Fake Noose!

You can call it Sailer’s Boast: Whenever there is some remarkably dumb development flabbergasting the respectable pundits, I’ve no doubt explained the entire phenomenon years ago in various Taki’s columns. For example, the sidesplitting Jussie Smollett fake noose story is a classic ...

Rep. Ilhan Omar

The Emperor’s New Clout

While our society’s growing hate hysteria against straight white men may seem a bit demented, it is actually a logical requirement of the fundamental strategy of the Democratic Party: to mobilize a Coalition of the Margins comprising identity groups—such as blacks, transgenders, Muslims, and ...

The Allure of Protective Stupidity

The most important aspect of the Grievance Studies hoax—in which three writers duped supposedly scholarly gender and race journals with absurd papers such as “Human Reactions to Rape Culture and Queer Performativity at the Dog Park”—may also be the most overlooked: the triumph of their term ...

The Scramble for America

The Scramble for Africa became possible when Europeans began to use quinine to lessen the ferocious toll that malaria took upon whites. Before the later 19th century, Europeans had barely penetrated into the interior of tropical Africa. But as indigenous diseases became less lethal, a great ...

Identity Stalinism

The media’s latest Days of Rage, in which a white boy drove the national press into a frenzy by smiling at the leftist Person of Color banging a drum in his face, was like a greatest-hits collection of my old observations. So I’m going to take a victory lap to review how ideas I’ve been ...

Santa Monica, CA

The High Price of Affordable L.A.

With my hometown of Los Angeles coming back into fashion again, it’s worth wondering whether some of its traditional problems are fixable. Or do urban-planning mistakes tend to be forever? There’s glib talk these days about the need to build affordable housing, but much of Los Angeles is ...

The Fundamental Constant of Sociology

With the perennial race-IQ controversy back in the news, due to The New York Times attempting to put the boot in on 90-year-old Nobelist James D. Watson from the left and Nassim Nicholas Taleb thundering on against IQ from the right, it’s worth calling attention to one of the most elegant ...

Christian Bale

‘Anchorman’ Without Laughs

Vice stars Christian Bale, Christopher Nolan’s Batman, in an eerily impeccable impersonation of former vice president Dick Cheney. Amy Adams is forceful as the veep’s intellectual wife, Lynne Cheney, and Sam Rockwell is wonderfully well cast as George W. Bush. With a trio that strong ...

Negotiating the Curve

Nassim Nicholas Taleb is a prodigious intellectual who has managed to build a significant following with his books on investing and “tail risk,” such as The Black Swan and Skin in the Game. Yet he’s never quite gotten Watsoned out of polite society for his variegated crimethinking. All this ...

The Unhappiness Explosion

The prestige of the intersectional is pushing respectable opinion in anti-science directions, as seen in the resurgent prestige of astrology and witchcraft. Granted, perhaps it doesn’t matter all that much what lowbrows who like horoscopes and spells are into, but it probably does matter that ...