A new report just released by the U.K.’s Royal College of Pediatrics and Child Health has recommended England immediately bans the smacking of children in its entirety—bad news for those deviants like me who pursue the practice as a part-time hobby, just for the fun of it. Whilst I and the other members of my local underground child-abuse club disagree profoundly with the proposal, I would nonetheless grudgingly admit there are plausible arguments on both sides of this particular debate…or so I had naively thought.

Previously, I had presumed the idea of smacking kids with the back of your hand/a wet fish/the nearest sledgehammer was primarily a moral or practical matter, the key questions being “Is it right?,” “Does it work?,” and “Is it highly enjoyable?” Now, however, I am grateful to discover the issue is actually a wholly “scientific” matter.

According to the Royal College, as paraphrased approvingly in top lefty rag The Guardian, “hundreds of studies” have somehow now “proved” that “the damage [to infants] from being smacked could [not “will,” then?] include poorer cognitive development, a higher risk of dropping out of school, increased aggression and perpetrating violence and antisocial behavior as adults.”

This conundrum now kindly having been reclaimed forever from the murky, indeterminate worlds of morality, ideology, and practicality, the report felt itself free to demand that, come this year’s looming U.K. General Election, “All political parties should include a commitment to [ban smacking] in their election manifestos.” The public should not so much as be given a choice when it comes to questions of science, you see, for science is at all times infallible, objective, and incontestable.

According to Bess Herbert, Advocacy Specialist at some stupid softy gay pressure group called End Corporal Punishment, “The science on physical punishment of children is now settled.” Ah, so the science is “settled,” then! Wherever have we heard that one before…?

Hippocratic Oafs
Today’s leftists have cottoned on to the fact that, in an increasingly secularized and politically divided Western world, science is for many people now the final objective reliable authority left to believe in. The very word itself now functions to millions of voters much as the word “magic” once did to their equally credulous ancestors in millennia gone by.

It’s not only banning the smacking of children: It’s also mass immigration. We all now have to accept its continued eternal future existence as a mere inescapable fact of life, like plague, famine, and death—the science says so, it’s an “inevitable” result of global warming. As the planet warms, some special natural reaction automatically attracts Eritreans toward your nearest welfare-check kiosk like iron filings to a magnet.

If that’s so, how come the science appears to suggest it’s only “inevitable” that the heat-threatened Africans will continue heading toward lands gullible enough to let them all in, like the U.S. and U.K., and not into those more sensible nations who simply stand firm and tell them all to sit tight, fry, and die back home, like Hungary and Japan?

And don’t forget that sweltering summer of 2020 when cities all around the developed world really did burn due to the widespread presence of imported African migrants in them. (A quick thought: As their “Global South” homelands also tend to be very hot, maybe the true cause of global warming is actually the excessive regional environmental presence of black people, not of CO₂ after all?)

During this fevered period, the left’s own precious BLM rallies, unlike all other known public gatherings in the Age of Covid-19, were deemed acceptable on “public health grounds” by various oh-so-impartial “WHITE COATS FOR BLACK LIVES” medics on the laughable pseudo-epidemiological grounds that “racism is also a public health crisis.” So is Race-Marxism, so let’s put all the rioting black bastards down right now; just imagine the reaction to any right-wing doctors who had come out with that particular equally pseudoscientific line back at the time.

Science Friction
As the Democratic Party is no longer especially democratic in nature, they should go the whole hog and rechristen themselves the “Science Party” instead, using that simple seven-letter word as the justification for imposing every last single one of their increasingly absurd and damaging policies upon an awestruck, largely scientifically illiterate (and consequently highly obedient) populace with no more need for any further “unnecessary” debate.

Even better, the Republicans could likewise henceforth be forcibly renamed the “Anti-Science Party” to put wavering voters off them even further, which in effect is what the compliant liberal media have already done to them anyway as regards any rebellious GOP politicians’ Net Zero skepticism or reasonable doubts about trans “medicine.”

With the presidential election coming up in November, you can expect to hear a lot more of this kind of rhetoric as the vote approaches ever closer. An early volley just appeared in the NYT, an op-ed by novelist Stephen Markley, who boasts he spent twelve long years writing a climate-change sci-fi story, The Deluge—Tolstoy didn’t spend as long writing Anna Karenina and War and Peace combined.

Markley warned that, whilst all the top profs agree the planet is doomed unless we pull down every last power plant and convert them into giant hamster wheels tomorrow, quack alchemists like Donald Trump are dangerously dissenting in their assessments of the matter, the Orange One having in the past called global warming a “hoax” and predicted instead that “It’ll start getting cooler, you watch.”

As a result, argues Markley, “the stakes of the climate crisis render the cliché of ‘This is the most important election of our lifetimes’ increasingly true because every four years those stakes climb precipitously alongside the toppling records of a radically new climate regime.” To parse, that roughly means as follows: “If Donald Trump wins in November ’24, then THE SCIENCE tells us that HUMANITY WILL DIE FOREVER, so he MUST NEVER BE ALLOWED to do so.”

Unscientific Americans
Well, Mr. Markley is a novelist, not a scientist, and has no professional obligation not to be partisan. But what about actual scientists themselves? Surely they shouldn’t see fit to wade into the arena of subjective political debate on a corporate, group collective level? They already have.

Prior to the last 2020 election, Scientific American, the country’s leading science periodical after Lysenkoism Monthly and Vaginal Healing Crystal News, endorsed a presidential candidate for the first time in its entire then-175 years of history—Joe Biden, who was offering “fact-based plans” to ensure America enjoyed a “more prosperous and more equitable future,” unlike Donald Trump, whom “the evidence and the science” demonstrated conclusively was a total drooling retard who had taken advice on epidemiology from “physicians who believe in aliens.”

According to Scientific American, Biden “comes prepared with plans to control COVID-19, improve health care, reduce carbon emissions and restore the role of legitimate science in policy-making.” Well, at least disease and climate change actually are scientific issues, I suppose. But what about the following reason listed by the editors for supporting him? “His plans include increased salaries for childcare workers and construction of new facilities for children because the inability to afford quality care keeps workers out of the economy and places enormous strains on families.”

How is massively expanding childcare on the taxpayer dime a scientific matter? Because families having “enormous strains” placed upon them is now suddenly a “public health” issue, allegedly, just like racism during coronavirus and the evil spanking of British toddlers today. If placing “enormous strains” upon families is objectively, scientifically bad, then how come Creepy Uncle Joe has spent the past four years relentlessly (and distinctly pseudoscientifically) trying to turn their kids tranny?

Scientific American was not alone in its laboratory-proven endorsement of Biden and repudiation of Trump, though. The New England Journal of Medicine, Nature, and, in a joint open letter, no fewer than 81 past U.S. Nobel Laureates all followed suit like literate lemmings. You can expect to see them do the same again later this year, I hereby “scientifically” predict, as November rolls around.

Going Against Nature
But, if they do repeat their actions, what will be the results of such proselytizing? Amusingly, a complex, data-driven, statistical paper (summary for humans here) published last year in the impeccably peer-reviewed journal Nature Human Behaviour purported to prove the ultimate results of Nature’s open endorsement of Joe Biden were as follows:

(1) To erode public trust in the journal Nature.

(2) To erode public trust in science in general.

(3) To erode public trust in the truth of favored left-wing scientific shibboleths like climate change and vaccines being utterly infallible.

(4) To make no difference whatsoever to the votes of undecided citizens.

(5) To therefore presumably make it more likely that the side Nature’s editors want to win the election will in fact lose it.

(6) To make the editors of Nature look like a bunch of self-defeating, absolute, solid-gold, planetary-level dickheads.

In a subsequent editorial, Nature took sober account of this paper’s findings…then basically just ignored and dismissed them, like flies to wanton boys. But how come? Surely, given the highly reliable, peer-reviewed source where this data first appeared—its author even had a Chinese-sounding name, so its math must have been correct—it should have been logically impossible for the editors to ignore. After all, it was the science, wasn’t it?

What a bunch of hypocrites. Imagine growing up to be as badly behaved as this. Someone should really have hit them all a bit more often when they were children.

One of the things that I notice walking through the streets of England—but not only in England—is the almost complete lack of self-respect of the population. Self-esteem, of course, is another matter entirely: Most people are on the qui vive for anything that they think might be regarded as an assault on their dignity as the bearer of human rights, ever growing in number, complexity, and self-contradiction.

Not only do people fail to make the most of themselves, they seem determined to make the worst of themselves, as if they were setting a challenge to others not to remark on them or pass a judgment about the way they look. In England, fat young women (of whom there are lamentably many) squeeze themselves into unbecomingly tight costumes, like toothpaste into a tube. It is as if they were intimidating you into not noticing how hideous they look.

