Alcoholics Anonymous is no longer a fellowship of men and women, as used to be reassuringly stated at the start of every meeting.

It’s now a “fellowship of people,” because AA is embracing gender ideology, attempting to increase ethnic membership, and is bringing in a new safeguarding policy that has already taken aim at men with criminal convictions.

This fall, it will publish a Plain Language version of the Big Book, in which words are changed for “gender balance” and the program “made accessible to fifth grade reading level.”

It’s hard to think of an organization more likely to lose every ounce of its usefulness once wokeness gets to work on it.

When they have finished polishing up the messy business of getting sober to bring it into the age of hurt feelings, and made roomfuls of drunks “safe” and “equal” by today’s definition, it’s hard to imagine what will be left.

Moreover, the erosion of gritty old AA in candlelit backrooms may well happen by stealth unless more members like me break their anonymity to tell the wider world what is going on, risking a form of ostracizing akin to what happens to Scientologists who break ranks.

Traditionally, of course, what happens in meetings should stay in meetings. But when criminals who have done their time are banned under the guise of keeping women safe from possible future harm, Minority Report-style, secrecy is not the best option.

People who don’t go to AA blithely assume, I think, that it is old-fashioned and unchanging. In fact, it is changing just as much as any other organization, it’s just that its members aren’t allowed to talk about the lunacy being enacted, and all public debate is stifled, effectively, under the anonymity principle.

Having been sober 23 years and a constant attendee in all that time, I was dismayed when I encountered in Surrey, England, what turned out to be a concerted attempt from the “top” of AA GB to force a politically correct agenda on the membership in a way that ought not to be possible under its bottom-up structure, by which the grassroots membership is meant to decide everything, and a form of benign anarchy is meant to prevail.

I must point out, having reached out to AA World Services in New York, that they distance themselves from a lot of what is happening in Britain, and when I talk to my friends in America they often say, “British AA has lost the plot.”

But if that is the case, World Services might want to consider intervening to protect its brand, because it was an American pioneer who first invented this, and it is arguably one of America’s finest-ever exports.

Specifically, I discovered that a question was corporately staged at AA’s 57th general service conference in York, England, in April 2023, to promote safeguarding.

This conference, incidentally, also agonized about how to encourage more alcoholics from ethnic minorities because the membership of AA “is predominantly white.”

A debate noted the need to explore “the barriers to entry” for black and Asian people. Well, the main barrier to entry is Muslims not being allowed to drink by their own culture, I would have thought. So unless they’re suggesting we get religiously teetotal people drunk in order to then get them into AA, they should let that disparity go.

Leaving that lunacy aside, I was leaked an email trail in which the general secretary of AA GB instructs a grassroots member many months ahead of this conference, in contravention of all AA practice, on the wording and tabling of a question on the need for “safeguarding officers” in meetings.

“Just added a couple of things and amended slightly…please submit later on today if possible. With much thanks and gratitude. LIF,” writes the general secretary, with LIF being a coded sign-off meaning Love in Fellowship.

In the event, the idea met with little enthusiasm among delegates. The only decision reached was that it was up to individual groups, and even that did not gain the two-thirds majority needed to enforce it. But the debate convinced a lot of people that this was the way things were going.

When safeguarding officers then started appearing, apparently spontaneously from the membership, people accepted them. And when one that I encountered started issuing edicts, breaching AA’s hallowed third tradition (the only requirement for membership is a desire to stop drinking), that was almost overwhelmingly accepted too.

This is nothing less than the unraveling of what stockbroker Bill Wilson and Dr. Robert Smith invented nearly a hundred years ago in the Midwest, after Bill didn’t want to drink in the bar of The Mayflower Hotel, Akron, one night and reached for the phone, and was put in touch with fellow drinker Bob, through a series of amazing coincidences.

Learning that two drunks can keep each other in remission by talking and helping others like themselves, often going into unsafe situations to do so, they began the ever-expanding miracle of AA.

It has lasted so long both because it is so loose in its rules, and because, in terms of its central beliefs, it trades on moral certainties. I would argue it is still firmly rooted in Christian principles. Twelve Steps based on moral and spiritual aims, with promises at the end similar to those in the Bible. Twelve traditions that clearly set out that anyone can come, and members must never cast anyone out, no matter how difficult their behavior.

So what happens when those moral certainties and Christian principles are called into question by trendy secularism, by wokeism, and by a concern for safeguarding women not just from potential harm, but from hurt feelings, at the cost of an open-door policy that has always allowed felons and troublemakers access because that is the whole point?

I first became aware of the changing tone a few years ago, when the preamble started being adapted in meetings to get rid of “men and women.” I noticed a lot more members than usual were closing meetings by inviting people to join them in the serenity prayer “using the word God as they understood Him, Her, It, or Them.” So stupid.

I heard the main speaker at one meeting say, “I would like to tell you what happened to me as a child, but I don’t want to trigger anybody. I’ve been told not to share it.”

Of course, this is the way the world is going. But if you can’t share your darkest trauma in a self-help group, where can you share it?

Meanwhile, the rewrite of the Big Book has produced less a plain language version, from the leaked excerpts I’ve seen, and more a plain stupid version.

To make it “gender balanced” they have made a metaphorical mention of a jaywalker female, for no reason.

The original text is poetry. “War fever ran high in the New England town…’ is one of the best openings to any book. They say the simple version is needed because of falling literacy levels. In which case, why bother with any book?

But the worst part is the drive to protect women from encounters with men in what is arguably the most obviously unsuitable place for any woman, or man, to search for dates. No one should do it, and if you do get involved romantically with a fellow member, expect disaster and you won’t be disappointed. And yet…

Around the time of coming back to meetings after lockdown, a year before that question started being arranged for the 2023 conference, a member I knew began to be informed he was being banned from meetings—eventually over a dozen—because he was allegedly flirting with women, and because he had previous convictions relating to women. These were nonviolent and related to long-term partners.

A member calling himself “the safeguarding officer,” and whose name eventually turned up on that email exchange about the conference with the general secretary—surprise, surprise—issued a “safeguarding alert” about the banned member to 200 meetings in two counties warning women not to give out their phone number. Hysteria broke out. The banned member was verbally and physically attacked in meetings.

I fought the man’s corner, and without naming anyone but myself, I wrote about the need to defend the ability of convicted criminals to access meetings, as long as they didn’t disrupt them on the night.

So ended my unquestioning loyalty to the fellowship, for which I incurred the wrath of AA. I was approached by members at meetings and told I was considered “a problem.” I received lengthy emails from the chairman of AA GB containing pious lectures about behavior.

“What is this, Scientology? The Amish?” I kept asking, incredulous. In fact, both those organizations would behave much better. At one point a friend rang me and told me that a senior member of the board had called me a “nut job” in remarks that had gone round like wildfire. My response: “Of course I’m a nut job. I’m in AA.”

Attempting to cleanse its meetings of difficult people is obviously bad business for Alcoholics Anonymous. There will be no one left in meetings.

I should add that up until now, the history of AA is remarkably void of violence, nor have there ever been reports of incidents of prejudice.

The meetings have always policed themselves well, and they continue to do so, mostly oblivious, with the majority of the membership unwilling or unable to question what is changing.

For those long enough sober to look into it, a new safeguarding policy document reads like a child has written it, and the number of banned members grows. They include, most shamefully, a schizophrenic lady in London who had been attending for years but was voted out permanently a few months ago after she shouted at someone during an obvious breakdown.

It is so often the irony that wherever you have an organization that is banging on about inclusivity and the need to protect feelings, there you will find the most exclusive membership policy, the worst infighting, and a good deal of hurt.

I see that Democrats are going with the image of Kamala Harris as a bad-ass prosecutor.

Hey, wait! Maybe now they’ll finally have an opportunity to mention that Donald Trump is a CONVICTED FELON. Did you know he was found guilty of THIRTY-FOUR FELONIES by a jury? (I’m not sure where, but it must have been in a neutral jurisdiction.)

Thus, Harris’ first speech since becoming the presumptive Democratic nominee began with her boasting about the cases she’d handled as San Francisco district attorney:

“Predators who abused women, fraudsters who ripped off consumers, cheaters who broke the rules for their own gain. So hear me when I say, I know Donald Trump’s type.”

OK, Democrats, you want to make this campaign about crime? Game on. Guess who is one of the principal figures responsible for the crime wave currently engulfing California?

That would be Kamala Harris.

As attorney general, it was her job to give propositions appearing on the ballot accurate titles and explanatory summaries. In order to fool the voters into passing Proposition 47 — decriminalizing crime — and Proposition 57 — allowing the release of thousands of violent criminals — Harris intentionally lied to the voters about what these laws would do.

Proposition 47 basically turned every crime into a “misdemeanor.” Grand theft, commercial burglary and possession of illegal narcotics — all misdemeanors.

