THE LAST ALPHA MALE
A memoir by
TAKI
January 01, 2026
Source: Bigstock
At the end of 2025, I’m feeling nostalgic. So, I’ll look back on the approximately 875 columns I’ve written for Taki’s Magazine since 2007.
That has to add up to well over one million words.
The first column I ever wrote for Taki’s was a positive 2007 review of Jimmy Carter’s book Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid. Eighteen years later, it holds up fairly well:
If I might, as a foreign observer who wishes Israel well, make a hard-headed suggestion: Instead of democratic neighbors, what Israel needs now are more moderately well-armed dictatorships on its frontiers, along the lines of Jordan, Egypt, and even Syria. Israel, the regional military superpower, can intimidate these into suppressing their native terrorists.
The Jordanian government, for example, knows that if some group within its borders shoots rockets at Israel, the Israeli military will come and break with impunity the shiny war toys that are the symbol and sword of the monarchy’s stranglehold on domestic power. So, the Jordanian secret police makes sure nobody in Jordan does anything that will make the big bad Israelis too mad.
Even Syria, which hates Israel (which has occupied Syria’s Golan Heights for a third of a century), has rigorously made sure that its territory is not the point of origin for direct attacks on Israel.
Unfortunately, Gaza, the West Bank, and Lebanon aren’t well-established dictatorships, but semi-anarchic territories, so Israel will continue to be intermittently pestered by organizations operating out of them. Eventually, if Israel is lucky, they may coalesce into centralized dictatorships that the IDF can intimidate into stopping terrorism.
Then again, they may not.
That is the nature of the Middle East. It may seem intolerable, but Middle Easterners have lived (and died) like that for thousands of years, and they won’t stop anytime soon.
Admittedly, though, I’m bored with Israel vs. Palestine.
What are some of my favorite Taki’s columns?
Many of my best are published in my collection Noticing.
But, among those that aren’t, I’d recommend my 2012
column “Goodbye, Mr. Chimps.” Since then, I’ve been campaigning against using chimpanzees and children in movies and TV:
Although future behavioral taboos are notoriously hard to predict, it’s clear that within this decade America will end the use of chimpanzees in entertainment. I’ll go much further out on a limb and also predict that within a generation, and for much the same reasons, we will seriously consider banning child stars….
As it becomes clear that having men play monkeys is better for all concerned, a similar question will suggest itself: Is it humane to use human children as professional entertainers?
“What are some of my favorite Taki’s columns?”The digital technology enabling adults to portray kid characters is rapidly arriving. Should audiences encourage that switch?
We should definitely consider it. We can all think of child stars who grew up to be sane adults, but the casualty list is long and lurid. A recent study found that 58 percent of retired laboratory chimpanzees show symptoms of depression. What would a study of former child actors find? A consuming hunger to get back into the spotlight and a permanent aversion to a normal job?
One obvious problem is sexual exploitation of ambitious minors.
From my 2012 review of psychologist Jonathan Haidt’s influential book The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion:
What Haidt never quite gets across is that conservatives typically define their groups concentrically, moving from their families outward to their communities, classes, religions, nations, and so forth. If Mars attacked, conservatives would be reflexively Earthist. As Ronald Reagan pointed out to the UN in 1987, “I occasionally think how quickly our differences worldwide would vanish if we were facing an alien threat from outside this world.” (Libertarians would wait to see if the Martian invaders were free marketeers.)
In contrast, modern liberals’ defining trait is making a public spectacle of how their loyalties leapfrog over some unworthy folks relatively close to them in favor of other people they barely know (or in the case of profoundly liberal sci-fi movies such as ‘Avatar,’ other 10-foot-tall blue space creatures they barely know).
As a down-to-Earth example, to root for Manchester United’s soccer team is conservative…if you are a Mancunian. If you live in Portland, Oregon, it’s liberal.
This urge toward leapfrogging loyalties has less to do with sympathy for the poor underdog (white liberals’ traditional favorites, such as soccer and the federal government, are hardly underdogs) as it is a desire to get one up in status on people they know and don’t like.