On an escalator in a station recently, I followed a very fat young woman. At the bottom of the escalator, she was eating some kind of nut bar, no doubt advertised as health-giving, as if she were urgently in need of nutrition. By the top of the escalator, she had taken out her telephone and was sending a message with astonishing dexterity: She could type faster on her tiny keyboard than I on my computer. From the look on her face, I judged her to be of good or even of superior intelligence. Her bad taste was not the consequence of intellectual incapacity.

Her black two-piece outfit clung to her body as closely as one wraps leftovers in cling film before putting them in the fridge. Between the upper and lower halves of the costume, however, was a kind of strait separating two continents, through which pudgy white flesh bulged. On the small of her back (not very small) was a tattoo. Naturally, her face was pierced with rings and other metallic adornments. She presented herself to the world with an almost ferocious, and certainly deliberate, absence of dignity.

Being fat is not by itself incompatible with dignity. I think, for example, of the fat market women of West Africa, in their long cotton gowns and magnificent turbans. When they move, they are stately, like the galleons of the line of an early navy. One respects them immediately.

There is an epidemic of self-abuse in the Western world, worse no doubt in the Anglo-Saxon parts than elsewhere, but spreading, for the world follows American trends with all the intelligence of a headless chicken. There have always been scruffy people—I was once one myself—but the mass adoption of ugliness as a fashion and way of being is something relatively new. It bespeaks a toxic mixture of self-hatred, narcissism, solipsism, and laziness.

The natural beauty of people presumably falls on a normal, or Gaussian, distribution, the vast majority of people falling somewhere between great beauty and great ugliness. But no one is, or very few people are, condemned to indignity. We adopt indignity as a way of being.

There are, of course, certain advantages to ugliness and indignity as goals. They are targets almost certain to be hit, requiring practically no effort. To turn oneself out well takes continued and continual effort, and while it may become second nature, it still remains a discipline that imposes its obligations.

Carried to excess, of course, it becomes vanity, which in some cases may be preposterous. Dandyism is often laughable. But the opposite is worse and is also a form of vanity, a worse form. What it suggests is the following: that I am so essentially important or good a person that I need not make an effort for others—you must therefore accept me as I am. This entails that I must accept you as you are, and hence the general level of self-respect declines, to be replaced by self-esteem. The former is a social quality—it requires seeing oneself through the eyes of others—while the latter is purely solipsistic.

I changed my views on mode of dress in Africa. Until then, I had taken the standard bohemian line that smartness of dress was nothing but the means by which a social class imposed its hegemony on the rest of society, and also that concern with dress was essentially trivial and superficial.

But in Africa I saw people who were far poorer than anyone I had ever met turn themselves out, whenever they could, with pride and care—and succeed magnificently. They did so even though it cost them great effort and even sacrifice. It was a triumph of the human spirit, a local defeat over the second law of thermodynamics. It changed my attitude to dress thereafter.

The deliberate self-uglification of people is a form of bullying. It is the demand that you do not notice something that you cannot help noticing. Comment upon it would be even worse. The only defense is to reply in kind, to be just as ugly, or at least as sloppy.

Personal ugliness is democratic, for its achievement is easily within the reach of all, while personal beauty is aristocratic because its achievement is not within the reach of all and is in part determined by heredity. Such ugliness, therefore, is politically virtuous in a way that beauty can never be. One displays one’s solidarity with the rest of mankind by uglifying oneself, whereas one displays one’s inegalitarianism by trying to be anything other than ugly, for example elegant.

This applies not only to dress but to tastes in other things. Of course, there is a large element of playacting and hypocrisy in all this. The rich man who dresses in proletarian fashion has no intention of sharing his wealth with the proletariat, quite the reverse, he is usually avid for more. He may also mix his message, for example like Donald Trump: by wearing a suit and tie but donning a baseball cap. No man, said Doctor Johnson in Rasselas, may drink simultaneously of the source and the mouth of the Nile, but for various crooked reasons the bourgeois may try to appear proletarian, the better to head off envy, criticism, or revolutionary sentiment. So far, at any rate, the ruse has worked.

Theodore Dalrymple’s latest book is Ramses: A Memoir, published by New English Review.

There’s an old expression that goes, “It’s an ill wind that blows nobody any good.” My dear departed mother-in-law turned that old saw on its ear and used to say, “Never does an ill wind blow that doesn’t blow some good.” I don’t know if she herself came up with that or if she just heard it somewhere, but with that in mind, and considering the relentless Category 100 hurricane we’ve endured these past three years, here’s a question: How many of you had John Fetterman as the voice of reason on your bingo card? Me neither. Yet there he is.

“It’s a great American value to protest, but I don’t believe living in a pup tent for Hamas is really helpful,” Fetterman said…. Since the start of the anti-Israel encampments, students at several universities and colleges have been suspended, those participating in the encampments have been arrested, and graduation ceremonies have been canceled.

Fetterman added that there was a “germ of antisemitism in all of these protests and then sometimes it flares up,” continuing on to reference words Khymani James, one of the leaders of the anti-Israel encampment at Columbia University, had said.

“One of the leaders in Columbia said some just awful things talking about, ‘Well, they’re lucky I’m not killing Zionists,’ and things like that. And, then he defended himself by saying, ‘Well, those were taken out of context,’ and I’m like, well those are very similar to the way the college presidents, same kind of language.”…

“We have imported alien, violent, dark-age cultures that work hand in hand with our own native-born tyrants to drag us back to an even darker age.”

Since Hamas’ attack, Fetterman has defended Israel and criticized anti-Israel protesters.

How John Fetterman, a trust-fund layabout whose résumé consisted of getting elected mayor of a dying Pennsylvania coal town and driving the final nail in its coffin, somehow emerged as a viable candidate for U.S. senator remains a mystery. Likely PA election shenanigans aside, there he was in grubby sweats and sneakers, taking his place in “the greatest deliberative body in the world.” At the time I thought, how low can one be to be so disrespectful to not show up in a suit and tie? Yet considering the corruption, venality, and tyrannical thuggery that infests that building and every other government edifice in D.C., why should I get all exercised? Recall the late, unlamented Harry Reid, currently roasting in hell, complaining how he could smell the body odor of commoner peon tourists visiting the Rotunda. All things considered, Fetterman actually is a breath of fresh air.

Was it the stroke, the lump on his neck, or even his Addams Family-esque wife, Giselle, that brought out this latent flash of sanity, reason, and actual moral clarity from someone who at first glance should fit quite comfortably between the likes of Titty-Caca AOC and multimillionaire multiple-mansion-owning Marxist Bernie Sanders? Who knows, and who cares? His voice of support of the state of Israel and American Jews being persecuted on our own soil (and if I remember correctly his anti-open-borders statements) have been full-throated and consistent since this current nightmare began last October.

For sure, he is a liberal if not leftist, but to go against a shibboleth and central tenet of the anti-American left by refusing to equivocate between Israel and the “Palestinians”—especially now during an election year when the Sponge-Brain Sh*ts-Pants/Kalorama Klown Komintern is desperate to rally their rabid base—surely is political death. But still he persists.

On the latest edition of our podcast, author and historian Michael Walsh lamented the slim prospect of a nation so divided, not merely on issues but on the legitimacy of the nation itself, ever finding any sort of common ground. Perhaps it’s reaching out to as many people like John Fetterman or Tulsi Gabbard (who Walsh would like to see as Trump’s VP pick) that will be the key. But given the nature of so-called cancel culture, a rather anodyne phrase for blackballing, ostracism, and outright persecution (with either the blessing or active participation of our own government), are these people on both sides of the divide brave enough to come forward?

It’s why I get so disheartened and frankly p.o.’d when politicians and pundits on our side are incapable or even unwilling to take a stand because they are blind, perhaps willfully, to the corruption that is or should be so obvious all around us. Case in point is the usually erudite Christopher Roach.

I will state as a preliminary matter that there is a difference between protest and targeted harassment and that the latter should not be protected as free speech. That said, our foreign policy towards Israel should be subject to debate and accepted as a target of protest as much as anything else. Suggestions that such views are beyond the pale and warrant expulsion simply because they are unpopular are impossible to square with the First Amendment and more general American principles of free speech….

There have been many overwrought and dishonest criticisms of recent campus protests, but they do not appear more violent or more sinister than other protests of recent years. They mostly seem to be peaceful sit-ins. While violence and threats of violence have no place on campus, part of academic freedom and the college experience involves encountering ideas one disagrees with. Like most protests, these assemblies consist of a majority that is law-abiding and engaging in free speech and a much smaller minority of angry, anti-social agitators. And this division is evident everywhere you look….

