Celebrity Selena Gomez recently posted, and then quickly deleted, a video of herself sobbing uncontrollably over the treatment of illegal immigrants being expelled by the Trump administration.

Gomez was, of course, mercilessly mocked by conservatives across social media. And there’s really nothing wrong with sympathizing with those trying to escape the deprivation and tyranny of the Third World. Most of us, I assume, would do the same for our families.

The frustration, though, is misplaced.

While I’m also a fan of immigration for economic and patriotic reasons, dismissing the negative cultural externalities — including violent crimes — that can accompany chaotic mass immigration, illegal or not, does the cause no favors.

The fact is we could build a giant bubble around the entire country right now, and the United States would still reign as the most welcoming place for foreigners that’s ever existed. And if we want that title to remain, championing legal avenues and decrying mass criminality and anarchy is the way to go. Because what’s happening now is only going to turn decent people against legal immigration.

“Everyone has an inalienable right to speak freely, but foreigners do not have an inalienable right to gin up hatred against Americans on the Upper West Side.”

In recent years, American citizenship has been transformed from a sacred privilege bestowed on the lucky, gracious newcomer into a right that’s demanded of us by people who break or circumvent the law.

Moreover, illegal immigration is inhumane — and not only to those swept up in the human trafficking and dangers of the southern border.

Democrats talk about people living in the shadows. It’s true. Those here illegally will never be integrated into society. Even if they don’t benefit from welfare programs, they inevitably end up relying on taxpayers. This, too, causes resentment.

The left acts as if we have a sacred oath to accept every refugee, but they have done virtually everything possible to destroy the public’s trust in the system. In 2021, Democrats scrapped the “Remain in Mexico” policy that compelled migrants to wait in that country while their claims were being adjudicated in court (until finally, the administration was forced by a court to reinstate the policy).

As Europe has shown us, accepting unlimited numbers of refugees from the same area at the same time with the same ideas and the same problems leads to ethnic enclaves, poor integration and reactionary nativist politics.

Though it’s not just refugees or illegal immigrants who can give immigrants a bad name.

Take the student visa problem. Just because your Gulf State petro-daddy or Chicom apparatchik parents can pay your way doesn’t mean we have any responsibility to host you. Colleges love foreign students because they pay cash for the whole ride, but too many of them are flying terrorist flags and creating havoc on our campuses. The spectacle almost surely makes normies less inclined to see immigration as a societal positive. Understandably so.

Leftists and civil libertarians had a breakdown when President Donald Trump signed an executive order to revoke student visas from noncitizen college students who participate in pro-Hamas protests. Listen, I’m a staunch supporter of unfettered speech rights of pro-terrorist noncitizens in their own countries. Everyone has an inalienable right to speak freely, but foreigners do not have an inalienable right to gin up hatred against Americans on the Upper West Side. Protest in Tiananmen Square or in front of the royal residence in Riyadh. A nation has the right to dictate the parameters visitors must follow and then expel those who engage in civil unrest.

When my parents defected from Hungary and came here, they were asked if they were members of the Communist Party because its ideology conflicts with American values. We can’t bore into the souls of would-be citizens or visa seekers. But we chuck them out if they don’t behave.

People often like to virtue-signal, insisting that the United States is a “nation of immigrants” or a nation of “ideas” rather than one of blood and soil. Those are both true statements to some extent. One of the “ideas” we had, though, was to be a sovereign nation that houses a set of norms, traditions, civic institutions, culture, laws, rights and virtues. We’ve been astoundingly successful at absorbing immigrants on a massive scale because the expectation was everyone would embrace our values.

Does anyone think we’re getting better at assimilating immigrants?

In the end, there are tons of laws we dislike, but the government upholds them anyway. Democrats say we’re a nation of laws, and yet when it comes to illegal aliens, they’re horrified that anyone might uphold them. If they truly cared about the future of immigration, they’d demand order, not feed chaos.

All things considered—my age, for example, and my unhealthy lifestyle—I have little, physically, to complain of. My only real problem is osteoarthritis of my hands, now somewhat deformed.

The great Doctor Johnson used to take an objective observer’s interest in his own illnesses, finding them curious. He even performed small physiological experiments on himself. I do not go quite this far, but I note with puzzlement that the pain in my fingers flits from one finger to the other, without any real reason for it that I can detect. At any rate, there is always one finger that pains me above the others (at the moment, that in my right index finger predominates, but it might be different tonight). It is as if there were a certain fixed amount of pain to be distributed among my fingers, and if it does not go to one, it must go to another. In this, it is rather like the economy in the thinking of many people: One person’s share of the economic cake is another’s penury.

From time to time, I feel it necessary to take an anti-inflammatory pill, which certainly brings me relief. I take as few as possible, both on general principle and for specific reasons. I am not against pills as such—some have kept me alive for half a century—but still I share the common prejudice that one should take as little medication as possible.

“The pill that was stuck in my throat occupied a hundred times more of my mind and attention than the great questions of our day.”

A few days ago, I took one of these anti-inflammatories, a shiny white round pill of a dimension that, though large, normally gives me no trouble to swallow. To my alarm, however, it soon seemed to stick in my gullet and was most uncomfortable.

I did all the things that one is supposed to do in this situation, but the wretched thing remained unmoved. I swallowed warm liquids, I bent my neck forward, I moved my head in all possible directions, I ate a banana, I ate some crustless bread, but all to no avail. The stubborn thing was stuck.

It was not exactly painful, but the discomfort was impossible to ignore for long. I could distract myself by reading or writing, but as soon as I swallowed—one soon learns in these circumstances how frequently one swallows, which previously one has taken for granted—the discomfort became acute again. It was, so to speak, a hard pill to swallow.

It might not have been a pill at all that caused the sensation, however. It might have been caused by a small injury to the esophagus done by the passing pill. There was even the possibility of a purely psychological cause, though no one likes to think of himself as susceptible to such psychological infirmity.

Information and advice on the internet were distinctly contradictory, ranging from assurance that pills do not get stuck in the esophagus because they dissolve and therefore are nothing to worry about, to warnings against the dangers of waiting for them to dissolve because they might cause inflammation or even erosion of the organ’s surface. What was striking was that all views were expressed with equally magisterial certainty though they contradicted one another. Genuine skepticism is not a normal state of mind, whereas dogmatism is, and if people cannot agree over so simple a matter as what is the cause of an unpleasant bodily sensation, and what to do about it, it is scarcely any wonder that the realm of politics is one of ceaseless conflict.

But whatever the cause of my sensation, it soon became something of an obsession with me that could not be kept at bay for long. When it was time for bed, the sensation was still there. Some of the advisers on the internet said that sufferers should on no account lie down, but I have never been able to sleep for long while upright, and I do like my sleep. When I lay down, the sensation worsened, but there is more than one possible explanation for that worsening. Eventually, however, I was able to sleep.

The next morning, I was better. This was a great relief not only in itself but because it obviated a possible need to seek medical advice, which in England (where I was) has become not so much an obstacle race as an obstacle crawl. The prospect of having to beg humbly for attention, and possibly of having to exaggerate or tell lies in order to obtain it, to say nothing of the hours and hours of waiting, was almost worse than the condition from which I sought relief.

It is a commonplace that life hangs by a thread, but so does equanimity. The philosopher Hume, I think, said somewhere that a toothache is able to destroy any philosophy, and a minor inconvenience may soon obsess the most stoical of persons.

Not every such inconvenience has this ability, however. One learns to put up with many inconveniences, but others are impossible to ignore. Things minor in themselves may, like a constant drip of water on a rock, erode the mind. The destruction of the equanimity of human beings is not necessarily proportional to the seriousness of its cause—that is to say, the seriousness as seen and measured by others. Tell me what inconvenience you cannot tolerate, and I will tell you what you are.

