Chesterton writes, in the 1920 edition of the Illustrated London News,

Every man ought to have read enough good literature to know when he is reading bad literature, and to go on reading it. He ought to have had what is rightly called a liberal education, that he may know the largest purposes to which human language has been put. But the object of a liberal education is to make him liberal, not merely to make him fastidious. He should be able to recognise the ideas that have been clarified and codified by the utterances of great men, when they appear in a more fragmentary fashion in the utterances of ordinary men. But if he has lost all interest in the utterances of ordinary men, he had far better not have been educated at all. He might as well say that he had been so carefully taught to waltz that he was quite unable to walk; or that he had been so perfectly trained to sing that he no longer knew how to speak. The highest outcome of an interest in literature is a finer interest in life; and bad literature as well as good may throw a light on life, if we have learnt to know light from darkness. And there are a great many other reasons for reading books besides the fact that they happen to be good books. It is a good thing to suffer fools gladly; and an even better thing to enjoy fools uproariously.

What’s remarkable about this paragraph is that, unless you own the Ignatius Press edition — which is out of print, extremely expensive, and impossible to find — these words have been buried, and thus almost totally unread, for somewhere over 100 years.

The question is, why? Chesterton, like George Orwell and CS Lewis, has such a dedicated fan club that burying such an essay seems almost impossible — either an extraordinary oversight, or part of a conspiracy. But a few weeks ago I found this was exactly the case. 998 authentic, original, and extremely interesting essays were sitting in public domain scans and waiting for someone to dig them out. So I started digging.

I put the word out to some of my friends, they threw some money at me for a ChatGPT upgrade, and I immediately went to work in excavation. To these friends — J, K, E, P, and R, I owe my sincere thanks. And if you like my writing, so do you. If I spent any more money on books this month, there was a pretty good chance my wife was going to shoot me.

As such, I present to you GK Chesterton’s writings for the Illustrated London News. There will be punctuational errors here, few and far between, because the goal was to keep what I found — to preserve Chesterton’s writing as much as possible; and when you tell a robot to do that, sometimes it keeps a printing error. Oh well. You can get over this. The essays are free. Read them, love them, quote them, share them. I don’t just want these on my Kindle or a few of my friends’ Kindles. I want them on everyone’s Kindles. I want the whole world to enjoy one of the most original, prolific, sensible, and humane authors any country ever produced.

This being said, here are the essays. I have done my part for humanity. Now I beg of you, please do yours and share them with everyone you can.

GK Chesterton: Our Notebook, Vol 1

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GK Chesterton: Our Notebook, Vol 2

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GK Chesterton: Our Notebook, Vol 3

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GK Chesterton: Our Notebook, Vol 4

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Yours,

-J

September 14th, 2026

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P.S. Because I figured out how to do stylish translations with ChatGPT, there are a LOT of great books coming your way, for free, over the next few years. To new readers, I strongly recommend hitting the subscribe button if you don’t want to miss out.

And if you haven’t got them already, here are Chesterton’s previously published works on Kindle. These are also free — and absolutely gigantic. Feel free to pass them around.

GK Chesterton: Nonfiction

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There’s only one thing standing in the way now: how would we go about doing this? How could you convince more than a third of the American public that they don’t know anything about government, and that this genuine ignorance, the kind that doesn’t only not know or not want to know, but that believes it already knows as much as it needs to know, to throw away their so-called “unalienable rights”** — the mechanics of which they can’t even explain?

The answer is simple. Tell them that surgeons don’t have to go to medical school anymore and drivers don't have to take any tests — and when they bitch about their lives being on the line, insist that people who never studied the US Constitution are incapable of running the government well too. If we require everyone to pass a test before they’re allowed to drive a car, why, in some places, do you not even have to show an ID to drive the country? You can’t even have sex with most strangers until you’re 18, but the second you turn 18 you can screw over the whole nation. And half the country already thinks we shouldn't own guns. Should we let those same people decide whether or not to drop nukes?

Contrary to the suggestions I’d given about property and taxation, my dream is that all Americans could apply for this higher level of citizenship. All of them could take a standardized test, written in plain language, about The Federalist, The Declaration of Independence, The U.S. Constitution, and in an almost-perfect world maybe even Second Treatise of Government. It wouldn’t even be written, but multiple choice, taken every four years, with a $40 fee and courses online and testing in every county. You can retake it if you fail it, and the second time you take it the fees are cut in half.

The argument against this, of course, will be that everyone, completely regardless of his ignorance or stupidity, should be allowed to literally direct the future of this country. If this is the case we’ll agree with them. We should take them at their word, open the vote to our three-year-olds, and let their parents sign for them. A fight we’ll win, since we're the only ones making the babies.

Yours,
-J

December 17, 2017

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PS: One other reform I’d make has to do with the election of senators. Back when the average American citizen had common sense they agreed that the average American citizen was a boob**; and out of this admission came the idea that if the eligible members of this nation were to elect their representatives — representatives who were theoretically better informed than the eligible citizens themselves — that these representatives ought to compile their knowledge of men and the mechanics of government and pick their own representatives: in this case meaning the US Senate, supposedly the cream of the crop.

This system worked well until some genius — completely averse to the idea that the people we elected to government, and who thus had experience in government, knew more about government than the people who elected them — decided to scrap it and had the public vote directly for our senators. The results couldn’t have been more stupid. Instead of having a body of men trusted by the lawmakers we trusted, we have another body of men who are trusted by the rabble; a congress as disreputable, demagogical, ignorant and bumbling as any embarrassing city council; certainly no better than our House of Representatives, and only underperformed by the President-you’d-like-to-have-a-beer-with. Which leads me to a point about the president.

My position on the presidency is that Americans have no idea what the president is for, which is why we keep ending up with terrible presidents. He’s not there to attend all the funerals of your favorite victims, or to chastise football players from the bully pulpit, or to express his disapproval of whatever his constituents currently hate on Twitter. That’s our job if we take it. He’s not there to decide whether we should patrol the border, or whether we should fund Obamacare. We have a border and he has to patrol it. We made Obamacare and he has to fund it. We elected people to the federal legislature, they made the federal laws for us, and his job is to make sure our federal laws are executed. That’s it. Anything less than this is traitorous. Anything too much more than this is tyrannical.

The president is supposed to be a kind of glorified errand boy and Americans are trying to make him a hero, or a saint, or (what’s worse than both of these) the distillation and hallmark of what it means to be American. We’ve lost the idea that we can personally be glorious, and so we spend our time looking for someone to be glorious for us in proxy. And big surprise: it isn’t working.Since I’ve been alive two and (maybe three) of our presidents have technically been draft dodgers, one of them was a frat boy known more for his connections and pranks than his prowess, and one of them was so effeminate he thought our male soldiers ought to be able to dress up as women — and, if this wasn’t ridiculous enough, that women ought to be leading our battle charges. There is almost nothing less soldierly than the glorified civilian in charge of our soldiers, and the reason we leave him in charge has less to do with any military competence on his part, and more to do with the fact that if he wasn’t in charge of our generals, one of our generals — usually men of confidence and charisma and actual talent, could potentially stage a coup after seeing the bumbling, incompetent ass we’ve elected for our president. This is the idea that our Founding Fathers had, they got it from the English ancestors they worshiped, and we have forgotten it because we worship ourselves.

*America is the only country in the world dumb enough to say Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore, put said wretched refuse on welfare, and then be shocked to find that our educational system is lagging and our politics are a circus and the world thinks of us as yokels.

