Category: Celebrities

No Man Has Ever ‘Won’ an Argument With His Wife (Change My Mind)

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Now, I heard a cryin’ man
Is half a man, with no sense of pride.
But if I have to cry to keep you,
I don’t mind weepin’, if it’ll keep you by my side.

Ain’t too proud to beg, sweet darlin’.
Please don’t leave me girl (don’t you go).
Ain’t too proud to plead, baby, baby.
Please don’t leave me girl (don’t you go).

Everything you need to know about love, you can learn from old R&B tunes, unless you’d prefer to learn it from old country-and-western songs. What the Temptations were laying down in 1966 has stood the test of time because it’s the absolute truth — however proud a man might be, love will force him to beg for mercy, because that’s how women are.

Rollo Tomassi has expounded on women’s inherent solipsism — it is no use trying to convince a woman to view any conflict or dispute from an objective or logical perspective. If she feels she has been wronged or insulted, no amount of rational argument will convince her otherwise.

Of course, men can be self-centered, emotional and stubborn, but when it comes to male/female relationships, it is the woman’s solipsistic certainty of her own rectitude — her feelings are never wrong — that so often proves the great stumbling block to happiness. No matter how irrational her anger may be, you’re not going to help the situation by telling her she’s wrong to be angry. Indeed, the two words you should never tell her in such a moment are “calm down.” Oh, that will set her off!

If she feels hurt, it doesn’t matter how many reasons you offer for why she shouldn’t feel that way. Her feelings are beyond criticism.

These meditations on the dynamics of male/female relationships are not just random or coincidental. Some readers will be aware of the situation — one which has “gone viral,” as the kids say — that has prompted me to share whatever little wisdom on this subject I can claim to have obtained after 34 years of marriage. Tim Pool is among the several YouTubers who’ve weighed in on the controversy, involving a Ring surveillance video of an unfortunate domestic situation. Tim says it looks to him as if the guy in the video has been “set up,” and that may be true. Dragging people’s dirty laundry into the public eye — leaking a video to Yashar Ali, really? — is the kind of scorched-earth tactic that connotes an irreconcilable breach and, as Tim says, it’s probably wrong to judge somebody on the basis of one (out-of-context) video clip.

“If Americans can be divorced for ‘incompatibility of temper’ I cannot conceive why they are not all divorced. I have known many happy marriages, but never a compatible one. The whole aim of marriage is to fight through and survive the instant when incompatibility becomes unquestionable. For a man and a woman, as such, are incompatible.”
— G.K. Chesterton

Perhaps not as memorable as a Motown lyric, Chesterton’s observation is nevertheless true. Men and women are different; trying to reconcile and accommodate these differences is the great challenge of marriage.

The goal of marriage is cooperation. When husband and wife begin trying to prove each other wrong, then it becomes a competition, and marital happiness becomes impossible. If love means anything — if it denotes more than mere affectionate sentiment — then it must include the willingness to lose an argument, rather than to make your beloved unhappy by a bullheaded determination to prove yourself right.

God knows that stubbornness and arrogance are among my faults. As I’ve often remarked, there are two kinds of people in the world — people who agree with me, and people who are wrong. When I was younger, I actually enjoyed arguing for the sake of argument, until it became apparent to me that I was wasting my time trying to convince wrong people of their error. If someone respected my judgment, they wouldn’t be disagreeing with me, would they? So the argument itself is evidence that they consider me unworthy of respect, and why should I indulge them as they seek to prove that I don’t deserve respect?

Perhaps (suggesting this only as a hypothetical possibility) I have been wrong about something occasionally, but if so, I’ve long since forgotten those occasions, and thus my arrogant conviction of my 100% correctness, which certainty forbids me ever to argue with anyone who disagrees with me. Don’t bother arguing with an old man who, even when he was very young, believed he already knew everything, and through the years has not become less convinced of his know-it-all wisdom.

Self-awareness requires me to confront the fact that no one could ever admire me as much as I admire myself, and to realize that this arrogance can be annoying to others. So I’ve learned to be silent, to bite my tongue when I’m tempted to correct people for being wrong. They don’t want to listen to my advice, and are therefore free to go to hell in the time and manner of their own choosing. It’s not my responsibility.