It is because we are all so different in our likes and dislikes, our loves and our detestations, that it is hopeless to expect any purely utilitarian solution to our collective problems in life. Furthermore, as Francis Bacon once said, “Such being the workmanship of God as he doth hang the greatest weight upon the smallest wires.”

So do we all. We do not have such minds as can encompass all the world and all the happenings in it at the same time; the pill (or whatever it was) that was stuck in my throat occupied a hundred times more of my mind and attention than the great questions of our day. And this is not entirely a bad thing: For if people attended only to the great questions of their day, all that makes life worth living would go by default. Some questions must be settled purely in the abstract, some purely in the concrete, and many or most somewhat between the two. Monomaniacs don’t understand this.

Theodore Dalrymple’s latest book is On the Ivory Stages (Mirabeau Press).

Democrats, those stalwart champions of democracy who tried to keep Donald Trump off the ballot, have an endlessly malleable understanding of whose view prevails whenever disputes arise between any combination of Congress, the courts, the president and the states. It’s almost as if they decide based not on any fixed principle, but on whose side they take.

When Joe Biden was president, he openly defied Supreme Court rulings — and bragged about doing so. Despite the court repeatedly telling him he had no authority to forgive student loans, he kept doing it. “The Supreme Court blocked it,” he said, “but that didn’t stop me.” No complaints from the left.

When Barack Obama was president, federal control of immigration was absolute! Arizona was said to be prohibited from following federal law because the president had decided not to follow the law. Suddenly, every Democrat was talking about the supremacy clause and claiming Arizona had been overtaken by Nazis.

“It’s absurd enough to imagine that the Supreme Court could abrogate powers committed solely to the president.”

Eventually, the Supreme Court upheld Arizona’s so-called “Papers Please” law, and the hysterics, confident that no one would remember their smug assurances that the law was unconstitutional, went right back to uttering their weighty pronouncements.

But when Trump was abiding by federal law in issuing what liberals called “the Muslim ban” (that, oddly enough, never mentioned Muslims), district courts and Trump’s own acting attorney general decided that their interpretation of a president’s duties should prevail over his.

They were heroes! At least until the Supreme Court upheld Trump’s non-Muslim-mentioning Muslim ban. It seems that — contra every editorial page in America — federal law expressly grants the president authority to exclude aliens if, in his opinion, their presence “would be detrimental to the interests of the United States.”

Whereupon everyone who’d screamed that we were living through a “constitutional crisis” (defined as “anything Democrats dislike”), “authoritarianism,” “tyranny” and “Trump’s Immigration Ban Is Illegal” (a New York Times headline) pretended not to notice the decision and never spoke of it again.

Now, here we are again. The Constitution vests “[t]he executive Power” exclusively in one man — you may know him as “the president of the United States” — and directs him, among other things, to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.” In order to faithfully execute the laws, he has to construe them, and there’s nothing in the Constitution to suggest that a court’s construal of the law takes precedence over the president’s.

The judiciary’s role is to resolve disputes, not to declare what the law is. Interpreting law is merely incidental to resolving disputes — just as it is incidental to the president faithfully executing the laws.

Often — not always — someone has to have the final say, and most people simply assume that the courts do. But in these cases, that’s insane. For example, USAID itself was created by executive order. The man who controls 100% of the executive branch is supposed to listen to a dinky little district court judge, who represents, at most, .05% of the judicial branch? Administering a program totally within the executive branch is simply not an exercise of “judicial power,” the only power courts have.

It bears mentioning that these lower court judges blocking Trump are constantly being overruled by the Supreme Court. This suggests they aren’t even trying to interpret law, but rather are interpreting the policy preferences of constitutional scholars like Sunny Hostin and Andy Cohen. This track record is another reason to give precedence to Trump’s reading of the law.

Liberals are especially bent out of shape that the man leading Trump’s attack on ludicrous government expenditures is Elon Musk. In case you haven’t heard, he is “unelected”!

You know who else is “unelected”? Federal judges. For devotees of “democracy,” I’d think the guy who just won a massive victory in both the Electoral College and popular vote would deserve a little more deference in his interpretation of the law than an unelected 1/2,000th part of a co-equal branch.

In faithfully executing the law, President Trump apparently believes — again, to take one example — that USAID is not doing its designated job of spreading goodwill around the world by spending $68 billion in taxpayer dollars on such programs as:

— a transgender opera in Colombia,

— a DEI musical in Ireland,

— a study of the transmission of HIV among sex workers and transgenders in South Africa,

— a TransCare Clinic in Vietnam,

— promotion of atheism in Nepal,

— a transgender comic book in Peru,

— pursuing “non-heterosexual objectives” around the globe,

— and, here at home, teaching illegals how to avoid deportation as well as assisting them in their drug and human trafficking.

As crazy as it sounds to end these wonderful programs by so much as a single discontinued penny, Trump did run on a promise to deep-six the woke enthusiasms of the progressive left, from importing the third world to DEI and any federal program that directly or indirectly has anything whatsoever to do with Rachel Levine.

It’s absurd enough to imagine that the Supreme Court could abrogate powers committed solely to the president. In this case, a mere district court judge thinks he can superintend President Trump’s decision to fire progressive lunatics who’ve burrowed into his own department and are expropriating taxpayer money to do the exact opposite of what the law intended.

If the president’s authority to make personnel decisions in the executive branch is subject to judicial veto, can a district court judge veto bills? Order Congress to adjourn or to pass a law? Make treaties? Perhaps we could have all 677 district court judges give their own State of the Union addresses next January!

The only reason the media are in mortal fear of Trump refusing to defer to the district courts subverting his authority — evidently, that would constitute another “constitutional crisis” — is because it’s so obvious that he should. If Trump is half the non-trans man his 77 million voters think he is, he will abide by the Constitution and ignore delusional judges.

Politicians bash businesses.

“Stop the greed!” shouts Sen. Bernie Sanders.

Many Republicans are equally ignorant.

When some Florida businesses raised prices in response to sudden demand during a crisis (a useful signaling device in a free market), Attorney General Pam Bondi called that “sickening … disgusting … unacceptable!” Now she’s U.S. attorney general.

Sen. Josh Hawley attacks airline CEOs for charging different people different prices. “You make it clear,” he sneered. “Money is your bottom line … ”

Well, yes, Senator. That’s the CEO’s job.

Sadly, bigshots trained as lawyers rarely understand the principles that make capitalism work so well.

“The only way you can make money in business is by providing customers with value!” Yaron Brook, head of the Ayn Rand Institute, says in my new video.

“The biggest problem we have in our culture is this perception that when you pursue your own self-interest, you are somehow a villain … it’s why socialism is still viewed as morally noble, capitalism as evil and bad.”

“Some rich people got absurdly rich. So what? The poor got richer, too.”

Ayn Rand was a philosopher who understood that others get richer because entrepreneurs pursue profit. Intellectuals hate her for saying that.

Rands’ books sold millions of copies, but the media trash her. HBO’s John Oliver show joked, “Ayn Rand became famous for her philosophy of objectivism, which is a nice way of saying, being a selfish a–hole.”

“Being selfish is not the same as being an a–hole,” responds Brook. It’s just following “your rational, long term, self-interest. … Her philosophy is smeared because it goes against 2,000 years of philosophy that tells us that the purpose of life and morality is to suffer and sacrifice.”

I wish politicians understood that entrepreneurial greed is why we have iPhones, refrigerators, cars that usually work, supermarkets that stay open all night, and many of the things that make our lives better.

Governments sometimes try to build things, but they routinely fail. California promised high-speed commuter rail service. Seventeen years, and billions of tax dollars later, no trains.