Of course the idea that any immigration system is going to bring in the best and the brightest is pure hogwash. The people who are doing well in any country, the successful doctors, lawyers, scientists, academics, and professional soldiers, are likely to remain put because they have too much invested wherever they are. As such you’re likely to get the people who are too poor and unexceptional to be happy and just rich enough to take off. The best chance of getting the best men is in a refugee crisis. It’s also the best chance of getting the worst.

**There’s an idea gaining popularity right now that voter registration ought to be automatic — in other words that the people who either couldn’t figure out how to register themselves or who didn’t have the initiative to register themselves can be trusted and ought to be trusted with directing our destiny. Is this really a solution? Yes — if looting is high on the agenda: the only politics our underclasses are capable of understanding.

***One of the signs of an active and honest mind is self-doubt; also an abundant and sometimes excessive use of italics.

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Solomon says that life and death are in the power of the tongue. Montaigne, expanding on the idea, says, in his essay On Names,

It is said that the church of Notre-Dame-la-Grande at Poitiers had the following origin. A dissolute young man who lived on that spot brought a prostitute to his house. As soon as she arrived, he asked her name. When she answered that it was Mary, he was struck so powerfully by religious awe and reverence for that sacred name of the Virgin Mother of our Savior that he not only sent the woman away at once but reformed the whole remainder of his life. In memory of this miracle, a chapel dedicated to Our Lady was built where the young man’s house had stood, and afterward the church we see there today.

He continues,

That devout correction entered directly into the soul through the voice and the ear. Another of the same kind entered through the bodily senses. Pythagoras was once among a group of young men who, heated by a feast, were conspiring to go and violate a respectable household. He ordered the musician to change her tune; and by means of solemn, grave, spondaic music, he gently enchanted their passion and lulled it to sleep.

So I’m leaving these here, and who knows? They probably won't stop a rapist, but maybe they’ll turn a brothel into a cathedral.

Yours,

-J

August 25th, 2026

Sharing dreams.

We talk more about the temptation to do evil than the temptation to do good. Probably because the temptation to do evil makes us look good, and the temptation to do good makes us look bad.

With one we look powerful but restrained; with the other we look derelict and weak.

Uncharitable?

The question of whether to help the poor is always secondary. The first question is, "are they poor because they're shitty? Or are they shitty because they’re poor?”

One definition of magnanimity.

Those who apologize because they need to and those who apologize because they want to.

The things we do for money.

“Ladies and gentlemen” was flattery at its most shameless: the pretense that the peasants in front of you were nobility and landholders.

Love and marriage.

What we need in a good marriage is someone to balance us out — in certain regards an opposite. This means the impulsive needs the planner, the dynamic needs an anchor, and the leader needs a follower.

What we want in a romance on the other hand is oftentimes what’s similar. We fall hardest for those who exhibit what we love most about ourselves.

Jerks and dupes.

The conflict between racists and anti-racists revolves around one thing: the fact that nature has never turned out two of the same people, and our whole social existence involves categorizing people and their behaviors.

Nature works in recognizable patterns — never in duplicates. The racists recognize the patterns. The anti-racists point out the inconsistencies. Both pick sides and pretend to be comfortable, but it gnaws on them both; and neither party, unless totally stupid, feels his position is unassailable. The man we call “racist” worries that by judging obvious trends he’s hurting a good man of another race. The anti-racist hides facts and worries he’ll be known as either a dupe or a liar.

Another reason racial controversies are so hot: they not only involve power, justice, and tribal psychology. They involve people defending positions they know are riddled with holes — and that their own side, at some point or another, could look either foolish or cruel.

Charisma matters.

Regarding Thomas Sowell and F.A. Hayek:

The public needs to know what they said. But they’re such bad writers that you can’t stick around long enough to hear them say all of it.

Like Solomon's saying, a man who is slack in his work is brother to him who destroys, to bore somebody with a good thing is tantamount to supporting a bad thing.

Cocksure.

Confidence has two parents: ignorance and experience.

To be sure of yourself means you never asked or you no longer have to. Between these two fringes lies uncertainty.

The meaning of taste.

All culture is prejudice. The first step to being cultured was the belief that some other way of doing something was inferior.

Equality ad infinitum.

“All men are created equal” is the polar opposite gist of “governments are instituted among men.” The first pretends to be a reason for government; the real reason for government immediately ruins it.

Our natural inequality creates injustice. And the government exists not only to upend this injustice, but to separate our people from the others — who result in different kinds of society and government, which we fear and often hate.

Aside from this, once someone takes the first saying seriously, he wonders, what about the man on the other side of the border? A question which ruins the very basis of rights. What each country makes for itself is exclusive — and each defends it with violence against everyone who remains “other.”

My personal goal.

Never tell someone to calm down. Use your manner and words to calm them down.

Never tell someone beneath you to smile. Instead be the reason they feel like smiling.

Never tell anyone to believe. Instead, give them something to believe in.

Fun and pain.

To really enjoy food, starve yourself.

To really enjoy sleep, work yourself to the bone.

To really enjoy water, let yourself be thirsty.

To really enjoy women, rarely touch one — and in the modern age of wankery, try to avoid touching yourself.

Those who inundate themselves with pleasure will never feel it. If you want to get high, lay low. If you want to have fun, let yourself feel bad. Longing, craving, and hurting are the gateways through which God delivers joy — the coinage paid for having fun.

When you get sick, rejoice: you are about to experience the ecstasy of feeling well. The best views come after the longest climbs.

Saintly or selfish.

The difference between the martyr and the suicide is smaller than we think. In the end neither of them were willing to live if they couldn’t have something they want. The difference between them is that one of them benefits us by their suicide and the other one hurts.

We call the “suicide” selfish because he thought it was too painful to live. But who is more selfish than the person who celebrates martyrs?

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Nobody needs to read 800 pages on anybody. This is the conclusion I came to after reading Chernow’s Alexander Hamilton and the first volume of The Last Lion. They’re really just too big to be useful.

Do I need to know, in the span of 200 pages, how Winston Churchill felt about his mom, or about how badly he did in school, or how poorly he wrote in first grade? Sure — maybe in 200 words. In a good study Bible Jesus gets around 300 pages, about half of them are notes, and another quarter — maybe more — is just bald repetition. Yet according to Christians, God decided that was all we needed on Him.

The fact the we remember so little about modern biographies is probably a result of their size. Plutarch’s Lives run anywhere from 30-60 pages per figure and what we take away from them is far more useful — especially from a good translation. We get a short childhood, a slew of great quips, some moral triumphs and failures, some background history, a solid battle or two, and then somebody dies.

Likewise, Thomas Babington Macaulay’s bios on great Englishmen run anywhere from 50-80 pages, are packed full of big theories and moral instruction, and die off before hearing what anyone ate for dinner. What about Macaulay’s biography? Not written by Macaulay, unfortunately, and thus almost a thousand pages long. Will anybody read it? Despite an almost fanatical love for the man, I almost certainly won’t.

For this reason I have directed and edited the following version of Plutarch’s Lives — a new edition, faithful to the Greek, in flowing, modern, high-school English. Too many books about ancient Greeks and Romans have been written by “modern” Americans and Brits, which defeats the whole purpose. The main value of reading about Greeks and Romans is to get away from modernity. It’s to see the great and ancient up close, and get a real whiff of their character: the things “modern” men usually lack — and, in consequence, things many writers today don’t even have a nose for.

