Shakespeare is the greatest poet in English history — but if you don’t know English history you can easily be made to think he’s the worst.

To prove this, Sir Ian McKellen says, in a recent monologue on The Late Show with Steven Colbert,

It’s all happening 400 years ago, and in London there’s a riot happening — there’s a mob out in the streets. And they’re complaining about the presence of strangers in London. By which they mean the recent immigrants who’ve arrived there. And they’re shouting […] and complaining and saying that the immigrants should be sent home wherever they came from. And the authorities sent out this young lawyer, Thomas More, to put down the riots, which he does in two ways — one by saying, you can’t riot like this: it’s against the law, so shut up and be quiet. And also, being by Shakespeare, with an appeal to their humanity. And in order to set it up, I’m going to have to ask somebody to shout “the strangers should be removed.”

Somebody shouts it, and then he launches on a beautiful monologue from Sir Thomas More — which you really should see for yourself.

It goes,

Grant them removed, and grant that this your noise

Hath chid down all the majesty of England;

Imagine that you see the wretched strangers,

Their babies at their backs and their poor luggage,

Plodding tooth ports and costs for transportation,

And that you sit as kings in your desires,

Authority quite silent by your brawl,

And you in ruff of your opinions clothed;

What had you got? I’ll tell you: you had taught

How insolence and strong hand should prevail,

How order should be quelled; and by this pattern

Not one of you should live an aged man,

For other ruffians, as their fancies wrought,

With self same hand, self reasons, and self right,

Would shark on you, and men like ravenous fishes

Would feed on one another.

He goes on later, with an appeal to The Golden Rule,

You’ll put down strangers,

Kill them, cut their throats, possess their houses,

And lead the majesty of law in line,

To slip him like a hound.

Say now the king (As he is clement, if th’ offender mourn)

Should so much come to short of your great trespass

As but to banish you, whether would you go?

What country, by the nature of your error,

Should give you harbor? go you to France or Flanders,

To any German province, to Spain or Portugal,

Nay, any where that not adheres to England,

— Why, you must needs be strangers: would you be pleased

To find a nation of such barbarous temper,

That, breaking out in hideous violence,

Would not afford you an abode on earth,

Whet their detested knives against your throats,

Spurn you like dogs, and like as if that God

Owed not nor made not you, nor that the claimants

Were not all appropriate to your comforts,

But chartered unto them, what would you think

To be thus used? this is the strangers case;

And this your mountanish inhumanity.

— the greatest case in the English language, I think, for helping refugees, and a reminder that In the majority of men, the love of justice is simply the fear of suffering injustice.

But there’s just one problem.

What Colbert and Sir Ian McKellen missed here — probably on purpose — is that Shakespeare was writing about Evil May Day. This was on May 1st, 1517, when English rioters, impelled by jealousy and greed, went around town, dragging lawful German and Flemish business owners out of bed, smashing up their shops, and beating them up. Some sources estimate that around a dozen victims died.

In Shakespeare’s time (almost a century after the riots) this monologue would have been relevant — so relevant, in fact, that the royal censor banned it. Over the past generation the Huguenots had fled France and settled in England. There was a religious war raging between the Catholics and Protestants across the continent, and one that was so sanguine that Catholics had gotten up in the middle of the night in France, formed into mobs, and proceeded to kill as many Protestant neighbors as possible. This was known as The Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, and is something that happens today in places like Nigeria and Rwanda, but is completely inconceivable in Europe. We have a hard time even imagining our ancestors doing it.

During this period there weren’t just “hard times” in France. The likelihood that Protestants would be jailed or murdered (or worse) was extremely high. And they had no legal recourse, because the violence wasn't only supported by the government, but many times instigated by it.

What this means is that most of the refugees in Shakespeare’s day were families. They were of the same religion as the English — and almost guaranteed, due to persecution, to be sincerely religious. They shared a common enemy with the English. There was no modern welfare system in Shakespeare’s England, so they couldn’t be coming to leech off the system. Thus the English weren’t upset about an influx of criminals: they were worried about being outclassed by an influx of skilled and religious artisans. This would be almost comparable, in our day, to an influx of Ukrainian doctors, engineers, MBAs, and techies. In Shakespeare’s day there was grumbling, but the royal censor made sure nobody acted like his grandparents. He commanded Shakespeare to “leave out the insurrection wholly and the cause thereof.”

Thus, though Colbert's timing draws an obvious parallel between Shakespeare’s rioters and Republicans, the difference between Shakespeare’s day and ours couldn’t be more stark. First of all, a large chunk of our immigrants today came against the laws. We aren’t getting families, but hordes of single, military-aged men. Most of our immigrants are coming from the poorest and least-educated classes of the poorest and least-educated nations. We don’t share a border with the great majority of illegals. We don’t share a common race or heritage with the great majority of legal immigrants either. We don’t have a common enemy, and, in fact, according to our leftists, the common enemy of the new foreigners is white Americans and Republicans. Oh, and Venezuela emptied their prisons and sent all their rapists to us.

We are currently housing large chunks of illegal immigrants in our prisons — according to the Bureau of Prisons, foreign nationals make up around 16% — and the riots we see happening are mostly by Democrats to keep foreign criminals in-house. Due to our laws, legal immigrants get access to food stamps and social security, and many of our illegal immigrants get free medical care — adding time to wait lists, and driving up the prices drastically for natives. News about immigrants raping children, or drunk-driving over pedestrians, or butchering innocents, is routinely and notoriously buried. And finally, it can be proved that no mass violence — ever, during my whole forty-two years of life — has ever been staged by our natives against immigrants. To put it simply, we’re on the receiving end of a beating, not in the process of dishing one out.

Not only does this make Sir Ian McKellan’s parallel slanderous: it makes it stupid. It’s an abuse of Shakespeare one could expect from an American ignoramus, or maybe from one of Shakespeare’s villains — maybe Macbeth’s wife or Othello's Iago. But certainly not from a Shakespearean actor. And certainly not from the man who played Gandalf — a wise, noble old wizard, whose only claim to fame is driving invaders back to Mordor, and sending even more of them to meet Jesus.

Shakespeare’s play was banned by the law because it hit too close to home. If Shakespeare were to live here a few years and see McKellen’s monologue, I doubt he’d know which home Colbert’s show was trying to hit. But it’s apparent that with our home, Colbert doesn’t really know it; and if he does know it, it’s pretty clear he doesn’t love it. Two things nobody could say about Shakespeare in his day without getting hooted off a soap-box*.

Yours,

-J

April 19th, 2026

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*I’ll let Shakespeare speak for himself — from the mouth of John of Gaunt, in Richard II, Act 2, Scene 1. (If you want to see the best performance of this, by none other than Patrick Stewart, I strongly recommend picking up The Hollow Crown).

This royal throne of kings, this sceptered isle,
This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars,
This other Eden, demi-paradise,
This fortress built by Nature for herself
Against infection and the hand of war,
This happy breed of men, this little world,
This precious stone set in the silver sea,
Which serves it in the office of a wall
Or as a moat defensive to a house,
Against the envy of less happier lands,
This blessèd plot, this earth, this realm, this England,
This nurse, this teeming womb of royal kings,
Feared by their breed and famous by their birth,
Renownèd for their deeds as far from home
For Christian service and true chivalry
As is the sepulcher in stubborn Jewry
Of the world’s ransom, blessèd Mary’s son,
This land of such dear souls, this dear dear land,
Dear for her reputation through the world,
Is now leased out—I die pronouncing it—
Like to a tenement or pelting farm.
England, bound in with the triumphant sea,
Whose rocky shore beats back the envious siege
Of wat’ry Neptune, is now bound in with shame,
With inky blots and rotten parchment bonds.
That England that was wont to conquer others
Hath made a shameful conquest of itself.
Ah, would the scandal vanish with my life,
How happy then were my ensuing death!

Republicans, of course, lack the words for speech like this. But Democrats lack the heart.

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Hi there! My name is Madison, and I’m an empath. What’s an empath? You didn’t ask? You don't care? Don't worry, I’ll tell you!

An empath is a person who has feelings. And not just any feelings, but they feel the feelings you're feeling too. In a bad mood? That affects me! And do you feel sad? I feel that too! In fact, if you poison the mood, I really hate that, and if you’re having a good time, I love it! And no, that’s not just like a regular person!

Also, consider this! You know those people you don’t feel anything for? Well, I have feelings for them too! In fact, I have so many feelings for them that I spend my time wondering why you don’t. I feel sorry for you, actually. Just kidding! I feel angry!

I feel angry that you don't care about the same people I care about — such as junkies, perverts, illegal aliens and other criminals. And what’s this you say? That you care more about their victims? You care more about your countrymen and neighborhood? About your family and ethnicity? Have a heart and care for somebody who matters — like a Somali welfare fraud, for instance!

I hear what you’re saying — that rent goes up when we let millions of illegal aliens in, that force is the only way to get them out, that used car prices and crime went through the roof too, that Central American drugs killed more of us than anything else, that the job market was ruined by cheap labor, and the illegal aliens who wrecked it are paid slave wages anyway — but did you see the toddler cry on Instagram? Why, I could just ruin Thanksgiving dinner and disown my parents over this! Oh, I just remembered: I already did!

And no, don’t ask me the obvious: how is it that I can feel everyone’s fear and pain except Republicans’ — and white people's? And the people I'm sitting at dinner with? Easy answer: because they aren’t good enough to feel the same things I feel.

But, you ask — wouldn't being an empath make our feelings the same? Wouldn't I, The Most Gracious and Compassionate, be able to look into anyone’s eyes and connect? Why can't I read everyone’s emotions and empathize, and not just the losers picked for me by liberal Christians, Democrats, and rage-baiting Tik-Tokers?

Even easier: because the less reason I have to feel, the more feelings I prove that I have. The further the target, the stronger the love. If you love somebody close to you? That’s for normies — for sinners. Loving the stranger, the weirdo, the outcast who has no connections to you at all? That’s empathy. That's love.

So fuck you.

Yours,

-M

March 13th, 2026

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Thomas Paine once wrote about the laws of Moses in The Age of Reason,

They contain some good moral precepts such as any man qualified to be a lawgiver or a legislator could produce himself, without having recourse to supernatural intervention. It is, however, necessary to except the declamation which says that God ‘visits the sins of the fathers upon the children’. This is contrary to every principle of moral justice.

But this is unfair to God. Physics visits the sins of the fathers on the children for generations. There is nothing you do at work that doesn’t affect strangers sitting at home miles away. Every thought that becomes a word, and every word that turns into a deed, launches a chain of effects that you won’t only not see, but that you won’t even be able to comprehend. The tiniest sins, like the tiniest blessings, affect even the unborn. Every day we inherit the entirety of history. And every day we fashion the future in our own image.

We never had the chance to act “for ourselves.” There is nothing in the world that was ever just “your business.” We are acting for everything we ever touch, everything within sight, everything within earshot. People say they don’t believe in Original Sin or guilt by association, but children always pay for the sins of their fathers. Always. Maybe not for all of them, but definitely for some of them.

And it is never fair.

Yours,

-J

March 6th, 2026

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Genesis 6 reads,

[T]he sons of God saw that the daughters of humans were beautiful, and they married any of them they chose. [...] The Nephilim were on the earth in those days — and also afterward— when the sons of God went to the daughters of humans and had children by them. They were the heroes of old, men of renown.

Clarification is needed on this subject. We applied for answers to God, to the Holy Roman Catholic Church, and Pastor Billy from First Baptist, but to no avail. We were forced out of desperation to hunt for context in the Old Testament; and in it we find that The Sons of God are mentioned in Genesis 6, the Book of Job, and possibly Psalm 82* — all references, apparently, to celestial beings.

Who these beings were (or maybe are) is unclear; but they were present at the founding of the world (Job 38:7), they are obviously a part of God's heavenly court (Job 1:6), and Satan may or may not be one of them (Job 2:1). They took a poll, and thought God did a good job making earth (for the most part). The sons of men, having a shorter-term perspective, and not being privy to insider secrets, have not always been in agreement.

Either way, Genesis 6 leaves us with one of two possibilities. According to Scripture, either the angels in heaven are all men, or the women in heaven are not hot.

The bigger question is why God allowed the possibility of sex in heaven at all — and why, despite the possibility of sex, there is either no sex in heaven, or the sex on earth is preferable. We have yet to see why God would create private parts and not provide either a shut-off switch or a sexual outlet; but this is practically how God designed us down here too. If there are any questions, please consult Matthew 5 for Christ’s definition of “adultery.” Or better yet, read Anna Karenina.

Jesus says, in response to an annoying "gotcha” question about marriage in heaven, that when we die we’ll all be "like the angels” — that is, totally free from marital vows. But this only leaves us with more questions. For instance, are vows unnecessary because we won't have gonads? Or (Sons of God in mind) are marriage vows only necessary here — because of a shortage of love, an excess of lust, and a clear dearth of resources? And will sex result in kids?

The Muslims have the clearest answer on this subject, and, for men, the most appealing. They believe heaven is women*. Proof that at least one person in Abrahamic history understood good marketing — better, at least, than whoever described heaven as “streets of gold” and “endless Hillsong.”

Either way we sincerely hope God either covers us in whoopie or castrates us. The middle ground (in this writer's opinion) belongs better on earth or in hell.

Yours,

-J

March 31st, 2026

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*Michael Heiser writes about weird Bible passages in The Unseen Realm,

We all have watershed moments in life, critical turning points where, from that moment on, nothing will ever be the same. One such moment in my own life—the catalyst behind this book—came on a Sunday morning in church while I was in graduate school. I was chatting with a friend who, like me, was working on a PhD in Hebrew studies, killing a few minutes before the service started.

I don’t recall much of the conversation, though I’m sure it was something about Old Testament theology. But I’ll never forget how it ended. My friend handed me his Hebrew Bible, open to Psalm 82. He said simply, “Here, read that … look at it closely.” The first verse hit me like a bolt of lightning:

God [elohim] stands in the divine assembly; he administers judgment in the midst of the gods [elohim].

I’ve indicated the Hebrew wording that caught my eye and put my heart in my throat. The word elohim occurs twice in this short verse. Other than the covenant name, Yahweh, it’s the most common word in the Old Testament for God. And the first use of the word in this verse worked fine. But since I knew my Hebrew grammar, I saw immediately that the second instance needed to be translated as plural. There it was, plain as day: The God of the Old Testament was part of an assembly—a pantheon—of other gods.

And that's the basis of Heiser's book. In short, that even Bible scholars — like practically everyone else, I imagine — gloss over the parts of the Bible that don't fit in with their worldview. And second, that if the Bible is true, then the world is much deeper and stranger than most Americans are willing to admit. If you're curious to see how many times theology-wrecking “strange verses” pop up, I strongly recommend reading the book.

Is it really possible, though, that angel wars and pantheons are real, and we miss whole universes right in front of us? According to NPR and Priyamvada Natarajan, an astrophysicist at Yale University, the things we see comprise only about 4 or 5 percent of the known universe. And the other 95% are the things we can either detect with machines, or just exist in theory. Beyond this, we have no idea what our senses and technology and even hypotheses are missing. And these things could be flying right over our heads.

This brings me to another point. The most common objection to Near-Death Experiences (such as meeting the Being of Light) or to ayahuasca trips (such as getting enlightened by a talking snake) is that both NDEs and psychedelic trips are chemical. But I would argue that so is talking to your mom, or grilling a steak. And so is you reading this right now.

So we brush off the Book of Genesis because it’s about talking snakes, and we brush off ayahuasca snakes because not everybody sees the snake. But skepticism goes both ways — to everybody but the fake skeptic. Sure, it might be all in your head. But so are your eyeballs — and the frontal lobe you used to write off the talking snake.

As such, I believe some of us are nuts. And I believe some of our ancestors made things up. But I also believe we are inter-dimensional beings. And sometimes our chemistry determines which dimension we live in most. Whether we go insane or touch reality during an NDE is the question. And I don’t believe God wanted it to be easy for us to get an answer.

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One of the great ironies of our society is that if you’re “a schedule Nazi” you’re really great at running a schedule, if you’re “a cleanliness Nazi” you’re really great at cleaning things up, if you’re “a rule Nazi” you’re trusted to follow the rules, but if you’re just “a Nazi” people don’t think you should have a job.