If Israel and its policies are so great, they should be able to win the battle of public opinion with facts, logic, and protests of their own. In many respects, they have. Americans are mostly pro-Israel. But life is not always black and white. Some of Israel’s supporters, as well as many Israelis, also object to the scale of destruction in Gaza and the military operation’s apparent inability to provide long-term security.

A moral panic over ordinary expressions of political disagreement, controversial views, and uncouth language is not the way. Such a policy would be inimical to free speech, based on a distorted record, and will only give the activists of the progressive left the validation they are seeking. University and government policy should be built on the solid, content-neutral ground of distinguishing permissible free speech from prohibited criminal violence and harassment.

The abject cluelessness Roach demonstrates about this issue is bad enough. But that he asserts that there is still an atmosphere of tolerance on campuses and even in the nation as a whole, especially with a junta in D.C. that has provably collaborated with the media to suppress opinions and the voices of its political enemies, is just gobsmacking in its obliviousness. As for that last sentence, Pollyanna just called from Beldingsville, VT, to say, “WTF, dude?!” Maybe we can get Nina Jankowicz to head up the effort. Winning.

How can one call for the defense and preservation of the First Amendment when it not only doesn’t function, but when the other Amendments are on the ropes if not de facto dead? Did the election of 2020, the imprisonment of political prisoners for using that First Amendment they foolishly thought protected them, and the in-your-face persecution of Donald Trump not prove anything? Evidently not.

Free speech does not exist anymore because the civil society it was part and parcel of, to greater or lesser extents since 1789, is either dead or about to flatline. Wanting to preserve the First Amendment is a nice sentiment, even admirable. But in 2024, it’s sort of like trying to set the broken arm of someone who’s in the final throes of total organ failure.

The notion of having to destroy the Constitution in order to save it is repulsive. Yet, as things stand today, the Constitution has all but been destroyed. The question is, should we somehow overcome those who shredded it during the course of the past century or more, do we get out the Scotch tape, simply paste it back together, and declare the nation restored? So, the NYPD have gone in and booted the micturating, matriculating Muslim/Marxist minions from Columbia and CCNY. Problem solved? Hardly.

The corruption of our entire society, which began with the Democrat-Left’s 200-plus-year will to power and the “progressives” who glommed onto them, was supercharged by the hijacking of academia that started more than eighty years ago with the likes of the Frankfurt School refugees, Horace Mann, John Dewey, and others who took Lenin’s words to heart:

Give me four years to teach the children and the seed I have sown will never be uprooted.

Well, they’ve had a lot more than four, as can plainly be seen (those that I’ve chastised notwithstanding) by our house divided, on fire, and collapsing in all around us. The only way forward is the complete eradication and full-on purge of every professor, teacher, and administrator who has poisoned and will continue to poison the minds of students, the First Amendment be damned. And then we can try to deprogram and de-Nazify upwards of three generations of pod people posing as American citizens and prevent subsequent generations from their fate, and doing us in once and for all.

Only then will we have a shot at creating a society that respects and reveres individual liberty and the rights of those with whom they disagree while at the same time protecting us from those who do not. Meh. We have imported alien, violent, dark-age cultures that work hand in hand with our own native-born tyrants to drag us back to an even darker age. Forever. They must be vanquished and excised from our midst.

If that means ditching the original Constitution to do so, then God help me, so be it. The left is fond of spouting that the Constitution is not a suicide pact. Well, it’s high time we take that attitude.

Too bad the Jewish students being harassed on campuses don’t have the Proud Boys around to protect them. They can thank the Anti-Defamation League’s Jonathan Greenblatt for making that impossible.

Greenblatt could see right through the Proud Boys’ stated mission of supporting Western Civilization. Ha! Mere camouflage for “a right-wing extremist group with a violent agenda.”

Similarly, the Southern Poverty Law Center alerted liberals that the Proud Boys were “extremist” and “white nationalist.”

Wikipedia’s entry on the group is a 20,000-word libel. (Apparently, the group “us[ed] ‘Western chauvinism’ as euphemism for the white genocide conspiracy theory” — just like Wikipedia uses “The Free Encyclopedia” as a euphemism for “left-wing bile.”)

There is literally nothing about “white nationalism” or “white genocide” in anything the Proud Boys said about themselves. Or “right-wing,” for that matter, unless prizing Western culture is now the exclusive province of the right wing.

How about these statements: “Zionists don’t deserve to live,” “Go back to Poland!” “Burn Tel Aviv” — all said recently by protesters at Columbia University. Or how about a Palestinian flag and the words “FINAL SOLUTION” at George Washington University?

I guess the ADL and SPLC didn’t see that coming, despite their exquisitely sensitive antennae for “hate.”

Arguably, these hate watchdogs took their eye off the ball by labeling conservatives “white nationalists” merely for admiring the West, opposing mass immigration, defending the police, writing books about IQ, attacking feminism, hating identity politics or warning of Islamic terrorism.

It sure seems like conservatives weren’t the biggest threat after all, eh, Jonathan?

In fact, now that the Biden administration is proposing to import Palestinians living in Gaza as “refugees,” could The New York Times, SPLC and ADL ease up on calling Peter Brimelow a “white nationalist” and “racist” solely because his website, VDare.com, opposes mass third world immigration?

While I’m thrilled that more than 10 people are finally expressing disgust at left-wing psychotics, where were they when much, much, much, much, much worse was being done to conservative speakers on college campuses?

Say, where’s Mitt Romney? Shouldn’t he be explaining that the anti-Israel agitators simply oppose genocide? That’s what they say, anyway, just as “antifa” said it was “anti-fascist.” Thus, on Aug. 15, 2017, in the middle of years-long violent antifa attacks on conservatives, Romney proclaimed: “[Antifa] opposes racism and bigotry. Morally different universes.”

How conservatives expressly define themselves is always a fake-out, whereas what antifa says about itself may not be questioned.

In February 2017, antifa nearly burned the University of California, Berkeley, to the ground to protest a Milo Yiannopoulos speech. You might say Milo was asking for it by being funny. (Leftists are cool with boring conservatives.)

Well, then how about Charles Murray, Heather Mac Donald, David Horowitz and Ben Shapiro? They are among the country’s smartest and most influential conservatives.

A month after the Milo conflagration, Murray was hounded off the stage by protesters at Middlebury College in Vermont. As Murray and his faculty interlocutor were trying to leave, the mob physically attacked them, then jumped on their car and tried to flip it. The professor had to be hospitalized, having sustained whiplash and a concussion.

No students were suspended or expelled. To the contrary, Middlebury promised to cancel any future speakers who might provoke leftist ire.

SPLC on Murray: “White nationalist.”

The following month, Mac Donald was forced to give her speech at California’s Claremont McKenna College livestreamed to an empty room after 250 protesters blocked students from entering the building. The protesters called Mac Donald an “anti-black fascist” who promoted “blatant anti-Blackness and white supremacy.”

In a preview of what was to come for anyone paying attention, the protesters not only chanted anti-police slogans, but also “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” Mac Donald’s book The War on Cops has absolutely nothing to do with Palestine.

That, too, didn’t set off any alarm bells at the ADL or SPLC — much less with donors, Wall Streeters or the media.

The Hamas cheerleading squads on campus today are despicable, but CNN spent a full segment last week interviewing a Jewish student because the protesters had splashed his brother with water. Conservative speakers would be thrilled if the worst they had to fear was water-splashing, ugly words and unauthorized camping.

Shapiro saw his scheduled speeches canceled by one college administration after another — California State University Los Angeles, Gonzaga University, Grand Canyon University, DePaul University.

Horowitz was shouted down at the University of Houston by pro-Palestinian activists shouting “Free, free, free Palestine” and “Racists off our campus.” (Everybody’s a “racist” to liberals. It’s like calling conservatives “poopy-heads.”)

ADL on Horowitz: “extremist,” “Islamophobe.” SPLC on Horowitz: “anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant and anti-black.”

In November 2019, thousands of antifa tried to prevent me from speaking at UC Berkeley. They failed for only one reason: The Proud Boys were there. Ditto with speeches I gave in Philadelphia and Los Angeles. Antifa came, but so did the Proud Boys. Order was maintained.

This is why the Proud Boys had to be made Public Enemy No. 1: They protected conservatives from violent leftists.

If the only thing you know about the Proud Boys is that they were at the Jan. 6 riot, you’ve been lied to. Yes, absolutely, a few dozen Proud Boys were there. This was an organization with 30,000 members. More Methodists attacked the Capitol, but they weren’t forced to disband. They weren’t a threat, you see, to the left’s shock troops.