You have to pursue a type of Zen acceptance about your inability to tell other people how to live their lives, or otherwise the sense of tragedy will overwhelm you. Like, why did the Patriots miss out on the opportunity to draft tight end Tucker Kraft? He went to the Packers, alas, and instead Bill Belichick picked a linebacker from Sacramento State — an error, I’m sure, but Bill Belichick didn’t ask for my advice on the NFL draft, and there’s no point arguing about it now. Selah.

So it is with the video of the domestic trouble involving the famous YouTube personality. There are liberals trying to claim that this incident proves that “tradcon” (traditional conservative) ideas about marriage are wrong, and I’m like, “What? Are you kidding me? Because I consider myself both traditional and conservative and sure as hell would never talk to my wife like that.” But people don’t ask my advice, see?

Y’all need to listen to some old Motown records and chill out. That may not sound like “tradcon” advice, but it sure is better than getting divorced over an argument about your dog. Change my mind.



 

 

Obscure Online ‘Celebrities’ and the Fragmentation of Popular Culture

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Chris and Katie Tyson, at their 2018 wedding

Once upon a time (he says, as if speaking of a distant and possibly mythical past) there were three major national TV networks, which was where practically all “famous” people were seen. During the 1980s, the proliferation of cable TV channels began to change this equation, and one of the responses to the challenge of cable — which cut into the audience and advertising revenue of the “Big Three” networks — was the rise of “reality TV” series. Survivor made its debut in 2000 on CBS, and The Bachelor premiered on ABC in 2002. The people who appeared on such programs became regarded as “celebrities,” as they were seen by audiences numbered in the millions, but these audiences were mere fractions of the population, much smaller proportionately than the viewership of the Big Three networks in earlier decades.

If you went back to the early 1970s, 20 million people routinely tuned in for Monday Night Football which meant that, in a nation of 200 million, fully a tenth of the population was watching Frank Gifford, Howard Cosell and “Dandy Don” Meredith. Thirty years later, although The Bachelor was considered a huge hit, its average audience was less than 10 million, in a nation of more than 300 million, meaning it was watched by only about 3% of the population. And this trend of audience fragmentation has only accelerated with the rise of social media. There are now YouTubers with audiences larger than many cable-TV programs (e.g., most of CNN’s lineup) and yet if you’re not a fan, you’ve probably never heard of these so-called celebrities, like “Mr. Beast.”

Jimmy Donaldson, 24, has more than 140 million YouTube subscribers on his MrBeast channel. He launched his channel while still in middle school in North Carolina and by 2021 reportedly was earning more than $50 million a year. Obviously, this makes him far more popular than, say, CNN’s Don Lemon, but I’d never heard of “Mr. Beast” before, and probably most of my readers hadn’t, either, because we’re grown-ups and don’t have time to watch the sort of silly stunts that constitute most of this YouTuber’s content. The astonishing success of “Mr. Beast,” however, enabled Donaldson to hire a lot of his hometown buddies to help him produce content, and among these buddies was Chris Tyson.

Tyson is now a YouTube “celebrity” in his own right. Three years ago, a few months after his wife Katie gave birth to their son Tucker, Chris “came out” as bisexual. He and Katie subsequently divorced, and now Chris Tyson has apparently decided that he is really a “she”:

Chris Tyson, A popular content creator who frequently appears on YouTuber MrBeast’s channel, revealed on Twitter today that they are taking hormone replacement therapy.
“HRT, and it’s only been 2 months,” Tyson posted on Twitter, quote-tweeting a MrBeast fan who shared a screengrab of them in the YouTuber’s most recent video, commenting on their changed appearance.
In a follow-up tweet on their alt account, Tyson, who says on Twitter they go by any pronouns, clarified their stance on gender-affirming hormone replacement therapy, quote-tweeting a fan who suggested Republicans are trying to “erase the trans community.”
“Informed consent HRT saved my and many others’ lives,” Tyson wrote. “The hurdles gnc [gender non-conforming] people have to jump through to get life-saving gender-affirming healthcare in a 1st world country is wild to me. Just let people make informed decisions about their own bodies.”
A longtime friend of MrBeast, aka Jimmy Donaldson, from childhood, Tyson appeared in many of Donaldson’s earlier videos, including one where they wrap the YouTuber in 100 layers of Saran wrap. Tyson has since become a permanent fixture on Donaldson’s channel, along with a slew of Donaldson’s childhood friends, many of whom have carved out their own careers as popular content creators.

