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Angelo Plume welcomed Millennial Woes to this edition of Counter-Currents Radio. They had a lengthy discussion on Woes’ series of essays about the downfall of the iconic British television program, Doctor Who, and also talked about how “woke” and anti-whiteness have taken over not only British television, but every other British institution. It is now available for download and online listening.

Topics covered in the livestream:

2:53 – How much of a nerd is MW?

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Greg Johnson, David Zsutty, and Angelo Plume talked about the results of the Counter-Currents internal survey and the various ways to “red pill” not only more people, but the right kind of people. It is now available for download and online listening. Topics discussed include:

10:46 – On studying below average IQ white people

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On the latest broadcast of Counter-Currents Radio, Greg Johnson and Angelo Plume  discussed the unrest and populist uprising in the United Kingdom, which was caused after an African stabbed three little girls to death. It is now available for download and online listening.

Topics discussed include:

9:27 – England, of all places!

To listen in a player, click here or below. To download, right-click the link and click “save as.”

You can order Derek Hawthorne’s book Being & The Birds or: Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Heidegger (But Were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock) here.

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Derek Hawthorne‘s new book, Being and “The Birds,” was the subject of the latest broadcast of Counter-Currents Radio. Philosopher and film critic Hawthorne draws on the thought of Martin Heidegger to illuminate Alfred Hitchcock’s 1963 classic film The Birds, about a series of savage and inexplicable bird attacks on Bodega Bay, a sleepy California fishing village. Hawthorne argues that The Birds depicts a Heideggerian “event” (Ereignis): a sudden and fundamental transformation of the meaning of everything. Modern men believe we are masters of our own destiny. Heidegger calls this “humanism” and rejects it completely. The Birds is an anti-humanist film. In the space of one weekend, all pretensions to the understanding and mastery of nature are shattered, and man is reduced to helplessness in the face of unfathomable mystery.

The author himself was joined by Greg Johnson, Austrian film scholar Martin Lichtmesz, and Counter-Currents’ in-house magus, James J. O’Meara to discuss both the book and the film, and the recording is now available for download and online listening. Topics discussed include:

00:02:57 The Birds and Black Lives Matter

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With only 99 days left until November 5, a hyperkinetic and implicitly schizophrenic election season kicks into full gear, meaning that both sides are flinging shit at one another like rabid island chimps, hoping that at least some of it sticks.

Sometimes the flung feces consist of old comments that came straight from the candidate’s mouth and which undermine their current persona. Other times it’s old e-mail snippets from estranged friends who seek to kneecap their former acquaintance’s political aspirations.

Audio version: To listen in a player, use the one below or click here. To download the mp3, right-click here and choose “save link/target as.”

In one case, it’s a five-year-old essay from a presidential candidate’s father claiming his daughter is descended from an aggressively cruel slaveowner.

In another case, it’s a disgruntled nephew accusing his uncle of dropping N-bombs and wishing death upon the disabled.

And finally, it’s a completely fabricated “confessional” wherein an author-turned-vice-presidential candidate says he used to copulate with a couch.

As I wrote here last week, I do not trust the mercurial, roly-poly, rabbi-endorsed Ohio Senator who went through many name changes until he settled on J. D. Vance. Unlike Vance, who seems to change his name and his political sympathies more often than most people change their socks, my opinion of him has remained steadfastly negative since I reviewed his book Hillbilly Elegy six years ago.

As far as I can tell, the main difference between J. D. Vance and Kamala Harris is that Vance married an Indian woman, whereas Harris plopped out of an Indian woman’s womb.

If Donald Trump picked Vance in the hope of securing disaffected voters in the deindustrialized Midwest, it has backfired spectacularly. One poll found that Vance is “the least-liked vice-presidential candidate since 1980” and that he has a net unfavorable rating of 16 points in Ohio, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, and Wisconsin.

So much for polls. Hitler clearly didn’t kill enough of them.

But since I am a fair and unbiased reporter, I am compelled to defend Vance against false rumors that in his younger years, he fornicated with a couch. The rumors started with some scamp who edited a pirated digital version of Hillbilly Elegy so that it contained this passage:

Years later, I looked at my wedding party of six groomsmen and realized that every single one of them had, like me, fucked a couch. All of us had found ourselves beheld by the eroticism of two cushions, side-by-side, with that lush, inviting valley between. We all knew how to respect one too: With a rubber glove and any lubricant you had on hand. All of us were lonely at some point, pushed away by the women in our lives. It was our outlet and an unspoken-yet-open secret. To want for a couch is to be, and to lay with one as one does? It is a rite of passage into the chambers of manhood.

You can buy Jim Goad’s The Redneck Manifesto here.

Since nearly everyone these days has a terminal case of confirmation bias, those seeking to thwart Trump’s second ascendancy to the presidency gobbled this up like peach pie to the point where the story became so widespread that the Associated Press ran a fact-checking story which found it to be untrue, only to then delete it.

