It’s understandable that Democrats are fuming about Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency ferreting out waste, fraud and abuse, inasmuch as the people committing the waste, fraud and abuse are their constituents. What I can’t understand is why they’re saying so out loud.
The Democrats claim there’s no “waste, fraud and abuse,” and if there is, it’s minuscule — infinitesimal — and if there’s an occasional overpayment, we have inspectors general coming down with a claw hammer on the miscreants — or at least they were, until Trump fired them! (Technically, he fired 17 out of 70 inspectors, and I’m sure every last one of them was absolutely vital.)
Basically, they’re staking their claim on the idea that the government is a streamlined, well-oiled machine. The only step that would “actually” combat waste, fraud and abuse, Democrats say, is to “invest in a skilled workforce.” (“Invest” meaning, raise the salaries of federal government employees and, no, this has nothing to do with the fact that government unions give 99% of their political donations to us.)
The left’s full-throated defense of federal waste reminded me of my “Excellence in Government” file.
It’s been busting at the seams lately, with the addition of the trillion dollars stolen from COVID relief funds. For perspective, that’s more than we’ve given to Volodymyr Zelenskyy, more than it cost Jeff Bezos to send the Real Housewives into orbit, and is nearly as much as California’s Reparations Committee decided was owed to the state’s black residents.
To be fair, the moment the $2.2 trillion “relief” program was announced, cybersecurity experts lit up the White House switchboard, warning that the CARES Act was like a 7-11 on the route of a BLM march. So it’s not as if anyone could have anticipated the coming heist. Only anyone who happened to peruse the dark web and notice that it was exploding with criminal groups in China, Nigeria, Romania and Russia, plotting to get their hands on U.S. taxpayer money.
Naturally, therefore, our highly trained federal workforce dutifully sent out a trillion dollars to federal prisoners ($267 million), dead people ($139 million — though curiously, Joe Biden didn’t get a cent) and people who appeared to be living in multiple states ($29 billion), among other manifest frauds. Sometimes the checks were sent directly to federal prisons, a mistake anyone could make.
Somalis in Minnesota stole $250 million in COVID relief funds, briefly distracting them from credit card skimming, child prostitution, machete attacks, child rape and joining jihad abroad.
Pretending to be providing meals for low-income children, the Somalis collected hundreds of
millions of taxpayer dollars, which they spent on luxury cars, multiple homes, expensive jewelry and other purchases that are not remotely meals for low-income children. (They didn’t scam the Payment Protection Plan because so few Somalis in Minnesota had jobs even before the pandemic that it wouldn’t have been believable.)
Another item in my “Government Excellence” file concerns the theft of hundreds of millions of dollars from Medicare committed by a different batch of Our Greatest Strength. So astute were government watchdogs that, from 2007 to 2009, Medicare made more home health care payments to a single county in Florida than to the rest of the country combined.
You can’t get anything past our highly trained federal workforce. (Would a CEO who failed to catch a half-billion-dollar theft from a single county be considered an indispensable employee?)
It’s hard to find a common denominator in this larceny, but in an unrelated note, the defendants were Michel De Jesus Huarte, Ramon Fonseca, Vicente Gonzalez, Alyd Dazza, Monika Blacio, Ricco Dazza, Orlin Tamayo Quinonez, Juan Carralero, Madelin Machado, Gladys Zambrana, Javier Zambrana, Enrique Perez, Alejandro Hernandez Quiros, Vanessa Estrada, Vicenta Tellechea, Modesto Hidalgo, Carlos Castaneda and so on.
El Salvador can’t build us prisons fast enough.
Despite the fact that no one’s Medicare has been touched by Musk, and no one in the Trump administration has suggested cutting Medicare, Democrats act as if DOGE is a thinly disguised plot to destroy the program. But they sure don’t mind when Our Greatest Strength drains Medicare with laughably obvious scams. I guess feigning concern for Medicare is more politically advantageous than defending the Democrat-voting criminals who are emptying it.
For my final “Excellence in Government” story, I give you two South Carolina housewives, Charlene Corley and her twin sister, Darlene Wooten, who casually defrauded the Pentagon out of $20 million over 10 years by scamming a military payment system overseen by 12,000 highly skilled government employees at the Defense Finance and Accounting Service.
The twins, a schoolteacher and state budget employee, registered their new company, C&D Distributors, as a military contractor and began sending ordinary hardware to the Defense Department, under a program to fast-track minor supplies to the Iraq and Afghanistan war zones. When a mistaken decimal point on a shipping invoice netted them an unwarranted $5,000, the sisters realized that no matter what number they entered, it would be paid, no questions asked.
Whereupon they began charging hundreds of thousands of dollars to ship small items worth a few dollars or less — $998,798 for two 19-cent washers, $492,097 for an $11 threaded plug, and $499,569 for 10 cotter pins worth $1.99 each.
Even decades after the scandal of the Pentagon paying contractors $600 for ashtrays, $640 for toilet seats and $400 for hammers — all billed to the taxpayers — the military wantonly paid more than 100 of the sisters’ preposterous shipping charges.
Their scheme went on from 1997 to 2006 and might have continued to this day (we’re always at war someplace) but for a mistaken double entry. When the feds were finally closing in — several beachfront homes, 10 luxury cars, plastic surgery, jewelry and millions of dollars later — Wooten committed suicide, leaving a $4.5 million check made out to the Defense Department.
We can only hope that the Chinese, Nigerian, Romanian, Russian, Hispanic and Somali criminal gangs ripping off U.S. government programs will be as guilt-ridden.
Like everyone else I met on an overnight meeting in the Bahamas, I am worried about a recession. The world’s largest economy could dip into one, and very quickly, said a multibillionaire attending the same party as me. Personally, I have never understood much about economics. I have always left such matters to people who can tell the difference between a hedge fund and a mutual fund, duties and tariffs, and so on.
So, let those of us who regularly read this column and know as little as I do about economics try to figure out what The Donald is doing: Is he taking us down a black hole, or is he making those of us living in America better off? All I am certain of is that good faith in the U.S. dollar is what the government runs on, which in turn is based on “business as usual.” Where change must be introduced, it need be in slow increments. When upended, there’s a danger of recession. The tariff plan includes duties on many countries, but the planned start dates for many of those changed abruptly last week, with a ninety-day pause for goods from many places except China. This is very disruptive and roils global markets. U.S. debt and U.S. budget deficit are also big—in fact, enormous—worries. The reason I am worried is that I’m not at all the type who worries. Still, the naysayers can get to one, especially when reading an old bag like the Dowd woman, whose proof that Trump doesn’t get math was by recalling The Donald’s appearance on Howard Stern’s show and when asked what’s 17 times 6 answered 112. I’m pretty certain if Einstein were asked the same question and had to answer in a jiffy he might well have also missed the mark. Such are the joys of reading old hags like la Dowd about The Donald.