Well, that’s weird. Why is Rolling Stone using “they/them” pronouns for Tyson, even though Tyson himself hasn’t demanded such treatment? Beyond that, however, why would a guy throw away what seemed to be a happy marriage in order to pursue such bizarre adventures in gender confusion? And what does it mean that this person is an influential “celebrity,” despite the fact that most grown-ups had no clue that he even existed? But then again, never mind me, I’m a guy so old that I remember when MTV played music videos. Talk about your ancient history . . .



 

 

Crazy People Are Dangerous: ‘Transgender Influencer’ Arrested After Getting Naked, Causing Disturbance at Miami Hotel

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Nicholas Nguyen, a/k/a “Nikita Dragun,” was arrested Monday and charged with felony battery on a police officer after causing a disturbance at a Miami hotel. According to reports, Nguyen/“Dragun” was naked in the pool area and had been engaging in disorderly conduct before police were called. When they arrived, police went to the room where Nguyen/“Dragun” was staying, and were spat on by the defendant. This was first reported by TMZ with the usual let’s-play-along-with-the-delusions female pronouns, and Time magazine is upset because Nguyen/“Dragun” was “misgendered” in the arrest affidavit.

Permit me to suggest that if you get naked at the hotel pool and thereby display your penis to the general public, the police who arrest you can be expected to presume you are male. Because, in fact, you are male.

Chances are that you have never heard of this person before, but we are living in an age when it is possible to become a “celebrity” even though the vast majority of people have no idea who you are. And so that you may be fully informed, here’s the boilerplate paragraph from Time:

The 26-year-old content creator, who is transgender, became popular in the beauty YouTube space in 2015. Since then, her candor about her transition and popular makeup videos have helped her to amass a following of more than 29 million combined followers on social platforms including TikTok, YouTube, Twitter, and Instagram. Last year, Dragun revealed her struggles with her mental health to her followers on social media. The beauty influencer uploaded a post to Instagram in which she said that she was involuntarily committed to a psychiatric facility for eight days following a manic episode on Thanksgiving Day. She then uploaded a YouTube video—which has since been deleted—in May, where she revealed she had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder.

Oh, “her candor about her transition” attracted “a mass following” and Nguyen/“Dragun” is now a “beauty influencer” with 29 million followers.

The fact that this person is a dangerous psychotic? Like the man said, when the going gets weird, the weird turn pro, and you’ve got to admit that weirdness is everywhere nowadays.

Nicholas Nguyen is a “woman” and Joe Biden is “president,” and it’s a hate crime to express skepticism about either of these assertions.

See? The before-and-after passport photos, helpfully posted to Instagram by the “transgender influencer,” demonstrate that the federal government is now playing along with these delusions. If you believe you’re a woman, you are a woman, as far as the U.S. State Department is concerned, and they’ll issue you a passport that declares this to be the case.

But a delusion is still a delusion, even if government agencies are willing to pretend otherwise, and then one day the cops show up because you’ve been parading around naked at the hotel pool — the unmistakable reality flopping around for all to see — and you end up in handcuffs at the county jail, pleading with a judge not to put you in a cell with other men.

Just so you know, Miami-Dade Corrections officials say that Nguyen/“Dragun” was never actually housed at the county jail:

“Inmate Dragun never made it beyond the booking process prior to release; therefore, she was never placed in a men’s unit,” corrections spokesperson Juan Diasgranados said in a statement. “All inmates undergoing our intake process remain in an open seating (open booking) area, in the presence of correctional staff.”
Diasgranados added Dragun was placed in a holding cell by herself due to her “high-profile status” before being released, and that she was escorted by an LGBTQ officer throughout her time at the facility.
“Miami-Dade Corrections and Rehabilitation Department (MDCR) is committed to protecting the rights of the transgender community and of all LGBTQ people,” the statement read. “MDCR has procedures in place for the appropriate intake, housing, and medical needs of transgender inmates, and we are committed to ensuring that all inmates in our custody, including transgender persons, are treated appropriately throughout our intake, classification and placement process.”

