On the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, the guns fell silent, and the world exhaled. It wasn’t peace so much as exhaustion. Twenty million dead, an old order blown to pieces, and a new one sketching itself in bureaucratic ink. In London and Paris, they danced. In Vienna and Berlin, they starved. Amid the mud of Flanders, a young Canadian, Pvt. George Price, was shot through the chest two minutes before the Armistice took effect—the last Allied soldier to die. An American, Pvt. Henry Gunther of Baltimore, fell a minute earlier—the last American to be killed in the war—charging a German machine gun whose crew were shouting at him to stop. Both men died within sight of peace, punctuation marks at the end of a sentence written in blood.
Remembrance Day—in the Commonwealth, or Veterans Day to Americans—was born of that silence. Versailles promised “never again” but guaranteed another bloodletting two decades later—a blood pact, not a peace. At Versailles, Woodrow Wilson’s idealism and French vengeance combined to redraw the world. The League of Nations was born, Germany was bound in economic chains, and the British Mandate system quietly laid the first stones on the road to Israel. What fell that November morning wasn’t only the German Empire but the entire architecture of Christendom: Austria-Hungary dissolved, the Tsar and his family executed in a cellar, and the ancient Christian communities of Anatolia driven out or destroyed. In their place rose the modern managerial state—rational, technocratic, and godless. It was not the rebirth of freedom but the enthronement of systems. For Americans, it marked the hinge between republic and empire. For Europe, civilizational suicide. And for Canada, Australia, and the rest of the Commonwealth, the baptism of nations in other men’s mud.
That moment is still what Remembrance Day commemorates, though we now speak of it as if it were a tragic inevitability—a kind of moral weather event. The bugles sound, the wreaths are laid, and the cameras capture it all in reverent high definition. Yet beneath the choreography lingers an unease that the old bargain has curdled. It surfaced this week in the person of Alec Penstone, a 100-year-old Royal Navy veteran of the Second World War, who appeared on Good Morning Britain for what the producers assumed would be a pleasant interlude of patriotic nostalgia. Instead, Penstone, with the calm of a man who has outlived diplomacy, detonated the segment. Asked what Remembrance Sunday meant to him, he looked straight into the camera and said: “My message is, I can see in my mind’s eye those rows and rows of white stones, and all the hundreds of my friends who gave their lives—for what? The country of today? No, I’m sorry—but the sacrifice wasn’t worth the result of what it is now.”
Cue the sound of studio jaws hitting the floor. Presenter Adil Ray pressed him to explain, as if he’d uttered heresy on live television. Penstone, gentle but unbending, said what many veterans think but seldom voice: that the “freedom” they fought for has been replaced by something cold, bureaucratic, and unfree in all but name. Cohost Kate Garraway hurried to console him, insisting that “all the generations since” were grateful, but the pathos of the moment was that they both knew it wasn’t true. Gratitude has become performance art: red poppies pinned beside rainbow badges. The irony, unspoken but glaring, was that Penstone’s dissent came under the gaze of the same Adil Ray who, only days earlier, had been summoned before ITV bosses over social media posts praising the new Muslim mayor of New York, Zohran Mamdani. In that post, Ray mused that Mamdani “might implement Sharia law,” before assuring readers that “the heart of Sharia is social justice, fairness, charity and cohesion.” It was a remarkable gloss from a man appalled by a veteran’s loss of faith in modern Britain—proof, perhaps, that one need not fight for a civilization to lecture those who did.
The poppy itself came from “In Flanders Fields,” written in 1915 by the Canadian officer John McCrae after watching a friend die at Ypres. Its simplicity hides its desolation: “In Flanders fields the poppies blow/Between the crosses, row on row…” The flower grew where the shells had churned the soil, nature’s requiem, crimson with the blood of boys who’d barely learned to shave. McCrae’s closing exhortation, to “take up our quarrel with the foe” and “hold the torch high,” became a kind of secular creed for a generation that mistook endurance for redemption. The torch was duly passed to another generation, and another, until at last it began to burn holes in the very fabric of Western civilization. These days, few remember who the foe was. Fewer still can say what the torch now illuminates. We hold it high mostly out of habit, a ritual flame guttering in the wind of a faithless age.
Drive through the towns of Ontario and you’ll see banners hanging from lampposts: sepia portraits of young men—19, 20, 21—who went overseas and never came back. Their names are mostly Anglo-Saxon, Scottish, or Irish, sons of a civilization once confident. They believed they were fighting for their homes, their faith, their country. Now their faces look down on a land that scarcely resembles any of those things. In many towns, the war memorial—once the solemn centerpiece—is now ringed with fast-food litter and used as a bench by newcomers who have no idea what the carved names mean. The moral of the story, if there is one, is simple enough: Die for your country, and in return you get your name on a fancy rock, to be forgotten or defaced by the people your rulers chose to replace you with. Crude, perhaps, but as Alec Penstone reminded us, it is no longer the cynics who feel that way.
For Americans, November 11 was once Armistice Day, a commemoration of the end of “the war to end all wars.” It was later rebranded Veterans Day, a shift as telling as any in the 20th century. What began as a meditation on loss became a celebration of service. The original message was “never again”; the new one is “thank you for your service.” The republic of citizen-soldiers gave way to an empire that manufactures them. In Britain and Canada, the ceremonies endure, and politicians make solemn speeches about “sacrifice for democracy,” even as they censor dissent, jail protesters, and hand governance to unelected panels. Naturally, our betters see no contradiction.
The tragedy of Remembrance Day is that it memorializes a world that no longer exists. The men who fell in 1914 believed in things—God, nation, hierarchy, home—that their grandchildren were taught to regard as suspect, even dangerous. The pageantry remains, but the piety has fled.
In the end, Alec Penstone’s remark was less an act of bitterness than one of recognition. He looked at the country his generation bled for and saw a homeland culturally disarmed and demographically conquered—a transformation imposed from above, the kind usually reserved for defeated nations. And he dared to ask the question the rest of us only whisper in our heads: Was it worth it? Remembrance Day is meant to answer that question with solemn conviction. Increasingly, it cannot. Because to answer honestly would be to admit that something profound has been lost—not only the men, but the meaning.
At 11 a.m. we will fall silent again as the bugles sound, the politicians bow, the schoolchildren recite “In Flanders Fields.” And in that silence, if you listen closely, you may hear the faintest murmur of the old world—the one that died believing it had saved the future. The guns have been silent for a century now. The question is whether we are.
Have you ever been sexually propositioned by a Rolling Stone via the internet? If not, then these days, you’re one of the very few. A 60-year-old madwoman in Sweden has been charged with abusing her position as a civil servant to con her employers out of 18,312,000 Swedish kroner (about $1.8m), transferring the tidy sum out of her local council’s accounts in 179 separate installments between 2019 and 2023. Where was she transferring the money to? To Mick Jagger, that’s where.
Mick—who these days tends to divide his time largely between various non-white Third World countries like Ghana and Nigeria for some unspecified reason—had contacted the elderly Swede via social media and told her he was deeply in love with her. Jagger promised to marry her, but there was a problem: When his current wife found out about their long-distance affair, she immediately locked all the singer’s bank accounts. To access them, he needed to pay his bank a fee, but this was impossible, as all his African accounts were frozen: a financial catch-22. Could the Swedish woman help? She certainly could. First she sold her summer house, then donated Jagger the proceeds. Then, this not being enough, she started defrauding her council.
Amazingly, she is not the only individual to have been tricked online by someone most unlike a Rolling Stone. In Japan, a lady in her 50s was disingenuously informed by another professional Mick-taker that she was Jagger’s supposed manager, Yvonne Meyer. The pseudonymous fraudster informed the dupe that Mick was a financial genius with the magical ability to multiply money simply by having it transferred into his own personal bank account. If she sent Mick $700, he would send her $4,000 back. Alternatively, if she wired him $290,000, he promised to send her $1.1m back. She chose the cheaper option, giving “Mick” about $780—before then receiving absolutely nothing back in return, not even a signed copy of Exile on Main Street.
If you think these two were gullible, consider another 65-year-old Japanese lonely heart who in 2022 was messaged by a foreign “astronaut” who told her he was stuck on the International Space Station, as he could not afford the cost of a “rocket ticket” back home to Earth. He said he was in love with her and that, if she would only pay for his return, he would make sure his spaceship landed in Japan before marrying her as a special reward. She sent him $30,000.
Horns of Africa
These are extreme examples, but there is a much wider ongoing problem of aged white Western women (let’s just agree to call the Japs honorary whites here—geisha girls look that way, anyhow) sending off cash to twentysomething foreign lotharios, generally thrusting young black men from Africa of surprisingly gerontophilic bent. Robert Mugabe made millions by cold-calling the residents of U.K. retirement homes and offering to mount them in their mobility scooters for a fiver, while in 1975 Idi Amin sent Queen Elizabeth II a telegram advising her that “Dear Liz, if you want to know a real man, come to Kampala!” (This latter example isn’t even a joke, he really did.)
