Look, if Ed Driscoll wants to play the literary allusion sweepstakes, I’ll see his Allen Ginsberg and raise him a Hunter S. Thompson. But the important point, really, is not about trying to win a silly game of Internet one-upsmanship, but rather that Bill Kristol has become a pathetic joke — a caricature of a parody of a satire of a stereotype. Remember how the anti-Trumpers were supposed to be “the adults in the room,” who resisted the allegedly immature appeal of the celebrity candidate? Trump supporters were just not serious people, you see, whereas Bill Kristol & Co. were devoted to principles of responsible statesmanship.
Fast-forward seven short years, and Bill’s gushing about some pop star like a silly teenager fangirling for Harry Styles. And we learn that not only is Bill on the Democratic Party’s fundraising email list, but he actually reads whatever dreck they spam out to their liberal donor base. He has not only abandoned whatever Conservative Principles™ led him into the anti-Trump camp, but Kristol has lost all sense of personal dignity.
My attorney had taken his shirt off and was pouring beer on his chest, to facilitate the tanning process. “What the hell are you yelling about?” he muttered, staring up at the sun with his eyes closed and covered with wraparound Spanish sunglasses. “Never mind,” I said. “It’s your turn to drive.” I hit the brakes and aimed the Great Red Shark toward the shoulder of the highway. No point mentioning those bats, I thought. The poor bastard will see them soon enough. . . .
When Democrats embraced “criminal justice reform,” the consequences were predictable, especially to anyone who remembers the 1970s, an era of lawlessness that inspired movies like Dirty Harry and Death Wish. The basic idea behind New York’s misguided 2019 “bail reform” law was that it was racist to keep suspects locked up before trial unless they could find someone to post their bail. Why was it racist? “Disparate impact” — i.e., because more black and Hispanic suspects than whites were kept in jail. This is an interesting theory, but the Democrats who insisted on changing the law, to release most suspects without requiring cash bail, apparently didn’t stop to consider all the possible ramifications of this so-called “reform.” There has been a dramatic increase in violent crime which has been particularly harmful to blacks and Hispanics, there very people on whose behalf the “reform” was promoted, reminding us of what Ronald Reagan said: “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help.'”
Republican congressman Lee Zeldin is running for governor of New York and has targeted the state’s bail reform law as a main part of his tough-on-crime agenda, He was actually giving a speech on this topic last week at a Veterans of Foreign Wars lodge when he was attacked onstage. His attacker David Jakubonis is an Iraq War veteran with a history of alcoholism who was apparently drunk at the time. Under New York’s “bail reform,” a state judge released Jakubonis on his own recognizance (i.e., without bail), but the feds were like, “Uh uh”:
The U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Western District of New York announced David Jakubonis, the suspect in the attack on Rep. Lee Zeldin, faces a federal assault charge.
The attack occurred during a campaign stop. Zeldin is the GOP gubernatorial candidate.
“Title 18, United States Code, Section 351(e) makes it a federal crime to willfully assault a Member of Congress,” the filing says. “Section 351(e) provides for an increased penalty where the assault involves the use of a dangerous weapon.” . . .
The judge released Jakubonis on his own recognizance.
That changed on Saturday when “FBI, New York state police and the Monroe County Sheriff’s Office took him into custody.” He went in front of U.S. Magistrate Judge Marian W. Payson.
Jakubonis is now behind bars.
The Department of Justice said Jakubonis “is due back in federal court Wednesday morning.”
Where he belongs, I hasten to add. Note that the J6 rioters were held without bail for months on end, but this guy attacks a congressman? Oh, New York was just going to turn him loose, because apparently attacking congressmen in New York is OK, as long as it’s a Republican congressman. This situation handed Zeldin a perfect example of the problems caused by turning the state over to corrupt Democrats like Kathy Hochul. Given the growing evidence pointing to a massive “red wave” in November, I expect Hochul (and many other Democrats in New York) will soon have plenty of leisure to contemplate their errors.
Ms. LeCourt is from northern France and first appeared in Playboy in 2019. Her Instagram can be found here; she has also appeared in nude photoshoots under the name Lea Guerlin. Given how hot much of the country has been lately, here she is by the pool. Ceterum autem censeo Silicon Valley esse delendam.
“Don’t worry,” they told us, “it’s just a few Confederate statues.”
Next thing you know, the woke mob has come for . . . David Hume?
The University of Edinburgh has seen its donations slump by almost £2 million after it “cancelled” the philosopher David Hume over his slavery links.
The institution said that 24 donations and 12 legacies had been “cancelled, amended or withdrawn” in response to the September 2020 renaming of a prominent campus building dedicated to its former student, one of the leading figures of the Scottish enlightenment.