In 2013, the year before the Rotherham report broke open the scandal of Pakistani rape gangs, I wrote “The Real Threat to British Elites”:
British leaders repeatedly swept the Muslim statutory gang-rapist phenomenon under the rug for over a decade. Way back in 2001, Nick Griffin of the British National Party began to point out that Pakistani pimps in Britain were targeting white girls under 16.
It’s most useful to think of this practice not so much as pedophilia—a bizarre fetish—but as economically rational whoremastering. Pakistani pimps focus on recruiting very young postpubescent English girls because they are so naive.
As we’ve seen in recent years, Muslim male-chauvinist cultures that treat females like dirt tend to nurture males who have a knack for living off women’s earnings….
In contrast, women-respecting Swedes seldom make talented pimps.
In the many Pakistani grooming cases in England, Ali G types would convince silly little white girls that they were their boyfriends, provide them with drugs, then browbeat them into proving their love by having sex at a party with all the pimps’ Uncle Jamaals.
The genius of the system is that the pimps don’t pay the girls, not even their room and board. After each party, they dump them back at their moms’ council flats.
Is this rape?
Of course. These girls are adolescents, far too young to give consent to being gang-banged.
Is it racial?
Feminist Susan Brownmiller’s 1975 bestseller ‘Against Our Will’ famously argued that “rape is a crime not of lust, but power.” That’s obviously missing much of the point. And yet conquest and rape seem to go together.
It might seem insane that this kind of Bronze Age predatory pattern would work so well in a sophisticated country such as England, but that’s exactly why it worked: Noticing patterns is now derided as “stereotyping.”…
And if the English government didn’t want Pakistanis to act Pakistani, they wouldn’t let them into England, now would they?
You have to admit the defendants have a point.
From my 2014 column “White Food” explaining why gentile Americans in the first two-thirds of the 20th century consumed so many white-colored foods:
Comparable ethnic connotations of boring blandness have been attached to a variety of white foods such as vanilla ice cream, milk, and mashed potatoes. Mel Brooks claimed that a typical Midwesterner “drives a white Ford station wagon, eats white bread, vanilla milkshakes, and mayonnaise.”…
Then again, the Borscht Belt jokesters did have a point: Average American whites in the middle of the 20th century sure did consume a lot of literally white stuff.
How come?
I finally started to understand when my wife mentioned that sometime before WWII her grandfather had worked inside a Chicago ice-cream factory. He came home and told his children, “After what I saw today, never eat any flavor of ice cream other than vanilla.”
From 2014:
The Rise and Fall of Statistics
…In contrast, we almost certainly would have had airplanes without much progress in statistics, just as we had airplanes before we had computers. My father worked as a mid-level engineer at Lockheed from the 1930s into the 1980s, using mostly his slide rule until he broke down and bought an electric calculator around 1973.
A couple of years later, while he was helping me with my math homework, I remarked that his expertise in calculus must come from using it all the time on the job. No, he said, he just remembered it from school; surprisingly few fellows at Lockheed used calculus. If they really needed to know the area under a curve, they would cut out little rectangles of graph paper with scissors. The only time he’d used calculus on the job was when he was first working at the flying car company.
These anecdotes of slide rules and scissors point out that there are more ways than one to skin a cat. In particular, much of the modern technological world was hashed out before modern statistical concepts existed even on the blackboard.
How did people manage to get by before modern statistics? First, as old catcher Yogi Berra likes to say, “You can observe a lot just by watching.” Yogi didn’t need a lab coat and a clipboard to get a sense of what pitch Bob Feller tended to throw when the count was 2–2. (Fastball.)
For instance, soccer statistics have radically improved over the last few years. From these vast compilations of numbers we can now finally observe that the two best soccer players are…Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo, the two players who were already recognized as the best by hundreds of millions of people watching them on TV.
But the other way people got by is that they didn’t: Things used to crash and kill you more often.
Lockheed’s F-104 fighter jet, which flew in March 1954, less than a year after Lockheed’s first IBM computer was installed, was designed and built with few of what we in the information age would consider the essentials. Yet, it still went 1,400 mph, which is a lot faster than you or I are ever likely to go in the 21st century now that the Concorde is gone.