So they’re “treated appropriately” — although I suppose there are different opinions about what the appropriate treatment might be.

Speaking of treatment, TMZ reports Nguyen/“Dragun” is now “receiving professional mental health care in a facility”:

Nikita’s rep, Jack Ketsoyan, tells TMZ … “We want to thank everyone for the overwhelming love and support for Nikita during this time. She is in a safe environment addressing her mental health. We ask for continued respect for her privacy and the sensitivity of this matter as she seeks treatment and healing.”
We’re told Nikita began seeking treatment Wednesday evening.
The transgender influencer has been open about her mental health struggles — in May she shared on her YouTube channel that she had been diagnosed as bipolar.
Nikita said she has a family history of bipolar disorder, though she was initially surprised by her diagnosis, because she didn’t quite understand what it meant to be bipolar. As a result, she says she didn’t relate her own symptoms to the disorder.

And by being “in a safe environment,” of course they mean, strapped in a straitjacket, locked in a padded room and injected with Thorazine.

Can’t wait for Nikita’s next TikTok video, doing the Haldol shuffle.

Y’know, it just now dawned on me that I missed the opportunity to do a really clever “Florida Man” headline on this story. Too bad.

Crazy People Are Dangerous.




 

A Cliché of a Stereotype: Kathy Griffin and the Pathetic Fate of Liberal Cat Ladies

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Which comes first, the liberal politics or the envious bitterness?

It’s one of those chicken-or-the-egg questions of causality that psychologists should spend more time researching. It’s not that all liberal women are doomed to be lonely and unpopular spinsters, nor even that every cat lady is a Democratic voter. Yet there is an observable correlation of traits that cannot be dismissed as a random coincidence.

If a woman is both physically attractive and emotionally capable of forming durable relationships, it is likely that she will get married while still young, and remain married. Even if such a woman should experience a breakup — because anybody can be afflicted with bad luck — she should not have a problem finding another partner and, having learned the lessons from her earlier misfortune, will try to avoid whatever mistakes caused her previous breakup. A certain level of humility is required to be able to learn from your mistakes, however, and one notices that people who can’t ever seem to make relationships work are reluctant to admit that they are the problem. No, no, no — they’re always the victim, and somebody else is always to blame. And the tendency to seek scapegoats is, I would argue, more aligned with the liberal worldview.

The Victimhood Mentality is just not conducive to happiness.

Kathy Griffin was past 40 before she married for the first time, but was divorced five years later. She then bounced around for about 10 years before ending up with another guy whom she married in 2020. She is, needless to say, childless. One may attribute Griffin’s fate to mere bad luck, but is it really just a coincidence that she is also a particularly obnoxious liberal? Or is “the personal the political,” as feminists tell us?

Probably not just a coincidence, I’d say. Kathy Griffin is not just a liberal, but a stereotype of everything that makes liberals unpopular. And obviously, though she was typical in the way she succumbed to Trump Derangement Syndrome, it wasn’t just about Trump.

Griffin is an insecure popularity-seeker, and will therefore reflexively jump onto any passing liberal bandwagon in a pathetic effort to grab the spotlight as The Most Attention-Worthy Liberal Celebrity:

Comedienne Kathy Griffin earned herself a Twitter suspension on Sunday when she impersonated billionaire Elon Musk as a stunt for Democrats.
Changing her profile name while employing Musk’s exact profile picture, Kathy Griffin then asked her thousands of followers to “Vote Blue” in the coming midterm election.
“Hey complainers and activists. Want to see real activism? Watch this. RT w #VoteBlue,” Griffin tweeted.
Twitter suspended Griffin’s account within an hour.
Though Elon Musk did not address the Griffin situation directly, he issued a clarification that Twitter will immediately suspend impersonating accounts that do not specifically label themselves parody.