So, in case you were wondering, J. D. Vance never fornicated with a couch. Correction: He may have fornicated with several couches, but he never wrote about it in Hillbilly Elegy.

I also wrote last week about how Vance had previously made several disparaging comments about Donald Trump, only to suddenly, er, “evolve” and “see the light.”

Last week came news that a former classmate of Vance’s at Yale Law School — a male-to-female tranny who calls himself “Sofia Nelson” — forked over to The New York Times roughly 90 text messages and e-mails he and Vance shared from 2014 to 2017. The messages reveal political sympathies diametrically opposed to the MAGA conservative persona that Vance is currently peddling.

Referencing the police shooting of dunderheaded black thug Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, Vance wrote:

I hate the police. Given the number of negative experiences I’ve had in the past few years, I can’t imagine what a black guy goes through.

Regarding his current running mate:

I’m obviously outraged at Trump’s rhetoric, and I worry most of all about how welcome Muslim citizens feel in their own country. . . . But I also think that people have always believed crazy shit and there have always been demagogues willing to exploit the people who believe crazy shit.

The more [that] white people feel like voting for Trump, the more black people will suffer. I really believe that. . . . He’s just a bad man. A morally reprehensible human being.

But the former Vance comments that received the most publicity last week came from 2021, after his (pick one): 1) utterly sincere political metamorphosis; or 2) opportunistic heel turn which reveals that underneath his beard and flab lurks a vast expanse of nothingness.

In a 2021 interview with Tucker Carlson, Vance opined:

We are effectively run in this country via the Democrats, via our corporate oligarchs, by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made, so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too.

After the excavated quote induced the predictable hissing and scratching from the childless cat ladies, Vance defended his comments in a sit-down with Megyn Kelly:

I’ve heard from a lot of conservative women, and frankly, a lot of liberal women who said, “I’m actually glad that you pointed out there’s become something profoundly anti-family in our public policy in our republic conversation.” Obviously, it was a sarcastic comment. . . . I’ve got nothing against cats, I’ve got nothing against dogs, I’ve got one dog at home, and I love him. But look, people are focusing so much on the sarcasm and not on the substance of what I actually said. And the substance of what I said, I’m sorry, It’s true. It is true that we’ve become anti-family. It is true that the left has become anti-child. It is simply true that it’s become way too hard to raise a family. . . .

I agree with Vance that structural economic changes — among them the outsourcing of industry and the importation of cheap multicultural labor — have made it much harder to raise a family than it was in the days when my dad, who didn’t even have a high-school diploma, was able to house and feed four kids and their stay-at-home mother.

But I strongly suspect that these structural economic changes preceded and thereby led to phenomena such as “childless cat ladies.” I’ve long felt that “feminism” wasn’t so much about “female empowerment” as it was about forcing women to compete for wages on a globalized economic plantation.

You can buy Jim Goad’s ANSWER Me! here.

Whereas you may believe that “culture is downstream of politics,” I’m inclined to think that both are downstream of economics.

The Fates, who in most historical depictions appear to be a trio of childless cat ladies, decreed that last week would also be when Pew Research released a study titled “The Experiences of U.S. Adults Who Don’t Have Children.”

I have never postured as a statistician, so perhaps I’m misreading the study’s page on “survey methodology,” but between April and May of this year, it seems as if Pew researchers quizzed “2,542 adults ages 50 and older who don’t have children and 770 adults ages 18 to 49 who don’t have children and say they are not too or not at all likely to have them.”

The authors claim that factors such as race, party affiliation, and gender were equally weighted. Again, tell me if I’m wrong, but it doesn’t appear as if opinions diverged significantly among the childless among these axes, so it might be a tad unfair to place the blame squarely on Leftist feminists.

According to the researchers:

For the most part, the experiences of adults without children and the reasons they give for not having them don’t vary much by gender. This is the case across both age groups.

As much as I’d like to blame women for everything, this survey does not allow me to solely blame them for the fact that last year, American fertility rates reached an all-time low. Also last year came another Pew survey that found “47% of U.S. adults younger than 50 without kids said they were unlikely to have children, up 10 percentage points from 2018.”

At least in last week’s Pew survey, the main demographic factor that divided childless adults, at least along attitudinal lines, was age, which Pew divided into those over 50 and those from 18-49:

The top response for those ages 50 and older is that it just didn’t happen. Meanwhile, those in the younger group are most likely to say they just don’t want to have kids. Women younger than 50 are especially likely to say they just don’t want to have children (64% vs. 50% of men in this group).

Among the reasons that respondents gave for being childless:

By even wider margins, younger childless adults said that abstaining from procreation made their lives easier:

Naturally, the gaping flaw in last week’s Pew survey is that it only interviewed childless adults, so it’s hard to get a bead on exactly who’s having kids, what their political leanings are, and whether they bother to vote.

