Like most of America’s cultural and political elites, Robert De Niro just cannot reconcile himself to Donald Trump winning the popular vote in 2024. Now he says he wants “a screening process that everyone has to go through”, which is very rich coming from a man who endorsed Kamala Harris.

Journalist Freddie Hayward was backstage with De Niro recently. Hayward “suggested that, perhaps, this is what we call an election”, whereupon the actor doubled down on his statement that a “screening process” should be added to the American elections system.

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The interview took place at the recent “State of the Swamp” counterprogram to the State of the Union speech, where De Niro appeared with a man in a frog costume. On stage, De Niro compared patriotism in the time of Trump to an “abused spouse professing love for their abuser.”

Backstage, De Niro suggested to Hayward that some sort of deliberative body ought to have prevented Trump from running again. Now 82, De Niro may be suffering from memory loss, and therefore unable to recall the many ways in which Democrats tried to prevent Trump from being able to run for president again.

He may also have forgotten that a country exists which has constitutional organs to do exactly the thing he describes. De Niro is describing the Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Iran, drafted by none other than Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.

In Iran, an Assembly of Experts chooses the Supreme Leader, while the Guardian Council decides who is allowed to run for president. Khomeini distrusted democracy, so he created these institutions to prevent exactly the sort of scenario that has made Robert De Niro so sad.

De Niro would probably enjoy life on the island of Cuba as well. There, the National Assembly of People’s Power selects the president and prime minister by absolute majority, cutting out any popular vote at all.

For that matter, the Electoral College was supposed to be a filtering mechanism against presidents with too much popularity in any one state or group of states. As far as I can tell, Robert De Niro has never expressed an opinion about the Electoral College. Perhaps he needs to educate himself on the topic?

Hollywood made a mistake by letting its actors speak their political minds. I am not being snide when I say that wish I knew less about Robert De Niro’s dumb opinions. In 2024, Democrats had a selection process that cut out popular democracy and put a vapid Kamala Harris in a contest she could never win. Our elites are still mad about it, still taking revenge on us, still unable to understand why Americans don’t do what they want.

They wanted us to see One Battle After Another. The message of the film, which depicts violent revolutionaries taking revenge on America, was so important that the Academy gave it six Oscars, including Best Picture. But the movie audience betrayed Hollywood by staying home, and then going to see Project Hail Mary instead.

We don’t vote for their woke candidates. We don’t buy tickets to see their woke garbage films. They hate us for it, so they want to change the rules, now, and make us suffer for our sins. They think of us as sinners, and themselves as the saints. In that way, they are exactly like the mullahs of Iran.

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It is not an April Fools Day joke that actual Communists were behind the No Kings rallies last weekend. Neville Roy Singham, an American billionaire loyal to the Chinese Communist Party, funds more than 500 organizations across the country with $3 billion a year to promote the interests of the CCP in America. His wife, Jodie Evans, is the co-founder of the pacifist protest group Code Pink. As the COMINTERN of 1937 decreed, “the Communist Parties of all capitalist countries must fight against military expenditures”, and Code Pink exists to agitate “against militarization measures taken by capitalist governments, especially the militarization of youth.”

For in the socialist paradise of workers, militarization of the youth is the exclusive domain of the revolution. “Here’s our pledge to you, our Somali Minnesotans, your great grandchildren will still be here when that orange clown is in the dustbin of history,” Tim Walz told a No Kings rally crowd. Ilhan Omar sent her daughter to Cuba with Code Pink to enjoy the first class hotel and the only electricity generators left on the island. Minnesota is the home of the new Young Communist International.

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“I’ll kill you”, one No Kings protester told a Breitbart journalist in Pennsylvania. In Portland, Isaiah Lee climbed onto the federal building, destroyed security cameras and committed other acts of vandalism. Lee, 26, was arrested. In Milford, New Hampshire, a young No Kings protester who refused to stop blocking a sidewalk was tackled and arrested by police. Meanwhile, No Kings organizers are increasingly leaning on local business communities to leave anti-crime programs using threats of boycott.

“There is only one solution, communist revolution!” chanted the No Kings crowd in Manhattan as they waved Soviet flags. “These No Kings rallies actually look pretty representative, to me, of the Democratic coalition”, Scott Jennings remarked on CNN. “I saw people flying the hammer and sickle in New York City. I saw Hezbollah flags, Hamas flags, I saw Palestinian flags, I saw trans signs, I see weirdo liberal boomers out there, this is pretty representative”.

“A well-functioning society educates the baby stuff out of its citizens”, Matthew Hennessy writes at the Wall Street Journal. “That doesn’t happen here because the people who do the teaching tend to be communist sympathizers, if not outright believers.” Indeed, the teaching profession is lost to ideological communism and this explains why our angsty kids are out in the street protesting instead of learning to read.

The No Kings rallies lacked diversity and many commentators noted the irony. “This is not for people of color to be on the street”, one white boomer lady told an interviewer in Manhattan, explaining “they are at risk when they do that. If anybody’s gonna get arrested here, it’s gonna be a Black person. It’s not safe for them and they don’t need to participate.” Soft bigotry sets the lowest expectations.

“We need to walk in their name”, the would-be white savior said. Otherwise, “white Christian males” will take over with gerrymandering and voter ID laws, tear up the Constitution, and make Donald Trump a literal monarch. These appear to be actual talking points from a parallel Metaverse where people like this woman share them to buttress their collective faith in the political religion of woke. I know them. They are real, and really this wrong.

Put another way, the revolution is a project of old people — Americans who can remember the 1970s — radicalizing the young, whom they have relieved of all meaningful education and sense of responsibility for their own behavior. Intersectionality and diagnosis give the kids their identities now instead of that toxic masculine patriotism stuff American students used to learn. Who needs the cisheteropatriarchy setting standards and promoting merit with the stars and stripes? Better to teach them to hate themselves, their country, and civilization itself.

Communism worships weaker gods than the United States Constitution. Faith in criminals to be on their best behavior, accompanied by racialized forgiveness of crime, is the essence of wokeness. Because this god is weak, it must be imposed on the population as a necessary moral crusade, all doubts shouted-over. The more violent or outrageous the crime, the more virtue Communists signal to us by coddling the criminal and approving the crime.

Feeding Our Future fraud defendant Abdul Abubakar Ali, who pleaded guilty to a count of wire fraud in 2022, was sentenced to one year and one day in prison on Monday. Having stolen $250 million along with dozens of co-defendants, Ali has paid just $92,500 in restitution out of his $3 million share. He would likely spend more time in prison if he just stopped paying taxes. The same judge just gave another guilty defendant just six months. For capital-C Communists, this is the intended outcome. Kulaks suffer far more than criminal fraudsters under Communist despotism.

Jessica Blinkhorn is a Platonic archetype of the No Kings protester. Wearing a BDSM mask, anti-ICE tattoos, and a leather tube top while rolling in her motorized wheelchair with a man in a Donald Trump mask on a leash, Blinkhorn calls herself “the DOGEWALKER”. For some reason, a man danced beside her in a J.D. Vance mask and a sandwich board reading: “Have u said thank-u yet?”, which is probably a reference to Ukraine.

Remember, lots of these anti-war people at the No Kings rally are pro-war-in-Ukraine. Moral consistency is not in fact their strong suit. Moral hectoring is their strong suit. Ukraine is not a strategic consideration, to them. Rather, Ukraine is a marginalized community. This is why their intended support of Ukraine consists of other people’s money.

But public piety becomes ridiculous when someone like Blinkhorn, a self-described performance artist whose visual work “depicts individuals with physical disabilities in hypersexualized poses and situations”, shows up to the No Kings rally in Mad Max headgear and then complains about people on the internet being mean to her.