It is now perfectly obvious that journalists, donors, Wall Street and ordinary liberals have been scammed by the ADL and the SPLC, spinning fantasies of evil conservatives, all while college leftists were marinating in pure evil, coddled and petted by college administrators, only to erupt into genocide-supporting lunatics after Oct. 7.

Polite liberals and head-in-the-sand conservatives never imagined these civilization destroyers would come for them. Is it too late to bring the Proud Boys back?

Numbskull journalist ignoramuses refer to this week’s Met Gala as the party of the year. Sycophantic hacks who can’t tell the difference between a hooker and a nun cannot be expected to know better, so never mind. The lyrical aplomb of yesterday’s balls and parties is terra incognita to them, whereas today’s vulgar, hyperbolic culture requires the gruesome exaggeration they provide. The Met Gala is now a Frankenstein monstrosity, a barbarity against refined taste, a grotesque copy of a once-wonderful occasion. When Pat Buckley ran the show I was a regular, as were many of my upper-class buddies. No longer. From the divine presence of chic ladies like C.Z. Guest and Babe Paley, it is now down to the Kardashians and Puff Daddy, as precipitous a descent as that of Harvey Weinstein. Pachyderms like the grotesque Lizzo are now considered glamorous, while the high-octane glamour of the ’50s is as gone with the wind as Confederate statues.

Back when I was young, balls were given nonstop in order to celebrate a whim, not to sell material things, as is the case today. Hostesses felt like giving a party and did. Charity balls were the exception, but it was a particularly American perversion, as throwing a blast just for fun had begun to rub the wannabes the wrong way. The best ones that I attended as a young man took place in Paris, before the place was taken over by North Africans. There was no unvarnished shabby chic back then, no grunge-inspired outfits, no fashion nerds, no freaks, no men in dresses—just glamour and beautiful designer gowns for the ladies.

If memory serves, the grandest of the grand balls were given by Sheila Rochambeau, born Sheila Mackintosh somewhere in the Midwest of America, who married a descendant of the great Revolutionary War French hero who carried the day against General Cornwallis in Yorktown. Her magnificent château outside Paris was the venue, and—her words—when I asked her how come an unknown 19-year-old was invited, “Because you’re good-looking, young, and have good manners.” The latter counted rather a lot back then, and invites galore followed: The Agnelli ball in the Bois de Boulogne, the Rothschild ball at their spectacular château de Ferrieres, the Rede ball in the Isle de Louis, the Thurn und Taxis dance at their historic Regensburg castle, I could go on and on.

The party sort of ended in 1968, when French students revolted in sympathy with the workers, and I had the opportunity to get around Paris on my best polo pony, Tango, as the capital had run dry of gasoline and bicycles were harder to find than petrol. Europe had been revived after the catastrophe of the war, South Americans with bulging pockets had come over, and the Italian and German economic miracles had taken place. Hosts and hostesses were eager to party and celebrate and did so with a vengeance. Things slowed down after 1968, while Paris and Prague burned and the Vietnam War split the US of A apart. It was time for serious work, and I turned to writing. But when asked in various stages of my life for the best party of them all, it was one I happened to have missed, back in 1815, a party that celebrated a congress that kept the peace for close to one hundred years.

The Congress of Vienna followed Napoleon’s defeat and exile to Elba in 1814, as the future of Europe hung in the balance. Britain, Austria, Prussia, and Russia were the big shots, along with a host of lesser powers, gathered in Vienna for an eight-month-long political and social carnival that has never taken place before or since. It resulted in an unprecedented level of European stability for close to 100 years.

There were crowned heads galore who insisted on being entertained, with nightly balls and parties organized by ambassadors, princesses, and grand visiting hostesses. The entourages of crowned heads, of ministers, of ambassadors, equerries, aides-de-camp, ladies-in-waiting, when added to the Austrian court and the society of Vienna, made up the largest aristocratic gathering that had ever been. I will only mention two events among the nonstop partying because of personal reasons. Luigi Boncompagni Ludovisi, Prince of Piombino, interrupted the festivities when he demanded to know with what right did the allies deprive him of his island of Elba to accommodate the man who had deprived him of his possession. Luigi was right but only got his isle back when Napo escaped a year later. Almost 200 years after that, I found myself in his descendant’s Roman palazzo when my daughter’s closest childhood friend, Delphina Lapham, married Bante Boncompagni Ludovisi.

Princess Katya Bagration was the greatest beauty of her time. She was the widow of Prince General Bagration, who was killed during the battle of Borodino back in 1812. The Russian was a man-killer. When she arrived in Vienna, she set her eye on Prince Metternich, already very busy with carving up Poland, satisfying his loving wife as well as his demanding mistress Wilhelmina, Duchess of Sagan. But during some important negotiations about Poland, Metternich got lucky with Katya Bagration and missed the meeting. When informed by his aides that a very large portion of Poland could have gone to the Austrians if he had been there, Metternich looked wistful for a moment, then exclaimed, “She was worth it.”

That all was back when men were men.

It was nearly 50 years ago that a liberal Congress completely dominated by Democrat big spenders passed a new set of budget rules — the Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act of 1974.

It has been a complete and unmitigated disaster. Since the act’s passage, the budget has been balanced four times and unbalanced 46 times. This was by design. Despite being called a “budget reform” law, the act was intended to grease the skids for new spending, but even Congress members the ’70s who designed it that way couldn’t have imagined the Pandora’s box of spending and debt it uncorked.

The law’s intention was to loosen restrictions on congressional spending, and to that extent, it worked.

This year, Congress hit a new low. Even with record-high deficits of nearly $2 trillion a year, Democrats and Republicans on Capitol Hill held hands in bipartisan agreement to spend $95 billion on a foreign aid bill for Ukraine and Israel without ONE PENNY being paid for with offsetting spending cuts — even though the flabby budget now exceeds $7 trillion.

Both parties have bought into the idea of “modern monetary theory,” a crackpot scheme that says the U.S. government can spend and borrow to kingdom come — which may arrive a lot sooner than we think if we stay on this financial path. In just the first three months of this year, Congress borrowed another half-trillion dollars. The members of Congress should be wearing T-shirts that read, “Stop us before we spend again!”

I’d like to suggest some common-sense ideas; it’s time for citizens to impose a fiscal restraining order on Congress and the White House.

1. Presidential impoundment authority. The president, just like the CEO of a company, should have the power to suspend spending on programs if it is deemed unnecessary. Every president from Thomas Jefferson, who used the power to stop some ship building for the military, to Abraham Lincoln to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who used the authority to end New Deal programs as the country entered World War II, to Richard Nixon exercised this control. In a $7 trillion budget, there are thousands of instances where money authorized by Congress is no longer needed. So let the president cancel it.

2. A super-majority vote requirement to raise taxes. President Joe Biden wants to balance the budget with $4 trillion of economically disastrous tax increases and no spending cuts. But it’s the spending that is out of control, not the tax revenues. Any tax increase enacted by Congress should require a two-thirds vote in both houses to be approved. This is what many well-run state governments require, and there should be similar safeguards in Washington.

3. A millionaire subsidy elimination act. This is an idea the late, great economist Walter Williams and I proposed over a decade ago. The idea is that no individual with an income of more than $1 million should be eligible for federal aid payments, and no business entity with more than $1 billion in revenues should be eligible for federal corporate welfare subsidies. This would have rendered the so-called Inflation Reduction Act, with its tens of billions of dollars in handouts to green energy firms and semiconductor companies like Intel, null and void.

4. The budget stamps solution. Here’s a simple idea that would effectively require a balanced budget each year. The concept was originally proposed by former Reagan administration economist John Rutledge. Under this plan, the government would issue a special blue currency called “budget stamps” that would be issued to all recipients of federal spending — much in the way that food stamps are issued to poor people. But budget stamps’ value would fluctuate with the amount of excess spending authorized by Congress — much as the dollar fluctuates in value every day relative to the price of gold or other currencies.

Recipients of federal assistance, federal employees and those who run federal agencies would receive this year $6 trillion in budget stamps. (Interest on the debt is excluded.)

But that money in total would be worth only the amount of money expected to be collected in taxes that year. So if tax collections were estimated at 90% of the spending, then every budget stamp would be worth 90 cents, not a dollar. The bigger the expected deficit, the less a budget stamp would be worth.

This would create a competition for dollars between agencies and programs. Each dollar allocated to foreign aid programs would be one less dollar available for the Pentagon, Social Security recipients, defense contractors, green energy programs, bilingual education and sugar subsidies.