If any of our ancestors were to be dropped into America today and just followed the lingo, they might be led to think that being “a Nazi” made you a superior person — the Master Race, even. But to my knowledge this is the first time anyone has been really good at everything except “being a good person.” A real insult would be saying “he doesn’t know how to run anything.” But we saved this term for “liberals” — the people who are allowed to run things, like California and the whole UK, into the ground.

For instance, nobody has ever been called “a liberal spender” without living on the edge of bankruptcy. If you got “a liberal education” it means you went bankrupt to not be educated. If you have “liberal values” it means you value everybody who lacks values. And if you “liberate a country,” well, it just means Americans blew it up. If anyone was to say “I’m liberalizing my schedule,” the only thing that would tell us is he probably won’t be on time for dinner. And somehow being “a liberal” is socially acceptable — respectable. According to HR, employable even.

I bring this up because I’ve been called a Nazi so many times it’s starting to not sting. And it should. After all, I really do believe in freedom of speech. I’m against brownshirts and collectivists and real bullies in general. I believe in real but limited suffrage, no drug-testing for the House and Senate, and Midnights by Taylor Swift. I believe in a well-regulated but not-too-encumbered capitalism, a totally-free pricing system, and the centerpiece of my existence is a long-haired Jew. In saner times this would get me branded as “a liberal” — and in most ages and places “a radical.” But today, because I believe in protecting a liberal system with a border, and not letting in too many people who either inbreed, or can’t read, or won’t follow the rules, I am now considered “a Nazi.”

The actual Nazis — who, by the way, would run any big city better than what we call “liberals” today — had many flaws, and even some diabolical ones. But turning absolutely every town they ever touched into a third-world ghetto isn’t one of them. And the big question today isn’t whether liberals are good and Nazis are bad. It’s whether Americans know what “good” and “bad” even mean.

When someone asks us whether someone is “good,” the first thing we ought to ask is, for what? For instance, did the city get cleaner and safer now that more guys like him moved in? In politics this might be a good start. And how are his children doing?

Also, is his wife happy? Is he good at his job? Are his words wholesome — life-giving, encouraging? Does he improve the general mood, or wreck it? Does he know the difference between someone who needs help and a professional victim? Does he take valid criticism and new information well? Can he handle his drink? Can he protect the people he loves? Does he know how to fix things — and messy situations? Is he able to explain how things work — and especially when they don’t? And does he help other people like this thrive, or does he hurt them?

In other words, the marks of being a “good person” aren’t whether you’re called a liberal or a Nazi. In the end they’re more like Paul’s qualifications for being a deacon.

Simply put, I want people like this to run our society, and I think there have to be rules to keep their opposites out of power. I would call these winners The Master Race (no matter their race) because everyone like this deserves to be in charge. I don’t know whether this makes me a Nazi, but I know it’s the main thing that keeps anyone from ruining their country.

And last I take comfort in the words of P.J. O’Rourke:

I have often been called a Nazi, and, although it is unfair, I don’t let it bother me. I don’t let it bother me for one simple reason. No one has ever had a fantasy about being tied to a bed and sexually ravished by someone dressed as a liberal.

Yours,

-J

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The whole point of Impractical Jokers is a few pranksters doing things, on purpose, which violate the norms of our society. This is what's known as comedy. In real life, the whole point of a border is keeping people out who violate the norms of our society on accident. This is what we know as “having a country.”

Now we all know that a country can be comical; but things get serious when too many people from too many countries start violating your norms willy-nilly. For instance, do Americans stand in line or crowd to the front? Do we throw trash in the garbage bins or on the street? How loudly can we play our music with the windows open? And can anybody park on the lawn?

Things get more uncomfortable when you ask, what age is an impregnable woman too young? And can you just follow one around if she's alone, or stare at her on the bus? Do you have to wash your hands before making a stranger a hot dog? And should people own actual dogs? And can you blast prayers at six in the morning from the top of a building? And do you have to hold it all in, or can you just shit on the street?

(Fooled you on that last one. In San Francisco almost anyone can fit in except Republicans).

Some other differences go well beyond laws and affect the norms. George Patton writes in his memoirs that when he visited the Sultan in Morocco, a leopard broke out of its cage and ran straight into the harem. A lot of screams were heard, and the Sultan took off. And when he came back, he told Patton (with a calm face) to not worry. It just got one of the concubines in the neck. The real wives were all safe, so they could carry on as usual.

This is the kind of thing that pisses Americans off, but it highlights a crucial difference between American and Arabian society. In 1942 Morocco, a man of eminence could pile up dozens of women of no eminence and sometimes they get bled to death by leopards. In modern America, a woman of no eminence can pile up men of eminence and bleed them dry on her own. This is what we refer to as “alimony” and “child support;” and if a man tries to escape the harem, we throw him in another one where the Sultan is his cellmate.

Thus so far from being against ethnic diversity, I’m for it — somewhere else. The great value of having other countries (and dare I say it: other states) is you can view them from a distance. And the chief benefit of viewing them from a distance is you can find out which things you want to do yourself and which things you want the cops to shoot at.

This is the conservative’s idea of diversity. It’s a plan where clear distinctions lie between “us” and “them” so we can delineate between the two and plan accordingly. And if you like this sort of thing, you believe deeply in Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The problem with the leftist’s diversity is that the diversity happens right at home, so by the time you realize you hate something, you’re stuck with it. Also you have to like it. This is the whole point of HR and DEI — to not let anyone at work say “I really support ICE.”

One country I’m really glad is “over there” is Great Britain — for the simple reason that the British will consider anybody “British.” And for the additional reason that if you disagree with who can be British in Britain you can end up in prison.

That’s why more people get arrested in Britain than in Russia for having opinions. It’s also why Mohammed is the most popular name in the country. And when Pakis started raping thousands of little girls, it’s the reason police swept the accusations under the rug. Simply put, Brits wanted to defend everything but Britishness — and that's why the United Arab Emirates won’t send any students to college in England. The UAE took one look at the radical Islamists in Oxford, and decided Oxford was too much like Mohammed to let the Islamic students back into Arabia.

Yesterday our forefathers would have burned the whole world because the British wanted to tax us too much. Today our forefathers would burn the whole world because the British tax their citizens to fund all the wrong things. I include here such laudable expenditures as disarming law-abiding citizens, hiding crime by foreigners, feeding terrorists and layabouts, making a joke out of God, and terrorizing the ethnically British. Sixty years ago the whole civilized world was allied against Soviet Russia. Today we have not just an interest, but a moral obligation to have the whole free world ally ourselves against the general ethos of Great Britain.

Whether Russia belongs on our team, in the age of China, is a fair question*. Whether the UK belongs on it without respecting themselves is obvious. A country should always question whether its allies are the kind of people who commit murder. But a country should never ally itself with a country in the middle of a suicide.

Yours,

-J

P.S. Just the other week Rupert Lowe and Restore Britain launched an attempt to free the Motherland from its leftist overlords and Islamic occupation.

I recommend watching the video, but below you’ll find a partial transcript, with beautiful passages such as,

Britain is not just an economy. Britain is not just an idea. Britain is not just a passport. Britain is a nation. Britain is a people: Our people.

And Restore Britain will never allow that to be erased. We will celebrate our Christian heritage and the identity that built and shaped this country. Responsibility, restraint, forgiveness, duty, and fairness. In short, a high-trust society. That will mean defending our culture. That will mean resisting the relentless creep of radical Islam. That will mean banning the burka, outlawing sharia law, outlawing cousin marriages, and reimposing our Christian-based rule of law.

This is how a man’s political party speaks. And I don't believe that anyone who feels differently about his homeland deserves a home. He goes on,

What is necessary will be incredibly painful. But for the first time in a very long time, voters will have genuine alternative, which is truthful with them about the scale of what now has to be done.

The first priority is to control who comes to our country, and more importantly, who stays in our country. Restore Britain will not just stop mass immigration; we will reverse it.

Every single illegal migrant will be securely detained, and then deported. The message will be unrelenting: If you are in this country without permission, you will be removed. For the foreseeable future, far more people must leave Britain than arrive.

If a foreign national is unable to speak English, lives in social housing, claims benefits, refuses to work, fails to integrate, commits crime, or even actively hates our way of life and wishes to do us harm, then they must leave, or be made to leave.

Sounds like poetry to me.

Restore Britain will make our communities safe again for women and children. That I promise you. If that means millions go, then millions go.

We’re constantly told that the economy needs vast swaths of low-skilled migrants. We know that’s simply not true. What we need is to get millions of healthy Brits back into work - a radical overhaul of how welfare is delivered. Protecting those in genuine need, but not funding healthy shirkers to live off the back of hard working men and women. If you can work, you must work. It really is that simple.

And furthermore,

The state has definitively become the enemy of the people. Restore Britain will burn away suffocating taxes on work and enterprise. We will slash unnecessary regulation. We will dismantle bloated quangos and the overbearing HR culture. We must crush parasitic Britain. We will restore long-term, stable, logical policy, so that business can plan and invest and grow again.

No country which refuses these principles deserves to be safe. No person who refuses these principles is worthy of life. What Rupert Lowe signifies isn’t just right vs left. In the lines laid out starkly above, it is smart vs stupid, light vs darkness, honor vs dishonor, and life vs suicide — in the once-upon-a-time greatest, once-upon-a-time brightest, once-most-beautiful country the world ever saw. And I believe it is our duty, not just as Americans, but as free citizens of any country, to make life harder on any government on “our team” which refuses these principles. And yes, that means I want us to invade Canada.

Despite what I said above, the U.K. — and specifically England — still represents to me a beacon of wholesomeness, manners, genius, dignity, character, style, and progress absolutely unparalleled in the history of mankind. It means C.S. Lewis and Winston Churchill; Samuel Johnson and Thomas Babington Macaulay; Winnie the Pooh, Harry Potter, Big Ben, and Queen Victoria.

Speaking of England evokes images from Pride and Prejudice. When I hear England I see Edmund Burke in the House of Commons. It means winding, cobblestone streets in ancient alleys; the cozy, charming countryside hedges and villas; the desperate fight against King Louis XIV and Nazi Germany; Shakespeare and Charles Dickens**; Greensleeves and Scarborough Fair; Edward Gibbon, Francis Bacon, G.K. Chesterton, and J.R.R. Tolkien.

To me, England is the grandfatherly prose of Orwell and the common sense of Locke. England means Adam Smith and David Hume. Lord Clive conquering the earth*** and Lord Nelson ruling the seas. The tremendous gift of civil liberty. The desperate fight against autocracy and popery. England, to anyone who really loves it, means a long history, stretching back to Roman times, through horror and desperation and Viking incursions, giving us a link to the past — a foothold in time; a character, still evident but fading, in the manners and principles of our nation.

To say I hate England would be wrong. The truth is I am in love with England. And because I’m in love with England, watching what’s happened to it in the last 50 years has made me almost ready to nuke it.

*At this point I don’t even recommend an alliance with Russia. White American men are the most right-wing they’ve been in generations. White American women are probably the worst they’ve ever been. Russia has killed off their men and has millions of the best women on the planet up for grabs.

I don’t want the US and Russia to make some kind of a trade pact or an anti-Chinese NATO. At this point I just want the US and Russia to get married.

**Theodore Dalrymple, the most eloquent (and probably sharpest) critic of British degeneracy, writes, in Our Culture: What’s Left of It,

This scene takes me back to Pyongyang. I was in the enormous and almost deserted square in front of the Great People’s Study House—all open spaces in Pyongyang remain deserted unless filled with parades of hundreds of thousands of human automata—when a young Korean slid surreptitiously up to me and asked, ‘Do you speak English?’

An electric moment: for in North Korea, unsupervised contact between a Korean and a foreigner is utterly unthinkable, as unthinkable as shouting, ‘Down with Big Brother!’

‘Yes,’ I replied.

‘I am a student at the Foreign Languages Institute. Reading Dickens and Shakespeare is the greatest, the only pleasure of my life.’

It was the most searing communication I have ever received in my life. We parted immediately afterward and of course will never meet again. For him, Dickens and Shakespeare (which the regime permitted him to read with quite other ends in view) guaranteed the possibility not just of freedom but of truly human life itself. Orwell and Huxley had the imagination to understand why—unlike me, who had to go to Pyongyang to find out.

What Britain represents to me isn’t just the place that made Dickens and Shakespeare. It also means the people which made Shakespeare and Dickens mean home.

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***Who is Lord Clive? And why should you care?

Macaulay writes, in his short biography of Clive,

We have always thought it strange that, while the history of the Spanish empire in America is familiarly known to all the nations of Europe, the great actions of our countrymen in the East should, even among ourselves, excite little interest.

Every schoolboy knows who imprisoned Montezuma, and who strangled Atahualpa. But we doubt whether one in ten, even among English gentlemen of highly cultivated minds, can tell who won the battle of Buxar, who perpetrated the massacre of Patna, whether Sujah Dowlah ruled in Oude or in Travancore, or whether Holkar was a Hindoo, or a Mussulman. Yet the victories of Cortes were gained over savages who had no letters, who were ignorant of the use of metals, who had not broken in a single animal to labour, who wielded no better weapons than those which could be made out of sticks, flints, and fish-bones, who regarded a horse-soldier as a monster, half man and half beast, who took a harquebusier for a sorcerer, able to scatter the thunder and lightning of the skies. The people of India, when we subdued them, were ten times as numerous as the Americans whom the Spaniards vanquished, and were at the same time quite as highly civilised as the victorious Spaniards. They had reared cities larger and fairer than Saragossa or Toledo, and buildings more beautiful and costly than the cathedral of Seville. They could show bankers richer than the richest firms of Barcelona or Cadiz, viceroys whose splendour far surpassed that of Ferdinand the Catholic, myriads of cavalry and long trains of artillery which would have astonished the Great Captain.

It might have been expected, that every Englishman who takes any interest in any part of history would be curious to know how a handful of his countrymen, separated from their home by an immense ocean, subjugated, in the course of a few years, one of the greatest empires in the world. Yet, unless we greatly err, this subject is, to most readers, not only insipid, but positively distasteful.

Macaulay blamed historians for being so boring — and he corrected this mistake by writing one of the most fun, fascinating, and shocking biographies ever penned by a Victorian.

You can buy all of Macaulay’s works on Amazon for $1.99.

Emerson once wrote,

A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the lustre of the firmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice his thought, because it is his. In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.

So I decided to keep these ones before I forgot them.

Yours,

-J

To infinity and benumbed.

This week I learned about Scream 7, Saw 10, and Final Destination: Bloodlines, which is probably the sixth. Then Terrifier 4. Evil Dead: Burn, which I think is film five. 28 Days Later 3 and I Know What You Did Last Summer 4. The sixth Insidious comes next, and The Exorcist 6 for some reason in a Mike Flanagan edition. Then last in this illustrious but incomprehensive ensemble we have Hellraiser 11, Friday the 13th 12, and freaking Halloween 13.

What disturbs me most about these films isn’t just that fat cats keep making them. It’s that people think they’re still interesting enough to keep buying them. Here we have a marriage between absolute degeneracy and the corporate; between terror and routine; between psychopathic outbreak and tradition. I’m not so sure Americans are the first people in history to be so deranged; but we are certainly the first people to ever be so boring about it.

Strength and sociability.

There are two kinds of people who “don’t like to talk about politics.”

1. People who don’t trust you.

2. People living with a series of half-baked opinions, untested hypotheses, irrational prejudices, and a fragile ego. In other words, people who don’t trust themselves.

Bad and worse.

Voltaire writes, in his Philosophical Dictionary, that there are two butlers at the door of a house, and you ask them to speak to the master. He’s not home, says the first one. The second butler says he’s home, but he’s in the back rooms spreading bunk facts and making false promises and all kinds of weapons and poisons. You ask why, and he says, to hurt and kill off the people doing the things He Himself planned. The atheist is the first porter, and the second is obviously a Calvinist.

The big question here is pretty straight-forward. If you were God, which servant would you be most offended by? The one who says you don’t exist? Or the one who makes you look like a dick?

All faithful take note: no matter our gist, it is we who are always in danger of the latter.

The barren.

The Institute for Family Studies reports that Republican states are gaining kids while Democratic states are losing them.