African love-scammers fraudulently offering sex, hugs, and marriage to desperate white women is now a major industry. In 2022, it was estimated to be worth some $1b annually from U.S. victims alone; when it comes to the full global cost, you can surely triple the sum, which is actually more than the annual GDP of several entire African economies like those of Eritrea, Lesotho, and Wakanda.
It’s obvious what the African lover boys get out of it: money, in proper, First World currencies, not just seashells, used playing cards, and colored beads. What the scammed females themselves get out of it is less certain. It must be blatantly obvious they are being scammed, especially now that the scam is so well-known. So, unless they genuinely have Alzheimer’s, why do they go on doing it?
Advertising Their Own Virtue
As anybody with a television set and some eyes cannot possibly have failed to notice, there are a wildly disproportionate number of mixed-race families and lovers portrayed on screen nowadays, particularly in the adverts. I once saw one in which a black man and a white woman (it’s normally that way around) somehow managed to possess a small Chinese daughter. Another mix-up in the globalist maternity ward.
It appears our Unseen Masters have decided miscegenation is the desired future for the entire human race, as illustrated by a new TV advertisement from Denmark. Promoting a TV documentary series called Evolution, it featured footage of an average white Danish couple making out on a sofa. Then a food-brandishing latter-day avatar of Count Coudenhove-Kalergi popped up on screen instructing the woman to abandon her pale, stale, current partner and suck on some proffered brown chocolate salty balls instead, as the old South Park song once had it.
Posing as a scientist, the intruder advised that “the history of war in Denmark” had introduced foreign DNA into the national gene pool (he tactfully doesn’t mention that this will have disproportionately occurred via the brutal rape of native Danish women by enemy soldiers). This, he said, will have “protected from disease” all the rape-babies thereby born, before strongly advising the pair to dump each other and seek out alternative, non-white partners possessed of more “exotic” and germ-killing genetics, from among all those nice new Ethiopians and Eritreans their government was kindly shipping in for them to make use of.
Compare this with the recent outrage about American Eagle’s “Sydney Sweeney Has Great Genes/Jeans!” adverts supposedly promoting Nazi-era blonde and blued Aryan eugenics programs, and you get some idea of the severe racial double standards at play here.
Sexual Healing
Are white women being subliminally groomed into falling prey to the electronic overtures of young black men from Lagos and Nairobi here? Maybe spreading your legs for a poor little African boy, real or otherwise, and telling your friends all about it is now just the most visible way for a proudly liberal white woman to publicly demonstrate she is on the right side of history?
There is even now a deranged concept of “sexual reparations” out there, in which white ladies are politely encouraged to put out for the black descendants of slaves and the colonially oppressed, thereby to make up for the ills of their forefathers, here and now in the present day.
A good example comes in the 2021 erotic romance novel Sexual Reparations: White Guilt Book 1, devised in the aftermath of George Floyd mania. Penned by someone purporting to be called “Kiki Rider” (a probable pseudonym of Robin DiAngelo), the blurb of the self-published filth by “the freshest new author to hit the erotic and fantasy romance scene” goes like this:
‘Sexual Reparations’ explores the deep-seated guilt of Emily and Dan, a white suburban couple who have completely bought into the ideology that white people are responsible for the sufferings of others and owe some form of restitution. Things begin with them doing their part in being vocal and physically participating in rallies, when they eventually encounter some young black men who share the same ideology. Except they’re not waiting for political actions and demand their payment now. Payment being the complete sexual submission of Emily and the emasculation of Dan. Through their physical presence, shaming and playing on her guilt, they separate her from Dan and take what they want. After being used, Emily is torn between extreme arousal, wanting more, and shame, plus not knowing what her partner Dan will say once she returns to him. One thing is for sure, nothing will ever be the same.
It certainly won’t: Emily and Dan will now have AIDS.
Reparation Nation
The above book could almost be taken as a satire of the extreme and illogical lengths some dim-witted white libtards are willing to go to in order to make up for historical racial “sins” against persons of other skin colors they themselves have not even committed. A follow-up volume may even go so far as to finally explain why Dawn French really married Lenny Henry. But it isn’t a satire, so far as I can tell, it is real—and its message has been absorbed by persons on the other side of the computer screen over in Africa, too.
A recent academic paper, “Fraud as Legitimate Retribution for Colonial Injustice: Neutralization Techniques in Interviews With Police and Online Romance Fraud Offenders,” by a joint team of British and African academics, provides interesting insights into the beliefs of African love-scammers, mainly a class of shameless Ghanaian con men known as “Sakawa Boys.”
The Sakawa Boys know full well that fraud and theft are wrong, but come from the more poverty-stricken element of Ghanaian society (i.e., the majority of it), so feel the need to engage in something the academics call “neutralization techniques”—that is to say, painting their objectively criminal actions as in fact being highly noble acts of ethical payback against those who have previously wronged them.
Their antics recast anew as belated revenge for colonial-era exploitation against their dead countrymen during Ghana’s pre-1957 period as an outpost of the British Empire, Sakawa Boys can soothe their consciences about bankrupting someone’s senile old granny by pretending they are actually heroically exorcising the unquiet ghost of Cecil Rhodes—even though more than half their victims are not from Britain, but America, which never colonized a single African nation at all, ever.
Reasoning that if their dupes are left penniless, generous Western welfare safety nets will pick up the pieces anyway, Sakawa Boys pretend to think their actions constitute the ultimate victimless crime. Some equally anticolonial Ghanaian policemen agree and let them go on getting away with it, to teach whitey a lesson. The white British stole their gold 100 years ago, they say, so now they are just stealing it all back again (but from completely different people…). Some Sakawa Boys interviewed by the academics specifically said, “This business [not “crime,” do note] is our version of reparations.”
Given the rate of black-on-white offenses in the field, I’m still waiting for a black rapist of a white woman over here in America or Britain to advance a small variant of this very same argument as a mitigating plea factor in court. And then to immediately walk away free, cleared of all charges.
In the meantime, stay vigilant and remain on the lookout for dangerous online scams yourself, involving black Africans, stranded astronauts, Rolling Stones, or otherwise. In particular, if you get an email message purporting to be from Bill Wyman, offering to marry your 13-year-old daughter for a one-off cash payment of $1m, don’t answer it: It’s real!
The Week’s Most Rewriting the Past, Mamdani Votes Cast, and Holocaust Truth at Last Headlines
ASTRONOMICALLY STUPID
Bootylicious celebrity Kim Kardashian has an ass so big, she thinks it makes her an expert on the moon. Amateur(ish) historian Kim came out this week as believing the Apollo moon landings were falsely staged by both Buzz Aldrin and “the other one” (Neil Armstrong), on the grounds that “There’s no gravity on the moon.” There’s no gravity in her statements, either.
Kim has pronounced the moon landings completely fake on the following key criteria: impossible lunar winds blowing the planted American flag of the astronauts, inconsistencies in the footprints the Apollo crew left behind, and the suspicious absence of stars in photographs. In response, the 95-year-old Buzz Aldrin has pronounced Kim herself completely fake on the following key criteria too: her anus, breasts, lips, nose, and cheeks.
It has since emerged that Kim also refuses to believe the moon has periods. But, strangely, she happily pretends to believe her stepfather Caitlyn does.
DENIAL IS A RIVER IN AUSCHWITZ
What are Konspiracy Kim’s opinions on the reality or otherwise of the Holocaust? Having watched every last episode of Keeping Up With the Kaltenbrunners, she definitely thinks it is real, and has in the past spoken out against heretical Muslim denial of Turkey’s Armenian Genocide of old, given her own proud Armenian ancestry.
“Many historians believe that if Turkey had been held responsible for the Armenian Genocide, and reprimanded for what they did, the [Nazi] Holocaust may not have happened,” she wrote in 2016. To which her then husband Kanye West replied, “It didn’t happen.”
America’s most famous Negro white supremacist Kanye often used to mix with America’s most famous Mexican white supremacist Nick Fuentes, another Holocaust denier (or numerical downplayer, anyway), whose smash-hit interview with Tucker Carlson last week gained an amazing 17 million views on X; that’s approximately 10.5m more than the number of Jews Fuentes reckons actually died in the gas chambers.
Fuentes may not also think the moon landings were fake, but he more than makes up for it by refusing to acknowledge the existence of Jew-piter. And if you think that particular gratuitous Jew-related joke is forced and unfunny, you should try watching Fuentes’ livestream channel; it’s like seeing Jackie Mason being forced to perform for his life in Sobibor.
Young Nick’s main “revelation” in his interview with Carlson was that he turns out to have been a surprising fan of Josef Stalin. It must have been something about Uncle Joe’s Zapata mustache that made Fuentes recognize the man as a fellow Mexican.
