After yet another assassination attempt on Donald Trump — or as The New York Times calls it, “what the FBI is calling an assassination attempt” — it’s time for Trump to hire Blackwater to do his security. (You can choose your own pronouns, but it’s up to the Times to decide if someone tried to assassinate you.)
My last suggestion along these lines was this:
“Dear Bureau of Prisons: Please get Jeffrey Epstein to a supermax prison pronto, or the people who want him dead will make sure we never know the truth. ACT NOW!” — posted on Twitter, 1:05 a.m., July 25, 2019
They didn’t move him, and three weeks later, Epstein was dead. I’d rather not be right this time, although neither he nor Trump built the wall.
You may have noticed that, instead of taking readers through the facts that lead to my point, I began with the conclusion. Trump isn’t known for being a detailed reader, so I had to put it up front.
But here’s my reasoning.
Contrary to the general public’s insane idea that the various U.S. intelligence and law enforcement agencies are all-knowing super sleuths, the truth is they know nothing about anything.
Only in Hollywood movies are intelligence agencies repositories of wisdom, courage and derring-do. In real life, a Secret Service agent isn’t Clint Eastwood, matching wits with evil genius John Malkovich to save the president’s life, but a bum passed out drunk in bed with a Colombian whore hours before President Barack Obama arrives for an international summit.
Let’s review just a few of the protective branches’ greatest hits, starting with the CIA, the most falsely admired agency. If nothing else comes of this column, I’d at least like to reduce the number of ignoramuses attributing superpowers to the CIA, as if we’re talking about James Bond and not Paul Blart: Mall Cop.
CIA, aka the Most Discredited Intel Agency on the Planet:
The CIA didn’t see 9/11 coming, couldn’t locate Osama bin Laden for a decade, had no inkling the USSR was on the verge of collapse throughout the ’80s, and was stunned by the 1979 Iranian revolution.
This is all pretty common knowledge about an elite, top-secret agency with a billion-dollar budget, having been reported in major media outlets — e.g.:
— The New York Times, March 29, 1987: “The Central Intelligence Agency has concluded that the Soviet economy significantly improved last year, putting the agency at odds with some Western specialists.”
Months later, the USSR was bankrupt.
— The Washington Post, Dec. 8, 1985: “Five months before the downfall of the Shah of Iran, according to the Senate Intelligence Committee, the CIA concluded that ‘Iran is not in a revolutionary or even a pre-revolutionary situation.’ A month later the [Defense Intelligence Agency] asserted that ‘the shah is expected to remain actively in power over the next 10 years.'”
In short order, the shah was fleeing for his life as hundreds of Americans were taken hostage by Islamic lunatics.
In another triumph for these all-knowing prophets, in 1999, NATO bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade by accident because the CIA had failed to update the addresses of foreign embassies.
Among the many enemy spies the CIA didn’t notice in its own ranks was Aldrich Ames, whose betrayal led to the execution or imprisonment of dozens of Soviet sources. Despite the fact that Ames was a drunk, an adulterer and living well beyond his means, the CIA didn’t realize he was a Soviet spy for eight years. Hey, anybody can have a bad few decades.
And don’t forget that, during the 2020 presidential campaign, it was former CIA acting director Michael Morell who organized the letter signed by “51 intelligence officers” claiming Hunter Biden’s laptop was “Russian disinformation.”
The only thing provable about CIA agents is that they know less about the world than anyone who isn’t a CIA agent.
FBI:
Which of these is your favorite FBI moment?
— A yearslong, multimillion-dollar Russia investigation instigated by a corrupt, Trump-hating FBI agent, who pushed the Hillary-supporting DOJ brass to sign off on multiple FISA warrants against American citizens, based on a nonsense “Russian dossier” compiled by someone being paid by the Hillary Clinton campaign.
— Shooting dead a woman holding her child, a 14-year-old boy, and a dog at Ruby Ridge.
— Incinerating more than 80 men, women and children to death in Waco, Texas (with assistance from crack ATF and DEA teams).
— Blowing off Phoenix FBI agent Ken Williams’ detailed memo two months before the 9/11 attack warning FBI higher-ups that a lot of Muslims were taking flight lessons, saying it looked like a “coordinated effort” by Osama bin Laden. Appalled by the agent’s Islamophobia, the bureau ignored his report.
— Clearing Islamic terrorist Omar Mateen shortly before he slaughtered 49 people at an Orlando nightclub.
— Refusing to follow up on repeated warnings about Parkland, Florida, mass shooter Nikolas Cruz.
— Dropping its investigation of recent school shooter Colt Gray because he told them his computer had been hacked.
At least under J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI was competent. Today, the bureau is the Social Justice Warrior version of the Keystone Cops.
Secret Service:
Rounding out this very brief review of the crackerjack performance of U.S. protective agencies is the one in the news this week, the Secret Service.
It’s bad enough that a dozen agents engaged in the aforementioned drunken whoring in Colombia while allegedly doing “advance work” for Obama in 2012. But guess how they were caught? One of the agents got into a screaming match with a Cartagena prostitute over her payment. Suggestion for a new Secret Service motto: Immoral and Stupid.
The following year, Secret Service agents were found passed out in the hallway of a Netherlands hotel the day before Obama arrived, and two other agents drunkenly wrecked a car in the Florida Keys. After that, the service issued a new rule: Agents must be sober for 12 hours before the beginning of their shift protecting the president. Good to know.
At least in Florida this week, Secret Service agents noticed that someone was pointing a gun at Trump. In 2011, illegal alien Oscar Ortega-Hernandez riddled the White House with bullets, but when a Secret Service agent tried to respond, his supervisor ordered him to stand down, saying there had been no shots fired. The shooting was only discovered days later, when an alert housekeeper found glass all over the floor where Ortega-Hernandez had shot out a window.
Although there are plenty of impressive individuals within these agencies — like Ken Williams, blown off by his superiors — they’re trapped in the maw of a criminally incompetent federal government.
After two assassination attempts on Trump within three months, it’s time to stop believing in Hollywood fantasies and get Trump some real security. He should hire Blackwater today.
“Wir schaffen das”—we’ll manage—will go down in history as true a prediction as the one by the Führer of a 1,000-year Reich. For any of you unaware of “Mutti’s” prediction, Angela Merkel said it back in 2015 when she took in one million Middle Eastern refugees. Adding insult to injury, Germany then went ahead and took in another cool million Africans in 2022. As a result of all this, I now read that Germany is about to rethink its borders, or at least try to stem the flood of refugees rushing to cash in, but that’s a bit like that old cliché of locking the barn after the horse has bolted.
Never mind. Immigration is the European topic most likely to inspire a circular firing squad of E.U. big shots. They’re the ones who insisted on open borders some thirty years ago, and instead of hanging their heads in shame, they’re now putting out cautious bulletins about ever-closer union being put on a waiting list for a while. These Brussels clowns should be forced to clean latrines of immigrant hostels for at least ten years. Hammered by illegal immigration and facing social meltdown, the Brussels dream is revealed as the nightmare it always was and is. In an age of global migration, doing away with national borders is the equivalent of leaving a bottle of whiskey in the bedroom of a recovering alcoholic.
Take it from Taki, open borders will be the end of Europe as we know it. There is no way that the old continent of 745 million souls can survive if 400 million Africans land on our shores. Surely you must think I’m joking, but actually, I’m not. Mind you, it is happening as I write this and will probably take a century, but if things remain as they are, I cannot see white Europeans being in the majority fifty years down the line. Corrupt African leaders, draught, and climate change will drive African hordes north, no ifs or buts about it. I just read an item about the Nigerian president purchasing a multimillion-dollar jet that swells his fleet of private jets to twelve. President Bola Tinubu’s latest toy is a customized Airbus A330, on which he flew to France recently. The new plane has been described as spacious and furnished with state-of-the-art avionics, a customized interior, and a communications system. Now you tell me, dear readers, how out of touch can a man be to ask citizens to endure hardship and austerity while spending $100 million for an airplane to supplant eleven other flying machines?
