of darkness at around 4 a.m. on 30 November before interlopers began torturing the tame and helpless animals. A concerned citizen, observing the scene from his window, said he saw “one of the culprits punch a donkey” before destroying the associated Christmas decorations. For good measure, the vandals then broke into a nearby church, smashed things up, and shat all over the place. According to some reports, the perpetrators had already attacked similar seasonal attractions elsewhere in the area. But not attacked any mosques. Obviously.

“The best way to repel angry Islamist butchers may be to fill the stables up with pigs instead.”

Donkey Hurty—by Ali Baa-Baa?
Whodunit? Or, in terms of the turds, Poodunit? As this was clearly an anti-Christian—or anti-infidel, maybe—hate-crime incident, the natural guess would be “imported Muslims.” Certainly that’s the automatic assumption many online commentators immediately jumped to. However, let us be fair: The donkey-bashing culprits have not as yet been apprehended by the local Gestapo, so it could well have been some passing Hare Krishnas, or even the unquiet ghost of Oliver Cromwell.

More realistically, it may have been left-wing or nihilist anti-Christian thugs, rather than specifically Islamic anti-Christian thugs, but the restrictive intricacies of German criminal procedures make it hard to tell. Even when arrests are made, German authorities have a very strict policy of never releasing the full names or images of suspects in criminal cases anyway, lest anyone realizes 99 percent of them are brown men called Muhammad (the other 1 percent are black men who prefer to spell it “Mohammed”). So until and unless any actual arrests are made, we shall never truly know.

Then again, with my Shylock Holmes hat on, I notice there may just possibly have been some kind of an undeclared Israel-Gaza angle to this whole thing, which should not be ignored. About a week prior to the Erbach donkey pogrom, a prominent news story in the German media had greatly angered the nation’s many Mohammedans.

Following the Israeli bombardment of the Gaza Strip, post–Oct. 7, Koran-lickers have continually been demanding more Palestinian refugees be admitted into Europe. The problem is, which ones to allow in? Many may be Hamas terrorists only disguised as helpless war cripples; it was difficult to tell, lots of these people have their limbs chopped off anyway. So, just to be safe, the German government decided to prioritize admitting one particular class of Gazan refugee above all others…donkeys. When Berlin’s security services said any Palestinian incomers had to be carefully vetted, making sure they were all farm animals was not quite what they meant.

When news broke that the government had refused to ship in any wounded Gazan children, but had quite happily flown across four donkeys to Oppenheim Zoo to be fed as many free carrots up either end as they could possibly handle, as part of something called “Project Donkey Flights,” the country’s substantial Islamic population began to quite literally explode with rage. Can it really be just coincidence that, a mere few days after donkeys were revealed as being enemies of the intifada, two were fisted in the face in front of a shocked Holy Family in Erbach?

Christmas Mourning
Even if the ass-pounders responsible do not turn out to be Muslim, but just a bunch of random Jesus-hating druggies, the general pattern of assaults upon German Nativity scenes and Christmas Markets is nonetheless plain: Most reported assailants really are “New Germans of a migration background,” or “Merkel-Hatchlings,” as they are technically known.

On Dec. 8 last year, 11,000 Syrians (not a misprint—although that number being there is certainly a massive mistake in another sense) marched into the Christmas Market in Essen, chanting, “Allahu Akbar!”—which is Arabic for “Christ is born, let’s kill Him!”—while shooting guns into the air, like these insufferable people do absolutely everywhere they fucking go.

The reason for the mass celebration with live ammunition was that the hated dictator Bashar al-Assad had finally been deposed, making it completely safe for the Syrian refugees to all return back home, as it was Bashar they were meant to have been fleeing. And yet, one year later, here we are, and most of these same people are strangely still there squatting in Germany nonetheless, firing their guns off for Christmas anyway—although now mainly at native Germans rather than safely into the clouds above. A few months earlier, in September, a Syrian refugee had already injured 31 people in a knife and machete attack in the same town.

Germany’s Christmas Markets are under nationwide threat, with ever more shutting down due to the prohibitive costs of protecting them from potential terror attack—which is precisely what the incoming Islamists wanted all along, their intended genocide being cultural as well as physical and demographic. By law, all such events in the country must now erect expensive concrete and metal barriers, as well as installing a two-meter-wide perimeter of sauerkrauts strung across barbed wire, to keep all the diversity-bringers using cars as improvised vehicular weapons out. And unlike free accommodation for Gazan donkeys, the German Federal Ministry of Finance won’t necessarily fund the cost of paying for them all.