THE MILLER’S TALE
Contemporary confusion about the true nature and extent of the Holocaust is disarmingly widespread. Trump-hating Hollywood legend Robert De Niro has just accused one of the key creators of the president’s current deportation drive, Stephen Miller, of being “the Goebbels of the Cabinet.” Asked if this meant he thought Miller was a Nazi, De Niro unhesitatingly replied, “Yes, he is, and he should be ashamed of himself.”
At this point, Miller issued a statement reminding Shitshow Bob that he was actually Jewish.
Miller then went on to state that, far from the cinematic classics of his youth, De Niro had lately degenerated down into merely “degrading himself on camera with one horrific film after another for my entire adult life.” Final proof Trump’s MAGA inner circle really has seen the Epstein Tapes? Or just a reference to a different Dirty Grandpa entirely?
NUMB-SKULL ACTIONS
Also deeply confused about the Holocaust was Maine Democrat Senate candidate Graham Platner, who professed complete ignorance that his favorite SS Tötenkopf skull tattoo was in any way related to Nazism, once its embarrassing existence was revealed prior to voting. In a literal cover-up effort, Platner has since had his apparent Schutzstaffel emblem inked over with what is described in reports as “a dog-like creature,” very likely a dog—probably a German shepherd called Blondi.
“I am not a secret Nazi,” Platner reassured worried electors, which is never a good start to any speech. According to former U.S. Marine Platner, plenty of American troops get edgy Nazi-linked tattoos like Tötenkopfs and SS double-lightning runes all the time, not because they are actually fascists, but because it makes them look big and hard with their shirts off: “I will be sure to inform all the black guys I know with [lightning] bolts that they’re Nazis now.” Kanye West already knows.
The strangest Holocaust-related faux pas of the week surely came from Pennsylvania, where one high school inexplicably decided to decorate a special Auschwitz-themed float for their annual fun Halloween street parade, complete with a replica of the infamous death-camp gates. Once again, prominent WWII historian Robert De Niro intervened to defend the school with his immense related expertise.
“Far from being in any way offensive, the association between Halloween and the Holocaust is long-standing and profound,” De Niro said. “In Bergen-Belsen, the inmates loved the holiday so much, they dressed up as living skeletons each and every day of the year, before knocking on the camp commandants’ doors, playfully begging for food.”
This entire segment was guest-written for you this week by Nick Fuentes. In Spanish.
THE FATHER OF LIES
Where does the current craze to falsely rewrite history from an obsessive fringe political perspective originate?
One answer may lie in New York, where Marxist Muslim Zohran Mamdani’s easy victory in this week’s mayoral race was partly attributed by him to his mad dad Mahmood Mamdani, whom Jihadi Junior acclaims as one of the greatest influences upon his own retarded adult outlook on life and economics. The last time a left-wing U.S. politician tried pushing us Dreams From My Father, we ended up with Obama. This time, we may get an even worse closet Islamist.
Among the radical Columbia University professor Mahmood’s many “history” books are Good Muslim, Bad Muslim, whose second half is far longer than its first and teaches that Islamist suicide bombers should not be “stigmatized”—otherwise they might go away and kill themselves or something.
Another work is Neither Settler Nor Native: The Making and Unmaking of Permanent Minorities, which argues the Nazis got their whole idea for eliminating the Jews from Eugenicist Uncle Sam in the first place, Hitler being greatly inspired by America’s “history of genocide, ethnic cleansing, official racism and concentration camps (known as Indian reservations).”
Still, as George Soros has reportedly been financing Mahmood’s scholarship (and, indirectly, his son’s election campaign), it seems the persecuted Jews got their own back on the wicked white Americans in the end—via the ominous proxy of their pet Muslims.
The book has been described as an “academic treatise on settler colonialism around the world.” Does that include the settler-colonialism of the Mamdanis themselves in New York?
PURE IDI-OCY
Mahmood’s latest and most comically revisionist book is Slow Poison: Idi Amin, Yoweri Musuveni, and the Making of the Ugandan State, which tries to repaint the notoriously bloodthirsty African despot Amin as a lovely man after all, on the sole apparent grounds that at least he wasn’t white like the country’s former British colonizers were.
Born in India, Mahmood was raised in Uganda, before being expelled by Amin in 1972, when the dictator woke up one morning and suddenly announced all the Patels had to scarper. Supposedly, this was because Amin had received a message from God to that effect in a dream: a bit like Martin Luther King, but not quite as racist.
Actually, Amin was lying. He really wanted the wogs out because he thought (not wholly inaccurately) that brown subcontinentals like Mahmood still controlled most of the nation’s postimperial industry and commerce, not the poor oppressed native blacks like himself, who had nary a corner shop nor a Microsoft Windows call center to their name. For this, Amin became known as “Black Hitler”—today that’s just Kanye West—but Mahmood argues this label was simply a bigoted “media-driven preconception” on behalf of racist Western journalists.
“Even as Amin ethnically cleansed Uganda of Asians and expropriated [their property, money, and businesses away] from them, he did everything in his power to spare Asian lives,” Mahmood wrote. Everything except threatening to kill them all if they and their kids didn’t get the fuck out within ninety days, of course—a warning Amin certainly never extended to all those fellow blacks whom he shot, bayoneted, beheaded, blew apart with dynamite, beat to a pulp with sledgehammers, fed to crocodiles, or ate himself for dinner.
Despite literally being kicked out of the country by Amin himself personally, Mahmood has managed in his book to divine who the true Paki-bashing neo-Nazi aggressors really were in Africa—the departed British, who had “no intention of taking responsibility for their colonial history” in terms of London facilitating the initial settlement of Indians in Uganda in the first place. No intention of taking any responsibility apart from spending millions on allowing 27,200 Ugandan Asian refugees to come and settle in Britain straightaway with barely any notice, that is. Including Mahmood Mamdani.
Due to his many bizarre antics, Idi Amin is often said to have been completely insane. This column disagrees. He deported Mahmood Mamdani, didn’t he?
ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK
Never mind taking any lessons from his father. When it comes to ethnic cleansing, has New York’s new mayor Zohran actually been taking lessons from the 1970s Black Hitler?
Immediately prior to his victory, around 765,000 New Yorkers, from a population of about 8.4m, said they would “definitely” flee the city if Zohran won and began to follow through on his wild and irresponsible promises to do things like nationalize the place’s grocery stores; Idi Amin was not the only one to try stealing all the Paki Shops, then.
Due to Zohran’s status as a loyal member of the Religion of Peace, combined with his seeming desire to “globalize the intifada,” Jews have been generally portrayed as the most likely to run away, so there goes the main tax base, and all the bagels.
Interestingly, though, 11 percent of the Big Apple’s Asian residents also said they were likely to exit. The combined Indian- and Pakistani-heritage population of New York City is about 3 percent, around 250,000 people; 11 percent of that is 27,500. Idi Amin himself expelled slightly fewer Ugandan Asians, at 27,200, directly to the United Kingdom, Mahmood Mamdani included.
Therefore, Zohran Mamdani is already officially worse than Idi Amin, and he was only elected on Wednesday.
PIZZA HUTU
Observing NYC’s looming ethnic auto-cleansing, some Republican politicians have proposed that, all things considered, rather than emptying out Jew York, it might be far easier to just deport Zohran Mamdani from the nation instead—it’s what Idi would have done.
But who would give him shelter? The U.K., of course, just like it once did to his ungrateful Commie father: They’ll let any old fool in there these days! In fact, the really hard part about being an illegal immigrant in Britain in 2025 is trying to get back out again.
Hadush Kebatu may sound like a special move from Street Fighter II: Turban Edition, but he is in fact a 38-year-old Ethiopian pervert imprisoned and then expelled from Albion’s fair shores after approaching a 14-year-old schoolgirl in the street, demanding a slice of her pizza, and offering to impregnate her with an agreeably brown baby.
Released from prison following the end of his sentence, officials were meant to put him on the next plane back to Pedo-Land but instead left Hadush standing around outside confused for ninety minutes. He asked where his deportation flight was, but jailers just told him to go away. So he did. And then he was reported to have “escaped” from custody.
Desperate to return home, Kebatu began wandering London, approaching random policemen and begging to be rearrested:
“Look here, police, I am wanted man, I am arrested, I will give you my hand, please help, where is police station?… I am not unknown…. I will give you my hand, please help me, where is the police station, take me, I am wanted. You know me, or my image, my name is Hadush Kebatu, nationality Ethiopia. Please, I was the mistake release from Chelmsford Prison. Please help me.”
But none of them did help him, the cops simply drove away. Once eventually apprehended, to ensure he didn’t create a fuss at the airport, immigration officials handed Hadush a £500 bribe—the average annual salary in Ethiopia being £502.45. That’s an excellent relative rate of pay for molesting a schoolgirl.