Now let’s get back to economics, or finance, or the stock market, or even tariffs. Nobody knows “nuttin’,” as far as I’m concerned, and the so-called experts are always getting it wrong. The only thing I am sure of is that Trump is imposing tariffs on certain goods that Uncle Sam does not and cannot produce. Such as manganese from Gabon that American companies need to make steel. On the other hand, I am sure that once this is pointed out, Gabon will be excluded from the tariff burden. Or so the great economist Taki believes. Also making the great economist lose sleep are higher interest rates, because higher interest rates make the federal debt harder to repay. Oy vey, as Einstein would say. Uncle Sam owes trillions—37, to be close to exact—and the plunging dollar is not helping. What happens if the almighty buck suddenly goes the way of the Mexican peso or Bolivian Bolivar, if that’s the currency of that faraway and very “high” country. Americans will have to start growing their own drugs because they will not be able to afford buying them from those nice guys down south. Sure, reviving domestic manufacturing is my dream—Pat Buchanan and I wrote at length about it when Clinton and Obama and the idiotic W. were going globalist—but factories take years to build, and not many people are ready to plunge their money into projects when The Donald’s successors might not maintain his policies.
See why I’m worried, jelly bean? Tariffs are like guns—they can make you win big and lose even bigger. In the meantime the stock market is going up and down like a drunken sailor who is being refused entry to an upstairs whorehouse. A 10 percent loss in the market is enormous when felt by 60 percent of American adults who own stocks or mutual funds. The only ones benefiting from this chaos are the Democrats, who got a shellacking last November and now have been given a reprieve on a golden platter. What I think The Donald should do is keep the screws on China and take it easy on the rest of the world. China is a hostile global power but one that can be tamed easily because the Chinese are intelligent people who simply dislike the West because of what the West did to China for a couple hundred years.
And now for a happy ending: Lift the tariffs for everyone except China, force Israel to stop the genocide or else, and watch the stock market reach 50,000 and The Donald proclaimed the greatest president since my favorite, Warren Harding. Yippee!
What is it about politicians in Washington that they just can’t stand progress or the thought of anyone getting rich?
That’s the attitude of many Democrats in Congress as they try to cripple the private equity and venture capital industries with higher tax rates. These financiers are some of the most dynamic risk-takers on the economic playing field. They are disrupting the old stodgy banking and Wall Street financing networks.
The PE and VC track records in funding small businesses and turning them into the future gazelles is almost a uniquely American success story.
But now, thanks to the industry’s winning track record in saving companies and jobs and making people rich, Washington thinks they are doing TOO well and wants to raise the tax rate on the industry by nearly 50%.
They want to slay the goose that’s been laying golden eggs for decades.
How golden? Last year alone, PE firms invested $350 billion of risk capital in companies ranging from everyday manufacturing to construction to cutting-edge artificial intelligence.
These investment firms don’t just provide the flow of dollars; they provide the critical management expertise that enables the firms to thrive. Academic research has shown that when companies take private equity investments, they are more innovative and rise in value.
They employ 13.3 million people in the United States while generating $1.1 trillion in wages and contributing $2 trillion to the nation’s gross domestic product. They also contribute $223 billion in federal tax revenue.
For investors, such as pension funds and foundations, returns have been generally higher from PE and VC funds than from investing in publicly traded stocks.
How are these deal-makers villains? You’d have to ask Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
When PE and VC firms invest in companies and add value to their operations, they take a portion of the gains. This “carried interest” arrangement aligns the incentives of the new investors with the old. When these firms succeed in creating significant new shareholder value, they are well compensated.
No one in the industry has a problem with this. But some Democrats in Congress want to charge the investors personal income tax rates of up to 39.6% instead of the 24% capital gains tax.
A new study by Charles Swenson, a professor at the University of Southern California, shows that implementing the tax changes being pushed by Democrats would trigger nearly 700,000 job losses in the private funds industry over a 10-year period, as well as “a long-run net annual loss of up to $9.93 billion in Federal tax revenues.”
That’s right. The proposal could LOSE revenue for the Treasury.
Some in Congress complain that these investors are really raiders overly focused on get-rich-quick schemes, including selling off the assets and closing businesses. That happens sometimes with fraudsters, but it’s the exception, not the rule.
The entire structure of the PE investment is to reward long-term success due to the equity feature of the terms. As part of the 2017 Trump tax cut deal, the industry agreed to a three-year holding period of the stock for the managers of these funds to qualify for the lower capital gains treatment on the appreciated value of the companies they invest in and advise.
In most stock acquisitions, the holding term is only one year for capital gains tax treatment.
This provision was a fair compromise and should be made permanent, just as the entire Trump tax reforms of 2017 should. The goal of the Trump 2.0 tax bill should be to encourage more investment by keeping tax rates low and not raising them.
After reading a report in the The Times this morning, I did something I never thought I would have to do: I immediately decided to send a stern warning to my two daughters in England reminding them that they find themselves in an authoritarian country, where freedom of expression is severely curtailed and law enforcement appears to be deployed to punish anyone who dissents from the prevailing political wisdom, in a fashion that bears chilling similarity to a police state.
I feel they are especially vulnerable because both of them grew up in southern Africa around people, both black and white, who like to laugh; very often at themselves, but with people who prefer not to take themselves, or life generally, too seriously. They are both prone to the sort of youthful exuberance that now appears to be off-limits in the land of their birth.
So it was, I read with shock that in the U.K. the police are arresting more than 12,000 people each year for “words that cause offence”; an average of thirty arrests per day.
Some examples:
(1) A man sentenced to eight weeks in jail for posting three memes on Facebook that were considered “grossly offensive.” The most objectionable of the memes depicted a group of knife-wielding immigrants with the caption “Coming to a town near you.”
(2) A teenager imprisoned for three months for posting offensive jokes on Facebook. He had apparently been drunk at the time, and the material had been copied from the website “Sickipedia.”
(3) Former footballer Paul Gascoigne was found guilty in a criminal court of racially aggravated abuse after a joke he made during a stop on his An Evening With Gazza tour at Wolverhampton Civic Hall. At one point during the show, he had turned to Errol Rowe, a black security guard, and said, “Can you smile, please? Because I can’t see you.” For this, Gascoigne was fined £1,000 and forced to pay a further £1,000 in compensation to Rowe.
(4) Last year, Lucy Connolly, the wife of a Conservative councillor, was sentenced to 31 months in prison after an offensive tweet about burning hotels housing asylum seekers in the wake of the Southport slaying of three little girls. Furious at the time, she removed the post four hours later, but this meant little to the court. She has been eligible for release on temporary license since last November, but her appeal to be allowed to spend time with her traumatized 12-year-old daughter and her sick husband suffering from bone marrow cancer has been refused.
(5) At the insistence of then Director of Public Prosecutions Keir Starmer, a man was convicted after a joke tweet about blowing up an airport after it had closed due to a snowfall.
(6) A preacher convicted of harassment for the crime of “misgendering” after referring to a trans-identified male as a “gentleman.”
(7) An army veteran was arrested and handcuffed for “causing anxiety” by posting an image of four “Progress Pride” flags arranged into a swastika.
(8) A former Royal Marine, Jamie Michael, posted a video online that criticized illegal migration and called for peaceful protest. He was arrested and charged and later found not guilty in court.
Having read this, I had a panic attack and thought, “Heaven forbid, but my girls could quite easily say or post something deemed ‘offensive’ on the spur of the moment or in a frivolous moment among close friends and find themselves in the sort of trouble that could ruin their lives.” And then, once “fingered” by a system like this, the fact that they are both very kind, decent, caring, compassionate girls would matter little (both girls have worked unpaid in African orphanages); they would be branded and banished to the margins of society.