But in just three years, a “selfish” private company, Brightline, built a train line the carries commuters and tourists from Miami to Orlando. At no cost to taxpayers.

The private sector routinely builds things that, over time, get better and cheaper.

The price of TVs has fallen 97% since 1998.

Why would capitalists, greedy people looking to make more money, lower prices?

Because they have to.

Unlike government, capitalists have competitors. Those selfish people want our business, too.

Pursuit of profit even fought racial discrimination.

When some Southern states’ Jim Crow laws imposed segregation, some greedy companies resisted the rules. One bus company even sued to end Jim Crow.

Economist Thomas Sowell noted, “Only whites could vote, but whites and blacks could both supply money.”

“There’s enormous profit-motive,” Brook points out, “In you being the one that allows everybody into your restaurant. … In a true marketplace, discrimination can exist, but it doesn’t exist for long.”

Ayn Rand said that selfishness even makes us love our families.

“Imagine,” says Brook, “going to the woman you’re going to marry and saying, ‘I’m not doing this for me. This is a massive sacrifice.’ She would slap you in the face, as she should. I love my wife for self-interested reasons.”

Corporate greed, regulated by competition, is the main reason world poverty has dropped. For thousands of years, most people tried to survive on the equivalent of less than $2 a day. Fifty years ago, thanks to capitalism, just 35% did. Now it’s just 9%.

Some rich people got absurdly rich. So what? The poor got richer, too.

Quietly, capitalism, harnessing individuals’ greed, makes the world a better place.

Oh dear—shock horror, rather—the first man to think about displacing a whole populace was one Adolf Hitler, although he never went through with it. He decided to kill them instead. I am talking about plans to deracinate the Gaza population to faraway places, 2 million souls in all, give or take 100,000, depending on the death toll of innocent old men, women, and children following the Israeli bombardment of the place. Yes, it was the Führer who wanted to move all of Germany’s Jews to Madagascar, but the locals said nein. So he took harsher measures. The Israelis do not plan to follow the Führer in exterminating the Palestinians, but make no mistake about it: Israel’s hard-right government plans to annex all of the West Bank as well as Gaza. And although Trump has not put a foot wrong since coming to power, his taking over Gaza will make him a second Nero, and it’s not even his own plan, although he’s taking credit for it.

David Freedman, Trump’s ambassador to Israel in his first term, called the plan “brilliant” and out-of-the-box creative. He added that it was the only solution to a terrible problem for Israel. Happily he did not call it a final solution, but one never knows what a rich New York Jew might say where Palestinians are concerned. Freedman added that it was intolerable that Palestinians who supported Hamas remain in Gaza.

“Does a Jewish hostage who has lost weight count more than a dead Palestinian child or mother?”

Well, here’s something that very few of us know, and I’ll even spill the beans on how I happened to find out: Forcibly removing the Gaza Palestinians would violate international law, but fifty years ago Israel was already violating international law by annexing parts of the West Bank and the Golan Heights. More than one million refugees were packed into camps in Lebanon and Jordan. The prospective Gaza takeover had a funny name, the Vulva Plan. (You can imagine why, as Gaza’s geographic position is right up there on Israel’s front.) David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first president, had counseled caution and patience. Hotheads like Begin, Dayan, and Sharon wanted it implemented. Wiser heads like Henry Kissinger and General Rabin were adamantly against it. Kicking 2 million unwilling Palestinians out was never going to be easy, but hard-liners like Netanyahu and his ilk remained hopeful.

How did the poor little Greek boy find all this out? Easy. The man who helped me become a journalist, Arnaud de Borchgrave, chief foreign correspondent for Newsweek, whose first cousin, Alexander de Marenches, was head of the French secret service. Alexander, Arnaud, and I had a very long and liquid lunch at the Paris Ritz long ago, and the French aristocrat spilled the beans that the Frogs had been listening in on Israel’s most secret communications. The French government had given the nuclear formulas to the Israelis, and de Marenches as head spook had access to Israeli secrets. Both Alexander and Arnaud are dead, but as soon as I read about The Donald’s plan, they immediately came to mind. Trump’s son-in-law, the ghastly Jared Kushner, had already spoken out of turn about what great real estate opportunities lay in Gaza’s seafront while the bodies still littered the place some months ago. Now Bezalel Smotrich, Israel’s finance minister whom BiBi has given broad authority over the West Bank, is openly saying that “With God’s help, this is the year of sovereignty over Judea and Samaria,” using the biblical name for the West Bank.

Two million out of Gaza and another 9 million out of the West Bank and there you have it, greater Israel. Although knowing hard-right Israelis and religious settler nuts, the crying will never stop. There have been strong rumors, especially among the security services of nations not allied with Israel, that Mossad was aware of the planned October Hamas attacks and did nothing in order for Israel to unleash the counterattack on Hamas. Since the war began, Hamas has been 90 percent destroyed, ditto Hezbollah; Assad has been overthrown; and the Iranians have been exposed as paper tigers. The theory that Israel knew and did nothing makes sense, but I don’t buy it. If proved true, Netanyahu would be a dead man, as would all those involved who knew. And they are not brave men, just plain criminals.

What I find amazing is that the Israeli land grab and the violence against Palestinians in the West Bank and in Gaza have not raised more protest among ruling parties in Europe. And I keep reading in British newspapers about some of the freed male Israeli hostages having lost weight. In the meantime there are thousands and thousands of dead and thousands and thousands of badly wounded women and children among Palestinians, but somehow they’re no longer mentioned. Does a dead Jew count more than a dead Palestinian, or vice versa? Or does a Jewish hostage who has lost weight count more than a dead Palestinian child or mother? What has happened to our humanity? Are we all as crazy and fanatical as the Netanyahu band of criminals?

The place the humanitarians who thought this up are thinking of sending the Palestinians is Puntland, an arid region on the northern tip of the Horn of Africa. Al-Shabaab terrorists control large swaths of the south, while the capital of Somalia, Mogadishu, is wracked by suicide bombings regularly. Sending the Gaza populace to Puntland is a fate worse than being bombed daily or humiliated by Israeli hard-liners.

With the left depressed in 2025, much of the cultural energy belongs to the right. But where’s it going to go?

One increasing possibility appears to be that newly self-confident right-wingers are getting into various kinds of New Age woo-woo, the occult, gnosticism, RFK Jr. junk science, paganism, Indian esotericism, Chinese numerology, health food fads, etc. In other words, all the old craziness satirized by Umberto Eco in Foucault’s Pendulum, plus some new innovations like AI cults and God knows what else.

G. K. Chesterton supposedly said, “The first effect of not believing in God is to believe in anything.” (Note that Chesterton never quite said that: This most famous Chestertonian epigram is actually an admirably succinct paraphrased summation of G. K.’s train of thought by his admirer Émile Cammaerts.)

The current right-wing coalition between tech bros and chuds opens up all sorts of possibilities, both highbrow and lowbrow.

For example, Silicon Valley is into psychedelic drugs lately.

And much of New Age is motivated by physical discomforts suffered by aging humans, which they like to blame on poisoning. Hitler blamed race poisons, others blame seed oils and microplastics.

My grandfather was a health food faddist who blamed his annoyances upon store-bought food (a not unreasonable perspective in the early 20th century), so he moved from Oak Park, Ill., to Altadena, Calif., in 1929 to put his children to work growing his health foods.

Altadena burned down last month.