You’d think Kebatu would be grateful for this unparalleled taxpayer generosity, but no, still he wanted more: “I went to the U.K., I ate some pizza, I tried to rape a teenager, and they only gave me a year’s wages for it. Prince Andrew did the exact same thing, and he got a big castle.”
One day, when the revisionist Mahmood Mamdani-like historians of the West’s future come to compile the dismal chronicles of our own present dying civilization, as exemplified perfectly in farcical parables like that of Mr. Kebatu, what will they write?
Hard to say; it’ll all be in Urdu or in Arabic.
It was the best of times if you owned a Che Guevara T-shirt and believed the rent fairy would one day sprinkle socialism over SoHo. It was the worst of times if you paid taxes, owned property, or thought competence should still count for something. New York has elected Zohran Mamdani, a self-described democratic socialist and part-time poet, as mayor of the largest city in the United States. His victory speech wasn’t the usual civic bromide about unity and hard work; it was fiery, bordering on revolutionary, the sort of oration that makes you check whether the podium conceals a guillotine. The new mayor’s dislike for Donald Trump was on full display at his thunderous rally, where he all but challenged the president to a rhetorical fistfight: “Donald Trump, since I know you’re watching, I have four words for you: Turn the volume up.” Judging by Trump’s personality, he will. The man who put his name on half of Manhattan isn’t likely to take that kind of jab lying down. For him, this isn’t just politics. It’s personal—and the fight will not stay polite.
But beneath the fireworks and fighting words lies a harder truth. Cities, like civilizations, don’t change through speeches but through arithmetic. The math matters more than the manifesto. When enough people move in who think differently, the old city becomes the new one—and the politics follow as predictably as pigeons after a hot dog bun. New York, once the capitalist citadel of the world, has now installed a man who regards profit as a necessary evil and landlords as an enemy class.
At his victory party, Jennifer Welch, podcast host, cultural gadfly, and patron saint of performative progressivism, gushed to MSNBC’s Mehdi Hasan that “Americans have no culture except multiculturalism…. Crusty white people need to learn how to embrace it.” It was the voice of a certain kind of modern moralist: self-satisfied, media-savvy, and serenely convinced that erasing one’s heritage is the height of sophistication. Cultural self-erasure, it seems, is now a civic virtue.
If the story sounds familiar, that’s because London wrote the first draft. Sadiq Khan, now on his third term, governs a once-English city rebranded as “post-British.” The old working class has been priced out, the middle class taxed out, and the new arrivals courted as a permanent electoral base. Khan calls this inclusivity. Dickens would call it irony. In A Tale of Two Cities, the poor rose against the rich; in Khan’s London, and now Mamdani’s New York, the governing class poses as the oppressed while living off the spoils. And this is not an isolated case. It is the story of every major Western metropolis. Paris, Toronto, Berlin, San Francisco—each has discovered that you don’t need to persuade voters if you can import them. Immigration supplies the numbers; identity politics supply the loyalty. The result is a soft one-party state run on ethnic arithmetic. The old civic idea of a shared culture has been replaced by a coalition of resentments—each voting as a tribe while congratulating itself on being cosmopolitan.
Mamdani’s platform reads like a wish list from the faculty lounge: more public housing, more free services, more defiance of immigration law. Chicago’s mayor and Illinois’ governor would nod approvingly. He even proposes taxpayer funding to expand access to gender-affirming health care, as if the city that can’t fill potholes can somehow afford to bankroll hormone therapy. He vows to triple the number of “union-built, state-funded homes,” as though bureaucracy ever built anything except more bureaucracy. But it hardly matters. The applause isn’t for competence; it’s for creed. The electorate has changed. The taxpayers who fled to Florida, New Jersey, and Connecticut no longer count. The new voting blocs—poorer, younger, more immigrant, more dependent on subsidy—hear in Mamdani’s promises not a warning but a pledge.
The New York Times swooned that Mamdani and London’s Sadiq Khan “embody a liberal, Muslim modernity navigating diverse communities.” Translation: This is what you’re getting, and you’ll like it. It’s the polite media euphemism for demographic inevitability—as if the transformation of a city were an act of nature, like the tides or the weather, rather than a political project with arithmetic attached. Meanwhile, reports swirl that Soros-linked charities funneled $40 million into Mamdani’s campaign. Progressives, of course, only object to billionaire influence when it comes from the wrong billionaires. When their own oligarchs buy elections, it’s called “civil society.”
His victory marks what one might call the Brazilianization of America: gleaming towers above, chaos below, and a managerial elite congratulating itself on its compassion while commuting past the wreckage. The middle class that once anchored civic life has been hollowed out, replaced by two tribes—the permanently dependent and the permanently detached. One lives on the state; the other off it. In between stands the dwindling taxpayer, yoked to both.
New York didn’t collapse overnight. The rot set in years ago, moral before fiscal. When a society teaches its elites to feel guilty about their own civilization, it shouldn’t be surprised when they vote for its dismantling. Mamdani has never managed anything larger than a protest march, yet he now presides over a bureaucracy with a budget bigger than most nations. The result will be a fiscal catastrophe disguised as moral progress. Taxes will rise, investment will flee, crime will climb—and the faithful will insist that this only proves how deeply the old order was corrupt.
London has already lived this farce. When Khan dismissed knife crime and terrorism as “part and parcel of living in a great city,” he wasn’t joking. He was delivering the new civic creed: decline as diversity, chaos as compassion. New York, ever eager to imitate the worst of British ideas with an American accent, is next in line.
Mamdani didn’t persuade New Yorkers; he inherited them. The arithmetic did the work. The city that once minted financiers now manufactures grievances. The metropolis of Guys and Dolls has become a sociology department with subway access. And yet the moral vanity endures. The new progressivism congratulates itself on being cosmopolitan while remaining parochial, enlightened while policing heresy. It preaches diversity and punishes disagreement, forever mistaking conformity for compassion. And the moment anyone dares note that the electoral map now mirrors ethnic and religious lines, the air-raid siren of “racism” sounds to drown the arithmetic. Facts don’t care about feelings—but feelings have the votes.
Dickens’ guillotine solved nothing; it merely reset the hierarchy. Today’s revolutionaries prefer taxes to tumbrels and bureaucrats to sansculottes, but the outcome is the same: the productive punished, the parasitic empowered, and everyone else applauding their undoing. London learned this lesson first, mistaking erosion for enlightenment and calling it progress. New York, ever eager to import its cousin’s mistakes, now writes the American chapter of the same morality play.
Perhaps Mamdani will surprise us and discover that budgets don’t balance by sermon, and that you can’t subsidize your way to solvency. But I wouldn’t wager the rent. History suggests otherwise.
New York’s tragedy isn’t that a socialist won; it’s that no one else could. Andrew Cuomo, scion of the old machine, couldn’t even make it close. Curtis Sliwa, the last man still speaking the language of crime and consequence, might as well have been campaigning in Esperanto. Mamdani didn’t seize New York; he inherited it—a city too demographically altered and too ideologically exhausted to resist. He isn’t the cause of its decline but the consequence, the arithmetic end of cultural self-loathing and imported loyalty.
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” Dickens wrote it as contrast. In 2025, it reads like prophecy—and in this transatlantic tale of two cities, London and New York are merely verses of the same elegy.
Walking recently in a quiet quarter of Geneva—is there any other kind of quarter in Geneva?—I looked up and saw something strange. Everywhere in Geneva is expensive, and this was not the least expensive part of it. Draped from the window of a flat in a fin de siècle building, a flat that must have been worth millions, were three flags: two rainbow flags with the words “No War” inscribed on them, and one Palestinian flag.
I am no expert on Hamas’ attitude to homosexuality, and I am unsure as to what kind of freedom is espoused in the slogan “Palestine shall be free from the river to the sea,” except to say that it is unlikely to include free inquiry into the historical origins and intellectual foundations of Islam. What interests me here is the state of mind of people who drape such flags in such situations.
In his novel Bleak House, Charles Dickens satirized the tendency of certain middle-class persons to concern themselves more with distant problems that they were largely powerless to effect, rather than with the problems under their very noses, about which they could do something practical. Mrs. Jellyby concerns herself in Bleak House exclusively with the condition of the natives of Borrioboola-Gha, on the left bank of the Niger, while neglecting her own children. Dickens called this telescopic philanthropy.
There is also telescopic morality, which is the feeling that, by espousing some cause in the abstract, and advertising that one is doing so, one is actually being a virtuous person. It matters little whether the advertisement of one’s virtuous sentiments has any effect: Life for some people is perpetual psychotherapy or psychodrama, and by sloganeering one has discharged oneself, so to speak, of the onerous duty to be good.