She desperately wants to be relevant, see? And if that kind of relevance is all you’ve got to live for, your life must be pretty empty.

My wife likes to relax in the evening by binge-watching reruns of Seinfeld, and it just so happened that one of the episodes she was watching Monday was “The Cartoon” (Season 9, Episode 13) with Kathy Griffin guest starring as Sally Weaver, the former college roommate of George’s deceased fiancée Susan. One of the subplots of the episode is about Kramer’s inability to keep his mouth shut. The show begins with Jerry and Kramer walking down the street:

Jerry: Oh, no, it’s Sally Weaver. . . . She moved to New York a few years ago. She’s trying to become an actress. . . . Untalented. She’s always inviting me to see her in some bad play in a tiny room without ventilation. . . . She should just give up. . . .
Sally: I’m on my way to an audition. Still waiting for that big break.
Kramer: Why don’t you just give up?
Jerry: Kramer!
Kramer: At least that’s what Jerry says. Now face it, if it hasn’t happened, it’s not gonna happen.

Later in the show, Kramer has been checking Jerry’s phone answering machine messages and says Sally called to say that she’s quitting show business because Jerry “ruined her life.”

Jerry: What? You’re the one who ruined her life.
Kramer: Well, that’s not how she remembers it.
Jerry: Well, I got to talk her out of this.
Kramer: I thought you said she stinks?
Jerry: She does stink and she should quit. But I don’t want it to be because of me. It should be the traditional route — years of rejections and failures till she’s spit out the bottom of the porn industry.

“She does stink and she should quit.”

As a summary of Kathy Griffin’s career, that’s perfect.




 

‘The Hard-Hitting Social Commentary We’re Trying to Get Across’

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Olivia Wilde and Florence Pugh in ‘Don’t Worry Darling’

Because my 19-year-old daughter is a Harry Styles fan, I have a built-in bias against Olivia Wilde, the 38-year-old ex-girlfriend of Jason Sudekis, whom Styles is currently dating. Also, it should be pointed out, Wilde’s grandfather was an infamous Commie, which is all the more reason to hate her. Now, as the cherry on top of this hot fudge sundae of hate, we have the revelation that a villainous character in Wilde’s new movie is based on Jordan Peterson — or, to put it more accurately, the character is based on an ignorant stereotype of Peterson:

Katie Silberman: [Heavy sigh, more scrolling] Last major point, I guess, is the Jordan Peterson thing.
Shane Van Dyke: The what?
Olivia Wilde: Frank the cult leader. Chris Pine? Katie and I thought the version you pitched us was a bit one-note, so we put our heads together and figured out a way to really bind all the hard-hitting social commentary we’re trying to get across. WB thought we should let you know, just so there’s no surprises when the movie comes out.
Carey Van Dyke: And what does Frank have to do with Jordan Peterson?
Olivia Wilde: You know…white male pseudo-intellectual. Leader of the incels. Spouts weird shit about chaos and lobsters?
Katie Silberman: That’s Frank all over.
Shane Van Dyke: No disrespect, gang, but have you read Jordan Peterson or listened to any of his lectures?
Olivia Wilde: Um, eww! I’ve never drank bleach before but I know it’s poison!

Perhaps most offensive here is Wilde’s assertion that Peterson — a professor of clinical psychology, who produced important research while on the faculty of Harvard in the 1990s — is a “pseudo-intellectual,” No, ma’am. Whatever your disagreements with the professor may be, he is a genuine intellectual, and there is nothing “pseudo” about it. Apparently, Wilde’s opinion of Peterson is not based on direct knowledge of his work, but rather is based on feminist criticism of his work. And her idea that Peterson is “Leader of the incels” — where did she get that? Isn’t that misbegotten notion also likely traceable to something Wilde got by reading Amanda Marcotte, Jessica Valenti and other feminists?