Theft of anything worth less than $950 — even theft of a gun — became a misdemeanor, no more consequential than a waiter giving a straw to someone who didn’t ask for one. As Californians have since learned, that $950 cap does not include the tens of thousands of dollars required to repair smashed car windows, store fronts or display cases.

As a result, smash-and-grab robberies have become the new sport in the Golden State, leaving entire inner-city neighborhoods without a pharmacy. The police don’t even respond to thefts of less than $950. Retail stores have to keep their entire inventory under lock and key, including ordinary items, like shampoo and toothpaste — and those are the ones that aren’t closing permanently. San Francisco’s landmark Union Square shopping district is now plastered with “For Lease” and “Going Out of Business” signs. Roughly 50% of all videos on the internet are clips of California “teens” dashing out of upscale stores with armloads of stolen goods — Gucci, Prada, Burberry, Luis Vuitton.

Last year, Los Angeles, Oakland and San Francisco topped the list of the U.S. cities with the most retail theft, according to the National Retail Federation. A fourth California city, Sacramento, came in at No. 7. These days, when a customer tries to actually pay for something, the cashier calls the manager.

The shoplifting is so pervasive that, earlier this year, a Target shoplifter strolled out of the store right past Gov. Gavin Newsom. During a CNN report on the rash of thefts in San Francisco, three shoplifters hit the CVS as they were filming.

Also good for business: Tourists are warned not to rent cars, because they’ll only be broken into. Drug addicts clog the sidewalks, writhing in their own needles and fecal matter.

How did Harris describe a proposition that would declare open season on the law-abiding? She titled Prop 47 “The Safe Neighborhoods and Schools Act,” something I cannot even say without doing air quotes.

For her next act of breathtaking mendacity, Harris deceived voters about Prop 57, which allowed the early release of thousands of violent criminals, including those convicted of attempted murder, grand theft, child molestation, drug use and possession and drive-by shootings.

Among the violent offenders given early release because of Prop 57 is Gregory Gadlin, sentenced to 35 years to life for assaulting his girlfriend with a 7-inch butcher knife, slashing her in the face, back, stomach and hand, leaving her with limited mobility.

Gadlin had previously been convicted of raping his 11-year-old niece, forcing her to orally copulate him and urinating in her mouth.

And before that, Gadlin was convicted of rape and sodomy of a pregnant 17-year-old. He’d offered to drive the girl to a hospital after she’d been attacked by two girls but, instead, took her to his home, where he hit her in the face, raped her, sodomized her and forced her to orally copulate him.

Another violent criminal released under Prop 57 was Luis Steven Flores, convicted of assault with a deadly weapon (a semi-automatic gun), battery on a peace officer and battery of another inmate.

And yet another violent criminal, Alfredo “Freddy” Casillas, shot a rival gang member and nearly beat him to death. His “good behavior” in prison consisted of stabbing a fellow inmate and hiding a homemade weapon in his cell.

The parole board conceded that both men had an “extensive history of violence” — but then cited Prop 57 and released them both.

And how did Harris title Prop 57? “The Early Parole for Non-Violent Criminals and Juvenile Court Trial Requirements Initiative.” Her summary told voters that “a ‘yes’ vote supported increasing parole and good behavior opportunities for felons convicted of nonviolent crimes …” (Do you know how to do air quotes?)

Harris on attempted murder, the rape of a child, battery of a police officer: Let ’em all out!

But she’s a real crime slayer when it comes to Trump describing his extortion payment to Stormy Daniels as a “legal expense” on a campaign finance report. (Democrats get to “34 felonies” because Trump wrote “Legal expense” on 34 different documents. It’s like saying a bank robber who stole $34 committed 34 bank robberies.)

On the plus side, maybe Harris’ ludicrously pro-criminal record will finally convince Trump to stop bragging about all the black criminals he released in a quixotic (and moronic) bid to win the black vote — following the advice of his trusted advisers, Jared Kushner and Kim Kardashian.

TRUMP: Let’s see … should I sacrifice the votes of millions of Americans fed up with crime in order to get up to 20% of 13% of the vote? Why, that’s 0.026% of the vote. YES! Hey, guys! Biden called you “super predators.” Did you know I’m letting people out of jail?

Instead of going on and on (and on) about his deep esteem for black criminals, here’s a non-idiotic idea for Trump.

The 30-second spot:

(Footage of a mob mass looting a store)

“In California, this used to be a felony. Thanks to Kamala Harris, it’s now a misdemeanor and effectively legal. She wrote the misleading wording for the ballot proposition that made it possible.”

Michael Mailer, son of the great novelist Norman Mailer, is a Harvard grad, a liberal, and an outstanding amateur boxer who advanced further in the Golden Gloves competition than any other Harvard wimp ever has or ever will, for that matter. Michael is a talented film director and producer who has numerous movies under his belt and is at present working nonstop when not arguing with yours truly about politics. He’s also my closest friend.

My beef with the movies is a simple one: the virtue signaling practiced by greedy little bald fat men who cast black actors as historical white persons. It not only signals total dishonesty, intellectually and otherwise, it is pathetic in its efforts to virtue-signal and please the left. Totalitarian regimes have tried this in the past. I remember as a child watching a UFA German production of Titanic. The only officer who did not panic but rescued many women and children pushed aside by eager-to-save-themselves fat Anglo-American capitalists was a German. I remember telling my Prussian nanny afterward how lucky those he saved were to be dealing with a German. (Fraulein agreed.)

So, are these modern Hollywood types like the Nazis, so scared of the truth they have to invent black dukes in Regency Britain? Actually, it’s a laughing matter, and what we should be doing is what an audience member did when he told Bono—who had pompously declared during a concert in Glasgow that “Every time I clap my hands a child dies in Africa”—“Well, stop fucking doing it, then.” We should boycott any movie that dishonestly presents the past and stop rewarding cowardice.

And by this we are not in any way denying past injustices, but representing fictional and factual history. The lefty point is, of course, that they feel injustices more keenly than anyone else, which is the biggest lie of all. Having a black actor play Hamlet as a top drug dealer’s son in Harlem and uttering, “To is or not to is, is the fucking question,” does not benefit anyone, starting with the fools who might pay to watch it. The trouble with America today is that everything is seen through the lens of oppressor and oppressed. The media and the movies perpetrate this myth, and I for one no longer read, listen to, or believe a word the media says, and do not watch movies made after 1959. (Except Michael’s films, and especially Heart of Champions.) Viewing ourselves as morally superior to our ancestors is a crock, and reinterpreting classic works an even bigger crock. But let’s have some fun.

Let’s create the sprawling saga that came to define the antebellum South as a new-and-improved Gone With the Wind movie. No longer black stereotypes in evidence, but Captain Butler as a gay man secretly in love with Ashley Wilkes, played by a black man, with Mamie as a trans, and Scarlett obsessed with Melanie, a Native American whose name was Florensiensis Naledi back out West. It’s bound to work and please the self-obsessed morons who now demand warnings when reading Papa Hemingway’s classics. The super aggressive trans lobby might take umbrage at Mamie’s weight, but to hell with them. And the same goes for the late Edith Wharton, who would have been even more aghast viewing this version of Gone than if she had spotted a turd in the middle of her drawing room.

By now, dear readers, you probably have guessed I’m no Hollywood groupie. Modern Hollywood, that is. The irony is that the few actors I have known were not only gentlemen in the old sense of the word, but became close friends with yours truly, politics aside. The late David Niven was a Gstaad neighbor and was in life as elegant and word-perfect as in his films. David was a very nice man with a good war record, and self-deprecating to a fault. As was Roger Moore, an even closer friend and neighbor, whose jokes were the funniest ever and were matched only by his generosity for the needy. And then there’s Harvey Keitel, whom I met at a party and when introduced to him asked him what was a nice Jewish boy like him doing in the Marine Corps instead of being down in Wall Street screwing Christians? “Who is this guy?” Harvey exploded to no one in particular. “I like him.” It was the start of a you-know-what friendship. The late Louis Jourdan, heartthrob of the ’50s, ditto, and Mathew Modine, as sweet and nice as they come.

Unfortunately, today the f-word has become a synonym for sincerity. The movies are mainly responsible for this, the lack of talent of writers and directors being exposed as millions of f-bombs are uttered nonstop by trained seals, sorry, actors. All it takes is a look at films like The Best Years of Our Lives, All About Eve, and The Razor’s Edge, all great classics without a single f-word ever necessary, and one realizes how far our culture has declined. And it gets even more painful at the sight of Americans in front of brain-dead celebrities and those who interview them, the degrading self-abasement a true portrait of our time.

I considered writing about presidential politics, but the way things are going lately, by the time you read this on Wednesday, we may well be on to a whole new storyline I can’t anticipate.

