The Wickedness of Whiteness: Leftist Minority-Worship Preaches the Innate Evil of Whites

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What’s the connection between cakes and leftism? Until last week, I would have found it impossible to give a good answer to that question. Then I picked up a new book by the British mathematician Ian Stewart (born 1945) and read the following:

The classic example [of fair division], from which everything else flows, is that of two children arguing over a cake. The problem is to divide the cake between them using a good protocol — a set of rules specified in advance — that is provably fair. The classic solution is “I cut, you choose.” … When I mentioned this method in an article, one reader wrote in to say that he’d tried it on his children, and Alice (not her real name) had promptly complained that Bob (not his) had the bigger piece. When her father pointed out that this was her fault for cutting badly, the news didn’t go down terribly well — in her eyes it amounted to blaming the victim — so her father swapped the two pieces. Only to hear her wail: “Bob’s piece is still bigger than mine!” (Ian Stewart, What’s the Use? The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics, Profile Books, 2021, chapter 2)

That might seem a funny but trivial story. In fact, it’s more than that: it captures the way millions of adult leftists think about “social justice” and “equality.” In particular, it captures the way Blacks and other non-Whites think. Nothing Whites can do will ever be enough to satisfy their demands or appease their anti-White hatred, resentment and envy. Whites will always be racist and White nations will always be unjust to non-Whites. Here’s an example of that kind of thinking from the Guardian:

Amy Mae Baxter was still a publishing trainee in 2019 when she founded Bad Form, an online magazine for writers of colour. … This March was a “huge month” for Bad Form, thanks to a flurry of black-authored titles commissioned in response to the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests finally hitting the shelves. Her worry, however, is that they’re all now competing with each other, meaning some might not sell as well as they otherwise could have. (“The book that tore publishing apart: ‘Harm has been done, and now everyone’s afraid,’” The Guardian, 18th June 2022)

How do you satisfy a leftist like Amy Mae Baxter? You can’t: the only solution is to get people like that out of your society. Even better is not to let them into your society at all. In other words, prevention is better than cure. The Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán believes in prevention, not cure, and refuses to open the borders of his White Christian nation to Blacks and Muslims. That’s why he is demonized by leftists around the world for his “racism” and “xenophobia.”

The toxicity of truth

Orbán has the truth on his side, but that doesn’t fully explain why he is successful. As I’ve argued before, having the truth on your side can be enervating and unhelpful, in part because you can subconsciously fall into the trap of thinking that truth will do the work for you. And believing in obvious truths doesn’t require any emotional investment or activate any of the religious modules that seem to be built into the human brain. No religion has ever been based on the claim that water is wet or that the sun rises in the east. It doesn’t take any effort to believe those things. But the very successful religion of Christianity is based on the claim that a man rose from the dead. That claim defies common sense and demands effort to believe. Once you’ve made that effort, you have an emotional and cognitive investment. Naturally enough, you then want to defend your investment and protect your belief against its critics.

Leftism also makes claims that defy common sense and demand emotional investment: we’re all the same under the skin; Blacks fail only because of White racism; East Asians flourish despite White racism; and so on. In short, leftism is a quasi-religion that activates those very powerful and ancient religious modules in the brain.  Old religious concepts like sin and blasphemy re-appear in the form of racism and hate-speech. Indeed, leftism is in part a Christian heresy or a perversion of Christianity, drawing on Christian ideas of spiritual equality but failing to accept the Christian idea that we’re all sinners. In fact, some Christians don’t accept that idea either. Calvinism has the concepts of an elect minority, bound from birth for Heaven, and a damned majority, bound from birth for Hell. In Calvinism, we’re all predestined to celestial bliss or infernal agony, and nothing we do will alter our fate.

Rhetoric as route to power

Leftism has re-created that Calvinist concept and founded what Gregory Hood at AmRen has called the Church of the Damned, where nothing Whites can do or say will ever cleanse them from their hereditary taint—their original sin—of racism. Leftism mandates both that Blacks and Whites are born equal and that only the innate evil of Whites explains why Blacks don’t have the same high achievements as Whites. In other words, leftism has two big lies that contradict each other: first, that we’re all born equal; second, that Whites are innately evil. The contradiction doesn’t weaken leftism but strengthens it, because it trains leftists in deceit and allows them to preach one thing while practicing another. They use the rhetoric of equality and justice as a Trojan horse to get themselves into power. Once they’re in power, they impose inequality and injustice on their enemies. A cult of minority-worship goes naturally with a cult of majority-demonization. An anonymous French writer long ago described how leftism operates:

« Quand je suis le plus faible, je vous demande la liberté, parce que tel est votre principe ; mais quand je suis le plus fort, je vous l’ôte, parce que tel est le mien. »

“When I am the weaker, I ask you for freedom, because that is your principle; but when I am the stronger, I take away your freedom, because that is my principle.”

Free speech in the U.S. is a classic example. In the 1950s when Jews had relatively little power compared to the present, Congressional committees were grilling Jewish communists and communist sympathizers on their ideologies and connections. It was the period of the notorious Hollywood blacklist. At that time, Jewish activist organizations were all for free speech. It’s a distant memory now that the left has power and the ADL is partnering with social media companies and payment processors like PayPal to get right-wing and even conservative messages off their platforms. And the Biden administration is actively pressuring social media companies in the same direction—a clear violation of the First Amendment. So now there is a very different kind of blacklist, one reserved for people who do not conform to leftist narratives.

Leftism is an ideology based on lies and run by liars. Look at the topic of slavery, where leftists work tirelessly to encourage White guilt and non-White grievance. But neither the guilt nor the grievance can be justified on the central leftist principle of human equality. If human beings are, as leftists insist from one side of their mouths, innately and absolutely equal, it follows that the roles of slave and master are determined entirely by accidents of history and geography. White Europeans enslaved Black Africans in our reality, but that was pure chance. If the historical and geographical dice had rolled differently, it would have been the other way around: Black Africans would have enslaved White Europeans.

The stench of White history

But there is no hint of any of that in the endless propaganda pumped out by the Left about White enslavement of Blacks (they ignore the Muslim enslavement of Blacks and much else). Kris Manjapra, a Black professor of history at Tufts University, has asked “When will Britain face up to its crimes against humanity?” in the Guardian. But he doesn’t preach the first big lie of leftism, namely the equality of all so-called races. He doesn’t talk about historical contingency and the decisive role of chance in determining who enslaved whom. Instead, he uses rhetoric about the “stench of British historical amnesia and of institutionalised racism” to promote the second big lie of leftism, namely, the innate moral superiority of non-Whites over Whites. The implication of his rhetoric is that the innately evil Whites of Europe enslaved the innately virtuous Blacks of Africa. But he also says something very interesting at the beginning of his anti-White polemic:

On 3 August 1835, somewhere in the City of London, two of Europe’s most famous bankers came to an agreement with the chancellor of the exchequer. Two years earlier, the British government had passed the Slavery Abolition Act, which outlawed slavery in most parts of the empire. Now it was taking out one of the largest loans in history, to finance the slave compensation package required by the 1833 act. Nathan Mayer Rothschild and his brother-in-law Moses Montefiore agreed to loan the British government £15m, with the government adding an additional £5m later. The total sum represented 40% of the government’s yearly income in those days, equivalent to some £300bn today. (When will Britain face up to its crimes against humanity?, The Guardian, 29th March 2018)

Manjapra then complains that all of this huge loan, which wasn’t paid off by ordinary White tax-payers until 2015, was used to compensate the White beneficiaries of slavery rather than its Black victims. He leaves two very interesting historical questions hanging in the air. First, how were Rothschild and Montefiore, members of the tiny and oppressed Jewish minority, in possession of such a vast sum of money? Second, in what other ways were Jewish plutocrats using their wealth and influence over  gentile politicians? Manjapra couldn’t explore those questions, of course, or he would have been denounced as an anti-Semite. But a lot of that vastly disproportionate Jewish wealth came from slavery, which Jews have practiced and been enriched by for many centuries. As Andrew Joyce has described at the Occidental Observer, Jewish slave-dealers worked in Europe from Roman times before turning to the profits to be made in Africa. Among much else, they “bought and sold Christian slaves and kidnapped and castrated Christian youths for the Muslim markets in Spain.”