This turns out to be the real Ms. Blinkhorn, a Georgia State professor. Imagine what the kids are learning from this woman. I bet they are learning nothing about art from her that will make them better artists — unless they are studying surrealism, in which case she will serve as a good model for confusing and repelling the audience.

Ms. Blinkhorn has a GoFundMe. She wants to take her act on the road, nationwide. And she has words for her new critics. “I take a seemingly powerless, worthless, burdensome, fat, disabled, queer form and I juxtapose it against the end-all, be-all, senility, ferality [sic] and masculinity that Donald Trump thinks he is”, Blinkhorn explained in a video. She is “here to educate you — because that’s what I do.”

She wants you to stop and think about these politicians who need to be reined in. “There’s an undercurrent of sexuality, but that’s not what it’s about”, she insists, and you are the one with the dirty mind for thinking so. A broken-brained Epstein accusation is the cherry on this shit sundae of stupidity. Blinkhorn has “the right to take up space” and be abnormal if she wants, including her psychology.

If you disagree with her, it is because “you made the wrong choice and you fucked up”. You will not be forgiven for your heresies until you agree that ‘normal’ is bad and ‘queer’ is good, and that Trump is bad and LGBTQ race communism is good, and that ICE is bad while unrestricted immigration is good. Such a character was too perfect in every possible way to not satirize. Comedy had to happen. It was fated:

Reader, the No Kings people are telling us all what they intend to do. They are serious when they talk about running Kamala Harris again because she is the ‘qween’. All the hippie talk about war and peace and fighting racism and queering normality is psychological validation of their real intentions. They wish to restore the ideological hegemony of the woke with super-Constitutional powers of oppression and make us all sorry for electing Donald Trump.

The reason so many No Kings protesters do not seem to have a grasp on real issues is that they are the current incarnation of the late 1990s email forward from your conservative in-laws. Whereas your conservative in-laws were fun at Thanksgiving, the No Kings activist is prone to cut off family, their closest friends, and strangers alike for thoughtcrimes, such as voting for Trump. In their informational ecosystem, nastiness is the energy that makes nonsense viral. The nastier, the more they like it.

Last week, as American airline passengers met a surge of ICE personnel helping to relieve congestion at the nation’s airports, a number of cocksure liberals posted images of their most hated federal agency expressing surprise and indignity that so many of its personnel are Black and Hispanic. In fact, ICE is probably the most-diverse federal agency, which ought to make it very popular with those liberals.

Instead, white liberals question the racial consciousness of minority Americans who would enforce American laws and police American borders. They say that no one is illegal on stolen land, which is ostensibly about correcting the past but actually lets slip their plans for the future: the Communists want to steal our country out from under us and give it to other people.

It never occurs to the No Kings crowd that Black and Hispanic Americans might not like Communism very much. Excuses about safety are a cope for the fact that most Black and Hispanic Americans have nothing in common with Jessica Blinkhorn and do not share her desire for queer body positive revolution.

The proof is online, now. Hundreds of thousands of users fled the “toxicity” of X.com for Bluesky, an app that recreates Twitter in 2017, but it has turned out they were the toxicity all along. Reddit has likewise become notorious for woke thought policing. Both websites are dying because their respective ‘communities’ demand to use the platform for free, being Communists.

The Communists are revolting. They are always revolting. Both revolutionary and too often unwashed to impress normal people offline, or else too old and sanctimonious for anyone to take them seriously, Communists literally and metaphorically stink. Tim Walz and Code Pink both stink of Chinese influence.

Donald Trump is all these people have, and he has broken them. When he is gone, they will not know how to cope with it — at least, not until Singham gives the useful idiots their instructions from Beijing.

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I am uprooting once again, transplanting myself across North America to where I came from, heeding the call of family. My father took a bad fall recently and the old folks will need me around to help. Dad will want to read my book draft anyway, so it’s good to go home.

In truth, I had not anticipated staying in downtown Oakland permanently. I am not a big city boy. It is very nice to be surrounded by restaurants, not so nice that the homeless will sit at your table and ask to drink your beer.

In Alabama, the local catfish restaurant might have a bit too much Christian kitsch. On Telegraph Avenue, around the Black Panther Party Museum, every sight angle brings me a fresh woke witness to annoying and destructive causes.

Being in Oakland feels like that party in Havana that Code Pink and Hasan Piker enjoyed this weekend. Patients reportedly died in hospitals under electricity blackouts while the Democratic Socialists of America partied the night away with every available generator in Cuba.

Imagine Haight-Ashbury on the deck of the USS Titanic, just before the iceberg. I get this feeling all the time, in California, that I am watching a slow-motion disaster brought on by an ideology of theft.

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While Gavin Newsom insisted that “THOUSANDS” (all caps original) of mentally ill homeless people had been helped by his “CARE Court”, the state could only produce evidence of 22 people being helped in four years.

“Even under the most NARROW definition (court-ordered treatment plans, which is one of many treatment outcomes), the number is 600+ and growing,” his press team tweeted. Thousands is actually hundreds. Call it ‘California math’.

“Out of roughly 3000 petitions filed by October statewide, 706 were approved but of those, 684 were voluntary agreements that were never the intended point of the program”, the Daily Mail reported. That left out a lot of people who needed the help Newsom proposed to give.

Celebrity parents like the late Rob and Michele Reiner, allegedly murdered by their long-troubled son Nick, or the parents of former Nickelodeon child star Tylor Chase, who has been living on the streets of Riverside and resisting efforts to help him, faced the same often insurmountable challenges as Deplazes and other families when trying to rescue and aid their children.

To recap: a program that the governor created with great fanfare, ostensibly to help families put homeless members in housing on an involuntary basis, spent $236 million to help 22 families. This kind of waste is just normal in California. In that sense, it is already a Third World country.

California is the perfect place for a single 38-year-old man to bill the Medicare system for over $90 million in fraudulent claims. Standards simply do not exist in this state unless someone is trying to create a job, in which case California will punish them severely.

Environmental regulations have become so onerous that California is losing their petroleum refineries. Gas is more expensive here than anywhere in the United States, now, because more of it must come from somewhere else, but the attorney general is suing to stop the federal government from reopening a pipeline that connects to existing refineries. This is degrowth in action. The cost of the virtue is supposed to be the signal Californians are meant to feel good about sending.

San Francisco made headlines last week by once again allowing middle school students to skip pre-algebra class if they can already handle the material. This was always the policy during my lifetime, all across America, until San Francisco tried to be different.

They wanted to hold back the highest achievers in order to achieve equity in educational outcomes: Harrison Bergeron, basically. No wonder California children are basically illiterate. Here again, Newsom tries to dress his failure up as a huge success. He passed a law, you see, and then scores went up.

When people show you that they are Communists, believe them.

Meanwhile, next door to Alabama, Mississippi is described as a “miracle” because they restored phonics education instead of sticking with decades of failed experiments in “whole language learning”.

In California, the Democrats want to make it easier to harass and defame Jews in public schools. Jews thrive in the American south. I attended a Hannukah dinner at a synagogue in Alabama just weeks after 10/7. I am going somewhere less exclusionary than California. I need more diversity than this.

I am returning to the summer sweat and baking sunshine of home. I go back to a town that banished the homeless by not giving in to the satanic temptation of weaponized empathy. There are places in America where people can still just rebuild their homes after a fire with minimal government involvement. Those places are not in California, which is a zombie state. I prefer the company of the living. I want my home again.

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The Our Duty USA website is here.