Plutarch writes, in his Life of Aemelius Paulus,

I first took up the writing of these Lives for the sake of others, but I have continued and grown fond of the work for my own sake as well. History serves me like a mirror: I try, as best I can, to shape my life and bring it into harmony with the virtues of the men I describe. The experience is really a kind of daily companionship. Through history I receive each of them in turn as a guest, welcome him into my home, and study, in Homer’s words, “how great he was, and what kind of man.” Then I select from his actions the most important and finest qualities for us to know. […]

By studying history and writing about it, I train myself to keep the best and most respected men always present in my memory. If daily contact with other people brings anything mean, malicious, or degrading into my thoughts, I can push it back and clear it away by calmly turning my mind toward the finest of these examples.

Proof that reading Plutarch's Lives — like all the other books we read, for better and for worse — isn’t about somebody else. In the end, it’s really about you, and what kind of person you want to be. Plutarch knew this and lived by it. Most modern biographers don’t.

A good dose of Plutarch reminds us that virtue is eternal. The real possession of it, especially in leadership and academia, is more likely to be ephemeral. And if this is the case, it's best to soak in these oases of goodness when we find them — if not in always in person, then at the very least in Plutarch.

This edition gets the job done, without a hefty investment into a good translation, or going “public domain” and slogging through a bad one. It has been my honor to get to know Plutarch — and an even greater one to share him. I only hope that after reading him, you feel the same way.

Yours,

-J

August 10th, 2026

Plutarch’s Lives: A Modern Translation

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P..S. I talked a lot about virtue above, but one thing that Plutarch is an expert on writing about is vice. And I don't think you can be truly good at the first without being a maestro at the second. In the end they’re two sides of the same coin.

As such, although I made this for my boys, they won't be getting the Lives until later, and even then with a warning. In these biographical essays you’ll find acts of lust both straight and homosexual. There will be murders and tortures and, in one life in particular, almost-unspeakable acts of serial-killer execution. There is incest, prostitution, rape, and polygamy. Drunks and degenerates exist side-by-side (and sometimes even in the same person) as saviors and sages. If you’re looking for the purely wholesome and kind, go watch Bluey. Plutarch’s Lives is a character examination of real-life pagans who got to the top — not Lives of the Saints, or William Bennett’s Book of Virtues.

What I’m trying to say is that Plutarch's Lives is a little nicer than Game of Thrones and about on par with the Old and New Testaments. As such, some discretion, especially when handing this to somebody under 16, is strongly advised. If your kid already knows exactly how Jesus was murdered, or about Lot and his daughters, or about Amnon and Tamar, or what Absalom did to David’s concubines, he’s probably good to go — or already ruined, depending on your perspective. Plutarch is about making judgments; and I advise you, before getting started, to exercise some good judgment about Plutarch.

P.P.S. When I was ready to finish the ebook and handed this preface to ChatGPT, it was kind enough to offer some unsolicited advice. It said it smoothed over some rough sentences, fixed some grammatical errors, and even patched a bad spelling of Aemelius. About the last one I was grateful, but upon further review I noticed one glaring error: the preface just didn’t sound quite like me.

So I kindly told ChatGPT to disregard all changes except the spelling. And then I had an epiphany. I realized that Mick Jagger, Joey Ramone, Jello Biafra, Tom Waits, David Lee Roth, Louis Armstrong, John Lennon, Brian Johnson, Bob Dylan, and Dave Mustaine are all technically “bad” singers — people whose virtuosity may be called into question, and who could have “benefited” greatly from some kind of vocal coaching. And I doubt the coaching would have improved anything. In certain cases, especially for Tom Waits and Louis Armstrong and Jello Biafra, it might have actually ruined them.

What I’m trying to say here is that, maybe for what you’re trying to do, there isn’t a “perfect” voice. Maybe a voice brings something to the show that can’t be measured with a tuning fork. You might have a swagger, a rhythm — a sneer — that carries more than the right pitch ever could. We know that in conversation, the way you say something conveys more, most times, than the words do themselves. I believe the same is true for singing, and I believe the same is true for writing. The modern age has raised the standard of singing to pitch-perfect — and the result has been a slew of technically professional, entirely replaceable, totally plastic sluts. The process works well enough for a machine, but it fails to really carry a soul.

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Of course it isn’t civilized, but neither are the feminists. The transgenders are on the verge of saving us from our “morality,” and instead of recognizing this golden opportunity, our right-wingers are busy crying about it. We were on the verge of putting women on the front lines without seeing how they’d do first as linebackers. Now we have an opportunity to publicly trample, bulldoze, uppercut, choke-hold, and generally mangle our most obnoxious women into submission — and we’re throwing away the opportunity because some of us think this is less offensive than having them shot, captured, and most likely gang-raped by a foreign enemy.

The truth is I don’t care much for seeing grown men join girls’ sports. It discourages our sane women from being athletic, which is a tragedy from almost any angle. But at the very least, I say let the men’s teams compete against the women’s teams every year — and then we can decide what to do with the army.

Yours,
-J

December 8th, 2018

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Every once in a while I have the privilege to introduce, to my adoring fans, somebody who is extremely dead.

Usually, the aforementioned cadaver is just as much a surprise to me as to them. Up until last week (for instance) I had no idea S.J. Perelman existed. He had been buried, literally and figuratively, beneath a whole host of oncoming inferiors: a gaggle of second and third-rate comics who just happened to catch my eye because they had been born later, and had access to better marketers. (Or maybe, if the retailer can be summed up by his wares, we could say the marketers were worse. Not their fault, necessarily — everybody has to make a buck).

Fortunately, in the world of good literature, being dead has no affect on how you make people feel alive*. Unlike the famous skeleton at the feast, the value of communing with a great writer isn't to remind you of your own death, but to make you laugh, and gape, and wince, and cry. And in the introduction to The Best of S.J. Perelman, which was compiled in 1947, I found the following gem.

In any consideration of S. J. Perelman — and S. J. Perelman certainly deserves the same consideration one accords old ladies on street cars, babies traveling unescorted on planes, and the feeble-minded generally — it is important to remember the crushing, the well-nigh intolerable odds under which the man has struggled to produce what may well be, in the verdict of history, the most picayune prose ever produced in America.

Denied every advantage, beset and plagued by ill fortune and a disposition so crabbed as to make Alexander Pope and Dr. Johnson seem sunny by contrast, he has nevertheless managed to belt out a series of books each less distinguished than its predecessor, each a milestone of bombast, conceit, pedantry, and strutting pomposity. In his pages proliferate all the weird grammatical flora tabulated by H. W. Fowler in his Modern English Usage—the Elegant Variation, the Facetious Zeugma, the Cast-Iron Idiom, the Battered Ornament, the Bower’s-Bird Phrase, the Sturdy Indefensible, the Side-Slip, and the Unequal Yokefellow. His work is a museum of mediocrity, a monument to the truly banal. What Flaubert did to the French bourgeois in Bouvard and Pecuchet, what Pizarro did to the Incas, what Jack Dempsey did to Paolino Uzcudun, S. J. Perelman has done to American belles-lettres.

It is customary to palliate the shortcomings of certain eminent men by pleading their physical drawbacks. Dostoievsky’s epilepsy, Beethoven’s deafness and Milton’s blindness have all been served up on occasion to explain their vagaries. The same must be done for S. J. Perelman, except that he has labored under a far greater handicap. Extraordinary though it may seem, his entire output over the past two decades has been achieved without benefit of brain. The plain medical fact which cannot be blinked (and if we are to blink it, we must accept the consequences) is that his skull is little more than a hollow gourd, a mere bony knob on which reposes a battered Herbert Johnson hat. How he contrives to fulfil the ordinary obligations of everyday life — to get to his office, philander with his secretary, bedevil his wife, and terrorize his children — is one of those mysteries of science like the common cold or mixed bathing.