This is Africa, and the very few have a hell of a lot while the very many have nothing. That the many want to come over to Europe and America is natural, where they think the streets are paved with gold. Well, ending up in settlements on the outskirts of Paris and in the Bronx might be disappointing, but at least they’re safer than back home. The problem is there’s no room—we’re already packed like sardines, at least here in Europe. Human trafficking gangs continue to thrive, bringing over desperate people. Italy has for years been paying Libya and Tunis to clamp down on migrants with some success. But Libya is a failed state and Tunisia is slipping back to autocracy and is therefore unreliable as to how long they will keep migrants on their side of the Mediterranean. In the meantime, people smugglers are busy cramming more people into dinghies and bringing them over.
Back home in the good old United States of America, people do not have to risk their lives on flimsy boats, they can walk in from Mexico. Kamala was assigned the task four years ago to stop illegals crossing the southern border, and she now claims that she did just that. Neither The New York Times nor The Washington Post, nor the three major TV channels, have bothered to call her an outrageous liar as over 10 million people have come into the country during the glorious Biden-Harris years. And now Kamala tells us while cheered on by the media that democracy is on the line if the Donald gets elected. This is exactly the same message the man who just tried to shoot Trump in Florida had posted ad nauseam on his website.
America does not have the same trouble that Europe has as far as size is concerned. She’s big and broad and has thousands of acres and acres of green land. The trouble with Ms. America is that by the year 2045 whites will be a minority, something to think about if you’re young and making plans for the future. That’s in twenty years and three months. So what is wrong with that, you may well ask.
It is natural for people to prefer living with their own kind, whites with whites, browns with browns, and blacks with blacks. The only truly equally multicolored country in the world is Brazil, yet they’ve never had a black, not even a brown, president. By 2035 deaths will outnumber births of white Europeans, and the same applies to the Americas. In the meantime, multinational crime syndicates are ravaging the U.S., with Venezuelan gangs having established themselves in cities like Denver, Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, Miami, and Minneapolis. The only thing that comes to mind is that those right-wing slogans back in Charlottesville in 2017 were wrong. We are being replaced.
So we’ve been through an entire debate, and Kamala Harris still hasn’t explained any of her extraordinary policy flip-flops.
I’m sorry, a person can’t just wake up one morning and abandon their entire worldview without an explanation. I mean, they can try, but no sensible person would take them seriously. Sure, politicians have been calibrating and triangulating their positions since Pericles. Most have been compelled to explain their ideological evolution — or have the decency to lie about it. None has ever relied on an army of anonymous campaign flacks to erase a lifetime of positions.
Well, not until Harris.
We all understand Democrats are desperate to shield voters from their candidate’s mind-numbing tautological rhetoric. Who can blame them, right? “Kamala Harris” is an empty vessel to be filled with the aspirations and dreams of gullible partisans. And allowing her to speak extemporaneously in public would kill all the joy, quicky.
These swirling platitudes and nervous laugh, however, don’t suggest that Harris isn’t bright. They suggest that she has no genuine philosophical or ethical belief system — other than, perhaps, obtaining and using power. Indeed, there’s little chance she will coherently expound on her sudden policy U-turns because they make zero ideological sense.
Let’s remember that Harris hasn’t merely been tinkering with the top marginal tax rate in her economic plan. She’s on the record championing, often quite passionately and definitively, a bunch of completely harebrained extremism.
“Will you fully endorse the Green New Deal tonight?” an Iowa voter asked Harris in 2019.
Yes, she answered. Fully.
“I support a Green New Deal, and I will tell you why,” Harris said. “Climate change is an existential threat.”
At the time, the price tag of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s, D-N.Y., trendy transformative idea to save the planet was about $10 trillion — though, really, the cost of deconstructing modernity is more likely to be in the tens of bajillions.
Harris’ campaign contends she no longer supports policies of the Green New Deal. And that’s fine. But it would probably be helpful to know what initially led her to back the elimination of fossil fuel energy production, the near-banning of meat and air travel, the retrofitting of “every building in America,” and a government-guaranteed job, home and “economic security” for all who are “unable or unwilling” to work.
Because some policy ideas are too dumb to forgive.
Remember, as well, that Harris didn’t endorse these policies as some idealistic young person. She was in her mid-50s, a senator from the most populous state in America who was running for the presidency, the same job she now seeks, when she thought it was a good idea to endorse the elimination of the combustion engine.
The economy is just the start. Harris has yet to answer a single genuine question on why she advocated the elimination of private health insurance or the decriminalization of illegal immigration. These aren’t tweaks in one’s political agenda. They represent two of the most vital issues facing voters.
Harris is also on the record supporting taxpayer-funded universal health care for illegal immigrants. On a 2019 ACLU questionnaire, the future “border czar” wrote that she was in favor of taxpayer-funded gender transition surgeries for detained immigrants — though she also pledged to end detentions altogether.
“Let me just be very clear about this,” Harris assured CNN’s Jake Tapper, every “human being” in the United States, citizen or not, deserves access to all government services, “period.”
The anonymous campaign official tasked with walking back this position failed to let us know why Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee, no longer believes “human beings” deserve care. Though, to be fair, flip-flopping on an appeal to emotion is never easy.
Of course, an appropriately curious voter might also want Harris to clarify whether she regrets helping bail out Minnesota “protesters” who were burning down minority neighborhoods, whether she is still a fan of the “defund the police” movement, whether she still believes Black people should have their own set of laws, or whether she still supports the reparation racket, probably the most un-American vote-buying scheme in existence.
Harris has been able to treat over a dozen major on-the-record stances as if they never existed. Modern campaigns ostensibly exist to provide voters with information so they can make educated decisions.
The vice president, self-styled defender of our sacred democracy, isn’t even pretending it matters.
If occasionally my columns seem to wander, it’s because sometimes the story itself wanders. A columnist can write by-the-numbers drivel (see Townhall), or he can take you on a journey, like a delicate water lily swept along by a river lazy yet purposeful.
Damn, I’m getting faggoty in my old age.
But yeah, sometimes the river takes you someplace interesting.
Last week I was ruing (so much ruing) because my response to Tucker Carlson’s pseudo-historian Darryl Cooper wasn’t getting engagement. I don’t care about views; I’m not talking about virality. I wrote the piece to counter Cooper’s ignorance, and it disturbed me that nobody seemed to care. And that depressed me, because it reinforced what I frequently see on the right: Nobody wants to read Holocaust history unless it’s presented in a lurid manner.
Rightists would rather the history be exciting than accurate. And my Holocaust history is dull. It’s not BASED, just factual. And nobody cares about that. These days history writers need an “oomph,” and at my age the only time I “oomph” is after a bean dinner.
So there I was, ruing, and I see that one of my buddies posted my Cooper column on Twitter (I’m banned for life but I can still monitor the site).
And some guy, screen name “FilmLadd” with 88k followers, replied, “David Cole is a huge mess,” following up that nugget of wisdom with this one: “Dachau was built in 1933. Operation Barbarossa stalling is not why the Holocaust happened. Pure bunk.” Okay, so now I’m no longer ruing, because I’m engaged. This is the first dude to actually respond to the column. It’s a dumb response, but a response all the same. I didn’t know who FilmLadd is, but 88k followers means he’s enough of a somebody for me to cite.
So I starts to think, “Maybe I can get a column out of this.” But then I’m like, “Wait, I just did a dry historical piece last week. I can’t do it two weeks in a row.”
And that’s true.