There is a paranoid pattern of belief on the Left where everything they hate is somehow related to every other thing they hate. For example, liberals hate Trump and they hate racism, therefore Trump is a racist, and anyone who writes something that liberals consider racist must be connected to Trump. The whole thing about “incels” sprang into public consciousness in 2014 when Elliot Rodger went on a murder spree in Santa Barbara, California. Feminist writers like Marcotte and Valenti became rather obsessed with this massacre as some kind of symbol of the fatal menace of “misogyny,” of which “incels” like Elliot Rodger were the violent tip of the hateful iceberg. A few months after the Santa Barbara massacre, “GamerGate” zoomed into prominence and, in the minds of many feminists, was instantly connected to the “incel” phenomenon. It was around the same time that Jordan Peterson began to become popular on YouTube, and I can only conjecture that his temporal proximity to these events caused feminists to associate him with the whole “incel”/“misogyny” phenomenon. Of course, there is the fact that Peterson looks at human differences from the standpoint of evolutionary psychology (dismissed by Wilde as “weird shit about chaos and lobsters”) which feminists insist is inherently sexist. That is to say, any man who suggests there are natural differences between men and women is guilty of “misogyny,” according to feminists and — to follow this everything-is-connected belief pattern to its irrational conclusion — because “incels” are also misogynists, then it is fair to view Jordan Peterson as a “leader of the incels.” In the same way, the Soviet Union imposed Lysenkoism and condemned basic agricultural science as “bourgeois.”

If the only tool you’ve got is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. And if the only ideology you have is feminism, every problem looks like misogyny. Because of the unipolar dynamic of feminist ideology, everything they consider problematic is lumped together as part of an oppressive system, and therefore Professor Peterson gets dumped into the same “basket of deplorables” as Donald Trump and “incels.”

Such is the “hard-hitting social commentary” Olivia Wilde wedged into her new movie, and really, Harry Styles needs to dump that bitch.

By the way, Harry — my daughter loves you. And she’s cute.

 

She doesn’t like lobsters, though.

UPDATE: Welcome, Instapundit readers!




 

Have We Reached Peak ‘Woke’ Yet?

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Sydney Sweeney is a young actress with enormous . . . talent. She has 14 million Instagram followers and is best known for her starring role on the HBO series Euphoria, for which she recently won an Emmy award.

Miss Sweeney was raised in rural Idaho in a religious family, and when her mother recently celebrated her 60th birthday, the party had a “hoedown” theme, with guests dressing in cowboy garb. But some fans, who also follow Miss Sweeney’s brother Instagram account, noticed that (a) Miss Sweeney’s father was wearing a pro-police “blue line” flag T-shirt and (b) some guests were wearing red “MAGA” style hats. The hats actually said, “Make 60 Great Again,” an obvious reference to her mother’s birthday, but what ensued was a big social-media firestorm, with left-wing political activists endeavoring to “cancel” Miss Sweeney because of her family’s apparent Republican sympathies.

Can we please stop this deranged “woke” witch-hunt mentality, in which we are expected to be outraged that white people in Idaho are voting Republican? I mean, I don’t know if you’ve seen any Idaho poll numbers lately, but unless the mob wants to “cancel” two-thirds of the population of Idaho, they need to shut up. Is it really so shocking that people who live in rural America generally have beliefs and attitudes that don’t match the preferences of urbanites? Please, forget about politics long enough to focus on Sydney Sweeney’s enormous . . . talent.




 

The Tragedy of Anne Heche

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“Homophobia was rampant in the mid-’90s, with a 1996 Gallup poll finding just 27% of Americans approved of same-sex marriage.”
— New York Post

Of course, we are expected not to consider the possibility that the 27% were wrong, nor to question the possibility that Anne Heche was anything other than a victim of “homophobia.” One could recite a long list of heterosexual actors who wrecked their careers through bad personal choices — many of whom died of drug overdoses or other not-entirely-accidental causes at much younger ages than Anne Heche did.

Heche was something of a rising star when she hooked up with Ellen DeGeneres at a Vanity Fair Oscar party in 1997. Heche, then 28 and more than a decade younger than DeGeneres, claimed she had never before been involved with a woman before. Her relationship with DeGeneres lasted less than three years and, while it didn’t exactly end Heche’s career — she continued acting in movies and television up until her death — certainly it dimmed her star power in Hollywood:

“It changed my life forever,” Heche admitted to Page Six in 2020. “The stigma attached to that relationship was so bad … I didn’t do a studio picture for 10 years. I was fired from a $10 million picture deal.”