The rest of his physique is even less prepossessing. Under a forehead roughly comparable to that of the Javanese or the Piltdown Man are visible a pair of tiny pig eyes, lit up alternately by greed and concupiscence. His nose, broken in childhood by a self-inflicted blow with a hockey stick, has a prehensile tip, ever quick to smell out an insult; at the least suspicion of an affront, Perelman, who has the pride of a Spanish grandee, has been known to whip out his sword-cane and hide in the nearest closet.

He has a good figure, if not a spectacular one; above the hips, a barrel chest and a barrel belly form a single plastic unit which bobbles uncertainly on a pair of skinny shanks. In motion, the man’s body may best be likened to a New Bedford whaler in the teeth of an equinoctial gale; in repose, it is strongly reminiscent of a giant sloth. In point of fact, from what small exterior evidence we possess, it would appear that he has modeled himself closely on that luckless animal. A monstrous indolence, cheek by jowl with the kind of irascibility displayed by a Vermont postmaster while sorting the morning mail, is perhaps his chief characteristic. Small wonder that he should have chosen for his book-plate that significant Revolutionary emblem, a crouched rattlesnake above the terse injunction, “Don’t Tread on Me.”

With this, the funnest (and maybe finest) introduction I've ever seen to any man’s work, I read on, and was kept totally amused. In the following pages I found typos, formatting issues, racial slurs, cracks at oversized women, and, in some places, an almost-incomprehensible dialogue that was worth reading two, three, even four times over — simply because it was so fun. And why did I buy this gem? Because of an obscure comment made by Woody Allen, to the effect that “nobody was ever funnier than S.J. Perelman.” High words from a man who, as a screenwriter, not only "holds the most wins (3) and nominations (16) for the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay,” but adopted a Korean girl and then proceeded to marry her. Republicans have yet to decide whether these facts are signs of Allen’s comedy or criminality. Democrats will let Jews get away with almost anything except The Holy Land.

Anywho, since picking the book up I have yet to be disappointed. The jokes land, even though he sometimes makes you consult a dictionary. And the words are strung together so well, and sparkle and shine with such style and wit, that he’s worth reading even when he’s being matter-of-fact. He penned screenplays for the Marx Brothers, and wrote side-by-side with E.B. White, over two decades, for The New Yorker. (If you don’t know why E.B. White matters, pick up his essays on Amazon).

I have no idea what to expect next — for instance, whether the following short stories will embarrass me for publicly sharing my hope in them. And who knows? Maybe I’ll just be embarrassed for sharing Perelman. Maybe his Wikipedia, like Woody Allen’s, will say he molested some of his relatives — possibly two uncles, and a grandma. But thus far Perelman is a reminder that like Oscar Wilde, The Princess Bride, “We are the World” and that poem on the Statue of Liberty, the best jokes never go stale.

You can buy The Best of S.J. Perelman for 99 cents on Kindle.

Yours,

-J

July 28th, 2026

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*Speaking of the dead giving us a new lease on life, Shakespeare writes, in his Sonnets,

THAT time of year thou mayst in me behold

When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang

Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,

Bare ruin’d choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.

In me thou see’st the twilight of such day

As after sunset fadeth in the west;

Which by and by black night doth take away,

Death’s second self, that seals up all in rest.

In me thou see’st the glowing of such fire,

That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,

As the death-bed whereon it must expire

Consum’d with that which it was nourish’d by.

This thou perceiv’st, which makes thy love more strong,

To love that well which thou must leave ere long.

—

BUT be contented: when that fell arrest

Without all bail shall carry me away,

My life hath in this line some interest,

Which for memorial still with thee shall stay.

When thou reviewest this, thou dost review

The very part was consecrate to thee:

The earth can have but earth, which is his due;

My spirit is thine, the better part of me:

So then thou hast but lost the dregs of life,

The prey of worms, my body being dead;

The coward conquest of a wretch’s knife,

Too base of thee to be remembered.

The worth of that is that which it contains,

And that is this, and this with thee remains.

— two stanzas I read four times to understand, and another four times to savor.

**The idea that every woman in Woody Allen’s vicinity was in danger is an overstep. He writes, in his memoir Apropos of Nothing,

In Mom’s defense I have to say [she] was a wonderful woman; bright, hardworking, sacrificing. She was faithful and loving and decent but not, let us say, physically prepossessing. When I said years later my mother looked like Groucho Marx, people thought I was kidding. […] Mom had five sisters, one homelier than the next, with Mom arguably the homeliest of the swarm. Let me put it this way: Freud’s Oedipal theory that all us men unconsciously want to kill our fathers and marry our mothers hits a brick wall when it comes to my mother.

After he married Soon-Yi, we owe him thanks for the clarification.

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The common belief about writers is that we’re a bunch of useless time-wasters: a horde of poverty-wallowing fruit-baskets who drink too much and don’t work enough and never have a chance to put our skills — supposing we actually have any — to good and practical use.

I don’t have a rebuttal to the drinking jab or the fruit-basket jab or even that we spend a lot of our time doing anything other than making money. But I did write this letter years ago — a short resume for a quiet, unassuming coworker who kept getting passed up for promotions even though he was the right man to move up. And my cohorts loved it so much, and they found it so true, so well-deserved, and so devoid of fudging or flattery that when I went around the business, asking people to sign it, they gave their emphatic thanks, gladly scribbled their John Hancocks, and he ended up getting called into the office. He’s now a part of the bourgeoisie (as I call them), and while I worked there, all of us were better for it.

The letter was such a glowing exposition of good character that reading it makes me warm to this day — not just because I wrote such an uplifting and solid piece, but because I had such a good subject to write about. Such paeans are usually reserved for drunk wedding speeches and funerals. It was my honor to launch this anonymous and invincible salvo while the subject was still living — and for him to find out about it not from the peons, but from his superiors.

So far as I’m aware, he has yet to find out it was written by me.

Yours,

-J

June 20th, 2026

P.S. The job itself may be described, by those who value income and glamour more than virtue and character, as necessary to society — but humble.

The status of the job here is almost beside the point. Lincoln once put it, whatever you are, be a good one. The Latter Day Saints (who have an affinity and a knack for folksy wisdom) would put it as “whate’re thou art, act well thy part.” To see a man perform a “working class” job with skill and grace almost always fills you with admiration. On the other hand, I have no idea what to do with men who claim a job is “beneath” them — and somehow fail to do it with finesse.

People want to raise the first man up, sometimes beyond his actual ability. The latter they just want to cut down. We have been enamored with girls running the lines at Chick-Fil-A. We’ve had doctors and professors who inspired us — to throw such “highly-trained professionals” right off a cliff.

P.P.S. Samuel Johnson once wrote, The only end of writing is to enable readers better to enjoy life, or better to endure it. So far I find myself justly acquitted. But he also wrote No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money; so it’s a wash.

Dear R- (and other applicable management),

We know employee appreciation notices come from above, but we wanted to make today the first time you’ve ever seen one come from below.

The subject here is B-. Many of us have worked with him for years now, and have had a chance to see his character in action. This last week he was the one thing standing between the [X] department and total disaster. He stayed hours overtime to ensure things ran smoothly, and because of him they did. He worked both sides of the department, jumping back and forth with total fluidity. He was knowledgeable beyond anyone else working the [X] department and he operated under stressful conditions with absolute equanimity. And he designed even our schedule to complete satisfaction.

But this was just one week among many, and concerning only the [X] department. His general virtues and talents, in no particular order, are as follows.

1) As mentioned above, he has an absolute mastery of whatever he puts his mind to.