Still, had I decided to get a column out of it, I’d have pointed out that retards like FilmLadd feed Holocaust denial. Rank amateurs who have zero comprehension of Holocaust historiography beyond having seen a movie or two are the best friends deniers have. Dachau’s opening had nothing to do with the Holocaust. It had everything to do with brutal Nazi repression of dissent, but it was not a “Jewish” camp per se. It was a camp for communists, trade unionists, outspoken anti-Nazis, Jehovah’s Witnesses, etc. There were very few Jews in Dachau initially (that would change in later years). But Dachau was not a “Holocaust camp,” unless you define the Holocaust as “Nazis were meanies but the camps, though unpleasant, were for labor, not extermination,” which is exactly as deniers define it.
When you call Dachau a Holocaust camp, you energize deniers, who giddily point out that “even the camp museum authorities” admit there were no gassings there, but there were sanitation and hygiene facilities and relatively few cremation retorts.
In fact, in 1933, Jews in Germany had it no worse—better, I’d say—than blacks in the American South. The Nuremberg Laws of 1935 were burdensome like Jim Crow, but, as pointed out by Professor Richard Rubinstein in The Myth of Rescue (Routledge, 1997), 37,000 Jews fled Germany in 1933 after the Nazis took power, and by 1935 almost half had returned, thinking, “Oy, I guess I can ride this out.”
Of course, they couldn’t, but unless you respect the timeline, and morons like FilmLadd don’t, you muck everything up and open the door for deniers. “If they wuz exterminatin’ Jews in 1933, how does ya explain the Haavara Agreement (1933–1939)? The Evian Conference (1938)? The Madagascar Plan (1940)? Them things is incompatible with extermination; Hitler just wanted emigration. GYUCK GYUCK HOLOHOAX!”
Every mainstream Holocaust historian agrees that the decision to begin mass-killing Jews was made in 1941. We know this in part because in May 1940 Hitler and Himmler explicitly stated via privately exchanged memo that they didn’t intend to kill Jews or other racial undesirables in the East because doing so would be “Bolshevist.”
A hundred books have been written about exactly when in 1941 the extermination decision was made. That debate’s been raging since the 1970s. The (in the words of Christopher Browning) “fateful months” between June and December 1941 hold many mysteries. We know that by the end of the year Himmler forbade all Jewish emigration, the extermination camps (not labor or penal camps but murder camps) were built or being built, and the Einsatzkommandos in occupied Russia had long moved from killing only Jewish adults to children as well. But there’s a shitload of confusion about whether the decision to start en masse exterminations was made all at once, gradually, in the euphoria of the initial success of Barbarossa, or when the campaign stalled. Historians can’t even agree on when Hitler’s “euphoria” ended. With the collapse of the drive to Moscow? Or earlier, as some records indicate.
Nobody summed up the debate better than Michael Marrus in The Holocaust in History (Brandeis University Press, 1987). The relevant chapter is free. Read it, huh? No, there’s nothing lurid or “based”; it’s just solid history. Forget your groypers, forget your influencers; learn to appreciate a good historian, and maybe you won’t inadvertently encourage deniers by taking something from 1933 that isn’t related to the Holocaust (defined as the physical extermination of Jews just for being Jews) and opening the door for deniers who’ll use your stupidity to give their empty case a veneer of solidity.
These are things I would’ve written had I decided to get a column out of FilmLadd’s imbecilic Dachau comment. But then I got distracted when I looked up FilmLadd’s identity. And I found a new angle, one that also appeals to my pet issues. FilmLadd is a dork named Ladd Ehlinger, and I partly knew the man! This untalented buffoon made a series of viral and terrible campaign ads for conservative candidates in the 2010s, and he used several of my Friends of Abe buddies as actors.
So while I don’t recall ever meeting Ehlinger (and I think I’d remember, as Down syndrome faces are memorable), I do remember cringing at his inept content. Ehlinger never worked for a single candidate who won. Every GOP/independent he produced spots for lost (one ad by Ehlinger was for an Alabama “patriot” who was a chronic shoplifter!). But Ehlinger’s spots went viral. They were shown on Bill O’Reilly and the Sean Hannity Anencephaly Hour, racking up millions of views, because they were purposely outrageous in the worst possible way. For example, in 2011 Ehlinger produced a spot supporting Republican Craig Huey in his race against Democrat Janice Hahn for a California congressional seat. The “ad” attempted to hit Hahn for being soft on crime by showing her as a stripper on a pole as two gold-tooth gangsta black guys rap, “Gimme yo cash, bitch, gimme yo cash, ho,” while firing AKs in the air as photos of Capone, Dillinger, and Charles Manson are flashed over a woman’s twerking ass.
Yep, it went viral. I knew people who were working on the Huey campaign, and they were horrified by it (Ehlinger did the spot independently of the campaign). Huey denounced the ad, but the damage was done; he went down in flames.
Ehlinger’s spots got millions of views, and not a single win (that shoplifting Alabaman came in third!). Oh, Ehlinger got tons of publicity for himself, in the L.A. Times, Forbes, Politico, etc. And in the end, isn’t that what really matters?
So at this point I start thinkin’, this is the angle I should pursue! Because it’s so relevant. Ehlinger’s the great-grandtard of what’s now the MAGA golden rule: Be outrageous! Get views! Go viral; drive the libs NUTS! Because that’s the ultimate goal: your online stats. Not votes, not actually winning. Don’t work to prevent crime. Twerk to make crime wacky!
Ehlinger took the winning crime issue and drowned it in self-indulgence. He made it a joke, because he didn’t give a fuck about anything but how viral he went. Serious campaign coordinators were disgusted by Ehlinger, whereas rightist “influencers” cheered him. And today, the influencers have largely eclipsed the serious campaign coordinators. Laura Loomer’s gone from online freak show to presidential adviser: “Don’t mention real human crime victims; talk about eating cats!”
And what scares me more than anything is that I know a segment of my readers will see that “gimme yo cash bitch” spot and like it. So removed from reality are many MAGAs, they’ll think, “Yes! It’s wild! It’s young! It shows we’re balls-out BASED and unafraid of the DEMONKILLARYCRATS!”
The fact that the ad torpedoed the candidate it was supposed to help will mean nothing to these dumbasses. After all, that’s just history, and who cares about learning history?
So that’s an angle I was thinking of pursuing once I looked up FilmLadd’s identity. But then I also started reading his Twitter thread and I saw that he seems to despise the aforementioned Laura Loomer. “Liability Loomer,” he calls her.
Wait…the guy who did the “strippers ’n’ niggas” ad that became a massive liability to the Republican it was supposed to help is calling somebody else a liability? The guy who made the crime issue “wacky” to boost his own visibility is now slamming someone who’s doing the exact same?
Well, there’s my angle, folks.
I emailed Ehlinger:
I’m curious how, today, you view that Janice Hahn video you did in 2011 (which many saw as a “liability” to Huey’s campaign). Do you still stand by that spot? Or have the years altered your views on the efficacy of such political ads?
I sent it several times, but no response. Ladd Ehlinger’s so spineless, Don Knotts is like, “Grow a pair, douchebag.”
See where my “voyage” took me? From ruing over the fact that folks aren’t interested in Holocaust history unless it’s wild and sensational, to encountering a guy who isn’t a denier but whose lack of historical knowledge assists deniers, to explaining the intricacies of the Holocaust timeline, to 2011 and the birth of the present-day rightist desire not to win votes but views via outrageous and destructive conduct, to the possibility that one of the guys who gave birth to so many GOP defeats might’ve seen the error of his ways, to the fact that too many people are Twitter cowards who’ll spout off from the safety of Musk’s bosom but won’t answer a simple and direct question politely asked, right back to ruing about how politics, just like Holocaust history, has become of no interest to the right unless it involves the salacious and sensational.