No doubt there are still some enthusiasts for war who think that a large war would finally put some backbone into a younger generation rendered soft, spoiled, degenerate, and decadent by peace and prosperity. Perhaps there are also some who think of war as a test of chivalry—a little like the Battle of Fontenoy in 1745, at the beginning of which the British commander allegedly said, “Gentlemen of France, fire first,” to which the French commander allegedly replied, “Gentlemen, we never fire first.” (About 20,000 men died in the ensuing battle.)
But while some people argue for a particular war as being the lesser of two evils, few people believe in or argue for the benefit of war as such. I cannot recall ever having seen a flag waved, not in favor of a particular war, but for war, any old war, against any old enemy, so long as there is a war.
Even those in favor of a particular war often change their minds. At the outset of the War of Jenkins’ Ear, in 1739, Sir Robert Walpole, the first British prime minister, said of the popular enthusiasm for the declaration of war against Spain, “They now ring the bells, but they will soon wring their hands.” This has happened many times in history—the First World War being perhaps the most dramatic example—and no doubt it will happen again, since an increase in human wisdom is not to be expected in the near future.
I have developed a kind of mental allergy to slogans brandished as virtuous that do not say anything that anyone (apart from lunatics) would contradict or oppose. Sloganeering in general is the death of thought, and the only slogan I have ever really appreciated was that of a man with a sandwich board who used to walk up and down Oxford Street in London, warning the population against the seven deadly proteins. They were supposedly connected in some way with the seven deadly sins. The man was serene in the confidence of the value of his message, but I think that he must have long ago fallen prey to something other than the seven deadly proteins.
There are certain symbols to which I have a deep aversion also; for example, the dove of peace. At best it has been used by well-meaning but ineffectual Mrs. Jellyby types, but at worst by highly militaristic regimes such as the Soviet, that impoverished their populations by concentrating the wealth of the country on armaments.
Before going to Geneva, I caught a train in England that had a white ribbon—one of those horrible little ribbons that the morally complacent and self-satisfied wear on their lapels—which was supposed to indicate that the train company was opposed to violence against women. It is surely a long time since anyone recited and meant literally the old proverb “A woman, a dog, and a walnut tree, the more you beat them the better they be,” and I do not expect one day to see people wearing a ribbon of a hitherto-unused color promoting violence toward women. No doubt the train in question had carried quite a few wife-beaters in its time; quite rightly, for the purpose of a train is to transport people, not to prevent them from being violent to women.
Another train went by painted in rainbow colors, with a single word inscribed in capitals on it: PRIDE. Sexual proclivities are nothing to be proud of and may be nothing to be ashamed of, either, though some are appalling, like those of Jeffrey Dahmer, who liked to paddle in the intestines of his victims whom he killed for his sexual pleasure, or Szilveszter Matuska, who apparently derived sexual pleasure from blowing up trains (as it happened). I am not sure that diversity is always to be “celebrated.”
By the way, the very word “celebrate” has come, at least for me, to connote something dreadful: It means that we are enjoined, on pain of being publicly denounced as bigoted if not as outright fascist, to rejoice in something that we do not welcome in the least, and certainly do not want to celebrate, even if we do not abominate it.
You can hardly open a packet of anything these days without being informed of how good the product inside is for the environment. I am coming to hate anything that claims to have anything to do with the environment.
I have never felt that I would like to throw a grenade as much as on seeing “No War” draped from a window in Geneva.
Theodore Dalrymple’s latest book is On the Ivory Stages (Mirabeau Press).
I’ve spent the last 10 days in London, a city I love. History, architecture, museums, tea, the accent — it is perfection. But the Mother Country is slightly retarded on the meaning of the rule of law.
I appeared at an event on Monday evening hosted by The Spectator magazine to debate the question, “Is America Great Again?” Me: YES! Peter Hitchens: No. (As an aside, I won!) The “go-to” line of my debate opponents — that is, Hitchens and the audience — was, But what about the rule of law?
President Trump is blowing up Venezuelan boats. He’s deploying the National Guard to our cities. He’s allowing immigration officers to beat up, arrest, detain and deport illegal aliens. All this, they say, violates the rule of law, morality, decency and the very foundation of Anglo-Saxon order.
Which can only mean Londoners read The New York Times, and not ironically.
First, the poor “fishermen.” The president is the commander in chief of the military, charged with defending our country from foreign attack and not, for example, ensuring the peace in Mogadishu, Ukraine, the Middle East, the Balkans, etc. etc. etc. As noble as those goals may be, that’s not what Americans are paying taxes for, and it’s not the president’s job.
The poor fishermen are drug-runners. Drugs pouring into our country from narco-terrorist states and drug cartels kill about 100,000 Americans every year. That’s more than were killed in the entire Korean War and Vietnam War combined. For comparison, Islamic terrorists have killed fewer than 5,000 people on U.S. soil in the past 25 years.
We finally have a president deploying our military to save American lives, and Londoners seem to imagine that Trump has stomped all over the rule of law. We wouldn’t hear a note of dissension if only he were using our troops to feed starving Somalians or bomb Yugoslavia.
The Britons were particularly exercised that, by firing on Venezuelan narco-terrorists in our own hemisphere, Trump had violated the War Powers Act of 1973 — the flaw of which should be immediately apparent from the words “of 1973.” Passed by the post-Watergate Congress, during what was known as “the most destructive period in American history,” the law demands that presidents get congressional approval before deploying troops for more than 60 days.
(How was this a response to Watergate? Evidently, if only President Johnson hadn’t gotten us involved in a ground war in Asia, there never would have been a break-in at Democratic headquarters in the Watergate hotel.)
The law is obviously unconstitutional — again, the president is the commander in chief — and every president has ignored it, including President Obama, who didn’t get approval from Congress before bombing Libya for most of 2011, until Moammar Gadhafi was killed in late October. Hillary Clinton, the war’s architect (despite not being the commander in chief, but instead secretary of state), exulted, “We came. We saw. He died.”
You’d think that this boneheaded use of the U.S. military would be imprinted on every Briton’s psyche, inasmuch as it did absolutely nothing for our country but “enriched” the U.K. to the tune of about 400,000 Africans, who hopped on boats to Europe the moment Gadhafi was no longer there to stop them.
Nope. Bomb foreigners pointlessly — that’s cool. Use the military to protect American lives, and it’s the end of the rule of law.
As for the National Guard deployments to war-torn inner cities, the very reason we have a Constitution and not a loosely defined Articles of Confederation is because of Shays’ Rebellion in 1787, when 4,000 soldiers marched on an armory in Massachusetts, intending to seize weapons and overthrow the government.
A series of similar uprisings quickly made clear that the articles’ weak federal government was incapable of suppressing riots. That’s when the Founding Fathers headed to Philadelphia and produced a Constitution with a strong executive in command of federal troops.
Of course, Shays’ Rebellion was a day at the beach compared to the violent crime roiling our major cities today. In 2020, disaffected inner-city youth and entitled whites erupted in a maelstrom of violence in a poignant tribute to the late fentanyl addict George Floyd. Observing the turmoil, Sen. Tom Cotton wrote a Times op-ed urging Trump to send the military to restore order.
Trump ignored him, perhaps impressed by the Times‘ 1-million-word disclaimer disavowing the opinion piece they’d just published, having momentarily forgotten that they’re The New York Times and support violent criminals. Instead, the president sat in bed eating cheeseburgers and tweeting, “LAW AND ORDER!”
Now, five years later, he’s finally giving us law and order (which is his job under the Constitution) using the National Guard (of which he’s the commander in chief under the Constitution). But Londoners somehow see this as a dire threat to the rule of law.
Speaking of the rule of law, illegal immigrants are breaking it. As luck would have it, it’s the president’s job to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed.” But, for the past 50 years, it never dawned on a single president that “the laws” include immigration laws. Until now.
District court judges keep issuing opinions saying the president can’t — among other things — turn away illegals at the border, end the temporary protected status of certain immigrants, expedite deportations, detain illegals subject to deportation and so on. But there’s nothing in the Constitution or in federal law to suggest that the judiciary’s interpretation (don’t enforce the law) is superior to Trump’s (enforce the law).
In fact, the Constitution suggests exactly the opposite.
The entirety of the executive branch resides in this one man’s hands, whereas judges are merely constituent parts of a co-equal branch. Both are required to interpret laws — the president to take care that they be faithfully executed, and judges to decide cases and controversies.
A president is no more required to accept a court’s interpretation of the law than courts are to accept the president’s interpretation. The Supreme Court wins, but that’s only by custom, not the law.
So far, Trump’s interpretation has almost always been correct, and the district courts wrong, according to the high court. Remember his unconstitutional “Muslim ban”? (At least I was assured it was unconstitutional by The New York Times.)
Two years later, the Supreme Court ruled: OF COURSE the president has the authority to exclude any foreigners, at all, in the “public interest,” and the courts have no authority to second-guess him.
I’d put all this in a tweet, but with these prim British, so punctilious about the rule of law, I might end up in jail. Unless I’m a Pakistani, in which case I could gang-rape little English girls without risking arrest because the police don’t want to appear “racist.” Ah well, it’s the Mother Country. We must learn from them about the sacred rule of law.