So, I’m going to go off topic and reflect on a new paper by two economists about an early example of Cancel Culture, the 1947–1957 Red Scare in the movie industry, “McCarthyism, Media, and Political Repression: Evidence from Hollywood” by Hui Ren and Tan Tanyi Wang. It’s reflective of the rise of intellectual imperialism among economists:

Beyond the accused, we find that the anti-communist crusade also had a chilling effect on film content, as non-accused filmmakers avoided progressive topics. The decline in progressive films, in turn, made society more conservative.

The two economists congratulate themselves:

To our knowledge, we are the first to show that the Hollywood witch-hunt not only ruined individual careers but also changed the types of films Americans were exposed to, reshaping their political preferences in the process.

To make their case, the authors have assembled a vast trove of numbers from sources like the Internet Movie Database.

Yet, in reality, of course, few topics have been written about at vaster length over the past three generations than mid-century movie industry politics. And, despite their lack of data science chops, much the same theses have been put forward by historians and film critics for my entire lifetime: The House Un-American Activities Committee inquests in 1947 and 1951 helped push the film industry, and perhaps the country, away from the left.

But historians and critics aren’t economists, so they don’t count.

Academic economists used to write largely about dry topics like interest rates, but over the decades they’ve self-confidently shoved their way into more fun subjects that long were the province of now-woebegone academics like sociologists and cultural studies professors.

The economics profession has been doing better economically than other social sciences in recent years, in part because many elite colleges feel that offering a business administration major would make them look déclassé. So, students who intend upon business careers often find themselves majoring in economics, because, at least, economics is related to money. So, colleges still need teaching economists, even as undergrads flee the humanities and most of the social sciences to computer science.

And changes in technology have created more private industry jobs for economists with doctorates. When I majored in economics in 1980, professors put a fair amount of effort into explaining what microeconomic theory revealed about how to maximize profits in business. But when I went into the corporate world, I quickly discovered that businesses instead often ran on traditional simplistic rules of thumb. Why? Not because executives didn’t know anything about economics (like me, many had majored in the field), but because in 1982 they didn’t have the practical tools to collect data and change prices in real time.

Today, however, Amazon, having all the data in the world, employs something like 400 workers with PhDs in economics to figure out how best to manipulate prices.

For example, a few days ago, Amazon put the Kindle digital download version of my anthology Noticing (normally $29.95) on sale for $9.95. How long will it be at this price? Beats me. Amazon itself might not know. But I’d imagine that the algorithm that decides when to lower and raise prices was worked out by a bright microeconomist to maximize the wealth of Jeff Bezos.

The explosion in data availability has made the economics profession less theoretical and more empirical.

For instance, when I took financial economics in MBA school in 1981, my term paper was on whether the results of World Series games involving New York baseball teams drove the Dow Jones average up or down. If the Yankees won, did Wall Street traders feel more optimistic and thus bid up stocks?

Back then, I had to thumb through thick reference books and jot down a few hundred numbers with a pencil.

It was dull work.

(My finding: No, as the Efficient Market Hypothesis would predict, the outcome of World Series games had no detectable impact on New York Stock Exchange prices. But NYSE volume was down during daytime World Series games in New York, presumably because brokers were at the ballpark.)

Not surprisingly, back then, economists inclined toward the kind of theorizing you could do on a chalkboard. But now, economics grad students tend to be aces at finding and analyzing data.

For example, one of the most innovative economists of the 21st century is Harvard’s Raj Chetty, who has built amazing databases out of previously confidential numbers, such as your 1040 tax returns. Granted, Chetty is notably less than fecund in coming up with theoretical insights to explain his findings. But still, the data he has pulled together is extraordinary.

These changes in the field of economics have done a lot of good. But let me point out some tendencies of modern economists.

For one thing, the globalization of American economics has led to many of the most wizardly data analysts being Asians like Raj Chetty, Hui Ren, and Tan Tanyi Wang, clearly people with little intuitive feel for U.S. realities. America is a complicated place, so, despite all that is written about the USA, you can’t expect even 150-IQ foreigners to be adept at understanding it.

Another problem is that contemporary economists tend to be averse to giving examples from their data. For instance, in “McCarthyism, Media, and Political Repression,” the authors argue that the anti-Communist witch hunt led to fewer progressive films being made.

But what are progressive films, you might ask? Well, the authors have gone to great lengths to make up a list of “Benchmark Progressive Films” from Hollywood’s golden age. Yet they leave their list out of their main paper and relegate it to their data appendix, perhaps fearing that a list of movies would be too unprofessionally interesting.

The most famous of their progressive examples turn out to be three Depression-era prewar movies: Charlie Chaplin’s 1936 Modern Times, 1940’s The Grapes of Wrath, and Preston Sturges’ 1941 comedy Sullivan’s Travels about a rich movie director who impersonates a hobo to get the background to film the socially conscious novel O Brother, Where Art Thou? Then, in more prosperous 1947, the concerns of progressive movies seemed to evolve from brokeness to wokeness with two films about anti-Semitism: Gentleman’s Agreement and Crossfire.

Meanwhile, on their list of “conservative benchmark films” is 1939’s very funny anti-Communist Ninotchka, in which Greta Garbo plays a stern Soviet commissar sent to Paris:

Buljanoff: How are things in Moscow?

Ninotchka: Very good. The last mass trials were a great success. There are going to be fewer but better Russians.

I’m guessing cowriter Billy Wilder came up with that line.

Lists of movies are intriguing. But they tend to raise more questions than they answer. For example, what are the politics of Sturges fans the Coen Brothers? I’ve seen all 19 of their movies, but I still don’t know.

Hence, you could wind up arguing for hours about the exact political leanings of most of the best movies. For instance, The Grapes of Wrath was based on the novel by John Steinbeck and starred Henry Fonda, both left-of-center personalities, but it was directed by the conservative John Ford, who was so memorably portrayed recently by fellow conservative director David Lynch in liberal Steven Spielberg’s The Fabelmans.

A related unfortunate tendency of modern data-crunching economists is that they don’t like sorting their data and then presenting the tail ends for readers to inspect and opinionize about. Economists tend to assume that the cardinal sin is to notice outliers because they couldn’t possibly be representative of tendencies. So the authors don’t mention that screenwriter Lester Cole of the martyred 1947 Hollywood Ten admitted that all Ten had been Communist Party USA members at one point.

On the other hand, one mistake that economists, being not as politically correct as other social scientists, make less is to confuse correlation with causation.

Thus, I’m dubious about the authors’ contention that movies drove voting, rather than movies reflecting, with an erratic lag, broader cultural shifts. I was around in the early 1950s, but I can vividly recall Reagan’s 1980s, when a large fraction of movies were as liberal as in the 1970s, but a handful of conservative films like Top Gun turned out to be surprise hits.

For instance, Ghostbusters’ anti-EPA regulator scenes turned out to be sensations during the 1984 election season. Still, the inspiration for the movie was not state-of-the-art Reaganism, but Dan Aykroyd’s ancestral involvement with not-terribly-fashionable Spiritualism, going back to his great-grandfather trying to contact the dead through séances.

Although American culture turned around to be pro-business in the 1980s, the current spate of movies about great moments in corporate marketing like Air, Flamin’ Hot, and Tetris took several decades longer to come about.

It would make perfect sense if the late 1980s had produced a lot of movies about early-1980s products like Reebok and the IBM PC-XT.

But they didn’t.

Sometimes, that’s just the way things work out.

Ah, the best-laid plans of mice and untermenschen. This Jew is no happy concentration camper, as the Trump assassination attempt wrecked my summer of sleep.

See, I hate summer. The weather, the bugs, the AC bills. So in June I hatched a plan: I’d go off the wagon, drink from July 1 through September, and sleep the entire summer away.

I pre-wrote ten columns. That meant I could go ten weeks without having to be sober enough to be cogent.

What could go wrong?

Well, a John Hinckley/Mark David Chapman-looking “Rust Belt farmer mated with a pig and didn’t have the decency to kill the offspring for bacon” shot up a Trump rally, and now the dog days of summer are hounding me, because a couple of the columns I wrote last month need to be updated.

This one about conspiracy-mongering needs an update, as the Trump shooting “theories” are too good to pass up. Still, I’ll let it run as written in June, and I’ll do a part II next week.

Did I ever tell you about the hippie chick and the veal?

Tina was a real sweetie, quite blonde, quite pretty. In the early 1990s we traveled together to Nazi death camp sites because I know how to show a girl a good time.

She was a self-styled New Age guru. One of her favorite mottos was, “Yer beliefs determine yer reality!”

And I’d ask, “You mean figuratively, like, if you have a positive outlook, you’ll be better able to deal with adversity?”

And she’d respond, “No, literally. If you have cancer but believe you don’t, then you don’t. If you believe you’re a millionaire, you’re a millionaire. Yer beliefs change yer reality.”