While he argued against the institution of slavery, Hume was condemned by student activists largely for a footnote in a 1758 essay in which he said he was “apt to suspect the negroes to be naturally inferior to the whites”. The David Hume Tower was rechristened 40 George Square with the university claiming that while Hume’s opinions were “not uncommon” when he wrote them more than 250 years ago, they “rightly cause distress today”.
(Hat-tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.) Years ago, when the SPLC (and the once-influential Little Green Footballs) tried to “cancel” me, I took solace in knowing that my many friends would reject this smear and, more than a decade down the line, everyone now sees how this Thought Police tendency has run completely amok — as some of us predicted it would.
Once you incentivize witch-hunting, you can be sure that some people will begin seeing evidence of witchcraft everywhere. Thus it is with “white supremacy,” a term which once was chiefly used to describe the Jim Crow regime, but which has since lost all meaning by being slung around irresponsibly as an all-purpose smear. Orwell once observed:
The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable’. The words democracy, socialism, freedom, patriotic, realistic, justice, have each of them several different meanings which cannot be reconciled with one another. In the case of a word like democracy, not only is there no agreed definition, but the attempt to make one is resisted from all sides. It is almost universally felt that when we call a country democratic we are praising it: consequently the defenders of every kind of régime claim that it is a democracy, and fear that they might have to stop using that word if it were tied down to any one meaning. Words of this kind are often used in a consciously dishonest way. That is, the person who uses them has his own private definition, but allows his hearer to think he means something quite different.
To accuse someone of being a “white supremacist,” it ought to be necessary to prove they have advocated genocide or, at least, have spelled out a political platform for creating a latter-day apartheid. That is to say, unless someone is engaged in actively promoting violence and oppression, the accusation of “white supremacy” is erroneous, and perhaps “consciously dishonest,” as Orwell says. When we see this kind of Thought Police activity — people on the Internet claiming to have “exposed” such-and-so person as guilty of Wrongthink — rather than focusing our attention on the person accused of “white supremacy,” we should instead carefully scrutinize the accusers. What is their motive? What do they seek to gain by denouncing others as “extremists”?
Most of the time nowadays, it’s just partisan politics — Democrats trying to frighten voters by smearing Republicans as dangerous. But what could possibly be the motive, beyond virtue-signalling, for besmirching the character of David Hume, who died in 1776, and is therefore quite unlikely to endanger anyone? Hume’s unforgivable Thought Crime, we are told, involves a footnote in his essay, “Of National Characters.” Now, I daresay that not one in a thousand students at the University of Edinburgh has actually read this essay, which begins thus:
The vulgar are apt to carry all national characters to extremes; and having once established it as a principle, that any people are knavish, or cowardly, or ignorant, they will admit of no exception, but comprehend every individual under the same censure. Men of sense condemn these undistinguishing judgments: Though at the same time, they allow, that each nation has a peculiar set of manners, and that some particular qualities are more frequently to be met with among one people than among their neighbours.
Hume’s purpose is to argue against prejudicial generalizations about the character of people based upon their nationality. We might suspect that Hume was engaged in a bit of special pleading here as a Scot, given the sort of anti-Scottish stereotypes then prevalent in England. Still, the point he was trying to make is that it is “vulgar” to make such assumptions about any people. In arguing against the (then-popular) belief that conditions of climate shape “national characters,” Hume makes several enumerated points before reaching this paragraph:
If the characters of men depended on the air and climate, the degrees of heat and cold should naturally be expected to have a mighty influence; since nothing has a greater effect on all plants and irrational animals. And indeed there is some reason to think, that all the nations, which live beyond the polar circles or between the tropics, are inferior to the rest of the species, and are incapable of all the higher attainments of the human mind. The poverty and misery of the northern inhabitants of the globe, and the indolence of the southern, from their few necessities, may, perhaps, account for this remarkable difference, without our having recourse to physical causes. This however is certain, that the characters of nations are very promiscuous in the temperate climates, and that almost all the general observations, which have been formed of the more southern or more northern people in these climates, are found to be uncertain and fallacious.
It is at the end of this paragraph that Hume adds a footnote:
I am apt to suspect the negroes to be naturally inferior to the whites. There scarcely ever was a civilized nation of that complexion, nor even any individual eminent either in action or speculation. No ingenious manufactures amongst them, no arts, no sciences. On the other hand, the most rude and barbarous of the whites, such as the ancient Germans, the present Tartars, have still something eminent about them, in their valour, form of government, or some other particular. Such a uniform and constant difference could not happen, in so many countries and ages, if nature had not made an original distinction between these breeds of men. Not to mention our colonies, there are Negroe slaves dispersed all over Europe, of whom none ever discovered any symptoms of ingenuity; though low people, without education, will start up amongst us, and distinguish themselves in every profession. In Jamaica, indeed, they talk of one negroe as a man of parts and learning; but it is likely he is admired for slender accomplishments, like a parrot, who speaks a few words plainly.