Crazed with resentment after Trump’s win last November, they decided nothing less than the term “Nazi” would do. You know who “they” are: The New York Times, The New Yorker, protesters funded by George Soros like Antifa, furious left-wing types, Hollywood lefties, and other such kinds. Enough said about these people. They’re the types who always look unhappy.
The Nazis are referred to as the greatest killers of all time. This is universally acknowledged but factually untrue; they are far down the list of great killers after Mao, Stalin (adored by the left), and a few Mongol chiefs. This is how I picture it in my mind: A roomful of ugly men and very homely women are meeting and are desperate to invent a crime committed by The Donald. “Eureka,” cries out a trans freak, “he’s a Nazi.” The room goes quiet, and then all hell breaks loose. It’s perfect, and everyone agrees that from now on Trump will be referred to as a Nazi. The meeting ends with smiles and congratulations all around.
Vilified by the left as an Epstein-like monster, but also a Nazi, The Donald does not seem to give a damn. The fact that he won an election and both houses plus the popular vote keeps him jolly while the anti-Trumpers seethe. The Nazi label, however, has worked, especially among those in the media whose dyslexia with originality is well-known. Capitalism has also come under attack, simply because The Donald is the quintessential capitalist. And so they cry and wail that the blond Nazi has reduced our values to financial ones alone. This is news to me, a naive young Greek who all these years believed that America was a socialist haven that became the richest country in the world because it forced people to be equal where wealth was concerned.
Never mind. All this is caused by desperation by those who do not believe in freedom. The fact that Trump won fair and square is unacceptable to them, because they know better, just like Stalin and Lenin and Mao did. All those unfunny but overpaid TV late-night comedians and those dumb gel-haired men and women who read the news over the networks know better than John Q. Public, and they resent that their opinions were ignored by the great unwashed last November. They are those who write editorials in papers like the Times and for the networks that preach to us, the stupid, that a man can become a woman and vice versa. But now we are living in an era of backlash against DEI; thus calling anyone we disagree with a Nazi is starting to feel very old hat. Actually it sounds childish, the kind of thing some black career criminal calls the cop who’s arresting him for mugging and injuring a very old lady. Nazi has become disposable.
But enough said about the lefty media. Normal, Democrat voting folk are flummoxed that The Donald keeps winning when they find his views so despicable. And it’s happening all over the place. Javier Milei has just won big in his midterms down Argentine way, a great surprise after he had squeezed them until they cried, while conservative populists have won in Poland and Czechia. The globalist elite who meet in Davos and Brussels and know that they know better than the rest of us have not only failed to bring prosperity with their programs; they have also failed miserably to invest in cultural harmony among the voters. Poles and Hungarians are proud of their legacy and culture, and resent the fact that the global elite consider them and some Nigerian wife-beater to be one and the same. In rainy old Britain the fact that you can say anything as long as you’re brown or black, but you go straight to the pokey if you say something against the government and you’re white, has the newly formed Reform party under the great Nigel Farage way up in front in the polls. The trouble is there are four years to go before an election, and as the saying goes, two weeks is a long time in politics.
Ever since the 1940s, institutional arrangements were designed to ensure the voters have no say in what they really want. The administrative state knew better, and to hell with those dumb voters. Europe and the European Union started it, and America followed. No longer, thanks to Donald Trump. This is the real reason why so many elites are going bonkers. A dumb blond from Queens with a long red necktie is curtailing their power. What they don’t see or admit is that finally democracy is working, but they’re not about to take it lying down. I’ll keep you posted.
I was reading a new academic paper from the Journal of Political Economy titled “How Social Structure Drives Innovation: Surname Diversity and Patents in U.S. History” on how Diversity Was Our Strength in 1850–1940, and I was reminded once again that quantitative economists tend to lack much of a feel for history.
Most people criticize economists because they don’t always get the future right. I’m more concerned about how, as economists have increasingly imperialized the other social sciences, they tend to get the past wrong.
First, why are academic economists squeezing out sociologists and the like? The main reason appears to be that economics doctoral programs attract more talent than the poorer paid fields.
Why are economists well compensated? The number of private industry job openings for economists has grown significantly because the computerization of everything allows businesses to implement microeconomics theory for maximizing profits by just rewriting some code. Amazon, for example, now employs several hundred economists with Ph.D.s.
Another advantage of being an economist is you have somewhat more intellectual freedom than in the more politically correct departments.
On the other hand, you are still a college professor, so few economists feel able to afford to be fully honest about today’s most controversial questions.
So there are good reasons why economists are outpacing other social scientists. But economists tend to lack a knowledge base about history. Thus, when they wander into questions where a sense of the past is crucial, they’ll often make disastrous errors.
I first noticed this tendency in 1999 when U. of Chicago economist Steven “Freakonomics” Levitt announced that because crime was lower in 1997 than in 1985, this meant that 1973’s Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion must have culled the criminal class in utero. (This was one of the most eugenical intellectual fads of recent times, but nobody seemed to notice.)
I pointed out in response that the murder rate among black juveniles born right after Roe roughly quintupled due to the crack wars of the early 1990s, so who knows what the marginal effect of legalizing abortion was?
Likewise, future Nobel winner David Card announced that immigration must not lower wages because the 1980 Mariel boatlift from Cuba didn’t cause pay in Miami to drop relative to several other cities from 1980 to 1984. I responded that Miami in those exact years was enjoying the most notorious Cocaine Boom in pop cultural history (Scarface, Miami Vice).
Recently, Joe Biden appointed Lisa Cook to the Federal Reserve Board of Governors on the strength of her writing one prominent paper in which she had discovered, from looking at the number of patents awarded to black inventors each year, that America suddenly got much more racist from 1899 to 1900. I couldn’t think of anything that made that plausible. It turned out that most of her data on black inventors came from a survey done in early 1900 in order to honor black inventors at that year’s Paris World’s Fair.
So, here’s my offer to economists: Before you write up your big paper involving history, send it to me and I’ll tell you if you are on the right track or not.
This new paper on “Surname Diversity and Patents in U.S. History” is written by two economists, Max Posch and Jonathan Schulz, and one of the more prominent anthropologists, Joseph Henrich, author of The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous. Henrich’s acronym WEIRD stands for Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic, and he invented it to point out that Americans and Northwest Europeans tend to have fewer of the self-defeating cultural traits, such as clannishness, of more normal human cultures like, say, Sicilians or Pakistanis.
Sixty years ago, in the days of Margaret Mead, anthropology was a glamour field. But nowadays, few people to the right of Zohran Mamdani pay much attention to anthropology, so it’s not surprising for the Harvard anthropologist to team up with economists.
The authors appear to be from the human biodiversity-adjacent wings of anthropology and economics, but they no doubt worry about that being recognized. (For instance, Henrich wrote a book about how the Catholic Church banning cousin marriage made Europeans less clannish and more innovative, but never mentioned that HBD Chick had beaten him to most of his ideas about how family structure drives culture on her blog.) So they need to be able to point at their Diversity Is Our Strength findings to avoid being canceled.
This new paper argues that before WWII more patents were awarded to residents of American counties with higher diversity of last names:
We show that innovation in U.S. counties from 1850 to 1940 was propelled by shifts in the local social structure, as captured using the diversity of surnames. Leveraging quasi-random variation in counties’ surnames—stemming from the interplay between historical fluctuations in immigration and local factors that attract immigrants—we find that more diverse social structures increased both the quantity and quality of patents, likely because they spurred interactions among individuals with different skills and perspectives. The results suggest that the free flow of information between diverse minds drives innovation and contributed to the emergence of the U.S. as a global innovation hub.
The researchers assume that having people with more diverse surnames move into a county increases trust, sociability, and cooperativeness:
Socially and behaviorally, we hypothesize…that social structures dominated by large and powerful families, indicated by low surname entropy, result in fewer interactions and collaborations among diverse individuals…. Previous work on the impact of kinship on sociality has shown that weaker ties are associated with increased openness towards strangers based on survey and behavioral measures of trust, cooperation and nepotism….
But Americans have been famous for the past 200 years for concocting huge corporations out of strangers. So it’s hard to see that America really needed to import Sicilians to overcome the notorious problems of Sicily.
I can imagine that having random outsiders move into Sicily might reduce Sicilian clannishness, but the English already ranked up with the Dutch and Danish as being among the least clannish people in the world. Among students of family structure, the lands around the North Sea are famous as being home to the “absolute nuclear family.”
The English upper classes traditionally could barely stand being with their own children and would dispatch their sons to boarding school at age 7.
And English-Americans were even less Sicilian in their behavior.
The authors descend into self-parody when explaining their methodology:
In other words, the arrival of a particular set of immigrants (e.g., lots of “Corleones”) can either increase or decrease surname entropy in different counties, depending on whether “Corleones” are initially relatively rare or common.