Full circle! That river brought me right back to where I started, and I got a column out of merely recounting the trip.
It’s column-writing the Bruce Lee way: Be water. Don’t make water…like a coward.
You know how a doddery old white Irishman, Joe Biden, has just been pushed aside and replaced by a thrusting, younger, more coffee-colored ethnic replacement in terms of Kamala Harris? Well, the exact same thing is going on right across Ireland itself right now, only on a much larger, population-wide scale.
Controversy has arisen over the content of a new Irish Personal, Social and Health Education school textbook called Health and Wellbeing, which features a chapter misleadingly titled “All Different, All Equal,” containing cartoons and descriptions of two competing Irish clans, Family A and Family B. Students are invited to “close your eyes, and imagine what it would be like to live in [each] family.” The intended answers children are supposed to produce are rather different…
Textbook Racism
Family A are, to put it bluntly, a bunch of four all-white, bigoted, bog-brained Murphys who live like shit-caked retards on an isolated rural farm where they seemingly spend their days mating both with one another and the animals. These appalling genetic and moral rejects describe themselves as follows:
We do not like change or difference. All of our family members are Irish [by actual blood]…. We eat Irish food and have potatoes, bacon and cabbage every day, because it is Irish and it is our tradition…. We all play Irish musical instruments and go to the Fleadh [a domestic folk-music festival] every summer…. We love sport but we must only play hurling, handball or Gaelic football. No foreign games are permitted. It is okay for us to watch television programs made in Ireland…[but] the only movies we get to see are Irish ones, none of that Hollywood rubbish for us. We get told off if we mix with people from a different religion from ours as they would be a bad influence on us.
If you crossed out the word “Irish” and substituted in “Pakistani,” they would just sound like typical Muslims (minus the bacon-eating) and win wholehearted automatic approval from the traitorously deracinated modern-day Irish ruling class. But they are not, they are white and presumably Catholic, so must perforce be depicted as brain-dead scum. This is most unlike Family B, who are illustrated as being a fun-loving mixed-race couple, white mother and black dad, with two lovely beige half-caste offspring, one of whom is admirably and excitingly disabled. Rather than molesting livestock or their own close kin on a farm, they are shown having wholesome non-incestuous fun with pizzas, soccer scarves, and smartphones on holiday outside the Colosseum in Rome. These amazing liberal beings are described as follows:
We love change and difference. We find other cultures new and exciting. Our favorite dinners are curry, pizza and Asian food…. We like different types of music from reggae and hip-hop to classical. We have relations in London and Australia, and our family is part Irish, part Romanian and part Dutch…. My eldest brother, Flor, is partially sighted…. He is now a volunteer with the Red Cross in Syria…. Most years we house-swap with a family in a different country. It is a great way to meet people and learn about other cultures and societies. It makes you realize that, when you get to know them, people are more alike than different.
If that’s really so, then why does Ireland’s current remote ruling class, the people who write their textbooks and determine their kids’ curricula, think they themselves are of an entire different, more evolved species from the ordinary, chicken-bumming, Riverdancing Paddy-people in whose name they falsely claim to govern?
Democracy Is a Sham(rock)
Actually, Family B are rather strange. There is only one mother and one father. So how can they be “part Irish, part Romanian and part Dutch”? Presumably the only “part” of them that is actually Irish is their passports. The mother is, I am guessing, a Romanian immigrant. And, when they say the dad is “Dutch,” the authors don’t mean Dutch like Johann Cruyff or Inspector Van Der Valk, but a black immigrant into Holland from Surinam or somewhere, i.e., also Dutch by passport only, much as he is Irish by this same fake means. The implication is obvious: Ireland is now a nation of non-white immigrants (or women who sleep and breed with non-white immigrants), and these same immigrants are henceforth to be considered as being more authentically Irish than the actual Irish, with infinitely more right to live there than the Irish do.
One of the key planks of Communism-type creeds down the ages has been trying to turn parents against their children, and so it is here, with students being asked which family they would prefer to belong to, the intended answer being “The one whose mother and father are genetically nothing like my own.”
Unsurprisingly, the book caused outrage amongst the primitive white Celtic proles, with successful calls made for it to be withdrawn as being “racist against Irish people.” Of course it is, that’s the whole intention. Just look at who the Irish Unfree State has appointed as its new “National Action Plan Against Racism Special Rapporteur” this July: a peat-black “diversity and race-relations” consultant named Dr. Ebun Joseph, a name about as “authentically” Irish as Barack O’Bama. Ebun’s previous most significant contribution toward racial harmony in Eire came in 2019, when she was accidentally served a glass of blackcurrant Ribena cordial in a Galway restaurant instead of red wine by mistake—except she says it wasn’t a mistake, it was somehow deeply racist.
How, exactly? Some innocent employee just picked up the wrong glass, intended for a child menu, in error. If you put a professionally paranoid troublemaker like this in charge of spotting racism, you’re only going to end up with it being spotted absolutely everywhere—apart from, of course, in deliberately antiwhite Irish school textbooks. Here’s Ebun’s actual tweet about the incident:
I don’t want the “sick joker” or racist at @GalwayBayHotel who served me blackcurrant instead of the house red (wine) to win! So please, more Blacks go there. They can’t discourage us from going where we want!
Bring her some Um Bongo next time, see what she makes of that.
Unholy MacGreil
Are the Irish really all that racist? Traditionally, they’ve tended to be thought of more as victims of racism down the centuries, not the reverse. However, in 1977 a left-wing Irish Jesuit sociologist, Father Michael MacGreil, published a book, Prejudice and Tolerance in Ireland, that, with literal Jesuitical casuistry, argued that the fact there was then very little color prejudice on the island acted only as evidence that the place was actually secretly full of it.
A 1971 census revealed that, of 2.8m residents, only around 11,000 were foreign-born, I’d guess mostly British or other white Europeans. So, said MacGreil, the Irish probably were incredibly racist, they just didn’t have any convenient darkies to hand to actually demonstrate the fact upon: “The only reason we haven’t got a racial problem is because we don’t have a racial minority.” You do now: Thanks to globalist open-borders dogma, Guinness is no longer the only Black Stuff causing fights in Dublin.
In August, Ireland’s latest immigration figures were released. The country today has a population of 5.38m, of whom 4.54m are full Irish citizens. In the financial year 2023/24, almost 150,000 people came into the nation legally; the number of illegal arrivals, of whom there are many, was oddly not listed. So that would be 1.5m per decade. By that reckoning, in thirty years’ time, 4.5m will have landed, canceling out the 4.5m current real Irish citizens entirely. In fact, they will presumably outnumber them, as 833,000 actual Irish folk are currently aged 65-plus, many of whom will be dead by 2054. Thus, in three decades’ time, unless something is done, the Irish will be a minority in their own homeland—a despised minority, to judge by the current messaging in their own school textbooks.
Where’s the IRA when you need them? Unfortunately, in the guise of their far-left parent political wing Sinn Fein, who nowadays sit in the Irish parliament, they’re in on the whole thing too.
20:40 Vision
We are constantly told that “The Great Replacement” is a racist myth. To all non-blind people, however, unlike to the Irish-Dutch-Surinamese-Romanian disabled son of the above-mentioned Family B, it’s just a directly observable demographic fact. Ireland’s small population and prior 99.9 percent white ethnic homogeneity merely make the change particularly observable: What’s currently playing out there is only the wider West’s coming dire fate running on extreme fast-forward.
A survey carried out following elections in June showed almost a quarter of Irish voters believed that “The Establishment is replacing white Irish people with non-white immigrants” or “Elected officials want more immigration to bring in obedient voters who will vote for them.” It should be noted that, in Ireland, asylum seekers can vote in local elections—and that certain taxpayer-funded bodies are alleged to have been busing them in to voting booths en masse whilst telling them precisely who to tick a box for using phrases like “leave racists blank on the ballot.”