It’s commonly said that “B- knows everything” about how the business runs, and joked that if B- doesn’t know, it’s possible nobody does. He functions as a kind of walking [company] encyclopedia or manual.

2) He’s cool under fire.

When things get ugly, B- is as gentle and mild-mannered as when things are going smoothly.

3) He’s dedicated.

We can count on B- to be there when things go to hell. He works overtime when we need him to and nobody else can, does all jobs regardless of his rank, and he does it without complaining. Note his versatility, too: how he can jump between departments, and is frequently called to do so.

4) He’s well-liked by those who work for him.

Because B- has a cool head, he’s able to navigate even difficult departments with volatile mixes of people, steering clear of drama, and making himself popular with all cliques and factions. He’s a man you can approach with a problem, because his judgments are clear and impartial, and he’s the kind of man who will fix it for you if he can. He’s firm when he needs to be, but fair.

These virtues being noted, we know it’s not our business to tell you or anyone else in management who to pick for a promotion. But we ask you to consider B-, who didn’t put us up to this letter and doesn’t even know about it, for the next available shot at manager. We love working with him, and feel, on a deep level, that a man as humble as B-, who is good at everything except tooting his own horn, ought to have his horn tooted for him.

Thank you for your time and consideration, and for always fighting (and we would argue, succeeding) to keep [company] a great place to work.

Sincerely,

[This letter was signed by an overwhelming number of employees, and resulted in B’s promotion to management the following month]

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A “your” in the wrong place hints at all kinds of things — for instance, whether I’m sloppy, or hurried, or ignorant, or stupid. It makes you wonder if I ever passed the fourth grade and whether I learned anything after it. It's only fair to ask what kind of writer I am after that — and what kind of a thinker. If Jesus told us to “not judge” (whatever that means) He also said we can’t be trusted with much until we’ve been trusted with little. And I’ve intentionally shown you what happens when somebody can’t be trusted. Simply put, he gets judged — usually without mercy.

This is really the point of grammatical standards: not that we’ve had the same language forever, or that the English we’re speaking today is the English we’ll be speaking tomorrow, but that a single typo can ruin your whole message — like a single wart can ruin a nice smile. This is the point of the much-maligned English professor in the first place: the idea that somebody out there can teach us how to not completely screw up our delivery.

Some genius running the University of Washington’s Writing Center disagrees. He believes an English course should be inclusive, and we assert the opposite. It ought to be so exclusive that if you fail to make yourself included you fail. We believe a course ought to change a person, and that it ought to change him for the better — even if the “better” in this case means “the whiter.”

The liberals of course have some arguments in their defense. Everyone knows (except English professors) that English professors get pedantic; and nobody can deny that refusing to end a sentence in a preposition can be just as annoying as saying “literally” when what you really meant is “figuratively.” It’s literally one of the worst things I know of. There’s a being too “proper” in speech like there’s a being too “proper” with women*; and either of them ruins our chances at having great intercourse. Which brings us to a very important point. In every discussion about the “right” language, the question isn’t whether we’re annoying to everybody, but whether we’re annoying to the people we’re trying to win over.

Everyone has a dialect, after all. The most important thing for any English student to learn is how to write like the right ones. For instance, like the people who run our businesses and colleges and speak like our most inspiring leaders and theorists. We don't have time to learn how to speak like a sneaker-collecting baby-daddy or a trailer park Nazi because we don’t need them — or like them, or want to be around them. Our interest in Standard White English is fitting in with the best movers and thinkers today. This means writing like James Baldwin and Ta-Nehisi Coates — two of the whitest Black writers in history, and easily two of the best. What’s important is that whoever goes to an American school can learn to speak like somebody fit for American command. Anyone who teaches anything less sucks at her job. Figuratively.

The sounds we know as words are symbolic for ideas. The way we string those words together is a metaphor for how well we put ideas together. Obama never ran a business or joined the military or held an executive office, but he spoke like a responsible and educated white man, so Americans assumed he could act like one. Whether we were right or wrong is beside the point. He became the President, and he couldn’t have done it if he wrote or talked like Kanye West.

In this sense a good English class is only prejudicial as any other class is prejudicial. It sees somebody else who did well and wants us to be like them too. It takes no interest in our feelings about whether or not we’re the best. It makes us the best. And if we’re not all capable of being the best, a good English class should make us be able to fake it.

A person who has no interest in changing has no business enrolling. They have no business being in business — or in the business of making others trust us known as politics. In everything we do there’s an element of belonging. Whether we decide to belong with the best or not is entirely our decision. And a good school should give us the ability to choose at our leisure.

Yours,
-J

February 26^th, 2017

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P.S. If you want to know where we went wrong with English classes you would have to look to our other humanities departments. For years we’ve been celebrating science, technology, engineering and math, and everyone forgot what exactly makes a great man.

Psychology won’t do it. Sociology is a joke. Feminine studies has only gotten us to misunderstand women; the purpose of gender studies was to destroy the idea of genders; and black studies has only made black people worse. The humanities teach you what people feel and how to move them. It’s the art of knowing our emotional springs and how to press them. As such a dead humanities department isn’t just a dead humanities department. It’s a generation of people who don’t know what to do with people.

People complaining that promotions are unfair and politics is too full of politics and good English is racist are only seeing the tip of the iceberg. People who don’t believe in humanities rarely expect that the world is all politics. They have no idea that a hierarchy exists everywhere, and that who you know and how you manage them has everything to do with your success. The art of relating is every bit as crucial to your success as how well you work and how much you know.

The study of English is political by nature. It’s the art of putting your soul into somebody else's. The first question of English is how can I put my soul into words? The second question is how can I make them enjoy it? Anybody who ignores these two things isn’t just unfit to teach English. He’s destined to be managed by smarter people.

*Is there a being too proper with speech and women? Yes, nobody who ever confuses manners with formality is ever going to be a good closer.

Formality is the art of inspiring respect. It shows that you fit in with the high and mighty, and are supposed to be taken seriously. Manners is the art of making people feel easy, light, trustworthy, and comfortable. One of them aims at not screwing up. The other makes it really easy to screw.

Better manners means more fun. More formality means this is serious — and if you wear a tuxedo to the frat party, it had better be as a joke. Because you'll feel uncomfortable, and if people think you’re being serious, the butt of the jokes is going to be you.

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Baby names have always been a matter of difficulty. If you name him something that sounds great when he’s a baby it usually looks bad on him as a man. If you name him something great for a man, it probably fits badly when he’s a baby*.

No baby ever looked right as a Hunter or a Justice or a Steve. And likewise no man ever looked strong as a Percy or a Timmy or a Bud. Aim too cute and the man looks like a coward or a tard. Aim too high and the kid looks like a prick or a fraud.

Why bring this up? Because in the entirety of history, nobody’s parents ever aimed higher than Saint Jerome’s. His real name was Eusebius Hieronymus Sophronius — or, The Devout and Holy-named Sage. When he was young it didn't fit him because he was too young to be wise or holy. When he was old it didn't fit him because he was a jerk.

He was born sometime around 340 and given an at-the-time world-class education in the classics. And his whole life he was so hot-headed for Christianity and believed so much in perfection that his own bishop told him to calm down. You've got to be patient with people, the bishop said. They’re just people.

Jerome disagreed. He called the bishop a rotten, ignorant brute and a good match for a bad flock; gathered up a few of his closest friends, and went off into the desert to starve two of them to death.

Jerome almost died himself from the “sinless” (read: homeless and bathless and foodless) lifestyle and the unhealthy climate, but he decided to press on. He left to another hermitage with his library in tow — Virgil and Cicero and other favorites — and became worried he loved them more than the Bible. It was then he had a dream, the account of which goes as follows.