You can watch Erin Friday’s new podcast here.

Her X account is here.

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Here I am with another very dumb joke to open a digest post of everything I have been writing and podcasting around the intertubes of late.

The internet is actually a series of tubes, according to the Ted Stevens Foundation, a Washington think tank. These are links to all the electrons I pumped out to fill up those tubes.

What Washington actually needs is a septic think tank to clean up the Potomac. I’m glad I don’t live in that swamp. All of my intertubes are sanitized for your protection.

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The Distance

Use The Pronouns Or You'll Be Sorry. Also This Does Not Even Affect You, Why Do You Care?

History records that for one brief moment, it was okay to be gay. And then it passed, because the straights with interesting hair colors demanded the spotlight on campus. Kevin Waldman, a gay clinical researcher at the University of Michigan, finds that “gay male students experience conditional belonging when situated within a trans-centered LGBTQ identity hierarchy…

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a month ago · 12 likes · 1 comment · Matt Osborne

Polemology Positions

Year Five Of The Three-Day Special Operation

The renewed invasion caught the world off guard. It caught me off guard. I did not think Vladimir Putin was dumb enough to really do it. Turned out that the CIA and MI6 were right, he really was that dumb. As I plumbed sources of information, it became clear to me over the first 24 hours that…

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a month ago · 1 like · Matt Osborne

The Distance

Thing That Never Happens Turns Out To Have Happened Thousands Of Times, Actually

For those of us who have been in these ‘culture war’ trenches the longest, the story of Sage Blair is not new or shocking. Most Americans are only just now finding out she exists, and hearing her story for the first time, because she was not supposed to exist and her story is not supposed to be real…

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a month ago · 13 likes · Matt Osborne

Inspecting Gender

Why Judith Butler Was Inevitable

To the passing observer in 2017, it seemed that women’s rights were at the center of the world. #MeToo, Time’s Up, and the Women’s March had reshaped politics, culture, and society. The force was female, the future was female. All three movements are now dissolved and forgotten. Instead, a new schism was forming within feminism. On one side were feminis…

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a month ago · 9 likes · Matt Osborne

Osborne Ink

Ok, Weird: Nick Pope Basically Wrote A Foreword To My Book Draft At Skeptic Mag

Nick Pope worked for the Ministry of Defence over decades, running the ‘UFO desk’ from 1991 to 1994. While the MoD closed the office in 2006 and announced it was no longer studying UFOs at all in 2009, Pope became a fixture of Ancient Aliens on the History Channel, and more recently, a commentator on S…

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a month ago · Matt Osborne

The Distance

Brittany Ortiz AKA Slightly Twisted Female Charged For Violent Attack On A Family

A past organizer of a Let Women Speak event covered by The Distance has been charged alongside her father with injuring three people during an altercation at a youth basketball game on 1 February 2026…

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a month ago · 12 likes · 4 comments

The Distance

Thing That Never Happens Has Happened At Least $135 Million Times At Taxpayer Expense

A Congressional Budget Office analysis of Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program has found that taxpayers spent at least $135 million on transgender medicalization, including surgeries, on minors from 2019 to 2023…

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a month ago · 1 like · Matt Osborne

Polemology Positions

Battle Damage Assessment

An Israeli strike at 8:15 AM local time appears to have possibly ended the career of Ayatollah Ali Hosseini Khamenei. Reuters is reporting that Supreme Leader Khamenei and President Masoud Pezeshkian were present at the meeting, whole Israeli Channel 12 is reporting that Kha…

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a month ago · 1 like · Matt Osborne

The Distance

Why Single-Sex Prisons Are In The 1949 Geneva Convention

Women shall be treated with all the regard due to their sex and shall in all cases benefit by treatment as favourable as that granted to men. …

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a month ago · 7 likes · Matt Osborne

Polemology Positions

The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Must Decide How It Wants To Die, Now

Yesterday, Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi signaled that the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps is acting on its own, now. “What happened in Oman was not our choice”, he told Al Jazeera, referring to overnight missile strikes on that country. “We have already told ou…

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a month ago · 1 like · Matt Osborne

Osborne Ink

Why Democrats Suddenly Fear And Loathe AI

Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont wants a moratorium on data center construction. “We cannot sit back and allow a handful of billionaire Big Tech oligarchs to make decisions that will reshape our economy, our democracy and the future of humanity”, Sanders argued on social media. Instead, we should let Sanders, 84, reshape our economy, democracy and the fut…

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a month ago · Matt Osborne

The Distance

The Culture War Vibe Shift Is Happening Fast

Have you noticed the dogs that are not barking, right now? Actors. Big A-name celebrities, B-listers, even the C-listers have all suddenly re-learned the lost art of shutting up about divisive political topics. Pedro Pascal and Rachel Zegler and Emma Thompson and Mark Ruffalo are all shutting up, all of a sudden…

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a month ago · 1 like · Matt Osborne

Polemology Positions

Destroying The IRGC With Foes From Within

Ismail Qaani kept missing out on Israeli decapitation strikes that killed his colleagues in batches. After one coincidence too many, the Quds Force commander was reportedly detained by the regime and his fate remains unknown. Adding to suspicions, Qaani was…

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a month ago · 1 like · Matt Osborne

Osborne Ink

James Talarico Wants The White Men Of Texas To Feel The Pain Of Being Nonbinary

In 2019, James Talarico said that “prophetic voices like Jesus have helped me reckon with my own whiteness, my own masculinity, my own certainty, my own ego. It’s a never-ending process, and it’s a painful process.” Masculinity and whiteness are sins. White men have to feel pain for their sins. That’s what Talarico and the progressive Democratic Party want for white men: pain. Democrats want the white men of Texas to cry like Jesus and beg forgiveness for voting the wrong way, all these years…

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a month ago · Matt Osborne

The Distance

We Will Give 'Debunker' Michael Hobbes $10,000,000 For A 'Gender Identity' Detector

To date, the true nature of the phenomenon known as “gender identity” remains nebulous to our human understanding. Sure, people “express” themselves in various ways that cultures decide are “masculine” or “feminine.” In that sense, “gender” is a performance, just as Judith Butler argues…

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25 days ago · 10 likes

Osborne Ink

The Ultimate Climate Warming Heresy Is That It Might Be ...Good... For Humans, Actually?

You would not know it from the climate science we have all learned together, but periods of climate warming are consistently associated with the success of the human species, while periods of climate cooling are associated with human suffering. Contrary to the expectations of doomsday, the more likely outcome …

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25 days ago · 8 likes · Matt Osborne

This podcast unlocks on 31 March.

Polemology Positions

Pacifism Is A Lie

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24 days ago · 4 likes · Matt Osborne

The Distance

A Brief History Of Detransition

As shown by these two graphs, the rising number of published references to “detransitioner” has closely tracked the rise in published references to “puberty blockers”. The graph looks very different when both terms are compared together because detransitioners get far less attention than ‘trans kids’. We have to see them independently to discern the pattern…

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23 days ago · 31 likes · Matt Osborne

This is exclusive to premium subscribers of Osborne Ink.