Reading this report, it is very difficult to disagree with Elon Musk comparing modern Britain to the Soviet Union, and U.S. Vice President JD Vance’s claim that in Britain and Europe, “freedom of speech is in retreat” and “fundamental values” are no longer shared with the Americans. “You do not have shared values,” he said, “if you’re so afraid of your own people that you silence them and shut them up.”
In the midst of my deep dismay I reflected on life in Africa, where poor governance and various forms of chaos generally prevail, but looked at the blue sky and the Zambezi River, savored the quietude, and reminded myself I have much to be grateful for.
Compared to the overregulation, the myriad laws, the vindictiveness of the mainstream media, and the zeal of the all-powerful “thought police” in Britain, maybe mild mayhem and some misrule provide for a more agreeable way of life. Ironically, maybe we here, almost by mistake, are “freer” than our British and European “cousins.” And what I love about Africans in general, and black Africans in particular, is their wonderful sense of humor, and their ability not to take themselves too seriously; we still know how to laugh here on the “Dark Continent” and don’t have to worry about being locked up for doing it. And the icing on the cake: Really good beer is less than a pound a pint.
I’m writing to the girls to tell them to think about coming back home.
Leftists and rightists alike refuse to understand L.A.
Rightist dimwits like Ukrainian/Jewish podcaster Michael Malice, who claims “L.A. is the second Detroit,” and other rightist dimwits like this tard who claims “they lock their doors and windows in Compton because it’s all black,” live continually in 1992. And when I, who actually did live in 1992 L.A. (and many years before and after), try to point out that the black population here has dwindled to near insignificance (Compton is now 72 percent Mexican), I’m ignored, because rightists find the bugbear of “Boyz n the Hood” L.A. so pleasing.
Hmm…forever in stasis, frozen by morons in 1992. I wonder why that strikes such a chord with me.
That’s why I love this town. It suffers as I do at the hands of the dumbest among us.
“Lonely as I am, together we cry.”
Leftists mourn “black L.A.” They miss it so much, they refuse to update their mental file (even the L.A. Times still refers to Compton as “black”). Whereas rightists refuse to see the reality of present-day L.A. because Red Staters can never give up a good trope no matter how outdated (when you’re still bitching about MK-Ultra, which ended in 1973, you’re not going to stop bitching about “black L.A.” no matter how long it’s ceased to exist), leftists have a difficult time wrapping their heads around the fact that “new” L.A. isn’t as manipulable as black L.A. Mexicans scare leftists because they’re a political wild card. They can go socialist at times (whereas Americans romantically associate “revolution” with a bunch of verbose deists in wigs rebelling against high taxes, Mexicans romantically associate la revolución with commies freeing peasants from oppression), but also, Mexicans hate blacks and love law enforcement.
And Mexicans live in peace with whites, Jews, and Asians…something no black community can do these days, which is why leftists love blacks. Blacks are agents of fear and chaos, ensuring that no Orthodox Jew, Chinese grandma, or white woman goes unpunched. Just last week in Dallas (24 percent black, more than three times the L.A. percentage, but nobody ever talks about Dallas becoming “the second Detroit”), a white bride-to-be having a bachelorette party at a local bar was sucker punched by a black dude who ran away doing the “endearing” funny walk blacks like to do after being naughty (video here).
Mexicans don’t do that shit. A Mexican can see an elderly Asian or a young blonde and there’s no impulse to sock them. Imagine that.
My friend Kathy Shaidle (olevashólem) and I used to argue about this all the time, as only a Canadian and a lifelong Angeleno could. She’d ask me, “But doesn’t it bother you that there are parts of L.A. where nobody speaks English?” and I’d be like, “You should talk, Canadienne.”
I find it a fully acceptable trade-off to see neighborhoods that used to breed a demographic that routinely committed massacres of whites replaced by neighborhoods where I might have to say por favor and gracias. I’ll take that deal.
Mexican businesses don’t hire blacks, something that’s hastened the black exodus from the county, driving blacks back to the Deep South where they’re of more use as a workforce (dance wit’ the ones who brung ya).
Hastening that exodus even more? Mexicans literally firebombed blacks out of South Central and the Eastside, to the extent that in 2014 Obama invoked RICO to stop the race-based terror campaigns…and give the man credit—he actually used the DOJ to stop the harassment of “his people,” something Trump never did during months of BLM terrorism in 2020.
Maybe Obama should’ve just tweeted “LAW & ORDER” a thousand times over.
Mexicans have twice helped defeat affirmative action in this state, because they correctly recognize it as a pro-black policy. Indeed, Mexicans are so gung ho for law enforcement (the LASD is 52 percent Hispanic, and the LAPD is 54 percent Hispanic) that when it comes to police department hiring in L.A., Mexis find themselves in the same position Asians do regarding college admissions. Mexis are held back in hiring and promotion so that blacks can be affirmative-actioned onto the force.
There have been multiple lawsuits about this. Mexicans want to join law enforcement like Asians want to get into Harvard. But unlike Asians, most of whom are fine with bending over and taking rejection up the ass so as not to appear racist, Mexicans don’t like seeing D’Quarius cheat Pedro out of that uniform.
There are several conservative-affiliated legal advocacy orgs that have filed suit on behalf of Asians regarding bias in university admissions, because rank-and-file Asians need a Heritage Foundation-funded ching-chong to arm-twist them to anger. Mexicans don’t; they get angry all on their own. Not because they’re anti-civilization, but, as people who disproportionately become cops, they have an interest in preserving it. Even if that’s not a conscious notion, there are worse things to have than an ethnic group that leans heavily toward law enforcement while also displaying a primordial disdain for the group that comprises a disproportionate number of civilization-destroying lawbreakers.
So if you present Mexicans with a ballot initiative to eradicate affirmative action, they go for it, no Heritage Foundation lobbying needed.
Mind you, Mexis aren’t the only reason leftists don’t like facing the reality of present-day L.A. Persians, constituting nearly 30 percent of Beverly Hills and next-door Westwood (the upscale community dubbed “Tehrangeles”), represent a massive inconvenience for leftists: a “model immigrant” community (in terms of income, law-abidingness, and respect for the basic norms of civilization), very much like Asians. But unlike Asians, who tend to be slavishly leftist, Persians go to the right.
Leftists hate that. They want their immigrants either lawless and aggrieved or upscale and willing to get socked on the jaw by Daquan.
The Persian community in Southern Cal, numbering by most estimates 600,000, is not monolithic. It’s comprised of everyone who fled the Ayatollah’s revolution in 1979. Many people assume that the Westside Persians are all Jews, but that’s inaccurate. Yes, Jews fled the Islamic revolution, but so did many of Iran’s Armenians, Assyrian Christians, Baha’is, Kurds, Mandeans, Sufis, and Zoroastrians.
Widely unrecognized is that a large number of Iranian Muslims fled too. The Shah, a brutal dictator who tried to modernize Iran and keep it secular, was heavily supported by the country’s moderate Muslims. During the Shah’s reign, the secular Muslims were the elites. But once Ayatollah Guacamola came to power, those secular (and wealthy) Muslims realized that their heads would be the first on the chopping block (Muslims are always hardest on their own “traitors”), so they fled in huge numbers.
As a result, whereas Jews comprise the plurality of Beverly Hills Persians, Muslims are the plurality of Persians in the even wealthier Rancho Palos Verdes coastal community.