[I was] dragged before the Judge’s judgment seat. I was asked to state my condition, and replied that I was a Christian. But He Who presided said, “Thou liest; thou art a Ciceronian, not a Christian. For where thy treasure is, there will thy heart be also.”

Straightway I became dumb, and I felt the strokes of the whip — for He had ordered me to be scourged. [...] At last the bystanders fell at the knees of Him Who presided, and prayed Him to pardon my youth and give me opportunity to repent of my error, on the understanding that the extreme of torture should be inflicted upon me if ever I read again the books of Gentile authors. […] This experience was no sweet or idle dream. [...] I profess that my shoulders were black and blue, and that I felt the bruises long after I awoke. […] Henceforth I read the books of God with greater zeal than I had ever given before to the books of men.

Proof that even in the Dark Ages, the only way to make Leviticus interesting is to threaten somebody with torture.

People swallowed his story, though, and in 379 the people of Antioch made him a priest. He was so smart and radical and sharp that by 382 he was in Rome — a secretary to Pope Damasus, who commissioned him to translate the New Testament into Latin. Despite being surrounded by luxury he ate sparsely, and kept the brown robe of an anchorite monk. He became really popular among the rich ladies, to the point where pagan critics started to raise eyebrows and make jokes about it.

An unfair accusation, I think, because Saint Jerome hated sex more than anyone else. He condemned priests for getting married. He advised women to run off to convents. And because Saint John was unmarried, he preferred him over Saint Peter. “I praise marriage,” he said — “but only because it makes more virgins.”

In a letter to a girl named Eustochium, he comes close to sounding like a feminist, or even a man-hating lesbian. He says he’s not against marriage, per se, but that if you stay single you avoid the pains of pregnancy, crying children, taking care of a household, and the tortures of jealousy — a narrow escape from Sodom itself, as he puts it. He writes,

Virginity can be lost even by a thought. […] Let your companions be those who are pale of face and thin with fasting. […] Let your fasts be of daily occurrence. Wash your bed and water your couch nightly with tears. [...] Let the seclusion of your own chamber ever guard you; ever let the Bridegroom sport with you within. […] When sleep falls upon you He will come behind the wall, and will put His hand through the door and will touch your womb. And you will awake and rise up and cry, “I am sick with love.” And you will hear Him answer: “A garden enclosed is my sister, my spouse; a spring shut up, a fountain sealed.”

— a letter which went public, made everybody throw up, and was greeted (in his words) “with showers of stones.” Proving that across all cultures and ages, “Jesus is my boyfriend” lyrics are gross.

A rich lady named Paula — Eustochium’s mom, it turns out — fell for this tomfoolery and brought her daughters along with her. Three months after doing Jerome's diets in a convent, one daughter, Blaesilla, got too sick to hold her own head up, and promptly died. The public was furious, and the pagans (as Jerome says in his letters) wanted to throw him into the river.

Jerome felt less enthusiastic about it. When Paula, Blesilla’s mother, couldn't eat food, and was seen crying at the funeral hysterically, Jerome wrote her a very impressive letter telling her to man up.

Have you no fear, then, lest the Saviour may say to you: Are you angry, Paula, that your daughter has become my daughter? Are you vexed at my decree, and do you, with rebellious tears, grudge me the possession of Blæsilla? [Note that Jerome is speaking for Jesus here] You ought to know what my purpose is both for you and for yours. You deny yourself food, not to fast but to gratify your grief; and such abstinence is displeasing to me. Such fasts are my enemies. I receive no soul which forsakes the body against my will. [...] My spirit rests only upon him ​that is poor and of a contrite spirit, and that trembles at my word.

Having thus outdone Jesus, who cried when Lazarus died, he ended the letter on a softer note:

[S]o long as breath animates my body, so long as I continue in the enjoyment of life, I engage, declare, and promise that Blæsilla’s name shall be forever on my tongue, that my labors shall be dedicated to her honor, and that my talents shall be devoted to her praise. No page will I write in which Blæsilla’s name shall not occur.

A beautiful tribute — except I bought a giant collection of Jerome’s letters, and Blaesilla’s name only shows up in seven of them.

Having pissed off enough people in Rome, Jerome high-tailed it to Bethlehem. It was there he took Paula and her other daughter Eustochium, and proceeded to live a life of diabolical virtue. Sequestered in a cave with his books, he spent the next 34 years of his life reading the classics the angel told him not to, writing the Latin Vulgate, and fighting with the other church fathers. He called the majestic St Ambrose** “a deformed little crow.” He quarreled sharply with both Chrysostom and Augustine. He called John, the patriarch of Jerusalem, a Judas and a Satan — “for whom Hell can never provide adequate punishment.” Christ said to the Apostles, “they will know you’re mine by the love you show for one another.” If this is the case, we have yet to know who St Jerome belongs to.

He was never officially confirmed a saint by the Catholic Church — a testament to the good sense of the Vatican. He earned the title by public acclaim after writing The Latin Vulgate — no small gift to mankind, as it made the Bible accessible to Europe — and his fifty-something works defending the church against “heretics.” Aside from this he set up a hospice for pilgrims in the Holy Land, and a school to teach children a variety of subjects.

These things being said, his personal letters show little-to-none of the Fruit of the Spirit. Instead we see pride, insolence, reckless tale-bearing, outright hatred, Scripture-twisting, and a lack of grace almost unparalleled in Patristic literature. Saint Jerome is what happens when you cross the arrogance of a Cicero with the intolerance of an Imam and the ignorance of a Southern Baptist.

May the grace of God be with him — and also with me, a man who either has the opposite flaws of Saint Jerome, or for every apparent mote, a log.

Yours,

-J

July 6th, 2026

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P.S. Why is Jerome such a pain in the ass? Why is he against good clothes, and food, and houses, and mourning, and sex? And probably more importantly, why did so many Christians find this inspiring?

The problem with the New Testament is that, if some passages are taken at face value, sometimes it feels morally, intellectually, and emotionally stifling. "The cares of this world" are seen as an obstacle to salvation (Matthew 13:18-23). How long would it be before somebody tried to throw them away? Suffering is seen as a badge of belonging (2 Timothy 3:12; 1 Peter 2:20-21). How long would it take for happiness to be considered a sign of perdition? In order to follow Jesus you have to “pick up your cross,” feeling lust for a neighbor is adultery, and hatred for any fellow man is murder. How long would it be for someone to confuse losing with winning — to cut off his balls like Origen, to try and mollycoddle a public enemy? The fact that St Jerome tried to do much of this and still live is impressive. The fact the he didn't know it’s impossible (and that expecting everyone else to do it is cruel) is more than just prideful. It’s Satanic. Nobody can love anyone else (or commit an act of charity) without wanting them to “do well.” And conversely, nobody can hate anyone else without wanting them to hit rock bottom like Saint Jerome.

The Old Testament on the other hand is liberating. The Psalms give you a license to feel — to curse, and yowl, and cry, and laugh. Lamentations gives you a license to mourn. The Song of Solomon gives you a license to lust. The Proverbs give you a license to think — to judge, and to get rich. Ecclesiastes gives you a license to doubt and question and despair. The Law gives you a right to have rights. By the New Testament almost all of this is either forbidden or in limbo; and “the saints” fight what they think is a war against sin nature, only to find themselves in a war against nature. It is technically impossible to be “a good Christian” and be a full person. Christianity touts the so-called “humane” virtues so hard that sometimes it becomes cruel to humanity.