Media and politicians will decry this as a make-believe “conspiracy theory.” But it isn’t. Actual government documents for something called “Project 2040,” a national planning strategy published in 2019, prove it. Ireland currently has a falling birth rate like the rest of the West, yet Project 2040 assumes that, by the titular year in question, there will be “approximately one million additional people living here in Ireland,” allegedly needed to fund older white people’s pensions. Where will they come from, if not actual Irish wombs? The answer is obviously Africa and the Muslim world.
Civil servants are planning for this twenty-year scheme, even though elections come every five years. The conclusion is clear: An unaccountable, permanent technocratic class really runs the country, voters have no chance to vote for any party that will deviate from this scheme, and “democracy” in Ireland is now a complete and utter sham. It doesn’t even make any sense on its own terms. Supposedly, one reason immigrants are needed is to fill all those empty Irish jobs—but Project 2040 specifically states that civil servants will “need to create 660,000 additional jobs to create full employment.” Would it not be easier simply to import 660,000 fewer people?
Plantation Nation
Predictably, this insane scheme is now causing all sorts of utterly foreseeable social problems. There is a massive housing crisis. There is a rise in migrant-perpetrated crime, of the usual kinds. There are race riots at proposed asylum accommodation centers and elsewhere. The crock of gold at the end of the leprechaun’s rainbow is fast turning into a crock of shit instead.
Consider events in the tiny village of Dundrum, whose population of circa 200 was outnumbered by the arrival of nearly 300 unwanted asylum seekers, immediately rendering the natives a minority in their own hometown. The tedious, unenlightened local spud-munchers protested and tried to stop the invasion, but the all-wise, all-knowing government just sent in a “small army” of Roundhead-style riot police to impose the colonization by force for the Thick Micks’ own ungrateful benefit, a process that has been likened to a “New Plantation.”
The original Plantation, of course, was performed across Ireland by various English armies from the 1500s and 1600s, when settlers from the British mainland were shipped in, given land and housing, and encouraged to forcibly pacify, deracinate, dominate, exploit, and “civilize” the backwards natives, like those poor, cow-tipping inbreds so contemptuously depicted in today’s Irish school social engineering textbooks. To escape, many Celts eventually just emigrated—they were literally replaced by outsiders.
Due to such historic mistreatment at the hands of others, the Irish used to be known as “white niggers.” If the Project 2040 people get their way, pretty soon they’ll just be known as ordinary black ones.
The Week’s Most Fleeting, Skeeting, and Hades-Heating Headlines
IAMS WHAT IAMS
It was a week in which Americans obsessed over the question, “Are Haitians eating cats?”
There’s reason to be skeptical of the rumors. First of all, cats clean themselves regularly, and Haitians have an ingrained aversion to anything hygienic. Haitians are far more likely to eat not the cat but what it leaves in the litter box. After all, cat saliva’s a natural antibacterial, whereas the average Haitian is a natural probacterial.
If it kills germs, Haitians don’t want it.
But still, is there any truth to the rumor that Haitian illegals are running Kentoussaint Fried Kitten joints in Ohio?
Enter far-left meme superstar Rainn Wilson, aka “Bill Hader died and a mad scientist revived him with a mongoloid’s brain and created retarded Frankenstein.” Wilson angrily declared that he’s leaving X for good because of the Haitian/cat rumors. Yes, he said, a black person did cruelly torture and eat a cat last week, but it was “an American black woman,” not a Haitian.
And the nation cheered…then stopped as a deathly silence fell upon the crowd.
Because that really doesn’t make the story “better.”
Sheriff: “Good news, Jim. We identified the serial killer, and it’s not the schizo laborer you brought to town.”
Jim: “Oh, thank God! I’m so relieved.”
Sheriff: “Yeah, it’s your own son. Well, sleep tight, buddy!”
The idea that the only proven cat-eater is someone who can’t be deported is cold cuts—sorry, cold comfort. The “main coon” told police she was masticating the Manx because she heard cats are “warm-blooded” and she was sick of them cold-ass fries.
Meanwhile in N.Y.C., “Hindu Guyanese and Indo-Caribbean immigrants” are killing pigs in religious rituals, which is legal thanks to the unanimous 1993 SCOTUS decision Babalu Aye v. Hialeah (“Babalu Aye” is when you get pink eye from a Cuban).
At the time, Clarence Thomas stated that he has no problem with Santeria cultists killing pigs…as long as he gits da feet.
LASSIE LEAVE HOME
Fortunately, Russian cats are safe. Haitians who illegally enter that country are shot out of cannons at Ukraine (germ warfare…every Haitian’s carrying something).
And those Haitians are missing quite a meal! Crumbs, a 38-pound tabby in Perm, Russia, has set a record as the world’s fattest feline. A stray, Crumbs’ rescuers overfed him, and now veterinarians are trying to slim him down. All while Crumbs does what cats do best—sit with a look of disdain for those around them, contributing nothing but a sense of superiority.
At least he’s not actively trying to murder anyone.
Last month the Tulsa fire department released footage of a fire that left a family homeless.
The cause?
Their dogs.
Footage from inside the house shows one of the dogs nibbling on an electronic device containing a lithium battery (because he’s a bad boy, a very bad boy). The dog unleashes a cascade of sparks. Initially, both dogs “flea,” but once the fire starts burning, they return to the scene of the crime and just stand there, watching in silent fascination, before showing themselves out through the flap in the back door, leaving the family to die.
“Should we bark or something?”
“Nah, it’s not a real emergency like a UPS delivery or a squirrel. Let’s let this one play out.”
People who own flatulent canines that fart themselves awake in the middle of the night should breathe a sigh of relief (though not in the direction of their hound) that that’s the worst their dog does.
Thankfully, the family was alerted by smoke detectors and escaped.
Sometimes Lassie rescues Timmy from the well, and sometimes Lassie pushes Timmy down it.
SPECIAL DELIVERANCE
There’s no road map for dealing with the aftermath of a school shooting. But in Appalachia, there’s a dirt-road map.
And while there may be no one “right” way for the killer’s kin to react, there’s most certainly a wrong one.
Winder, Georgia, home of Apalachee High (scene of the mass shooting by student Colt Gray), is located near the exact spot where the film Deliverance was set. And while it’s easy to laugh at such a school, Apalachee kids have won the gold thirty years straight in the national “blank-faced banjo-playing” competition.
Following the shooting, Gray’s aunt Annie Polhamus (sister of the boy’s meth-smoking mom) took to Facebook to attack the people criticizing her murderous nephew: “They are charging my 14yo nephew as an adult, for murder. Yall ready to see Polhamus blood in full throttle? Nah, I wouldn’t be either.”
Actually, the nation just saw “Polhamus blood in full throttle,” and it was an unpleasant sight.
Funny enough, a cut scene from Deliverance depicts the surviving rafters being confronted by Annie Pol-anus, aunt of the dude who raped Ned Beatty.
Meanwhile, it turns out the FBI had been tipped off that Gray was planning to shoot up his school, but (this is true) when visited by law enforcement, Gray claimed that the online threats were “Russian hacking,” and the agents bought it and left.
So remember, if you’re ever questioned by FBI agents, “Russian hacking” is their “Beetlejuice”: Say it three times and their credulity appears.
Also, Gray’s pappy (now himself charged with murder) bought his boy a gun after the police visit, telling the lad to “only use this to stop Burt Reynolds from killing you as you’re raping Ned Beatty.”
“I think both them’s dead, Paw,” the boy replied. “But Jon Voight and Ronny Cox is still livin’.”