“You can alter the physical world with ‘yer beliefs’?”

“Yep!”

And I’d say, “You know that’s batshit insane, right?”

And she’d flash the condescending smile of a wise woman benevolently tolerating a fool.

So one night we’re in Vienna, at a fine restaurant. And I see they have veal. And hot damn do I love veal. I ordered the scaloppine, and Tina barked at me, “That’s baby cow! Precious baby cow! How can you eat that?”

And I replied, “I believe it’s a cucumber salad. And since my beliefs determine my physical reality, it actually is a cucumber salad.”

I’ll never forget her shocked response: “No! No! You’re not supposed to use it for that!”

Tina’s “guru” bullshit was intended for hippie-dippy morons who seek to flee reality. And I got a hard-on of happiness turning that lunacy around on her, and against her.

If you’re well-versed in conspiracy-mongering—the Alex Jones/Jim Fetzer “false flag” stupidity—you know that the keystone phrase of “Everything’s a staged psy-op” is “Where’s the blood?”

These “sleuths” will view photos of a crime scene and declare, “Where’s the blood?” and you’re supposed to go, “Oh wow, right! It must be a fake because there’s no blood! Jim Fetzer is a SLOOTH!”

I wrote about this eight years ago in a piece called “False Flaggots” (read it here). A founding myth of the Jones/Fetzer cult is that the average human body contains as much blood as a large aboveground swimming pool, so when a body’s punctured, the blood will flow endlessly, for hours, for blocks.

When murderous incel Elliot Rodger took his own life at the close of his 2014 rampage, the “proof” it was a false flag was that the car in which he shot himself in the head didn’t fill up with blood that cascaded down the street like a tsunami. The idea that the blood from the head wound could be contained inside the car, absorbed by the upholstery and carpeting, was ridiculous to the supersleuths.

Now, you can show these idiots any number of historical photos, like pics from the Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre, for example—a garage full of bullet-riddled men, some corpses with a small trickle of blood, some with zero trickle, but no “tsunami.” You can try to explain how blood congeals (no flaggot has ever once used the term “livor mortis,” and no, that’s not one of my wacky puns), how things like clothing and temperature can influence blood trails, but they won’t listen.

With the Boston Marathon bombing, the “proof” that it was a false flag was the pic of the guy with his leg blown off being wheeled away. “That leg should be spraying a geyser of blood like a firehose!” the flaggots declared.

Where’sthebloodwhere’sthebloodwhere’stheblood?

Following the Pulse nightclub shooting, flaggot extraordinaire Paul Craig Roberts “where’stheblooded” the shit outta the event based on one photo:

A couple of people were helping a guy with tattoos in place of a shirt, but there was no sign of blood. About 6 people were carrying a person stretched out prone (no stretcher) down a street. There was no blood and it looked like a crisis acting performance. Why prone? Is an injured person really able to keep his body stiff so that he can be carried along prone parallel to the ground?

First of all, Roberts, being a functional retard, doesn’t know the difference between prone and supine. And yeah, if you’re playacting at being Sherlock Holmes, it helps to know that difference (here’s the pic he’s describing). Second, the injured person was being carried by six people—two at the legs, two supporting the back, two supporting the head and shoulders. Yes, an injured human can be carried that way “parallel to the ground.” Third, most of the injured man’s body is obscured by those carrying him; we can’t see if there’s blood on the body.

Roberts would eventually declare Pulse a hoax because none of his readers could prove it happened by examining the photos. That’s the extent to which these lunatics believe that every criminal investigation comes down to amateur losers staring at AP photos.

Look, I could go on. Just Google “where’s the blood” and “false flag” to see what a huge trope this was, especially during the Obama years. No one could post anything about a mass shooting without a bunch of flaggots screeching,“Where’sthebloodwhere’sthebloodwhere’stheblood?”

But now we have a fascinating role reversal. Flaggots are boosting wartime casualty photos from Gaza (“look what the ZIONISTS are doing to the CHILDRUNNNNN!”). Boosting them unquestioningly. Gone is the sleutherism, the skepticism, the qwestchins. And even though much of what comes from the Palestinian side is of questionable veracity, many of those Gaza pics are 100 percent real. Adults and children with head injuries and missing limbs.

And no geysers of blood anywhere!

Before I got booted from Twitter, I was trolling flaggots who posted Gaza photos by commenting, “Where’sthebloodwhere’sthebloodwhere’stheblood?” And the flaggot response reminded me of hippie chick Tina: “No, no, ‘where’s the blood’s’ not supposed to be used for that! It’s a tool for fighting Obammer GUN GRABBERS! You don’t use it to help Zionists!”

With Gaza, we’ve seen limbs blown off just like in Boston and no geyser of blood. We’ve seen head wounds that don’t flood a city block. And we’ve seen fewer than six people carry supine bodies (Roberts, the worthless cretin who thinks six humans can’t carry a body, gets his books published by Penguin. Penguin! While I’m considered too toxic for even small-time publishers. That fucking stings. Yes, it’s self-indulgent for me to bring that up, but when exactly should it stop bothering me?).

So I’m curious if any flaggots are willing to admit that “where’s the blood” was always an idiotic trope.

Well, they don’t have to. Because the flaggot community has moved on. Sure, there are still a few odd “where’s the blooders” on Twitter—some tards never understand when a catchphrase is played out—but for the major flaggots, the days of “where’s the blooding” every mass shooting are over.

Why?

Three reasons, all overlapping.

First, Obammer’s come and gone, and he didn’t “take yur gunz.” Of course, you can say, “Yeah, but he’s secretly controlling Joe and Kamala, and they’ll take yur gunz and take the rap,” but c’mon, how many times can you predict a gun grab that never comes?

Second, flaggots have become political preterists (“we’re in the post–End Times”). No more predicting future gun-grabs; the “enemy” made its move already by stealing the 2020 election and framing MAGA for J6. The apocalypse has happened. Saying “They’ll take yer gunz” is passé. The Antichrist “took yer president.”

Everyone’s favorite Musk-coddled neo-Nazi Stew Peters summed it up in a recent tweet: “We’ve been programmed to sit and do NOTHING while astroturfed riots and other false flags happen all around us. Why? To keep you from noticing that our elections are 100% FAKE and stolen.”

Get it? Those little false-flag shootings Jones/Fetzer/Roberts used to spend hours deconstructing? Distractions, all! While those guys were “where’s the blooding” a Walmart massacre, yer elekshun was being stollen!

MAGA/flaggot obsession with 2020 “vote fraud” and J6 “frame-up” has made mass-shooting sleuthing passé.

Add to that the third thing—Jews! A segment of the far-right got tired of talking about nameless “theys” carrying out tiny ops in schools and movie theaters and malls. Time to name the they and paint larger portraits. The Jews are destroying civilization as we know it! Who has time to “where’s the blood” a measly restaurant shooting! That’s a symptom. Fight the cause: Baron Rothschild!

“Where’s the blood” was reactive. Today’s young conspiracy tards want to be proactive! Name the they, and take the fight to the they (by saying “wooden doors” a thousand times and putting “Christ is King” in your bio on Twitter; that’ll defeat ’em!).

None of this is unusual; it’s present in all ideological movements: a thirst for the “hard stuff.” “Diplomatic” oldies are eventually eclipsed by “stop beating around the bush—name ’em and slay ’em” youngsters.

The Obama-era Alex Jones nonspecific sleuthing (“Who’s to blame?” “Obammer!” “Yeah, but who’s behind Obammer?” “Uh…elites!”) that supposedly bankrupted Jones via the Sandy Hook civil suit (I’ll believe it when I see it; Jones will be fine. You still donate to Bannon, who embezzled from you. You’ll surely rescue Jones) is not “hard” enough for today’s young rightists.

“Don’t bore me by saying ‘they’; we’re way past that point. I need something more specific.”

Says Elon Musk.

The fact is, there was never an Overton Window. Never something that expands laterally, that “allows more stuff to come through,” that makes ever-more-extreme material “acceptable.”

That was always a nonsensical notion.

There’s an Overton Gateway. It has depth, not width. It’s not something ideologues look at, it’s something they go through, pursuing ever more hardcore extremism, and it need fit no more than one person at a time, though its capacity for one-by-one is endless.

And as idiotic as I used to find “where’s the blood,” I must admit, as I look at the state of Musk’s “slay the Jews” Twitter, I kind of miss it.

Like my hippie chick’s ramblings, it almost seems quaint, grading on a bell curve.

I have never been able to take the political opinions of movie stars terribly seriously. Whilst still a young English teacher, I once taught a future famous Hollywood actress, whom I shall not embarrass by naming here. During a class discussion about politics one day, this girl, then aged 17, solemnly informed me how she would “never vote for the Conservatory Party, because the Conservatory Party are only for rich people, as only rich people have conservatories, don’t they?” (For U.S. readers: A conservatory is British English for what you call a “solarium” or “orangery.”)