Osborne Ink

Cuba Negotiates The Terms Of Their Liberation

Donald Trump has defeated proletarian internationalism in Cuba. President Miguel Díaz-Canel acknowledged on Friday that his government is negotiating the terms of their surrender with the Trump administration, capitulating rather than attempt ‘resistance’ to internal and external forces it cannot overcome…

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18 days ago · 6 likes · Matt Osborne

Exclusively for premium subscribers to Polemology.net:

Polemology Positions

Behold, A Hormuz Strategy Unfolds

“Hours ago, U.S. forces successfully employed multiple 5,000-pound deep penetrator munitions on hardened Iranian missile sites along Iran’s coastline near the Strait of Hormuz” CENTCOM announced Tuesday evening. “The Iranian anti-ship cruise missiles in these sites posed a risk to international shipping in the strait.” Posed, past tense, because the former threat to the world economy is gone, now…

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15 days ago · 2 likes · Matt Osborne

The Distance

Stop Trying To Help The Butch Lesbians Gain Acceptance With Your Awful Video Game

Aeta, a young knight errant, undertakes a “brutal journey through Italy” to rescue her true love, Bianca (see above): this is the plot of 1348 Ex Voto, a new video game that centers the ‘representation’ of lesbians right in its marketing…

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15 days ago · 3 likes · Matt Osborne

Polemology Positions

The Successful Deterrence Of Xi Jinping

The latest report on national security issues by the Director of National Intelligence assesses that “Chinese leaders do not currently plan to execute an invasion of Taiwan in 2027, nor do they have a fixed timeline for achieving unification”, according to…

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14 days ago · 1 like · Matt Osborne

Osborne Ink

Why They Cover Up The Cult Of César Chávez

César Chávez became a friend and imitator of Charles Dederich, founder of Synanon, during the 1970s. Dederich established control of his initiates through The Game, a regular practice of Maoist struggle sessions in which everyone engaged in verbal attacks on one another to break down egos and inculcate obedience…

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14 days ago · 3 likes · Matt Osborne

The Distance

Thing That Hardly Ever Happens Happened 60 Times In Just One Blue Colorado County

According to the United States Department of Education, Jefferson County, Colorado public schools have allowed boys to take up 60 different places on girls sports teams. One “nonbinary” player is listed on a team for girls as well, though it is unclear whether this student is male or female…

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14 days ago · 3 likes · Matt Osborne

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César Chávez became a friend and imitator of Charles Dederich, founder of Synanon, during the 1970s. Dederich established control of his initiates through The Game, a regular practice of Maoist struggle sessions in which everyone engaged in verbal attacks on one another to break down egos and inculcate obedience.

Chávez was clearly impressed by the result because he followed Dederich’s advice when he moved the United Farm Workers headquarters to its final home in La Paz. With most of his political goals achieved, Chávez wanted two things as his labor rights movement culminated: money and obedience. He would shed followers freely to squeeze the most he could out of the remaining ones.

The motto Chávez gave his movement — Sí, se puede! (Yes, we can!) — was already a dark joke when he died in 1993. Lionized in the years since by every liberal and Democrat alike for uniting fruit pickers against the evil capitalist exploitation of kulak grape farmers, César Chávez was revealed as a cult leader in the 21st century. It did not affect his fandom among Democrats.

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This week, The New York Times unraveled the cult of César Chávez. Intrepid journalists got clear answers from a woman who is almost one hundred years old, with receipts. They substantiated three solid accusations of rape, molestation, and sexual violence after five decades of silence.

Dolores Huerta is practically a cult figure on the left herself, so her account bears extraordinary weight. Moreover, because Chávez was a man who perpetrated his acts against ‘brown girls’, the intersectionality of his victims outranks his ethnicity. It is therefore not racist to cancel him, and so the statues have been covered up with alacrity.

Plans for renaming all the Chávez streets and Chávez buildings and Chávez plazas have already been announced all over blue America. Chávez parades are canceled. In California, César Chávez Day will become Farmworkers Day. The cult of César Chávez has fallen dramatically, catastrophically, as if to make future archaeologists wonder why his statures were suddenly torn down all over the country in a great purgation.

Ms. Debra Rojas recalls her experience with clarity. She uses the word “grooming” because it is the correct word for what women and girls endured to keep the jefe happy. While the family and union are expressing sympathy with the victims, the history of denial is consistent with their financial interest in his false sainthood.

A handful of Mr. Chavez’s relatives and former U.F.W. leaders have been aware for years about various allegations of sexual misconduct, but there is no evidence that they made efforts to fully investigate the accusations, acknowledge the victims or apologize to them. Instead, many of the women say they were discouraged from speaking out in order to preserve Mr. Chavez’s public image.

Americans have a duty to question their civil rights icons. Far from simply being flawed, César Chávez was a monster. Worse, even without knowing the allegations of criminal sexual behavior, the fact he was a cult leader should have been enough to raise red flags for everyone.

Should have been, because the left has a blind spot with cults.

Half of San Francisco is named for Harvey Milk, but none of the “Saint Harvey” plaques and inscriptions mention his relationship with Jim Jones and the People’s Temple. Milk was a regular speaker at the Temple, wrote frequent letters to Jones, lobbied on his behalf, and supported their activities in his weekly newspaper column even after stories of abuse began to emerge. Residents of Jonestown sent Milk more than fifty condolence letters after his lover took his own life.

The most prominent biographer of Milk, Randy Shilts, elides most of this history and tries to downplay the connection to Jones. He does however mention that Ann Kronenberg, Milk’s hand-picked successor, immediately blamed Jones for the Milk assassination while offering no evidence. The cult of Harvey Milk simply did not want to examine the issue at all after his death, and deflected from it immediately with a risible conspiracy theory.

Ask anyone with a casual knowledge of the People’s Temple what it was, and they will almost certainly tell you, incorrectly, that Jones was an evangelical Christian. In fact, visitors to the cult compound in Guyana noted a complete absence of Christian iconography or “outwardly religious trappings” because Jones had been a Communist since the 1950s. From The New York Times in 1978:

Several survivors, like the former farm manager, Jim Boge, suggested that Mr. Jones’s attachment to religion was not to the substance but to the technique. Mr. Jones, he said, had found evangelical speaking, music, faith‐healing and other tent‐meeting techniques useful in attracting and controlling the many working-class members, particularly the aged, whose Social Security and Government support checks were an important resource.

Religious performance was a means of “attracting and controlling” people, for Jones, who wanted as many government checks as possible going into his communist pocket. His heroes were Stalin and Mao, not Jesus and Mary. The communist character of the Jones cult was minimized in the 1980 TV miniseries about Jonestown, Guyana Tragedy. Powers Boothe portrayed Jones as a religious man, while the script framed him as a social justice activist gone wrong.

Cults of personality are quite common on the left and may even represent a successful formula. Barack Obama, the community organizer who became president, built an entire campaign on the basis of his personal charisma. His motto, “Yes we can”, directly borrowed Sí, se puede! Even the famous Shepard Fairey “HOPE” poster features totalitarian graphic design. The ‘branding’ of candidate Obama intentionally mirrored the look of a communist cult — and he monopolized authority on the left.

It was unclear just what could replace Obama’s personality cult. Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont still has a fanatical following that never could believe he was less popular than Hillary Clinton. For while her cult of personality was not as intense, more of it lived inside the Democratic Party, whereas Sanders primarily shaped his appeal towards new and disaffected voters from outside it. Not by coincidence, this is when Democrats started losing elections to the cult of Donald Trump.

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Of course, there is a vast difference between political candidates using branding techniques to chase voters and cult leaders abusing their followers. My point is that this aesthetic — call it ‘communist cult chic’ — is actually very attractive to liberal Democrats. Imitate Jim Jones, and your temple will fill up with believers in the social justice gospel, so that you can squeeze them for votes and money. It’s a proven formula for success, on the left.

This is why I say that the left has a blind spot for cults. Reading the intellectual history of Lenin and Trotsky and Stalin and Mao, one comes away with the impression that Bolsheviks and Mensheviks were simply rival cults, and that all of totalitarianism is in fact a history of cults. Trotsky’s failure to play the intra-party game, and his eventual demise in Mexico City, resonates with Sanders disdaining the party super delegates and paying for it in 2016. But these are people, and it pays also to think of causes.