It should come as no surprise that when fatness is preferable to fitness, and borders are racist, and winning is selfish, and loving your ethnicity is fascist, and telling the facts is hateful, and the land you're living on is stolen — that when families are both cumbersome and expendable; when marriage vows are easily broken; when sadness is fought off with a prescription; when criminals and losers are martyrs and heroes; and death is inevitable but God is irrelevant — it should come as no surprise, I say, that these regions fail to produce children.

The people who have no reason to live are the same people who have no reason to breed.

Tug of war.

"You shouldn't be selfish” is itself a form of selfishness. We want others to live for us and not for themselves.

Poor and rich.

People who are into politics to save the world: miserable.
People who are into politics to make fun of people: totally fulfilled.

Pale blue God.

A.W. Pink writes, in The Sovereignty of God,

Our obedience has profited God nothing. […] He was perfectly blessed in Himself before the first creature was called into being. And what are all the creatures of His hands unto Him even now? Let Scripture again make answer: Behold, the nations are as a drop of a bucket, and are counted as the small dust of the balance: behold, He taketh up the isles as a very little thing. And Lebanon is not sufficient to burn, nor the beasts thereof sufficient for a burnt offering. All nations before him are as nothing; and they are counted to him less than nothing, and vanity. To whom then will ye liken God? or what likeness will ye compare unto him? (Isa 40:15-18).

— a confusion of the bigness of God with His concern: a total about-face to the God-man who cries at funerals, who floods the whole world when He gets angry, who got brutally murdered in an act of heroism, and dictates much of the Old Testament in the voice of an angry judge, a bereaved parent, and a scorned lover.

Pink here almost sounds like the atheists and other “deep thinkers” who say “the universe is so big that you basically don’t matter” — forgetting that the man who regrets this fact, and the mother who nursed him, are just as much “the universe” as Betelgeuse and the amoeba.

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Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall is probably the most embarrassing book I’ve ever recommended. And it was embarrassing mainly because at the time I recommended it I’d never actually read it.

This is the problem with recommending books. If you’re 80 or 90% done with anything you have a pretty good idea what’s in it. The problem with Decline and Fall was that it was so funny I started recommending it at 30%. I’d already been talking books with a coworker, and I decided to tell her everything I knew about Waugh. There was only one problem, and it was that I didn't know anything about Waugh. And a hundred times worse than this, it was that one of my co-worker’s parents is African.

If you’ve read Decline and Fall, you know this is a big problem.

What I didn’t know 30% of the way through was that one of Waugh’s characters thinks black people are stupid ooga-boogas and jungle-bunnies. And when did I find this out? On a Saturday morning, right after making the recommendation to a black person on Friday. Thus the next two days were spent biting my nails — hoping, both awake and asleep, that my coworker didn’t give a shit about my opinion.

I was happy to find on Monday morning that my gushing appraisal was underwhelming. The book remained unpurchased and unread, at least long enough for me to tell her to skip it. She thanked me, I promised myself I'd never recommend anything I hadn’t finished yet, and I bring this up today to prove that I don’t always keep all my promises.

What I'm getting at is, I’m a hundred pages into Catch-22 and I’m giving it my full recommendation. Like Waugh’s Decline and Fall, the humor is sharp and ridiculous. Also like Waugh, the prose is so fresh that it doesn’t matter what Heller says so long as he keeps saying it.

Is the book uplifting? Is it wise? Is it inspiring? I’m sorry to say on all counts, absolutely not. It is a book of such incomparable horseshit — such random, half-baked, almost-incoherent absurdity, full of lechers and liars, psychos and racists, cowards and hypocrites, hypochondriacs and drunks — that I’m recommending it here against the plain dictates of experience and morality. For the first 50 pages I couldn’t even tell who was who, and what they were supposed to be doing, or if they were even doing anything at all. Once I got 70 pages in, I decided to re-read the whole thing, and was rewarded with exactly zero further understanding — just a roaring, soaring roller-coaster of scandal and idiocy.

Thus far there's no discernible plot, and it’s so good that I don’t even care. So if you’re reading this 50 years in the future, and you’re, say, 200 pages ahead of me, and Heller says something so rotten and tasteless that you’re wondering how could somebody like J do this to me, I remind you that I’m only a hundred pages in, and thus far it’s a winner.

What is Catch-22 about? So far, just some coward named Yossarian trying to not fly planes in World War 2, and the completely deranged cast of characters he runs into mostly while not flying. "Catch-22,” the catchphrase rule for which the book is named, is probably the least interesting joke of the book, and, thus far, the “plot” doesn't even revolve around it. I just keep going back for passages like this,

Colonel Cargill, General Peckem’s troubleshooter, was a forceful, ruddy man. Before the war he had been an alert, hard-hitting, aggressive marketing executive. He was a very bad marketing executive. Colonel Cargill was so awful a marketing executive that his services were much sought after by firms eager to establish losses for tax purposes. Throughout the civilized world, from Battery Park to Fulton Street, he was known as a dependable man for a fast tax write-off. His prices were high, for failure often did not come easily. He had to start at the top and work his way down, and with sympathetic friends in Washington, losing money was no simple matter. It took months of hard work and careful misplanning. A person misplaced, disorganized, miscalculated, overlooked everything and opened every loophole, and just when he thought he had it made, the government gave him a lake or a forest or an oilfield and spoiled everything. Even with such handicaps, Colonel Cargill could be relied on to run the most prosperous enterprise into the ground. He was a self-made man who owed his lack of success to nobody.

If this is your kind of thing, Catch-22 is full of it (and I mean that in both ways). Heller writes about a selfish sourpuss named Doc Deneeka,

[H]e was a very warm, compassionate man who never stopped feeling sorry for himself.

And of winning an award for marching drills,

[T]he idea of pennants as prizes was absurd. No money went with them, no class privileges. Like Olympic medals and tennis trophies, all they signified was that the owner had done something of no benefit to anyone more capably than everyone else.

Probably too logical in the end, and missing the fact that mastering something and ranking yourself high are pleasures in themselves — no matter how “inconsequential.” But this is the thing about comedy. It’s the most fun when somebody takes themselves too seriously.

There are other passages less sharp than these: beautiful, flowing cascades of nouns and adjectives and verbs that you want to read over again just for the hell of it. Such as this passage about a hospital patient killing time,

Havermeyer had grown very proficient at shooting field mice at night with the gun he had stolen from the dead man in Yossarian’s tent. His bait was a bar of candy and he would presight in the darkness as he sat waiting for the nibble with a finger of his other hand inside a loop of the line he had run from the frame of his mosquito net to the chain of the unfrosted light bulb overhead. The line was taut as a banjo string, and the merest tug would snap it on and blind the shivering quarry in a blaze of light. Havermeyer would chortle exultantly as he watched the tiny mammal freeze and roll its terrified eyes about in frantic search of the intruder. Havermeyer would wait until the eyes fell upon his own and then he laughed aloud and pulled the trigger at the same time, showering the rank, furry body all over the tent with a reverberating crash and dispatching its timid soul back to his or her Creator.

And this passage about a lecher:

Women killed Hungry Joe. His response to them as sexual beings was one of frenzied worship and idolatry. They were lovely, satisfying, maddening manifestations of the miraculous, instruments of pleasure too powerful to be measured, too keen to be endured, and too exquisite to be intended for employment by base, unworthy man.

Something any healthy man can relate to. And in my favorite chapter so far, the one about Major Major, this long (but perfect) passage,

Some men are born mediocre, some men achieve mediocrity, and some men have mediocrity thrust upon them. With Major Major it had been all three. Even among men lacking all distinction he inevitably stood out as a man lacking more distinction than all the rest, and people who met him were always impressed by how unimpressive he was.

Major Major had three strikes on him from the beginning—his mother, his father and Henry Fonda, to whom he bore a sickly resemblance almost from the moment of his birth. Long before he even suspected who Henry Fonda was, he found himself the subject of unflattering comparisons everywhere he went. Total strangers saw fit to deprecate him, with the result that he was stricken early with a guilty fear of people and an obsequious impulse to apologize to society for the fact that he was not Henry Fonda. It was not an easy task for him to go through life looking something like Henry Fonda, but he never once thought of quitting, having inherited his perseverance from his father, a lanky man with a good sense of humor.

Major Major’s father was a sober God-fearing man whose idea of a good joke was to lie about his age. He was a long-limbed farmer, a God-fearing, freedom-loving, law-abiding rugged individualist who held that federal aid to anyone but farmers was creeping socialism. He advocated thrift and hard work and disapproved of loose women who turned him down. His specialty was alfalfa, and he made a good thing out of not growing any. The government paid him well for every bushel of alfalfa he did not grow. The more alfalfa he did not grow, the more money the government gave him, and he spent every penny he didn’t earn on new land to increase the amount of alfalfa he did not produce.

And this psychologically true passage in the same chapter,

Major Major’s father had a Calvinist’s faith in predestination and could perceive distinctly how everyone’s misfortunes but his own were expressions of God’s will.

I could add more passages, more quotes, and rant more about this filthy and ridiculous book — but what’s the point? Little I can say about it would be better than what Heller has already said. As such, at this point — I remind you, about one-hundred pages in — I give it my recommendation. At least before I run into something which totally ruins it, and have to apologize in a whole other essay.

Yours,

-J

March 2nd, 2026

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P.S. The last “other favorite passage” of mine.

Yossarian was a lead bombardier who had been demoted because he no longer gave a damn whether he missed or not. He had decided to live forever or die in the attempt, and his only mission each time he went up was to come down alive.

The men had loved flying behind Yossarian, who used to come barreling in over the target from all directions and every height, climbing and diving and twisting and turning so steeply and sharply that it was all the pilots of the other five planes could do to stay in formation with him, leveling out only for the two or three seconds it took for the bombs to drop and then zooming off again with an aching howl of engines, and wrenching his flight through the air so violently as he wove his way through the filthy barrages of flak that the six planes were soon flung out all over the sky like prayers, each one a pushover for the German fighters, which was just fine with Yossarian, for there were no German fighters any more and he did not want any exploding planes near his when they exploded.

Only when all the Sturm und Drang had been left far behind would he tip his flak helmet back wearily on his sweating head and stop barking directions to McWatt at the controls, who had nothing better to wonder about at a time like that than where the bombs had fallen.

“Bomb bay clear,” Sergeant Knight in the back would announce.

“Did we hit the bridge?” McWatt would ask.

“I couldn’t see, sir, I kept getting bounced around back here pretty hard and I couldn’t see. Everything’s covered with smoke now and I can’t see.”

“Hey, Aarfy, did the bombs hit the target?”

“What target?” Captain Aardvaark, Yossarian’s plump, pipe-smoking navigator would say from the confusion of maps he had created at Yossarian’s side in the nose of the ship. “I don’t think we’re at the target yet. Are we?”

“Yossarian, did the bombs hit the target?”

“What bombs?” answered Yossarian, whose only concern had been the flak.

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Despite this, all moral weight here seems to lean against abortion, mostly because you can't tell a pro-choice woman you wish she'd been aborted. They consider it bad manners; and in all my experience dealing with people they consider it a wish they'd been murdered.

If this is the case, a morally consistent response from them would be “thank you.” After all we broke with our ideals so that they don't have to break with theirs. But they do break with their ideals by objecting, and they do it just as angrily as if they were babies, or Catholics. The whole thing is backward and it makes you despair for humanity — or at least for those of us who have to deal with leftists.

Case in point: a short while ago Tomi Lahren, a blonde known only for being hot and yelling at leftists, got fired by her conservative network for being pro-choice. Despite remaining on the payroll, she proceeded to sue Glenn Beck for (please don't laugh) wrongful termination.

What this means is she claimed to be pro-choice and she wasn’t. She's pro-choice if the choice is being made by a woman. She's against choice if you're her boss. She says she's for liberty when she meant she's against life; and she says you can take a life but only if the life is your baby’s. This is what we refer to in the West as “progress.”

There are of course other ways of getting rid of children. One of Moses’ most controversial laws says, in effect, that if a kid’s so rotten that his parents can't stand him, they can take him to the council and the council can throw rocks at him.

Somehow this seems worse than abortion when it's a million times better. With abortion you have no idea who you're killing. In ancient Israel you knew exactly who you were killing and you hated him. With abortion the child is 100% innocent. In Israel the child was probably guilty. I think they call this an "honor killing.” If this is the case they ought to call an abortion a dishonorable killing*.

Moses' law is fair because it's almost impossible for any parent to come to this point. Everyone knows there are faces only a mother could love. But there are also souls that only a mother could love. And there are souls that even a mother could hate. Moses allowed the person who's least likely to kill a child a right to end the matter and save all of us before it got out of hand. We, on the other hand, call this “barbaric” while letting mothers kill children they're most likely to love.

Yours,
-J

April 13th, 2017

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Editor’s Update, 2026: Some of you are reading this and thinking, “J approves of honor killings?!” And to this I would answer no — I merely prefer them to our policy right now. No idea how anyone can be pro-psychopath and anti-baby, but this is the world we live in. Democrats’ motherly instincts are for absolutely everybody but the infants.

As such, I’m not even pro-life. I’m pro-chance. When it comes to executing criminals and lunatics, I’m pro-death. Moses left this up to somebody’s parents. I think it would be better — and in fact, so did our ancestors — to put the death penalty up as an option, and leave it up to a jury.

This leaves a fun question: who would I send on a one-way ticket to meet Jesus? I would expand the death penalty to include all kidnappers, murderers, rapists, child-molesters, robbers, pimps, pornographers, anyone who mutilates the genitalia of children, money launderers, dealers of meth and coke and opiates, doctors who run pill mills, scientists and marketers who lie or hide information about dangerous chemicals and pharmaceuticals, drug mules and coyotes, people who sell national secrets to other countries, anyone who retaliates against legitimate whistleblowers, any public official who refuses to protect the border, career protesters and paid rioters, and people who commit flagrant welfare fraud.

Despite this list, in the light of history I think of myself as lenient on this issue — almost liberal, even. Plutarch writes of Draco, the ruler from whom we got the term draconian, in his Life of Solon,

Under the Draconian code almost any kind of offence was liable to the death penalty, so that even those convicted of idleness were executed, and those who stole fruit or vegetables suffered the same punishment as those who committed sacrilege or murder. […]

Draco himself, when he was once asked why he had decreed the death penalty for the great majority of offences, replied that he considered the minor ones deserved it, and so for the major ones no heavier punishment was left.

Not that crazy of an idea when you see a fatso leaving the shopping cart on the curb.

Still I wonder if Draco’s code was (effectively) more lenient than ours anyway. To prove this, try convicting anyone via jury for jaywalking when death is on the menu — a stance for which many cops would turn a blind eye, his peers would likely rule not guilty, and a man’s neighbors would be likely to falsify records or hide evidence. In the end, extreme rigor and extreme liberty meet. Where almost everyone is on the chopping block, lady justice isn’t just blind on purpose — we find she’s also deaf and dumb.

*My dad refused to fire phosphorous shells on the Viet-Cong because they were sleeping — he passed the honor off to another yahoo on ship. How much worse, in every sense, is cutting a poor baby to pieces in-utero? With the former you can compare it to stealing candy from a baby. But what are you supposed to compare the latter to?

My take on killing the sleeping Viet-Cong is slightly different from my dad’s, and coincides more closely with the Polish mercenary Rafal Ganowicz. In 1967 he was asked what it felt like to take a human life. His answer: “I wouldn't know. I've only ever killed communists.”

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I really, deeply, truly believe that somewhere around one third of the country, under psychiatric scrutiny, could be classified as clinically insane. I also believe that around 100% of Americans would agree with this statement, even though 0% of them would volunteer themselves for the loony bin. So before you start clapping, please see whether you're on the list.

I would include here people who think the earth is flat and roundness is “a conspiracy,” who believe that blowhards like Pat Robertson and Robert Morris speak for God; who think men can turn into women, and that anyone who disagrees in public should be subject to penalties. I would add anyone who thinks Charlie Kirk was murdered by TPUSA so that Erica Kirk and JD Vance could have an affair; and anyone who thinks Jewish people are God's favorites, incapable of pissing Him off, and that silencing all their critics is the main way to prove you’re on “the right side of history.”