Other studies on politics and childbearing reach different conclusions. Here’s one from 2020 titled “The Conservative Fertility Advantage,” asserting that counties who voted for Trump in that year’s election “have higher birth rates” than counties that voted for Biden, which seems contradictory when one takes into account that whites have lower birth rates than non-whites:

This is particularly astonishing given that Democrats perform very well in counties with many Hispanic and black voters, who have higher birth rates than non-Hispanic white Americans (and indeed, the more non-Hispanic whites in a county, the lower its birth rate in my models). The relationship is also unchanged if the sample is restricted to only very-high-density counties, such as those representing the center of major cities. In other words, the Republican “fertility advantage” does not arise from more rural counties with higher birth rates, and it exists despite the fact that much of the Democratic Party’s electoral base is among racial and ethnic groups with higher birth rates in general. The split I identify isn’t about race or urbanization or region of the country: it’s about family. Within racial- or ethnic-groups, within states or urbanized areas, the more conservative areas tend to have more babies.

That 2020 report, published by the Institute for Family Studies, says that although blacks and Hispanics — who tend to vote Democratic — have more babies than whites, “the more conservative areas tend to have more babies.” Perhaps liberal whites — both men and women — are so uniquely childless that they skew the stats?

At this point, the swirling maelstrom of seemingly contradictory statistics is giving me a headache. More studies are needed, and I’d be glad to conduct them if you’d be so philanthropic as to supply me with the proper funding.

But for now, I think it’s deeply sexist to blame only the childless cat ladies. Clearly the childless cat men are also a problem.

Sheriff’s Deputy Sean Grayson and Sonya Massey about one minute before he shot and killed her. Source: Illinois State Police

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Nearly two weeks ago after surviving an attempt on his life, it appeared as if Donald Trump had sewn up November’s election.

Then, on Sunday night, Joe Biden dropped out of the race and endorsed the cackling biracial knob-gobbler Kamala Harris as his replacement.

On Monday, Illinois State Police released bodycam footage of a white male officer shooting a mentally ill black woman dead in her home. The shooting had occurred back on July 6, but in politics, timing is everything.

Audio version: To listen in a player, use the one below or click here. To download the mp3, right-click here and choose “save link/target as.”

The black woman, 36-year-old Sonya Massey, was a mother of two, but she apparently lived alone in a dingy, cluttered house in Woodside Township near Springfield, Illinois. Shortly after midnight on July 6, Massey dialed 911, saying she feared there was a prowler outside her house.

To the sonic backdrop of buzzing summertime insects and what is either fireworks or gunshots in the distance, two white male deputies from the Sangamon Sheriff’s Office arrived and searched the premises surrounding Massey’s house. The only suspicious thing they found was a black car parked in the driveway with two smashed windows.

Deputy Sean Grayson knocked on Massey’s door for three minutes. At one point before opening the door, Massey screamed something unintelligible at them, but I could make out the word “fuck.” After Grayson explained that he was from the Sheriff’s Department and that she’d called them, Massey, wearing a nightgown, opened the door, mumbled something about God, and explained that she had needed to get dressed. Right from the start, Massey appeared to be so out of it that Grayson asked her, “Doing all right mentally?”

Once inside the house — which revealed Massey to be a slovenly hoarder — Grayson calmly asked Massey simple questions such as whether she owned the car in the driveway. She said she did not. When quizzed about whether she’d been aware of any damage to the car, she muttered something about a dent. When asked about the smashed windows, she said that had happened “earlier.”

Massey, who has her face buried in her smartphone for most of the interview, is evasive throughout. She even paused to reflect when Grayson asked for her last name, which leads an obviously frustrated Grayson to say, “Shouldn’t have to think about your last name.”

When Grayson notices there’s a pot of boiling water on Massey’s stove, he points at it and says, “We don’t need a fire while we’re here.” Massey gets up from the couch, walks toward the stove, grabs two potholders, and lifts the pot of boiling water. When she notices the cops flinching at the sight of her holding the pot, the following dialogue ensues:

SONYA MASSEY: Where are you going?

SEAN GRAYSON: Away from your hot, steaming water.

SONYA MASSEY: Away from my hot, steaming water?

SEAN GRAYSON: Yeah.

SONYA MASSEY: Ah, I rebuke you in the name of Jesus. I rebuke you in the name of Jesus.

SEAN GRAYSON: You better fuckin’ not. I swear to God, I’ll fuckin’ shoot you right in your fuckin’ face. [draws his gun and points it at Massey]

SONYA MASSEY: Okay, I’m sorry.

SEAN GRAYSON: Drop the fuckin’ pot! Drop the fuckin’ pot! Drop — [fires three shots at Massey]

You can buy Jim Goad’s Whiteness: The Original Sin here.

Grayson’s unidentified partner says he’s going to get his First Aid kit, but Grayson says, “She’s done. You can go get it, but that’s a head shot.”

Seconds later, Grayson tells his partner, “Dude, I’m not taking fucking boiling water to the fuckin’ head — and look, it fucking came right to our feet, too. Goddamn it.”