Deficits would be impossible, since the government under the new rule would be incapable of spending more than it took in. Because Congress’s salaries (and staffs) would be paid in budget stamps, Congress would be financially incentivized to cut unnecessary and wasteful spending.

Almost no one in the Washington swamp will like these ideas — all the more reason to adopt them.

Did I ever tell you about the time one elderly Nazi took on and beat the entire U.S. government, the neocons, the military-industrial complex, and Israel?

It’s a hell of a tale!

In 1943, at age 16, German patriot Hans Schmidt joined the Waffen SS as a corporal in Division Leibstandarte. Wounded in battle, he was taken prisoner by American troops and held in a POW camp. After the war, he relocated to Chicago, where he became a naturalized citizen, did well in business, and in the 1980s launched a Holocaust denial org called GANPAC—the German-American National Political Action Committee.

Mind you, it was a committee of one, but what’s numbers compared with good old-fashioned German moxie (sorry, machzie)?

Because of his wealth, he was always welcomed at the Holocaust “revisionist” events I attended in the early ’90s. I interviewed him once…not about the Holocaust, but about his wartime experiences (I’d always interview WWII veterans, even the “bad guys”). Of course, he started talking about the Holocaust anyway; poor chap couldn’t help himself.

I never did anything with the footage…I suppose I’ll put it on eBay.

Oh, right, Nazi ban…okay, anyone interested reach out to me on Substack.

Anyway, when the Gulf War started, Schmidt declared in his GANPAC newsletter that the supposed premise of the war, to “liberate Kuwait,” was a false flag. The real purpose was to kill Saddam Hussein. Bush, the neocons, Israel, and Jews everywhere had hatched an elaborate plot to trick Hussein into invading Kuwait in order to give cover to what was essentially a targeted assassination of one man. Sure, millions of American soldiers were about to die, but what’s a few dead grunts to the Rothschilds?

I ran into Schmidt in D.C. a month or so after the war’s successful conclusion. I reminded him that the war had ended with a minimal number of American casualties, and Hussein was still alive. Indeed, not just still alive, but still ruling Iraq.

“Ja,” Schmidt said, stroking his chin, “I expozed zehr plan, so ze Jews had to retreat. I alerted ze worldt und saved Hussein’s life!”

Ain’t that something! Hans Schmidt altered the course of history with his home-printed newsletters!

Now, what lesson can we learn from that little anecdote?

Battling invisible foes on an imaginary battlefield is the easiest war to wage. As a teen, Schmidt fought real-life enemies on a real-world battlefield, and he got his kraut ass kicked. The Allies wiped the floor with him and his kameraden. But now, as an old man, living comfortably, he realized that he could fight larger, more important battles completely in his mind, without leaving the comfort of his home or breaking a sweat.

Do you find Schmidt laughable? Pathetic, even? Well, sorry, folks, but that’s how I view some of you who’ve traded fighting real-world political contests for Tucker’s imaginary “MAGA vs. the invisible CIA world controllers” battlefield.

Yes, this is a continuation of last week’s column.

Imaginary battles are where you go when you’ve had your ass kicked in terrestrial ones. Tucker’s descent into “it’s all an illusion; events are being manipulated by behind-the-scenes puppet masters,” which aligns his views with those of Alex Jones and, to a great extent, Trump himself, and the enthusiastic response to this escapism on the part of ordinary MAGAs, indicates a right wing that’s fast giving up on terrestrial fighting.

Didja hear? Charlie Kirk is now battling the CIA by telling his followers not to watch movies, because movies is how they getcha with their psyops!

Kirk could not deliver Arizona for the GOP. All his bluster, all his supposed “activism,” all the donations he rakes in, he could not score a single real-world electoral win in his own state. Still, he’s gotta do something to excuse that $6.5 million Scottsdale mansion. So he’s fighting the Battle of CIA Movie Psyops, and you know what? I think the kid might win that one!

It’s The NeverEnding Story! And Kirk is riding Falkor, naming princesses, and saving Fantasia.

Funny enough, when that film came out in 1984, it was widely derided for its ending in which the bullied protagonist boy gets revenge against his tormentors in his imagination, while his real-world lot remains as desperate as when the film began. We were like, “Is it really a happy ending that the boy’s taken refuge in fantasy?”

What fags we were. What irredeemable cucks. The imagination is where all the best wars are waged.

On the other hand—and hear me out on this—perhaps you’re not helpless pawns being moved around a chessboard by Baron Rothschild. Maybe the right’s misfortune is its own doing.

I’ll give you one example, locally.

It’s easy to blame California’s transition to deep blue stronghold on immigration. “The Dems dun imported a new electorate!”

Okay, so here’s a brainteaser for ya. In the 1990s, our governor for two terms (the limit in this state) was Pete Wilson, a Republican with strong views against illegal immigration. He handily won twice.

Then, after Wilson, we got Gray Davis, a pro-immigration open-borders Democrat, for one full term. He was recalled after starting his second term, and we got Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Republican who ran on stopping illegal immigration and ending special treatment for illegals. He easily beat Davis and the other Democrat challenger, bald bean Cruz Bustamante (Davis’ lieutenant governor). In 2006, Schwarzenegger cruised to reelection.

Let’s examine this puzzling pattern: Immigration restrictionist GOP wins two terms. Democrat open-borders extremist wins one term. He’s recalled, and an immigration restrictionist GOP wins two terms. How can you blame that pattern on a changed electorate? Did Mexicans move here during Wilson’s term, elect Davis, then move out before the recall, so Schwarzenegger could win? In 2003, did they all travel back to Zahapotecajuacan to pick up their mail?

That’s imbecilic. The gubernatorial pattern is easily explicable by the stupidity of the state GOP. Not Baron Rothschild, not the Elders of Zion, but the very real, very visible, very retarded GOP.

Wilson was anti-immigration and pro-choice on abortion. A perfect combo for a state that was pro-choice before Roe.

Wilson won and served his two terms.

But then the state GOP decided, “Hey, let’s run an anti-abortion lunatic (Dan Lungren), a guy who says, ‘Put pregnant moms in jail and force childbirth!’”

And Lungren lost soundly to Davis. Then, when Davis ran for reelection, who’d the GOP put up against him? Another anti-abortion extremist! And Davis won again.

At that point, Richard Riordan of blessed memory—a genuine hero, the pro-choice GOP mayor of L.A. who’d even managed to win our bean vote—stepped in and was like, “Fuck this bullshit” (he said it more eloquently). He helped engineer the recall with the intent of running himself, but Schwarzenegger stepped in and Riordan stepped aside. And Schwarzenegger—same as Wilson: pro-choice, anti–open borders—kicked Davis’ ass.

That gubernatorial pattern had nothing to do with a “changing electorate.” It had to do with idiots running the state party, failing to recognize the importance of abortion here, failing to understand that anti-immigration rhetoric, popular as it was statewide, must go hand in hand with pro-choice.

Of course, once in office, Schwarzenegger, due to a combination of ego, inexperience, and various other personality defects, reneged on his immigration pledges, lost every battle with the Dems, and finally gave in and spent his second term pardoning criminals because, as he so eloquently put it while boning his hideous Guatemalan housekeeper, “Glauuaauuurgaaaaurggh.”

And now the state may very well be too far gone. But if so, it was lost by humans. Visible, flesh-and-blood, fallible humans, not some invisible psyop conspiracy.

In California, the GOP killed the GOP. There was no grassy-knoll gunman. Dumb people were dumb and did dumb things and dumbness ensued.

Like that’s a surprise or something. That’s the story of mankind.

On a national level, Trump fucked things up for Trump. Sure, he had enemies. So did LBJ. So did FDR. But they prevailed anyway. It was Trump who killed the Trump presidency. And it’s the national GOP that’s mired in dysfunction. The CIA, the Rothschilds, and Adam Weishaupt aren’t involved. They don’t need to be.

You have every right to be angry. Insane MAGAs on one side, Con Inc. establishment weaklings on the other. But retreating into fantasy won’t help. Indeed (to repeat a point from last week), it won’t just “not help,” it’ll actively harm.

Because I hate to say it, as it sounds scoldful (not sure that’s a word but I’m going with it anyway), but you bear some responsibility if you obsess over Deep State specters while ignoring the flesh-and-blood villains directly in front of you. Case in point: Steve Bannon. He stole the “build the wall” money. Stole it right from under your nose. The term “grift” is thrown around a lot on the right, but the fact is, even the Shapiro/Boering “change the culture” movie scams are still money-for-goods-and-services trades, which are straightforward, if foolish. Bannon did actual theft, like, a real crime, but he was pardoned by Trump. Tucker wants you to worry about invisible foes so that you’ll keep rewarding “he’s waving to you from the yacht you bought him” foes like Bannon.