By now I am hardly original to point out that ‘wokeness’ is a cult, or else a ‘cult-like’ phenomenon, or to say that transgender ideology behaves like a cult. Nor am I the first to note that the phrase ‘born in the wrong body’ is patent religious speech. I have been asked why these strange beliefs seem to mesmerize Democrats, who cannot seem to give up on them.

The answer I have proposed elsewhere is that these beliefs form an ersatz religion among Democrats, for whom traditional Christianity is now anathema. I use the word ersatz to infer that these beliefs are poor substitutes for real religion, for they require the worship of weak gods.

Because these gods are weak, the cult must exert even stronger control over its believers. Misgendering, preferred pronouns, and phrases like “biological sex” become flashpoints for cancel mobs because the ideology of transgenderism is incoherent. The internal logic cannot survive five seconds of debate, therefore ‘this is not a debate’.

Notably, Democrats have redoubled their devotion to the cult of gender identity while largely letting go of the gods Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. To be sure, they expect to return to power in their glory, one day, and restore what Donald Trump has destroyed. They will also put him in prison, along with all of his friends and appointees, and also crush everyone who went along with him in any way, so that no one ever dares to smash their idols again.

So sayeth the cult of peace and justice.

César Chávez raped and molested with impunity because stopping him would have hurt the cause. Leftist political history is replete with men who did the same, and got away with it for the same reason. Feminism parted ways with the American left after the 1960s because women like Andrea Dworkin had had enough of leftist men, and the women who enable them. This is not really a new story at all.

Now the statues will be quietly removed from their plinths, the street signs will be changed, the plazas and buildings will be retitled, all in a single season. Watch them cover up the existence of the cult of Chávez, now, so that his sickening crimes do not damage the sacred cause.

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Elizabethan plays and joke books printed in London during the 1630s featured the “bull.” As humor historian William Linneman writes, a bull is “a proposition containing a ludicrous inconsistency unperceived by the speaker.”1 For example, a young Irishman thought that a thermos was the most amazing technology ever invented, “because it keeps hot things hot, and cold things cold. How does it know?”

We laugh at the silly person. It feels good to laugh, especially when we laugh along with other people. This time, the person is Irish, but the bull-speaker could be from anywhere, have any background, and the joke would still be funny.

In the 1650s, Oliver Cromwell subdued the Irish and sent all the troublesome ones away to the New World as indentured servants. A few decades later, “the existing bull configuration … was transferred in its entirety to the Irish,” according to historian Brian Earls.2 This process started in joke books during the 1680s and then spread to the British stage in 1703.

The “bulls are consistently (and evidently with some deliberation) woven into the speech of the Irish characters, where they are placed in revealing juxtaposition with the standard speech of the English interlocutors,” Earls writes. In this comedic performance, the English were the “straight man” while the Irish character in the “double act” was the “comic partner” saying the bulls.

This is how the British music hall tradition produced a stereotype so uproarious that people could hear the infectious laughter all the way across the Atlantic Ocean.

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The word “bull” is likely French in origin, its original meaning being fraud or deceit. It is the word from which TS Elliot coined the term “bullshit.” This was always the implied spirit of the comic bull trope: someone said some bullshit, and then everyone laughed at the bullshit. Except for the straight man, of course, because his job — per the job title — is to maintain a straight face. Stiff upper lips and all that.

“The tradition thus established pervaded the representation of Irish characters on the eighteenth century stage,” Earls writes. “It carried over into the nineteenth century on the English, Irish, and North American stage, in the works of Dion Boucicault and others, as the bull-uttering comic servants and adventurers of the previous century were replaced by bull uttering peasants.”

Ireland, and stereotypes associated with the Irish, were incorporated into an Atlantic literary comic world before the United States of America became a country.

There were of course complaints about representation. “Although writers from Irish and Anglo-Irish backgrounds made a significant contribution to the stereotype, and there is evidence that it was popular with domestic audiences, Irish commentators tended to resent the resultant caricature which was perceived as a misrepresentation of English origin,” Earls writes.

However, as R.L. Edgeworth explained in the first English language essay on the so-called Irish bull, creatively titled “Essay on Irish Bulls,” in 1802, examples of the comic trope originate all over the world, including Ireland. Local circumstances lead to revised and repurposed jokes.

For example, the bull I used in the opening — an Irishman exclaiming that a thermos is the most amazing technology ever invented, “because it keeps hot things hot, and cold things cold. How does it know?” — is almost as old as the thermos. It was used by computer programmers in the 1980s. We also find a version of this joke in a book of Alabama-Auburn jokes, for example.3

Auburn student: I think the most amazing thing in the world is the thermos, because it keeps hot things hot and cold things cold.

Bama student: Well, what’s so amazing about that?

Auburn student: How do it know?

The Alabama-Auburn college football rivalry began in the early 20th century. It has nothing obvious in common with jokes the Irish tell about one another. Yet here are just a few examples of the many jokes that appear in both the Auburn-Alabama joke book as well as the Bumper Book of Kerryman Jokes.4

A terrible fire at the University of Alabama burned the library completely to the ground. Both coloring books were destroyed.

And:

Have you heard about the Kerryman whose library was burned down? Both books were destroyed and one of them hadn’t even been colored in.

Did you hear about the Auburn boys who tried to blow up the Alabama bus? They burned their mouths on the exhaust pipe.

And:

Have you heard about the Kerryman who tried to blow up a bus? He burned his lips on the exhaust pipe.

Did you hear about the Alabama students who hijacked a submarine? They demanded one million dollars and three parachutes.

And:

Have you heard about the Kerryman who hijacked a submarine? He demanded a million euro ransom and a parachute.

How do you define gross stupidity? 144 Alabama students.

And:

What is gross ignorance? 144 Corkmen.

Did you hear about the Alabama student who thought bacteria was the rear entrance to a cafe?

And:

Have you heard about the Kerryman who thought bacteria was the rear entrance to a café?

The University of Alabama football team no longer has any ice water. The player with the recipe graduated.

And:

Why do you never get ice in your drink in Kerry? The fellow with the recipe emigrated.

An Auburn housewife was crying at the kitchen sink when her husband walked in.

“What’s the matter dear?” He asked.

“I was washing the ice cubes with hot water and now I can’t find them.”

And:

Why did the Kerryman lose his job as a barman? He rinsed the ice-cubes in hot water and spent half an hour looking for them afterwards.

A small Alabama town purchased a new fire truck. The next time the councilmen met they discussed how to dispose of the old one. The Crimson Tide councilman suggested they keep it and use it for false alarms.

And:

What are old Kerry fire engines used for? False alarms.

The lawyer, who was a graduate of Alabama was irate. “Do you know the penalty for perjury?” he shouted at the witness. “A few minutes ago you told this court that you have only one brother. Now your sister swears that you have two brothers. Let’s have the truth!”

And:

Why was the Kerryman confused? He couldn’t understand how he only had three brothers while his sister had four.

By dint of long tradition, people from the county of Kerry are framed as the rednecks of Ireland, the Irish that other Irish people are supposed to look down upon. Auburn and Alabama have similarly punched down on one another for generations. Coach Paul “Bear” Bryant used to refer to Auburn as “that cow college,” for example. And there are jokes about other Irish people in the Bumper Book of Kerryman Jokes, too.

None of this is consistent with the 21st century ethos of “not punching down” in comedy. On the contrary, comedians have been “punching down” since Aristophanes’ first show run at the Theatre of Dionysius. Mockery is as necessary to getting along together as any other social interaction.