Listening, Learning, Lying

You wouldn’t guess any of that from anti-White propaganda-films like Amistad (1997), which was directed by the proudly Jewish Steven Spielberg and is about Blacks mutinying against cruel Whites as they are carried into slavery. In Hollywood, Jews are not simply over-represented but overwhelmingly dominant, and they have been promoting minority-worship and majority-demonization for decades. That propaganda will increasingly shift from denying history to outright reversing it. Leftism is abandoning the rhetoric of equality to insist on the wickedness of Whiteness. In August 2022, the White American historian James H. Sweet made a doomed attempt to criticize this trend:

The Elmina [Ghana] tour guide claimed that “Ghanaians” sent their “servants” into chattel slavery unknowingly. The guide made no reference to warfare or Indigenous slavery, histories that interrupt assumptions of ancestral connection between modern-day Ghanaians and visitors from the diaspora. Similarly, the forthcoming film The Woman King seems to suggest that Dahomey’s female warriors and King Ghezo fought the European slave trade.

In fact, they promoted it. Historically accurate rendering of Asante or Dahomean greed and enslavement apparently contradict modern-day political imperatives. (President of American Historical Association Dares Doubt the 1619 Project, Quickly Apologizes, Steve Sailer, 20th August 2022)

The video below is a classic summary of African culpability in the British slave trade that dumbfounded Don Lemon, a CNN anchor — Africans rounding up Africans and depositing them in cages on the beach, the costs to the British navy for policing their ban on the slave trade [2000 dead British sailors], and the uniqueness of the British anti-slavery policy at a time when slavery was essentially universal.

As Steve Sailer has noted, Prof. Sweet was quickly forced into a groveling apology. He announced that “I sincerely regret the way I have alienated some of my Black colleagues and friends” and promised that “I’m listening and learning.” One of the things he is “learning” is that traditional White standards of scholarship have no place in modern academia and must exercise no influence on portrayal of the past. Yes, it’s historically true that King Ghezo and his female warriors promoted the European slave-trade rather than fighting it. But so what? If it serves the purposes of leftist propaganda and the promotion of Black grievance to invert the truth, that is precisely what must be done. Virtue trumps veracity and it is virtuous to sanctify Blacks and demonize Whites.

History isn’t a science, as you can see from the inability of historians to make accurate and useful predictions of the future based on their study of the past. But I’m an amateur historian and I will confidently make this prediction: that the demonization of Whites will not lessen as ever more power and wealth are taken from Whites. On the contrary, it will intensify. George Orwell also described how leftism operates: “The more the Party is powerful, the less it will be tolerant: the weaker the opposition, the tighter the despotism.”

Not by words but by war

Black leftists like Kris Manjapra are not seeking justice and equality. No, they’re seeking revenge. And their anti-White rhetoric will increasingly translate into anti-White action. Manjapra and countless other non-Whites share the psychology of the Black criminal Eldridge Cleaver (1935–1998), who made this boast way back in 1968: “Rape was an insurrectionary act. It delighted me that I was defying and trampling upon the white man’s law, upon his system of values, and that I was defiling his women — and this point, I believe was the most satisfying to me because I was very resentful over the historical fact of how the white man has used the black woman. I felt I was getting revenge.”

Revenge and resentment are what power leftism and motivate the Black and Brown foot soldiers of leftism. That’s why leftists were so eager to open the borders of formerly cohesive and conservative Western nations. Hungary can defend its native Whites and maintain its ancient traditions because anti-White barbarians are outside its gates. America, Britain and France can’t emulate Hungary because anti-White barbarians are inside the gates. And those barbarians are growing in numbers, aggression and arrogance by the day. Separation is the only solution and separation will not come by words but by war.

Schooling and Education Amid the Siege: A Perspective

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This writing sketches out a perspective on schooling and education (they are different things; more on that later on) for your consideration, including what, if anything, to do about it.

Me: Retired after a career in schooling, first as a high school teacher and later a professor of education.  Late in life, the birth of a daughter, now eighteen, who grew up with her mother in another state from where I live.  I stayed in contact with my daughter from long range through email and regular visits, which included observing her classes in school and talking with her teachers, and I read the frequent communiques schools sent to parents.   A couple of weeks ago as I write this, she started college near where I live.  All to say, I bring a parental as well as a professional perspective to bear on this concern.

The context: The full-bore campaign I’ve witnessed up close to shape the hearts and minds of students in its favored direction by what, over the half-century span of my career, have become politicized-left American elementary and secondary public schools.  (It’s going on in universities too, don’t I know, but that’s not the focus here.)   If you’re reading this publication you know the thrust: schools have taken it upon themselves—who needs a mandate?—to disparage and demonize this country and its political and cultural heritage as racist, sexist, and oppressive, and use the school and its captive students as a venue for promoting a brand of identity politics that includes beating up on White people and getting them to beat up on themselves.  I’m sorry to report that it’s being done effectively—not that it takes any great skill to propagandize and browbeat children—and with, I worry, lasting negative impact on the young people who have been subjected to it and—scary thought—on this country.  I don’t have the space here—or, frankly, the energy—to do more than affirm that I consider what’s going on to be an alarming turn of events.  I’ll leave it with a recommendation of a book I have come upon recently and found useful you may not know about: The Anti-Fascist Classroom: Denazification in Soviet-Occupied Germany, 1945–1949 by Benita Blessing.1

With that brief introduction as a backdrop, below is a perspective that has come out of my experiences in schools and as a parent that I think might give direction and impetus to combatting what’s going down currently in our schools.   See what you can take from it.

School people are employees.

Teachers, school administrators, counselors, and the rest, like to see themselves as autonomous professionals and the school they work in as their school, and they’ve been good at selling that idea to the public.  They call the shots—it’s their classes, their students, their programs.  They tell parents what’s up and what is going to go on and it is the parents’ job to go along with it and support their efforts.  Students do what they are told, including nights and weekends.  It’s called homework and we all know what a good thing that is, don’t we?  With homework in place as a hallowed activity, teachers have a claim on your child 24/7.  Microsoft doesn’t presume to have that power over its minions, plus it has to pay them and they can quit.

They don’t want to hear this, but school people aren’t Mussolinis.  They are salaried employees.  And who hires them and who do they work for?  In this country, the basic idea is that it’s the local community (or anyway should be), who have directed their elected representatives, the school board, to build a school with funds they provide and set up its curriculum (learning goals and areas of study) and hire people to bring it off.  In an immediate sense, the school employees work for the parents and students in a particular school.  They serve them, they don’t order them around.   Students aren’t their lab animals (“I’ll train them up to do the dance I like”).

The central actor in a school is the individual student. 

Think about something you really know about.  It could be fixing cars or the Civil War or sculpting or classical music or mathematics or astronomy, you name it.  Think about how you came to be so up on it.  You may have taken a class in it and been inspired by a teacher, but very quickly, and most basically, you did it.  You had the goal, the intention—you owned it, it was yours—to get better at whatever it was and you took responsibility for getting it done, and you worked hard at it and had a good time doing it, it wasn’t sleep-inducing drudgery.

You tinkered with carburetors and learned from that and improved the next time you fixed one.  If it was writing, you reviewed what you put together and ran it by people whose opinions you respect and learned from that, and then you wrote some more and saw how it went.  You read books by the finest writers looking for how they brought it off and saw what you could take from them.  You sequenced the process: you did the next thing you needed to do, whatever it was.

Tellingly, you didn’t show up to class at 9:50 a.m. and dutifully do what the teacher came up with for you to do.  You didn’t get together with a bunch of people to do activities (“Let’s us break into groups and roleplay”).  You didn’t do the exact same thing as everybody else.  The relationship that mattered to you wasn’t with the teacher—isn’t she nice?—but with mathematics or painting and mastering it (mastering it;  you had high standards).

I get my laptop fixed by a university tech team, as they call themselves.  It’s university undergraduates.  I marvel at how much they know about computers.  I’ve asked several of them how they got so good with computers.  “Did you take courses in them?” Invariably it’s been, “No, I just picked it up.”  Teachers think the wheels turn because of their daily lesson plans and assignments, when in fact they get in the way of what needs to be done: individual students taking on the job of learning biology.

It’s best to think of schools as places where students learn rather than teachers teach and see where that takes you.

The learning process isn’t tricky.