The 36-minute bodycam video the Illinois State police released on Monday features footage from both officers at the scene. Sean Grayson’s video doesn’t start until 28:07. The shooting doesn’t happen until about 28:21, but slowed-down video clearly shows Massey flinging whatever was in the pot toward the officers.

Historical precedent might justify fearing the sight of a black woman holding a pot of hot water. Consider the following headlines:

WOMAN THROWS BOILING WATER IN BOSS’ FACE AFTER FIRING

Girl who burned other girl in “hot water challenge” sentenced to probation

APD: Woman pours boiling water on boyfriend, injures child

Hamilton Co. woman charged with assault for allegedly pouring boiling water on ex-boyfriend

AUGUSTA WOMAN THROWS BOILING WATER AT HUSBAND

Suburban woman receives 10 years after pouring boiling water on sleeping boyfriend

Sometimes, it’s more than hot water. In 1974, soul singer Al Green’s former lover Mary Woodson tossed “a pot of hot grits” on his naked back, fled the bathroom, and shot herself dead in another room. VICE magazine did a whole daffy article about how black women tossing hot grits on their cheating men is “often a tool of women’s rage and domestic warfare.”

The rich lore black of women tossing hot, boiling substances at others has led to the colloquialism “Nigger Napalm.”

But just like George Floyd resisting arrest after using a counterfeit bill while high on fentanyl was excised from all the major accounts that led to rioting in the summer of 2020, the same thing is already happening with official accounts about what happened to Sonya Massey.

Only a day after announcing he was withdrawing from the presidential race — and the same day that the Grayson/Massey bodycam footage was released — alleged Chief Executive Joe Biden emerged from his crypt to issue an official statement about the shooting:

Sonya Massey, a beloved mother, friend, daughter, and young Black [sic] woman, should be alive today. Sonya called the police because she was concerned about a potential intruder. . . . Sonya’s death at the hands of a responding officer reminds us that all too often Black [sic] Americans face fears for their safety in ways many of the rest of us do not. . . . While we wait for the case to be prosecuted, let us pray to comfort the grieving. Congress must pass the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act now. Our fundamental commitment to justice is at stake.

On Tuesday, Kamala Harris released her own statement:

Sonya Massey deserved to be safe. After she called the police for help, she was tragically killed in her own home at the hands of a responding officer sworn to protect and serve. . . . The disturbing footage released yesterday confirms what we know from the lived experiences of so many — we have much work to do to ensure that our justice system fully lives up to its name. . . . I join President Biden in commending the swift action of the State’s Attorney’s Office and in calling on Congress to pass the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, a bill that I coauthored in the Senate. . . .

Black lawyer Ben Crump — who has made a name for himself riding black coffins as if they were motorcycles and can now add Massey’s family to his client list along with the families of Trayvon Martin, Breonna Taylor, Michael Brown, Ahmaud Arbery, Tyre Nichols, and George Floyd — burped out the following:

This is the worst police shooting video ever. . . . She needed a helping hand. She did not need a bullet to her face. . . . I know it’s hard for some people to even fathom it, but it’s a reality for most people of color, especially black people in America. We think about this every day that but by the grace of God, it could be your mama next or your daughter or your son.

Sean Grayson, who has a checkered history as a police officer and a record of driving under the influence convictions, has been arrested and charged with first-degree murder. Expect him to get the full Derek Chauvin treatment from both the law and other inmates.

Grayson shot and killed Sonya Massey about 200 miles south of Chicago, where the Democratic National Convention will be held next month. Expect her corpse to be used as a prop throughout the convention. She might even be the star of the show.

Savitri Devi proclaims Donald Trump final avatar of Vishnu at Republican National Convention

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Greg Johnson, Angelo Plume (Telegram, YouTube), and David Zsutty continued their discussion of the 2024 US presidential election on the second half of the latest broadcast of Counter-Currents Radio. It is now available for download and online listening.

Topics discussed include:

00:00:32 Right-wing cancel culture

To listen in a player, click here or below. To download, right-click the link and click “save as.”

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Greg Johnson was joined by Angelo Plume (Telegram, YouTube) and David Zsutty on the latest broadcast of Counter-Currents Radio to discuss all the ever-increasing chaos and drama surrounding the 2024 US presidential election, and they of course answered listener questions as well. It is now available for download and online listening.

Topics discussed include:

00:02:46 The assassination attempt on Trump

To listen in a player, click here or below. To download, right-click the link and click “save as.”

Image source: Wikimedia Commons

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In January I’d written about how I found myself “violently disinterested” in this year’s upcoming presidential election.

I’m still cynical about the idea that it matters who’s president when it seems obvious that the country is like a terminal patient waiting to die. In fact, I’m cynical about the idea that it ever mattered who’s president, when it seems obvious that bankers have always run the country.

But far be it from me to rob people of hope in a world that seems hopeless, so if you think Trump is going to get the nation back on course, I’d be a complete dick to rain on your parade.

Audio version: To listen in a player, use the one below or click here. To download the mp3, right-click here and choose “save link/target as.”