It was a heroic era of technology, but not a safe one. The F-104 crashed so frequently that the German press called it “the Widowmaker” and “the Flying Coffin.” After a while, the top men at Lockheed lost interest in their “missile with a man in it” and handed it off to less creative workers like my father to sweat out ways to keep the German pilots from dying so much….
To this day, statistical reasoning still strikes many as being in dubious taste. Larry Summers was let go as president of Harvard after pointing out that males tend to have larger variances in IQ than females. Similarly, Jason Richwine lost his job last year after it was revealed that his Harvard doctoral dissertation, ‘IQ and Immigration Policy,’ was a sophisticated statistical analysis of matters of grave national import.
From 2014:
I’m sometimes accused of having created a vast secret corpus of sinister ideas that I keep carefully hidden away from the millions of words I’ve published.
I’ve always wondered: When exactly would I have had the time to do this? And do I really seem like the kind of writer who would cunningly keep his best ideas unexpressed, especially when there is a big “Publish” button staring me in the face and all I have to do is click on it?
On the other hand, what about the giants of the past who had the brainpower to pull off something as complicated as this? The political scholar Leo Strauss (1899–1973) and many of his neoconservative acolytes have long argued that greats such as Plato and Aristotle had both inoffensive doctrines for the public and “esoteric” teachings for their inner circles….
We haven’t heard much about Straussianism lately due to the unfortunate series of events in Iraq that befell the best-laid plans of the sages. But that doesn’t mean that Strauss was necessarily wrong about the ancients. And that has interesting implications for how we should read current works.
As the approaching 20th anniversary of the publication of ‘The Bell Curve’ reminds us, the best minds of our age have reasons for being less than wholly frank.
For example, about a year ago, a distinguished psychologist approached me with his plan for a scientific meeting of researchers and journalists on IQ, heredity, and race in his home city, one of the great capitals of the Western world. I cautioned him that the last such meeting there had been broken up by leftist thugs with the apparent approval of the police. He decided to make all the arrangements in secret, and was thus able to carry off his plan without his colleagues being beaten for their heresies.
From 2015:
The important new book ‘Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America,’ by ‘Los Angeles Times’ homicide reporter Jill Leovy, is the hybrid of a true crime tale about the struggle of white LAPD detective John Skaggs to find the killer of the son of a black LAPD detective and a taboo-breaking scholarly analysis of America’s plague of black-on-black homicides.
At a moment when the conventional wisdom is coalescing around the idea that the big problem with the criminal justice system is white policemen being too mean to black criminals, Leovy drops a bombshell carefully justified by what she learned reporting from 2001 to 2012 on black crime in South Central Los Angeles. She argues the opposite: that white people should work harder to track down and lock up black murderers. Leovy admits:
This is not an easy argument to make in these times. Many critics today complain that the criminal justice system is heavy-handed and unfair to minorities. We hear a great deal about capital punishment, excessively punitive drug laws, supposed misuse of eyewitness evidence, troublingly high rates of black male incarceration, and so forth. So to assert that black Americans suffer from too little application of the law, not too much, seems at odds with common perception.
But if “black lives matter,” it’s time to get serious and admit that the main killers of blacks are, overwhelmingly, other blacks.
From 2015:
We now know that [Jose] Canseco went on over the next half decade to be, as a high school friend who became a baseball agent told me more than 20 years ago, “the Typhoid Mary of steroids,” helping launch the Steroids Era of roughly 1993. Mass steroid use appears to have spread from the proto-‘Moneyball’ Oakland A’s, who went to the World Series in 1988–90, to the Texas Rangers, who happened to be co-owned by George W. Bush….
The explosion of psychedelic drugs in the 1960s was part of the delayed hedonistic reaction to the stringent conditions of the Depression and WWII era. But their use tended to be volubly rationalized at the time on revolutionary or utopian principles.
In contrast, the rise of steroids was more furtive, since people who use performance enhancers can’t persuasively claim that they want to overthrow the social order when they clearly just want to be able to work harder at getting ahead within it.