Leftists ignore Persians. They vote wrong, they don’t riot, they don’t shit in the street or support Democrats. But rightists ignore this demographic as well, because it’s just too much fun for Red State Cletuses to screech about “GYOOKIDDY-GYOOK BUVURLY HILLS LIBURRELS.” Being aware of the truly upscale L.A. County areas like Ranch Palos Verdes would require seeking information more specific than what’s found in a meme—hell, it might even require reading a map. And that’s a fate worse than death for MAGAs.
If info doesn’t come from a tweet posted by a man named “Catturd,” it’s FAKE NEWS!
Now, something happened a week ago that’s so “present-day L.A.,” it was ignored by everyone, left and right.
A 45-year-old black man was rampaging through the streets of an east-central L.A. neighborhood (one of those formerly black, now bean areas). He tried breaking into the apartment of a Mexican family. The husband called 911 (en español), but when the black guy looked like he was about to gain entry and attack the family’s children, the husband charged the intruder, tackling him, putting him in a choke hold while punching the shit out of the bastard’s sloping forehead.
By the time cops (white and Mexican) arrived and politely asked the husband to release the guy, the black dude was dead. Although this event happened months ago, only last week was the video released—a combination of police body-cam, bystander cameras, and security cam footage.
The husband killed the hell outta the black guy, who kept screaming that he couldn’t breathe. An autopsy concluded that the black dude died by “traumatic asphyxia with contributing factors that included methamphetamine, cocaine, cocaethylene, ethanol, as well as hyperteophic heart condition.”
Any of this sound familiar? It’s literally George Floyd and Daniel Penny fused together into one story.
And you know what happened?
NOTHING.
Our new DA, the wonderful Nate Hochman (heavily backed by our Persians), ruled the matter a justifiable homicide. The Mexican husband was free and clear. And when the footage was released, there were no riots, no protests, because blacks don’t have the numbers here anymore (the Floyd riots in 2020 were only possible because leftist whites joined in). But also, and this is rarely noted, in 2020 BLM chose to sack Rodeo Drive primarily to steal Nikes, but secondarily because the BHPD is less Mexican than the LAPD, and BLM knew that the BHPD would be too nervous to kick the required amount of black ass, while Mexican cops would’ve taken those stolen Nikes and put them so far up Daquan’s ass he’d have laces comin’ out his nose.
My point is, this is why L.A. is sucking less and less (as NYC sucks more and more). Crazed black man on drugs threatens a family. Mexican husband chokes him like a chicken wing. White and Mexican cops treat the husband with respect, Jewish DA rules the death justified, and blacks don’t dare take to the streets because Mexis would Emmett Till them in an instant.
That’s how it should work. No Chauvin trial, no Penny trial. A populace defending itself, and a DA who allows it.
If you want me to give that up because I’m supposedly oppressed by occasionally having to speak a few words of Spanish, get bent.
The same week the above-mentioned footage was released, another crazed “foundational black” went on a rampage on the streets of L.A. County in a stolen truck, smashing car after car, injuring innocent bystander after innocent bystander, until a team of white and Mexi cops tackled the mutha and pounded him into the ground.
I haven’t cheered that hard at anything on TV since Phil Leotardo got whacked on The Sopranos.
And our DA is not only not going after the cops for “brutality,” he’s throwing the book at the black guy, charging him with attempted murder (for reference, previous DAs used to routinely downgrade car chase charges).
Fifty-six years I’ve lived here. If I say I’m optimistic, I likely know better than you, so don’t dismiss my judgment just because you might not be able to “gyook-gyook” at L.A. anymore.
Next week I’ll go into specifics of last year’s DA vote. You might find the breakdown revealing.
How is it possible to “sexually harass” a statue? You’d have to ask Dublin City Council, who have just declared an innovative new experiment in protecting a supposedly “vulnerable” local sculpture from getting her bronze breasts rubbed for good luck by foreign tourists. By employing a series of stewards to guard the effigy, at a cost of several thousand euros, politicians hope to reeducate visitors as to why polishing her paps supposedly causes profound “worry and discomfort” to the city’s womenfolk.
This measure being announced on 1 April, Dublin City Council Arts Officer Ray Yeats felt compelled to tell journalists this was not an April Fool’s joke. For Yeats to stand up before the press corps and openly state, “Hey, lads, here’s a policy so feckin’ retarded I have to specifically confirm it isn’t a massive, fat joke on live TV,” demonstrates clearly that those responsible must have known full well how completely stupid and pointless their whole measure was. So why did they do it?
Penis de Milo
Maybe the councillors were all graduates of Classics courses from Trinity College Dublin, so knew full well where such things could lead if not nipped in the bud early. There is a word for those who fall in love with statues, like Pygmalion in the ancient myth, “agalmatophilia,” from the Greek word “agalma,” meaning “statue.”
The Greeks knew of several supposed real-life examples, most famously Cleisophus of Selymbria, who fell for a marble nymph in the Temple of Samos, shutting himself up with it after the priests had gone home. Finding his lover surprisingly cold, and repelled by “the unyielding nature of the stone,” Cleisophus soon lost his desire forever—although an alternative account has it that the committed art lover cunningly stuck a slice of meat “on a certain part” of the statue’s anatomy and had his way with it in that fashion. Rumor has it this is the only way Prince Harry can achieve active satisfaction upon the equally ice-cold surface area of his own statuesque, ebony-carved love idol today.
In more modern times, there was a drunken young lady who sought to straddle the porcelain penis of a statue of the wine god Bacchus in Florence last year. Critics said this was the inevitable result of the greedy city council spending years trying to turn Florence “into Disney World”—that people now climb aboard its statues and try to Donald Duck them.
Such “objectum sexuals,” as they are also known (see my articles here and here), are surprisingly common these days. Were Dublin City Council just nervous their own well-endowed statue might attract hordes of further agalmatophiles to sully the city from all across the planet? Not quite. They were far more scared of upsetting a loudmouthed resident student pseudo-feminist with the somewhat Dickensian name of Tilly Cripwell.
Bronze Age Perverts
To help fund her studies, Tilly has become a busker, whose chosen spot is beside a prominent local tourist attraction, a bronze-cast statue of a fictional (although Tilly seemingly thinks otherwise) 18th-century Dublin fishwife and prostitute named Molly Malone. Popularly known as “the tart with the cart,” Molly was supposed to have sold seafood from a wheelbarrow by day, and her holes from a street corner by night, thus causing her to reek of fish 24 hours long.
Being a reputed doxy, Molly’s mannequin comes replete with a low, Regency-era bodice, barely covering a pair of near-spherical globes around which the legend has arisen that, if you stop and rub them, you will be blessed with good luck. Molly has now been touched up by fortune seekers so often that the protective blackened patina has entirely worn off from her bosom, revealing the original golden bronze beneath, making it look as if she has just been groped by King Midas.
Molly is best-known as the subject of a traditional drinking song, the lyrics of the opening and closing verse going like this:
In Dublin’s fair city,
Where the girls are so pretty,
I first set my eyes on sweet Molly Malone,
As she wheeled her wheelbarrow,
Through streets broad and narrow,
Crying, “Cockles and mussels, alive, alive, oh!”
She died of a fever,
And no one could save her,
And that was the end of sweet Molly Malone,
But her ghost wheels its barrow,
Through streets broad and narrow,
Crying, “Cockles and mussels, alive, alive, oh!”