“I ain’t rapin’ nobody named Runny Cocks,” the dad barked, muttering to himself, “That boy ain’t right.”
UN-CONDIT-IONAL LOVE
Some families are haunted by curses. The Condits are haunted by Cuevas.
Yes, the Condits are plagued by beans.
Remember Gary Condit? He was the clean-cut TV-dad-lookin’ California “conservative Democrat” from the 1990s. A family man, a man of faith and morals, Condit wept with the nation when his intern, Chandra Levy, went missing in 2001.
But Condit had a secret; when he needed to “leave it to beaver,” Chandra was his release. When her sexually abused corpse was eventually found in a shallow grave, Condit’s wholesome Brady Bunch reputation died quicker than Robert Reed after that night in a bathhouse.
Then it turned out it was a bean murderer all along—Salvadoran immigrant Ingmar Guandique—who’d already done time for sticking his dique where it didn’t belong.
Condit celebrated the vindication and planned a political comeback…until the sole witness against Guandique, Armando Morales—another bean—admitted to fabricating his testimony and g’won-dique was told g’won, get outta here.
With a history like that, it’s puzzling why Condit’s son Chad, who followed his father into politics, would choose to work as chief of staff for a Hispanic politico.
Because it went about as well as you’d expect.
Apparently, California State Senator Marie Alvarado-Gil—a Dem who recently jumped ship to the GOP—wanted Condit to jump her…nonstop. Condit’s suing Alvarado-Gil for giving him permanent back and hip injuries from the “sexual acrobatics” she demanded. Apparently the “wise Latina” expected constant erections (rise Latina) from Condit’s large penis (supersize Latina), which she’d crush between her legs during sex (thighs Latina); she even insisted he penetrate her with his fingers as she drove (digitize Latina).
The Mexican humping bean claims Condit’s lying. And California Republicans, who finally won a Mexican and damned if they’re gonna let her fall to these charges, are trying to find a Salvadoran who can deposit not a Condit intern but a Condit himself in a shallow grave.
SNAKE MISHANDLERS
Jeffrey Leibowitz, a teacher in Florence, South Carolina, ain’t no jittery Jew when it comes to snakes.
Or blacks.
Florence is 51 percent black and only 2 percent Asian. What kind of Jew lives in a place with schvartzes but no Szechuan?
The kind of Jew who posts videos of himself free-handling deadly snakes.
“Free-handling” is when the handler doesn’t wear protective gear. It’s like riding bareback with the Reaper. And Leibowitz’s favorite snake to handle? The inland taipan—oxyuranus microlepidotus. And if it bites you, it’s kissyuranus goodbyepidotus. The taipan’s so toxic even Hillary Clinton won’t associate with it. And for years herpetologists have begged Leibowitz to stop posting his videos, explaining that his cavalier attitude puts him at risk, along with potential copycats.
But the Shoah constrictor refused to give up his act, posting a video last week in which he said, while swinging a taipan like it’s chicken time on Yom Kippur, “I can control him, there’s no need to be scared.”
And then the snake bit him, turning Leibowitz from influencer to toxinfluencer.
Leibowitz screamed “dangadinndu heysheeeitmanmamma fugyoomuvvafugginsheeeit,” which led one of his assistants to proclaim, “He’s speaking in tongues! He found Christ,” but his other assistant interjected, “Naw, he teaches at an HBCU. He cusses like his students.”
Making the situation even funnier, the nearest place with taipan antivenom was like, “He ain’t gettin’ any!” Kristen Wiley of the Kentucky Reptile Zoo declared, “None for dumbass. This antivenom is very rare; I need it for my staff in case of emergency.”
By the time Leibowitz got antivenom he was a vegetable, ironically no longer of interest to the carnivore that bit him.
He remains on life support.
Florence Reptile Control (motto: “Get Them Snakes Away From Me, Bitch”) euthanized Leibowitz’s collection, including his gaboon viper (not to be confused with the gabagoon viper, which extorts its victims via a protection racket).
On the bright side, doctors say it’s likely Jeff and his snakes will soon be reunited.
From time to time I receive, unsolicited, messages from insurance companies about “how to keep myself safe,” to use an odious modern locution. Mostly they are about the weather, reminding me that ice is slippery, or that the sun can be hot—for, as Shakespeare observed more than 400 years ago, sometimes too hot the eye of heaven shines.
In exceptionally hot weather, my insurers tell me, I should stay indoors, or if I venture out, stay in the shade; I should wear light clothes, drink plenty of water, and so forth. This, of course, is all perfectly sensible, but I cannot help wondering how many more people seek the shade when they walk in the sun for having read the message from their insurance company.
What is the real purpose of these messages? I suspect that it is to give the impression to the recipients that the insurance companies that send them care about their welfare and not just about their premiums. It is natural egocentricity for humans to suppose that any message that they receive is directed at them, and not at the 1,350,000 other people who also receive it. The strange thing is that, however much you tell yourself that the message is completely impersonal, you nevertheless think that someone, somewhere, must be thinking of you. It is difficult, sometimes, to align our innermost feelings with what our rational minds know.
These messages do not write themselves (though perhaps with artificial intelligence they soon will). Someone, somewhere, must have written or at least authorized them, presumably under the impression that while he was doing so, he was working. Particularly in the public sector, activity is often mistaken for work, if by work we mean labor that results in something worthwhile. I do not have the figures in hand, but I suspect that at least half of human activity commonly known as work is not really work in this more refined sense. It is more like occupational therapy for those who would not otherwise know what to do with themselves; and such a class of person would be very dangerous.
Recently, however, I received a message from an insurance company that was more interesting than that to wrap up warm when it was cold. It informed me how to recognize a car accident in which I was involved that had been arranged by insurance scammers. Such accidents are apparently a growing industry (all organized activity is now called an industry, just as all activity performed for pay is work).
Such scammers take advantage of the general principle that the driver who drives into the rear of another vehicle is invariably at fault and there is no defense for having done so. The scammers have various ruses for producing such accidents. After the accident, there are various indications that the driver of the vehicle driven into is a scammer. He is, for example, abnormally calm, and neither shaken nor angry, as most victims of such accidents, when they are genuine, usually are (I once recognized a murderer by his abnormal calm after a death that occurred in his presence). He is more than usually ready with all his details, as if he had anticipated the supposed accident. He has generally chosen his victim, who will belong to a category most likely to have an accident, the young or the old. In the case of the latter, he might be very understanding and accommodating: He may offer to forget the whole affair in return for a cash payment, and may even kindly offer to take the unfortunate supposedly miscreant driver to the nearest cash machine to withdraw the money.
The insurance company’s message suggested clues to fraudulent road “accidents,” including exaggerated claims by passengers to immediate whiplash injury (an injury that does not persist in countries in which it is not legally recognized as an actionable injury and no compensation is possible for it, the possibility of compensation being the cause of much unnecessary suffering).
But it also suggested a means to avoid such pseudo-accidents, prevention being better than cure. The latter in this case would require the insurance company to fight the case in court, which it would be most unwilling to do, insurance companies being more interested in settlement that truth.
The best method of prevention, said the message, was to install a dashcam, a camera on the dashboard of your car to record all your journeys in your car. According to the insurance company, if the scammers see such a dashcam in your car, they will desist from practicing their wiles on you and rather choose another driver to victimize.
I do not know the empirical evidence that this is so, but it does not sound implausible. Nevertheless, I found the message slightly disturbing: yet another part of our lives that must be recorded, in this case to avoid an eventuality that must, statistically, remain rare. Soon, it seems, the totality of our lives will be recorded.