Next is anyone who thinks The Sermon on the Mount should be on courthouses instead of the Ten Commandments, and that doing so would not only be “more Christian,” but less dangerous to the public health than anarchy, or communism. And why stop there? I'd add people who put criminal aliens in the same category as Anne Frank, and think Elon Musk, the Jew-loving libertarian, is a Nazi, and Donald Trump is “literally Hitler.”

These not-entirely uncommon positions go well beyond plain ignorance and rank up there with hearing voices and seeing gremlins; and if I had the choice, I'd strip them of the vote and even put some of them in psych wards. This would clean up the country significantly, and let us get back to discussing matters more serious than whether Somalis are more American than Republicans, and whether Emmanuel Macron’s wife is actually a dude.

Or at least it would, if it wasn’t for the second third of Americans who are just stupid. Republicans like to call these people “Democrats”* and Democrats like to call these people “Republicans,” but the reality is these people are what everyone usually refers to as “swing voters.” These are people who overwhelmingly agree that an open border is bad; and then, when you try to send people back across the border, The Pew Research Center says they can’t stand that either.

These are people who hate inflation, so they vote for the guy who wants tariffs. They want to bring manufacturing back to America, but they want it without starting inflationary trade wars. They’re worried about the national budget, but they hate it when you cut spending. They can’t stand rioters running loose, and cry when you send the national guard to stop them.

In short, the swing voter is somebody who can’t see pros and cons. He has probably never heard of pros and cons. He doesn't know what “a tradeoff” is, and every time he votes, he thinks he elected a savior, only to find out, four years later, that the hero he elected is actually (to him these days) a villain. He has no intelligible philosophy, no workable ethic, no cohesive system of law other than “this hurts and I hate it and now I want the other thing.” Thus whoever’s in charge is on the news. And to him, whoever's in the news becomes the national bogeyman. He runs one way and stubs his toe. He turns the other way, and falls off a cliff.

Is he completely without merit? Not entirely, I would argue. The great virtue of the swing voter is his humility: the ability to say “I was wrong” and change course. The big problem with swing voters is they’re always wrong. And to prove this, I refer you to their own opinions — enshrined and totally contradicted, ad nauseam, in what they refer to as “their voting record.”

This is, of course, when humility goes wrong. When humility goes right, it means people who are not only open to new information, but who reevaluate their positions in the light of new evidence and questioning. And that means they believe in asking questions and being questioned. They consider it a right, even — a public service. They call it “freedom of speech,” and know “free speech” doesn't mean joining Al Qaeda and making pornography.

The real qualification to not being a psycho or a dumbass means not having a giant ego. It means recognizing your vulnerability to short-sightedness, ignorance, laziness, prejudice and provincialism, half-baked faiths, blind spots, ego trips, and sacred cows. And that’s the irony of being self-aware. This last remaining hope, not just of American civilization, but of any civilization, is the only portion of the public which doesn’t fully believe in itself.

When this goes right, a man becomes a beacon of light — standing tall and bright in the middle of a hurricane. When he changes his position he merely adds to it, refining it, correcting its course. And as he grows so does his sense of balance, and grace, and nuance**. But when humility goes wrong, he flip-flops from one extreme to the next and becomes the hurricane itself — and gets referred to in the news as a swing voter.

Yours,

-J

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P.S. I suspect that many of the things we blame on faulty brains may be a result of their working too well.

For instance, the belief that Donald Trump, on the verge of arrest after the 2020 elections, was playing 4D chess, and that random clerks and garbagemen were privy to a host of insider information, and we should go to Washington DC and “trust the plan,” was probably a front for extreme feelings of powerlessness and ignorance — a desperate reach not only for hope, but for the dream that we, the puny and the clueless, could actually understand the world around us. And that somebody smart was actually in control of it.

White Savior Complex ranks even crazier than this, in my book: a desperate need to not only love and care for somebody (we see this most often with childless ladies and rejects) but to feel loved and needed yourself. Thus the desperate round-the-world search not only for somebody to stand above and pity, but the half-psychotic quest for an enemy — an enemy whose crimes you fabricate, against all evidence, and the “victim” whose flaws you deny, to the point of obliviousness. “Trust the plan” was the crazy belief in somebody else. “Black Lives Matter” was the crazy belief in yourself. Especially when you yourself were actually the one in need of help.

The really big question here isn’t whether these people are crazy, though. I think it’s pretty clear that people with real needs and working brains are capable of believing and doing worse things than lunatics. The real question is, am I lying to myself in some way like they are? And if I am, am I brave enough to see it?

*On top of the fact that I believe one third of Americans are bonkers, I really, truly, and unsarcastically feel that there are smart Democrats out there. And like all smart people, these are defined most by the questions they ask.

For instance,

• Is it okay for the President to deport illegal aliens, who came from Mexico, to war-torn Sudan? Or to put them in a Salvadoran prison without a trial?

• Do non-citizen immigrants like Mahmoud Khalil have a right to free speech? Or does the Bill of Rights only apply to citizens? Can foreigners be detained indefinitely by ICE?

• Or, why is the President pardoning a bunch of ponzi-schemers and granny-scammers?

• Is it a good precedent to send troops into the Capitol? Wasn’t that the beginning of the end for Rome?

• Why is Trump saying the Epstein files are fake after campaigning on their release? Wasn't he aware of them during his first term? And why did Congress have to force him to release them? And how do we know the redacted names aren’t public officials?

• Should the President, the plaintiff in a lawsuit he filed before taking office, be able to decide whether he gets paid 230 million dollars — of taxpayer money?

• Is it morally wrong to question our relationship with Israel? Is criticizing things Jews currently do really the same thing as anti-Semitism?

• Didn’t Trump campaign on reducing inflation — not making it worse?

• How can we get rid of income taxes? If tariffs are to bring jobs home, how can that be a stable tax revenue once we don’t import nearly as much?

• How can Trump pay $2000 to each American from the tariff revenue if the tariff revenue is way less than the payout?

• Isn’t spending this recklessly dangerous for the country? (To be fair, neither party really cares about this).

• Is our beef with Venezuela really about drugs when most of our citizens are killed by drugs from Mexico?

These to me are all useful and legitimate questions, and, quite frankly, I think Republicans who don’t ask them are silly. And I wish the people who asked these kinds of questions were in charge of the Democrats. But we all know they aren’t. And instead of such respectable pests, we’re left with the people who ask whether it’s okay to have a border, whether cops should be allowed to shoot back at criminals, and whether anyone can define “a woman.”

**How important is nuance? Nietzsche writes, in Beyond Good and Evil,

In our youthful years we respect and despise without that art of nuance which constitutes the best thing we gain from life, and, as is only fair, we have to pay dearly for having assailed men and things with Yes and No in such a fashion. Everything is so regulated that the worst of all tastes, the taste for the unconditional, is cruelly misused and made a fool of until a man learns to introduce a little art into his feelings and even to venture trying the artificial: as genuine artists of life do. The anger and reverence characteristic of youth seem to allow themselves no peace until they have falsified men and things in such a way that they can vent themselves on them – youth as such is something that falsifies and deceives.

Later, when the youthful soul, tormented by disappointments, finally turns suspiciously on itself, still hot and savage even in its suspicion and pangs of conscience: how angry it is with itself now, how it impatiently rends itself, how it takes revenge for its long self-delusion, as if it had blinded itself deliberately! During this transition one punishes oneself by distrusting one’s feelings; one tortures one’s enthusiasm with doubts, indeed one feels that even a good conscience is a danger, as though a good conscience were a screening of oneself and a sign that one’s subtler honesty had grown weary; and above all one takes sides, takes sides on principle, against ‘youth’. – A decade later: and one grasps that all this too – was still youth!

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Probably the biggest insult leveled at a grown man — other than being a liar, or a weenie — is that he’s a dad. Do your jokes suck? Then those would be dad jokes. Are you a fat piece of shit? That would be due to a dad-bod.

If you dress like a dad, it means beige shorts with tube socks and sandals. If you listen to dad rock, it means a band that hasn't made anything good in decades, and probably because they died from an extreme case of osteoporosis, or dementia. And if they survived, they look stupid now like Rod Stewart and Julian Casablancas. Simply put, they’ve either been wearing the same thing for 20 years, or are 80 years old and trying too hard to dress like 20 year-olds. And they usually have a dad-bod.

The great irony of this insult is it’s a testament to the opposite. It is we, the dads, who are the only people on the planet charming and virile enough to have gotten anyone pregnant. Some of us have done it five times. Some of us (in more dignified countries) have done it with four wives. Some of us have been so sexy that we have to pay six women money every month. (This last part, of course, is only [partially] braggable if you can afford it).

I would argue that, so far from being an insult, a dad-body is the body you have that convinces a woman to carry your baby. A dad joke is the joke that makes her snort out her Coke in a restaurant. A dad band is the band you play in the car when you’re on your way to second-base.

Do I dress like a dad? That should be because I’m about to become one — again. And any man who can convince a woman to do anything as crazy as putting on a dress, finding a priest, and pledging her whole life to you, no matter how shitty you actually are, should be teaching master-classes on the art of charm and persuasion. No apologizing for the state of his jokes: I propose that at the very least they’re good enough.

The counter-argument to this is that somewhere around 80% of all men globally make babies, and in the US, at our peak during the Baby Boom, around 79% of all people ended up married. This, as you might guess, is more a testament to women’s stupidity or desperation than man’s usefulness or charm — especially since we can see the great majority of men, we don't want to be like any of them, and around half of all marriages currently end in divorce. But this still reinforces my original point. Most women, good taste or bad, still choose to make these men fathers, year after year, and there’s no more reliable marker than this.

Gen Z seems more sensible on this issue. They refer to every man who’s fat and embarrassing not as a dad, but an unc. This is still an outright disrespect for their elders (and maybe their elders should try being respectable first). But this shifts the whole gist away from fatherhood and pictures an irresponsible old boob who’s as unsexy as our relatives but hasn’t necessarily made any whoopie. An uncle doesn’t even have to be married. He could be living in your grandma’s basement. He could be in jail.

To make fun of your dad is to make fun of yourself. A dad is where you came from. He’s the one who bought you the clothes you think are so cool. He either trains you right or screws you over. To shift the focus from your dad to your uncle isn’t just more respectful. It’s more egotistical. You can fall close to the tree and land softly. You can pick a man to marry and feel like you have good taste.

Another reason I respect Gen Z more than the Millennials. They seem to have more respect for themselves.

Yours,

-J

February 3rd, 2026

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Another batch of homespun thoughts for you.

Yours,

-J

January 29th, 2026

Empire and Shire.

The great aim of politics is to make things so safe that people get engrossed in their own personal, private worlds. But once people get engrossed in their own personal worlds, they lose the desire and ability to really practice politics. The Empire creates the Shire, and the success of the Shire breaks up the Empire.

Prosperity or equality.

There are only two ways to stop illegal immigration into a prosperous country. The first is to use violence and the threat of violence — a sealed border and deportations by force. The second is to let people in until the quality of life decreases so nobody wants to come in anymore.

If you don’t choose the first, you choose the second.

Carte blanche.

Everyone is fighting a battle you know nothing about.

Yes, and when we give the public a free pass to kick us, to embarrass us, to let us down, we add a million to the list.

Man’s best friend.

People love dogs because they're always happy to see you, subsist on practically garbage, accept a scolding or a kicking with grace, and never imply their owners are boring, or selfish, or stupid, or rude.

When a man loves dogs and hates people, he shows what he wants from people but was unwilling to be to anyone else first. A dog both flatters and shames his owner. The dog-lover runs from what he hates while being it.

Forward and back.

History is just as surprising as the future. Both are a giant void, and you never know what you’re going to find.

Bad guy, right words.

It doesn't matter who truth comes from. Whoever speaks truth to me, in that moment, is my benefactor.

It is more important to be right with the wrong people than to be wrong with the right people.

Adam? Where are you?

It’s easier to do Bible study with your family in the morning. By the evening you've been seen eating too many apples, and are ashamed to see God (or anyone who knows him) face-to-face.

In the morning you're innocent; by night you feel naked.

A hell of a trade, or a trade from hell?

The bigger your business, the further you trade. The further you trade, the more things you put up with.

Diversity, multiculturalism, and tolerance (to the extreme) may not always be the creeds of the international businessman, but they’re always his essence. To make the most money he has to subvert not only his tastes and convictions, but those of his employees — and eventually those of his government.

Chiaroscuro.

What are good and evil? Great charity can only be expressed in great poverty, great mercy in great wrongdoing, great heroism in great villainy, and great solutions in great perplexity.

God creates light to outshine darkness. God creates Satan — the great district attorney — so we can know Jesus, the great public defender. Pain was the only way to show the joy of His inner being. All suffering for His children is temporary. The end result of this whole struggle is ecstasy. The depths were created so we could scale the highest mountains.

God vs Man.

The question of Calvinism vs Armenianism — in other words, whether we choose salvation or God chooses us — is ultimately a failure to understand Buddhism.

Every man is interconnected, either by his senses, his memory, his imagination, or a long chain of events, with much of the universe. A man can’t walk without the floor, so the floor is (in a sense) him walking. A man can’t judge a painting without the light and the painting, so in a sense, the sun and the painting are him judging. What does he eat? Grain. So the grain is part of him eating. Where does he sleep? A bed. So the bed is part of him sleeping.

A man has no choice to be anything without other things. And a man has no choice to be saved without a savior. Both must act to be what they are — and what the Calvinists and Arminians fight about is which of them is most irrelevant.

Thanks, but no thanks.

Love it, hate it, build it, break it, catch it, lose it, grab it, drop it.

Miss it and kiss it.

Size it up,

try it out,

tinker with it and then switch it around.

Go somewhere nice and then leave it.

Lose yourself in a person and then forget them.

Cry about something one day and the next day make fun of it.

The central feature of all life is change. Those who accept the sovereignty of God must accept the world we were given — and then thank Him for giving us the power to reject it. We weren't just born to say thank you. We were also born to say no thank you.

And wisdom is knowing which to do when.

Passing the buck.

Ogden Nash once wrote,

He drinks because she scolds, he thinks;
She thinks she scolds because he drinks;
And neither will admit what’s true,
That he’s a sot and she’s a shrew.

There are people who have problems and people who are problems. The latter usually portray themselves as the former.

Warm or cold?

How can anyone admire something without loathing something else? “Do not judge” means “do not love.”

Yours,

-J

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White women have always been my favorite; but times have changed since I was playing the field, and now the big question a young man has to ask, when chasing a beautiful, college-aged honky, is whether the target of his affections is bonkers.

With other countries you only have to worry about things such as The Ugly Bomb or whether she’ll throw pans at your head — I refer here respectively to the Arabs and the Mexicans. But since 2002 the chances a white woman will need a helmet or a straitjacket have easily gone to 1 in 2. And to make things worse, all the tell-tale signs — Disney merch and fidget spinners and propeller beanies, et al — have either gone mainstream or are now totally defunct.

(Even medications are no longer a sign, since the stigma is gone, and white women like to collect them like Pokemon cards so they can feel important. In the world of corporate diversity the only options available were race or sexual orientation or religion or mental illness; but the tanning beds weren’t strong enough, they didn’t like the way they looked in bow ties and suspenders or a burkha, and they decided to go with looking bat-shit).

So how does a man navigate a minefield with no warnings? Does he just crawl through the mud, poking his shovel willy-nilly, hoping for a miracle? Even in the Bronze Age Solomon said a good wife is a gift from the Lord; and this means you never knew what you were getting until it was too late. But I suppose this has always been the case with men too. The difference is, women have always had clear signs.

For instance, when looking for a man, a woman would ask — does he have a job? Is he good at it? Is he likely to move up as we build a family? Could he protect me from a kidnapper, or a psycho? Does he chew with his mouth open? (They never ask “would he beat me?” because, as we all know, the men who beat women are knee-deep in whoopie. For the same reason, we know women almost never ask “would he cheat on me?”)

But women are a different animal. They survive on art and polish; and all the best tell-tale signs women use for men, such as whether he's a go-getter, are almost totally irrelevant in her case. Most people care if their wives are useful and competent, of course — I exclude such notables as Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, George W Bush, Barack Obama, and Joseph Robinette Biden. But nobody cares if his wife is a doctor. They care about whether she can nurse. And that’s something tits can only imply.