Yet, generally speaking, in the English-speaking world, this sort of stuff has historically been associated with the left, with the friends of Chesterton’s great frenemy George Bernard Shaw. Down through the generations, the left has been more associated with the Big 5 personality trait of “openness.” Shavian socialists drove George Orwell, a leftist with a rightist pro-chud personality, crazy, as Paul Laity notes:

“Socialism,” George Orwell famously wrote in ‘The Road to Wigan Pier’ (1936), draws towards it “with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, ‘Nature Cure’ quack, pacifist and feminist in England.” His tirade against such “cranks” is memorably extended in other passages of the book to include “vegetarians with wilting beards,” the “outer-suburban creeping Jesus” eager to begin his yoga exercises, and “that dreary tribe of high-minded women and sandal-wearers and bearded fruit-juice drinkers who come flocking towards the smell of ‘progress’ like bluebottles to a dead cat.”

I must admit, though, that I like fruit-juice drinking. And women in yoga pants are not the worst thing about the 21st century.

Something else that’s going on, though, is that the global dominance of the English language, plus the internet, is spreading weird Continental European rightist ideas among young Americans.

New Age thinking was largely due to the spread of the study of comparative religion.

For example, the British ruled India and Hong Kong, so they became exposed to a lot of Asian ideas.

“My vague impression is that New Age stuff has come back into fashion in recent years, especially among young women.”

Some of them were useful. Consider the Victorian mathematics genius George Boole, whose Boolean algebra, Claude Shannon pointed out almost a century later, could provide the basis for computing—one of the most colossal insights of the 20th century. Boole’s widow attributed her husband’s breakthroughs to esoteric Indian and Jewish influences. (The world’s most famous mountain, Mt. Everest, was named after Mrs. Boole’s uncle George Everest, the Surveyor General of India.)

In contrast, the Germans didn’t enjoy much of an empire, but they were phenomenally diligent scholars.

For example, I was a reasonably well-read youth, but my choices were consciously Anglo-American conservative, with my more ambitious books guided by National Review’s Anglophilia: The summer when I was 14, I read Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, at 15 James Boswell’s Life of Johnson, and at 16 Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones.

Hence, I never even heard of current Continental favorites of younger rightists like Carl Schmitt until my 40s, Julius Evola until my 50s, and Mircea Eliade until my 60s.

I’m old enough to remember when New Age woo, which traces back at least to 19th-century Britain and America, came roaring back in the late 1960s. One moment, everybody my age was into astronauts and science, then the next:

When the moon is in the Seventh House
And Jupiter aligns with Mars
Then peace will guide the planets
And love will steer the stars
This is the dawning of the Age of Aquarius
The Age of Aquarius
Aquarius! Aquarius!
Harmony and understanding
Sympathy and trust abounding
No more falsehoods or derisions
Golden living dreams of visions
Mystic crystal revelation
And the mind’s true liberation
Aquarius! Aquarius!

Keep in mind that the lyrics for “Aquarius” weren’t written by some twentysomething hippie for a rock album, but for Broadway by two thirtysomething traditional theater gays. Hair opened off-Broadway in October 1967 and was a smash on Broadway in 1968. The pop group the 5th Dimension, a favorite of TV variety shows, won the Best Record Grammy for their cover in 1970.

In other words, New Ageism was huge 55-plus years ago.

Pretty soon everybody was into New Age stuff for about ten or fifteen years. This included some normally conservative personalities. For example, in his memoir Travels, Michael Crichton talks about going to parties with Lockheed engineers where everybody tried bending spoons with their minds like Uri Geller. (Crichton claims he could bend a spoon with his brain, but it was tedious so he got bored and stopped doing it.)

Similarly, the aerospace districts of the suburban San Fernando Valley were really into the hilarious Pyramid Power Pyramid Scam of May 1980.

Pyramid Power had been a growing fad in the 1970s. I recall one fashionable Westwood hair salon where you could pay extra to have your hair cut while sitting under a pyramid-shaped tent suspended from the ceiling. Presumably, the Ancient Egyptian emanations reduced bad hair days. Or something.

I didn’t.

Then again, being a ye of little faith, I did have a lot of bad hair days.

But the peak came in May 1980 when some genius combined the cult of Pyramid Power with a traditional pyramid scam. (This probably wasn’t the first time: In Evelyn Waugh’s 1932 novel Black Mischief, the British ambassador to Azania is captivated by a chain letter he receives about the metaphysical implications of the dimensions of the Great Pyramid of Cheops.)

In the second half of May 1980, there were evening traffic jams on the Ventura Freeway (101) due to all the suburbanites going to Pyramid Power parties to sit under pyramids made out of coat hangers and fabric while they paid cash for their own set of coat hangers.

The downline recruits gave their $1,000 fee to their upline recruiter while sitting under an actual pyramid (or as close as the upline recruiter could come to making a pyramid out of hangers and cloth). In return, the recruits got the Power of the Pyramid (and their own sets of hangers) to go get their own recruits to give them money while sitting under their pyramids.

This was a multilevel marketing pyramid scheme that came pre-debunked. You couldn’t get people to wise up by telling them, “You don’t understand, it’s a pyramid scheme!” because of course it was a pyramid scheme. “Well, duh, yeah, it’s a pyramid scheme,” participants would laugh. “How do you think those Egyptian pharaohs got so rich that they could afford those giant pyramids? Through tapping the secret energy of Pyramid Power!”

What could possibly go wrong?

I got back to L.A. from college in Houston on May 16, 1980, and Pyramid Parties were all anybody could talk about in the San Fernando Valley. I left for a backpacking trip around Europe on May 20; but when I got back to the Valley a few months later, the topic had been firmly deposited in the realm of We Shall Never Speak of This Again.

New Age books became a publishing sensation in about 1968, but suddenly the market dried up around 1982.

You could attribute the decline in New Age nonsense to the hardheaded Reagan Era. Yet, interestingly, Nancy Reagan got into astrology after Ronnie was nearly murdered in 1981, when she hired astrologer Joan Quigley, whom she’d seen on The Merv Griffin Show, to give the First Couple advice.

This situation had been anticipated twenty years before by science-fiction writer Robert Heinlein in his druggie/hippie cult novel Stranger in a Strange Land, when the heroes have to influence the President of the World, so they contact his wife’s astrologer, Becky Vesant (a reference to Annie Besant, who was involved in every single left-wing cult of her long life, including atheism, Marxism, theosophy, feminism, and Indian nationalism).

Weirdly, Heinlein and Reagan were not unassociated. Heinlein was a fan of the sci-fi-ish language reform movement General Semantics. In 1966, Reagan, who was often called by his opponents, not unimperceptibly, Ronnie Raygun (the tragedy of Reagan’s movie career was that science fiction wasn’t yet a major genre), appointed the second most important General Semantics spokesman, Professor S.I. Hayakawa, as president of protest-plagued San Francisco State college.

A decade later Hayakawa was elected to the U.S. Senate (R-CA). My neighbor Jerry Pournelle attested that the elderly Heinlein helped write an early draft of Reagan’s epochal 1983 Star Wars speech.

Due to being old, I’m less in touch with cultural trends than I used to be. But my vague impression is that New Age stuff has come back into fashion in recent years, especially among young women.

Some of this is reasonable. For example, yoga was big among my friends’ moms way back in 1971. Then yoga vanished for decades; but then it came back. Because exercise regimens are repetitive and depressing, it’s good that different types of exercise go in and out of fashion, since it helps that there are seemingly novel exercises over which you can get excited.

But it’s not clear that the future will be so agreeable.

London, 1911. Two proper gentlemen meet for an ale.

“With this land grant and generous endowment by the Brothers Wilks—who stomp the earth to extract petrol for lamps and whatnot—we shall be greatly facilitated in an endeavor of our choice. Wot say thee, friend Jeremy?”

“My oath, brother Benjamin, I do declare that we should employ the sum to open a vast empire of horse stables. He who controleth a city’s equines doth controleth a city’s culture, so sayeth Andreas de Breitbarte, to whom we owe the aphorism ‘Culture lieth downstream of horseshit.’”