Many steroid-using celebrities deny it. The cleverest, Arnold Schwarzenegger, confessed to using steroids to Barbara Walters way back in 1974, but successfully managed to downplay it as a minor increment to his career. To this day, actors are particularly loath to admit they use anything to change body shapes from role to role: Charlie Sheen is one of the rare stars to admit it, and he claims it was only to add some mph to his fastball in 1989’s ‘Major League.’ (His father, Martin Sheen, recently argued that Charlie’s 2011 meltdown was more due to steroids than cocaine.)…
The career of Tom Wolfe illustrates this odd dichotomy. Wolfe’s 1968 nonfiction bestseller about novelist Ken Kesey’s promotion of LSD, ‘The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test,’ was instantly a cultural touchstone, discussed everywhere in literary journals. Wolfe himself noted that this was an easy book to report because so many of the friends of Kesey whom Wolfe interviewed were themselves outstanding writers, such as Larry McMurtry (‘Lonesome Dove’), who in 2011 married Kesey’s widow.
Wolfe, a Southern conservative by inclination, soon lost interest in LSD. His writing from 1973 onward is instead studded with references to weight lifting and muscles. But nobody ever seemed to notice what Wolfe was driving at.
Finally, in 2012, in a review in ‘The New Yorker’ entitled “Muscle-Bound,” literary critic James Wood angrily denounced Wolfe’s novel about a weight-lifting Miami Cuban cop, ‘Back to Blood,’ on the grounds that real people aren’t that interested in how they look. (Perhaps Wood could consult with Miami’s own Jose Canseco?) To this critic, literature and muscles do not mix.
But while there’s no fashionable theory to explain it, people seem to like having more masculine-looking heroes than in the past….
From 2016:
The much-discussed death of Prince last week brings up an old question: Why do pop stars tend to be rather fey?
Granted, using Prince as an example of any statistical pattern is a dubious enterprise. Prince went through life as a sample size of one….
There’s a modest negative correlation between how much a star needs applause and his masculinity level. Broadway stars are the surest of getting their fix of applause nightly and are likely the gayest on average. Rock stars get tremendous ovations, but first they need to deliver in the loneliness of the studio. Movie stars must be able to perform in isolation, as in Gay Talese’s story about what a movie star told her retired-ballplayer husband after a USO tour introduced her to the pleasures of performing in front of an audience:
“Joe,” said Marilyn Monroe, just back from Korea, “You never heard such cheering.”
“Yes I have,” Joe DiMaggio answered.
Team-sport athletes get their cheers, but they also play half their games on the road in front of hostile audiences, where they must be motivated by the masculine urge to ruin a crowd’s evening.
All this is not to say that rock stars tend to be particularly gay.
The acid test of any profession’s tendency toward male homosexuality was its AIDS death toll during the ’80s and early ’90s. For example, ballet lost Nureyev, Joffrey, and Ailey. Fashion icons Halston and Perry Ellis died of AIDS.
In contrast, rock lost one big star, Freddie Mercury of Queen. But that Freddie was gay didn’t really come as much of a surprise.
Perhaps more striking in retrospect was how many eyeliner-wearing stars of the glam-rock ’70s made it at least close to their biblical three score and ten. David Bowie and Mick Jagger married fashion models. When AIDS came along, Lou Reed stopped calling himself a heroin-addicted homosexual and got straight and got married.
There are modest masculinity patterns among instrumentalists. Guitarists may tend to be more masculine than keyboardists (for example, Elton John and Little Richard on the gay side; but then the super showmen Jerry Lee Lewis and Keith Emerson were straight). When Jesse Jackson was running for president in the 1980s, he was asked how he could claim to be heading a “Rainbow Coalition” open to homosexuals when he spent much of his time campaigning in black churches. He answered that lots of black churches have gay organists.
During the peak decade for rock stars, the ’70s, a particular facial structure emerged as the Platonic ideal for rock stars: a vaguely Asian look with high cheekbones and a narrow jaw. Steven Tyler of Aerosmith is perhaps the canonical example.
From 2017:
…We may have gotten a hint of an answer this week whether blue-state America’s worsening climate of science denialism will backfire on the giant tech quasi-monopolies when Google CEO Sundar Pichai publicly fired a software engineer for writing a carefully argued memo, “Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber.”
The brilliant young coder is James Damore, a former doctoral student in systems biology at Harvard….
