Go Fog Yourself

This is a sequel-in-spirit to last week’s piece about rightist “fog.” In a recent column I mentioned a Ron Unz contradiction regarding the Holocaust. In his “landmark” 17,600-word Holocaust denial essay, Unz wrote that Jews never made a big deal about the Holocaust until the 1970s (when ...

Biden’s Killing the American Dream of Homeownership

In boasting about Bidenomics two weeks ago in Milwaukee, President Joe Biden declared that his policies are "restoring the American dream." Then he went into his creepy whispering mode and assured us "it's working." Huh? Isn't a big aspiration of the American dream owning a home? Biden keeps ...

Duchess of Sussex

Meghan: The Black Princess

This week sees the first anniversary of HM Queen Elizabeth II’s death on 8 September 2022 and provides an excellent opportunity to stop and reflect upon the many heartfelt tributes that poured in from around the globe as the sad news broke: tributes such as “I heard the chief monarch of a ...

The Week That Perished

The Week’s Most Sabering, Neighboring, and Day-of-Laboring Headlines 2023: A SPICE ODYSSEY A prehistoric veldt in South Asia. Members of a hairy, knuckle-walking Paleolithic cavemen tribe stare quizzically at a large black monolith. Grunting, screeching, and flinging poo, they hesitantly ...

Paris, France

Paris Was Yesterday

GSTAAD—A reader’s inquiry as to why I think Paris was yesterday has me remembering times past. When did the party end? According to the point of view of many night owls, the party ended when the Queen of the Night, Regine, shut down “New Jimmy’s” and moved to London, where she flopped. ...

A Secret Garden

One of my few remaining ambitions is to catalog my library—if that is not too grand a word for my accumulation of books. Certainly, I have known municipal libraries with fewer volumes, especially now as they can’t wait to dispose of those encumbrances and obstructors of computer ...

Apparently, Not All Black Lives Matter

Let's be honest: As far as the media are concerned, most black lives don't matter. Only in the tiny, infinitesimally small percentage of cases when a black person is killed by a white guy do the media sit up and take notice. Thus, while there was blanket coverage of a white racist 21-year-old ...

A Matter of Speaking

I am writing this dispatch from the birthplace of “oracy,” the art of public speaking first perfected by the Athenian Demosthenes, a speaker so eloquent and influential he managed to force the great Aristotle to move back to Macedonia, his birthplace. Demosthenes did not like nor trust northern ...

Whatever You Can Get Away With

Theoretically, you could become a professor of ethnic studies without being the ethnicity you study, just as you can be a gerontologist without being old or a botanist without being a plant. Still, and while I don’t often offer career advice, trust me on this: Don’t try it. The pervasiveness ...

Control Versus Choice

COVID cases are up. Hospitalizations climbed 24% last week. But the media make everything seem scarier than it is. The headline "Up 24%!" comes after dramatic lows. Hospitalizations are still less than half what they were when President Joe Biden said, "The pandemic is over." Yet the shallow ...