Oh, it was the “stigma” that did the damage, was it? Never mind what the people who buy movie tickets think — “Damn those homophobes!” — and never mind, of course, that Heche’s status as “bisexual” seemed rather transient. She left DeGeneres for a man, and then left him for another man, and if she ever had any further involvement in what the media call “the LGBTQ community,” she never mentioned it publicly.

Toxicology reportedly found cocaine and fentanyl in her blood after she rammed her car into a home in L.A. in the middle of the afternoon last week, and she died after being removed from life support Friday.

Just for the record, I don’t approve of cocaine or fentanyl, either, and if any dopeheads feel stigmatized because of my disapproval, tough luck.




 

Watching The Herd Stampede

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— by Wombat-socho


Silicon Valley delenda est.

IRS headquarters in Mordor-on-the-Potomac


This weekend the Senate passed, and Slow Joe signed, the so-called “Inflation Reduction Act”, and today the right side of the blogosphere was full of folks screaming about the part where the IRS will get funding for 87,000 new agents, which certainly seems to fit the complaint memorably issued by Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence:

He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our people, and eat out their substance.


I first caught sight of this on Dana Loesch’s Instagram, and left the comment that as far as I was concerned this was no big deal. The IRS’ staffing problems are of long standing, and much of the problem boils down to the fact that very few accountants want to work for one of the most hated agencies of the Federal government when they can earn a lot more money and a lot less enmity signing up with Deloitte, KPMG, or some smaller accounting shop. The IRS was desperate enough to make me an offer this spring (almost a year after I filed an application with them while I was on unemployment last year) and I don’t even have an accounting degree. I do have fifteen years of seasonal experience preparing taxes, especially small business Schedule Cs, and I think that was what led them to make me an offer. Unfortunately for the IRS, the offer was for a position in Ogden, Utah, which is a long way from my current burrow in rural Nevada, and the pay for a GS-5 Step 1 is not much more than I’m earning from disability and my tax season work with H&R Block, so I turned them down. But think on it – they are so desperate for bodies they were seriously considering hiring a 62-year-old semi-retired tax professional who hadn’t held a full-time job sine 2009. Would they be doing that if they could find freshly-minted accounting majors from…anywhere?

Coming at this from a slightly different angle, there was no shortage of people in the comments to Dana’s post harrumphing “Well, they don’t need accountants, they just need activists to harass Republicans!” Yeah, sure, they’ll be issuing the brown shirts and Democrat Party brassards right after these people fill out their Standard Form 86. People need to tighten their tinfoil hats and consider that 1) nothing gets done quickly by the Feds, especially in the hiring process, and 2) the IRS can’t just hire unqualified schmucks to stand around and menace the taxpayers. I would be extremely surprised if the IRS managed to get the job requirements for the new meat done before the end of the calendar year/beginning of tax season, much less hire more than a few hundred agents. By then, assuming everyone on the Right has been out doing the necessary field work, the Red Tsunami should have swept a lot of Democrats out of Congress, and even if McCarthy & O’Connell can’t manage to outright repeal this shameful bill, they should be able to slice here, trim there, and tie up the IRS personnel bureaucrats long enough to keep anywhere near 87,000 agents from getting hired.

Finally, there’s no guarantee the IRS is going to use those agents the way the Democrats want them used. Right now the staffing crunch is so bad that a lot of paper returns filed in 2021 haven’t even been looked at, much less processed, and if they haven’t finished 2021, what do you think their stack of 2022 returns looks like? The IRS very badly wants those returns finished, because every one that doesn’t get done in a timely fashion means that either the IRS owes interest on the refunds or they aren’t collecting the debts owed by people with balances due. I suspect a lot of the 87,000 new chums are going to be handed a desk, a banker’s box full of returns, and told “I don’t want to see your face until these are done. You have until Friday – and don’t forget you’re on six-month probation, rookie.”

So be of good cheer. Maybe some of the crazies on the left want to use these new T-men to be goon squads in the service of the Great Reset, but I don’t think it’s going to work out that way.


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