The real signs of lunacy, on the other hand, are all rock-solid if you ask the right questions. Be careful to use tact here, because if you ask these questions the wrong way and she’s a psycho, she’ll probably scream Nazi! in the middle of a restaurant; and if she’s sane, she’ll think, “does this guy think I’m a f@$*&(% psycho?” Either of which is a problem.

But in short you’ll want to know:

1. Does she think marriage is for people who are in love?

This one is important because I’ve met countless men whose wives left them, took the house, and abandoned the kids, just because they “loved him like a brother.” No arguing. No warning signs. Just plain old, “we get along great. but you’re just not exciting enough.”

Were the guys boobs? Absolutely — usually just as doofy and unattractive as their counterparts. Did they have thinning hair and terrible morning breath? Undoubtedly. But marriage isn’t about whether you want to bang somebody’s brains out. It’s about whether you can build a life together — especially with children! — no matter how many other people want to bang you. It should also be fairly obvious, from inscrutable things such as “wedding vows” and “laws,” that marriage isn't about staying in love. It's about what happens when you fall out of it. This is how an adult views marriage, which I why I view women who fail to answer this question correctly Top Tier Morons.

2. Does she think being fit is optional, and being fat is cool?

No comment necessary, but I’ll indulge the reader just in case. This is a question of whether she understands objective goods and evils. This is like asking, would you rather be strong or weak? and she answers weak. This is like asking would you rather be smart or dumb? and she answers dumb. This is literally asking would you rather be beautiful or ugly? and she answers ugly.

What it means is that she’s so susceptible to indoctrination and propaganda that she couldn’t find her ass if somebody said it was on her head. If you play with this fire I hope you get burned.

3. Does she think having a dog and having a kid are the same thing?

This one is interesting because, unlike the last question, which deals with whether she’s a liar, it shows something is deeply wrong with her actual taste. This is like somebody asking if you like movies by Steven Spielberg or Christopher Nolan and saying, “not really: I prefer Spongebob Squarepants.” This is like somebody giving you a choice between eating a ribeye or a Ball Park and you choosing the Ball Park. This is implicitly saying, “I don’t want a family because I don't know what love is, and I’m afraid to spread my genes.”

And why are they afraid to spread their genes? Because deep down, they know their genes are stupid.

It’s worth noting here that the usual reason a woman prefers a dog to a kid isn’t just because she’s shallow. It's because she says “babies are such hard work,” and then, instead of loving a beautiful and eternal little being, she chooses to go to actual work. She then spends her youth on back-pats from her douche boss — or worse, becomes a douche boss — instead of building her real legacy and hearing “mama, I love you.” Oh, and then she spends her whole paycheck on a freaking daycare. Great trade, mongo.

4. Does she hate being white? Does she have a white savior complex? Does she feel like every single “minority” is an innocent child of peace — and that when they aren’t, it’s your race’s fault?

This woman will absolutely cheat on you because she’s already cheated on everybody else. She will sell her body and soul for almost anyone else except the people who look like, oh, you know, her family. She also has no idea what accountability is — for instance, when somebody is actually guilty or innocent. And having zero sense of accountability, believe it or not, is one of the chief signs of being a dumbass.

5. Does she praise women for being “strong women”?

Big tip: none of the women you know who are actually strong refer to other women as “strong women.” An actually strong woman, in the man’s sense, has usually been through something horrible, so whatever she’s dealing with, you feel like she can handle it. She can criticize without being a whiner. She’s trusted to take care of business because everyone knows she can deliver the goods. She can switch gears to leading or following with ease, and people want her on their team because she makes them feel like they can win. She has a gleam in her eye, and can get men to do what she wants because deep down, they all want to marry her.

But this isn't what women mean when they call other women “strong.” What they mean is a loudmouth who has to get her way all the time, and if she doesn’t get her way, she'll find a way to hurt you. "Strong women” are the kind of women everyone is nice to because they’re afraid of them. And because they're afraid of them, they hate them.

The woman who worships them — who loves to see a “girl-boss” “kick ass” — will also be happy kicking your ass. For show. That is, in public. And if you marry her, you deserve it, because (surprise!) you are both stupid.

6. Is she obsessed with the LGBTQ community?

This is a woman who has no idea what sex really exists for — that is, to perpetuate meaning through procreation. She's a giant fan of twinks, not only because she either can’t handle or can’t appreciate manly men, but because twinks are usually the only men whose sexual standards are lower than her own. Their history on Grindr is even more embarrassing than hers on Tinder.

She says drag queens are “beautiful,” even though drag queens are basically circus clowns and you never see her complimenting Bozo. She says trans women are real women but if you say she looks like a trans woman she’ll hate you. She pretends she can’t define a woman, which means it's impossible for her to be a good one. And this isn't just because she’s a liar. It’s also because she's bonkers.

7. Does she refer to her exes as "narcissists”?

Amazing how so many men became narcissists overnight, isn’t it? This is because a woman who’s bonkers needs to blame her failures on mental illness. Not on stupidity, I remind you — the fact that she chooses bad partners. And she doesn’t blame it on her mental illness. That would require understanding and compassion — from you. In other words, when she has a mental issue, she gets a “mental health day” and a badge that says “I’m special.”

What I mean here is that she has to believe her exes are mentally ill because, how could a relationship with someone like her go to complete shit? How about a look in the mirror, genius.

8. Does she have shirts and posters that say “be kind,” “good vibes only,” “everyone is welcome here,” and “mental health”?

If so, buckle up: you’re about to get the exact opposite.

Yours,

-J

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P.S. It’s worth mentioning here that not every woman who shows signs of idiocy may actually be an idiot. A lot of it may be youth’s fault; and in fact some of them throw off these hallmarks of lunacy and end up being pretty good wives. But do you really want to risk it? And let’s be real: aren’t there other important signs of character? Other than red flags about being a psycho?

For instance, can she admit when she’s wrong? Does she like to learn and grow even when it isn’t easy? Does she contribute in a serious way to the holidays — the food and decor and music, for instance? And does she really like your jokes? (Don’t downplay these last two. They prove, first, whether she’s the kind of woman who can turn a house into a home. And second, whether she’ll be able to stand living in it).

The question of how she treats her dad and the waiter are always a solid go-to for character. But despite being the most polished of all animals, whether or not she dresses herself well is almost beside the point. The rest of your life you’ll be seeing her in PJs anyway; and even if she’s a clothes horse, a nice dress never looked good on a pig. What matters most is that she keeps herself intact and doesn’t dress like a fool.

Even here there’s a precarious balance. Sweat pants in public are a likely sign of degeneracy. Impeccable style is a harbinger of imminent bankruptcy. And the real thing you need to know — whether she’s neat and clean — should be readily apparent from the back seat of her car.

This is the first time you’ll be happy to see a pile of McDonalds wrappers. It means with a little willpower, you can safely dodge a bullet. At this point just open the door and throw yourself onto the freeway — it will be less painful than a daily step onto one of her Legos.

Solomon’s mom, writing to him as Lemuel (his joke name, I assume), has a slightly higher standard for women than I do:

Who can find a wife of noble character?
She is worth far more than rubies.
Her husband has full confidence in her
and lacks nothing of value.
She brings him good instead of harm
all the days of her life.
She picks out wool and flax in the market
and works them with eager hands.
She’s like the merchant ships
bringing food from afar.
She gets up while it’s still night;
she makes food for her family
and has enough to feed even the servants.
She finds a good field and buys it;
out of her earnings she plants a vineyard.
She goes about her work with good speed;
and her arms are strong for her tasks.
She sees that her trading turns a profit,
and her lamp doesn’t go out at night.
In her hand she holds the distaff
and grasps the spindle with nimble fingers.
She opens her arms to the poor
and extends her hands to the needy.
When it snows she doesn’t worry for her household
because all of them are clothed in scarlet.
She makes coverings for her bed;
and she herself is clothed in fine linen and purple.
Her husband is respected at the city gate,
where he takes his seat among the elders.
She makes clothes of linen and sells them,
and supplies the merchants with stylish sashes.
She herself is clothed with strength and dignity;
she can laugh at the days to come instead of cowering.
She speaks with wisdom,
and faithful instruction is on her tongue.
She watches over the affairs of her household
and doesn’t eat the bread of laziness.
Her children get up and call her blessed;
her husband also, and he praises her:
“Many women do noble things,
but you do better than all of them.”
Charm is deceptive, and beauty is fleeting;
but a woman who fears the Lord is to be praised.
Honor her for everything her hands have done,
and let people praise her for her works at the city gate.

A tall order for a woman — which is probably the reason he says, in Ecclesiastes 7, that he’s never found a good one. It seems even mom didn’t make the cut.

I have some better advice for him: if you want to enjoy women, try cheating less and dreaming smaller.

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The thing about ideas is they tend to move from place to place. One person says something stupid and the other stupid people hear him and the next thing you know you’re getting tortured in a gulag. This is why Christ said a man who accepts the words of a prophet has a prophet’s reward. The prophet speaks first, but it takes the heart of a prophet to hear one. The question, whenever you hear a prophet or a moron, is whether your country is full of prophets or morons. This is why the liberals have taken over the school system and the media, and nearly everyone, until the Enlightenment, was heavily in favor of censorship*. Simply put, we took one look at our neighbors and knew they’d fall for anything.

This time they fell for whoring. Germany, in a move that stunned even the scandalous Italians, decided to turn their country into Las Vegas, and now the English and others are worried.

The Germans, of course, like everyone else caught with their pants down, had an excuse. They said they did it to protect women. Too dangerous on the streets with pimps and such; so they decided to move them to brothels. What happened next is obvious. A large surplus of abused and ruined women, usually abandoned or molested as children, many of them from Bulgaria and Romania and already mastered by pimps, flooded the country immediately. Megabrothels opened overnight. The number of Johns increased exponentially. Prostitutes became a mainstay at their carnivals; mega-pimps became nouveau riches; and the German people, once known for alcoholism and Nazis and other hilarious monkey shines, became known for taking advantage of Europe’s orphans and victims. Even when the Germans are helping people they’re hurting people.

It’s estimated by the German government that 400,000 such hookers live in Germany, and that 90% of them, one way or another, are still forced into it. Five times more prostitutes than are estimated in England. At first, for them, the going was “good.” The hookers saw an influx of cash, and it was estimated that if you couldn’t save a nest egg you could maybe feed a family. Money was being sent back to feed starving mothers and fathers in Romania. The Johns came in, on “good” nights, sometimes 15 to 20 if you were lucky.

But then something happened. The market became glutted with whores. Brothels opened next to brothels. The smallest towns had their bordellos. The number of Johns per woman dwindled, and the hookers themselves began to get desperate.

This is all shown in a documentary called The Mega Brothel, available on Amazon Prime; and beyond the prostitutes themselves we get a glimpse at the lives of the mega-pimps. One man, head of the biggest brothel chain right now in Germany, called Paradise, says it’s a family business — but no mention, so far as I can remember, is made of his wife. I suspect she left him, like his manager’s wife estranged him.

The owner brought his son to work with him for years, and was planning to pass it as an inheritance — but the boy decided to kill himself first. The daughter he brings to work (!) is proud of him, and plans to get into the business herself — but only the managerial aspects of it. When asked why not the whoring, she says it’s a “tough question” which she “can’t answer.” At this point the camera pans to the father, and the expression on his face is the highlight of the whole film**.

Around this point you begin to wonder if the Germans have any dignity. The answer is no. Their knights in shining armor, at least in this documentary, are almost all women, and beyond this many of these “heroes” are short-haired and frumpy and shrill; not exactly the type to reclaim a healthy sexual culture.

One group of angry feminists crashed an opening party for a new brothel — predictably topless, and screeching, and eventually thrown into a paddy wagon. A good cause fought so badly it makes you want to side with the pimps. Even when they’re fighting for dignity the feminists are embarrassing. To make matters worse, so far as I was able to make out, their main objection to the industry wasn’t even selling sex for money, but coercion. A feminist believes strongly in “her body, her choice.” She thinks blowing sleazebags is a career choice, but staying home with the children is a tragedy.

It should be mentioned here that these protests deeply offended the mega-pimp. He says, predictably, that he isn’t taking advantage of any women — that they all come to him (true), that he charges them entrance fees to the brothel but doesn’t skim anything else off their earnings (also true), and that the women who work for him are happy (false). The manager, before he was arrested for trafficking, disagreed with the owner. He said the women were completely ruined, and that they had “no souls.” But I suppose this is the difference between a man who owns a business and a man who only runs it.

I can’t recommend this documentary to any of Christ’s boys, but the heathens will enjoy it. There’s simply too much T&A. But I recommend it to absolutely every woman I know, and I advise her to take notes from it and share them with the men she knows. At least, if she doesn’t want hookers parading the festivals for her sons, and pimps out combing the high schools for her daughters***.

Yours,
-J

February 22, 2019

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*On this issue of taking over the schools and promoting your own values, I agree with the leftists more than the “free-speechers.” In a school system, free speech is the fraudulent pretense of the underdog. When the free-speechers get control, what they want is to teach people the way they see the world. No honest and intelligent man, sending his kid off to college or founding a college or going to college himself, is going to require classes in Hinduism, flat eartherism, queer theory, voodoo practice, hip hop history, or prosperity theology. The liberals have taken a similar stance, and as they don’t believe in capitalism, or Jesus, or gender roles, or the rule of law, or the right of white people to have a country, they teach everything they can to disgrace them.

There is no such thing and there will never be such a thing as a “free speech” college. There is no such thing as “an education” in general. You’re educated to become a specific kind of person, and that requires a whole lot of censorship — not even because you’re not allowed to hear the other ideas, but simply because you don’t have the time.

**The second highlight of the film involves the most likable whore in the bunch: a curvy, charming blonde with a cute accent and a strange sense of dignity. She said that men are allowed to touch you on the arm, but until they enter a bedroom and break out the cash, if they touch you on the breast or anywhere else she tells them to stop it. “We’re prostitutes, not sluts,” she says. A hierarchy of dignity that I never knew existed — but now that I know about it, I agree with it.

***One method of pimping is known as The Boyfriend Method, and is primarily used on young girls. The girl is approached by a young man and asked out on a date. After a few dates he tells her he’s in love with her. A short while later he invents a financial disaster; she’s encouraged to whore out to pay for it; and the natural instincts of a young girl to nurture and care for her loved ones is wasted — on a man who takes all her money, and eventually turns abusive. These girls are frequently subject to trafficking, and prosecuting the men is difficult. Is he a pimp or her boyfriend? Those in charge of the law, unfortunately, many times find the line too blurry to decide.

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The magic of Christmas songs may (and should) be ranked as follows:

1. Hymns about mankind being saved by a God-man. Here I include such hits as O Holy Night, and O Come O Come Emmanuel. In other words, things based on real magic.

2. Songs about how magical the Christmas season is. Here I mean such classics as White Christmas, and It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas. In other words, second-hand magic.

3. Songs that are loosely related to Christmas but actually feature someone getting dumped, or wanting to make the eight-legged monster. Here I mean Last Christmas, Santa Baby, and the diabolical All I Want for Christmas is You.

4. Jingles that has-been musicians barfed up because they realized they were running out of coke money. In this category I list Wonderful Christmastime, and Do They Know It’s Christmas?

This isn’t by any means a comprehensive list of Christmas songs. In the above slew you’ll note such illustrious absences as “hymns about inanimate seasonal objects” (that is, O Christmas Tree) and “ditties about fourth-rate Cold War-era claymation characters” (that is, Frosty the Snowman and Rudolf the Red-nosed Reindeer). But my point is simple. In terms of magic, the drop from one to two is drastic (excluding Carol of the Bells, of course); the fall from two to three is almost catastrophic; and it could be safely surmised that between three and four there isn’t any drop at all. Mainly because both of them are rock bottom.

This being said, I’m not a man who fights the Christmas wars. You can’t just cut Frosty the Snowman out of your playlist and expect somebody else to grow a soul and stop saying “Turkey Day” instead of “Thanksgiving.” These people are too far gone; and, aside from a Paul-on-the-road-to-Damascus epiphany, there’s really no hope for them at all. I say let them ruin their own Christmas in peace. Jesus can save them Himself — later.

I take a “pacifist” stance here because a long time ago I was at work and wishing every customer a happy Easter. And everyone was in a good mood until somebody shot back, “It’s Resurrection Sunday.” He didn’t add you dumb shit, but that’s exactly how it felt.