Having said all that, the events of the past two weeks have been so insanely dramatic that I now find myself violently interested in the campaign, if only from a dramatic perspective.

On Saturday the 13th, Trump heroically survived an attempt on his life. And yesterday, on the 21st — which is technically outside of the confines of last week — Joe Biden announced on Twitter/X that he was dropping out of the race and threw his full, spindly, brittle-boned weight behind the charmless half-breed whore Kamala Harris.

I was surprised that the announcement came before Biden met with Benjamin Netanyahu, because it had been announced that he planned to clear his possible withdrawal with the Israeli Führer before making that leap.

Online armchair analysts have offered several reasons for why they think Harris is unelectable. Among them:

So Kamala Harris is the chosen one.

She is absolutely batshit bonkers crazy.

This is going to be so fun to watch.

Try not to laugh at the “I can be unburdened compilation” pic.twitter.com/nUu2bBPaqj

— Concerned Citizen (@BGatesIsaPyscho) July 21, 2024

Regardless, early polling finds Harris only two points behind Trump, a position she’s held consistently since July 4.

Many are predicting that August’s Democratic Convention in Chicago will be a repeat of 1968’s bloody DNC in Chicago. The Democrats have about a month to settle on someone else. Names being batted around are almost uniformly female, chief among them Gretchen Whitmer, Hillary Clinton, and Michelle Obama. The only plausible male candidate is California Governor Gavin Newsom, who might be too politically savvy to enter this race and may wait until 2028.

But the prospect of Trump versus a supremely annoying black woman has “race war” written all over it, don’t you think?

Last week at an aggressively multicultural Republican National Convention that bore uncomfortable similarities to the film Idiocracy, Donald Trump selected Ohio Senator J. D. Vance as his running mate.

You may have heard of J. D. Vance, but you probably didn’t know that he wasn’t born as James David Vance but rather as James Donald Bowman before finally settling on a new name that swaps out his middle and last names, only to preserve the “James.”

In 2018 I wrote a critical review of Vance’s breakthrough book Hillbilly Elegy. I titled it “Let’s Blame the Hillbillies for All Their Problems,” but editors changed the title so that it included the word “Dissent,” which, much like “Dissident,” is a word I’d never use, but let’s not quibble. The main thrust of my review is in these three paragraphs:

Yet when Vance takes a bleak look at the rotten-toothed, opiate-addled, food-stamp-slinging people who apparently didn’t have the smarts or character to lift themselves out of their environment like he did, he can’t seem to bring himself to blame anyone but the hillbillies. Rising addiction and suicide rates among this population, along with its unprecedented drop in longevity rates, is solely framed as a moral failing — it can’t possibly be pinned on the fact that politicians sold all the middle- and working-class jobs overseas and imported millions of hostile nonwhite proles to snap up the remaining low-paying jobs.

All the despair he observes is blamed on some vague spiritual sickness rather than on material realities. His diagnosis is no less scolding or condescending than Barack Obama’s finger-wagging about rural losers who bitterly cling to guns and Bibles.

Although he self-identifies as a conservative, Vance sends little moralistic smoke signals throughout the book that indicate he’s entirely under the thrall of liberal thought-policing. He repeatedly refers to racism, sexism, and homophobia as if they were leprosy. He speaks of Barack Obama with a reverence that is so squirrelly, it borders on Chris Matthews’s infamous line about a thrill going up his leg. He suggests that rural Americans who distrust a media who openly hate and defame rural Americans are simply paranoid and uneducated.

Back then, Vance was firmly anti-Trump, calling him an “idiot,” saying he “can’t stomach Trump,” alleging that “he’s noxious and is leading the white working class to a very dark place,” wondering whether Trump might be “America’s Hitler,” and even threatening in 2016 that he might vote for Hillary Clinton if it seemed that Trump had a chance of winning.

As recently as 2022, when he was running for US Senate against Tim Ryan in Ohio, Vance balked at the idea that he was a racist:

Here’s exactly what happens when the media and people like Tim Ryan accuse me of engaging in great replacement theory. What happens is my own children — my biracial children — get attacked by scumbags online and in person, because you are so desperate for political power that you’ll accuse me, the father of three beautiful biracial babies, of engaging in racism. We are sick of it. You can believe in a border without being a racist.

Now, lifted in part by huge donations from billionaire Peter Thiel and the approval of Hasidic singers, Vance is now a firm Trumpster and a rabid/vehement/virulent Zionist.

I do not trust this man.

Last Friday, God swooped down from the heavens and selfishly deprived our planet of Sheila Jackson Lee’s presence, leaving a 74-year-old trail of skid marks on our collective consciousness.

In their fawning obit, The New York Times feted the tiny dead negress as a “Champion for Progressive Causes.” Okay, well, if Ted Kennedy was the “Lion of the Senate,” Sheila Jackson Lee was the Hippo of the House of Representatives.

You can buy Jim Goad’s ANSWER Me! here.

She was born Sheila Jackson in Queens, New York, and for reasons which I will bet my house had nothing to do with raw intelligence, she somehow squirmed into Yale University and was bequeathed a Bachelor of Arts in political science in 1972.