“Then horse stables it shall be. Have you chosen a title for your demesne?”

“Indeed! I shall be Lord Boreing of Balding Badwigge Estate. And thee?”

“Lord Shapiro of Beaniehead Cutcock Manor.”

That back-and-forth between two foppish inbreds was in 1911.

1912, the very next year, marked the first time in which automobiles outnumbered horses on the streets of London, Paris, and NYC. Horse transport was coming to an inevitable end. There was literally no worse, more shortsighted investment a person could make in 1911 than horse transport.

And you know, in 1911 there were morons who didn’t see that coming. Dolts who lived in the past, clinging to outmoded worldviews.

Well, such morons exist today, too. And the entertainment industry’s current death/rebirth cycle, the most radical since the dissolution of the studio system, is making bedfellows of old foes, antagonists joined only by stupidity and a reliance on a rapidly collapsing model.

Mainstream political conservatives and antiwhite DEI czars, seeing their dreams dying as they struggle with their limited cranial capacity to figure out where to go from here.

The Dream

“First, there was the dream.”
—Hugo Drax, billionaire industrialist obsessed with the conquest of space

In the 1980s, there was a dream, a belief, popularized by (but not originating with) Bill Cosby, that “images” of blacks on TV can alter black reality. Portray blacks as doctors, lawyers, and good little achievers who do their homework and never sass their elders or violate curfew, and in real life, blacks will become exactly that.

“Leftist racial social engineers, rightist self-proclaimed media czars, all sharing the same childish dream that movies be magic.”

Cosby employed a “positive images” consultant on his megahit 1980s TV show: Alvin Poussaint, professor of psychiatry, Harvard:

Poussaint encouraged the development early on of Theo’s character as someone who enjoys school. The stereotype he and the show’s staff sought to avoid was that of the young black male as an academic nonachiever. “That is a stereotype, but it’s also a problem right now in the black community,” Poussaint says, “that’s happening to too many black male youths.”

So Theo Huxtable was portrayed as an academic overachiever, and now, forty years later, black student test scores are on par with Asians.

Oh, wait…no, the magic didn’t work. None of the magic worked. After decades of portraying blacks as pure light and goodness, America has higher black crime rates and lower black academic test scores.

Meanwhile, circa 2009, American conservatives got the same idea as black leftists: Movies and TV can work magic. Led by Andrew “politics is downstream of culture” Breitbart, rightists decided that if they began making “positive” films, “patriotic,” “Bible-based,” “moralistic” films (films that, like The Cosby Show, mixed positive messaging with something that passed for humor), Democrats would never win another election. Everyone would vote GOP and the nation would become George Washington’s wet dream.

How’d that work out? Well, we got two Obama terms, one Biden term, Speaker Pelosi, DEI, police defunding, trannies in schools, Covid lockdowns, Covid welfare, and now a second Trump administration birthed not by movies but by Kamala’s preternatural crappiness coupled with Democrat open-borders extremism.

Leftist racial social engineers, rightist self-proclaimed media czars, all sharing the same childish dream that movies be magic. That movies and TV can change a people or a nation. That dream was propelled not just by naivete and ignorance; it was propelled by the old Hollywood model, the implosion of which was covered in the previous parts of this series. The old model, in which movie studios and TV networks were the only game in town—you took their content or you got nothing—created the illusion of media power because you’d get TV and movie “events” that absolutely everybody would watch and excitedly talk about. Mass viewership, not niche.

Witnessing the success of the Roots miniseries in the 1970s and The Cosby Show in the ’80s—watercooler fare that would have everyone chattering the next day—it’s understandable that simpletons believed TV has a mesmeric power that goes beyond “what a fine way to kill a few hours.”

But it never did. The man-children who believed in the magic were themselves the ones being mesmerized by the way in which a particular movie or show could become a cultural event, the “talk of the town.”

“If we could just harness that power, we could use it for good! To raise black SAT scores, to make every black a doctor! To elect GOPs, to make every American a wholesome pro-life prayer-breakfast Republican hetero.”

Always remember the guiding principle of advertising: The point of a restaurant ad is not to make you hungry. That’s hoodoo-voodoo bullshit. A burger ad can’t make a nauseous man crave food. Admen are not trying to make the sated hungry. Rather, they understand basic human nature. They know that you may not be hungry right this minute, but you will be hungry at some point today. The goal of the burger ad is that when you get hungry, you’ll choose restaurant A over restaurant B.

Advertising cannot make you what you aren’t. It’s not magic; neither are movies or TV shows, no matter how message-heavy they are.

Still, the lure of “event” programming, blockbuster films, “must-see” TV shows, made the impossible seem attainable.

The old model kept the dream alive.

The Reality

“Now there is reality.”
—Hugo Drax (tried to kill every human on earth, still a better man than Elon)

I’ve been trying to drive a stake through the heart of the “make movies to change the culture” nonsense for the ten years I’ve been writing this column. But I no longer have to; the dream died on its own. The dream’s over for all the “movies is magic” nutjobs, because the Hollywood implosion means the fracturing of content. With the exception of Marvel films and the other few reliable franchises that merit the expense, the money’s just not there anymore, and the mass-distribution structure’s just not there anymore, for “message” films left or right.

And TV (aka streaming)? The streamers have downsized to such an extent, there’s no such thing as “event” TV anymore. Streaming is all niche now; “boutique” audiences, cliques. No more Roots, or Cosby, or final Seinfeld episode. No more “the thing everybody watches together all at once.” Everybody’s watching something different on their idiotic little phone screens, and that ends, for good, the “change the culture through movies/TV” mania, because whatever content you make, it’s not going to be foisted upon anyone other than those who already want to see it, who are already partial to it. The mania always depended on ghetto blacks seeing Cosby and going, “Man, that show really taught me I gotta get my life together! I’m gettin’ my PhD,” and on white racists seeing Roots and going, “I’ve been such a fool; blacks got a tough break, and I’ll devote my life to helping them,” and that ain’t happening anymore. Nobody anywhere is so hard-up for content that they’ll watch what they aren’t already keen on.

The dream depended on the old model in which the studios and networks could force content upon the entire nation. But now people just watch what they want, and with the studios, networks, and streamers having closed their wallets, that means 99 percent of everything will be smaller. Smaller content, cheaper content, more fleeting content.

Sure, there will still be streaming hits, but even those will be niche. It’s just that some niches are bigger than others.

That’s the irony of conservatives jumping into the biz with both feet right now. They actually already had the present formula without knowing it. From the days of Focus on the Family’s morality videos to Kirk Cameron’s “rapture” movies, it was always about preaching to the converted. Then you had the Breitbartians bitching, “We want to do more than that! We want to create wide-release films that will reach everyone, so that gay communist atheists can have their hearts changed via our amazing Nick Searcy in a cowboy hat films.”

And conservative dumbasses started wasting millions of crowdfunded dollars making “wide-release” films just as the wide-release film market dried up and the industry contracted so that everything became the “preaching to the choir” that rightists had been doing all along.

It takes a special kind of stupid to be that not prescient.

Meanwhile, the leftist racial social engineers are feeling the same pain. Those Amazon race quotas for actors were premised on the model that Amazon streaming would corner the market and evil whites would be forced to watch nothing but obese weave-wearing LaQuedas all day long. But in the current streaming contraction, Amazon’s suffering the most. It can produce all the LaQuedavision it wants; the only people watching it are those who already like that stuff. No whites are being tortured by having to sit through it. Which takes all the fun out of it for the social engineers.

That’s why the quotas have been abandoned. There’s no point to them if whites can’t be forced to see LaQueda. Streaming’s not like public schools; you don’t have a captive audience. So whereas public school teachers can still force a message on captives, Hollywood can’t.