Now, I don’t fault this absolute mook for wanting to focus on Jesus. And I don’t blame him for being upset that the whole thing had been hijacked by pagans and liberals after we’d already hijacked it from pagans for Jesus. Actually, after I wrote that I’m not even sure who’s entitled to grievance.

But my point still stands. He didn’t convert me to Christianity by being a jerk. And for that moment I actually became an obnoxious liberal. Because I was already on his side before he spoke, and after he spoke I wondered if I was ready to die fighting for the Easter Bunny.

Temu Jesus (or as we like to call him, Mohammed) once said there’s no compulsion in religion and I believe him. The problem is, he didn’t really believe it himself. But either way, I admit there’s a time to pile on the wives, sharpen your sword, and take back Mecca, and this year I’m in the mood for two of them. Except to me, Mecca isn’t a cube in Saudi Arabia or a standoff at the grocery store. Mecca is my church and my home. And it’s my soul. And I don’t want to be forced on anyone else, like Mohammed was. I want to be contagious because I’m sexy. (I know that sounds like herpes, so if my mom is reading this, I’m sorry).

All I’m getting at is, before you unload a salvo of Christmas hymns on the ungodly, make sure you have a twinkle in your eye. Make sure you’re ready to apologize and forgive. Make sure you’re gracious and kind. And when the whole world looks bleak, make sure you’re the kind of shoulder someone can lean on — because you know how this all ends, and you know the One responsible for the grand finale.

So for my home and anyone else’s who cares, I recommend Spotify’s Christmas choir playlist. It’s got a great selection of the old hymns, sung well by choir boys and other such quasi-Catholic respectables. Then I’d add a few lit candles, the smell of spiced wine, and some thanks to our Creator for loving us despite not only our bad deeds, bad words, and worse thoughts, but also for our (let’s be real) bad taste.

To the people who would rather celebrate the Aztecs than Columbus, and who prefer Juneteenth to the Fourth of July, God bless you — really — and I hope you enjoy the 25th of December. But you won’t enjoy it as much as I do. And I hope someday you will. Because if you're anything like me, about the third time I hear I Want A Hippopotamus for Christmas, I want to blow my brains out.

Yours,

-J

December 20th, 2025

ADDENDUM:

It’s been made very clear by readers at The American Thinker that this essay may be unclear to some people. Now, it isn’t my fault that Americans don’t know how to read. But my position was never that it was wrong or distasteful to play White Christmas on Christmas — merely that it wasn’t the pinnacle of Christmas magic in general. To ignore O Holy Night or Hark The Herald Angels Sing on Christmas is borderline unChristian (at least in America). To not play Bing Crosby the first snow day of the season is 100% unAmerican.

So have fun. Enjoy your Christmas and play silly shit by 98 Degrees and Kelly Clarkson. Light a log on fire and call it a Yule Log even though nobody knows what Yule is. Tell your kids a fat man brought them gifts and slid down the chimney even though half of America can barely fit through their car doors. I really want you to enjoy (almost) every tradition you grew up with as a kid, and I have no intention of spoiling any of it. All I want to do is draw attention to the fact that some things are more meaningful than others, and to remind you, if that meaning has any place in your heart, to not forget the real magic.

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AJP Taylor writes, in The Oxford History of England, that before August of 1914 no Englishman ever had an ID. He also didn't need a passport to travel, and he could pretty much go anywhere he wanted.

He didn’t need a permit to change his house. He could trade with any foreign country on pretty much the same terms he traded in his own. Unlike the other European countries, he didn’t have to do mandatory service in the military; and the annual amount of taxes Englishmen paid to the government was somewhere around only eight percent. Things were so loose that these rules also went for foreigners. They didn’t have to register with the state either, and they could come and go pretty much as they pleased*.

This is all interesting to me because 1914 was the height of the British Empire and the government was practically invisible — except for the post office, the school (which only lasted for many until they turned 13), the policeman, and some safety rules and regulations. To modern Americans this looks like a state of borderline anarchy. And the British were on top of the world, despite the British government not really being on top of Britain.

The reason I bring this up is because, maybe a hundred and fifty years before this, the English language was in a state of almost absolute freedom too. You could almost call it chaos. And yet this period, of the mid-to-late 1700s, was a time of profound leaps in the art of communication. Not only were the British reading and writing more as the years went on, but they were learning more, thinking more, and growing more than ever before. They were delivering speeches for hours in Parliament that could easily pass as theatrical performances.

They couldn’t agree on what to capitalize at first, or how to spell, or even which way to frame a sentence best. But somehow that's when the clearest sentences were used, and the deepest thoughts were framed, and the most perfect words were picked. Reading Samuel Johnson's Rambler, from somewhere in the 1750s, or Madison's and Hamilton's Federalist, or Gibbon’s Decline and Fall, or almost any speech or letter by Edmund Burke, it's clear that great thinkers and masters of communication are never hemmed in: they're let loose. And, Samuel Johnson being a rare exception, they almost never teach. What they do is inspire.

Samuel Johnson's command of the English language was so powerful and meticulous that when he made the first English dictionary, people just said, why the hell not? He didn't get help from any schools or patrons, and finally, at the end of the lonely and financially difficult project of eight years, he found this puff-piece in the London Chronicle, written by Lord Chesterfield.

‘It must be owned, that our language is, at present, in a state of anarchy, and hitherto, perhaps, it may not have been the worse for it. During our free and open trade, many words and expressions have been imported, adopted, and naturalized from other languages, which have greatly enriched our own. Let it still preserve what real strength and beauty it may have borrowed from others; but let it not, like the Tarpeian maid, be overwhelmed and crushed by unnecessary ornaments. The time for discrimination seems to be now come.

‘Toleration, adoption, and naturalization have run their lengths. Good order and authority are now necessary. But where shall we find them, and, at the same time, the obedience due to them? We must have recourse to the old Roman expedient in times of confusion, and chuse a dictator. Upon this principle, I give my vote for Mr. Johnson to fill that great and arduous post. And I hereby declare, that I make a total surrender of all my rights and privileges in the English language, as a free-born British subject, to the said Mr. Johnson, during the term of his dictatorship. Nay more, I will not only obey him, like an old Roman, as my dictator, but, like a modern Roman, I will implicitly believe in him as my Pope, and hold him to be infallible while in the chair, but no longer. More than this he cannot well require; for, I presume, that obedience can never be expected, when there is neither terrour to enforce, nor interest to invite it.’

Chesterfield, by publishing this letter, was hoping to have it included as the preface to the dictionary. But what Chesterfield neglected to mention is that the dictator he so venerated had only yesterday been a mendicant. Johnson had been knocking at Chesty's door for years, actually, asking for financial assistance, and had been turned away so many times that he gave up. So when Johnson saw the letter in the papers, he wasn't flattered, or even mollified. He was pissed off.

He wrote Lord Chesterfield personally,

‘When, upon some slight encouragement, I first visited your Lordship, I was overpowered, like the rest of mankind, by the enchantment of your address; and could not forbear to wish that I might boast myself Le vainqueur du vainqueur de la terre; — that I might obtain that regard for which I saw the world contending; but I found my attendance so little encouraged, that neither pride nor modesty would suffer me to continue it. When I had once addressed your Lordship in publick, I had exhausted all the art of pleasing which a retired and uncourtly scholar can possess. I had done all that I could; and no man is well pleased to have his all neglected, be it ever so little.

‘Seven years, my Lord, have now past, since I waited in your outward rooms, or was repulsed from your door; during which time I have been pushing on my work through difficulties, of which it is useless to complain, and have brought it, at last, to the verge of publication, without one act of assistance, one word of encouragement, or one smile of favour. Such treatment I did not expect, for I never had a Patron before. […]

‘Is a Patron, my Lord, one who looks with unconcern on a man struggling for life in the water, and, when he has reached ground, encumbers him with help? The notice which you have been pleased to take of my labours, had it been early, had been kind; but it has been delayed till I am indifferent, and cannot enjoy it; till I am solitary, and cannot impart it; till I am known, and do not want it. I hope it is no very cynical asperity not to confess obligations where no benefit has been received, or to be unwilling that the Publick should consider me as owing that to a Patron, which Providence has enabled me to do for myself.

— a vitriol which took hold and never quit.

Later, when speaking of Chesterfield, he said, This man I thought had been a Lord among wits; but, I find, he is only a wit among Lords. And when Chesty's letters to his son were published, Johnson remarked, they teach the morals of a whore, and the manners of a dancing master. For reasons like this you'll find Johnson referred to, in Chesterfield's letters to his son, as “a respectable Hottentot.”

What I'm getting at is simple: when it comes to who should be teaching English, I pick anybody who writes and speaks this well. English teachers are good at keeping you from obvious mistakes, but don’t ever trust your language to a professor of English. Just find out who moves you and soak in them until great English leaks out your ears.

Yours,

-J

December 16th, 2025

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P.S. Obviously, Samuel Johnson isn’t the only writer I admire. A few of my favorites are Hunter S Thompson, Nora Ephron, Chuck Palahniuk, and Cormac McCarthy. P.J. O’Rourke and the Frame translation of Montaigne. I love Voltaire and Shakespeare and Thomas Paine and Edward Gibbon. John Steinbeck and George Orwell, Edmund Burke and Eric Hoffer. I’m a big fan of Ayn Rand’s ranting. and anything historical by Thomas Babington Macaulay. G.K. Chesterton and H.L. Mencken and E.B. White are perennial go-to’s; and I love the Saunders translation of Schopenhauer, and the C.S. Lewis translation of C.S. Lewis.

In there you’ll find the scoundrel and the scholar, the floral and the Spartan, the business and the bluster, the prophet and the playboy; and what should be clear from such a motley crew of literary giants is that there’s no one “right way” to do English. There's definitely a wrong way, and it's to bore and confuse the reader. But there isn’t an ideal way to shape a sentence; and, aside from the people you want to write for, there’s no tribunal to appeal to. You either make sense or you don't. You're either beautiful or you're not.

Love at first sight is always a surprise. You can make up a checklist if you want, but — I guarantee you — it's a total waste of time. Your dream girl will tear it to shreds the second she walks into the room.

*I’m sure you can think of some downsides of living in almost-absolute liberty, but the amazing thing is how dynamic and powerful both Britain and the USA were at this state — when neither of them had much of a state.

Barbara Tuchmann chronicles one downside in The Proud Tower: that nearly every lunatic in Russia and the West sought refuge in England, and in the period before The Great War, it became a hot-bed for foreign communists and anarchists and socialists and false prophets. And from there, the freaks put out their pamphlets and rallied all the malcontents. And they sent them all over the world to wreak havoc.

And this is how it always goes. Liberty is ephemeral. And its successes invite and breed those who tear it to shreds.

**Regarding the need for a dictionary, Stuart Chase writes in The Tyranny of Words,

Years ago I read a little book by Allen Upward called The New Word. It was an attempt to get at the meaning of “idealism” as used in the terms of the Nobel Prize award — an award for “the most distinguished work of an idealist tendency.”

Upward began his quest — which was ultimately to lead him over the living world and back to the dawn of written history — by asking a number of his friends to give their personal interpretation of the term “idealism.” He received the following replies: fanatical, poetical, what cannot be proved, altruistic, intangible, opposite of materialism, not practical, sentimental, something to do with imaginative powers, exact, [and] true.

With this kind of confusion it’s a miracle English (or any language) works at all — especially with the more abstract and difficult concepts. And it’s no wonder people mangle the meaning of Philippians 4:13.

Mr Upward wasn't the first to badger his friends and get discouraged. Mr Chase says that H.G. Wells wrote something for the Fabian Society, and said, of words, The forceps of the mind were clumsy, and crushed the truth a little when grasping it. A meaning which Mr Wells wrote, believed people would understand, and a hundred-plus years later seems crystal clear. At least to me.

But even Mr Wells is outclassed by the pessimistic words of Lao Tse: Those who know do not tell; Those who tell do not know.

— a statement I would take more seriously if only Lao Tse hadn’t said it.

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The big question of being A Man isn’t just what can I do?, but what can I do without?

That means by middle age, you should be asking whether you’ve gotten somewhere — and whether getting there, in turn, has made you a weenie. Chuck Palahniuk writes for all the domesticated men, in Fight Club,

You buy furniture. You tell yourself, this is the last sofa I will ever need in my life. Buy the sofa, then for a couple years you’re satisfied that no matter what goes wrong, at least you’ve got your sofa issue handled. Then the right set of dishes. Then the perfect bed. The drapes. The rug. Then you’re trapped in your lovely nest, and the things you used to own, now they own you.

What this means is that even kids have an advantage over many of us, because kids are on the other side of freedom. They can’t plan their own day but they also haven't adapted to anything yet. They can sleep on the floor, wear grubby clothes, go without showering, without brushing their teeth — without a healthy meal. And the kids don’t even know what they've got. And they don't know what they lack. And they don’t really care.

But we do.

Because we have standards.

And aren’t standards half of being a man? This isn’t good enough for me, this isn't right, this could improve is the general idea; and if a man doesn’t have a strong dose of this in him, everybody thinks he's a bum.

The poet Rumi writes, in almost direct contradiction to Palahniuk,

Anyone who steps into an orchard walks inside the orchard keeper*

— proving it isn’t too shallow or “unspiritual” to show who you are (or what you were) by what you made. When Dorcas died in the Book of Acts, the first Christians took Peter on a tour of her clothing line. And you can know a woman by her vibe, of course; but just as easily, you can know her by the way she mops the floor, or schools her kids, or makes a meal.

When we lose a great person a whole world of little things falls apart. A really beautiful person makes everything around them beautiful. A ten who lives in a pig sty drops down to a five — or worse.

H.L. Mencken adds to this, writing on the meaning of personal taste,

It is, indeed, simply impossible to imagine a genuine lover of beautiful things who does not make some attempt to get them into his immediate surroundings, just as it is impossible to imagine a genuine lover of music who does not try to make it. Let a man gabble about art day in and day out and know all the public collections by heart — and if his own home is unmitigatedly ugly, then his frenzy for beauty is fraudulent. Let him subscribe to all public funds for the preservation of bad paintings and worse statuary—and if he wears a green necktie with a blue shirt, then he remains a Philistine.

But like all good things, even style and dignity have their counterfeits. “Success” was obvious — a whole world of things going rightly and brightly around you. So others caught on, and just went after the things. Thus was born the Rolex, the Jaguar, and the gold-digging trophy wife. Caricatures of strength, and order, and intelligence, many times bought with a monthly payment at a high APR.

We still have a hard time telling whether a man buys a Ferrari or sells himself to the dealership. Since those who do things other men won’t do will have things other men won’t have, the big question should be, what did he sacrifice to get there? Time? Family? Self-reflection? A credit score? Or his body? Or enlightenment? And was it worth it? And if it wasn’t, does that make him dedicated anyway — a hard-driven go-getter? Or does it just make him a clown?**

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Chuck Palahniuk has so many true and uncomfortable passages in Fight Club that it’s hard to tell whether the book is a comedy or horror or a sermon. And maybe it’s all three. Maybe that’s what satire is.

Tyler Durden says,

Everything you can ever accomplish will end up as trash. Anything you’re ever proud of will be thrown away.

— an echo of Christ’s own parable of the man who lives to stock up his barn and still dies anyway. The difference between Tyler Durden and Jesus is that Jesus is the light at the end of the tunnel. With Fight Club, there is no light. There’s only a crash. And Tyler prefers to take things into his own hands and crash right now.

And what about this passage, about how the further you stray from God, the better the homecoming?

“Burn the Louvre,” the mechanic says, “and wipe your ass with the Mona Lisa. This way at least, God would know our names.” The lower you fall, the higher you’ll fly. The farther you run, the more God wants you back. “If the prodigal son had never left home,” the mechanic says, “the fatted calf would still be alive.” It’s not enough to be numbered with the grains of sand on the beach and the stars in the sky.

— a passage with just enough truth in it to make you wonder whether Palahniuk is crazy or wise, as many of Christ’s most ardent followers were scoundrels and prostitutes. There really is a sharp, ecstatic contrast between hitting rock bottom and touching the center of the cosmos. But the trick is to get the right one in front of the other. And to really hit rock bottom, you can’t usually do it on purpose.

And what about his takes on manhood — that you can’t be comfortable in your skin until you risk it or lose it?