I know a hundred guys on the right who continue to support, financially or via other forms of patronage, people they know are crooked, or toxic to voters. These real-world bad guys are the ones who profit from the right’s drift toward imaginary foes. The more you believe there are invisible vipers aligned against you, the more you’ll ignore—or embrace—the visible ones.

Consider fighting the visible ones first. There’ll always be time to get Baron Rothschild. He ain’t goin’ anywhere, what with being immortal and all.

See, the ultimate gag is that it’s the belief you’re in invisible shackles that puts you in invisible shackles. Tucker, Jones, all these con men tell you on a daily basis that you’re not “free.” The deck is stacked against you; “they” control everything. “They” have shackled you! You can’t see the bonds, but they’re there.

Once you start believing you’re in invisible shackles, you’re in invisible shackles. The guys telling you that some nameless force has invisible-shackled you are the ones who’ve actually invisible-shackled you.

As I said, a good gag.

And as Tucker and so many high-profile rightist influencers keep leaning into the invisible-enemies trope, I fear it’s gonna become the defining gag on the right.

Hans Schmidt lost an actual war but won an imaginary one. He died forgotten and unknown, having had no actual impact in the world.

But he died happy, because his virtual victory was real to him. You can choose that path. Fight the Illuminati in your mind, win the war, and award yourself a medal like a good little boy. And die happy.

Surely a more humane death than the painful, tortured one of the nation you supposedly love, DOA because those fighting for it fled to Fantasia.

Over in Spain around this time of year, during Holy Month, a specially chosen prisoner is picked out for sudden early release by the ever-generous Spanish State and let back out into the wild as a kind of non-chocolaty Easter present to the nation, a tradition dating back to 1759.

To qualify for early release, a convict must first be nominated by a favored Christian order, that of Jesus El Rico, whose members deem his case deserving—or so it would initially appear. In fact, members of Malaga’s local government pick a few inmates with “the right profile” (i.e., no pedos), then instruct the monks to send a letter requesting their immediate pardon to the Spanish Ministry of Justice, whereupon the mandarins of the day pick out the candidate they deem most worthy.

Who gets chosen? During Easter 2024, it was the turn of Jose Manuel, previously serving three years for a strangely unspecified “crime against public health” (maybe he once went outside during Covid-19 without wearing a mask?), whilst last year’s winner was a completely harmless-sounding individual named Antonio Daniel, a 31-year-old convicted drug dealer. Apparently, “practically all” of those given early release under the scheme never go on to commit any further crimes—a good thing, as they have apparently included rapists and murderers in the past. How very reassuring that single word “practically” is there, then.

Is the Pope Muslim?
If the clergymen of Jesus El Rico wish to ensure a guaranteed genuinely harmless individual is released for Easter Month 2025, perhaps they should pencil in the name of another local holy man, Father Custodio Ballester, a 59-year-old Catholic priest who it emerged recently could face a $1,600 fine and three years locked away underground in a Spanish oubliette for supposedly committing some imaginary new modern class of offense known as a “hate crime.”

What did Fr. Ballester do? Lynch a local Blackamoor? Forcibly carve a swastika into a Murano Jew’s forehead with a rusty crucifix whilst calling him a Christ-killer? No, he just said some unacceptably accurate things about radical Islam.

In 2016, the Archbishop of Barcelona had written a public “Sunday Letter,” titled “The Necessary Dialogue With Islam,” in which he had argued that the “Necessary Dialogue” between Christians and Muslims of the future should go something like this: “Hello, please come and take over our societies completely en masse in the name of your Blessed Prophet, PBUH, and how much jizya tax would you like us to pay you each month from now on, Abdul?”

Of course, I paraphrase slightly. Actually, the Letter of Archbishop Apostate praised the current Pope Francis for saying things to that same basic effect, the Pope having just traveled to Egypt’s Al-Azhar University, generally considered the Muslim world’s chief seat of learning outside of the North Luton Islamic Center, where he had given a public hug to its Grand Imam Ahmad Al-Tayeb, the highest theological authority in all Sunni Islam.

This cheering public demonstration of interfaith public frottage was not necessarily taken overly well by certain Christians with functioning memory cells, however, as all such contact between the Vatican and Al-Azhar had previously been suspended following a minor incident in 2011 when Islamic extremists had peacefully car-bombed the Coptic Christian cathedral in Alexandria, killing 23 worshippers.

The then Pope, Benedict XVI, had used this as an opportunity to condemn the widespread persecution of Christians in Muslim countries—Christians are in fact the world’s No. 1 persecuted group globally these days, not obese black transsexuals, as the mainstream media would prefer you to believe—which did not go down terribly well in Egypt, with Al-Azhar University calling Benedict’s words “undue Western interference.”

But now, things were all A-OK between Christianity and the Muslim world, wrote the naive Barcelona Archbishop in his 2016 Letter, as the new Pope and the Grand Imam had spoken of their faiths’ “common commitment” to “peace in the world” and “the rejection of terrorism.” Did anyone tell the terrorists that when they planted their car bombs outside Alexandria Cathedral?

Papal Bullshit
Father Custodio Ballester read the Archbishop’s Letter and decided to publicly pen a Letter of his own, “The Impossible Dialogue With Islam,” arguing that his Catholic superiors, far from being Infallible, were talking complete cassocks: “Islam does not admit dialogue. Either you believe, or you are an infidel who must be subdued one way or another.”

That is what Fr. Ballester thought, anyway: “In countries where Muslims hold power, Christians are brutally persecuted and killed. So what dialogue are we talking about?” The one that tells us heathen folk we should supinely bend over and submit, I suppose; no true dialogue, just an immediate order. The Koran, Ballester said, is “indisputable and uninterpretable”; it places five key, nonnegotiable obligations upon the faithful: “Prayer, almsgiving, pilgrimage to Mecca, jihad and the extermination of the infidels!” Within this context, “a hug and a photo” between Pope and Grand Imam “mean nothing,” any more than a hug and a photo between Chamberlain and Hitler once did.

Jesus was “the Crucified One,” whereas Muhammad was “the warrior,” meaning the one would always inevitably try to conquer and subdue the other, the priest explained. “Nice difference, isn’t it?” he asked. Not to the contemporary Spanish State, it isn’t, as Fr. Ballester has just received a summons for prosecution from a provincial court.

As Ballester has pointed out, up until about five minutes ago criminal charges in Spain were reserved purely for use against those who “had actually done something.” “If I am convicted, this will no longer be Spain but Pakistan,” he added, “where you can be killed for blaspheming the Koran or Muhammad.” This was supposed to be the era of Spanish democracy, wasn’t it? Were we going back now to the bad old days of General Franco? Not necessarily, the persecuted padre explained—because, back then, he would actually have been treated rather more fairly.

Guardia Uncivil
Oh, how wonderful 21st-century Spanish “democracy” is, in a country where blatant left-wing prosecutors can now seek actual jail terms for priests who tell the truth or, in another recent gross miscarriage of justice, for sports administrators briefly kissing someone after they had just won an international soccer tournament. Franco once treated Marxists similarly, of course—but now that the Marxists actually have their hands on the levers of power again, maybe El Caudillo can be shown to have been absolutely correct to have done so, in the name of maintaining the wider social good.

General Franco is often portrayed these days by Those Who Rule Us as an evil fascist, who persecuted and killed people for no good reason, and whose Nationalist troops utterly destroyed democracy in Spain—with the active connivance of the equally evil Catholic Church. But is this really so?

From 1931, when Spain’s monarchy was abolished and the “democratic” left-wing Spanish Second Republic ushered in, the benign “democrats” in question began annulling inconvenient election results and cracking down on free speech and free thought by virtue of disingenuously labeling all conservative-minded opponents as “fascists” (sound familiar to any American readers today?), all whilst mercilessly persecuting the Catholic Church and its believers.

This became one of the main triggers of the subsequent Civil War, with churches being burned, worshippers shot, nuns raped, and thousands of the nation’s clergy tortured and martyred: Here’s a photo of a dead nun dug up and put on display to be mocked and spat on by those lovely #BeKind Commies. Given such “Red Terror,” as this strangely (i.e., deliberately) semi-forgotten religious genocide became known, it is hardly any wonder the Catholic Church ended up throwing its lot in with General Franco, is it?