The education profession thinks it takes years of university study to get a handle on how to make learning happen.  Bullcrap.  Back to how much you know about, let’s say, gardening.  Getting so good at gardening was a matter of common sense.  You checked out examples of good gardens, sought out good gardeners and picked their brains, read books on gardening you got from the library, and tried things that worked and didn’t work and learned from that and did it better the next time.

You didn’t need a bachelor’s degree in teaching gardening to figure out how to get good at gardening.  You didn’t need someone to write up a syllabus that told you precisely what to do for the next three months.  You just got on with it, prompted by an interest and hope (an image in your head of a great garden and the satisfaction and pride that comes from creating one).

Schools can serve a good purpose.

What I’ve said so far may sound like I’m for bagging schools or making a pitch for home schooling.  I’m not doing that.  Important, significant learning can go on in schools.  Teachers can be inspiring examples of people who are really into what they teach—literature, art, science, and so on (which too often isn’t the case).  Teachers can suggest good work for students to take on and be supportive when they take it on.  Teachers can be kind, moral, upright people and exemplify what a good human being is like.  It’s good for students to be around their peers—they can learn a lot from them, including social skills and the value in looking out for other people and how to go about it.  And simply, it is good for students to get out of the house every day, a place that in too many cases isn’t a healthy place for them.   Covid and the remote learning that schools imposed in its name—which never should have happened, but that’s not the topic here—resulted in regrettable outcomes, including child abuse and mental distress.

Schools can encourage students to learn the basics.

What are the basics?   I offer this list:

  • Reading capability. I’m thinking of at least a fifth-grade level. The ability to read a news article, understand written instructions, that kind of thing.
  • Writing capability. The ability to write coherent, grammatically correct sentences and paragraphs.
  • Mathematical capability. The ability to add, subtract, multiply, and divide, know what a percentage is, run a cash register—you know what I mean.

So far, this sounds like readin’, writin’, and ‘rithmetic, and so it is.  If you don’t have those skills going for you, and a lot of people don’t, you’ve got big problems, and you’re very likely to be a drag on society.

  • Political literacy. This country is a constitutional republic (not a democracy, by the way). You need to have a basic understanding of what this political arrangement is about, because it is the game that’s on your table and you’d best learn to play effectively by its rules.  Absent dictates from on high, this system is grounded in personal freedom, liberty, and the opportunity and challenge to make something out of your life and be good for the people around you in the process.  It depends on you to keep the system going and not be coaxed, bullied, or conned into turning it into an authoritarian, “elite”-dominated, hostile alien-controlled, conform-or-else wet blanket and roadblock.  You need to know what the Founders, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and federalism are really about, and what the ideal of republican citizenship is really about (concurrently looking out for you and yours and doing what you can at the local, state, and national political levels), rather than what the marionette string-pullers tell you they are about.
  • Good character. I’m thinking of three character traits that schools should promote:

Personal responsibility.  You don’t whine, blame, play the victim, or lay back and wait for someone or something to make things good for you.   You don’t take handouts.  You don’t demand special favors.  You have jobs to do and people to care for and you shut the hell up and get on with it.

Hard work.  You do things the absolute best you can.  When you sweep the floor, you sweep the floor!  If it is a McDonald’s job, the uniform is clean and pressed and you’re there early and they’ve never seen anybody flip a hamburger as well as you.  If you’re writing something, you proof the hell out of it.  I watch NFL games and these days the players have sayings on the back of their helmets—“fight racism,” “inspire change,” and the like.  I’d suggest “go to work,” though I don’t suppose that would go over very well.

Decency.  You are kind, giving, you help people out, you don’t hurt people (or animals), you protect them.  You are a good human being.  Sounds like the Boy Scout Oath?  Fine with me.

How can a school promote those qualities?  It can go public that it believes in these things and wants students to exemplify them in the way they live their lives.  The people who work in schools can embody them.  They can note and affirm good examples of these qualities—in books, the news, wherever it is.  They can celebrate when students exhibit good character.  A big part of good teaching (and good parenting) involves catching somebody doing something right and making a big deal of it.

You’re picking up on what isn’t in this list—no left-wing (or right-wing, for that matter) political indoctrination.  No ethnic and race bashing (“privileged Whites and their evil ways”).  Schools need to butt out with that stuff, or better, be forced to butt out.  They aren’t ever going to get off what they are doing until it becomes detrimental to their perceived self-interest to keep doing it, and that state of affairs is going to have to come from the outside (I’m thinking of politicians and parents); what’s going on is too locked in place to come from the inside.

Schools should offer rich learning opportunities for students.

What opportunities?  I have a bias toward the traditional academic subjects, including for students from less advantaged backgrounds.   I see them as personally liberating as they empower individuals by informing and disciplining their minds: history, literature, science, math, sociology, psychology, philosophy, and fine art.  Students are invited to study them and are provided support and encouragement as they embark on their individual learning quests.  I worry about a vocations-directed focus prior to the post-secondary years because it can pre-judge and channel the scruffier students, if you’ll pardon the label, into slots that don’t match up with their highest possibilities.  To get personal, knowing that Beethoven created music not just Chuck Berry served to keep me off the assembly line at the local Ford plant where I was headed.  I’m intrigued by the K-12 curriculum of Michigan’s Hillsdale College. It calls for “a classical American education” and invites you to look into it.

I’m enamored of physical education of a certain sort.  Not the usual competitive team sports where you wear a number and a coach calls the plays and runs you in and out of the game.  I mean activities that bring you into contact with your corporal being and its potential.  I’m thinking of such things as yoga and dance and meditation and hiking and rock-climbing and sailing.  Getting personal again, I either didn’t know about the activities just listed or assumed they weren’t for the likes of me, and as I think back on it, the schools I went to were just fine with that.   I was cut out, so it was assumed, for trying to hit a curve ball and sink a jump shot, neither of which I was any good at doing, and trying to do them got me nowhere.

Schooling and education are not the same thing.

We need to keep in mind that important education—the kind that   makes a difference in how people think and live—goes on in other contexts than schools.   Peers educate, as do politicians, the clergy, friends, libraries, movies and TV shows, websites, and recreational activities—the football team, the drama club, and sailing promote different ways of thinking and being.   I’ll shine a light on two elements of modern life that educate: modes of communication, such as texting and social media, and parents.

Marshall McLuhan, a Canadian communication theorist prominent in the 1960’s became famous for the phrase, “The medium is the message.” His point was that forms of communication greatly affect people and thus deserve to be areas of serious study.

To illustrate, I get a lot of emails from people who have read my writings in books and online (I’m hearing impaired and can’t use a phone).  Over the last fifteen years or so, those emails have changed greatly.  Correspondents used to write me in crafted sentences and paragraphs that spelled out what they took from what I wrote and ideas it brought up for them.  They would ask me to expand upon or clarify something in my writing.

Not now.  Now, I get what appears to be a dashed off sentence or two—shallow, simple—that says something about them, not what I wrote.  I recently wrote a website thought about the old-time movie and television cowboy Roy Rogers.  Or nominally at least; it wasn’t really about Roy.  I used him as a metaphor to get into a consideration of childhood neglect and isolation.  Anyway, a typical response to what I put together has been, “I watched Roy’s show when I was a kid.”  That’s it.

I speculate that these kinds of communications, and the level of thinking behind them, such as it is, have been shaped by texting and social media posts.  Quick, casual self-presentational, off the top—this is what I’m like, this is my favorite kind of music, here’s a picture of me and my friends, etc.  On the run, from my phone.   These ways of communicating have resulted in people being less thoughtful, less perceptive, more malleable and conformist (like me, oh please like me), a worrisome outcome if you are concerned about personal autonomy and self-direction in a time of mind management and social engineering.

In an earlier writing, I outlined ten downsides of being heavily—as in every waking moment for a lot of school-aged people—engaged with social media, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and the rest.