Fight club isn’t about winning or losing fights. Fight club isn’t about words. You see a guy come to fight club for the first time, and his ass is a loaf of white bread. You see this same guy here six months later, and he looks carved out of wood. This guy trusts himself to handle anything. There’s grunting and noise at fight club like at the gym, but fight club isn’t about looking good. There’s hysterical shouting in tongues like at church, and when you wake up Sunday afternoon you feel saved. […]

When we invented fight club, Tyler and I, neither of us had ever been in a fight before. If you’ve never been in a fight, you wonder. About getting hurt, about what you’re capable of doing against another man. I was the first guy Tyler ever felt safe enough to ask, and we were both drunk in a bar where no one would care so Tyler said, “I want you to do me a favor. I want you to hit me as hard as you can.” I didn’t want to, but Tyler explained it all, about not wanting to die without any scars, about being tired of watching only professionals fight, and wanting to know more about himself.

A short passage any man can relate to if he hasn't been to war, or even boot camp.

Unfortunately there is no easy, clear-cut answer to this dilemma. On the one hand, we have the need to make the world a little Zion. And on the other, we have the urge to know we can make it through hell to get there. And the only way to get close to either is to lose the other.

Speaking of the waste of talent we see every day, all around us,

"I see the strongest and the smartest men who have ever lived,” he says, his face outlined against the stars in the driver’s window, “and these men are pumping gas and waiting tables.”

Something which strikes home for me, a monkey by day and a scholar by night. The passage isn’t a criticism of our society in particular, though, since more genius was always squandered in Feudalism or Soviet Russia; but still a reminder of our wastefulness — or more accurately, of our having been wasted. There simply wasn’t any way to fund it, and there probably never will be. A real tinge of optimism, though, when you think about it. Palahniuk believes we can fly much, much higher than we currently do.

He goes on.

You have a class of young strong men and women, and they want to give their lives to something. Advertising has these people chasing cars and clothes they don’t need. Generations have been working in jobs they hate, just so they can buy what they don’t really need.

We don’t have a great war in our generation, or a great depression, but we do, we have a great war of the spirit. We have a great revolution against the culture. The great depression is our lives. We have a spiritual depression.

and further,

“We are the middle children of history, raised by television to believe that someday we’ll be millionaires and movie stars and rock stars, but we won’t. And we’re just learning this fact.”

All true, of course; but missing one thing. We’re only disappointed when we forget the absolute profundity and unlikelihood of the present moment: that the universe is steeped in magic, that the Magician is with us, watching, goading, whispering, judging, blessing, and drawing us back to Him; and that being a rock star or a millionaire was always chump change in the general picture of the cosmic lottery.

Palahniuk was upset — and knows Americans are upset — because we’re missing something. Self-possession is his proposed remedy. And so is throwing away a sham dream. And they're both a good start. But we were designed to possess so much more, and the real problem is that too many of us are dreaming too small.

Yours,

-J

December, 2025

*Rumi wasn't all production, of course. He writes later,

Close your lips and let the maker of mouths talk.

— a reminder that spiritual greatness knows when to conjure and when to consume: when to breathe out, and when to breathe in. What we forget is that someone who exhales or holds his breath for too long finds himself gasping for air — and that he enjoys inhaling more than the rest of us.

**Regarding being a strong clown, 27 years ago somebody bet Karl Bushby that he couldn’t walk around the whole world. In 2026, after decades of marching, Bushby is set to prove that idiot wrong.

This goes to show there’s a fine line between “a feat of incredible determination and strength” and “a stupid waste of time.” I hate to see a virtue wasted, like vines full of shriveled grapes in late summer, unpicked. But even more than this, I’d hate to see a good Malbec used to clean windows, or to dye a white T-shirt.

Still, he could have done worse. He could have shored up his immense talents, and went into Black Lives Matter, or usury, or feminism. The difference between spilling your wine on the floor and waterboarding the neighbor with it.

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In my last essay about Nietzsche I forgot to mention one final (and extreme) irony: the fact that Nietzsche saw a horse getting whipped, and freaked out so badly that he turned into a vegetable.

Thus Nietzsche became an exception to his own rule. Not only did he prove that sometimes what doesn’t kill you makes you weaker; but he showed that after all he said about pity and pain, things like,

Examine the lives of the best and most fruitful men and peoples, and ask yourself: can a tree grow proud and tall without storms and inclemency? Disregard and opposition, all sorts of obstinacy, cruelty, greed, distrust, jealousy, hatred and violence — are these not among the favourable circumstances without which great growth, even in virtue, is scarcely possible? The poison by which the weaker natures perish strengthens the strong — and they do not call it poison.

— after all this (mostly true) you-can-do-it manly rah-rah, I tell you, it turned out he wasn’t preaching to us so much as he was preaching to himself. Most (if not all) sermons and philosophy are ours, in a sense, as he taught — a holy salvo of the preacher, by the preacher, and for the preacher. Which means they have a strong whiff of the personal, the subjective, and the lop-sided — a single man’s perspective on what he needs, and what he wants, and what he fears. And Nietzsche was no exception to the rule*. The entire time he was telling us to be tough it was because he knew he was too soft.

In the end he got his ass kicked by a whimper. And this herald of the Superman — the one who refuses to call suffering an evil, who plows through pain and pity alike, who marches to his own drum, and who bulldozes past the common herd — was felled by an extreme case of the herd instinct. He saw an animal crying, and wanted to cradle it in his arms.

He made fun of women for wanting to coddle us and lived out his last years — if it can be called living — being babied by a woman. Which is the same end (and the same beginning) decreed by God for most of us. But we get cocky, and forget that so-called independence and strength (and their corollary, pride) are only for the middle years: a short flowering which gets cut down, in its prime, by the first frosts of an approaching winter**.

Nietzsche made the Superman too abstruse anyway, I think. Being able to give and take a beating is a big part of it, of course. But in the end, what is being a great man? Just being somebody’s first pick in a business, a party, a family, and a foxhole.

You fail to be #1 to somebody in each of these categories and you’re not really superior at all. The Superman can’t be superior to any thing unless he’s a good fit for someone. Our value is never determined by what we “are.” What we are has always been determined by what we do. That and how we make somebody close to us feel. If you want to be a Superman, don’t see how many times you can get kicked in the pants. Start by finding out how to be a great husband, or a great dad.

One more thing should be said here. When I said people find meanings in Nietzsche’s writings because they think they’re supposed to find meanings, that isn’t really such a bad thing. Having faith in a writer is the only reason anyone picks up any books at all. It’s also why we go to church and read the Bible.

A man who has faith may be young and naive. But because he believes, he grapples with a passage, wrestles with it, twists and tumbles with it, until, like Jacob, the angel gives him a blessing — and a new name. (There’s also a time when you think you’re wrestling with an angel and it turns out to be a retard, or a lunatic. There are “beer goggles” of the spirit, and only experience can save you from them).

The author of the Book of Hebrews writes,

For the word of God is alive and active. Sharper than any double-edged sword, it penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit, joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and attitudes of the heart.

But the Bible is alive, in great part, only because we are alive. Faith is the medium through which God delivers meaning. It causes us to seek and it causes us to find. And I believe the same is true, on a much smaller scale, with Nietzsche. The loss of faith in either The Bible or Beyond Good and Evil never meant they failed us. Many times, it means we failed them.

Yours,

-J

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P.S. One of my favorite instances of a brilliant man struggling with a “B.S.” passage is CS Lewis writing in Reflections on the Psalms. Especially those passages that say things like, happy is the one who seizes your infants and dashes them upon the rocks,

It seems that there is a general rule in the moral universe which may be formulated “The higher, the more in danger”. The “average sensual man” who is sometimes unfaithful to his wife, sometimes tipsy, always a little selfish, now and then (within the law) a trifle sharp in his deals, is certainly, by ordinary standards, a “lower” type than the man whose soul is filled with some great Cause, to which he will subordinate his appetites, his fortune, and even his safety. But it is out of the second man that something really fiendish can be made; an Inquisitor, a Member of the Committee of Public Safety. It is great men, potential saints, not little men, who become merciless fanatics. Those who are readiest to die for a cause may easily become those who are readiest to kill for it. […]

The higher the stakes, the greater the temptation to lose your temper over the game. We must not over-value the relative harmlessness of the little, sensual, frivolous people. They are not above, but below, some temptations.

Lewis reminds me that we’re saved (many times) by our vices just as much as by our virtues. So yes, maybe a keen sense of justice kept us from doing evil. But so have laziness, and fickleness, and cowardice. We have probably been saved more times by procrastination than by the Holy Spirit. Simply put, we get tired of an evil dream because we took too many cat-naps, and never saw it to fruition. We were never good enough to be really horrible. As Rochefoucauld puts it, many of our virtues are simply vices in disguise.

Lewis adds, maybe more insightfully,

The Jews sinned in this matter worse than the Pagans not because they were further from God but because they were nearer to Him. For the Supernatural, entering a human soul, opens to it new possibilities both of good and evil. From that point the road branches: one way to sanctity, love, humility, the other to spiritual pride, self-righteousness, persecuting zeal. And no way back to the mere humdrum virtues and vices of the unawakened soul. If the Divine call does not make us better, it will make us very much worse. Of all bad men religious bad men are the worst. Of all created beings the wickedest is one who originally stood in the immediate presence of God.

And how did I find these passages — which there are many more of in the book? Not because I had any faith in the angry Psalms, but because I had faith in C.S. Lewis.

*Is it such a surprise that Nietzsche got bit by the pitbull he was walking? Jordan B Peterson preached the Alpha Male and, despite spiritual hardiness, found his body couldn’t keep up with him. Karl Marx preached against selfishness and we found he couldn’t take care of his own family. Ayn Rand preached for selfishness, as a means to happiness, and we found she wasn't happy. Solomon preached self-control and we found he didn’t have any. The man who posts success quotes is almost always a failure in business. The woman who “hates drama” is almost always a bitch.

With any good sermon it’s hard to tell whether the preacher is driving the bus or just hit by it. We found something in ourselves that was lacking, that was hurting, that we hate — and instead of turning our guns inward, we take them out on the universe. Because the universe had already pulled guns on us first.

**Samuel Johnson writes, in the Rambler, about how seriously everyone takes the truism "life is short,”

if my readers will turn their thoughts back upon their old friends, they will find it difficult to call a single man to remembrance, who appeared to know that life was short till he was about to lose it.

***As usual, Nietzsche, seeing the cracks in his own foundation, counter-poises one statement to another:

There is as much wisdom in pain as in pleasure: like pleasure, pain represents a power for the preservation of the species of the first order. Were it not so, pain itself would have perished long ago; that it hurts is no argument against it: it is its very essence. In pain I hear the commanding call of the ship’s captain: ‘Take in the sails!’ The bold seafarer known as ‘man’ must have learned to set his sails in a thousand different ways, otherwise he could not have lasted long, for the ocean would soon have swallowed him up. We must also know how to live with diminished energies: as soon as pain gives its danger signal, it is time to diminish them – some great danger, some storm, is approaching, and we would do well to ‘fill the sails’ as little as possible.

And I criticized him for not seeing how success breeds failure, but in The Will to Power, he writes of decadence — not as a sign of ruin, but of success,

The phenomenon of decadence is as necessary as any increase and advance of life: one is in no position to abolish it.

Reason demands, on the contrary, that we do justice to it. It is a disgrace for all socialist systematizers that they suppose there could be circumstances — social combinations — in which vice, disease, prostitution, distress would no longer grow. But that means condemning life — A society is not free to remain young. And even at the height of its strength it has to form refuse and waste materials. The more energetically and boldly it advances, the richer it will be in failures and deformities, the closer to decline. Age is not abolished by means of institutions. Neither is disease. Nor vice.

Thus we attack Nietzsche's position — and only shortly thereafter, we find he’d already attacked it himself. He was spring and summer, fall and winter. We think we’ve caught him in one of spring's follies, only to find that he was seasons ahead of us — and had already dropped the leaves we thought we’d catch from his branches.

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Dear M,

When I was a small boy I was told about a coming judgment. Mom said that God was the judge, but what stuck with me more forcefully was the idea of how He would do it. There would be a great TV in the sky with all our deeds on view — all of them, large and small — and everyone would see what kind of life we lived.

This of course got lumped in with a viewing of thoughts* — far more terrifying than a viewing of deeds, but without which a judgment of deeds is impossible. Somehow God Himself was pushed, accidentally, out of the picture. He was running the show but not the audience Himself. I came to assume, not on an official level but an emotional one, that God had a deeper understanding of the whole mess: that His thoughts were so far beyond ours and His understanding so deep that He was with us the whole time and had almost given up judgment. I believe this was due in part to Jesus Christ and a blanket amnesty, but mostly due to the fact that He knew too much to be shocked by anything. He had already written parts of the film, produced it, seen it, and considered it a re-run. My Tia Maria, on the other hand? First viewing.

When I was a believer, I had always said I was a Christian in doctrine. But in retrospect, what this makes me is a Chinese pagan. I’m afraid of the judgment, but not of God’s judgment. I worry about what my ancestors, my parents, or even my children, will say*.

I worship none of my relatives. In fact I can think of none of them specifically I look up to. But the idea of being fully known by them is a trainwreck, and the only consolation, so far as I can think of one, is that they’ll be fully embarrassed about being seen by me. Every time one passes away, I examine myself fully. The report I give myself is usually not kind; and if anyone’s is kind to himself, I consider him a snake**.

This isn’t a belief I chose, but one I was born into, and bred into, and one which grows stronger as I grow older. I’ve heard of many men getting more religious before they die, out of a fear of hell. But who ever heard of an American who got more pious out of a fear of his dead grandma? The truth is that I, the man I know more than anyone else, remain a mystery — to myself. One of the joys of searching, chewing, digesting your own thoughts is this perpetual discovery — that there’s a deeper "you” than you ever imagined, and that when you put yourself into words, what you find is you’re actually a foreigner.

Yours,
-J

April 29, 2020

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PS: Am I saying this is my theology? That I believe this is how the universe really works, and we can count on it happening? No — the universe remains a giant question mark. I’m merely saying here that The Final Judgment affects me on an emotional level, and I have little control over it. Train up a child in the way he shall go, and when he is old he will not turn from it is how Solomon put it. Nor, in the case of the afterlife, would I have it otherwise.

There are men who’d pick otherwise, however, and I admit that a cold, bleak, death-is-the-end atheism has one and only one advantage: that it can hide you as a person from exposure. But a man who takes refuge in the void negates his sins by negating his life. We assume he does this because he’s a scoundrel — but he could be like the rest of us, living day to day, with secret lusts and hates and little shames, and be so sensitive to his own reputation that he’d rather be wiped from the cosmos than be found out. And maybe if we consider ourselves he’s right.

The genius of Christianity lies here: that the Great Shame is coming, that it will be so bad that each of us will get leveled into the mud, and that somehow, by some almighty sleight-of-hand, some of us will come out clean.

*The Scriptures are clear on our thoughts: The Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. This sounds like hyperbole to me; but even if it is, what can it mean? That deep down we’re so rotten and selfish and perverted that our best attempts to be good are still tainted with evil. Christians read Freud and threw him under the bus — for agreeing with God that we're disgusting***.

**For all the apostle says on sin — for whoever keeps the whole law and just stumbles at one point is guilty of breaking all of it — he never mentions that this is the way we think of nobody. If we did it would be a sin in itself. Real life is much more complex; and we usually judge people not by some one brushstroke, but by the overall picture they paint. Yes David killed Uriah — but did you see the way he spared Saul? Yes Thomas Jefferson owned slaves — but did you see the way he freed us?

Beside this there’s one thing each of us won’t see, and it’s the thing everyone else thinks is obvious. None of us really has a clue what we look like when we smile with our eyes closed after waking up in the morning, or the gleam in the eye when we’re in love, or what we look like holding our arms out so a daughter can run to us and be picked up. We’ve seen ourselves in the mirror but never as a son or a father or a lover. We have no idea that a whole host of characteristics, completely amoral in nature, endears us to others; and that many of the things we miss are responsible for others glossing over our traits that we hate. We mostly know how much evil we cause — but the good things, the beautiful things, the indescribable and unquantifiable things flow through us almost unknown. Many of us are beautiful — and we will never know exactly how much.