Certainly, if Hume were alive and running for public office, his authorship of this statement would make it difficult for him to get elected, to say the least. As it is, we’re dealing with a 179-word footnote in an essay about “National Characters.” Hume writes only that he is “apt to suspect” — that is to say, offering his best guest, based on however much direct observation and study he had done — as to the “original distinction between these breeds of men.” Supposing that any student at the University of Edinburgh had actually read this 1758 essay (which I doubt many have), are we supposed to imagine that they were offended by it? Or, conversely, that this footnote by Hume had persuaded them that “negroes” are indeed “naturally inferior”? We may imagine the serious-minded sophomore philosophy student who, poring over the collected works of Hume, find this footnote and suddenly cries, “Eureka! This explains everything!” No, of course not. Don’t be absurd.
But this is how the Thought Police operate, you see — the life’s work of Hume, comprising many tens of thousands of words written on a variety of subjects, must be cast aside because of this one footnote of less than 200 words and, rather conveniently, the author is not alive to defend himself. Hume is, in this sense, kind of like those Confederate soldiers whose reputations are posthumously besmirched by “activists” and “intellectuals” engaged in virtue-signalling at their expense. Knowing what kind of men those soldiers were — “of gunpowder reputation,” as was said of my great-grandfather’s regimental commander — one doubts any of these pipsqueak “activists” would dare insult them if they were alive, but defaming the dead is easy work. Hume was a man of formidable skill in argumentation, and if anyone at the time had found fault with this footnote in his essay, certainly Hume would have been capable of defending himself. As it was, of course, no one in 18th-century Europe had any reason to question Hume’s judgment on this matter. How many avid believers in racial equality were there in England in 1758? Few, if any, I’m sure, and probably they had more important matters to deal with than accosting a Scottish philosopher about a footnote.
Really, why was this deemed important enough to rename a building at the University of Edinburgh? Is it any wonder that donors are canceling their bequests? What a silly tempest in a teapot — “Ban the dead racist David Hume!” — yet the Eminent Scholars in charge of a university evidently took it seriously. Everyone involved in this disgrace ought to be ashamed of themselves, but our latter-day “intellectuals” don’t seem to have any sense of shame. “Get woke, go broke,” indeed.
Have you forgotten Augustus Claudius Romain, Jr., the Brooklyn native who styles himself “Gazi Kodzo,” supreme commander of the Black Hammer Organization? I wrote about Romain/“Kodzo” in February (“The Destructive Cult of Racial ‘Liberation’”) as the group tried and failed to build their own “community” in Colorado:
For the followers of Black Hammer, their “take back the land” dream ended with what can only be called a sort of radical Fyre Festival, a bummer of a bad camping trip, with a few minor injuries. But there is no guarantee that the next radical gesture will end so harmlessly.
After that dream fell apart, Romain/“Kodzo” and his remaining followers relocated to Atlanta, where things apparently went downhill badly:
The group regularly gathers in downtown’s Woodruff Park to hand out food and clothing to the homeless as members proselytize over a megaphone. In November, Atlanta police arrested several members of the group, including Kodzo, when they refused an order to turn down the amplifier that was violating the city’s noise ordinance, according to a police report. When the police went to arrest Kodzo other members of the group began pushing officers, according to the report.
Kodzo and several other Hammers were arrested and charged with disorderly conduct and obstruction of police. Officers seized a .45-caliber handgun and two-way radios, among other items, according to the reports.
Last year, members of the group who were closest to Kodzo moved into a rented house in a suburban southside neighborhood in Riverdale. The group was evicted in December and owed $21,000 in unpaid rent, attorney’s fees and other charges, according to records in Clayton County State Court. Public records indicate the group then took up residence in the Fayetteville home that was the scene Tuesday’s shooting.
Now, we will get to Tuesday’s shooting in a minute, but let me clear up something that seems to be causing a problem for some journalists.
Notice the word “cult” is inside quotation marks in that Daily Beast headline, as if they’re afraid of being sued for libel if they state, as a fact, that Black Hammer is a cult — which it most definitely is, and we ought not be tiptoeing around that fact as if we’re scared of it. Good journalism at times requires courage, the kind of courage that involves publishing the truth and defending it. Having gone to trial to defend myself in such a situation, I do not say this casually. If you’re a journalist who’s afraid to call a cult a cult, maybe you need to find some other line of work.
Romain was born in Brooklyn and grew up around Atlanta. In his early 20s, he went to Los Angeles and apparently worked as some kind of personal assistant for the head of a small modeling agency, helping to stage “mansion parties,” among other things. Sometime after 2015, Romain was recruited by the African People’s Socialist Party (APSP) and moved to the party’s headquarters in St. Petersburg, Florida, where his duties were mainly about running social-media accounts. In 2018, Romain — now calling himself Kodzo — left the APSP and moved back to Atlanta, where he established the Black Hammer Organization in February 2019. Romain/Kodzo claimed he quit the APSP because it was secretly controlled by white people; the APSP says he was expelled for unspecified misconduct. You can believe whatever you want, but the point is that he learned his ideology and tactics at one black “liberation” organization and then employed this knowledge to create his own organization with himself as “Commander-in-Chief.”