She moved down to Houston, Texas with her undoubtedly longsuffering husband, Elwyn Cornelius Lee, and in 1995 she managed to get elected as the US representative for the Lone Star State’s 18th Congressional district, which is nearly twice as black as it is white, which helps explain why this pint-sized nimrod kept getting elected. She would hold that position until pancreatic cancer nipped her in the bud last Friday, and I already regret typing this sentence, because it leads me to ponder exactly what part of the body the “bud” is and what Sheila Jackson Lee’s bud looked like.

With all due respect and preemptive apologies to anyone who has to live in Houston, I’ve always found it to be the most unpleasant of America’s biggest cities. It’s the nation’s “most diverse” major metropolis and is an endlessly sprawling mishmash that seems to have been designed by Jackson Pollock. Last I checked, Houston was suffering from extended power outages due to Hurricane Beryl, and of course there has been looting.

Ms. Jackson Lee left us with so many memories that would have been funnier if you discount the fact that we were paying her salary and that she infected Congress like a big black herpes sore for nearly 30 years. Among these memories:

In 1997 during a visit to the California operations center for the Mars Pathfinder, she inquired as to whether the Pathfinder had taken a photo of the American flag that astronaut Neil Armstrong had planted there in 1969.

In 2003, Lee expressed her discomfort that hurricane names were too “lily white” and suggested that future hurricanes should receive monikers such as “Keisha, Jamal, and Deshawn.”

As you may know, the Vietnam War was ostensibly a struggle to prevent the spread of Communism, but it failed, and more than 58,000 American soldiers lost their lives in the process, while there are estimates that far more than 58,000 former soldiers killed themselves after coming home. But in 2010 — 35 years after the war ended and became the united Socialist Republic of Vietnam a year later — she said, live and on camera:

Today, we have two Vietnams, side by side, North and South, exchanging and working. We may not agree with all that North Vietnam is doing, but they are living in peace. I would look for a better human rights record for North Vietnam, but they are living side by side.

She implied in 2014 — which was 226 years after the US Constitution was ratified — that the Constitution was, in fact, 400 years old.

In 2019 Lee said she’d personally held an AR-15 rifle in her hands and that it was “as heavy as ten boxes that you might move in.”

She alleged in 2022 that not only can sticks and stones break your bones, but it was “well documented that words nowadays can actually break your bones,” too.

She got caught on tape last year berating her staffers as “fuckups” and “idiots.”

This past spring during the solar eclipse, she delivered this astronomically dubious speech…

Provide unique light and energy so that you have the energy of the moon at night and sometimes you’ve heard the word full moon and sometimes you need to take the opportunity just to come out and see a full moon is that complete rounded circle which is made up mostly of gases and that’s why the question the question is why or how could we as humans live on the moon. The gas is such that we could do that. The sun is a mighty powerful heat that is almost impossible to go near the sun. The moon is more manageable, and you will see in a moment,  or not a moment, you’ll see in a couple of years that NASA is going back to the moon.

. . . and then struggled valiantly to put on her eclipse glasses.

But more than anything else, the world will remember that Sheila Jackson Lee was a dancer.

In a video that rattles the soul even when you factor in that it took place in Philadelphia and all the major actors were black, a stout woman with dreadlocks shot at a seven-month-old male in his stroller. When the black tot’s mother started screeching, “Mah baby!”, the gunwoman yelled “Fuck your baby, bitch!” and then triumphantly sauntered away.

You can buy Jim Goad’s The Redneck Manifesto here.

When police arrived, both parents had fled the scene, and police suspect it’s because they both had outstanding criminal warrants.

On Friday, police arrested 28-year-old Dominique Billups, charging her with three counts of aggravated assault, possession of an instrument of crime, and reckless engagement, among other offenses.

“That video is very disturbing,” said Police Lieutenant Dennis Rosenbaum on Saturday, “and it looks like this all stems from a $100 narcotics debt, is what we’re being told.” Mr. Rosenbaum also said that Ms. Billups was already familiar to police, as she’d been shot in the same neighborhood in August 2022.

A passerby had rushed the wounded infant to a local hospital, where it was determined he’d suffered a non-fatal leg injury from a 9mm bullet, which at seven months old has already earned him lifelong ghetto cred.

“I just lost my baby, the most beautiful child of God,” wails Rayana “Rayy” Smith, the mother of eight-year-old Demeria Hollingsworth, on a GoFundMe page set up to help give a proper burial to the young child who, it must be noted, does not share her mother’s surname.

For undisclosed reasons, Ms. Smith had sent her daughter off to stay with her grandmother in Humboldt, Tennessee for the entire summer, but little Demeria didn’t even live to see the dawning of August.

According to the Daily Mail, police have charged the hapless Demeria’s 12-year-old cousin with first-degree murder and tampering with evidence “after suffocating the little girl with bedding after [a] fight over [an] iPhone”:

The unidentified girl, who turns 13 next week, allegedly used bedding to suffocate Demeria Hollingsworth, eight, before cleaning up and repositioning her body on Monday, according to WREG.