Like all Puritans throughout history, noticing people harmlessly enjoying themselves, Silly Tilly—as I’m sure this highly humor-filled and smiley-faced young poppet would just love to become known to all the many wonderful men in her life—became righteously disgusted that Molly was becoming “reduced to her breasts,” something she said “triggered me so much” as it “sets a really bad example to younger generations.” Accordingly, Tilly contacted Dublin City Council and demanded surgical alterations take place to Molly’s statue “so that her breasts aren’t a different color than the rest of her” as with Pamela Anderson.
Banshee Screams “BanThis”
Supposedly, the sexist tourists were “violating” Molly’s honor every bit as much as Cleisophus of Selymbria had once done to that poor innocent cutlet of veal in Samos, which was especially terrible, said Tilly, as the sculpture was “one of the few representations of women in Irish culture.” Yes. Apart from Erin, Queen Maeve, Cathleen ni Houlihan, Grainne, Anna Liffey, St. Brigid, Constance Markievicz, Maud and Iseult Gonne, Lady Augusta Gregory, and the Blessed Virgin Mary, members of the fairer sex have never once been represented in Irish literature, legend, drama, religion, painting, music, poetry, or sculpture.
To put further irresistible pressure on Dublin’s councillors, Tilly started a “Leave Molly mAlone” campaign, releasing a new single of that same name online in which she altered the traditional lyrics of Molly’s song, wailing out neo-feminist doggerel like “Now no one can save her/From the people who claim her/And I want to scream/Just leave Molly alone!”
So do I, and want to scream it to you, you daft little bint. But I can’t, because, beneath the relevant YouTube video where Tilly cruelly murders Molly’s song in front of her own statue—accompanied by a fellow student-y idiot bearing a placard, the pair looking uncannily like Fathers Ted Crilly and Dougal McGuire protesting against The Passion of St. Tibulus on the classic old Anglo-Irish sitcom—all the public comments have been turned off for some inexplicable reason.
After agreeing to meet with Tilly and accede to her dogmatic demands, Dublin City Council framed their subsequent employment of statue stewards as simply another standard means of protecting public art from defacement. But her own words reveal Tilly herself to have been motivated by clear ideological shibboleths like dismantling the patriarchy, complaining that “I walk by the Oscar Wilde statue in Merrion Square every day. You don’t see people rubbing his crotch for good luck.” If you did, and you were male, Oscar would probably quite like it.
Tilly further wants Molly elevated from her present, easily squeezable street-level position onto a high and domineering plinth above, which politicians depict as a purely protective measure, but Tilly views as raising a representative of a historically oppressed group up above the hideous sexist penis-people marching by below. By lifting Molly onto a literal moral platform, Tilly would empower the fictional fishwife “to set an example for other female statues” to follow. I don’t think they’ll be sentient enough to actually observe and apply such an example, though, Tilly. Just like your own, their heads are empty.
This is one of Tilly’s actual arguments as to why the Irish taxpayer should bother funding this shit: “A lot of people say, ‘Oh, there’s the [similarly street-level] Charging Bull [statue] in New York and a lot of people go and touch its balls,’ but it’s not like bulls are a [historically] oppressed group in society.” They are in Spain.
When Irish Eyes Are Averted
If Tilly were a real feminist, she might have observed a genuine recent case of a young woman being subjected to having her breasts groped by an unreconstructed patriarchal male, in the shape of a 15-year-old schoolgirl who went to a Mullingar hospital to give a blood sample before her phlebotomist separated her from her mother, lay her down, and proceeded to “examine” her breasts for free for no good medical reason. Unfortunately, the patriarch in question was named Eldhose Yohannan, and he was an Indian immigrant, so that’s probably not the kind of sexual abuse by foreign visitors Tilly wishes to notice.
Other recent rapes in Ireland would include one perpetrated by a man named Randi Gladstone (you should meet his brothers Rapi and Stabi) from Guyana, who falsely imprisoned and then abused an 18-year-old girl in a holiday camp in County Dublin, and a “Tipperary man” who forced a daughter to watch him rape her own mother, besides threatening her with an axe. It was a long, long way from Tipperary to the criminal’s actual homeland abroad, however—his lack of proficiency in English was taken into account as a mitigating factor in his sentencing. After all, otherwise he could have just verbally threatened to kill his victim, no big sharp axe prop necessary.
Algerian asylum-seeker Adel Kerai, meanwhile, left Molly Malone’s statue well alone and stalked an animate, flesh-and-blood young Irishwoman throughout the streets of Dublin’s fair city for half an hour before “sexually assaulting her in public” by “putting his hand down her top, touching her genital area over her clothes, and pressing his erect penis against her.”
Sex crimes against actual humans across Ireland have increased by at least 75 percent over the past decade or so, to the point where rape is now three times more common than in the average E.U. nation, an upsurge that broadly corresponds with a massive and unwanted increase in immigration-cum-invasion from the black and Muslim worlds. Yet when it comes to politically awkward truths like this, the mouths of “feminists” like Tilly Cripwell remain as silent as if they too were made of marble, preferring to whine endlessly about complete and total nonproblems like tourists touching statues.
Dublin Down On Their Errors
Maybe, as a decoy measure, Dublin City Council could henceforth fit all their public statuary with appealingly smooth slices of meat (albeit probably not pork) between their legs, Samos-style, so as to provide all the testosterone-ridden imports with more appropriate avenues for their sudden bursts of uncontrollable lust in the heathen, fleshpot lands of the Occident. Or, Tilly could always seek to raise awareness of a genuine growing national problem affecting Irishwomen rather than a completely fake one for once, and alter Molly Malone’s lyrics anew, to these:
In Dublin’s fair city,
Is Molly still pretty?
It’s quite hard to tell when she’s wearing the veil,
As she whips forth her camel,
The broad streets to travel,
Crying, “Chickpea and hummus, halal, halal, oh!”
She died of Sharia,
And no one could save her,
From stoning by her husband, the dominant male,
Now her corpse on a barrow,
He wheels through streets broad and narrow,
Crying, “Allahu Akbar, Allah, Allah, oh!”
Alternatively, I notice a France-based Muslim fashion brand has just caused controversy by producing an advertisement in which the Eiffel Tower is trollingly draped in an embonpoint-obscuring hijab. Dublin Council could just try doing that to Molly’s statue as a far cheaper modesty-protection policy instead. Given current demographic shifts, I’d imagine someday soon such a measure will be deemed compulsory anyway.
The Week’s Most Calming, Embalming, and Sunday Palming Headlines
NEXT TIME TRY PEPSI
The Sentinelese are a pre-neolithic tribe of “negrito” cavemen who live on an island in the Indian Ocean. The civilized world (and India) have agreed to leave this “uncontacted tribe” forever isolated.
What, no “diversity”? Why are cavemen exempt from the benefits of DEI? There’s a LOT of leaves on Sentinel Island, yet no Mexicans to blow them. Is that fair to either people?
Mind you, the Sentinelese don’t seem to want to be contacted. Whenever an outsider approaches the island, out comes “Big Bowman,” the tribe’s top warrior, a knock-kneed throwback who holds a bow taller than his own body (see him here). And everyone who gets close has to condescendingly feign fear: “Oh no! He has a large bow! I’m so scared! Let’s get outta here!”
So Big Bowman likely has a huge ego.