Get my point? The dream, the mad, stupid dream that you could condition people via movies and TV, whether that meant making a black low achiever into an honor student or turning a commie anarchist into a Bible-toting patriot, was always predicated on the ability to corral people, via lack of viewing options, into sitting through content that was outside their bubble. And those days are OVER. For good. And they’re never coming back. And if you give one dime to anyone claiming they can “change the culture” by making an online movie, you’re an idiot. Take the money you’d give Daily Wire and spend it on rope and a chair; you’ll do the world a better service stringing yourself up.

Movies and TV shows were never going to change the culture. But the dreamers could dream.

Not anymore. The business model that allowed the dream to exist is dead.

Thank God. As has been detailed in the previous parts of this series, the current downturn/implosion has led to a lot of misery for the people who used to make a living in the biz. And that’s tragic. But worth it, so very worth it, for putting the “movies/TV to change the culture” imbeciles out of their misery.

And mine.

A British court has just made a surprising judgment. According to reports, David Spencer, a 56-year-old soccer fan, was convicted and fined £1,375 for hurling racial abuse at a 15-year-old brown boy in the stands at a game, after allegedly chanting the impolite invective “You’re a P***. You’re a P***. Turn round. Watch the match.” The punishment sounds a bit harsh to me: If printed accurately as above, Mr. Spencer didn’t even call the boy a Paki.

Possibly taking this act of highly considerate verbal self-asterisking into account, magistrates did not initially issue the miscreant with the further available sentence of a “banning order,” preventing him from attending any future matches. Prosecutors thought this too lenient, though, so they made an appeal to a Crown Court judge—a rare sensible judge who, observing there was derogatory “banter” going on between two rival sets of opposing fans that day, each “giving as much as they were getting,” pronounced Spencer’s original penalty more than enough.

This steadfast refusal of the judge to buckle pleased me immensely, not because I think you should go around randomly calling nearby children Pakis, but because I’m old-fashioned enough not to consider calling other humans hurty-wurty names to be even remotely a police matter. Sadly, censorious British bobbies increasingly disagree. The latest proof comes in the case of Georgia Venables, an Englishwoman dragged into an actual court of law for displaying a joke car-bumper sticker reading “Don’t be a cunt.” Evidently, the arresting officers didn’t understand how to follow instructions.

The Grievance Factory
Mr. Spencer’s case reminded me of how my late uncle used to work in a local car-manufacturing plant in which the main way the bored factory-floor employees got through the day was by ostentatiously insulting one another nonstop about any and all of their “protected characteristics,” as we are solemnly enjoined to call them nowadays.

One such worker was a Pakistani, whom, predictably enough, the others habitually referred to as a “Paki.” He took no offense and called them “white bastards” right back, realizing it was all intended in a spirit of crude jest, with nary a mention of the magic word “racism” at all.

“I’m old-fashioned enough not to consider calling other humans hurty-wurty names to be even remotely a police matter.”

One day, however, a new employee turned up on the shift and innocently asked the Pakistani whether he happened to be an Indian. Subcontinental ethno-religious tensions being what they are, it was all the other workers could do to hold their colleague back from twisting the new boy’s head off right there and then with a wrench, before ululating down the neck hole.

Ironically, it turned out the true racist in the factory happened not to be white. Even more ironically, the car company in question, Jaguar Land Rover, was later bought out by Indians.

You can tell this was all quite some time back, of course—not only because the Pakistani didn’t sue his employers for several million pounds immediately for being racially insulted, but even more so because at that point he was still the only Pakistani working there. Inhabitants of Great Britain were made of sterner stuff back then, no matter their pigmentation. No longer. In our era of excessively easy offense, the kingdom’s increasingly infantile citizens can be upset by literally anything.

Simple Twists of Hate
I have written previously on this site about the ludicrousness of the U.K.’s present Non-Crime Hate Incident laws. An NCHI is a contradictory form of “crime” that isn’t legally a crime at all, but which has to be officially investigated by the police as if it is one anyway, Franz Kafka-style. NCHIs are framed in such an ambiguous manner as to allow anyone to interpret literally anything as being a subliminal insult against them, even farts on the other side of the street.

A new investigation into NCHIs revealed U.K. Keystone Cops were wasting their own time looking into incredibly “distressing” and “offensive” events like the following:

(1) Someone rearranging novelty letter-bearing “alphabet cups” to spell out “a rude word” on shelves in a supermarket. Reports did not specify what precise “rude word” it was, in order to avoid offending people.

(2) A motorist disagreeing that their car should have failed its MoT roadworthiness test at a local garage.

(3) Someone expressing the view that being pansexual was not really “a thing,” perhaps because it isn’t.

(4) A schoolgirl calling a classmate “a Polish twat” online after the two had fallen out.

(5) A soccer supporter (not David Spencer) singing an insulting chant about rent boys.

(6) A woman finding a dead cat next to her bin.

(7) Someone complaining a dog owner may have potentially named their pet after a well-known celebrity homosexual.

The most elaborately paranoid such NCHI came when police recorded that a duo of “known offenders” had “hung a very large soiled pair of underpants” on their washing line for what was deemed an abnormally long period, which their (presumably white, but possibly suntanned) Italian neighbor somehow interpreted as being a skiddy slur against her racial heritage. Had the neighbor involved actually possessed poo-brown skin, this allegation might at least have made more sense.

Insults to Intelligence
It’s a good job U.S. readers, sheltered as they are by the First Amendment guaranteeing freedom of speech, don’t have NCHIs too, as it appears modern-day Americans are every bit as easily offended as the British. According to data released by the Pew Research Center last August, 62 percent of Americans think that “people being too easily offended by things others say” is a “major problem” in the country today.

One randomly chosen online list provides the following oversensitive all-American examples:

(1) A driver being offended by her passenger putting on a seat belt as she “thought I was commenting on her ability to drive.”

(2) An HR commissar refusing to allow directions to an employee’s home to be given out to his coworkers, as he lived in a place called “Gay Street.”

(3) A fireman being piously lectured against calling an item “flame retardant,” lest it offend any emotionally flammable retards in the vicinity—such as the person complaining, perhaps. (Don’t show that particular retard this recent Takimag article with a similar punning title, or they’ll really go up in flames.)

(4) A woman haranguing a parent that her baby should not be allowed to wear a shirt with a NASA logo on in public because “he’s clearly not an astronaut.”

(5) A prudish restaurant-goer complaining about a sign saying “Condiments available upon request,” as diners should really be expected to bring their own rubber prophylactics along.

(6) A pair of old ladies getting upset at a Shakespeare performance that they considered excessively politically correct because “Othello was being played by a black man.”

Nonetheless, increasing America-wide touchiness or not, the idea that the cops might turn up on a U.S. doorstep one day just because you’d left some ploppy underwear out in the vague presence of a foreigner seemed unthinkable even in the bad old Biden-Harris days of about two weeks ago. Here in the NCHI-ridden U.K., things are rather different. It’s why I’m always so incredibly careful not to write anything that could be considered potentially offensive by hair-trigger demographics like Pakis or Itis in my own articles on this website.

We’ll Wipe Them Off the Map!
Not having any NCHIs conveniently to hand, offense-seeking American race hucksters et al. have just had to seek out other desperate means of enforcing their desired regime of preening linguistic censorship instead.

Under President Biden over the past four years, the federal government embarked upon a wild spree of renaming hundreds of supposedly unbelievably racially offensive and harmful American place-names nationwide. I suppose you can see why some of them were bowdlerized thus; turns out there was a place in Arizona called Squaw Tits, now known as Isanaklesh Peaks. Now that Trump’s back in office and busily renaming American toponyms himself along defiantly non-woke lines, he should quickly redub it Twin Peaks in honor of the late David Lynch. Or just change it back to what it was in honor of Elizabeth Warren.