The girl’s mother writes on her GoFundMe page, which as of this writing has already raised nearly $15,000:

The pain I’m feeling is unbearable. I have to now live life without her in this crazy world.

All this crazy, unbearable pain could have been averted if Ms. Smith hadn’t sent her daughter away for the summer. Then again, Ms. Smith would be $15,000 poorer.

In 2022, the Miami Herald ran a story titled “As Desperate Haitians Take to the Sea, They Turn to Vodou To Help Guide Their Journeys.” The piece seemed to unquestioningly assert that voodoo rituals helped superstitious Haitians safely traverse the water in their quest to leech off nations more prosperous than Haiti — i.e., every other nation in the Western Hemisphere:

But mariners and owners of Haiti’s wooden sloops like the ones that have successfully made landings in the Florida Keys since November have another explanation for why, after years of being intercepted, some are suddenly getting through: Vodou.

The faith in the essential role of Vodou in the clandestine migrant operations is rooted in the same mysticism that many Haitians believe launched the first successful slave revolt in modern history.

No mention was made of the fact that from 1791 until the present, Haitians continued practicing voodoo, only to wind up with modern Haiti.

Now comes this headline from the same Miami Herald: “Vodou ritual with candles on migrant boat sets off explosion, kills 40 Haitians at sea”:

A Vodou ceremony aboard a boat filled with desperate Haitian migrants seeking a safe landing ended in tragedy after candles and matches used in the ritual set gasoline-filled drums on fire, setting off an explosion that killed at least 40 people.

I figured I’d end this week’s news on a lighter note.

Image source: Wikimedia Commons

1,583 words / 12:19

As we all commemorate National Watermelon Month and finalize plans to celebrate National Watermelon Day on August 3, it has come to my attention that many black people are terrified of eating watermelon in front of whites.

What a strange thing to fear. I’d think it’s better than being tied to a post and whipped for getting uppity with your slave master, but I’ve never been a black slave, so I wouldn’t know. Then again, neither have any of the modern black writers who write agonized treatises about trembling in horror of confirming “stereotype threat” by nibbling on watermelon under the cruel white gaze.

Audio version: To listen in a player, use the one below or click here. To download the mp3, right-click here and choose “save link/target as.”

On Monday in The Baltimore Banner, John-John Williams IV — apparently three John-John Williamses weren’t enough — wrote about a black woman he knows who refuses to eat watermelon in places where she might risk being seen by a white person:

Chrissy Thornton has a list of rules when it comes to foods she’ll eat in front of white people: no watermelon, no fried chicken, no ribs. She doesn’t like the optics.

“It’s not about watermelon. People say it’s healthy. Of course it is. But that’s not what they see when they see us eating it. They see a stereotype that was created decades ago,” said the 48-year-old Reisterstown resident, who is Black [sic]. “I probably eat more watermelon than anyone I know. But I do it in the privacy of my own people. It’s one more way we can’t allow our counterparts to see us that way.”

A “counterpart” such as myself would assume that black people in Baltimore have more pressing problems than having me accidentally espy them eating watermelon — chief among them living around other black people in Baltimore.

In 2022, balding and bespectacled black lady Renee Graham wrote in the Boston Globe:

On my first trip to Italy years ago, my friends and I did something we’d never dared before — we ate watermelon in public, purchased from a street vendor in Rome.

In 2019, Cynthia Greenlee — a purple-lipped recipient of a MacDowell Fellowship in Literature and winner of the James Beard Foundation Award — wrote about her dread of eating watermelon in front of white people:

My hand hovered over the fruit tray, about to spear a chunk of watermelon, when a white person walked up. I paused.

Does she ever pause while walking the streets alone at night and sees an unfamiliar black man approaching her? And if so, has she ever written about that?

In November 2014, while accepting a National Book Award for her “adolescent verse memoir” Brown Girl Dreaming, Flavor Flav lookalike Jacqueline Woodson suffered the indignity of being reminded by Daniel Handler, the white man who introduced her, that she was allergic to watermelon. The previous summer, Handler had graciously hosted Woodson at his Cape Cod home and tried to serve watermelon soup, whereupon Woodson informed him that she was allergic to it. But Woodson rewarded his generosity by writing an essay in The New York Times she titled “The Pain of the Watermelon Joke.” She accused Handler of operating from “a place of ignorance.”

In 2015, gay black TV broadcaster Vester Flanagan shot two white co-workers live and on camera, then blew off his own head during a police chase. He’d previously claimed that workers had taunted him by intermittently placing a watermelon “in a strategic location where it would be visible to newsroom employees entering and exiting the building.”

In the grand scheme of things, I’d reckon it’s worse to commit a double homicide than allegedly being forced to view the occasional strategically-placed watermelon, but I’m clearly operating from a place of ignorance.

You can buy Jim Goad’s The Bomb Inside My Brain here.