The ten downsides:2

  1. The Opportunity Cost. One way to compute the cost of anything you are doing is the worth of everything else you could have been doing instead. If you are sprucing up your Facebook account, you are not spending the afternoon curled up reading Dostoevsky, taking a walk in the woods and learning Nature’s truths, or engaged in serious thought and reflection.
  2. Never Completely in the Room. With social media, you are always someplace other than in this place, here, now. You are always in the virtual world. In that realm, your focus is on the picture you just sent out on Instagram and reviewing your text messages and sending texts and anticipating what responses you are going to get to what you just sent.
  3. “Let Me Tell You What I Think.” Social media are centered on off-the-top commentaries and self-references. They are about what I think, what I prefer, how the world looks to me. They are about telling my story and letting people know what somebody else’s story brings up for me. Subjective truth, what’s true for me, my opinion, my reactions, takes precedence over the search for the truth outside myself. Social media prompt engaging other people’s ideas just enough for them to prompt what I want to say about myself with regard to whatever or whoever it is.
  4. Easy Does It. Tapping little keys with your thumbs, no heavy lifting in that. In fact, effortlessness is a central value in social media, as well as one of its appeals. Another social media value: shallowness. No need to dig deeply into anything.
  5. Affinity for the Pop Culture. The social media message (both pronunciations) people in the direction of the popular culture. Being on top of contemporary mass entertainment and its messages and ways is a major value in social media.
  6. “Nowism.” Social media are all about this time, now. What’s on for today, that’s the ticket. Who cares about the past? They know no history.
  7. Puts You in Show Business. Facebook and Instagram and Twitter put you and Jimmy Fallon in the same line of work; you are both in show business. You and Jimmy are both engaged in self-promotion, exhibiting yourself in such a way as to get attention and go over big with your audience and being popular. Popularity is a major value in the world of social media; get that lineup of friends expanded, get a lot of action coming your way. The way to do it: get along, go along.
  8. Imprecise Word. Social media is about tossed off, ungrammatical, on-impulse tweets and chatty, informal, two- line text messages. A free society depends on people who think hard about things and act accordingly.
  9. Groupthink. Social media breed a collective, identity; you become a member of a virtual community and absorbed into it. With social media, you are never private. You are always on display: nine o’clock on a Thursday night, there you are, they can see you.  A life in public contributes to an increased need to belong, and the way to belong is to go along with the crowd, conform. Social media involves self-disclosure.  The more you talk about yourself—in any context, not just the internet—the more you reveal about yourself, especially negative self-disclosures, the more subject you are to control by others. Social media breed a kind of networked intelligence: accepted, and acceptable, thought is whatever the wisdom of the collective happens to be. Morality becomes shared morality. Truth, proof, becomes social, what is in the wind, or better, what is in cyberspace.
  10. Why Grow Up? There is a stress in social media on youth, newness, immaturity. We all have to figure out how to pitch who we are to the world, and to ourselves, and many people these days have decided to “play it young,” and the social media push them in this direction.    Children are especially prone to manipulation and intimidation.

Personally, I won’t have anything to do with texting and social media.  Bottom line in this writing: if you are the Pied Piper, social media obsessions provide you with good prospects to entice.

Of special mention in this context is TikTok.  Owned by a Chinese company, launched outside China in 2016 and aimed at young people, it became the most popular website in the world in 2021, surpassing Google.  If you want to understand who/what is educating today’s youth, check out TikTok.  One way of seeing the schools’ use of Covid to justify locking down children in their homes is turning them over to TikTok.

This is not the place to go into a long discourse on TikTok.  I’ll leave it that as a parent I find it addictive, vulgar, and base.  I watched my respectful, hard-working, National Honor Society, academic- and athletic-achieving daughter turning into a snippy, “show-offy,” “consumerized,” sexualized, lower-element-emulating urban teen.  Ouch.

And last but absolutely not least, parents as educators.   The people doing the talking center stage in society these days love to get across the idea that parents don’t matter for much in their children’s lives (“Back off and leave your children to me”).  My working life that got me around young people surfaced just the opposite reality, at least potentially.  Mom and Dad can have an enormous and lasting positive educational influence.   It’s not so much what they say that has the impact on their children.  Rather, it is what they are.  The challenge for parents is not so much pointing the way as being the way.  What does your life example teach your child?

What do you do with any, all, of this?

I don’t know what you do.  You have to decide that.  I only know what I decided to do: write this up.  Given my age (advanced), circumstances, obligations, ambitions, and capabilities, it was the best thing I could think of to do.  What you do depends on who you uniquely are as a person, where you are in your life’s journey, your particular situation and responsibilities and possibilities, and your beliefs and commitments.  Maybe you do something, maybe you do nothing.  “Somethings” that come to mind include publicly critiquing what I’ve written here and improving on it, setting out to become more informed about schooling and education, expressing your views to your family, friends, and neighbors, giving your children good books to read of the sort that schools aren’t about to give them, speaking up at schoolboard meetings and parent conferences, writing online or in articles and books, organizing other parents, participating in a schooling-oriented organization, supporting a politician or running for office yourself, and taking your role as a parent more seriously.  Whatever you do, nothing is too small; everything matters.  It could be voting in the next school board election when you haven’t in the past, fine.  Little things you and I do encourage other people to do little (and big) things and it snowballs.  What’s most important is that we take ourselves seriously and get in the game and do the best we can while we still have the gift of life.

Endnotes

  1. Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. Expensive, get it from a library.
  2. Robert S. Griffin, Personal Computer Use in Our Time: An Addiction?, 2014. In the writings section of my personal website, www.robertsgriffin.com

Show Us the Way, Rich Liberals!

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Show Us the Way, Rich Liberals!

    It’s been awe-inspiring to see the bottomless generosity of Martha’s Vineyard residents after Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis sent them 50 illegal immigrants from Venezuela last week.

     WE LOVE YOU, YOU’VE ENRICHED OUR LIVES, NOW GET THE F–K OUT OF HERE.

Unlike angry, White MAGA voters upset about their towns being flooded with illegals, Vineyard residents would LOVE to be sort of a — what’s the word? — “sanctuary” for illegals. Really, they would. But that won’t be possible.

As Lisa Belcastro, manager of the Vineyard’s homeless shelter, succinctly put it: “We are definitely supplying them with a lot of love … They need to be off island.” The illegals “need” to hustle off because “Their immigration appointments are not here.” (Are their appointments in the Trump-supporting working-class town they were bussed to?)

In any event, GREAT NEWS, LISA! Nearly half of released illegals don’t appear for their hearings anyway. And guess what? There are absolutely no consequences. (A dozen anti-American websites claim that vast, gigantic numbers of illegals show up for their hearings, but they’re counting illegals who are being held in detention.)

On NPR, Vineyard radio host Eve Zuckoff also began with a testimonial about how “the community rallied”! But unfortunately, “there isn’t the infrastructure.” What do these great humanitarians imagine dirt-poor towns in south Texas have in terms of “infrastructure”?

Every single objection Vineyard residents have raised against the illegals being allowed to stay is precisely what ordinary Americans — not privileged enough to live in Martha’s Vineyard — have been screaming from the rooftops for 30 years. Those 50 illegals represent less than a millionth of the “enrichment” that’s already been foisted on the rest of America. (They’re 1/100,000th of the illegals admitted just under Biden.)

Vastly poorer towns have been forced to turn nearly their entire annual budgets over to feeding, housing, educating — and incarcerating — great heaping portions of Third-Worlders, while douchebags in places like Martha’s Vineyard (88% White; 3.7% Black and 1.7% Hispanic) preen about their higher morality.

For 20 years, hospitals on the Mexican border have been spending hundreds of millions of dollars a year caring for illegals — some of whom are driven directly to American hospitals by Mexican ambulances. I have nine kids all with an ailment that they call diseaso expensivo back in Xochitl. And I heard something about free cable?

In 2002, a small community hospital in Arizona serving the Tohono O’odham Nation alone was spending $1.5 million a year treating illegals.

With some border hospitals devoting two-thirds of their entire operating budgets to illegals, forcing them to reduce staff, increase rates and cut back services, how about Martha’s Vineyard pony up a little of its budget on their beloved illegals?

Nah, they’ll just pat themselves on the back for proclaiming the island a “sanctuary city” before teeing off at the Mink Meadows Golf Club. Why? Because they’re better than you.

In case ordinary Americans weren’t enraged enough about bossy illegals and the hypocritical elites who enable them, the 50 Venezuelans sent to the Vineyard are suing Gov. DeSantis for the indignity of being flown to a wealthy resort town. (Maybe the media shouldn’t have spent the last week raving about how fabulously the illegals were being treated in the Vineyard — at least until they had to get the hell out.)