I first became aware of the increasing tendency to such recording when I appeared as a witness in murder trials. This was thirty years ago, when I was astonished to learn how much of our lives is now recorded on CCTV cameras. The movements of the accused in the street or in the entrances to buildings were all filmed (the quality in those days was often so poor that it required experts to decipher what was recorded, but it has since greatly improved). I discovered what I had not previously suspected, that one can hardly move in public without being watched.
When Pope John XXXIII was told that he should not make himself so visible when he walked in the gardens of the Vatican, he asked, “Why, is it that I misbehave?” But it is not because one wants to misbehave that being under constant observation makes one uneasy and makes misbehavior difficult. It is rather that such constant surveillance tends to undermine the distinction between what is properly public and properly private, to the detriment of the latter and the expansion of the former. Where everything is recorded (and we are increasingly complicit in this), we become performers rather than characters, and the boundary between the real and the bogus is extinguished.
Theodore Dalrymple’s latest book is Ramses: A Memoir, published by New English Review.
Kate Middleton’s latest video presentation, in which she runs through meadows while telling us how wonderful her cancer journey has been, is just about the most disturbing thing I have ever seen on the screen.
I’ve watched Don’t Look Now with Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland, which was just about the scariest thing I’d seen until now, in terms of the unsettling camera work and the fact you don’t ever quite see what it is so deeply, deeply wrong about it until the final frame. But this is somehow more disturbing.
Kate’s cancer journey movie is a lot like Don’t Look Now, with its soft focus wandering through beautiful scenery, interspersed with disorientating camera work, setting you on edge as the thing builds and builds to its worrying climax.
Instead of scenes of Venice and the love affair between Christie and Sutherland, we get the English countryside, and the love of Kate and William, with Kate sometimes with him rapturously, and sometimes meandering in these forests and meadows alone. It’s not the Venice lagoon—but the effect is the same.
I cannot see why the Princess of Wales or the powers at the palace could possibly have thought this video would be a reassuring update, unless it’s a straightforward piece of brainwashing designed to make the masses very happy to have cancer, and bear it beautifully, just like her.
“Cancer journey.” If I hear that phrase one more time, I’ll scream. So I’ll scream a lot. Everyone says it now. Cancer is no longer an illness, it’s a journey: an exciting, wonderful opportunity, or so the purveyors of the cancer-journey idea would have us believe.
As Kate tells us about her cancer journey, she is in a beautiful white dress, floaty, like an angel. She and her children laugh and gambol in these meadows—but they laugh distantly, with an eerie echo.
They appear sometimes fractured into multiple screens. It’s possible someone got too arty with the production after getting carried away, but it appears to me as though the way it is filmed is a message.
The quality is astounding—it’s Hollywood standard. I’m not saying Kate, William, the kids, Carole and Michael Middleton, who all appear, are acting. But they appear not to act so well it is fantastically slick—as good as any big-budget movie.
As we watch the family in highly stylized “behind the scenes” footage, Kate does the voice-over about her cancer journey, on and on, ever more poetically, piling metaphor upon metaphor, until you just want to shout out, “Okay, okay! I get it! Cancer is fucking fantastic! I don’t have it, but I want it now! Is that what you want me to say?” And then we get the big reveal…
If you haven’t seen the film, do watch it. If you have viewed the film already, take a closer look.
It begins with Kate, William, and the children walking through the woods. Piano music is playing. Mournful piano music. Harmonic minor chords.
In a soft, sad voice she says: “As the summer comes to an end…”
You see, we’re not only in the woods, but in summer’s end mode. Not difficult that. “…I cannot tell you what a relief it is to have finally completed my chemotherapy treatment.” Note she doesn’t say it’s worked, just completed. “The last nine months have been incredibly tough for us as a family. Life as you know it can change in an instant…”
But wait, she’s about to lay two more metaphors on us, and mix ’em, to boot.
“…and we’ve had to find a way to navigate the stormy waters and road unknown…”
That’s a lot of navigating. Almost too much, you might say. In statement analysis, when people overstate, it’s a tell, or red flag. They’re trying too hard to convince you.
“The cancer journey is complex, scary, and unpredictable for everyone…” She and William are sitting together in the woods, her head on his shoulder. Then they’re with the kids, playing in the woods. And then the camera cuts to her standing alone in a dense area, gazing up into these massive trees, as big as redwoods are, as she tells us she’s come face-to-face with her own vulnerabilities…
Now we cut to a fuzzy, juddery take of her pushing the kids on swings, split into three shots, like it’s old footage from the attic. But wait, this is still that happy day in the woods. So why are we imagining this being their old memories, and all they’ve got left?
The tall trees are filmed gorgeously, from the bottom looking up as the light shafts from the heavens break through.
Kate now begins what amounts to a sermon, in her soft but crystal-clear voice, about how she and William have had to “reflect and be grateful for the simple yet important things in life which so many of us often take for granted—simply loving and being loved.”
Now, listen here, Your Royal Highness. I take nothing important for granted—never have, never will—so you and William must be thinking of yourselves.
Perhaps the royal family take important things for granted. But anyway…
“Doing what I can to stay cancer-free is now my focus.”
Note she’s not saying she’s cancer-free, she’s saying she is trying to stay cancer-free.
“Although I have finished chemotherapy…”
Never did anyone say that word more beautifully. She almost makes it sound like one of the most beautiful words in the English language…
“…my path to healing and full recovery is long, and I must continue to take each day as it comes….” Then she talks about “this new phrase of recovery.”
I think that’s pretty clear. Anyone who doesn’t see through all that is a moron.
Now the music changes. It becomes briefly quite scary, then it goes Irish for some reason. We are now in an Irish lament. Fiddles eek out their mournful dirge, as she says:
“To all those who are continuing their own cancer journey, I remain with you…”
Now she’s wandering a meadow of wheat and wildflowers. The violin music builds, and she makes her final statement, very slowly:
“Out of darkness can come light…so let that light shine bright!” And she releases a white butterfly from her hands—I actually shuddered—and it flies away, and the camera cuts to an upward shot of the trees, pointing into the sky.
Now the kids are running through the fields alone. Then the family is together, briefly. Then the thing cuts to a Kodak-style line of photos, as if in their memory box again.
The violins build and soar higher and higher, and the photo album shots on the screen fade to white. Pure, pure white. Intense, bright white. Nothing but white. Is this what heaven looks like?
Dear God, can anyone be so stupid as to not work that little lot out? This is nothing less than the rebranding of serious illness ending potentially in an untimely death as something positive.
Cancer is now one in two, if you believe the statistics. Neoplasms, like the one in my mother’s neck, have gone off the charts since 2021. Loads of horrible illnesses are off the charts suddenly, including in young and middle-aged and previously healthy people. Sepsis is a quarter of a million a year. Shingles is one in three. Heart attacks, well, we all know how many are having those. We don’t need the official statistics. Whether the figures are right or wrong, or cooked to high heaven with new presentation formulas, we see those in our families and social circles dropping from their hearts going bang, like my father from a blood clot, or like other friends of mine needing a new valve.
Death is all around us, and so the feeling grows, to paraphrase a song used in another schmaltzy movie.
The grim reaper is now such a frequent visitor that we could be forgiven for starting to think death has never been more normal. But it’s a big stretch to go from not questioning excess death figures to saying that actually getting really ill from cancer is exciting, and an opportunity, and I’m getting a warm, fuzzy feeling about it.
Look, I’m a believer. I believe nothing happens in God’s world by mistake. If you have a health setback, you bear it with grace if you can, and you try to make some good come out of it. I admire those who live with cancer, and those who overcome cancer, and those we’ve all lost who have died from it.
But I have to say, I don’t want to get ill, and I don’t want to welcome illness if I get it. What I really want to do is look the hell into why so many young, previously fit, and healthy women like Kate got cancer in the first place these past few years, along with so many others of all ages getting all these heart attacks and strokes.