The premise wasn’t even correct on its own terms: My current two next-door neighbors on either side each have conservatories, and one is a window cleaner whilst the other works in a warehouse. Presumably, now that she’s a multimillionaire adult, my former student today habitually votes for the Conservatory Party on a regular basis herself? People who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones.

Clooney Tunes
I thought of this perfectly pleasant yet politically ill-informed girl recently when I read her fellow Hollywood star George Clooney’s laughable open letter in The New York Times begging yet another well-known star of stage and prostate screening, Joe Biden, to stand down before it was too late on account of his clear senile dementia, as demonstrated in last month’s embarrassing TV debate with Donald Trump during which he is alleged to have literally shat himself. At last, a leader who always follows through! (Although, in today’s less-than-bipartisan spirit, opponents claim it was actually Trump who dumped.)

Following this, another brain-farting Hollywood titan, Whoopi Goldberg, then went on TV and said she didn’t care if the President soiled himself constantly, as she herself “has poopy days all the time.” Indeed so, she appears to make her hair from long, strung-together beads of them. “I’m gonna stand behind you,” she reassured Biden—probably with a bucket.

Clooney is surely correct to advise Walter Shitty that every player has his entrance, and his exit, and indeed Joe has just announced he is stepping down. All well and good. It’s just that I would question why precisely the arbitrary public intervention of the man whose first notable screen credit was in Return of the Killer Tomatoes was somehow supposed to have been the moment where the debate suddenly shifted and Sleepy Joe finally saw sense before crawling shamefaced away into his crypt for good. If Hollywood really wanted to make a condemnation of Biden’s mental unfitness to so much as change his own diaper, surely it would have had much more impact coming from the mouth of Bruce Willis?

Ronald “Kill All Commies” Reagan, Walt “Hitler Was Right” Disney, and John “I Wish I Could Shoot Injuns for Real” Wayne apart, major Hollywood players are not that well-known for their levels of political acuity, as demonstrated by the fact that, the very month before successfully calling on Joe to drop out, Clooney had quite happily helped him raise $30m in donations for his campaign—a fact George actively mentions in his article. Is he seriously expecting us to believe he didn’t notice Biden was a teensy bit doddery before begging all this cash from duped donors?

Bad Memories
According to George: “It’s devastating to say it, but the Joe Biden I was with three weeks ago at the fund-raiser was not the Joe ‘big F-ing deal’ Biden of 2010. He wasn’t even the Joe Biden of 2020,” as if back then Joe was still somehow as fresh and full of boyish vitality as Pitt the Younger. No, he wasn’t. Back in 2020, Joe the Elder was already a semi-sentient corpse who walked like Asimo and talked like a bad séance, who was confined to making video appearances from his own basement lest he repeatedly humiliate/soil himself in public.

And during his prior term as Barack Obama’s VP, from 2009 to ’17, I distinctly remember another group of my former female students erecting an ironic fake adoring photo shrine to him on their class noticeboard, mocking his drooling and fundamentally useless nature. If they could see this more than a decade ago (and remember, one of them thought there was such a thing as the “Conservatory Party”), then why couldn’t an allegedly well-informed “political insider” like George Clooney see it as recently as last month?

Maybe Clooney himself also has dementia? After all, he appeared to be suffering from false memories in his article himself, which he concluded thus: “Joe Biden is a hero; he saved democracy in 2020. We need him to do it again in 2024 [by immediately visiting Dignitas].”

Sorry, George, but I don’t remember Biden “saving democracy” by winning the White House back in 2020. I just remember an obviously incapable Brezhnev-style gerontocrat scarecrow in a suit being installed in office following a gigantic nationwide media and Big Tech cover-up of his patent late-stage coffin-dodgery and his son’s equally dodgy laptop. But then, perhaps Clooney, as a fully paid-up member of the Democratic media-industrial complex, would just prefer to wipe the slate clean of all that.

Say It Ain’t So, Joe
Biden may have just hobbled reluctantly away from his candidacy on Sunday, after prominent Democrat supporters had begun openly calling his campaign an act of “elder abuse,” but a more cunning political tactic might simply have been to lean into his dementia as a potential electoral asset instead. The main overriding project of today’s obsessively identitarian left is to get America to misremember its past wholesale, as with the 1619 Project hoax. What better figurehead for this program of deliberately selective misremembering than Joe “My Son Beau Died Fighting Nazism at the Alamo” Biden?

Notoriously, Biden has a habit of misremembering his own past. Just consider his implausible claim to have had an “epiphany” about gay marriage way back in high school when, as his father dropped him off at the gates, “I remember about to get out of the car and look to my right and two well-dressed men in suits kissed each other…. And I’ll never forget it, I turned and looked at my dad and he said, ‘Joey, it’s simple. They love each other.’”

And, from that moment on, so he now says, Joe Biden supported gay marriage. Apart from all the many times during his fifty-plus-year political career when he spoke out against it prior to 2012, when he suddenly realized support for the practice might be considered an electoral asset amongst the Democrats’ new, younger, more woke voter base. In any case, he clearly didn’t see two men openly kissing each other outside a high school back in the early-1960s rust belt, did he? If he had genuinely witnessed this deviant and ultrarare sight for the day, Joe’s heartwarming anecdote would actually have run as follows:

“I remember about to get out of the car and look to my right and two well-dressed men in suits kissed each other…. And I’ll never forget it, I turned and looked at my dad and he said, ‘Joey, it’s simple. They love each other. And for this they both must die.’ Then he turned the car straight around and ran them right over, whilst shouting, ‘Keep away from my son’s straight normal asshole, you fucking perverts!’ And I stood there in the playground, laughing and laughing at the two dead groomers, just like all the other kids did. And the teachers too. When the cops turned up, they just shoveled them both into a trash can with spades and said they deserved it. Anyway, please vote Biden-Harris, 2024.”

Total Recall (of the Ballot)
There are plenty more examples of Geriatric Joe recounting “memories” of similarly dubious provenance, the question being whether he was doing this on purpose, to win support with fake politically useful pseudo-anecdotes, or inadvertently, due to a dementia-related condition known as “confabulation,” defined by one medic as being when “You are trying to tell a story, but your brain can’t fill the space, so your brain protects you by making stuff up,” e.g., “My dad used to point out random homos on the street and order me to respect them.”

Then again, there is a third option: Maybe Joe initially just knowingly made these things up, for cynical campaign purposes, before, with an effort of epic self-deception, later coming to believe they were actually true for real, like Baron Munchausen with access to the nuclear button.

Plenty of other politicians these days appear to have done something very similar, as when Hillary Clinton incorrectly claimed to have come under sniper fire in Bosnia, when in fact she was greeted at the airport by an 8-year-old girl who read her a poem and then kissed her.

Biden’s current political opponent Donald Trump, too, is not unknown for being as fond of false memories as he is of false mammaries. Despite this, Trump has inaccurately recollected, “I have the world’s greatest memory. It’s the one thing everyone agrees on.”

No Remembrance of Things Past
Once upon a time, Western politicians (like Trump himself, to be fair, who really did come under actual sniper fire of late) did not waltz straight from university into Parliament or Senate, having genuine interesting experiences from the wider world outside Washington, London, and Brussels to fall back on. Winston Churchill could have regaled voters about the time he was involved in the British Army’s final major cavalry charge during the Battle of Omdurman, or boasted of escaping from a South African prison during the Boer War, and he would actually have been telling the truth.

Today, matters are rather different. Most contemporary politicians’ knowledge of the past appears to be about as extensive as my celebrity ex-student’s knowledge of British conservatories and those who purchase them. They have crafted a world for us all to live in where, by design, there is little true respect for, or knowledge of, the past—a kind of historyless permanent present, in which the only politically “true” past is the politically useful one, as in 1984-cum-1619.

In 2013, doctors were puzzled by patient responses to a visual dementia test in which they were shown photos of incredibly well-known faces like Churchill and asked to put a name to them. Increasingly, participants were drawing a blank: But the true reason turned out not to be a sudden modern-day increase in dementia, but a sudden modern-day increase in sheer historical ignorance. Accordingly, the famous faces were altered: Out went Emperor Hirohito, in came Oprah Winfrey.

Conveniently, therefore, as well as measuring rates of dementia, the test also became highly diagnostic of an entire brain-damaged society with approximately zero accumulated cultural or historical memory to it. “A people without history is not redeemed from time, for history is a pattern of timeless moments,” T.S. Eliot once wrote, although I forget precisely where.