***When I wrote this line I was forced to pick up an old copy of Erich Fromm, the legendary German psychologist, on dreams and dream interpretation:

To [Freud] the child has many asocial impulses. Since it lacks the physical strength and the knowledge to act on its impulses, it is harmless and no one needs to protect himself against its evil designs. But if one focuses on the quality of its strivings rather than on their results in practice, the young child is an asocial and amoral being****. This holds true in the first place for its sexual impulses. [...] The young child has intense sadistic and masochistic strivings. It is an exhibitionist and also a little “peeping Tom.” It is not capable of loving anyone but is narcissistic, loving only itself to the exclusion of anyone else. It is intensely jealous and filled with destructive impulses against its rivals. [...] Freud’s picture of the child is remarkably similar to that which St. Augustine has given; [...] and Freud holds that the benevolent, loving, constructive impulses in man are not primary. [H]e claims that they are a secondary production arising from the necessity to repress his originally evil strivings. Culture is understood as being the result of such repression.

— in other words, Fromm insists that goodness is tacked on as an afterthought, and is mostly just a paint-coat facade. I could only faintly remember this passage, which echoes Chesterton’s God made children small so they wouldn’t kill us, and cute so we wouldn’t kill them; and looking it up reminded me less of Freud, and more of how much I’ve forgotten about him. I read for hours and was left with only a vague impression.

Montaigne complained incessantly about his bad memory at the same time he gave us, more than any author I know of, a burst dike of random quotes and anecdotes. He was extraordinary to his readers and an offense to himself. To a man who prizes learning, the mind is a faulty thing. We study for hours and are left with mostly seconds. We want to take everything, but the bag we carry it in has holes in it. We’re showered with great thoughts, only to find most of them flushed down the drain. To the experienced searcher, the problem isn’t finding something new — it’s hanging on to what we’ve already found, and not getting bored doing it.

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For a while I wondered if anybody I knew actually finished a book by Nietzsche. Or at the very least understood it. Or read it at all.

I began to think this when I realized his most famous works are Thus Spake Zarathustra, Beyond Good and Evil, Ecce Homo, and The Will to Power — the first of these an unreadable foray into fourth-rate Old-Testament soapboxing, and the latter three written on the verge of insanity. Go ahead and pick them up yourself. I've never met anyone who could explain what they just read*, and I also never met anyone who, in the process of reading him, said they were having fun. After a slight badgering by Yours Truly, the answer was always a “no” on both counts.

I’ve seen somebody online say he's their “favorite philosopher” after spelling his name Neechy. I’ve seen two people argue about what Nietzsche “really said” and then both admit they never read him. I swear on Schopenhauer's grave — a much finer and less trendy philosopher — that what most people really love about Nietzsche is the fact that other people say they love Nietzsche; and the immense amount of faith they put into his works is the very thing that makes his works so profound to them. Simply put, they can’t understand him; and in the immense struggle to not be left out, and in the hacking and mowing through the weedy, tangled jungle of his later prose, they put meanings into his words which he probably didn’t intend, but which feel personal, profound — even sublime. Because he had to mean something, right?

Not that surprising an attitude, though, as Nietzsche himself wrote, well before he was spacing out and licking windows,

Those who know that they are profound strive for clarity. Those who would like to seem profound to the crowd strive for obscurity. For the crowd believes that if it cannot see to the bottom of something it must be profound.

This being from The Joyous Science, the first 3/4ths of it written long before he went off the rails. During this period, a time of both real profundity and almost crystal clarity, he threw barbs at writers such as himself.

Thoughts are the shadows of our feelings — always darker, emptier, and simpler.

And this admission of philosophy's limits,

He is a thinker; that means, he knows how to make things simpler than they are.

Anyhow, I posit that there are two types of people (somewhere out there) who actually love Nietzsche. The first is the one who struggles hard, trying to get at what Nietzsche meant*. For this person, the sheer untangling of a mess is the joy of the chase in itself. Not that hard to believe, because Nietzsche does say things — and even many great things, when you dig long enough. These are the people who read Beyond Good and Evil.

But the second kind of person who loves Nietzsche loves him for his cleverness, his poetry, and his clarity. And I believe the person who enjoys this side of him — his comfortable armchair profundity, his terseness, his relevance to everyday life — prefers The Joyous Science, Human, All Too Human, The Dawn of Day. So pick these up if you want to grow and have a good time.

An example of something that hits home:

Why does our conscience prick us after ordinary social gatherings? Because we have treated serious things lightly, because in talking of persons we have not spoken quite justly or have been silent when we should have spoken; because, sometimes, we have not jumped up and run away. In short, because we have behaved in society as if we belonged to it.

Something both uncomfortable and true. He says a little earlier in Human,

It is far pleasanter to injure and afterwards beg for forgiveness than to be injured and grant forgiveness. He who does the former gives evidence of power and afterwards of kindness of character. The person injured, however, if he does not wish to be considered inhuman, must forgive — his enjoyment of the other’s humiliation is insignificant on account of this constraint.

Not just a piece of speculative philosophy or arguing, like a lot of Kant's or Plato’s works, but something you can really touch — because it has already touched you at some point. Which is the best kind of philosophy, I think.

And this judgment on two kinds of souls,

A refined nature is vexed by knowing that some one owes it thanks, a coarse nature by knowing that it owes thanks to someone.

I also love this passage from The Joyous Science (Hill translation) about being “successful” at life, but knowing you were meant for more,

Everything he is doing now is decent and in order, and yet he has a bad conscience. For he was tasked with the extraordinary.

And this passage, which, if it had been written this century, would be about woke anthems, and ham-handed Christian movies,

This artist offends me by the way in which he presents his ideas, even his very good ideas: so broadly and emphatically, and with such crude rhetorical tricks, as if he were addressing the mob. After devoting some time to his art we always feel as if we've been in bad company.

Noting a stark difference between the sexes, he writes,

Fathers and sons have much more consideration for each other than mothers and daughters do.

And what about this musing on literature — that we can only get from them what's already inside us?

Everything in nature and history which is my sort of thing speaks to me, praises me, urges me on and comforts me — other things I either do not hear, or immediately forget. We are always only in our own company.

Something which I think especially applies to his own writings. A statement which comes with a flipside:

A: ‘We are only praised by our equals!’

B: ‘Yes! And he who praises you is saying, ‘You are my equal!”

I also like this reminder that real self-denial and asceticism spring from abundance of self,

Today he is poor, not because everything has been taken away from him, but because he has thrown everything away. What does it matter to him? He is accustomed to finding things. It is the poor who misunderstand his voluntary poverty.

And this reminder that reason can be easily employed by the unreasonable,

There is a way of asking us for our reasons that leads us not only to forget our best reasons but also to conceive a stubborn aversion to all reasons. This way of asking makes people very stupid — and is a trick used by tyrannical people.

And this reminder of what pride really is, and that it’s really all a sham,

The proud feel chagrined even by those who advance them: they are angry with the horses of their carriage.

This last one is interesting to me because one of the theories Nietzsche really did throw out there and which people really do understand is the idea of “master and slave morality.” Which is effectively that Jesus’s ideals are for people on the bottom of the totem pole: those who can only achieve peace by throwing away their rights and (on some level) their dignity.

The reason I know this idea is bunk is because I am “a person.” And I’m not only a person, but I'm in the position of almost every other person. Which is to say I’m for hire.

Not really that much of an embarrassment, if you think about it. The richest man in the world was hired by somebody else. That's how he got rich. The President was also hired by somebody else. And the fact is, almost everybody who ever lived has had to either build a coalition or be a servant of some kind. And the first on some level usually involves the latter. Nobody can get anywhere good without being something good to somebody else.

So my philosophy is, everybody is somebody else’s monkey. And if this is the case, why not train to be a great monkey? And isn’t that the heart of Jesus’s teachings anyway? Put yourself at the lowest place, and somebody will seat you higher. If you want to eventually be a master, first learn how to be a great servant.

I really love Nietzsche's thoughts on suffering and greatness:

You want, if possible—and there is no more insane “if possible”—to abolish suffering. And we? It really seems that we would rather have it worse than ever. Well-being as you understand it — that is no goal, that seems to us an end, a state that soon makes man ridiculous and contemptible — that makes his destruction desirable. The discipline of suffering, of great suffering — do you not know that only this discipline has created all enhancements of man so far? That tension of the soul in unhappiness which cultivates its strength, its shudders face to face with great ruin, its inventiveness and courage in enduring, persevering, interpreting, and exploiting suffering, and whatever has been granted to it of profundity, secret, mask, spirit, cunning, greatness—was it not granted to it through suffering, through the discipline of great suffering?

In man creature and creator are united: in man there is material, fragment, excess, clay, dirt, nonsense, chaos; but in man there is also creator, form-giver, hammer hardness, spectator divinity, and seventh day: do you understand this contrast? And that your pity is for the “creature in man,” for what must be formed, broken, forged, torn, burnt, made incandescent, and purified — that which necessarily must and should suffer? And our pity— do you not comprehend for whom our converse pity is when it resists your pity as the worst of all pamperings and weaknesses?

Thus it is pity versus pity.

A great question, which many on the right and left argue about today: which pity do you live by? Fatherly pity, which seeks suffering as a means to growth — to strength — to mastery? Or motherly pity, which just wants to comfort?

Neither, I think, is appropriate in all seasons; but either way we live in a shifting world of constant change. It is failure which makes winners, and it is winners which make things easy — and thus breed failures. We are incapable of having one without the other. And if the value of being strong is bulldozing through people's obstacles, isn't this "motherly” anyway? The former only makes the latter possible. And conversely, the mother nurses the infant who turns into the champion.

The question was never so much which. It was always when.

Probably the most surprising thing about Nietzsche is his poetry — a series of short jabs, in The Joyous Science, which are fun to chew on (if read in the Kevin Hill translation, at least).

Where you stand you must dig deep,

Below you is the well!

Let the superstitious shout,

That down there’s only hell!

This is clearly about one’s willingness to explore — to seek even the deepest and worst parts of yourself and ask what they mean. The drive of a true psychologist. And this one, about being something great one day and having to abandon it for something else you need, maybe something almost contrary, tomorrow,

Our virtues ought to dash, and so,

Like Homer’s verse, should come and go!

I love this reminder that Nietzsche isn’t a series of arrivals, but a bold and almost reckless chase:

Attracted by my style and voice,

You would follow after me?

Walk your own path faithfully,

And – bit by bit – become like me.

I also love his insistence that his errors and recklessness are due not to his shortcomings, but to his abundance.

I spill much of what I pour,

And so you say I’m filled with scorn.

And yet whoever’s cup is full

Will find that when he drinks, he spills –

Without despising wine the more.

And my personal favorite, about exploring and embracing every aspect of himself — a full, confusing, and boisterous being:

Incisive, gentle, crude, refined,

Familiar, foreign, pure and vile,

A tryst of sage and imbecile:

All this I seek and claim as mine,

To be at once dove, snake and swine!

Something that feels close to me, who in these essays am filled with Christian charity and vitriol, jokes and lamentations, sex and sobriety, cleanliness and filth. Each essay is so different from the spirit of the essay before it that I could almost be considered a fraud — and yet I could never hold on to any aspect of myself for too long.

All of Nietzsche's works require work. None of it is an end in itself, and many times it's worth a rebuttal. But this proves that Nietzsche is a dynamic being; explosive, organic, living, moving; full of assailable observations, half-truths, and uncomfortable questions. In other words, not interested in being a “perfect” man, he aims for being real instead.

Nietzsche’s middle period is sturdier, humbler, and keeps to surer footing. In All Too Human, The Joyous Science, and The Dawn of Day, you’ll find lots of practical introspection, social criticism, and wise musings in general — but they’re each modest, straight-forward, almost chaste-feeling. In the later years, Beyond Good and Evil, Twilight of the Gods, and The Antichrist, you'll find a lot of high-flying prose and a general feeling of light-headedness. They have the feeling that he flew too high like Icarus: the air was too thin, and that what you’re seeing is a man hacking out his own thoughts, postulating, prophesying, blabbering, shouting, standing on an edge. In these later books you’ll have to dig harder for meaning; but when you find it — and I believe what kind of a man you are determines what you’ll find — you’ll know it was worth it. The diamonds will be fewer and further between, in some sections, but they will be brighter.

Thus Spake Zarathustra is dog shit.

Yours,

-J

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P.S. My honest assessment of Nietzsche goes thusly. The whole purpose of looking deep inside yourself and questioning and trying so many things is to realize how finite you are, how false, how rotten and tumultuous — and to cling onto Someone infinite, and good, and sturdy, and true. The end of all the study of man is to find out how much he needs God. Solomon got there. Nietzsche went crazy.

Like Karl Marx, Nietzsche’s father was a clergyman and Nietzsche turned into the devil. He was weak and sick and he looked down on the weak and sickly. He threw God aside and found he couldn’t keep a woman — and even looked down on women in general. The sign (in my opinion) of a true loser. A real winner is loved by women — and he tends to love them back. Even if he doesn't understand them.

This being said, he’s still worth a read. Since most of us can’t read Nietzsche in German, if you want to understand him better and enjoy him less, try Walter Kaufmann. If you want to enjoy him more and understand him less, try Helen Zimmern. For a healthy balance between the two, something readable and digestible, try Kevin Hill for The Joyous Science, and John McFarland Kennedy for The Dawn of Day. The Penguin translations of Beyond Good and Evil, The Antichrist, and Twilight of the Idols are all modern and stylish.

To be honest, there were so many good passages that it was difficult to fit them all in the essay without ruining it. Some I couldn't leave behind are,

Those who have thoroughly denied themselves something for a long time will almost imagine, when they accidentally encounter it again, that they have discovered it — and what happiness there is in being a discoverer! Let us be wiser than the snakes that lie too long in the same sun.

He also comments almost prophetically about the Russian and Chinese bots which spread lies about American politics,

The most perfidious way of harming a cause consists of defending it deliberately with faulty arguments.

And I love this poem about every man's climb from incompetence to mastery,

Among the pigs, a child is crawling

Never rising to his feet.

Listen to his endless bawling!

When will he get up and stand?

No, he won’t admit defeat!

Soon the child will learn to dance!

First he walks on his two feet,

But in the end walks on his hands.

And what about this musing on romantic jealousy — one of the principle pillars of marriage?

The lover wants the unconditional and exclusive possession of the person he longs for, he wants unconditional power as much over her soul as over her body, he wants to be loved exclusively, and to live and reign in the other soul as what is highest and most desirable.

When we consider that this means nothing less than to exclude the whole world from a precious commodity, and from the happiness and enjoyment it affords, that the lover contemplates the deprivation and ruin of all rivals, and would like to be the dragon of his golden hoard, the most inconsiderate and selfish of all ‘conquerors’ and exploiters, and finally that to the lover himself the rest of the world seems pale, indifferent and unprofitable, and that he is ready to make any sacrifice, disturb all existing arrangements, and put his own interests above all others — we are astonished that this ferocious avarice and injustice of sexual love has been glorified and deified to such an extent. Still more astonishing is the fact that the concept of love as the opposite of selfishness has always been modeled on it, when it is perhaps precisely the most candid expression of selfishness!

Something I personally have known too well — and, in my youth, paid for dearly.

*To be fair to Nietzsche’s fan club, who can say what Nietzsche “really meant” when he meant so many things — about so many things? And from so many angles?

Nietzsche’s lack of one overriding position in many of his books isn’t a testament to his opacity or imbecility, but to his fertility. His most quotable materials, such as

that which does not kill me makes me stronger,

and,

He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. And when you gaze long into an abyss the abyss also gazes into you.

and

He who has a “why” to live can deal with almost any “how,”

and

Whatever is done for love is done beyond the realm of good and evil

are fun, but they barely scratch the surface. He's incapable of being pinned down because he almost seems infinite — always on the move. A mess of a man, really, but which of us isn’t? We can’t put him in a box because we can’t box God or ourselves either. And others, to us — those we view from the outside, the casual acquaintances and siblings and coworkers — are caricatures. We merely have Nietzsche’s inner man in writing. And this hodge-podge and turmoil is what makes him feel so real.

**One famous internet joke about Nietzsche.

God is dead — Nietzsche, 1882.

Nietzsche is dead — God, 1900.

A reminder that man is small — and that he really ought to remember it.

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