The Venezuelans are demanding $75,000 per illegal, which should go over well with Americans living on $40,000 a year, already taxed to support the tens of millions of poverty-stricken third-worlders living in our country.

But my gosh, the Venezuelans assimilated to America quickly! They break into our country and, Week One: Oy, my back! My back!

Similarly, the 100,000 Somalis in Minnesota assimilated with amazing speed to scamming our welfare system. The land of Walter Mondale and “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” is now the land of 100,000 Somalis, helpfully moved there by our State department beginning in the 1990s. In short order, clean, high-trust, homogeneous Minnesota became a hotbed of crime, terrorism and welfare fraud.

But surely this is small price to pay to rescue our fellow human beings from the horrors of Somalia! What’s that? You say the “refugees” are vacationing in Somalia? Help! Help! Get me out of here! Also, I’ll be needing a government check to fund my trip back to Somalia every winter.

Yes, these desperate “refugees” are cheerfully visiting friends and relatives in the country where they allegedly fear for their very lives! We only found out they were vacationing in Somalia because they asked for a break on their government-subsidized rent while they were away. (Request approved!)

Of course, they weren’t all going back to Somalia. Some were going to Syria to fight for the Islamic State. A 2015 House Homeland Security Committee report found that Minnesota contributed the most foreign fighters to ISIS of any state. Two of every four Somali-Minnesotans intercepted at New York’s JFK airport on route to an ISIS training camp had used federal financial-aid funds to pay for their travel.

This week, the Daily Mail reports that “Minnesotans” stole more than a quarter BILLION dollars in pandemic relief funds from the U.S. taxpayer, for such pandemic-related needs as 20 cars, 40 properties, guns, cryptocurrency, a week at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas and dozens of luxury items. And this is interesting: also a luxury apartment in Kenya.

The pandemic thieves appear to consist of one white woman and 46 Somalis:

— Aimee Marie Bock

— Abdikerm Abdelahi Eidleh

— Salim Ahmed Said

— Abdulkadir Nur Salah

— Ahmed Sharif Omar-Hashim

— Abdi Nur Salah

— Abdihakim Ali Ahmed

— Ahmed Mohamed Artan

— Abdikadir Ainanshe Mohamud

— Abdinasir Mahamed Abshir

— Asad Mohamed Abshir

— Hamdi Hussein Omar

— Ahmed Abdullahi Ghedi

— Abdirahman Mohamud Ahmed

— Abdiaziz Shafii Farah

— Mohamed Jama Ismail

— Mahad Ibrahim

— Abdimajid Mohamed Nur

— Said Shafii Farah

— Abdiwahab Maalim Aftin

— Mukhtar Mohamed Shariff

— Hayat Mohamed Nur

— Qamar Ahmed Hassan

— Sahra Mohamed Nur

— Abdiwahab Ahmed Mohamud

— Filsan Mumin Hassan

— Guhaad Hashi Said

— Abdullahe Nur Jesow

— Abdul Abubakar Ali

— Yusuf Bashir Ali

— Haji Osman Salad

— Fahad Nur

— Anab Artan Awad

— Sharmarke Issa

— Farhiya Mohamud

— Liban Yasin Alishire

— Ahmed Yasin Ali

— Khadar Jigre Adan

— Sharmake Jama

— Ayan Jama

— Asha Jama

— Fartun Jama

— Mustafa Jama

— Zamzam Jama

— Bekam Addissu Merdassa

— Hadith Yusuf Ahmed

— Hanna Marekegn

Your loss, Martha’s Vineyard!

Note to Gov. DeSantis: Keep the flights going. Never stop. And in about three years, remember the words “immigration fraud” and “repatriation.”

Seeing Some Old Friends and Acquaintances

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Going to a gathering of old friends and acquaintances is always sort of bittersweet. The sweet part is seeing the friends and getting some positive attention rather than a lot of negative attention as I have become accustomed to when not around people who are already on board. The sad part is contemplating the political implications. I can only conclude that the vast majority of my generation are completely clueless about our issues—White identity and interests, Jewish power and its consequences, and multiculturalism combined with mass non-White immigration and its consequences—consequences that are apparent to anyone paying attention and looking at the available information. Instead, they are far more interested in their families (especially women)—how many children and grandchildren do you have?—and in sports (mostly men)—I got a quick refresher course in all the local teams. Their media were things like MSNBC, Meet the Press, and the local newspaper—all Left-liberal. To the extent that they care at all, their opinions reflect these media sources. A couple people dropped hints to being conservative, but I didn’t hear anything that seemed to offer a glimmer of hope that they had been red-pilled.

To the extent that they care at all. The reality is that huge numbers of people are not really all that interested in politics. They care far more about their careers, their leisure activities, their families, and dealing with everyday life.  Voter turnout for the 2020 election was around 67% if you believe the narrative in an election that was engineered to be insecure under the cover of the Covid scare.  This means millions of people didn’t bother to vote. And many people who did vote know next to nothing about the issues or how the government works. And far too many can be easily swayed by sophisticated political advertising funded by activist billionaires, many of whom are Jews who have contributed the bulk of the money for the Democrats and far too much to ignore for the Republicans.

And they are economically comfortable, so you hear a lot about second homes and leisure travel to far-off places. Many of them are religious and at least some of their politics is religiously motivated. And the great majority are overweight and out of shape—sort of easing into old age and the supposed inevitability of decline.

I can’t even imagine trying to proselytize to them. It’s like they are on the other side of the moon. Where would you start? I suppose you could suggest some reading, some podcasts, or internet sites, but their first reaction is likely bewilderment and even moral outrage, and it would be hard to get past that. It’s hard to get past that because the default way that White people evaluate political issues—especially if they are on the Left and especially among women—is very often moral. Moral judgments are deeply intertwined with emotion and with personal identity. Facts become irrelevant. The whole point of the vast literature depicting victimization of non-Whites and gender minorities is based on inculcating moral revulsion by depicting particularly egregious examples of White misbehavior—like the way the media framed the George Floyd incident. So you are in a deep hole to start with. Exposing them to the realities, say, of Black IQ and short time perspective would be met with blank stares followed by moral revulsion. Forget about citing data.

And of course they are insulated from the effects of the ongoing disaster. They live in suburbs, small cities, or rural areas. I saw maybe one or two non-Whites the entire visit until I got to the big-city airports. Their media doesn’t cover issues like the surge in illegal immigration, crime in the cities, and much else. Re immigration, the arrival of 2–3 million illegals in the past year is an issue that would never even be mentioned in the mainstream liberal-Left media. Gov. DeSantis’s strategy of shipping needy illegals off to sanctuary cities like New York, DC, and Chicago is great and is certainly resulting in the entire gamut of mainstream media covering the issue (with—surprise!—moral revulsion on the Left [human trafficking!!] and gleeful coverage on Fox News).  Better is sending illegals to smaller places like Martha’s Vineyard that wear their sanctuary status as a moral badge and are suddenly confronted with an influx of people in need of social services—certainly not something that well-heeled liberals should ever have to endure, even if jobs are available. The migrants DeSantis sent to the Vineyard were of course dispatched elsewhere by the national guard within a couple days during which the Vineyardians claim to have been greatly enriched.

This may wake up some Whites to what is going on at the border and may well help the GOP in November, but it doesn’t really get to the heart of the ongoing, decades-long replacement of the White population via legal and illegal immigration. The electoral replacement of Whites is essentially irreversible at this point barring a political cataclysm—and to be sure, there is no shortage of talk about a civil war.  (The Left, which always plays for keeps, is well advanced in purging the military and security agencies in anticipation of such an eventuality.) But even assuming the GOP benefits enough to do well in November, it doesn’t change the reality that the GOP is worse than useless as far as seriously trying to change the present trajectory. (It’s the same in Sweden where a conservative coalition will form a government but exclude the further-right Sweden Democrats, whose main issue is immigration and its disastrous effects, from ministerial positions. The cordon sanitaire in Europe is alive and well.)

So I have to say it’s not looking good right now. Most White people need to get hit over the head to get them to change at all—which is why the strategy of some GOP governors to ship illegals to sanctuary jurisdictions makes political sense. But again, the GOP has a long record of being worse than useless.