They say voters end up with the politicians they deserve. Maybe, by landing a U.S. President with a brain so shriveled a sniper’s bullet may actually increase its cognitive capacity, like with trepanning, the Free World has indeed now got the leader it merits, at least for a few months more: a dementia-ridden Democrat for a dementia-ridden democracy. Shame Joe’s stepping down. I can’t remember a candidate ever having been so fitting, myself.

The Week’s Most Sheltering, Peltering, and Sweltering Headlines

HONEST GAYBE
The problem with declaring everyone gay is that eventually you run out of heroes to spotlight because gay stops being special. Ever since LGBTOs (“BTO” because “You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet” is the anthem of every tranny who flashes schoolgirls) abandoned the “10 percent standard” of the 1980s (“10 percent of people in the world are gay”) for “everyone’s gay, everyone’s trans, we’re the majority,” LGBTs have lost the niche market that gives birth to things like Black History Month, Black Inventors Hour (“traffic lights and peanut butter. Damn, we still have 59 minutes left”), and Black Mathematicians Minute (“Benjamin Banneker and Katherine Johnson. So what do we do with the next 57 seconds?”).

Out of necessity, gays have started vulturing older icons, claiming dominion over the already revered.

A new Hollywood documentary, Lover of Men: The Untold History of Abraham Lincoln, claims to present evidence that the Great Emancipator was more like the “Great! A man sips peter.”

That pun is so bad it qualifies for the death penalty in ten states.

The film explores Lincoln’s “deep ties with daring, dashing guys and includes interviews with historians from Harvard, Columbia, Brown, Wellesley and Rutgers. One expert sums it up: ‘Lincoln probably slept in the same bed with more men than he did with women.’”

So from now on, “Lincoln slept here” should be followed by “and you might want to wash the sheets.”

Still, if the film’s correct, it finally explains why Lincoln chose Johnson as his VP.

The movie also makes a few questionable claims about Lincoln’s assassination, including that he was only at the theater that night because he thought it was going to be a musical (“oh my God, where are the tights? The dancers? The pizzazz?”) and Booth only shot him because he wouldn’t stop loudly bitching about the costumes (“what seamstress put together that monstrosity? I could sew better sinking on the Hunley, girlfriend”).

Perhaps the strongest argument for Lincoln not being gay is that no gay man would try to rock a beard without a mustache. “Okay, that is like seriously Appalachia hillbilly. Unless you’re about to kill a Hatfield, spend a day at a hair salon, sweetie. Our chins aren’t for curtains…or drapes.”

RHETORIC BUTLER
Following the attempted assassination of Donald Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania, and the killing and wounding of his followers, a nervous nation looks for a savior. Who can rescue us from this tempestuous political moment?

Only one man: Washington Post chief correspondent Dan Balz.

You may know his father, Claude Balz, author of the classic study of survival in the Kalahari, “Naked in a Lion’s Den.”

Or his brother Kenneth, aka “bro Ken Balz.”

Or his Sikh brother-in-law Balu Balz, who’s never been good with women.

And the less said about uncle Harry Balz, the better.

Last week Dan Balz penned a magnum opus in the Post calling for all sides—all sides, you hear?—to lower the fevered political rhetoric. He cited the 2017 baseball field shooting of GOP Congressman Steve Scalise as evidence of “Democrats going too far,” and the hammer attack on Nancy Pelosi’s husband as an example of Republicans doing the same…though the Scalise shooter was a die-hard leftist partisan with an agenda while the Pelosi attacker was a schizo homeless guy who flung poo, but sure, both attacks are the same.

It should be added that following the Scalise shooting, the WaPo—Balz’s paper—described the would-be assassin as “always angry” and “disagreeable” to all he encountered, yet nevertheless publicly shamed the shooter’s Republican neighbors for not befriending him.

For reporters at a paper-of-record to react to the attempted assassination by a Democrat of a Republican congressman by attacking his Republican neighbors for not being nice to him even as they admit that he was an “always angry sourpuss,” then to come out and say, “Hey, let’s not be partisan hacks,” well…that takes Balz.

Like Dan Balz’s great-grandfather Ignatius Ronald Balz.

Also known as I. Ron Balz.

JULYTEENTH
The Texas slaves who learned in June 1865 that they were free had a letdown a month later. No EBT cards or DEI hiring, no New York Times opining on how slaves invented everything.

So it only makes sense to observe Julyteenth, marking the end of the initial Juneteenth exuberance.

Here’s how Julyteenth played out this year.

Estinfil Filsmagre sounds like a cheap “Touch of Gray” hair-dye knockoff.

“Estinfil…fills my gray!”

But in fact he’s a murderous thug who lucked out. Locked in a Broward County cell for stabbing a dude, but unable to have an in-person hearing due to Covid, Filsmagre caught a break when the county decided to clean out a bunch of “time-serveds” to clear backlog. “Filsmagre is back at home with his daughter!” crowed the Miami-Dade College “justice” newsletter.

But Filsmagre didn’t stay with his daughter long (you expected otherwise?). He moved to Indianapolis, knife in hand, looking to celebrate his escape from Miami and child support at a bar called Miami’s Garden (“it’s like home, but no baby mamma”). According to police, Filsmagre became enraged because…you think he needed a reason?…and stabbed nine muthas outside the bar.

But this is black Indianapolis, where stabbed muthas fight back. Bystanders beat Filsmagre so bad, his mug shot is a living illustration of “Leroy looked like a jigsaw puzzle with a couple o’ pieces gone.”

Seriously—compare the Miami mug shot to the Indianapolis one. “Bad Bad Leroy Broward” had a lousy Julyteenth.

Then there’s Kimbrady Carriker. A year ago he celebrated Juneteenth by shooting seven muthas in Philly, killing five. Carriker was condemned to a mental institution, but last month his lawyer announced that he’s well again. Cured.

A Juneteenth miracle!

Carriker’s father, Grady Carriker (who looks like the most pissed-off Morgan Freeman ever), celebrated the news by pouring gasoline on his own mother and cousin and setting them on fire.

Those Carrikers…what characters!

Dad and son can now share a cell and reminisce about better times…and future crimes.

NO PUN(JAB) INTENDED
Last week was not a banner(jee) one for Indians and Pakis. First, in Queens, an immigrant cabdriver named Jamshaid Choudhry (not to be confused with “Jam Shed Chowdery,” the New England version of “Love Shack” (“JAAAAM SHED…CHOWDERY!”), used his shoe to decapitate a statue of Jesus/a> in front of a Catholic church (Our Lady of the Crappily Built Statues). Police knew the attacker was Muslim not Hindu because Hindus only add heads to gods, they never remove them (“your God only has one head and two arms? I pity you, sahib”).

Still, a Hindu made news a different way.

To the average Indian, the biggest decision in a day is, “Should I burn my mouth with curry or my bride with gasoline?” An Indian with dignity is a mythical creature…the Loch Ganesh Monster.

Texas Democrat Taral Patel, handpicked by Biden to serve as White House liaison for housing, urban development, and disaster recovery (another brilliant Biden move, as India lacks housing, has zero urban development, and loses about a million people a year to disasters), is currently running for county commissioner of Fort Bend.

Last September, Patel got his campaign off to a rollicking start by claiming “racist harassment by right-wingers” on Facebook. And indeed, the comments were nasty, mocking his faith, questioning his immigration status, even threatening to lynch him.

Patel’s GOP opponent suspected that those “racist comments” were a little too over-the-top. So he went to the local DA. And last week Patel was arrested; investigators were able to trace the hateful Facebook accounts straight to his own computer.

Tragic that a man born to hack the computers of old white people kept his own PC so poorly secured. It’s the ultimate irony when an Indian needs help from Microsoft security.

DOOMMATES
Local Republicans had a bad week too. Marisa Simonetti is a “conservative” running for Hennepin County, Minnesota, commissioner.

Simonetti checks every MAGA politibimbo box: huge breasts, crazy eyes, manic speech, a “last thing Phil Hartman saw on earth” psycho smile, out-of-wedlock kids, and a record of real estate fraud and domestic abuse.

In other words, Trump’s dream VP pick.

But alas, ’twas not to be. Simonetti had brought a roommate into her leased house without asking permission from the home’s owner. And last week she impulsively decided that she wanted the roommate gone, so she ran through the house screaming GLORY JESUS HALLELUJAH while banging metal pots, and when the housemate emerged due to the racket, Simonetti threw a live tarantula at her.

Funny enough, that’s Steve Bannon’s strategy for dealing with Kim Jong-Un during the next Trump administration.

Simonetti was arrested. She explained to the media that she threw the arachnid because she’s a “silly goose” who was “trying to re-create a scene from Home Alone.”

That’s an actual quote.

Maybe choosing Palin was McCain’s greatest crime against conservatism. Look what the hell that started.