Without all the jokes about the Irish, and by the Irish about each other, the Irish might never have become Americans.

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Listed above are ten examples that I found in two joke books separated by an ocean and a college sports culture. They point to a common body of Atlantic humor that existed in print before the phonograph, radio, or TV, and before the black or Jewish comedians of the 20th century club scene.

As Earls explains in his essay, during the 19th century, the humor of most Irish bulls resided in a dissonance between the new, still-standardizing English language and the various dialects of Irish people who were mostly still illiterate and transmitting their culture orally. Similarly, some bulls “were noted as having been uttered by English country people or the lower classes in the towns.” Making fun of yokels is universal.

Victorians actually seem to have regarded bulls as a form of education. Published in 1989, The Book of Bulls, Irish and Other by G.R. Neilson wrote that “in addition to the amusement which is caused, the reading of good collection of bulls” tends to “encourage clearness of thought and style, and correctness of speech and writing.”

In the early 19th century, “the Irish were the immigrants with the most definite stereotype,” Earls writes. Stereotypical Irish men had “a derby hat and a dudeen pipe, a belligerent attitude, and a love of whiskey.”

“Thus, when the first American humor periodicals began in the 1830s, the stereotype was ready for them, and the comic Irishman became one of the staples of American comedy.”

He was caricatured as a hirsute, muscular laborer, with cheek whiskers, a broad upper lip, a button nose, and prognathous jaws. Sometimes the features were distorted to give a simian aspect.

[…]

The Irish of the comic papers lived in a shanty: the chimney was a jointed stove-pipe that might lean in any direction. In New York, Shanty-town was located on the cliffs of Coogan’s Bluff, and the Irish were pictured climbing ladders to get to their houses. The typical Irishman had several children and a termagant wife who took in washing. Houlihan dreamt that he had died and was admitted directly to heaven: Saint Peter told him that the time he had spend with Mrs. Houliahn was purgatory enough.

Irish cooks and servants were demanding and domineering. Irish workers were unruly. Irish politicians were corrupt. Irish hatred of England brought foreign disputes to America. Though there was substance to some of these stereotypes, they were increasingly seen as stereotypes after the American Civil War.

“These twisted drawings began to disappear somewhat toward the end of the century,” Earls explains. A prominent magazine “mentioned that where it had been once the fashion to malign the Irish, they became better thought of after Americans experienced other types of foreigners.”

Modernity was arriving fast. The pace of change had quickened in the 19th century, for now many more people were literate; mass culture had arrived. Many of the bulls Earls has found in the archives show Irish people with struggles that would have been familiar to most people living in the bourgeoning shopkeeper culture of America in the 1890s. They had become sitcom characters:

Mike had no faith in life insurance: his brother had put hundreds of dollars in a policy and died anyway. All the company did was to give the widow two thousand dollars to run through with her next husband.

And:

When Pat was told that his boss was going to buy him an automobile truck to drive instead of a team, he decided he would have to subscribe to the Scientific American to learn how to swear at the thing.

And:

When Mike told Pat about the millionaire that had lost $2,000,000, Pat replied that it was better to have happened to the millionaire than to some poor man who could not afford it.

Even as negative stereotypes receded, however, the Irish accents remained. “A priest admonished another widow for being miserly and told her she should lay up treasures in heaven. ‘Och, where I'd niver see thim agin?’” Earls records.

Bridget, a popular character in the 1850s, asked prospective employers: “How many avenings can I have out o’the wake fer coortin’? Does the masther belong to the Laigue of Deliverance? Have ye anny objections to me pore old mither and me husband’s lame nevvy slapin’ in the kitchen?”

It was half the fun of Irish comic tropes, and now the Irish-Americans began to perfect their own comic brogue in English print.

Finley Peter Dunne was a Chicagoan who could write, turning from a newspaper office hand into a police reporter while he was a young man.

As a sportswriter, he coined the term “southpaw” for a left-handed pitcher. He covered presidential nominating conventions. Dunne had a considerable impact on the shape of American journalism — and newspaper writing sharpened his wit to a fine point. Bulls were pithy, and therefore perfect for his style.

Literary historian John O. Rees praises “Dunne’s extraordinary virtuosity in the medium” of written Irish-accented English.5 Dunne told an interviewer in 1899 that “his sole object was to give a faithful impression of the dialect spoken in communities like Bridgeport, the outlying settlement where most of Chicago's Irish under-class lived and worked,” Rees writes.

In Bridgeport, he told his readers, one could hear “all the various accents of Ireland, from the awkward brogue of the 'far-downer' to the mild and aisy Elizabethan English of the southern Irishman, and all the exquisite variations to be heard between Armagh and Bantry Bay, with the difference that would naturally arise from substituting cinders and sulphuretted hydrogen for soft misty air and peat smoke.”

It was mythmaking. “In fact Dunne had picked up his brogue expertise not in Bridgeport but at home as a boy, in the small, prosperous Irish neighborhood on the west Side where his parents immigrants from Kilkenny and Queens County, had settled before the Civil war,” Rees reveals.

Whereas at first Dunne “risked only a few departures in orthography and punctuation from ordinary conversational English,” he “was mindful of the excesses that most local colorists of the day were committing with dialect, as they mistakenly strove for slavish phonetic accuracy.” He criticized writers who made their work unreadable.

During a series of humorous fictional sketches based on the travails of a local politician, “many more contractions” began to appear in the dialogue of his characters. Dunne “never strove for anything resembling absolute authenticity with his brogue, even in its final form,” Rees writes in 1989, for he wanted his readers to be able to read it.

Not unlike his friend Mark Twain in Huckleberry Finn, Dunne managed to suggest the vernacular, with adroit simplification and stylization: he highlighted only a few repeated, striking features, including "iv" for "of," "thr" for "tr," "a" and "r" phonemes lengthened by hyphenation, and occasional carryovers from the mother tongue ("soggarth," "omadhon," "gossoon").

A new reader of Dunne’s style “soon comes to terms with its novel sound patterns and punctuation, and finds that the consistently clear syntax and idiomatic logic make for piquant but quite acceptably easy reading,” Rees says.

“Ye know what orig-inal sin is, Hinnissy,” the titular Mr. Dooley explains in Dunne’s “Mr Dooley’s Philosophy.”

Ye was bor-rn with wan an' I was bor-rn with wan an' ivrybody was bor-rn with wan. 'Twas took out iv me be Father Tuomy with holy wather first an' be me father aftherward with a sthrap. But I niver cud find out what it was. Th' sins I've committed since, I'm sure iv. They're painted red an' carry a bell an' whin I'm awake in bed they stan' out on th' wall like th' ilicthric signs they have down be State sthreet in front iv th' clothin' stores. But I'll go to th' grave without knowin' exactly what th' black orig-inal sin was I committed. All I know is I done wrong.

The original sin of the Irish was to be in the way of the English. By the dawn of the 20th century, the stereotypical sins of the Irish had transformed into all-American jokes. We are still telling some of them to one other, about each other, in Alabama.

Happy St. Patrick’s Day.

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Donald Trump has defeated proletarian internationalism in Cuba. President Miguel Díaz-Canel acknowledged on Friday that his government is negotiating the terms of their surrender with the Trump administration, capitulating rather than attempt ‘resistance’ to internal and external forces it cannot overcome.

They need energy, which can be cut off at any time, and has effectively been cut off for weeks, now. Today, the entire island’s electrical grid reportedly failed. Keeping the lights on is a basic requirement for the proles to feel the least bit of solidarity with their democratic dictatorships. Cubans were not happy in the first place, since they lived in a communist state, and now the proles are absolutely furious at their dictatorship of the proletariat.