Last week Ukrainian-American tourist Mykhailo Polyakov sneaked onto the island to leave a can of Coca-Cola as a prank. Unlike the Christian missionary who was slaughtered by Big Bowman in 2018, Polyakov managed to leave the Coke, pose for TikTok, and split.
If only Ukrainians could be that stealthy against Russia.
Sadly, the gift of the Coke led to a new visitor the next day—RFK Jr. showed up to lecture about sugary drinks. He became the first Kennedy felled by an arrow. Oliver Stone’s already claiming there was a second bowman, because the entire island’s a grassy knoll.
Movie idea: An internationally pursued criminal sails to Sentinel, and when Big Bowman shows up, the criminal blows him to hell with a bazooka. And the other islanders are like, “Uh…we never liked that guy anyway; total jerk, real d-bag. Maybe a stranger’s just a friend we haven’t met!”
What better place for a wanted man to hide than the one spot on earth every nation’s forbidden from entering?
CAMELITTLE, CAMELOT
Speaking of the Kennedys, you never know if you’ll kill one of them or they’ll kill one of you. A Kennedy might be a passenger and get his head blown off, or a driver who’ll drown a bitch.
Trusting Kennedys with matters of life and death is always a risky proposition. Which is why it’s odd to see Republicans who, according to a new study in the British Journal of Political Science, are less likely than Democrats to trust medical science, putting so much faith in RFK Jr.’s nutritional nanny-stating.
Because RFK-J may not have killed a human, but apparently he just murdered a clown.
A Mental Floss piece last week detailed how McDonald’s has been quietly phasing out Ronald McDonald thanks to RFK Jr.’s incessant bitching about marketing fast food to kids. According to RFK-J, Ronald’s every bit as dangerous as Joe Camel, the cigarette mascot discontinued because apparently teens are compelled to copy any cartoon character’s behavior.
And considering how many teens are crushed each year by anvil traps they set to catch fast-running flightless Southwestern birds, that might be true.
According to the article, as Ronald’s being phased out, he’s being replaced by Grimace, the amorphous purple giant. Because (and this is a quote) Grimace is “more popular at basketball games,” which is code for “Corporate McDonald’s thinks Grimace appeals to the chain’s black customer base.”
And if that coding’s too subtle for you, the article adds that Ronald’s still being used at “NASCAR events.”
So Grimace, the stupid ugly deep-purple obese glutton, is being used for blacks, and Ronald, the red-haired pale-skinned witchcraft-practicing pedo, is being used for whites. McDonald’s has found a way to insult everyone.
And McDonald’s isn’t just thinking black and white. Coming soon: the new character ¡Fry Carumba!—a Mexican french fry who blows the leaves used for McDonald’s salads. And Muslim Quarter Pounder, a turbaned hash brown who beats the crap out of Jews.
MODEL T (FOR TERMINATE)
A report in last week’s Trends in Cognitive Sciences claims that AI has learned to tell unstable people to kill themselves.
Who knew the rise of the machines would be verbal?
Indeed, most hands-on murders by robots occur only because the automatons were just following orders.
Like at Disneyland, in 2000. Four-year-old Brandon Zucker was on the Roger Rabbit ride when his Mickey Mouse hat flew off. Instinctively, young Brandon reached onto the tracks to retrieve it, and he was pulled under the car, which folded him neatly into a tiny square, as one would do a bedsheet.
Turned out the ride was programmed to tastefully fold any trash on the tracks for easy disposal, but the machinery couldn’t differentiate between garbage and a boy.
Sadly, Brandon died (on the plus side, his remains fit neatly in a sock drawer). Upon arriving at the Pearly Gates, Brandon’s first words were, “Uh, I had a hat…”
And now it’s happened again. Last week in Dundee, Mich. (outside Detroit, but not outside enough to be livable), a 62-year-old autoworker at a Fiat Chrysler plant fell onto the assembly line and was essentially “assembled” like a car.
The worker, identified in the local press as a black man named Ronnie Adams, came with a twelve-inch stick preinstalled, but the assembly line machines gave him a rear spoiler (well, that’s the end of those trousers), emergency braking (sorry, that should be “emergency breaking”), a digital cockpit (less said about that the better), traction control (because traction was where he was headed), a muffler (as he wouldn’t stop screaming), keyless entry (straight through the skull), retractable headlights (plus a retractable head), a back crumple zone, a front crumple zone…actually, all of Adams became a crumple zone.
As if it needs to be said, Adams didn’t survive. His last words as his body rolled off the line? “It still beats living in Detroit.”
Making matters worse, within hours of reaching the county morgue, Adams’ body was recalled for faulty wiring. Corpse or no corpse, it’s still a Chrysler.
Adams’ wife was compensated for her loss with a new widow wiper.
WHACK JOB
Joycelyn Elders was Bill Clinton’s pick for Surgeon General in 1993, the first black woman to serve in that position. As director of the Arkansas Department of Public Health (being director of the “Arkansas Department of Public Health” is like being a hedge fund manager for a skid row tent city), Elders had allowed defective condoms to be shipped to the state’s public schools. She claimed that recalling the condoms might’ve made kids lose faith in birth control (as if the resulting pregnancies from the porous sheaths wouldn’t do that too).
She sailed to confirmation anyway, because Republicans missed the vote, their heads having exploded from the frustration of not knowing whether to attack Elders for sending condoms to children, or for not sending working condoms to children.
Once in office, Elders one-upped the condom controversy by advocating the teaching of female masturbation in urban schools so that black girls can find a way to receive sexual pleasure on their own, prompting Clinton to blurt out at a press conference, “Holy damn that’s HOT!”
Elders was forced to resign for the masturbation remarks; she went on to earn millions by designing a menthol-flavored vibrator.
Last week Texas State Senator Angela Paxton, wife of Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, advanced a bill that would require online purchasers of vibrators to submit a photo ID, so that minors learn that there’s never a substitution for the real thing. After all, Texas is a Christian state; only the most wholesome types of children’s activities are allowed. Paxton’s bill would ensure that the only kind of joysticks stroked by kids are the ones used to murder cops in Grand Theft Auto.
Evangelical Christians are an odd lot…against abortion, against teen pregnancy, but also against masturbation.
Perhaps the fear is that allowing girls to learn the joy of self-pleasure might make them less willing to be raped and trafficked by conservative “hero” Andrew Tate.
The vibrator industry is actively fighting Paxton’s bill, pointing out that some things go deep in the heart of Texas, while others go deep in…someplace else.
THE NEWSOM MYSTERIES
Last week saw a murder mystery so confounding, so impossible to solve, the world’s greatest detectives, from Sherlock Holmes to Hercule Poirot, couldn’t have cracked it.
BTW, “poi rot” is every Hawaiian’s worst nightmare.
The mystery centers on the baffling death of 62-year-old Stephanie Dowells in Northern California. Dowells was the wife of a black gentleman named David Brinson. In 1993, Brinson was sentenced to life imprisonment for strangling four people to death. News reports don’t say if he strangled all four at once, or staggered them over time. But if it was all four at once, that’s actually rather impressive.
Brinson really loves to strangle. In his Oakland high school yearbook he was voted “Most Likely to Crush Windpipes.” His family coat of arms is a lion throttling an eagle. An amateur baseball player, he was kicked off the team because he always wanted to choke. Some black men like big asses, some prefer big ass-phyxiations.