For Fr. Ballester today, the leftist Red Terror has once again returned, just dressed up in “kinder,” more “progressive” clothing—that of “the official ideology of the European Union” and its complicit leftist member states. In “democratic” E.U. Spain, he said, we now “cannot speak of religious freedom, but of the dictatorship of the single thought.” The secularist E.U. dictatorship, he said, displayed a “revanchist eagerness” to act like the heirs of the Second Republic leftists:

“They dream of resuming the same revolution. Now they don’t need to kill [just to prosecute under ‘hate crime’ laws], although it doesn’t seem like they would mind either, judging by their war cry, ‘You’ll burn like in ’36!’”

The Reign in Spain
Oddly enough, though, today’s anti-Catholic Spanish leftists are actually surprisingly keen on at least one form of religion being spread throughout the country—that of Islam, which had once conquered the southern portion of Iberia wholesale. The former history of the Islamic Empires in Europe (unlike that of the history of the European Empires in Islamic lands, obviously) is henceforth to be officially hymned as one long peacenik lovefest of harmony and tolerance.

In March, an ancient astrolabe—one of those contraptions used to model the planets—was rediscovered in an Italian museum. Dating from the days of Al-Andalus, as Moorish Spain was once called, it contained engravings in both Arabic and Hebrew, thereby supposedly demonstrating how, contrary to the situation in today’s appallingly white supremacist world, back when the towelheads were on top in Al-Andalus, all faiths worked together in perfect cooperation, in a regime known as the convivencia, or “living together.”

A myth of “The Andalusian Paradise” has since arisen in which Moorish Spain is imagined as having been…well, a multicultural paradise, much as Malmo, London, Marseilles, and Brussels surely are today. See? The Moors of old were not barbarians like the justly Commie-killed Catholics were; instead, they were merely olden-days versions of classic 21st-century NYT or Guardian readers, goes this utterly delusional line of thinking, as “proven” by the astrolabe.

Unfortunately, the Moors ruled Spain for hundreds of years, and, besides all those oh-so-tolerant multilingual astrolabes, you can also find equally as many instances of Christians and Jews being slaughtered, forced to convert, made to pay the jizya tax, and more. Black Africans were enslaved there. Churches were demolished or forcibly turned into mosques. There were beheadings and pogroms. Laws from Seville in 1100 declared a Muslim “must not clear [Jews’ or Christians’] rubbish nor clean their latrines” in a primitive caste system; during that same century, the Catholics of Malaga and Grenada were ethnically cleansed by the thousands into Morocco. How is the mass expulsion of Christians “living together” with them?

Just as these same historically blind E.U.-era Spanish progressives falsely imagine Second Republic-era Spain to have been one long leftist kumbaya wet dream, so they imagine Al-Andalus to have been just the same; somehow, all those dead, exiled, enslaved, dhimmified, and mutilated Christians, blacks, and Jews manage to remain invisible to their blinkered eyes. It’s El 1619 Proyecto all over again.

Back in 1492, after several solid centuries of warfare, the Spanish finally managed to throw the Muslim imperialists out forever (or so they thought). Today, Islamic extremists from organizations like ISIS promise that, thanks to E.U.-enabled mass immigration, they will return and reconquer the place anew. The current persecution being handed out against Fr. Custodio Ballester demonstrates clearly that, in their frenzied eagerness to destroy the West’s Christian heritage forever, our current quisling left-wing politicians will only aid them in this task.

Oh, Ferdinand, Isabella—why did you ever bother?

The Week’s Most Fussing, Trussing, and Exodussing Headlines

HOLLYWOOD MAGIC, HOLLYWOOD TRAGIC
The anchor of the Universal Studios Hollywood theme park is the legendary tram ride, which used to feature several “practical effect” attractions, including an animatronic King Kong that would shake a rickety bridge as the tram crossed, an animatronic Jaws that would attack the tram on a rickety bridge, and the rickety bridge attraction that was just a rickety bridge.

When the park was built, the bosses obviously got taken to the cleaners by a traveling rickety bridge salesman.

Ten years ago, the Universal powers-that-be ditched any attractions that physically jolt attendees, partly out of concern for lawsuits. So, out with animatronic King Kong, in with a “3D movie experience.” Out with animatronic Jurassic Park dinosaurs, in with a “3D movie experience.”

Because nobody can get hurt watching a movie in a tram as it crawls at 5 mph.

Unless the driver is, like, stoned, bro.

Last week, as the tram was crawling at a snail’s pace through the backlot, the driver poorly negotiated a turn, and the last car became hooked on the edge of a safety guardrail, which performed the exact opposite of its intended function. As the driver, not realizing why there was a “drag” on the tram, kept gunning it, the guardrail edge sliced through the last car, crushing some passengers and ejecting others through the air.

Thankfully, there were no deaths, but over fifteen injuries, one critical.

Studio Boss: “Who the hell was driving that tram?”

Lackey: “Our new employee, Dumbass O’Herlihy.”

Boss: “Why the hell did we hire someone named Dumbass O’Herlihy?”

Lackey: “He came highly recommended by our HR director, Idiot Boy.”

Boss: “Oh, okay. Idiot Boy does good work.”

Facing lawsuits, Universal’s lawyers are claiming that the entire thing was part of the park’s new attraction celebrating the studio’s biggest hit of 2023: Oppenheimer—The Ride. “Collide like a particle, be split like an atom!”

THE DARK AT THE END OF THE TUNNEL
Sticking with Hollywood…

Last week, the town’s black impresario made a stunning admission: He’s run out of new stories to tell.

Kenya Barris, creator of Black-ish, told People that he’s focusing exclusively on remakes. “I feel like there’s really no new stories if we’re gonna be honest, know what I’m saying?” he told the magazine, displaying the dazzling wit that’s made him a billionaire.

Barris has a point. Nearly every “black” story’s been told, especially when it comes to “the first black person to…” biopics. First black in space, first black congresswoman, first black Oscar winner, first black TV star, first black Nobel laureate, first black banker, first black judge, first black supermodel, all of these are actual biopics produced over the past year alone.

So is Barris correct? Are there no more “first black person to…” movies left?

Nonsense! Coming in 2024:

The first black dog groomer: A Dream De-Furred, starring Don Cheadle.

First black cattle rancher: Grazin’ in the Sun, starring Forest Whitaker and Don Cheadle.

First black man to eat frozen fish: Sole on Ice, starring Jeffrey Wright (with Don Cheadle as “Gorton”).

First black beekeeper: Lift Every Voice and Sting; Terrence Howard (cameo by Don Cheadle).

First black woman to make Chinese food: Long Wok to Freedom, with Viola Davis, Awkwafina, and Don Cheadle as a dumpling.

First black man to tell a nurse he has chlamydia: Misses, I Pee Burning, starring Jaden Smith, Taraji Henson, and Don Cheadle as “lymph node.”

And finally, the first black woman to cover her body in suet and run through the National Aviary asking birds for economic advice: The Maxine Waters Story, starring Octavia Spencer.

No Don Cheadle in that one, but Mayim Bialik is getting rave reviews as a toucan.

BOO DISSED MONK
Across the nation, students at “elite” universities are protesting Israel’s Gaza war while “glamping” in designer tents with Uber-delivered food.

Sissies! The recent spate of self-immolations has raised the bar on how to protest with guts!

Charbroiled guts.

Max Azzarello, the most recent immolator, stated that his goal was to expose fraud.

And maybe he did.

For decades, Buddhists have claimed that the discipline exhibited by the monks who immolated to protest the Vietnam War was due to meditation! “Motionless and quiescence was the fundamental meaning expressed by the burning monk, the epitome of a profound behavior due to numerous hours of meditation.” (Cogent Psychology, 2019)

Bullcrap! Aaron Bushnell managed to stand perfectly still for 45 seconds while totally engulfed (standing, not sitting cross-legged like those lazy monks); Azzarello stayed upright for 30 seconds. Turns out it’s got nothing to do with “meditation.” As the L.A. Times points out in a piece explaining the phenomenon of people staying motionless after immolating, “Once the burn becomes severe, it’s burned down to the nerves so you don’t have any sensation. Then the adrenaline kicks in.”

Meditation? Buddhist frauds! It’s just nerve damage and adrenaline. And Western men would’ve figured that out earlier, except until now none of them were stupid enough to pour gasoline on themselves and light a match. But an insane blond airman and a shaggy hippie pulled back the curtain, and the free ride is over, Dalai Lame-ah.

All those begging bowls filled by gullible whites in awe of your “mystical powers.” All those adulatory films and TV shows. For nothing.

“Grasshopper”? More like “kiss-my-asshopper.”

America lost Richard Gere to your hokum.

Okay, you get points for that; please don’t give him back.