The Democratic Socialists of America are a proletarian internationalist organization within the Democratic Party coalition. DSA amplifies and echoes the proletarian internationalist propaganda of foreign antagonists, notably Cuba. A group of DSA representatives decrying the effective blockade of the island is planning to visit Cuba this week to find out for themselves just how real Cubans feel.

Of course, the ‘real Cubans’ they meet will be fellow Communists. It would be hilarious to watch them meet with the Cubans who riot and set police stations on fire, or the political prisoners released on Friday, or the entrepreneurs about to unleash capitalism, which is already part of the surrender. But I doubt that will happen.

Cuba is becoming libre before our eyes. Raúl Guillermo Rodríguez Castro, a grandson of former Cuban President Raúl Castro, the brother of Fidel Castro, has already been floated as a new transitional figure: Castro III, basically, because the Cuban proletarian communism appears to be another hereditary proletarian communism like North Korea.

One wonders what Karl Marx would make of his intellectual progeny who have replicated the old system of inherited monarchy. I suspect he would be utterly confused by the gay space communists, that is, the DSA members with rainbow progress flags and bizarre hair colors.

For that matter, I bet Zohran Mamdani would offend Marx with his Intersectionalist Third Worldist form of communism — though Stalin and Mao would appreciate Mamdani’s autocratic habits.

Reader, have you heard that the real communism, the one that works, has not been tried yet? DSA will tell you it is true. They are ready to explain it, at length, if you have the patience to listen.

I would pay money to see how that hackneyed shtick is received in the actual Cuban streets, right now, but there is a blackout going on, so we will just have to wait for the results of this happy experiment in useful idiocy.

Patience is easy for me, as I know that when Cuba is effectively Libre, the truths behind many old lies will emerge, and it may very well change the American political landscape.

Cuba and Iran are two of the five key strategic antagonists to American interest promoting the most propagandistic visions of America, and both nations hold secret truths that Democrats, DSA perhaps most of all, fear more than nuclear bombs.

This essay is about Cuba. I started thinking about old stories that might change, soon, and this got long enough that I had to follow my rule of putting up a paywall — because I am not a Communist.

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Defensive walls are a universal technology. When Hernando de Soto landed in Florida in 1539 to explore the American southeast, he found “a well inhabited and a fat country” with “some great and walled towns, and many houses scattered all about the fields, to wit, a crossbow shot or two, the one from the other.”1 These walls were built “of great posts thrust deepe into the ground and very rough, and many long railes as big as ones arme laid acrosse between them, and the wall was about the height of a lance, and it was daubed within and without with clay, and had loope holes.”

Defensive walls are also an entirely bourgeois construction; the concept of a gated community existed in the New World before Columbus. One Native American capitol called Pacaha was “very great, walled, and beset with towers, and many loopeholes were in the towers and wall” with “a great lake, that came neere unto the wall: and it entered into a ditch that went round about the towne, wanting but a little to environ it round”, suggesting enormous expenditure of community resources. Each fortified town was close enough to support the others, a peer among equals, but also separated from the others, the palisades creating exclusion rather than inclusion.

This pattern is not unique to the New World. A similar, if smaller, 10,000-year old Siberian site at Amnya was clearly meant to be seen and respected. Similar ditch-and-palisade constructions appear globally in the archaeology.2 From the first appearance of palisaded communities, wooden walls and ditches were high-visibility markers of status, a form of conspicuous consumption before the invention of money. All defensive structures are designed to manage risks, however, and palisades are consistent with risk management in a world of raiding activity. Grim archaeology shows that these defenses were necessary, and not simply for show.

This essay is cross-posted for premium subscribers from Polemology.net, where it will be locked until 2027. It is presented here for premium subscribers to Osborne Ink.

Polemology Positions

The Walls Of Cahokia And The Palisaded Communities Of The Middle Mississippian

Defensive walls are a universal technology. When Hernando de Soto landed in Florida in 1539 to explore the American southeast, he found “a well inhabited and a fat country” with “some great and walled towns, and many houses scattered all about the fields, to wit, a crossbow shot or two, the one from the other…

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2 months ago · 4 likes · Matt Osborne

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The Gays Against Groomers website is at this link.

Michael’s X account is at this link.

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You would not know it from the climate science we have all learned together, but periods of climate warming are consistently associated with the success of the human species, while periods of climate cooling are associated with human suffering. Contrary to the expectations of doomsday, the more likely outcome of anthropogenic climate warming would seem to be a more successful human race, just based on this history. Climate alarmists tell us that we need to rapidly cool the planet to save ourselves, but the historical record suggests this would in fact create enormous human suffering.

This thesis is bound to be controversial, and I am not a climate scientist, nor am I going to argue this topic with scientists. Rather, the climate heresy posed here illustrates why ‘the science’ is so distrusted on this topic. Public perceptions of climate risk generally track the economic times — it is a classic ‘virtue signal’ reflecting our anxieties during times of plenty — while ‘net zero’ carbon policies have earned widespread opposition by destroying industrial bases, impoverishing ratepayers, and immiserating politics. Thus ‘scientists’ as a class now risk a catastrophe of their own making by allowing activists to speak for ‘the consensus of scientists’.

What follows is not an academic thesis or a scientific paper. It is merely an illustration of the history, a narrative for the reader to consider. What risks do we create by associating ‘science’ in the public mind with expensive public policy disasters? Americans no longer trust ‘the experts’ like they used to. What is the fallout of expertise being politicized to failing ends? I am just describing a heresy that already exists, that is bound to grow more popular. If you are adamantly in favor of climate mitigation, then ignoring this problem will not make it go away. Consider this fair warning of what you face.

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It gets hot

Homo sapiens left Africa during Marine Isotope Stage 5 (MIS 5), an interglacial period characterized by warmer temperatures 130,000-80,000 years ago. Fossils appear in the Levant and Arabia during this period as wetter conditions likely created green corridors of vegetation and water resources, facilitating movement through arid regions like the Sahara and Arabian Peninsula. Humans also likely floated along the coasts on primitive watercraft as sea levels rose. Warming even seems to have increased intergroup communication. Our original success as a species took place in a period of warming.

It gets cold

Then around 70,000-50,000 years ago, a period of global climate cooling accelerated the pace of human migration out of Africa. It also produced a DNA bottleneck, that is, mass death, followed by a rebound in human population as the climate warmed again. Put simply, humanity suffered during the cold spell and recovered when the planet warmed again. Cooling is consistently associated with the suffering of the human species.

It gets hot

We currently live in the Holocene interglacial, a warm period that is now about 11,700 years old. The so-called Holocene Climatic Optimum, also called Holocene Thermal Maximum or Hypsithermal, roughly 9,000–5,000 years ago, peaking around 6,000–7,000 years ago, made the Neolithic revolution possible. Everything that followed — the transition to agriculture, settled villages, and the rise of early civilizations along the Nile, Tigris-Euphrates, Indus, and Yellow Rivers — took place in a period of comparatively warm, wet weather compared to previous human history. Warmer, more stable climates made it possible to grow crops every year. Population grew and urbanism followed. Food surpluses freed up people for specialization, leading to advancements in technology, art, and governance. We have succeeded in evolving as a species during this long-term warm period.