And for some reason, this serial strangler in a maximum-security pen was allowed conjugal visits with his wife. Last week, Dowells arrived to spend the night in her man’s cell, and in the morning prison officials found her strangled to death.
This is not a joke: Investigators are stumped. Woman gets locked overnight in cell with serial strangler and is found strangled to death the next morning.
And cops are baffled.
The prison is located outside Sacramento, a city known for excessively retarded politicians.
And apparently police as well.
A French antiquarian bookseller from whom I buy books from time to time sends them to me through the post with old-fashioned postage stamps on the packet. How pleased I am when I receive such a packet! Postage stamps are almost relics of the past, and I have long reached the age when relics of the past are more precious to me than hopes for the future. I derive almost as much pleasure from the stamps as from the books; and almost as much pleasure also as from receiving a handwritten letter, a rare occurrence indeed.
I regret the passing of the postage stamp, for stamps, like banknotes, were often objects of beauty. Like most boys of my time and age, I had a period of collecting them, though I was never a serious philatelist, excited by watermarks and perforations.
I still remember, however, the independence of Ghana (in 1957) as an important event in my tiny life: For Ghana, formerly the Gold Coast, broke with colonial philatelic tradition and replaced the restrained, skillfully engraved depictions of local life in sober colors—a different color for each denomination—with bold but crude and brightly multicolored designs. At first I thought this some kind of liberation, but it soon dawned on me that the liberation, if such it was, was one of bad taste. Interestingly, that liberation from restraint was soon to affect the postage stamps of my own country, which became brighter and cruder in design: a difference akin to that between the tender drawings of Winnie-the-Pooh by E.H. Shepard and the crude cartoons of Disney.
One of the reasons that I regret the passing of the postage stamp is that children (especially boys, for the urge to collect seems more a male than a female trait) no longer go through a stamp-collecting phase. I speak, of course, in generalities: The population of the world is large, and there is no human conduct impossible to find in it. And if you ask what boys did before there were postage stamps to collect, that is to say before 1840 when they were invented, I would reply that the era of the postage stamp coincided with that of the prolongation of childhood, when leisure in childhood became widespread, if not universal.
It didn’t take long for postage stamps to become objects of collection, and now they are objects of investment as well (which is to say, speculation). The world’s most expensive stamp, the British Guiana magenta, of which only one example is known to have survived, was last sold for more than $8 million in 2014. Issued in 1856, it was already recognized as a quite exceptional rarity in 1873 and therefore of more than usual value. Moreover, philatelists, like bibliophiles, are ever on the lookout for small misprints or other errors that can turn something worth a dollar or two into more than most people accumulate in a lifetime.
This teaches a not-insignificant lesson: that the labor theory of value must be wrong. According to this theory, taken up by Marx but not originated by him, the exchange value of an object depends on the amount of socially necessary labor to produce it; but this theory cannot account for the fact that one tiny piece of paper should be worth next to nothing, while another, very similar piece of paper, that took no more labor to produce, is worth a fortune and whose exchange value is enough to buy an entire house. I do not say that this is rational, I say only that it is so; an intelligent Martian descending to Earth would no doubt find it further evidence of the folly of mankind. The labor theory of value can be saved only by means of dishonest mental acrobatics, for example by claiming that British Guiana had to be established for the magenta stamp to be produced and that its establishment was immensely expensive in labor.
None of this, of course, concerned me as a young stamp collector, though there was undoubtedly a competitive element to the hobby—it was a joy to possess stamps that none of one’s friends possessed. But there was a kind of wisdom or providence in the hobby, for it painlessly taught those who pursued it many things that they might otherwise have been refractory to learning, such being the stubbornness of boys. (I have never subscribed to the view that boys, or at any rate most of them, naturally seek knowledge.)
Stamps taught me a lot about history and geography, though not perhaps in any depth. Just how much they taught me became evident to me more than forty years later. The hospital in which I was working suddenly appointed a bureaucrat whose job it was to badger the staff about diversity, equity, and inclusion; and it so happened that our city had also suddenly seen an influx of Congolese illegal immigrants posing as asylum seekers.
Knowing the Congo as I did, I sympathized with the illegal immigrants individually, but sympathy with an individual is not quite the same as approval of a policy. Be that as it may, the DEI bureaucrat sent all the staff of my hospital a circular informing them that the main language of the Congo was Arabic.
Ah, if only she had collected stamps in her youth! By the age of 10 I would have been able to tell her that this was not so, that French was the lingua franca of the country, and I would have regarded her circular with contempt. But that she did not know anything about the subject of her circular taught me another lesson: that the purpose of a DEI bureaucracy is not to improve anyone’s life, apart from that of the bureaucrats themselves, but to employ people who have spent too long in useless education, a most dangerous class if left unemployed and dissatisfied.
What a terrible misfortune has been the decline of stamp collecting except for speculative purposes! An alliance of stamp collecting and the internet could have been such a powerful instrument of education of the young. For example, one of the stamps recently arrived from my bookseller was a beautifully engraved portrait of Marshal Juin, a man of equivocal record in the history of France. Into how much modern history could a child easily have entered if he had collected such a stamp (an aesthetic education in itself by comparison with the aesthetic coarseness of so much modern entertainment) and followed the links that aroused curiosity would have suggested.
Theodore Dalrymple’s latest book is On the Ivory Stages (Mirabeau Press).
The Democrats’ most influential pollster, David Shor, has been in the news lately with his report on how Kamala Harris botched the 2024 election. Lots of interesting stuff, but one particular item in Shor’s analysis requires refutation for encouraging Republicans’ worst, stupidest, most mathematically illiterate idea about how to win elections. To wit: their endless quest to win the non-white vote.
I wouldn’t mention it, except the GOP is already diving headlong into this self-destructive behavior without any inveigling by a sneaky, socialist Obama pollster.
It is a fact that whites are the only ethnic group that ever votes majority Republican. By any rational calculus, therefore, Republicans’ sole objective every election should be driving up the white vote (for liberals, “the oppressor vote”), both as a share of the GOP voters and as a share of the electorate. It’s great if minorities vote for you, too, but that’s not what wins elections.
Instead, the geniuses of my party have decided to be the living embodiment of the joke about a guy selling apples at a loss, who explains he’s going to make it up with volume.
If you’re not winning 51% of the vote, you’re losing, Republicans.
Here’s Shor’s honey pot for the clueless:
“If we look at 2016 to 2024 trends by race and ideology, you see this clear story where white voters really did not shift at all. Kamala Harris did exactly as well as Hillary Clinton did among white conservatives, white liberals, white moderates.
“But if you look among Hispanic and Asian voters, you see these enormous double-digit declines. To highlight one example: In 2016, Democrats got 81% of Hispanic moderates. Fast-forward to 2024; Democrats got only 57% of Hispanic moderates.”
[GOP consultants, spokesmen and donors doing cartwheels] Yay! We won (at most) 43% of the “moderate” Hispanic vote. Now if we could only double the volume of Hispanic voters …
First, that stat reminds me of the headlines in the 1980s constantly warning about the explosion of AIDS in heterosexuals:
— People magazine, 1985: AIDS “poses a growing threat to heterosexuals.”
— The Washington Post, 1986: “The number of heterosexual AIDS patients more than doubled in 1985.”
— The New Internationalist, 1987: “[AIDS] is spreading rapidly amongst heterosexuals.”