If having Corleones move into your county doesn’t boost your trust of your neighbors, I don’t know what would!
The authors conclude that we should strive for more government-mandated diversity:
Overall, our results highlight the central importance of social structure in driving innovation and suggest that policies aimed at promoting routine interaction among diverse individuals may foster more rapid innovation.
As I recall, America already tried extra hard to promote The Diverse into top jobs over the past dozen years, but it proved such a disaster that lately fewer and fewer people will even admit to having ever pushed DEI.
The most obvious question about this research project is: Why study the surnames of all the people living in counties where patents were awarded instead of just studying the surnames of the people who earned the patents?
Well, because the latter has been done several times, and the results are exactly what you’d expect: During the golden age of American invention from 1850 to 1940, most inventors had names like Miller and Johnson (or sometimes Mueller and Jensen). That’s not surprising: Most Americans back then were from northwestern Europe, which was the most technologically innovative part of the world.
So, what the authors have discovered is that from 1850 to 1940, the Millers and Johnsons who received patents were more likely to live in counties (typically in the industrial North) where there were more exotic surnames like Kowalski than the Millers and Johnson in counties (typically in the rural South) where few immigrants with, say, weird Slavic names bothered to move.
For example, one state with very low surname diversity is Utah, which is home to tens of thousands of descendants of its polygamous founder Brigham Young, who had 55 children by sixteen wives.
I once theorized that the great quarterback Steve Young, a direct descendant of Brigham Young, must have been the biggest Big Man on Campus ever during his near-Heisman Trophy year at Brigham Young University. But no, it turns out that BYU has many descendants of BY each year, so few Mormons found it sensational that a Young was the star of the BYU football team.
So, is Utah as deficient in technological innovation as it is in surname diversity?
Not as far as I can tell. Utah is kind of like South Korea, where a huge fraction of the population is named “Kim,” but the place is basically fine.
The researchers explain:
The core idea is that many, if not most, innovations arise from the recombinations of existing ideas, approaches and techniques that come together when diverse minds meet, share ideas and sometimes collaborate.
But how was this theorized benefit of diversity supposed to work in real life if the names on patents were the same old WASP names? Did Leland Miller, head engineer at the Carnegie steel mill in Allegheny County, hear about an old Ruthenian trick for improving the Bessemer process from puddler Jan Kowalski, but diabolically decided not to put his name on the patent application?
Or did the Kowalskis move to Allegheny County because the Millers and Johnsons had built a giant engine of prosperity there? This study is kind of like noticing that Los Angeles County is home to a lot of Mexicans and a lot of movie stars and then assuming that Mexicans must become movie stars.
Like most economists these days, the authors are averse to citing examples illustrating their purported findings, which they no doubt would disparage as “anecdata.” But examples ought to be helpful in grasping whether your thinking is realistic or not, especially when you, like many economists these days, are so adroit with such a variety of statistical techniques that you can make numbers do anything you want.
Now that I think about historical instances of times and places with major technological progress, diversity seems closer to a hindrance.
The highly diverse Roman Empire enjoyed remarkable economic prosperity because the Romans provided law and order for merchants over a colossal expanse in which all roads led to Rome, encompassing a huge number of different cultures, each with their specialty crafts. And yet, Roman times didn’t see all that much technological progress (outside of concrete).
To this day, Italians remain the masters of luxury crafts like marble. Many cheaper substitutes for marble have been invented, such as concrete, but lots of rich people still want marble in their houses. If you are willing to pay for marble shaped well, you’ll likely end up employing an Italian-American family firm of marble masons who have been in the business for who knows how many generations.
In contrast, many of the most important technological upheavals of the past quarter of a millennium were the creation of a single type of Briton: what the English used to call Dissenting Protestants, back when Congregationalists, Presbyterians, and Methodists were banned from Oxford and Cambridge until the 1850s for not belonging to the Church of England.
For example, the Industrial Revolution emerged not in relatively cosmopolitan London but in the provincial English Midlands, places like Manchester and Birmingham.
Similarly, the American industrial boom after the Civil War was largely, as Mark Twain noted, the work of Connecticut Yankees and the like, typically from the same post-Puritan Protestant sects as their cousins in Britain.
As Neal Stephenson points out, Silicon Valley was largely built by fellows from Northern college towns founded by the descendants of the Puritans who’d briefly won the English Civil War. Tom Wolfe noted that Intel’s Robert Noyce, “the mayor of Silicon Valley,” was the son of the Grinnell College chaplain.
Studying the maps in this paper closely, I see that the Kentucky–West Virginia border area, home to the famous feud between the Hatfield and McCoy clans, tends to stand out as the authors’ bête noire. I finally figured out that much of what they’ve discovered doesn’t actually have a lot to do with immigration or with what we think of as diversity.
Instead, they’ve laboriously re-created from surname analysis the four-tier structure of British-Americans documented by historian David Hackett Fischer in 1989’s Albion’s Seed. From north to south, America was settled by post-Puritan Yankees, Quakers, Scots-Irish, and southern English. (The Yankees were the most inventive, while the Scots-Irish were the orneriest.) This isn’t racial diversity or even ethnic diversity, it is the sub-ethnic diversity that laid the crucial templates for American regionalism.
The border of Kentucky and West Virginia in the Appalachians, which the researchers’ methodology emphasizes as their nominee for worst place in America, is the most Scots-Irish part of the country. And it’s the least WEIRD part of America, the most clannish, the most like the rest of the world. If you explained a 19th-century Appalachian feud to a Sicilian or Pakistani, he’d wholly understand it.
There, cousin marriage lasted longest in America after eugenicists had successfully campaigned against it everywhere else. It’s where the Hatfields lived in one county and the McCoys in another because they each feared violence from the other family.
Not surprisingly, it wasn’t a center of technological innovation.
Okay, well, that’s…interesting.
But even in the 1890s when the new tabloid newspapers loved to run stories about the outlandish behavior of the Hatfields and McCoys, those crazy hillbillies, it didn’t seem to have much to do with the American mainstream.
But today, the home of the Industrial Revolution, the English Midlands, is home to millions of inbreeding Pakistanis.
Perhaps America will also get less WEIRD in its pursuit of diversity?
You’ve probably heard by now the blockbuster news that Microsoft founder Bill Gates, one of the richest people to ever walk the planet, has had a change of heart on climate change. For several decades, Gates poured billions of dollars into the climate-industrial complex and was howling that the end is nigh unless we stop using fossil fuels, cars, air conditioning and general anesthesia.
Now he says he rejects the “doomsday” predictions of the more extreme global warming prophets.
Some conservatives have snuffed that Gates has shifted his position on climate change because he and Microsoft have invested heavily in energy-intensive data centers.
What Gates has done is courageous and praiseworthy. There are not many people of his stature who will admit that they were wrong. Al Gore certainly hasn’t. My wife says I never do.
Gates still endorses the need for communal action (which won’t work), but he has sensibly disassociated himself from the increasingly radical and economically destructive dictates from the green movement. For that, the Left has tossed him out of their tent as a “traitor.”
I wish to highlight several critical insights that should be the starting point for constructive debate that every clear-minded thinker on either side of the issue should embrace.
1) It’s time to put human welfare at the center of our climate policies. This includes improving agriculture and health in poor countries.
2) Countries should be encouraged to grow their economies even if that means a reliance on fossil fuels like natural gas. Economic growth is essential to human progress.
3) Although climate change will hurt poor people, it will not be the only or even the biggest threat to the lives and welfare of the vast majority of them. The biggest problems are poverty and disease.
I would add to these wise declarations two inconvenient truths: First, the solution to changing temperatures and weather patterns is technological progress. A much smaller percentage of people die of severe weather events today than did 50 or 100 or 1,000 years ago.
Second, energy is the master resource, and to deny people reliable and affordable energy is to keep them poor and vulnerable — and this is inhumane.
If Gates were to direct even a small fraction of his foundation funds toward ensuring everyone on the planet has access to electric power and safe drinking water, it would do more for humanity than all the hundreds of billions of dollars that governments and foundations have devoted to climate programs that have failed to change the globe’s temperature.
There was once a pre-WWII English Music Hall blackface comedian who adopted the stage name “Nosmo King.” He got his unusual alias after seeing the words “NO SMOKING” on a vertically split theater entrance one day, with “NO SMO” painted on one half of the double door, and “KING” on the other. If the “SMO” bit had ever faded off, left-wingers visiting Nosmo’s old theater today could have gotten the name for their latest meaningless street movement, “No Kings,” from observing the very same washed-out health-and-safety notice.
It is difficult to conceive of a more pointless form of protest than calling for there to be no king in a nation that is demonstrably not a monarchy. But still the morons march down America’s malls and highways nonetheless. As they already have what they were asking for, at least they are guaranteed to go home happy.