The latest example is of a group of five Muslim migrants, including an Egyptian imam, being arrested after plotting to snowplow a van into a crowd at a Christmas Market in Bavaria—quite why it takes five men to devise a plot that consists, in entirety, of (1) buy van, (2) turn ignition key, and (3) kill kuffar is not wholly clear.

If the Egyptian imam turns out to be a “refugee,” the reason for his presence in the country would not be quite clear, either; the main imams Egypt is presently an unsafe zone for tend to be radical extremist ones linked to the Muslim Brotherhood, who continually plot to overthrow the land’s military government. If so, presumably the answer the imam will have given on the “Reason to Let Me In” box on his asylum application form will have been “Because I’m a terrorist.” To which the generous German state’s own response must have been, “Oh, go on, then, it’s Christmas!”

Cradle Snatchers
Germany’s time-honored Weihnachtsmarkt is clearly every bit as much of an endangered species as German donkeys now are. It’s the same in other newly Islamized lands across Europe like Belgium, where one tactic tried to alleviate needlessly created interethnic and interreligious tensions is appeasement. In Brussels, the city center Nativity scene this year had a Holy Family whose faces were deliberately featureless and made up of an inchoate yet inclusive pixelated 8-bit mosaic of varied global skin tones, so as not to alienate any incomers by cruelly privileging white Europeans over all other visitors. This way, it was said, “anyone can see themselves in them,” even Ilhan Omar.

And how did said diverse incomers respond to this kind show of welcoming inclusivity? They beheaded the Baby Jesus and ran away with his severed multiracial skull.

Again, no one’s yet been caught, and Brussels police suddenly announced Jesus had supposedly not been beheaded after all, just kidnapped full-bodily (such an easy mistake for them to make!). But, given that the crime came amid a wave of other Muslim-perpetrated destruction of such festive scenes, combined with the alleged ISIS-style neck-chopping modus operandi of the neo-Herods responsible, once again public suspicion fell squarely upon low-level amateur jihadis.

If Belgium demonstrates clearly that appeasement of the Turk will not work any better in 2020s Brussels than it ever once would have done at Lepanto, Tours, or the Gates of Vienna, then the German authorities have thought of a cunning new ruse to defuse the situation instead: ruin Christmas Markets’ previously wholesome situation in order thereby to discourage fun-seekers from wanting to attend them in the first place.

Yule Be Sorry
One potential method of doing so was to turn them all gay, as with the annual “Winter Avenue” Christmas Market they hold in Weimar Era 2.0 Berlin these days, where visiting Christopher Isherwoods, W.H. Audens, and Stephen Spenders (that last one’s rhyming slang) can head to wish themselves a Very Gay Christmas indeed.

According to one report, Berlin’s Winter Back Passage includes such wonderful traditional Christian attractions as a rainbow dome, pink-colored wine, lots and lots of lovely toilet cubicles, and the joyous festive presence of a presiding drag-queen cross between Jacqueline Onassis, Amy Winehouse, and the Whore of Babylon called Jacky Oh-Weinhaus. The den of iniquity is incredibly well shielded by barriers, CCTV, metal pillars, and police guardsmen—not only to protect visitors from Egyptian imams driving vans over their legs, but also to protect normal minds from corruption by queer filth. Before allowing entrance, armed guards are obliged to utter the following words: “This is an adult attraction; I have a duty to tell you that you or your children may see pictures of penises and things of that nature.” Things were much better when such items were just left dangling from the Nativity donkeys.

That’s one good way to put punters off ever visiting any more German Christmas Markets without ever having to explicitly invoke the specter of Islam, then. Another chosen solution was to veer from extreme left to extreme right and pretend the Nazis had surprisingly invented the things in their current form, twisting them to their sinister ends to re-form them into zealous centers of bigotry, extremism, and Jew-hate during the 1930s.

Actually, this second ploy might just work: If German Christmas Markets really are marketed as being literal Meccas of bigotry, extremism, and Jew-hate, then imported Arab extremists will begin immediately flocking to them en masse, Zionist donkeys on display or no Zionist donkeys on display. And they’ll never even consider attacking the things then, will they? Problem solved, multiculturalism works perfectly well for everybody involved after all.

All it remains for me to declaim out loud just in time for Christmas morn, then, is Frohe Weihnachten euch allen! Or possibly Frohe Weihnachten euch Allah—it’s hard to say anymore.