Yes, the rate doubled, by going from one case to two.
Similarly, the GOP’s Hispanic vote went from a whopping 19% in 2016 to 43% (at most) in 2024. I can’t emphasize this strongly enough, Republicans: That’s losing.
Second, Shor strongly implies that whites had nothing to do with Trump’s victory because Harris “did exactly as well as Hillary Clinton” among white voters.
In fact, however, the big story of the 2024 election is that whites increased their share of the electorate for the first time since 1992. As NPR put it, 71% “might be the most important number of the election,” representing the white portion of the electorate. For whites to reverse their decades-long decline “is eye-popping and a big reason for Trump’s win.”
Republican donors: Let’s concentrate like a laser beam on getting 8% of the black vote and 44% of the Hispanic vote!
The GOP’s unrequited love of minorities has never worked, and it’s embarrassing. Suddenly, we find them championing AOC-lite policies, like emptying the jails, amnesty, affirmative action, menthol cigarettes and whatever the Platinum Plan was. All of this is HATED by the 71% of the electorate that likes them, and impresses, on a good day, 5% of the 30%. (Five percent being minorities who vote GOP, despite Democrat bribes; and 30% being the minority share of the electorate.)
But until Trump (2016 and 2024, anyway), Republicans studiously ignored white voters. Where else are they going to go — in the words of political savant Jared Kushner, just before Trump blew the 2020 election by losing only one demographic compared to 2016: whites.
For the GOP to obsess over groups that vote majority Democrat isn’t just a waste of time, it’s a suicide mission. As Democrats rush headlong into making themselves a party dedicated to hating white people, surprisingly enough, they’re losing white voters.
Joe Biden chose his vice president because she’s black (half — but good enough). He chose his Supreme Court nominee because she’s black. He chose two-thirds of his judicial nominees because they weren’t white. He chose his press secretary because she’s black. (And a lesbian! And an immigrant! A trifecta!) He chose his chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff because he’s black (and promised to discriminate against white men).
And so on.
That’s why, even as the country has rapidly transformed into one that is vastly less white, the share of Americans who identify as Republican has increased.
Pollsters explain this white flight from the Democratic Party with reference to what they call the “Racial Resentment Scale” and I call the “Equality Before the Law Scale.” (It’s a rule that white people must always be “resentful”, “phobic” and “fearful,” while minorities are “proud,” “brave” and “resilient.”)
Respondents are asked to agree or disagree with these four statements:
1. Irish, Italian and Jewish ethnicities overcame prejudice and worked their way up. Blacks should do the same without any special favors.
2. Generations of slavery and discrimination have created conditions that make it difficult for blacks to work their way out of the lower class.
3. Over the past few years, blacks have gotten less than they deserve.
4. It’s really a matter of some people just not trying hard enough: If blacks would only try harder, they could be just as well off as whites.
Come to think of it, instead of the “Equality Before the Law Scale,” I think I’ll call it the “Not Willing To Lie to Pollsters Scale.”
Whites aren’t that bad, Republicans. Maybe you should stop being embarrassed that they vote for you.
A change of pace is always welcome, especially when writing a column about politics. The latter can be as boring as writing about cooking, and the only newspaper that used a cookery writer as a political pundit is The New York Times. I think he’s called Frank Bruni and he’s reported to be going blind due to his loathing of Donald Trump.
Never mind. When your correspondent was still in shorts and newly arrived in America, the greatest and most feared gangster was one Frank Costello. Brought up in front of a Senate investigating committee, his lawyers managed to keep his face out of camera range and only his hands were televised. Somebody at home figured out that his nails were manicured and polished. He lost a few points among us after that.
Years later at a chic nightclub I watched as some greasy-looking fellow kept running his fingers up and down my wife’s naked back. I stood up and punched downward. All hell broke loose. The owner, Oleg Cassini, Jackie Kennedy’s couturier and JFK’s procurer, demanded I apologize to the slob I had hit as he was Senator Williams of New Jersey. The year was 1966. I did nothing of the sort but instead went to the bathroom to wash my hands as I had cut my knuckle during the fracas. That’s when I heard the following from a man speaking on the telephone: “Yeah, his name is Taki, and he lives in the Sherry-Netherland.”
Although he was a mincing rat of a man, I took what I was hearing rather seriously. In fact his words had an elegiac sense of doom—gangsters spraying the 18-year-old wife’s face with acid and other such horrors. This, I said to myself, is real; cancel culture for good. So, with no time for heroics, I called on my friend Tom Corbally, man about town, lady-killer par excellence, decorated rear gunner on more than thirty missions over Germany, and among the best-looking men in New York City and definitely connected with the city’s most powerful but criminal members. “Don’t worry, kid, we’ll go see Mr. C,” said Tom when I visited him at 530 Park Avenue. Mr. C was the way people in the know referred to Frank Costello, retired head of the Cosa Nostra, but still no one to disrespect, and then some.
We met at Childs, on 79th Street and Madison Avenue, where Mr. C lunched and dined daily. His voice was gravelly, more like Robert Kennedy’s today, and his accent was not exactly upper-class, but neither was it Brooklynese, as my father used to call it. After I explained my predicament, Mr. C asked only one question: “Were you in any way out of line?” “No, sir,” I answered truthfully. “I’ll see what I can do,” said Mr. C.
A few days later at P.J. Clarke’s, another popular city hangout back then, the rat man spotted me and came up with his hand extended. “Hey, Taki, no hard feelings, everything’s fine,” said the rat. “And the senator said you had a hell of a right.” Obviously Mr. C’s magic wand had done the trick. Incidentally, Senator Williams, having survived a right cross, did not end well. Like a more recent senator from New Jersey, he was indicted in something called Arabgate and disappeared from view. My problem was how to thank Mr. C for services rendered. My finances were tight, so I went to my mother and spilled the beans, and she came to the rescue. “Just don’t tell your father you know people like this gangster,” she warned.
Alas, more problems ensued. My mother bought a pair of Cartier cuff links that if memory serves were green and very chic and expensive. They did not register with Mr. C, who told Tom Corbally that “your friend Taki is a cheapskate.” Size mattered to those gents, and the cuff links I gave him were understated to say the least. But then we made up for good. Tom had told Mr. C that Gianni Agnelli and I were great friends, and Mr. C told me he’d like to meet the Fiat heir and chairman-to-be. Costello had a daily morning shave at the Waldorf Astoria barbershop, and Gianni Agnelli kept a suite at the Waldorf Towers. I pleaded with Gianni to come down to the barbershop for two minutes, and he finally said yes. Mr. C called him Giovanni, while Gianni called him Mr. Costello. “I wanted to meet you and tell you my first car was a Fiat,” said Mr. C. “I won it in a raffle in Atlantic City when I was a kid. I told the man holding the mic that No. 9 wins. He told me to get lost. Then I showed him the rod and repeated that No. 9 wins. And it did.” “How amusing,” said Agnelli, “I don’t think our advertising department can use it.”
Yep, those were the days, and they all came back because of a new movie, The Alto Knights, that features Frank Costello played by Robert De Niro. In this film Mr. C is shown as an uxorious husband. In real life Mr. C was married but spending three nights a week with Thelma Martin, his mistress, whose apartment was a couple of blocks down from where he lived with his wife. Movies always show life to be worse than it really is.