Ironically, Damore was fired for defending Google against the libel that only rampant sexism can explain why the second-richest company in the world doesn’t employ 50 percent women in technical jobs (much as Larry Summers was forced out as president of Harvard a decade ago in sizable measure for defending Harvard from similar charges).
In response, the Google CEO argued, in effect, that Google’s female employees, being highly emotional and not very logical women, can’t be expected to not take personally abstract masculine concepts such as “averages.”
It’s not punching down for the Indian-born CEO of Google (who was paid $200 million last year) to fire a twentysomething coder, it’s punching up because the victim’s a white male, just as it wasn’t punching down for Apple CEO Tim Cook to attack an Indiana pizza maker because Tim is gay. (In today’s zeitgeist, the billionaire always wins.)
Granted, all of this sounds ridiculous, which it is. If Google’s CEO actually believed that his firm was leaving money on the table by not employing enough women (or black or Hispanic) engineers due to sexism, it would be his fiduciary duty to hire far more.
But of course he has zero intention of doing much of that.
Why can’t Google, with all its money, find as many women as men?
For one reason, because coding doesn’t much appeal to women. My wife, for instance, used to be a computer programmer. She was good at it, but it’s a boring job if you find people more interesting than things. Further, American programmers used to be rather well paid, but then the H-1B visa program allowed employers to substitute cheaper Asian men for American women.
Google became the second-most valuable company in the world (following only Apple, an especially white-male-led company) largely on the strength of its hardworking white and Asian male workforce. For Google to blow up $655 billion in market capitalization by taking seriously the current year’s Narrative about how diversity is our strength would be insane.
On the other hand, $655 billion inevitably attracts parasites….
From 2021’s “Raising the Bard”:
How did Shakespeare use the word “race”?
During the current Great Awokening, the Enlightenment of the late 17th and 18th centuries has increasingly come under attack, both on general principles (Who needs reason when you have Lived Experience?) and for taking a scientific interest in race.
To today’s sensitive ears, Linnaeus’ Enlightenment project of categorizing plants and animals into species and men into races sounds pseudoscientific, anti-social-constructionist, and downright transphobic in its emphasis on distinctions.
Moreover, the French Enlightenment’s emphasis on lucid prose as an aid to clear thought is increasingly annoying to the Woke.
So, it’s worth looking at how the English language’s best-known pre-Enlightenment writer, William Shakespeare (1564–1616), used the word “race” in his plays and sonnets.
While always highly popular, his ascent to the pinnacle of prestige dates to the fading of the Enlightenment into the Romantic era of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Shakespeare was very much not a French philosophe. He represented instead the apogee of the allusive English poetic tradition in which unexpected connections and metaphorical linkages are more prized than clarity.
Not surprisingly, then, the meaning of the word “race” keeps shifting in Shakespeare so that you can never pin him down to a single meaning. Yet, each shade of definition seems weirdly related to each other variant….
Thus, Shakespeare’s understanding of the word “race” was messy but also thought-provoking….
There have been two general ways to think about race. The first is the top-down Linnaean scientific approach in which people of unknown ancestral heritage are grouped together according to physical clues that they are related.
The other way is bottom-up: Your parents told you who your ancestors were.
Shakespeare lived in a time when the latter was more natural than the former….
Central to Shakespeare’s various uses of race are horses, their racing and their breeding, which tended to blur in the English mind….
This led to an equine double meaning: A race is what horses run, and race describes breeds and families and lineages and pedigrees, whether horsey or human. It’s sort of a pun on the part of Shakespeare (and the English language), but he’s also calling attention to the similarity between horse breeding and human breeding, especially royal or noble lines….
A long effort to import better Arabian and Turkish sires, such as the Byerley Turk, and to carefully breed them eventually led to the foundation of the world-conquering thoroughbred breed in the 18th century. By Victorian times, horse racing was seen around the world as quintessentially English. In countries like Argentina, the Jockey Club was the redoubt of the Anglophile faction. From the 18th-century English Agricultural Revolution’s obsession with artificial selection of livestock emerged the key British scientific breakthrough of the 19th century: Darwin’s theory of natural selection.
Notoriously, I’m bad at coming up with conclusions for my columns.
So, I’ll leave off with Shakespeare.