We’ve had a headful of brainwashing for several years now, with all the celebrity “brave fights,” but this Kate video is going too far.
Kate has so much clout with the masses that it matters when she runs through meadows in a floaty dress with long, flowing lustrous hair to make a point about cancer.
She should not do it, any more than she should have told people to get the Covid vaccine in the recordings her and William made about that, and being photographed having it.
The royals should stay out of telling us what to do medically, and what to think and feel about our illnesses, as much as they should stay out of giving their opinion on Gaza.
I can understand people saying, “What a lovely film, Kate must be better.” But I would say if she just wanted to tell us she’s doing well, getting back to work, and on the road to recovery, which we hope she is, she’d just do an interview saying that, and we’d say great and wish her well.
This Hollywood style mini-movie with full-on soundtrack protests too much. With its constant pace-changing and big-reveal white butterfly moment at the end, as scary to me as the little girl in the red cloak turning round at the end of Don’t Look Now, this is about saying to all the one in twos, take your cancer on the chin and don’t ask questions how you got it, because half the population is on a cancer journey, even our beautiful princess.
This is about showing how cancer will and must take you on a voyage of inner discovery, and while of course the destination is often death, who knows, maybe death’s a journey too, even though we keep insisting we’re all atheists now.
It’s challenging, the cancer journey, but all journeys are. There will be moments where you think, “Hang on, maybe it’s that Covid vaccine, and this is a huge balls-up and I’m going die needlessly!”
But that’s to be expected. It’s normal to have irrational fears and to doubt how wonderful cancer is. But take heart. The rewards are great. You will get a new perspective on what’s important: loving and being loved, or something or other…
So if you have been diagnosed, get started on your cancer journey today (without complaining about how or why you might have gotten it). And be like our beautiful Kate…
In 1982 the federal budget deficit rose above $100 billion for the first time (those were the good old days!), and then-President Ronald Reagan agreed to an infamous budget deal with then-House Speaker Tip O’Neill. Democrats would agree to $3 of spending cuts for every $1 of tax increases. Reagan foolishly agreed to the deal. The taxes went up. The spending cuts never materialized.
Reagan used to fume for the rest of his presidency, “I’m still waiting for those $3 of spending cuts.”
Back then Democrats at least pretended they would cut spending. Democratic presidential candidate Michael Dukakis pledged in 1988 that he would “only raise taxes as a last resort.”
My, how times have changed. Now we have red ink multiple times higher than back then, with the Biden-Kamala baseline forecast calling for $2 trillion in deficits from now until kingdom come. The Democrats are entirely untroubled by the forecast and act as though the federal credit card has no limit.
Well, if Vice President Kamala Harris wins the election, we will put that risky proposition to the test.
Because in the wake of the largest amounts of red ink in American history, Harris has proposed zero reductions in federal spending. That’s right: not a single penny.
I’ve thoroughly searched through every Harris campaign document and declaration on the economy and the budget but haven’t discovered even one program, out of the thousands of line-item agencies in the budget, that she would shutter or terminate.
With Harris, it’s big government everlasting.
The plan is $4.6 trillion in new taxes, as reported by The New York Times, to go with zero spending cuts. That means the ratio of taxes to spending cuts is infinity to one.
Republicans are hardly blameless in the ocean of red ink. But at least former President Donald Trump has proposed a presidential commission to identify ways to cut hundreds of billions of dollars of waste, fraud, theft, duplication and inefficiency in federal programs. This commission, to be headed by Elon Musk, is a brilliant idea.
Democrats have greeted the idea with contempt. Their tolerance of government waste and fraud reminds me of the famous Jack Nicholson line in the movie “A Few Good Men”: “You don’t WANT to know the truth.” Democrats don’t want to expose the government corruption and inefficiency.
Harris’ only ideas for cutting the budget are gimmicks like Medicare price controls or revoking patents to lower costs. These are likely to hurt the economy more than help.
Now we are hearing from Goldman Sachs and other Wall Street analysts that Harris will be better for reducing debt than Trump. They seem to agree that a $4.6 trillion tax increase on business and investors is just what the doctor ordered.
Have they told their clients that?
Give Harris credit. She isn’t disguising her master plan: the biggest tax and spend binge in American history. I just hope voters are paying attention.
Debate winner: CNN’s Candy Crowley. In 2012, she — the moderator — interjected herself into a Romney-Obama debate to fact-check Mitt Romney with a lie. But unlike ABC’s crack moderators on Tuesday night, at least she only did it once.
I’m exhausted from fact-checking ABC’s fact-checkers, so I’m just going to tell you about a brilliant experiment that pretty clearly established who won the Trump-Clinton debates in 2016.
The media say Trump whiffed Tuesday night, but that’s what we were told in 2016, too. It also could be that Kamala Harris came across as a smirker — MSNBC’s signature move — just like Hillary Clinton did. You’ve probably forgotten this — if you ever knew it — but notwithstanding Clinton’s allegedly devastating debate performances with Trump, she bombed. There’s scientific proof.
Feminists were ecstatic when Trump called Clinton “a nasty woman” at one of the debates, rushing out with “nasty woman” T-shirts, pins, backpacks and other merchandise. With the feminists’ usual finger on the pulse of the nation, it never occurred to them that maybe she was nasty.
Trump was responding to Clinton’s snotty aside — while describing her Social Security plans, of all things:
Clinton: “My Social Security payroll contribution will go up, as will Donald’s — assuming he can’t figure out how to get out of it — but what we want to do is –”
Trump: “Such a nasty woman.”
In order to test the feminist theory that Clinton, as a woman, was judged much more harshly than Trump, a couple of professors at New York University and INSEAD designed the perfect experiment. Two months after the election, they re-created the 2016 debates, but with a man playing Clinton and a woman playing Trump.
Professional actors were hired to reenact segments from each of the three debates, using the candidates’ exact words, gestures, intonation and stances. During rehearsals, they even had a screen with the actual debate running behind them to ensure a precise replica of the candidates’ performances, with only the genders inverted. (For you confused Gen Z’ers, back then there were only two genders.)
The professors and their (sold-out) audiences were stunned by the result. As NYU professor Joe Salvatore put it, instead of confirming their “liberal assumption” that “no one would have accepted Trump’s behavior from a woman, and that the male Clinton would seem like the much stronger candidate,” audience members found themselves hating the male Clinton and being impressed by the female Trump.
This is how Salvatore described the reactions:
“We heard a lot of ‘now I understand how this happened’ — meaning how Trump won the election. People got upset. There was a guy two rows in front of me who was literally holding his head in his hands, and the person with him was rubbing his back. The simplicity of Trump’s message became easier for people to hear when it was coming from a woman — that was a theme. One person said, ‘I’m just so struck by how precise Trump’s technique is.’ Another — a musical theater composer, actually — said that Trump created ‘hummable lyrics,’ while Clinton talked a lot, and everything she said was true and factual, but there was no ‘hook’ to it.” (Sadly, the Trump bump among the musical theater crowd was short-lived.)
One audience member said she found the [male] Clinton “really punchable.”
I suspect the Trump-Harris debate will elicit similar reactions. Trump is Trump, a known quantity. His scattershot delivery isn’t going to shock anyone. If you already detest the man, your view was confirmed. But if you don’t hate him, Trump put a lot of points on the board, while Harris said nothing, and said it smugly.
The debate sure didn’t give undecided voters what they wanted from Harris. As has been widely reported, they are waiting breathlessly for some hint of what she believes and what she would do as president. After the ABC debate, they’re still waiting. About all they learned is that Harris comes from a middle-class family. (That regular guy routine worked great for John Kasich!)
But they know that life was better under Trump. And they know that Harris, like Clinton, is a nasty woman.