The key to Black Hammer was, first, its leader’s large following on social media and, second, his knowledge of radical organizing tactics. He already had a large following on Twitter and Facebook before he started Black Hammer, and his experience with the APSP gave him a level of prestige that put him far above the vulnerable young people he attracted to his organization, so that his leadership — his words, his ideology, his actions — were exempt from criticism. Without him, there was no Black Hammer, and therefore, to be a member of the organization was to be an idolatrous servant of the Supreme Commander. This is a cult.
Would any sane person be associated with this dangerous kook? I think not, but as I said, Black Hammer attracted vulnerable young people, and by “vulnerable,” of course I mean, a few fries short of a Happy Meal. The very fact that someone was involved in this cult was evidence of their mental deficiency, because rational and intelligent people would never go anywhere near a group led by such an obvious crackpot.
There is a factor of self-selection in the membership of cults. People who are generally successful in life are seldom enthralled by the radical promise of “liberation,” and people with a healthy sense of street-wise skepticism — i.e., those with a functional bullshit detector — would be suspicious of anyone calling himself the Supreme Commander. If you’ve read Eric Hoffer’s The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements, you know that such movements tend to attract people who can be categorized as misfits. So you collect together a bunch of misfits, who don’t have a lot going for them in terms of career success or social popularity, and who furthermore are naïve enough to fall for the radical promise of “liberation,” and what you have is a recipe for disaster. The Khmer Rouge, Jonestown, Heaven’s Gate — these things never have a happy ending. It was therefore foreseeable that Black Hammer would ultimately end with some headline-making debacle, even if the specifics could not be predicted. And thus we turn to events in Fayetteville:
The home linked to Tuesday’s SWAT standoff, alleged kidnapping and deadly shooting in Fayetteville is a communal house of Atlanta-based extremist organization, the Black Hammer Party, whose leader was arrested in connection to the episode, according to police.
The group’s leader, Augustus C. Romain, 36, was charged with 11 felony counts, including party to the crime of false imprisonment, party to the crime of kidnapping, party to the crime of aggravated assault, criminal street gang activity, criminal conspiracy to commit a felony and aggravated sodomy, according to a press release issued Wednesday by the Fayetteville Police Department.
(Whoa — “aggravated sodomy”? We eagerly await the police affidavit that gives us the tawdry details behind that charge.)
A second person who lived at the home, Xavier H. Rushin, 21, was charged in the incident with a misdemeanor and 10 felonies, including kidnapping, aggravated assault, false imprisonment and criminal street gang activity, the release said.
Fayetteville Police said they received a 911 call Tuesday morning at 7:48 a.m. from “a person whispering that they had been kidnapped by an organization and was being held in the garage of a residence.” Police said they located the residence by tracing the call.
The hours-long standoff, which resulted in a neighborhood shelter-in-place order, ended Tuesday afternoon when officers discovered a person inside the home shot dead, police said.
When officers responded to the residence in the Woodbyne subdivision off White Road, a group of nine people exited the home, but one person remained inside, a police press release said.
Police observed a person waving their hand from a garage window, the release said. Officers also approached a person outside the residence and they attempted to flee, the release said. The police press release did not identify that person.
The shelter-in-place order remained in effect for several hours as a SWAT unit responded. Police eventually sent a robot into the home for further investigation and discovered a person who remained inside was dead, the spokesman said. With the robot’s help, the house was surveyed and the lockdown lifted around 2:15 p.m.
The deceased person was found in the home with a gunshot wound to the head. The Black Hammer group’s social media posts identified the man as one of their members. Police said the man was 18, but the AJC is not identifying him because he appears to be a suicide victim. Officials said they believe the gunshot wound to the head was self-inflicted.
The AJC won’t name him, but the dead teenager was Amonte Ammons, who was hailed by Black Hammer as their “Minister of Defense,” and who is alleged to have been kidnapped, beaten and forcibly sodomized by Romain/“Kodzo.” Now, I don’t know what the word “liberation” means to you, but that sure doesn’t sound like my idea of liberation.
Gazi Kodzo’s police booking mug shot
Fayette County is a prosperous suburban community where President Trump got 52% of the vote in 2020, so it’s not likely that the would-be revolutionary (and accused rapist) “Gazi Kodzo” can expect lenient treatment from the criminal justice system there. They’re going to send him to Reidsville, and probably for a long, long time.
He’s certainly not likely to be suing anyone for libel, so there is no reason for any journalist to hesitate to call Black Hammer a cult.