Perhaps next of all they should try going on a march asking for the right to go on a march.
The Trump Dump
Many of the latest round of No Kings gatherings just ended up looking like Halloween had come a week or two early. Supposedly, around 7 million retards in childish fancy-dress costumes turned up at 2,700 separate rallies nationwide, eager to ensure President Trump could not rule forever as America’s newly crowned King Donald I. That’s one million more than died in the Holocaust, but the original 6 million didn’t deserve it.
Evidently protesters had not heard of a little thing called the 2028 election, at which point the then-octogenarian Trump will be legally and constitutionally bound to stand down from office, despite his and Steve Bannon’s recent leftoid-baiting teases otherwise.
Nonetheless, an “American Values Survey” by the Public Religion Research Institute indicates that 56 percent of Americans consider Trump a “dangerous dictator whose power should be limited.” Good job his power is limited, then, by the Constitution, the Supreme Court, Congress, the Senate, the laws of gravity, economics, human life, and physics, ad infinitum. This isn’t Bad King John we’re talking about here. Just someone who actually likes to get things done and try to keep his promises to his voters for once (in his second term, anyway).
Trump has been endlessly panned for his recent “disturbing, excremental propaganda campaign” of posting a very short mocking AI-generated video clip of himself wearing a golden crown and dumping liquid poo over the No Kings mob from a military jet plane. But true all-powerful monarchs don’t settle for posting scatological videos online: They have actual air force jet pilots drop rather more unpleasant substances onto rebellious crowds from a great height, such as barrel bombs, sarin nerve agent, white phosphorous, and napalm, not the explosive brown aftermath of Donald’s latest late-night Oval Office McDonald’s blowout.
Unauthorized Loggins
Trump’s video was backed by the song “Danger Zone” by the distinctly fecally named Kenny Loggins, whoever he is. Once Kenny found out about King Log’s actions, he demanded his song be “removed immediately” on the usual delusional left-wing grounds that Trump was trying to divide a previously 100 percent harmonious populace who otherwise would have remained completely united:
I can’t imagine why anybody would want their music used or associated with something created with the sole purpose of dividing us. Too many people are trying to tear us apart, and we need to find new ways to come together. We’re all Americans, and we’re all patriotic. There is no “us and them”—that’s not who we are, nor is it what we should be. It’s all of us. We’re in this together, and it is my hope that we can embrace music as a way of celebrating and uniting each and every one of us.
We’re “all Americans”—even all the Haitians, Somalis, Syrians, and so forth flooding into the country. And we’re “all patriotic,” too—even the ones out there chanting “Death to America!” who want to see the entire country crash and burn. Loggins sounds more full of shit than Trump’s CGI bomb bay doors were. So did a lot of the protesters.
Drama Queens
Supposedly, the revolting rabble represented the entire nation, calling themselves a “big tent”: always useful, to keep all the clowns in. One black female harlequin in Virginia held a placard saying “NO TAXATION WITHOUT REPRESENTATION! GEORGE III—STAMP ACT, D.J. TRUMP—TARIFFS.” Doesn’t she realize Trump has placed his trade tariffs on other countries, not the U.S.? Then again, she is black, so maybe she’s actually a Nigerian national, very concerned about the future of her failing yam export business.
In Chicago, Jewish protester Lindsay Weinberg was so clued-up on royal history she thought Adolf Hitler had once been the king of Germany, waving aloft a crappy cardboard sign comparing ICE agents to König Adolf I’s Gestapo:
“It’s really personal to me when I hear people getting grabbed off the streets and taken away…. I mean, many, many victims of the Holocaust don’t know what happened to their relatives, but I happen to know that [my German-Jewish great-grandmother’s] bones are in a mass grave…. That’s important history for people to remember. People are getting disappeared. People are hiding. People are being murdered. People are being wounded. People are experiencing trauma. It’s escalating.”
But sadly not escalating to the point where Weinberg herself has yet been “disappeared.” Where did the Gestapo take arrested Jews off to? Auschwitz and Belsen. Where do ICE agents take arrested illegal Mexicans and Venezuelans off to? An airport to fly them back home.
For protesters against a guy who was supposedly destroying democracy, some of the Nosmo King crowd certainly had an original way of mobilizing against this totalitarian royal disgrace—by agitating to get in there early and destroy democracy themselves first. Here is a highly non-J6-like extract from a leaflet handed out by friendly anarchists at one No Kings rally:
WE DEMAND…That angry mobs storm the Supreme Court, ABOLISHING IT outright, returning power to community elders [re: black and Muslim loudmouths], to wayward youngsters [re: violent criminals] and to those of us who earn trust in their communities continuously because of their care and humility, not appointed authority.
That last bit there really means “surrender power to us, the self-appointed new authorities, not the legally elected old ones like President Trump”—or, put another way, “Make us all little kings, but mini-monarchs falsely relabeled along more acceptably left-wing lines, unelected yet all-powerful nonetheless.” Should the movement really be called “No Kings, More Commissars”?
RAGE Against the Machine
Next year sees the 250th anniversary of U.S. independence from the British Crown—and some Americans are beginning to regret it. A 2023 poll shows 27 percent of citizens aged 18 to 29 would prefer to be royal subjects, with groups like the Monarchists of America hoping for an all-powerful absolutist emperor to cut through the Gordian knot of endless committees, paperwork, and lawfare holding the nation back from greatness.
Democrats and other assorted spiteful mutants prefer the currently prevailing model of permanent administrative stasis across the West whenever right-wingers win elections, and hives of buzzing state activity whenever left-wingers win. Having infiltrated all our previously neutral institutions with fellow travelers, they have perfected the fine art of ensuring that when conservatives tug lustily on the levers of modern “power,” nothing ever happens, but when liberals so much as tickle those exact same devices with a feather, everything runs like clockwork on cocaine.
Then, the leftist hive mind can act as a kind of collective despotic king, while pretending we all still inhabit a “democracy,” whereas when a right-wing president or prime minister tries to fulfill his promises, he is frustrated at every turn by the true controlling viziers and prince regents merely disguised as agents of an “impartial” managing civil service. Hence, borders can be opened very easily but never closed, government spending boosted but never cut, no matter what the “enfranchised” serfs themselves may want.
One man who sees through this scam is Silicon Valley tech wizard Curtis Yarvin, America’s most famous backer of quasi-royal rule, who advises that governments be structured like corporations, with a “CEO King” at the top, accountable only to some independent aristocracy-like body analogous to a board of directors. Nations would become more akin to microstates, and fake democracy would be abolished—citizens’ only true right would be to vote with their feet and head off toward other, competing microstates if they think life sounds better there.
Yarvin thus isn’t quite an advocate of turning Trump into an almighty God Emperor, but it is useful for the left to pretend he is, for easy scaremongering purposes. A recent long profile in The New Yorker veered between mocking Yarvin as a loony (because his ideal aristocratic board of directors would consist of airline pilots), calling him a racist (because he acknowledges race exists, which it does), and implying he secretly sets MAGA policy agenda from outside.
It is true that Yarvin knows J.D. Vance, once suggested turning Gaza into a beach resort like Trump also once did, and has promoted his own DOGE-like unit called RAGE (Retire All Government Employees). But, on the other hand, Yarvin also suggests hooking criminals and other subhumans up to permanent Matrix-style virtual reality units and leaving them hallucinating happily there forever, as “a humane alternative to genocide,” and putting “the church blacks in charge of the ghetto blacks” in little mini-Bantustans, neither of which are anything like current MAGA policy. Sadly.
Frog Princesses
Who even are these appalling people? Just look at videos of them, ranting hatefully and hypocritically about how Charlie Kirk deserved to die because he was always ranting hatefully and hypocritically, calling everyone in sight Nazis, or spazzing about dressed as inflatable giant unicorns, dinosaurs, axolotls, and, most often of all, cartoon frogs.
Many seem mentally ill, with one psychologist observing how the crowds of Lovecraftian frog-humans are mainly made up of disturbed hysterical white women in their mid-40s, who are using the whole thing as a free form of public “group therapy playing out in the streets,” in an era where “emotional catharsis and civic activism have begun to blur.”
Basically, these solipsistic show-offs are doing it for themselves, masturbatorily polishing their own moral halos while pretending to be latter-day French revolutionaries, painting themselves as make-believe agents of what they fantasize to be “The People” against the agents of Orange Tyranny.
In fact, they represent no one but themselves, with the average normal, nonmutant person taking one glance and concluding, “Pure genetic waste.” Do they not have any proper jobs to go to? Construction workers and plumbers do, hence them not generally being on the marches themselves. These tantrum throwers are nothing but pathetic, entitled, sheltered, perpetual infants—if Trump really is the Sun King, then they’re all Marie Antoinette with blow-up webbed green feet.
Let them eat cake? Trump in his fighter jet had it better: Let them eat shit instead.