In 2018, the President of New York University said it had been “inexcusably insensitive” that in the course of honoring Black History Month, a dining hall at his school offered what The New York Times called “two beverages with racist connotations: Kool-Aid and watermelon-flavored water.”

In 2019, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts offered a formal apology after a black teacher named Marvelyne Lamy claimed that a staff member had told her group of black students, “No food, no drink, and no watermelon.” Boston Mayor Marty Walsh said that the purported remark was “incredibly disturbing.” The story made international news, with the Daily Mail dubbing it “shocking racist behavior.” The shockingly racist staff member claims they were misheard, however, and that they’d merely said, “No food, no drink, and no water bottles.”

In 2022, officials at the Children’s Museum of Indianapolis had dared to offer “Juneteenth Watermelon Salad” but backpedaled when it had been deemed “offensive after a photo of the salad circulated on social media.” A museum rep added, “We deeply regret the hurt and the pain that the food offering in our food court has caused, and we apologize.”

I’d bet my house that I experienced more pain reading that comment than any black children did at the prospect of eating free watermelon salad.

In 2023, the principal of a middle school in Nyack, New York sent a groveling apology letter to parents:

The offering of chicken and waffles as an entree with watermelon as a dessert on the first day of Black History Month was inexcusably insensitive and reflected a lack of understanding of our district’s vision to address racial bias.

Wait a cotton-pickin’ minute — what’s so bad about eating watermelon? Alongside the similarly hateful banana, it’s my favorite fruit. One summer about nine or ten years ago, back when Jacqueline Woodson was grieving about painful watermelon jokes and Vester Flanagan was killing white people because he’d felt taunted by their watermelon placement, I polished off three watermelons in five days.

The Wikipedia page “Watermelon stereotype” attempts to explain the roots of this deeply painful meme:

The watermelon stereotype is an anti-Black [sic] racist trope originating in the Southern United States. It first arose as a backlash against African American emancipation and economic self-sufficiency in the late 1860s.

After the American Civil War, in several areas of the south, former slaves grew watermelon on their own land as a cash-crop to sell. Thus, for African Americans, watermelons were a symbol of liberation and self-reliance. But for many in the majority white culture watermelons embodied, and threatened, a loss of dominance. Southern White [sic] resentment against African Americans led to a politically potent cultural caricature, using the watermelon to disparage African Americans as childish and unclean, among other negative attributes.

While researching this article, I saw this narrative unquestioningly pushed over and over and over and over and over and over and over: Whites felt threatened by black entrepreneurial savvy as demonstrated through watermelon sales, so in order to demoralize them and thwart the possibility that blacks would, oh, master math and physics and economic theory and suddenly start inventing things, they created a cruel stereotype that blacks enjoy eating watermelon.

It would have been nice if any of these people peddling this storyline had cited evidence from any white person saying something in the spirit of, “We felt economically threatened by these coons selling watermelons, so we had to shut ’em down with gross stereotypes of coons eating watermelons.” Is it too much of me to ask for even one citation?

The Wikipedia page on “watermelon stereotype” says the “first known image associating Black [sic] Americans with watermelons” was a benign 1866 illustration adjoining a newspaper article in Charleston, South Carolina that explained:

The Southern negro in no particular more palpably exhibits his epicurean tastes than in his excessive fondness for watermelons. The juvenile freedman is especially intense in his partiality for that refreshing fruit.

But the same Wikipedia page suggests that around the same time, black minstrels were propagating their own watermelon stereotypes:

The link between African Americans and watermelons may have been promoted in part by African American minstrels who sang popular songs such as “The Watermelon Song” and “Oh, Dat Watermelon” in their shows, and which were set down in print in the 1870s.

Sample lyrics from “Oh, Dat Watermelon”:

Den Oh, dat watermelon,

Excuse me for suspecting that these black minstrels unwittingly presented far grosser caricatures of black behavior than that anemic newspaper article did.

Film shorts from the late 1890s such as Watermelon Contest depicted black men sloppily gobbling on the oversized and deeply-hydrating fruit — but, as with the minstrels of the 1870s singing watermelon songs, these were black people depicting themselves.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_0BtFa1MV1Y

I could be wrong, but it seems as if most of the egregiously cartoonish depictions of blacks and watermelons that were produced by whites — things such as the “coon cards” of the early 1900s, songs such as 1916’s “Nigger Love a Watermelon Ha!, Ha!, Ha!” and 1941’s Universal Pictures animated cartoon Scrub Me Mama with a Boogie Beat — came after the watermelon songs by black minstrels in the 1870s. It doesn’t seem as if whites created this stereotype as much as they observed it and then appropriated it.

Rather than modern white people being “inexcusably insensitive,” I think it’s more accurate to describe contemporary blacks as being pathetically thin-skinned.

I can think of a lot of worse things that black people do than eating watermelon. I doubt it’s even in the Top 100. And yet, unlike eating watermelon, they aren’t afraid to do most of these things in public.