Yet some of the names U.S. Year Zero activists wanted erasing forever were simply bemusing. What’s wrong with a place called Anna, Illinois? Apparently, if randomly capitalized for no good reason, ANNA secretly stands for “Ain’t No Niggers Allowed”—or so the misinformed campaigners said.

Should we rename Tolstoy’s great novel Karen Karenina henceforth, then? After all, there were no black people allowed to appear in that either, just a lot of self-entitled, moaning, privileged white women like the one referred to in the title. Meanwhile, who was truly going to be offended by the fact there was a place called Devil’s Tower in Wyoming, exactly? Jesus?

A mere short year ago, to mark America’s Black History Month 2024, several “racial justice” groups listed the above silly place-names as being ones “that perpetuate stereotypes and hate,” as “the living legacy of white supremacy,” demanding the Democrats surgically remove all of them from U.S. maps too, just like Squaw Tits. They evinced pseudo-medical evidence that to refuse would be to make non-white American schoolchildren ill and maybe even KILL THEM, as racism “truly is a disease. Racism and its effects can lead to chronic stress to children. And chronic stress leads to actual changes in hormones that cause inflammation in the body, a marker of chronic disease.”

Dropping Names
Yet I can’t help but feel some of the names targeted for ideological replacement were less “harmful” than simply amusing, particularly to kids. Mad toponyms like Big Negro Creek in Illinois, and Darky Knob in Kentucky, would surely just make most mentally normal schoolchildren who encounter them start laughing, not crying, as lefty campaigners implied.

I still remember coming across a British hill called Brown Willy on a map during a childhood geography lesson long ago. “I’ve got one of those,” said the single non-white child in the class. How damaged did he sound by the experience? (The prominence’s puerile name could also be considered potentially highly LGBTQ+-friendly, if you stop to think about it—especially as the name probably derives from an old Cornish term meaning “Hill of Swallows.”)

According to one Black Lives Matter nomenclapuritan, however, forcibly wiping Darky Knob clean was the first step toward unleashing a whole new racial utopia out upon the land: “In a nation plagued by poverty, injustice and hopelessness, changing racist location names is a simple fix.” Yes, it’s certainly much more of a “simple fix” than creating any practical useful policies to actually address such genuine difficulties as “poverty, injustice and hopelessness,” isn’t it?

The modern world is full of many problems. Shitty undies hanging on a line, naughty chants at soccer games, or obscure place-names that sound amusingly like black men’s penises are surely not primary amongst them. No offense, but are these soap-swilling morons out of their minds?

The Week’s Most Narrowing, Harrowing, and Cupid-Arrowing Headlines

HURTY GURDY
It was the worst week for Sweden since that time the Muppet chef made ribbestek and nobody ever saw Miss Piggy again.

First, there was Salwan Momika, an Iraqi atheist and TikTok prankster residing in Stockholm. Momika’s favorite online gag was to burn Qurans while telling Muslims to “come and get me.”

So last week Muslims came and got him; Momika was shot dead on his balcony while performing his latest stunt, burning copies of Sweden’s only contribution to Western lit: Pippi Longstocking. While initially it was thought that Momika’s murder might’ve been Longstocking-related, as the stunt pissed off Swedish literati and pedophiles, authorities now believe that the killing was orchestrated by foreign assassins from one of the many Muslim nations that routinely protested Momika’s channel.

Note to Quran-burners who make it their life’s goal to infuriate Muslims to the point of homicidal rage: Maybe don’t use as your base of operations a country with zero immigration controls. The Nazis guarding the camp on Hogan’s Heroes were less clownish than the Swedish border patrol.

Meanwhile in Orebro, a school for adults learning Swedish as a second language was bullet-riddled in what ended up as the nation’s worst mass shooting ever. Eleven dead, including the gunman. The school was a popular choice for African immigrants who’d immigrated to imbibe Swedish women’s insatiable appetite for black dudes. Indeed, in the school’s course catalog, its most popular class is described thusly: “It’s been a week of raw animal sex; now you gotta talk to the bitch. Learn how to say ‘Lemme sleep, you damn stupid ho; I gots a lot on my mind’ in a language your pale-ass cracker will understand.”

It makes perfect sense that a town with a language school for Africans would be called Orebro. Indeed, that’s also the name of the favorite cookie of Swedish women. White cream filling surrounded by black wafers, it doesn’t allow you to eat it until you secure it a green card first. And once the cookie gets permanent residency, you’re left with its mocha offspring and all the related bills.

GET BACK, GET BACK, GET AKBAR WHERE YOU ONCE BELONGED
In terms of idiots inviting mo’ harmadin from Mohammedans, nothing could top a Swedish influencer burning Qurans while provoking Muslims to “do your worst.”

Wait, did someone say, “Do your worst”? Why, that’s the catchphrase of Trump’s second term.

It’s like somebody dared Trump, “Can you think of anything dumber and less necessary than invading Greenland and annexing Canada?”

And Trump narrowed it down to two possibilities. The first: invade the Congo and harvest Ebola lesions for sale in the U.S. as nausea-inducing lunch snacks. And granted, that would’ve been a bad idea. But Trump nixed it due to lobbying from Papa John’s, because the company didn’t want the foreign competition.

Idea No. 2? Invade Gaza and “relocate” the Palestinians. Yes, Trump looked at the fetid strip of hellish earth known for one thing and one thing only—a bitter, violent, vengeful people who’ll blow up their own children to avenge land from which they were forcibly relocated—and he said, “I’m gonna forcibly relocate those zealots because what could go wrong?”

“New Zealand’s like New Guinea, but the giant dicks are figurative.”

Trump’s plan, to use U.S. troops to kick the Palestinians out of Gaza, was announced last week during a meeting with Benjamin Netanyahu, who reacted to the news with an erection of joy that shot ramrod-straight from his slacks with such vigor, even Elon Musk mistook it for a sieg heil.

Trump announced that once the Palestinians are removed from Gaza, “the world’s people” would become the new residents, occupying an “international unbelievable place,” a “Riviera of the Middle East.”

At which point Gustavo the deported gardener dolefully looked back at the Texas border and said to himself, “It was that important to send me back to Jalisco that you elected this lunatic?”

As for the Palestinians, they seem upbeat. “We were getting tired of killing Israelis,” Hamas spokesman Qurz T. Ali told the AP. “This’ll give us all-new targets. We were thinking of going scorched earth on the 2028 L.A. Olympics, but it seems Karen Bass made that a moot gesture.”

MOUNT ROMNEY
Remember the outrage when Mitt Romney, the lab-engineered DNA admixture of Joseph Smith and a horse’s diarrhetic ass, declared that “corporations are people”?

While certainly true as a legal fiction, leftists pointed out that in real life only people can be people.

Why, a corporation identifying as a person is as silly as a man identifying as a woman!

And that’s why leftists don’t criticize “corporate personhood” anymore.

Well, New Zealand has just one-upped “corporations are people” to a degree that’s even making trannies say, “C’mon, now you’re just being silly.”

New Zealand’s very much like its most famous son, Russell Crowe. Looks great from afar. Impresses initially. And then you realize it’s an ungodly mess of unlikability and irritation.

New Zealand’s like New Guinea, but the giant dicks are figurative.

And now New Zealand has declared a mountain to be a human. Taranaki Maunga, a massive clump of dirt considered sacred by Maoris, is as of last week fully recognized as a person by the government of New Zealand. If you’re unclear on just what a Maori is, it’s as if someone took a look at Australian aborigines and said, “I like the subhuman intelligence and violent tendencies, but let’s trade the diminutive pygmy stature for massive Polynesian bodies so filled with blubber and poi as to render them bulletproof.”