It gets cold a couple of times (probably volcanoes)

During this warmer period of prehistory, there were two cooling spells. The 8.2 kiloyear event (~8200–7600 years ago, ~6200 BC) was an major abrupt drop (~1–3°C), possibly caused by freshwater outflow from North American glacial lakes disrupting Atlantic ocean circulation. This created drier conditions, weakened the Indian Ocean monsoons, and made parts of Europe, the Middle East, North Africa, and Asia arid. Neolithic settlements were abandoned. Archaeology has discerned cultural shifts and population disruptions in early agricultural societies such as Mesopotamia. Societies migrated and adopted new lifeways to survive, abandoning early urbanism, so the stress on humanity is visible to science.

The 4.2 kiloyear event (~4200–3900 years ago, ~2200 BC) was a megadrought that dried up Africa, Asia, and the Middle East for centuries. The Akkadian Empire fell to famine and invasion by hungry hordes of displaced people. The Old Kingdom of Egypt saw a drastic decline and near-collapse due to low Nile floods, famine, and resulting instability. The entire Harappan civilization ended its urban phase, abandoned their cities, and migrated southeastwards. In China, the Liangzhu culture collapsed from drought, migration, and upheaval. Cities shrank or disappeared. Social complexity was reduced everywhere.

It gets hot and then cold and then hot again (volcanoes)

The Roman Warm Period, or Roman Climatic Optimum (300 BC to 300 AD), was a prolonged period of relatively warm and stable conditions in the Mediterranean, Europe, and parts of the North Atlantic that is correlated with the rise and success of the Roman Empire, while the cooling spell that followed is correlated with its decline. This was the ‘Little Ice Age’ from ~450–700 CE, including the ‘Year of Darkness’ in 536 that resulted from a volcanic eruption. Western European decline gave us the term ‘dark age’. Similar stresses appear across Eurasia.

The Medieval Warm Period, also called Medieval Climate Optimum or Medieval Climatic Anomaly, from around 950 to 1250 AD, raised temperatures in North America and Eurasia to levels they would not reach again until the 20th century. This period is associated with vineyards in England, Norse settlements in Iceland and then Greenland, broad population growth, stronger centralized governments, reduced need for fortifications in some areas, bustling international trade, and architectural innovation. Food surpluses and milder winters supported prosperity and made exploration feasible.

This period ended with the ‘Little Ice Age’, roughly 1300 to 1850 AD. This was the most recent major cooling period, with temperatures ~0.6°C cooler on average across the northern hemisphere. First, the Great Famine, 1315–1317, killed millions of Europeans. North American cities like Cahokia were abandoned. The cold snap peaked during the so-called ‘Iron Century’ associated with wars of religion, crop failures, famines, and plagues in Europe that reduced the population of some parts of Germany by 70%. In China, the Ming Dynasty fell, and the Chinese population plummeted more than 40% in many regions. Skeletons from this period show global reductions in height.

One side effect of this climate change was European exploration and empire building. The Dutch Golden Age of the late 16th and 17th centuries was a time of economic boom, global trade dominance, scientific and cultural advances, population growth, and urbanization through successful adaptation to the stress. Innovations in whaling, shipbuilding, and agriculture helped the Netherlands adapt and prosper by claiming faraway lands and islands. Climate cooling is therefore associated with colonization and empire, which are allegedly the greatest crimes in human history.

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This is not climate change denial, it is the opposite

First, to accept this hypothesis — that climate warming is good for humanity and climate cooling is bad for humanity — we must believe climate scientists when they tell us the climate history of the planet. Second, it requires accepting as true and given the scientific consensus that the global climate is currently warming, as well as the separate consensus that this warming is anthropogenic, i.e. man-made. What I have done here is simply ask whether anthropogenic climate warming is really a death sentence for humanity and assemble a substantive argument that the answer is no. Feel free to take issue with that conclusion if you want to. My entire point is that it is easy to make this argument.

Taken on its own terms, with hindsight, we can see that our scientific understanding of the history of the climate in human times correlates warming periods with our success, and cooling periods with our suffering. This is a historical view, however. It regards the past instead of projecting into the future, which is what climate activism has always done. Al Gore warned us that the Statue of Liberty would be under rising seas by now. Eight years ago, Greta Thunberg was autistically upset that the world would be dead in five years. Science is poorly served by such prophets. Public policy prescriptions that annoy and impoverish Americans to avoid imaginary future catastrophes are bound to backfire on the people who imposed them.

Moral scolding is also a losing strategy, in the end. People do not become evil by noticing that the catastrophic predictions of climate alarmists are not coming true, that change is not necessarily bad. The climate is indeed changing, as it always does. These are slow, aggregate changes, however, and they are not necessarily bad for us. They might even herald a golden age for humanity, brought on by the heretics who adapted to climate change with the greatest success. Anyway, that would be consistent with human history.

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In 2019, James Talarico said that “prophetic voices like Jesus have helped me reckon with my own whiteness, my own masculinity, my own certainty, my own ego. It’s a never-ending process, and it’s a painful process.” Masculinity and whiteness are sins. White men have to feel pain for their sins. That’s what Talarico and the progressive Democratic Party want for white men: pain. Democrats want the white men of Texas to cry like Jesus and beg forgiveness for voting the wrong way, all these years.

Talarico also carries his bible upside-down, fingers to page edges. A symbolic choice, perhaps. As the rainbow-draped cross from the inside of his church shows, James Talarico holds beliefs that are bigger than the Bible and larger than Jesus. I say this having no dog in the sectarian fight. Rather, Talarico’s Christianity is a recognizable bricolage, a pastiche of beliefs in which the Bible and Jesus are but one element. I have learned to recognize them. They are common.

Today, there are six colors in the progress flag rainbow. Originally, there were eight, but the hot pink stripe was removed because the color was expensive. Bunting and hanging arrangements looked better with even-numbered stripes, too, so turquoise was removed to leave six colors. While the flag of sexual freedom was never the Seven Rays of a secret Rosicrucian brotherhood, it was from the beginning a nod to the ‘New Age’ of Carlos Castaneda, sex magic, yoga, and ‘vibes’. In the cross arrangement above, the twisted white and blue fabric stripes are the suffragette colors. Talarico’s Christity is postmodern. His Jesus is a queer feminist suffering for your sins, and he wants the gun-hugging white dudes to feel the pain they/them feel.

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In photographs taken just before the June 2023 hearing, he sits at the witness table with a crescent moon smile, fing…

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Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont wants a moratorium on data center construction. “We cannot sit back and allow a handful of billionaire Big Tech oligarchs to make decisions that will reshape our economy, our democracy and the future of humanity”, Sanders argued on social media. Instead, we should let Sanders, 84, reshape our economy, democracy and the fut…

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“These are not normal times,” Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut told a small crowd attending the Change.org “People’s State of the Union” at the National Mall on Tuesday night. “And Democrats have to stop behaving normally.”

Murphy appeared with Sen. Ruben Gallego of Arizona, Sen. Adam Schiff o…

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Nick Pope worked for the Ministry of Defence over decades, running the ‘UFO desk’ from 1991 to 1994. While the MoD closed the office in 2006 and announced it was no longer studying UFOs at all in 2009, Pope became a fixture of Ancient Aliens on the History Channel, and more recently, a commentator on S…

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Its time for another roundup of all the writing and podcasting I have done lately. I always try to start these things with a very dumb joke. Is this joke dumb enough? Is it very dumb enough? Give the post a like if you think my joke is enough very dumb, or at least the right amount of very dumb.

Because that is what I consider success, in this case. Set…

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1 - Turns out Barack Obama is a Harmonialist.

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At the Munich Security Conference on Saturday, Hillary Clinton announced that liberal western mass migration policy had gone “too far”, admitting that illegal immigrants are “disruptive and destabilizing” to their host societies. Not that she wants to deport anyone, of course, because that w…

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