Meanwhile, an Arab in Miami went from reading Mohammed to bleeding mo’ harmed. When Hamid Hamidi rented a room from hot Latina fashion model Mariel Rivera Samuels, he told his imam, “Forget the suicide bombing; I don’t need the virgins—I’ve got my reward on earth!”

What Hamidi didn’t know was that Samuels was also a hot Latina schizophrenic, and last week she lunged at her Rumi-mate with a butcher knife, trying to murder him. When the panicked Hamid barricaded himself in his room and called the cops, Eva Long-gorier charged them, forcing them to open fire, turning Salma Hayek into Salma Bye-ek.

Farewell to Trump’s Latino outreach coordinator.

Electoral politics, particularly in Western Europe, is a toxic amalgam of power-madness, low cunning, and moral grandiosity. Of these, as St. Paul said of charity, moral grandiosity is the greatest: that is to say, not the best or most important in this particular context, but the most harmful.

I suppose it is only natural for a man or woman who has been legitimately elected—according to preestablished rules—to suppose that he or she is not only popular but entitled to direct affairs according to his or her own brilliant conceptions. Unfortunately, in Britain we are beginning to see the truth of this fact of human nature.

The man newly in charge of Britain’s energy supplies, by the name of Ed Miliband, had decided that exploration and licensing of gas and oil reserves in the North Sea will henceforth not be permitted. At the same time, thousands of acres of productive farmland will be given over to wind farms and solar panels, though Britain often produces more electricity by wind than it can use—or, more importantly, store. Moreover, the wind does not always blow and the sun does not always shine very brightly, as visitors to its shores have often remarked, so that Britain would need at least four times as many solar panels as sunnier climes to produce any given amount of electricity other than the most minimal.

There is absolutely no prospect that it can do entirely without gas and oil in the near future, so it will have to continue to import them. It already has some of the most expensive energy in the world, putting its industry (such as remains) at a disadvantage. Furthermore, the effect on global climate change, assuming the theory of greenhouse gases being responsible for it is a hundred percent correct, would be negligible even if, per impossibile, Britain abandoned all use of fossil fuel, because the country emits only 1 percent of global greenhouse gases anyway. The annual increase alone in emissions of countries such as China and India is far greater than the British total.

So what is Mr. Miliband playing at? To use farmland in a very overcrowded country to erect thousands of unsightly windmills bespeaks a kind of Marxist hatred of the countryside, and of the rural idiocy to which Marx referred. Unsightliness is of no concern to environmentalists, who perceive notional emissions of carbon dioxide more vividly than what they see with their eyes. Miliband’s father was a Marxist professor who lived at a time when smokestacks were still a symbol of progress in Soviet iconography; they have been replaced by windmills in current “progressive” ideological iconography.

Mr. Miliband, a British minister, has, I surmise, his mind firmly focused on the whole world and its ecosphere, which he wants to save, rather than on the small corner of it for which he carries important responsibilities. It is too boring for him, not sufficiently interesting, merely to ensure that old ladies can afford to heat their homes in the dead of winter. Who needs old ladies anyway? They have had their time, in which they probably kept themselves warm for years by burning coal. It is payback time: Let them shiver, so long as moral perfection is achieved and the planet is saved. But the idea that China is going to alter its conduct because of the magnificently self-sacrificing policies of Britain could occur only to a man in the grip of self-importance rising to the level of megalomania, the occupational disease of professional politicians.

But of course, Mr. Miliband is not the only one of his type. Preening petty politicians are by no means uncommon. They have only to hear of a bad idea to alight on it like a fly on ordure. Moral grandiosity is to them what honey is to bears.

Take the case of Sweden. It is not very long ago that much of the Swedish intelligentsia prided itself on Sweden being what it called “a moral superpower.” Perhaps Swedes hadn’t fully recovered from the Battle of Poltava in 1709, which ended Sweden’s status as a great European power forever, when Peter the Great defeated Charles XII. Rich, equal, and peaceful, Sweden was a beacon to the world, or thought that it was. It aided Africa generously, including by funding Julius Nyerere, who had what so many intellectuals thought was the bright idea of herding Tanzanian peasants from where they were living into collectivized villages. What generosity (except that it was an economic disaster)!

Not contented with being merely a peaceful, prosperous, egalitarian country, a beacon to the world in its own estimate and that of many others, it began to turn some of itself into a refugee camp. Surely when refugees saw the wonders of Swedish social democracy, thought the bien-pensant Swedes, they would soon convert to it? Alas, this seems not to have happened to any great extent; on the contrary, Sweden is now a crime-ridden country to an extent not previously imaginable. It has more gang killings, and more violent youths, than any other country in Western Europe—and Britain is no slacker in this regard.

It has to be emphasized that Sweden was under no moral obligation to accept refugees or migrants. It did so merely from an abstract wish to maintain its philosophically kitschy status as a moral superpower. Now it has a problem to which there may be no solution, though of course no one can predict the future with exactitude.

Nearly 7 percent of the population of Sweden—30 percent of Malmo—was born in Islamic countries, and given the higher fecundity of Muslims, the percentage of Muslims in the population is bound to increase even without further immigration. Of course, there is some integration, and a large proportion of the immigrant population gives no problem; but that is not the same as saying that this mass immigration has brought any benefit to the Swedish population to balance its disadvantages, other than a more diverse cuisine, which is often mistaken for multiculturalism by those who do not have to take the consequences of what they preach.

Of course, in a welfare state the number of dependents has constantly to be refreshed, under the morally grandiose guise of universal compassion for the unfortunate—of whom, unfortunately, there are some billions.

Theodore Dalrymple’s latest book is Ramses: A Memoir, published by New English Review.

Oh help. As I write, the mumbling egg plant in the White House shovels money and arms into two wars, neither necessary, and he and Lockheed Martin prepare for a third, also unnecessary, over Taiwan, which is none of their business. Since in the Federal Bubble on the Potomac there is chatter at the mental level of water-dwelling marsupials of sending American troops into these, perhaps a bit of thought might be a good idea.

Begin with the dismal record of the American military in actually fighting wars. Go back a way. In Vietnam, American forces, with enormous superiority in air power, artillery, armor, and helicopters–lost. In Afghanistan, with even greater superiority over peasants with rifles and not much-else, the American military–lost. Just now in the Red Sea an aircraft carrier and several destroyers have for months tried to keep ragtag Yemenis from blocking traffic to the crucial Suez Canal and–failed. After more than two years of pushing the war in Ukraine, America’s puppet army is–losing.

And now Washington wants to fight…China.

Why undertake anything so obviously cockamamie? The reasons are several. Start with the insular complacency of a city long-accustomed to immense international power and unable to see that it no longer has it. Many who hold the reins in the city are old men who remember the world of decades ago when an aircraft carrier could intimidate almost any country, including China. This isn’t then, but the old have difficulty noticing. Add a Congress incontinently ignorant of anything but the politics of Washington and of their home states. There is nobody on the House China committee who reads, speaks, or writes Chinese. Yet Congress inveighs fiercely against Beijing like a swarm of feral hamsters.

We have all heard repeatedly that America is the Indispensable Nation, Exceptional, the Sole Superpower, the Shining City on a Hill that other countries want to imitate. I will hope that most of us take this as the forgettable political boilerplate that it is. But there are many in Washington who actually believe it. They are smug, self-assured, and unable to think beyond the walls imposed by belief. Many are highly intelligent, making it easy to ignor the opinions of lesser mortals. They read each other, talk to each other, and drink together.
The sense of superiority, even invincibility, leads to disasters. If you are the Sole Superpower, you don’t really have to ask what other countries can do, think or want. You don’t have to plan realistically or ask what if?

What if, for example, the Russian fleet shows up in support of China? If North Korea seized the chance and invades South Korea, giving Washington two major wars at once? If China sinks tankers going to Japan and Taiwan, neither of which has oil? If Washington insouciantly bombs the Chinese mainland, which it will, and China or Russia hits the Pentagon and Capitol with sub-launched missiles? What does the sole superpower then do?

Consider the war in Ukraine. Washington went into it (the rest of the country didn’t know where it was) sure that losing was impossible. After all, Russia was backward, technologically primitive, and (as we heard over and over) “a gas station pretending to be a country.” If there was an effort actually to understand what Russia could do, no sign of this appeared.

Washington was, however, sure of many things. Russia could not withstand a long war. It has. Its currency would collapse. It didn’t. (Remember Field Marshal Joe in the White House chortling that “The ruble is rubble?” It wasn’t.) The Russian public would rise and oust Putin. It didn’t. The rest of the world would rally around Washington and isolate Russia diplomatically. It didn’t. The sanctions would collapse the Russian economy. They didn’t. NATO’s superior weapons and tactics would crush Russian forces. They didn’t. Russia would run out of artillery ammunition and missiles. It didn’t. NATO did.