Some Psychology  

Speaking of hitting people over the head with issues that affect them, there is evidence, summarized in Ch. 8 of Individualism and the Western Liberal Tradition, that White people informed that they will soon be a minority (another issue that is rarely mentioned in the mainstream media except for a few examples of Leftist triumphalism) tend to adopt more conservative attitudes. I suppose this is positive because in the long run, the disastrous consequences of the current direction of the West will be apparent to ever-increasing numbers of White people.

But of course, there are a lot of countervailing psychological forces in play, also discussed in the above-mentioned book and all related to the unique Western tradition of individualism. Chief among these is that the social glue of Western societies is based on establishing moral communities rather than communities based on kinship (e.g., clan-type cultures or groups, such as Jewish groups, with high levels of ethnocentrism resulting in strong ingroup identifications and negative attitudes toward outgroups). (The uniqueness of Western individualism, our relative lack of ethnocentrism, and our lack of social organization based on extensive kinship are also a theme of Joseph Henrich’s The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous.) The moral communities of the West are a powerful force for social cohesion. Westerners are peculiarly prone to feeling guilt for contravening the moral attitudes of their cultures. In the environments we evolved in, violating the moral sensibilities of the group was an evolutionary dead end. So my old friends and acquaintances going along with the current anti-White zeitgeist are simply conforming to the morally tinged messages of suffering minorities and evil Whites they see every day in their media.

In the contemporary West, these moral communities are created by the messages disseminated by the media and the academic world—top-down control of culture processed by our higher brain centers able to inhibit evolved tendencies, e.g., toward ingroup racial identity. And at this time people are inundated with messages that race doesn’t exist, that all groups have the same genetic potential and are only held back by White racism, etc. And of course, there are huge incentives for going along with these ideas and increasingly dire penalties to those who voice opposition.

Women are particularly prone to the primacy of moral attitudes in politics. There are likely deep evolutionary reasons for this—personality differences related to being higher on nurturance and love important for rearing children and cementing long-term relationships, but for women in individualist cultures it means also being empathic to the suffering non-Whites they see in the media which can easily lead to pathological altruism, such as after the Haitian earthquake of 2010. And of course there is no shortage of men who have the same reaction.

It’s impossible to turn on television these days without messages to donate to Haitian relief by Michelle Obama and others. Or we read a newspaper article and find that there is an outpouring of concern about Haiti — leading not only to financial donations but to offers of adoption by American, presumably White, parents of the estimated 380,000 Haitian orphans:

Tammy Gage of Stanberry, Mo., cries every time she turns on the TV and sees the devastation in Haiti. And though she already has three daughters, she didn’t hesitate when her husband suggested that they adopt from Haiti.

“That’s all he needed to say,” she said.

Gage and her husband, Brad, are among many Americans expressing interest in adopting children who have been left orphans from the quake last week. Adoption advocacy groups are reporting dozens of calls a day.

Patrick Cleburne points out that 37% of Americans say they or someone in their family has donated to Haitian relief.

This altruism on behalf of genetically unrelated people who have created the quintessential dysfunctional society is pathetic and shows how far we have to go to get people to think rationally about this issue. [Should Haiti Be Rebuilt]

There are also sex differences in proneness to fear and desire for safety, with women higher. As they say, there is safety in numbers, so going along with the views of the majority of your moral community offers protection, whereas going against such views may have a variety of negative consequences—form getting fired from your job or getting ostracized from friends and family. And these days, a reincarnation of the gulag for political dissenters in the West is a real possibility and is already a reality in much of the West where there are no Constitutional guarantees of free speech.  The Left, which once championed free speech, is now adamantly opposed to free speech on sensitive topics like race and multiculturalism. And throughout the West, the views championed by elites in control of the mainstream media and the judicial system conform entirely to the anti-White zeitgeist. There’s a natural tendency to look up to elites—and to fear their power. We live in an oligarchy presiding over a faux democracy.

These lock-step moral communities produce a hive-mind, cult-like mentality. Tobias Langdon provides a particularly graphic example of the hive mind based on moral certitude and illustrated by constant virtue-signaling. Quoting a Guardian columnist attending a book fair:

You will never meet a group of people more consistent in their views, and not because most of them also go to the same pilates class. Every man jack of them voted remain [on Brexit], and they are considerably more leftwing than those at any meeting of any political party. … The audience absolutely hate being politically misidentified, and they spend those first 10 minutes desperately signalling, with spontaneous clapping and foot-stamping, to indicate that nobody hates the [the “conservative” Conservative] government more than they. … The atmosphere, it probably goes without saying, is electrifying.

So we are up against it. But never say die. The future cannot be predicted.

Fetterman’s Murderous Campaign Aides: How it Really Happened

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FETTERMAN’S MURDEROUS CAMPAIGN AIDES: HOW IT REALLY HAPPENED

Dr. Mehmet Oz, Republican Senate candidate in Pennsylvania, recently attacked his opponent, the ridiculous Lt. Gov. John Fetterman, for a pro-criminal record that would embarrass George Soros. Specifically, he criticized Fetterman for employing as aides on his campaign Dennis and Lee Horton, who spent 27 years in prison for a horrific armed robbery murder.

Drunk on his own self-righteousness, Fetterman sanctimoniously responded: “Does Dr. Oz believe that the wrongfully convicted should die in prison?” He added that the brothers “spent 27 years in prison for a crime they didn’t commit.”

Members of the media, who fervently believe our prisons are just bursting at the seams with completely innocent men, didn’t need to hear more. Suddenly, the entire media-big tech-entertainment conglomerate was screaming at Oz: HOW DARE YOU, YOU MORALLY BANKRUPT DOUCHEBAG! THESE TWO MEN WERE PROVED INNOCENT!

Were they now?

Here’s how the media tells “the actual story,” as somberly delivered by MSNBC’s Chris Hayes, who majored in “Easily Fooled” studies at Brown University:

“According to brothers Dennis and Lee Horton [and who would know better?], on Memorial Day 1993, they were out for a joyride when they picked up their friend, a guy named Robert Leaf.

“The police involved with the case were accused of using a whole host of problematic tactics during the investigation [yes, they were “accused” — accusations laughed out of court by Democratic judges]; eyewitnesses changed their story [they did not] after prosecutors tried to pin the crime on all three of them — the Hortons as well.

“And the district attorney’s case file, which was not made available till 2018 [I think we know why, Larry Krasner!], included a note stating Leaf is the shooter and a police note indicating Leaf acknowledged his role — all seeming to clear the Hortons. [total B.S.]

The Horton brothers, who are black, refused a plea agreement because they said they didn’t want to plead guilty to a crime they did not commit.”

Below, I have edited Hayes’ description to include only those parts that are relevant and actually true:

“on Memorial Day 1993 …

“a guy named Robert Leaf

“They were … pulled over and all three men were arrested.

“The Horton brothers … are black.”

Luckily for people interested in knowing the truth — a group that decidedly does not include Chris Hayes — the Horton brothers spent their years in prison clogging up the courts with frivolous appeals, so it’s possible to find out how these innocent lambs were somehow convicted of A CRIME THEY DIDN’T COMMIT!

“On May 31, 1993, [Dennis Horton], his brother Lee Horton (‘Lee’), and a co-conspirator Robert Leaf (‘Leaf’) robbed Filito’s Bar located at 5th Street and Hunting Park Avenue.

“During the course of the robbery, [Dennis Horton], who was carrying a rifle, shot Samuel Alemo multiple times. Alemo later died from his gunshot wounds. [Dennis Horton] also shot Luz Archella and her daughter Luz Martinez, injuring both. Leaf brandished what appeared to be a black pistol while Lee took money from bar patrons. After leaving the bar, the three men fled in a blue automobile.

“A passerby was able to supply police with a description of the vehicle and a partial license plate number. A radio call was sent out, which included a description of the three assailants, their vehicle, and the last four digits of the license plate. A police officer observed the vehicle a short time later only a mile from the crime scene, and placed [Dennis Horton] and his companions under arrest.

“Police recovered a .22-caliber semiautomatic rifle from the backseat of the car, as well as a black pellet gun under the front passenger seat. Ballistics testing identified the rifle as the same weapon used during the robbery at Filito’s. [Horton], Lee, and Leaf … were taken to the hospital where Martinez and her daughter, as well as another bar patron, Miguel DeJesus, identified them as the robbers.”

(The judges, incidentally, were all Democrats, including the only black woman on the 38-member appellate court, who subscribes to the theory that prison is “The New Jim Crow.”)