Thus I thank God most of Christendom is half-assed. We have yet to see whether being human makes us frail or being frail makes us humane. Either way, the road to moral perfection has only two outcomes — one ending up like God, and the other ending up like St Jerome. And I think Jerome makes it clear that the “God outcome” is well beyond our ability. The end of the attempt is never loving. The byproduct of forcing the impossible is always loathing.

Do you want to be a good Christian? Be gracious and humble — examine yourself, beg for forgiveness, and then, if you’re trying to earn your salvation, give up.

*The ideal names for a boy are versatile — such as William, or Thomas. Baby Billy is a sure win. So is William for a politician or a professional, and Will or Bill for a strong man in general. And Thomas can fit a scholar well, or a doctor or a writer, as Tommy can fit a bike-riding scoundrel or a bare-knuckle boxer. A good name should be full and smart-sounding — easy to whittle down for pet names and parties; easy to puff back up when writing a resume.

**Of course St Jerome quarreled with St Ambrose. St Ambrose was a peacemaker and a statesman and that made them natural enemies. Will Durant, whose writings informed much of the essay above, writes in The Age of Faith,

The career of Ambrose (340?–398) illustrates the power of Christianity to draw into its service first-rate men who, a generation earlier, would have served the state. Born at Trier, son of the prefect of Gaul, he was by every precedent destined to a political career, and we are not surprised to hear of him next as provincial governor of northern Italy. Residing at Milan, he was in close touch with the emperor of the West, who found in him the old Roman qualities of solid judgment, executive ability, and quiet courage. Learning that rival factions were gathering at the cathedral to choose a bishop [PERSONAL NOTE: these “gatherings” of rival Christians were known to end in riots and murder], he hurried to the scene, and by his presence and his words quelled an incipient disturbance. When the factions could not agree on a candidate, someone suggested Ambrose; his name brought the people to an enthusiastic unanimity; and the governor, protesting and still unbaptized, was hurriedly christened, ordained to the diaconate, then to the priesthood, then to the episcopacy, all in one week (374).

He filled his new office with the dignity and mastery of a statesman. He abandoned the trappings of political position, and lived in exemplary simplicity. He gave his money and property to the poor, and sold the consecrated plate of his church to ransom captives of war. He was a theologian who powerfully defended the Nicene Creed, an orator whose sermons helped to convert Augustine, a poet who composed some of the Church’s earliest and noblest hymns, a judge whose learning and integrity shamed the corruption of secular courts, a diplomat entrusted with difficult missions by both Church and state, a good disciplinarian who upheld but overshadowed the pope, an ecclesiastic who brought the great Theodosius to penance, and dominated the policies of Valentinian III.

Little surprise that such a kindly, capable, and ultimately worldly saint would end up fighting with a blowhard, an ascetic, and a literary viper. One was made for building the world up. The other was made for tearing it down.

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Despite touting itself as the “least regulated state in the US,” you can’t just move to Idaho and do whatever you want. There are still rules, they say.

Chief among these are,

1. You can’t just “go hunting,” and, in fact, the state of Idaho requires you to have “a license.”

2. No matter how hard it is to find elk and shoot them, and despite the fact that everybody here eats beef, shooting cows is considered bad form — unmanly, even.

3. You have to make sure the cows you shoot aren’t somebody else’s. And finally,

4. This usually means hunting on “public property,” like some kind of communist.

These things combined ruin the whole experience of hunting, and, if not followed exactly, the thing that ends up being hunted is you.

All I wanted to say is that the Great American Experience is dead. Below you’ll find some other discoveries I made this week, and I hope they’re easier to swallow than what I already listed above.

Yours, in tears and coonskin cap,

-J

June 29th, 2026

Meliocentrists.

Atheists tend to worship Galileo — for telling the public that the universe doesn’t revolve around them.

Which is precisely the same reason atheists hate Christians — for telling them they aren’t the final authority; that the Light has some into the world and The World isn’t necessarily The Light; that their views are small and even contemptible in the face of eternity.

Breeding.

If you end up with one or two kids and think you’re “done,” just look at one of their faces. Is this somebody you’d get rid of? Or would you give everything you owned just to keep him alive?

If you have another baby, that’s exactly how you’d feel about him too.

Don’t be robbed by your lack of imagination. You’d pay any amount to have what you can’t yet see.

A double dose of incompetence.

Vows of poverty, chastity, silence — strange, but (historically) honorable.

Being dirt poor, being single at 30, getting tongue-tied — a disgrace.

We don’t measure a man by the state he’s currently in. We care more about what he can do.

The best move of the incapable and incompetent is to pretend they’re slumming on purpose — and thus that they prefer it. These are many times referred to as “monks” and “Stoics” — sometimes even saints.

But because they’re incapable and incompetent, they usually pretend somebody else caused them to fail — and that they hate it. Which adds another reason to hate them.

Whatever thy lot.

Whatever MY lot, it is well with my soul. — righteous.

Whatever THEIR lot, it is well with my soul — evil.

Now ask yourself a question. Aren’t these really the same thing? Why is it a good thing to accept the will of God for you and not to accept it for somebody else?

Christian ethics, at bottom, are the belief that everyone is important except yourself. Thus the comic genius of Joseph Heller,

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.

— a case of Christianity inverted.

And splash with a hint of sin.

A man can’t be truly evil without some goodness. He requires some measure of trustworthiness, intelligence, charm, ability, and even some form of wisdom. Without these he goes nowhere. He might even be considered a victim.

Likewise, a man can’t be truly good without a little bit of badness. He requires some pugnacity, some craft, some guile, some sex, some fakery, some discontent with his own lot; some adherence to the here-and-now instead of eternity; some disrespect for the comfort and safety of somebody; some belief in his superiority to others, some preference for his family over others’; a willingness to occasionally break rules — an ability to let loose and have a good time while something else in the world is on fire. He doesn’t buy peace at any price. He will raise hell with those who threaten heaven. He knows who to cry for and who to laugh at, and hurt, and even kill.

If he lacks these things at certain times he’s less of a saint and more a liability. To be a really bad man, you must be a little bit good. To be a really good man, you must be a little bit bad.

Lightning never strikes twice.

Jesus says, in Matthew 23,

“Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You build tombs for the prophets and decorate the graves of the righteous. And you say, ‘If we had lived in the days of our ancestors, we would not have taken part with them in shedding the blood of the prophets.’

And this highlights the most common mistake of the fake-righteous. Your prophet is almost never your father’s prophet.

What dad needed to hear isn’t necessarily what you need, because his sins aren’t necessarily the same sins as your sins. A prophet is as precise as a pin-prick and as electric as a bolt of lightning. He never strikes the same place twice because that would be missing the mark. Your prophet isn’t just right: he’s right on time — to be offensive to you, a moving target.

Those who pine for the old prophets, mimicking their dated messages and old styles, aren’t actually in favor of the new prophets.

They’re just librarians.

Two absurdities.

“We have to pass this bill to find out what’s in it.” — Nancy Pelosi.

“The Bible is the word of God” — from somebody who can’t tell you what’s in it.

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The psychology of her stance is both crazy and logical. The God of the heavens loved her while she was whoring around, fighting her husband, getting divorced, slitting her wrists and aborting her kid. She was given this deal so she cut one for others.

The uglier they were the more she had to love them. In fact she could only know she loved them when they were ugly. She read that parable of Christ’s where the ruler forgave his steward for big things and the steward didn’t forgive his servant for little things; and knowing what happened to that steward (he was tortured probably to death), and hearing Our Father was going to do the same to us (Christ’s words, not mine), she decided to not get tortured for eternity. She had no ground to stand on so she took others who were too drunk to stand up. They offered nothing and she offered everything. They made our world a worse place and she offered to make their world better. This is called the Catholic “preferential option for the poor.”