PITCH IMPERFECT
In April 1976, as the Cubs played the Dodgers in L.A., two filthy hippies ran onto the field to burn an American flag. Fielder Rick Monday charged the protesters and saved the flag, to thunderous applause. He received a congratulatory call from President Ford, and one from Truman Capote, who misheard “Rick Monday saved a flag from being burned” (he didn’t hear the “l” in “flag”).

How things have changed! These days, it’s the players, not the hippies, who need fire. Last week, a Harlem high school soccer game had to be abandoned when a group of 30 African migrants wouldn’t leave the pitch. The migrants had set up camp on the field, and when the coaches tried to explain that they’d reserved it for their game, one of the migrants told them, “We don’t have to leave; we can do whatever the fuck we want.”

That’s when you need Rick Monday with a flamethrower.

After a half hour of arguing, the teams called off the game; the coaches feared that there was too much risk that the “peaceful enrichers” would take violent revenge against the participants.

Nice going, Mayor Adams. Hard to believe that man was once a cop. One gets the impression that the side of his squad car was emblazoned not with “To Protect and Serve” but “Feets Don’t Fail Me Now.”

As destitute illegals continue to pour into NYC, giving Harlem not so much a renaissance but a lumpenaissance, Democrats fear no electoral consequences. Based on the photos in the press, many of the dispossessed soccer kids were Asian, and Asians literally have their teeth knocked out daily by blacks without ever rethinking their Democrat allegiance. A recent Daily Mail piece reported that IQs in the U.S. are falling for the first time in recorded history. Well, crush Asian skulls every day, that’s what you get.

Echoing the Rick Monday affair, President Biden called the African migrants to congratulate them on holding their ground. Reporters listening to the call said it was hard to comprehend what was said, because of the bizarre, incoherent, primitive Third World clicks and grunts.

They said the Africans were hard to understand, too.

OW, CANADA
It’s ain’t just Harlem having trouble with immigrants. North America’s endearing simpletons are finding out the hard way that opening their borders to the world’s detritus wasn’t the greatest idea. Canadians are like a retarded boy who gets a bag of candy and decides, out of sheer goodness, to share it with the neighborhood kids, who proceed to steal the entire thing and kick him in the face.

Things have gotten so bad in Canada regarding immigrant crime, a housing crisis, and a strain on the nation’s beloved cradle-to-grave social services programs, that last week anencephalic man-child Justin Trudeau confessed that he has no choice but to shut the door, at least temporarily, on the flood of Third Worlders he welcomed into his country because Australian aborigines are the only people on earth who make him look intelligent in comparison.

Over in British Columbia, aka “California but with nonstop rain, frigid beaches, and even dumber politicians,” the authorities in charge of investigating international drug trafficking (the C.I.-Eh?) have identified the immigrant kingpin responsible for importing billions of dollars’ worth of meth into B.C. (that’s billions of Canadian dollars, so roughly $1,100 USD).

Chi Lop, a Canadian-raised immigrant, has a Myanmar-to-Vancouver meth pipeline. And authorities have vowed to shut it down. In a lengthy piece in the Vancouver Sun, head constable Gordy McGordonson declared that he’s going to ask Lop very nicely to stop bringing in the meth. And if that fails, he plans to scowl at him. Severely.

BTW, the Chi-Lops are an underrated R&B vocal quartet. They have a string of catchy singles, including “Have You Seen Her (She Has My Meth),” “Oh Girl (Gimme Back My Meth),” “Give More Power to the People (to Smoke Meth),” “I Want to Pay You Back (for the Meth),” and “Homely Girl (Looks Better After Meth).”

As reported by the WaPo, Indian and African immigrants say they’re beginning to feel unwelcome in Canada.

So, no different from everywhere else.

Plagiarism is the highest form of flattery, and many authors ought to be flattered to be plagiarized, considering what rubbish they write. Such, at any rate, were my first thoughts on reading the allegations of plagiarism against Dr. Natalie J. Perry, brought against her by Christopher Rufo, the investigative journalist who has exposed many a case of such plagiarism in the higher reaches, or lower depths, of university administration.

Dr. Perry is something called the “Cultural North Star Lead” (by their job titles shall ye know them) of the UCLA School of Medicine. It is possible, I suppose, that some ill-informed readers will not know what a Cultural North Star Lead actually does, or what the Cultural North Star actually is, so some description might help them. According to the medical school’s website, the Cultural North Star:

helps us build and maintain an inclusive, mission-driven culture by mapping our decisions, actions, and interactions to a shared framework.

I am not sure that this brings us much closer to an understanding in concrete detail of what Dr. Perry does when she arrives in her office on Monday morning—if, that is, she’s not working remotely, or on sabbatical, or on maternity leave, or on one of the many other ways of absenting oneself on full pay from one’s position. To judge from a photo easily found on the internet, she is a very happy person, as I would be if I were paid a large salary for the not disagreeable job of forcing people to agree, at least in public, with my point of view.

I rather fear, however, that Dr. Perry might be both sincere and hardworking; and no busybody is busier than the one who thinks that he or she is engaged in God’s work. A cynical careerist is far preferable, though it is possible that we have created—I almost said built—a culture in which true belief and ruthless careerism are happily conjoined.

Whether the charges of plagiarism against Dr. Perry are justified, I leave to others to decide. It is, besides, a rather minor question compared with the deep mystery of how the original passages allegedly plagiarized came to be written and published in the first place (if Dr. Perry is a plagiarist, she is at least an accurate one). I quote:

Leadership that addressed diversity issues and concerns in higher education is highly multidimensional and complex. Substantively, it is much more than a simple response or adaptation to demographic representation—it is about the intergroup dynamics that characterize colleges and universities, in both structure and culture. Leadership that addresses diversity issues and concerns in higher education is identified as diversity leadership. Diversity leadership primarily uses organizational values such as competition and success to incorporate diverse people or groups and enhance the organizational success in a changing environment.

Suffice it to say that if I were a plagiarist, this is not a passage that I would choose to plagiarize (though I admit that diligent search might find worse), for the passage is not one that I should have been proud to have originated. I am not sure, however, that I could have originated it; for try as I might to imitate such verbiage, meaning keeps breaking through whatever I think, say, or write. Academics of a certain stamp, though, fight against meaning and triumph in the struggle; for meaning is their enemy, as it would expose the vacuity or banality of their thoughts.

As Richard II said, though, mock not flesh and blood, for though we may laugh at the absurdity of an academy in which drivel such as I have quoted is not only written but rewarded, yet it has a distinctively sinister effect and menacing tone. For example, it implies that the Zhdanovs and Vyshinskys of diversity, equity, and inclusion will not be satisfied with mere demographic equal representation between groups, for if they were, they might easily work themselves out of a job, which would never do. Such equal representation might at least be attainable (whether it would be desirable is another question entirely, of course), but if it were the sole target to be reached it would carry the risk of rendering the pullulating Zhdanovs and Vyshinskys of the academy redundant. Something less definite is required that they might keep themselves in employment forever, and nothing is better suited to this than the continuous surveillance of “intergroup dynamics,” especially when everything has been done to ensure that everyone is as sensitive as possible to the slightest disobliging remark or suspect facial expression. In Romania, they used to say that a change of rulers is the joy of fools; in universities, spontaneous good humor or friendship is the despair of Cultural North Star Leaders.

A leader, or would-be leader, who maps our decisions in a mission-driven culture; such is the person whom Mr. Rufo now accuses of plagiarism. But the plagiarism is a small and insignificant matter compared with the overweening ambition of which she is, so to speak, a mere foot soldier. It would be no better—in fact, it might be worse—if she were not a plagiarist (I assume that Mr. Rufo has his facts right, and I apologize in advance if he has not). For if she were not a plagiarist, she would be of marginally higher standing than she is as a plagiarist; and the last thing we want is for people of slightly higher standing to aim at evil.

For evil a mission-driven culture mapped by functionaries is, or would be if it ever came about. It aims at an enforced unanimity and uniformity, not only of thought but of feeling. To ensure this, it is prepared to institute a permanent ideological inquisition of the type that Elizabeth I rejected as her purpose nearer five than four hundred years ago.

I mistakenly thought ten years ago that at least medical schools would remain free from the posturing and power madness of the ambitious mediocrities who seem now to be turned out in such large numbers by institutions supposedly of higher learning. There is a rare genetic syndrome called the Lesch-Nyhan syndrome, among whose symptoms is uncontrollable self-harm such as the biting of the sufferer’s own flesh, as well as mental retardation. It sometimes seems as if the whole of the West is now suffering from a kind of cultural Lesch-Nyhan syndrome.

Theodore Dalrymple’s latest book is Ramses: A Memoir, published by New English Review.

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