So when Maoris insisted that their holy hill be officially recognized as a human, the New Zealand government said “fair dinkum.” After all, this is the same government that initially banned Candace Owens from speaking there until she declared that Jews drink baby blood, at which point the NZ government was like, “Welcome, sister!”

New Zealand, where Taranaki Maunga, a literal mud clump, must legally be referred to as “sir,” and where Owens’ Kikes Kill Tykes Tour 2025 kicks off next month.

Such a shame Bikini Atoll suffered the brunt of A-bomb tests. New Zealand would’ve been far less of a loss for humanity.

CHUBBY EXCHEQUER
“Kilonzi” sounds like how a ghetto black would order a calzone in an Italian restaurant. “Gimme one kilonzi, some fettucheen, and a fuckasha.”

But in fact Marianne Kilonzi was a rotund black woman who was senior VP of Citibank in the U.K. Two weeks ago she was brutally assassinated, and for some strange reason leftists aren’t cheering this one like they did that Luigi guy who offed the healthcare exec in NYC.

Maybe there is some value in corporate affirmative action after all; a black board of directors will ensure that insane leftists don’t cheer their demise.

As to what motivated Killed-onzi’s murder, London’s cops aren’t saying, as they’re too busy arresting old white men who posted transphobic memes on Facebook. But most likely, cold chips played a role.

Speaking of which, “Monjah” sounds like how a ghetto black would say “mangia” at an Italian restaurant. But Louisville’s Monjah James-Wooten don’t like him no eye-talian food. Nope, he wants fries, and they best be hot.

Which they weren’t last week when James-Wooten visited a Wendy’s. So he did the only rational thing he could: He pulled a gun and opened fire on the employees. And the employees, all of whom were armed (the only rational thing to do when serving fries in a 25 percent black city), returned fire, forcing James-Wooten to flee.

One employee was shot in the rectum (rectum? He killed ’um!), and Jones-Wooten was arrested.

Footnote: The next day Monjah’s female passenger contacted police, claiming she’d been shot too.

Those must’ve been some cold-ass fries; dude shot the employees who served ’em and the slag who was just a bystander.

Cold fries? Everyone dies.

THREE FOR THE ROAD (TO HELL)
When Robert Kenney Knox, it’s best not to answer.

Last week 23-year-old Knox, a black gentleman in Amarillo, Tex., decided to go barhopping. Slapping on his favorite aftershave (Oscar Micheaux-de-toilette), he called his best gal, Nahryah Hilesta Ines Hayes (recipient of the “You Got Too Many Names, Bitch” award three years running), and his token white friend, Britt Brinson-Cave, whose name seems more fit for a British noble than for Texas white trash.

And off the gleesome threesome went, to enjoy their Saturday night.

But trouble lurked on the horizon. While boozing it up at a nightclub called Bodega’s, His Lordship Brinson-Cave became overly intoxicated and retreated to doze in the car.

Leaving Knox without a hot wingman.

Enter Love Louima, a 25-year-old Haitian immigrant. And he had eyes on Knox’s gal.

Cue “Copacabana”:

His name’s Louima,
He wore a vèvè.
His voodoo power ’came aglow, when he cast eyes on Kenney’s ho.
He summoned Legba, to draw her over,
But Louima went a bit too far, so Kenney ran back to his car,
And then the bullets flew,
As Kenney fired at Lou.
There was AIDS blood on the dance floor,
The Haitian blown in two!

After killing Louima, Nahryah jumped into the driver’s seat as Knox in the passenger seat fired at bystanders as they drove off. Fifteen rounds were discharged, resulting in only minor grazes. That alone would’ve alerted the cops that the shooter was black.

Louima was pronounced dead at the scene. His body was turned over to the local Haitian restaurant for “disposal” at Sunday’s buffet (“our extra ingredient is Love”). Knox and Nahryah were arrested. Amazingly, Brinton-Cave slept through everything in the back seat. He was detained by Amarillo authorities for being a pompous-named dumbass.

The Department of Government Efficiency has started making moves.

The D.C. media are furious about his attempts to cut government agencies.

But I take Elon Musk’s side.

More efficient government has been promised often. It’s never happened.

Instead, government just grew.

Sen. Rand Paul showcases stupid government “investments” like the $118,000 study of finger snapping, which the National Science Foundation said was “inspired by the infamous finger snap of the (comic book) villain ‘Thanos.'” The government concluded that “varying degrees of friction between the fingers alters … performance of a snap.”

Gee, thanks.

“More efficient government has been promised often. It’s never happened.”

They even spent thousands of dollars to study whether Neil Armstrong, landing on the moon, said: “One small step for man,” or “one small step for a man.”

NASA says no “a” is audible in the recordings, and I never heard an “a,” but we all paid for an expensive study in which the Science Foundation concluded, “Ambiguity exists.”

Gee, thanks.

They also spent $1.5 million to study ways to improve the taste of tomatoes. Researchers found that sugar helps.

America is going broke. Silly rich people should fund such frivolous research. Taxpayers shouldn’t.

But each special interest will fight for its life, and even if Musk cuts all such funding, it would barely affect our ever-increasing deficit.

Let’s look at bigger cuts:

In my new video, Chris Edwards, editor of the Cato Institute’s “Downsizing Government” website, says, “The first thing I would cut is over a trillion dollars in subsidies to states and local governments — K-12 school funding, school lunch funding, food stamp funding.”

Giving people food stamps sounds kind, but Edwards notes that, “Taxpayers fund candy and cake,” and when “state governments ask to eliminate junk food … they aren’t allowed to.”

Really. States aren’t allowed to limit welfare payments for junk food.

Edwards also proposes cuts to corporate welfare: “Federal government spends $180 billion a year subsidizing corporations … but that doesn’t help the average person.”

More could be saved by selling the government’s stockpile of “an unbelievable 300,000 buildings.”

Many sit empty. The ones in my video look first-class, but government still won’t sell them.

Nor do bureaucrats sell land they don’t use. The federal government owns a lot, including most of the land in America’s west.

“We don’t know the market value,” says Edwards, “It is in the trillions.”

Instead of selling, politicians print more money and use it to buy even more land, like Biden’s recent purchase of 640 acres in Wyoming.

President Donald Trump says he will make cuts. Will he? Last time he didn’t.

This time he seems more serious about it.

He recently moved to end DEI programs, telling federal DEI workers, “Don’t come in.”

But he’s still paying them!

“It’s very difficult to fire federal workers,” Edwards points out.

Also, even if Trump managed to fire every federal employee, it still wouldn’t eliminate the deficit.

It’s almost impossible to do that, without cutting the biggest spending — Defense, Medicare, Social Security. So far, Trump says he won’t touch those.

“Trump does not have to solve the entire deficit problem in his four years in office,” says Edwards, “but he’s got to get the ball rolling.”

Government doesn’t need to balance the budget. If it just slowed spending growth, the private economy might grow enough to reduce our debt.

But how can the private sector grow when there are so many regulations?

“SpaceX had to do a study to see if Starship would hit a shark,” Musk complains. He says he told the regulators, “It’s a big ocean, you know? There’s a lot of sharks. It’s not impossible … ”

When regulators finally dropped their shark objections, Musk thought the Space X launch was approved. “We said, ‘OK, now we’re done.’ And they said, ‘What about whales? … If the rocket goes underwater, then explodes, and the whales have hearing damage?’ This is real! It goes on and on.”

Maybe Musk will change that. Hope so. To overcome our ruinous deficits, we need growth. To get that, we need less government spending and fewer rules.