As you can see right away, one problem with the media’s version of events is: What the hell happened to the other two guys?

This was a daytime robbery of a bar, where two of the perpetrators walked around, taking the patrons’ wallets at gunpoint — not a nighttime mugging witnessed from 20 yards away. The victims had plenty of time to observe the perps. However much criminal defense lawyers attack eyewitness testimony, the patrons certainly knew it was three guys, not one; that they were black, not white; and they were male, not female.

But more important, right after the murdering thieves sped off, a passerby called the police with a description of the car, including four of six numbers from the license plate. Within minutes, that very car was stopped by the police a mile from the bar. And you’ll never guess what they found in that car … three black guys and a recently fired rifle!

Explain, again, how the Horton brothers happened to be in that car?

Right after their arrest, all three men were positively identified at the hospital by the people they’d shot at earlier that day. But even without that identification, again: They were caught in the getaway car, mere minutes after the crime.

So if I understand it correctly, the media’s theory of the crime is as follows:

Immediately after the robbery — and I mean immediately! — Leaf told his REAL accomplices: I’ve got a fantastic idea! You guys get out of the car. I know these two brothers — the Hortons — who look exactly like you and I’m pretty sure are wearing the exact same clothes. Also, their car is identical to yours and — you’ll never believe this — their license plate number is only off by two digits. I’ll just call them to come pick me up and wait here by the side of the road with the long-barreled — and easy to conceal! — rifle we just fired — OH CRAP! IT’S THE POLICE!

Look, it would be one thing if Fetterman defended his years-long PR campaign on behalf of the murdering Horton brothers by saying, They’ve served long enough! Everybody deserves a second chance. I would disagree, especially because the brothers continue to deny their guilt — but in that case, at least Fetterman would only be a gullible fool, and not a despicable, bald-faced liar.

     COPYRIGHT 2022 ANN COULTER

Putin’s Narrowing Options

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Putin's Narrowing Options

Early in this war, Russia’s hawks talked openly of the possible use of tactical nuclear weapons. That talk has begun anew.

A desperate Vladimir Putin is a dangerous Vladimir Putin, and there are signs Putin’s situation in Ukraine may be becoming desperate.

In the last week, the Russian army in the Kharkiv region of Ukraine was driven out of some 2,200 square miles of territory, according to the Ukrainians, whose soldiers are now two miles from the Russian border.

The Kharkiv battle was a rout for the surprised Russians who tore off their uniforms, threw down their weapons and fled, some on stolen bicycles. For Russia, it was the worst defeat of the war.

That Moscow sustained a stunning setback is attested to by the news that Russian nationalists back home have begun to grumble openly about Putin’s management of the war he launched on Feb. 24.

Where does Putin stand now?

He is in the seventh month of a war he launched last winter, and he appears to be headed into this coming winter with no victory and no end to the war in sight.

His early offensives, while successful north of Crimea and in the Donbas, failed to capture Kiev, Kharkiv or Odessa on the Black Sea, Ukraine’s three largest cities, which were Russia’s strategic objectives.

Putin’s gains in the Donbas are the one great prize he has. But his army is now demoralized and on the defensive. The momentum of the war has shifted in Kiev’s favor.

Western and, in particular, the U.S. weapons Ukraine is being provided have proven devastating to the Russian forces, whose losses in tanks, armor and troops are major.

Thousands of Russian soldiers have been killed, wounded or captured. Putin has no available reserves in Russia without imposing conscription to replace them.

The Ukrainians now appear to be guaranteed an endless supply of the modern U.S. weapons they have used to decimate the Russian army.

The present prospect for Putin is thus no victory, no end to the war, no end to the weekly casualty lists of dead, wounded and missing, a continued stalemate now, and the prospect of eventual defeat ahead.

Could Putin survive perceived defeat in a war he launched, and the personal, political and national humiliation he and Russia would sustain from such a defeat? Would Putin be able to survive that and remain president of Russia after 22 years in power?

In short, in a war history will call Putin’s War, the tide is turning against the Russians, and Putin faces the prospect of having been the ruler who launched Russia’s least necessary and lost war.

What are Putin’s options?

The first is to stay the course, cut off oil and gas exports to NATO Europe, and hope Ukraine’s losses and Europe’s hardships this winter compel Kiev and its allies to accept a truce that allows Russia to retain some of the new territory it has gained since Feb. 24.

The problem with this course of action is that it is Ukraine’s army that appears to have time on its side now and the wind at its back.

The alternative to a war that lasts as long as the Ukrainians are willing to fight to drive the Russians out is for Russia to escalate and win, and force an end to the fighting.

How could Moscow do this?

First, Putin could raise the stakes, say we are at war with NATO, call up Russian’s army reserves, as in World War II, and conscript enough new soldiers to replace those already lost.

Second, there is the Grozny option, the devastating artillery, air and rocket assault the Russians visited upon the Chechen capital to bring an end to a separatist moment in 2000.

But would the Russians, before the eyes of the world, do to Kiev or Kharkiv what they did to Grozny a quarter century ago?

Beyond the Grozny option, there is the nuclear option.

Russia has thousands of tactical atomic weapons, the largest such arsenal in the world, and the threat to use, or the actual use of one or more of these weapons, would raise the stakes in the war exponentially.

Early in this war, Russia’s hawks talked openly of the possible use of tactical nuclear weapons. That talk has begun anew.

The basic question comes down to this:

Would Putin threaten or use nuclear weapons to prevent a defeat and humiliation for himself and Russia? And, if so, how and where would he use them? And how would Kiev and the West respond?

America, Britain and France are all three both NATO and nuclear-weapons states. But none has a vital interest in the outcome of this Ukraine war to justify a nuclear war with Russia, even if Russia resorts to first use of such a weapon.

The longer this war goes on, and the sooner the Russian bleeding becomes intolerable to Putin, the more likely it is that he will escalate, rather than capitulate and accept defeat and humiliation for his country and himself, leading to his removal from power.

Again, a desperate Putin is a dangerous Putin.

Acting White: Colouring British History

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I first noticed it 10 years ago while watching a BBC adaptation of Graham Greene’s famous 1938 gangster novel Brighton Rock. Considered a very violent book for its time, it was famously filmed in 1948 as a classic piece of British noir starring a young Richard Attenborough as Pinkie, the hoodlum with the sharp suits and penchant for throwing acid in his rivals’ faces.

But in the BBC adaptation there was something wrong. Pinkie’s gang, Dallow, Spicer and Cubitt, were depicted in the novel as runtish and impulsively violent criminals, but there was one thing about them that was clear from the prose; they were all White. In this version, however, Dallow was Black. The notion that an English south coast gangster just before World War II would be anything other than White is absurd, and I assumed this was just the usual BBC tokenism. However, over the next decade it would become increasingly common for producers to cast Black actors in what were obviously White parts. Today it seems almost mandatory.

Going forward a decade we find another BBC drama which tells the story of Anne Boleyn, the second wife of King Henry VIII’s famed six spouses, and executed for her troubles in 1536. The actress playing Anne was Black. While the fictional Dallow in Brighton Rock being Black can be dismissed as a by-product of BBC moral rectitude, casting a woman who history and portraiture tell us was a White Englishwoman is operating in different territory. Anne Boleyn was born in Norfolk in England circa 1501. Her father was a knight who had attended the burial of Henry VII. Again, the idea she could have been Black makes no historical sense whatsoever. But that is not the point.

Interviews with the acting profession are rarely of any interest intellectually, but Jodie Turner-Smith, the Black actress who portrayed Anne Boleyn, caught my attention in an interview with the New York Times: “As a Black woman, I can understand being marginalized. I have a lived experience of what limitation and marginalization feel like.”

The idea that “lived experience” can be transplanted from one era to another, one race to another, one class to another, one ideology to another, and carry all its accidental attributes with it whole, is absurd enough in itself. But I would imagine Turner-Smith does know the experience of limitation and marginalization. Her culture limits itself, and its marginalization is entirely self-willed and driven by a visceral racism towards the more successful White races. This is one of the reasons that boosting Black culture to match their achievements on the basketball court gives White progressives such a perverse pleasure. They are helping failure, like wiping the spittle from the chin of someone slightly retarded trying to eat dinner.