All of this demonstrates a catastrophic failure of the intelligence agencies, an ignorance of, among other things, Russia’s economic structure and capacity, will to fight, motives, and weaponry. For this we pay billions.

So: Washington has painted itself into a corner. If it negotiates, this will amount to a surrender. The gargantuan inflamed egos will not easily accept that the Sole Superpower has just lost in a war it concocted itself. A loss would disastrously reduce Washington’s military credibility. NATO might realize that it had been taken for a ride and decline to do it again. Taiwan might figure out that it was being set up to fight China, a short distance across the water, as a second Ukraine.

Possibilities Washington didn’t foresee, smugly regarding Russia as an enlarged Guatemala. A desperate Washington is capable of fathomless stupidity. There is talk of provoking a Europewide war, even attacking Russia itself. Oh good.

Here I offer Fred’s Fourth Military Law: Military stupidity comes in three levels: Normally stupid; really, really stupid; and invading Russia. It isn’t good for you. Charles XII tried it, as did Napoleon and Hitler. With identical results.

Inside the Beltway, “American boots on the ground” sounds scary, even decisive. No. American weaponry, its chief purpose being to funnel money to the arms industry, has performed poorly in the Ukraine. The vaunted M1 tank burns like any other. Russia has a large advantage in missiles, both in numbers and sophistication, including hypersonics. The F16 fighter, apparently thought of as a sort of hypergalactic Star Wars craft, first flew in 1976, though it is not actually a biplane. The enlisted ranks in particular are rotted by low recruiting standards, diversity hiring, sexual curiosities and homosexuals. One thinks of the 35th Squealing Demons Regiment, or the frightful Tranny Berzerkers.

Bear in mind that a military is less a fighting force than a psychological condition, an element of this being pathological optimism. An army will not fight if it is told that it consists of mediocre infantry, poorly trained and led, and not really as well armed or led as the potential enemy. Consequently they are regularly assured that they are the most formidable, death-dealing troops in this or any nearby universe.

This makes for misjudgement, as does the fact that wars, whatever their alleged causes, are actually consequences of secretions from those parts of men that women say men think with. Countries fight war after war after war after war, not because it is a good idea but because it is what men do, like packs of wild dogs.

This is why wars so seldom turn out as the aggressors expect. In 1914 Germany started WWI, and lost. In 1939, it started WWII, and lost. In 1941 the Japanese attacked America, and lost. After this, the French re-invaded Vietnam, and lost. Then the Americans invaded Vietnam, and lost. The Russians invaded Afghanistan, and lost. Then the Americans invaded Afghanistan, and lost. Then the Americans started a war in Ukraine, and are losing. Now they want a war with China.

I’m going to change my phylum. This one doesn’t look to have much future, and anyway it is embarrassing.

If you were worried that liberals would tone down the apocalyptic rhetoric about Donald Trump after Saturday’s assassination attempt — He’s an existential threat to democracy! a fascist! an aspiring dictator! an authoritarian! Hitler! — you can rest easy.

Apparently, the left has concluded that the best way to avoid political violence in the future is to ratchet up their dire warnings about the end of democracy presaged by a second Trump presidency. (That’s almost as good as their plan to lower deficits by spending more.)

Two days after the shooting, Vox announced in a headline, “Yes, it’s still fair to call Trump a threat to democracy.”

President Joe Biden agreed, telling NBC’s Lester Holt, “How do you talk about the threat to democracy, which is real, when [Trump] says things like he says.” (Otherwise, it was a great interview except that the president kept calling Lester “Bryant.” Amazingly, it’s necessary to add: That’s a joke.)

MSNBC’s Joy Reid called Trump “the greatest purveyor and promoter of political violence, really, since anyone can remember.” Pro tip for Biden defenders: Maybe don’t bring up people’s ability to remember things.

I’m not sure how to measure who the biggest “purveyor and promoter of political violence” is, but I can do a body count. And when it comes to political violence, the left beats the living daylights out of the right, so to speak,

Granted, we’re only 248 years into this experiment, but so far, every single shooting of a national politician in the U.S. has been committed by a person on the left — or someone even more deranged than a liberal.

A few would-be assassins were simply delusional nuts. Richard Lawrence, for example, was a house painter who thought he was King Richard III of England. He tried to shoot President Andrew Jackson because he thought the United States owed him money.

The rest were political activists who may have been crazy enough to be left-wingers but were not so crazy as to believe they were King Richard III.

Democrat, actor and peace activist John Wilkes Booth shot President Abraham Lincoln on April 14, 1865, because, as he explained in a letter to his family, he loved “peace more than life.” (But he really wanted to direct.)

Charles J. Guiteau, who shot President James Garfield in 1881, had a long relationship with a utopian commune, the Oneida Community, where free love and communal child-rearing were practiced — and this was before Hillary Clinton’s “It Takes a Village”!

Leon Czolgosz, who killed President William McKinley in 1901, was a socialist and anarchist inspired by socialist radical Emma Goldman.

Giuseppe Zangara plotted to kill both Republican President Herbert Hoover and President-elect Franklin Roosevelt, intending to assassinate “all capitalist presidents and kings.” He just missed Roosevelt, killing Chicago Mayor Anton Cermak instead.

Lee Harvey Oswald, who shot President John F. Kennedy on Nov. 22, 1963, was a stone-cold communist since reading Communist propaganda as a teenager. He moved to the USSR, and when his application for Soviet citizenship was denied, slit his wrists. He then moved with his Russian wife and child back to the U.S., planning to move to Cuba and biding his time passing out “Fair Play for Cuba” leaflets.

Inspired by Communist and Socialist Party literature, Oswald first tried to kill Maj. Gen. Edwin A. Walker, a John Bircher; then former Vice President Richard Nixon; and finally did kill President Kennedy — or so the mafia and the CIA would have us believe!

Upon his arrest, Oswald immediately called John Abt, lawyer for the American Communist Party, saying he wanted Abt to defend him so he could use the trial to showcase his Marxist beliefs.

Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme, who shot at President Gerald Ford in 1975, was part of Charles Manson’s countercultural hippie cult. She pulled a gun on Ford because she was upset about the plight of the California redwood — which put her on the shortlist for a MacArthur “genius” grant. Sadly, a woman has to do twice as much as a man …

Seventeen days later, Sara Jane Moore tried to kill Ford because, she said, “the government had declared war on the left.”

(Remarkably, these two assassination attempts on her husband didn’t lead Betty Ford into any sort of self-destructive behavior, thank goodness!)

In the entire history of the nation, only two senators and two congressmen have been assassinated. Three of the four were killed by “progressives” for political reasons.

The first member of Congress to be assassinated was Republican James M. Hinds of Arkansas. He was killed in 1868 by secretary of the Democratic Committee of Monroe County George A. Clark.

Sen. Robert Kennedy was killed on June 5, 1968, by Sirhan Sirhan, a Palestinian extremist angry with Kennedy for his support of Israel. (Luckily, that was the last recorded incident of extremist political violence by a Palestinian ever since, as far as I know.)

The most recent assassination of a member of Congress was in 1978, when Rep. Leo Ryan was killed by members of Jim Jones’ left-wing cult in Guyana.

There are other, less homicidal comparisons to be made.

No conservative has ever run at a secretary of State, waving bloody hands in her face (Code Pink’s Desiree Anita Ali-Fairooz at Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice when she was testifying before Congress).

No conservative has ever hit a Democratic politician in the face with a stupid sign, or attacked him as he mowed his lawn, breaking his ribs. (GOP Senate candidate Rand Paul in 2010; and again Sen. Paul in 2017).

No conservative has ever sneaked into a Democratic National Convention and heckled the speaker (Obama bundler Jodie Evans at Sarah Palin during the 2008 Republican National Convention).

No conservative has ever shot up the Democratic congressional baseball team to protest a Democratic president, as a Trump-hating Bernie Sanders supporter did to Republicans in 2017 (James T. Hodgkinson, wounding five, Rep. Steve Scalise critically).

Before you start wailing about how we “almost lost our democracy on Jan. 6,” that was the only right-wing mob violence in U.S. history. And we’ll never hear the end of it. Your grandchildren will be in nursing homes and Jan. 6 will still be at the top of the news feed.

Pretty weak tea, compared to the epic violence exhibited the previous year by BLM protesters, ginned up by the police-hating media.

Jan. 6 carnage: One person died — protester Ashley Babbitt, who was killed in cold blood by a black Capitol Police officer for trespassing; and $2.7 million in property damage.

BLM carnage: 25 deaths, thousands of injured law enforcement officers, hundreds more hospitalized, $2 billion worth of property damage, and torched stores, neighborhoods and police precincts.

Liberals accusing the former president of inciting political violence is factually incorrect, deeply ironic and slightly silly. (Other than that, good point!) Trump needs to hear Biden’s thoughts on political violence like he needs another hole in the head.

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