The colouring-in of British history via the delivery system of televised drama serves two purposes for the progressive British deep state, and it does this by targeting two age groups. For those of us well into middle age, like myself, it reminds us who are the new masters, and it discomforts and irritates us because we know that what we are seeing is, in the context of history, fake news. All of this is a bonus for folk such as the BBC, who are often charged by the Right with hating the British while in reality they despise only the English. Also, for the younger generation, who know no history because they are being taught other ‘subjects’, it creates a whole new past, one which never existed outside of BBC storyboards but which explains to the youngsters that Britain was always Black, whether portrayed as history or as fiction.

This year’s film Mr. Malcolm’s List is a work of fiction, but nevertheless has as its premise that London around the turn of the  nineteenth century contained Black people just as it does now. Billed as a “Regency Rom-com”, the movie features a Black lead role, that of an aristocrat. It is also billed as a “period comedy”. In what sense could it be? Period pieces are not about stately homes and perfumed wigs and whether everyone is smoking cigarettes or not (the standard British televisual way of explaining to the watcher that they are watching something set last century), they are about the authenticity of who was actually there, and what colour they were.

The casting of Black actors in what are obviously roles designed for White people has built into it two fail-safe systems. Firstly, it is revisionist history delivered via a medium guaranteed to be useful to the political class, wherever they might reign; entertainment. Legend has it that the reason Stalin didn’t have Shostakovitch shot the same as he did other musicians was because Dmitri could write film music, and Stalin recognized the power of movies as delivery systems for ideology.

Secondly, if a largely White audience decides to switch off the new wave of blaxploitation movies, it is not due to the quality of the product, but to White racism, which we are told exists the way gravity exists. It has enraged the Left that Top Gun: Maverick has been such a box-office success while Hollywood’s woke scripts have turned into loss-leaders for the industry.

The casting of Black actors to play what are clearly White characters leads inexorably to the introduction of judgmental racial themes, meaning the inherent goodness and victimhood of Blacks at the hands of oppressive and privileged Whites. The Railway Children is a film which the British, and English in particular, took to their hearts in the same way as, say, the Americans did with It’s a Wonderful Life. It’s a film which is English in essence, evocative of a certain period and a certain moral climate. The sequel, The Railway Children Return, made this year over half a century after the original, has a very different tale to impart from the first film’s tale of small villages, long summers, simple families and happy White children who avert a train disaster.

The sequel revolves around the arrival in a village of a Black soldier. Race was entirely absent from the original, but even the Left-wing Guardian was of the opinion that the film’s “BLM messaging… was jarring”. The British never watched The Railway Children and saw it as a film about Whiteness, but you can bet your shirt on the fact that the majority of films made in the foreseeable future will be about Blackness, particularly if they are remakes or sequels of movies deemed to be quintessentially White.

Britain’s other avowedly Left-wing newspaper, The Independent, notes that the sequel is shot in the same villages as the 1970 original, and ‘all that’s really changed is a slight shift in perspective to adapt to the modern social consciousness’. This is coding, of course, like most Leftist MSM journalism. What they mean is there are race-baiting sub-texts running through this film and there had better be. Whereas the first film revolved around the children’s father having been wrongly accused of espionage, the sequel has the children protecting a wounded Black soldier (which The Independent writes as ‘Black’ (but not White), the grammatically incorrect capitalization adopted in line with Associated Press protocols and noted above) and the headline to the review is:

‘A belated sequel that doesn’t have anything meaningful to say about racism’.

Why should it? We note again the irritated expectation of the Left that everything be reduced to the two skimpy dimensions of the race argument. But the “re-imagining” of British history via the medium of entertainment goes on.

Earlier this year, London saw a West End revival of the popular musical My Fair Lady. Based on George Bernard Shaw’s play Pygmalion, which premiered in 1913 and was itself based on the Greek myth of Pygmalion and Galatea, the story of My Fair Lady is that of a cockney flower girl in London’s East End just before World War I. A professor of linguistics, Henry Higgins, is appalled by her rough accent and bets a colleague he can make her speak like a duchess. It was filmed in 1964 starring Rex Harrison as Professor Higgins and Audrey Hepburn as Eliza Doolittle. It is a charming fantasy, and the film features songs well known to any British audience of a certain age.

The most recent theatrical production in London casts a Black actress as Eliza. Again, this is unfeasible. A Black cockney match-seller in the east end of London in 1912 is as likely as a Tibetan hot-dog vendor outside an American ball-game in the same year, probably less so. The only Blacks in London at that time would have been transitory sailors. But, again, the point is not historical verisimilitude but propaganda. The semiotics of casting Black actors in White parts from different eras of history is intended to convey the message that Britain, and particularly its major cities, has always had a large Black population, and a virtuous one at that. This is what the viewer is being told and not just expected but commanded to believe. In passing, I note that most of actress Amara Okereke’s roles are traditionally White. Not her fault. She is a pawn. And a Black pawn, meaning she moves second, after White ideologues have moved first. And, in the end, it is Whites in charge of this cultural revisionism.

The point is not that the BBC, the Royal Shakespeare Company, Channel 4 and all the other cultural commissars patrolling the grounds are trying to convince a guppy-mouthed British audience that history was largely populated by Black people. It wasn’t, and the older fish know that. What these people are telling you is that you had better start seeing it that way, because soon there will be examinations after class, and if you don’t make the grade things may change for you, just like they did for Anne Boleyn at the precise moment the axe went through her neck. The beauty of a Black Anne Boleyn, of course, is that the execution can be an imprimatur of racism. And racism is cause for, if not monetary, then certainly societal reparations, as Black people are shuffled into positions from the public sector to the entertainment industry to politics as a kind of bewildered meritocracy, one which will gradually pick off the culturally important posts, roles and offices of a rapidly declining United Kingdom.

Two of British entertainment’s most iconic fictional screen characters are Dr. Who and James Bond, the eccentric time-lord forever battling the Daleks and the suave spy with a shaken Martini and a licence to kill. It was inevitable, then, that cries for the roles going to Black actors would become increasingly shrill. The producers of Dr. Who had already tried a woman—to disastrous ratings, and the idea of ‘Jane Bond’ has been mooted on many occasions. But earlier this year Dr. Who got its first Black lead, Ncuti Gatwa, and the 14th Doctor will also be portrayed as a homosexual to bolster the show’s woke points tally.

The Blackening of British history via its dramatic representation only boosts one ethnicity, of course. You would never see on screen a Chinese Anne Boleyn, a Sikh Dallow, or a Maori aristocrat in Regency London. Just as Blacks are absurdly over-represented in British screen advertising — Blacks are only 3% of the British population but are inescapable in ads — so too it is vanishingly rare to see any other ethnicities. But that is not to say that the re-writing of history is taking place exclusively in Black terms. This revisionism does not stop with race.

I, Joan, a production of the story of Joan of Arc at London’s famous Globe Theatre (actually not Shakespeare’s original, but the third version, although any visitor to London should visit it anyway) has Joan as ‘non-binary’, and answering to pronouns of ‘they and them’. I trust the French inquisitors who burnt Joan didn’t midgender her. But, again, that isn’t the point, as the Globe Theatre’s website explains that the production is ‘alive, queer and full of hope’.

This racial revisionism currently dictating the make-up of British casting is a befuddled kind of re-wilding. White liberals have always been rabid Rousseauists, believing that Black people represent some sort of primal force the White man lacks, being pre-occupied as he has been by trifles such as the Classical world, the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, the age of technology and the founding of civilization and democracy. It is well known now that Blacks invented everything from the plough to the Large Hadron Collider, so they should be fairly represented in history, even if they weren’t there, rather than the racist reminder that the main place Blacks are over-represented seems to be prison.

Sir Richard Attenborough, who I mentioned at the start, directed the film Gandhi in 1982, with Ben Kingsley in the lead role. Kingsley, a brilliant and much-loved actor in the UK, has escaped cancel culture for the role as he was born Krishna Pandit Bhanji (albeit in Yorkshire in the north of England) but a story attaches itself to the production which I hope is true, as it offers advice to the British entertainment industry as to how a producer might respond to a demand for more Blacks in the cast. An Indian adviser on the film suggested to Attenborough that the main character of Gandhi might be more properly portrayed by a beam of light rather than a human actor. Attenborough replied; “We’re making a film about Gandhi, not fucking Tinkerbell”.