The people who take this stance always forget one thing. If the God of the Bible exists, He not only has the resources to do anything, but He is the resource. God not only knows the people to save, He knows which ones He can save. He has all the time in the world because He created the world before time. He begins things because He always knows the end of them. He can “throw Himself away” on hopeless causes because no cause to Him is hopeless.

Dorothy Day, on the other hand, is finite and mortal and can’t predict the future. Thus Dorothy Day can be wasted — and this process of wasting, according to the elect, is her “honor.” In fact the further she wastes herself the more honorable she is. What good is her mind for? Nothing — so long as she “has a heart.” I don’t know what everyone else thinks, but to me this makes her a giant dick.

To this brand of pathological do-gooders, the bum, the menace, the terror’s existence is simply what it is. The rest of us, to achieve sainthood, are told to live for him. We have everywhere to go and everything to do. The bum has simply to keep being a jackass. Does God throw him in hell? We aren’t told; but if we don’t do everything to make his life on earth a heaven, God will supposedly throw us there too. This is called a philosophy of uplift.

No mention is made of what we miss by being “saintly.” That instead of spending our time with a wretch we could be spending more time with our kids. That instead of paying for ugly things we could be buying art from Michaelangelo and thus keeping him in business. A man builds homes for us to live in and we’re supposed to ignore him. A man ruins a neighborhood and we’re supposed to give him a home. We turn the cold shoulder to our victims and heroes so we can uplift the villains.

We had time — precious time, petering out every second and lost for eternity — to love someone beautiful, someone honorable, someone brilliant, or stylish, or just, or prudent, or admirable, or dependable, or funny, or brave. Real heroes, big and small —beautiful people*. But we spent our short lives on the gutter because we were worried we might end up in a fire pit. We were told Heaven was full of good things. Then some of them showed up on earth and we chased them, and we were told because we chased them we could never be saints**.

Yours,
-J

November 27, 2018

PS: Dorothy Day had some idea that what she was doing was stupid. She wrote in her memoir Loaves and Fishes,

“This turning the other cheek, this inviting someone else to be a potential thief or murderer, in order that we may grow in grace—how obnoxious. In that case, I believe I’d rather be the striker than the meek one struck.”

After reading many articles on her, this is the only intelligent thing I’m aware she said. You may compare it with this statement from the magazine she founded, The Catholic Worker:

“Houses of hospitality are centers for learning to do the acts of love, so that the poor can receive what is, in justice, theirs, [emphasis mine] the second coat in our closet, the spare room in our home, a place at our table. Anything beyond what we immediately need belongs to those who go without.”

If they had possessions, I would rob them out of principle.

*Every so often I renew my old Christian prayer that God make me into something beautiful. Not quite useful. I don’t even always ask to be good. Just beautiful. Something worth watching, or staring in awe at. A work of art. God’s Sistine Chapel. To me this encompasses everything else, and acts as a shortcut. I used to pray to be good, but I tried being righteous and quite frankly I’d rather have friends.

**I think we all know, by this point, that most horrible things happen because someone was chasing beautiful things. Even so, I have a hard time believing that the way to get really beautiful things is by chasing ugly things. I have no idea what Dorothy’s philosophy does for your soul, but I know what it does to a city.

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Bion was such a sharp and controversial philosopher that people got tired of arguing with him and started making fun of his parents. It got so bad that he had to release a statement about it.

“My father was a freed slave,” he said. “He sold salted fish, and was so unremarkable that his crowning features were the brands on his face — a keepsake from his old master’s severity. My mother was the kind of woman you’d expect to marry such a man: straight out of a brothel. Then my father, who cheated the tax collector, was sold with our whole family. I was bought by an orator because I was young and charming, and when he died, I inherited all he had. I burned his writings, scraped together everything I could, came here to Athens, and took up philosophy. This is the blood and pedigree I claim, so let Persaeus and Philonides quit talking about it. You can judge me by my own merits.”

With that out of the way, everyone was forced to judge him by his own merits. He took the lowest seat* as Jesus later commanded, and was able to get on with his career of harassing the other philosophers.

We don't have any of his books, but his one-liners were fun and useful enough to pass around for two millennia. When someone asked him who has the most anxiety, he said “whoever wants to be the most happy.” He used to call old age “the harbor of all evils” since all of them like to take refuge there. Noting who gets hit with gossip and slander the hardest, he called fame the mother of all accusations. He called beauty “someone else’s good” since everybody sees you except yourself; and, knowing it takes money to make money, he called wealth “the sinews of success.”

He said not being able to bear evil is itself a great evil. Both he and Antisthenes are credited with the famous line, when asked whether to marry, if she’s ugly you’ll have to bear her; if she’s pretty you’ll have to share her. And in an age of slavery, prostitution, and conquest, he stated that it is better to gratify someone else with your own beauty than to pluck that of another; for the latter hurts both your body and soul.

Predating Jesus, he said the path to Hades is easy to travel — at any rate, men set off on it with their eyes closed. He said of a rich old miser, this man doesn't own property — property owns him. And recognizing the importance of humility, he used to say that a big ego is a big obstacle to progress.

Mirroring today’s there are old soldiers and bold soldiers, but there are no old, bold soldiers, Bion said that in youth men are brave, but in old age they excel in wisdom. He said the downside of being a miser is that you think your property belongs to you, but you get no more benefit from it than if it belonged to somebody else. He said wisdom surpasses the other virtues like sight surpasses the other senses — true, since the other virtues, applied the wrong way, are just as bad as vices. And he used to say that nobody should disparage old age, since everybody is trying so hard to reach it.

One day he saw a slanderer scowling. He said, “I can’t tell whether something bad happened to you or something good happened to somebody else.” And another time, when he was a fellow passenger with some worthless scoundrels, his ship was overtaken by pirates. “We’re done for if they recognize us,” his fellow sailors said — referring to their bad records. Agreeing with them, he comically shot back, “and I too if they don’t recognize me” — a double play on the idea of ransom and the importance of keeping good company.

What exactly was his philosophy? Nobody's quite sure, since he switched schools too many times to say — the mark of either a true fool or a real maverick and a seeker. At first he followed Plato’s Academy. Then he went for the cynicism of Diogenes. Then he followed Theodorus the atheist — a man known for mocking the gods, and being versatile in all kinds of sophistry. Then he followed Theophrastus, a follower of Aristotle. We don’t know whether he was a believer in any of them or just trying them out or mining what he could from them. But we know he was a master of all the different styles and had a great time making fun of everything.

His own style was theatrical, and he liked to use common language to jab at big subjects. His tastes were extravagant, and he loved to move from one city to another — sometimes throwing himself a parade on the way there. He was a gay horndog both for fun and to make allies. An extremely selfish man, he was big on the idea that “friends share property in common.” For this reason, even though students crowded into his lectures, not a single person ever chose to be his disciple.

He loved making fun of “the gods” — which is half noble and half crazy. To make jokes about the false myths and doctrines of the plebs is a good time. To make light of the magic and mystery of the universe is a mistake. Confounding one with the other and being “an atheist” doesn’t make you smarter than everyone else. It makes you confuse the absurdities of everyone else with the real majesty of God.

Which he found out by the end of his life, because he got sick. At that point the people of Chalcis (the place where he died) maintain that he got superstitious. He started reaching out to the gods any way he could, buying amulets and repenting of his irreverence and misdeeds. Because he made fun of everyone and "shared” all their stuff, nobody cared for him when he got sick, and he was in a state of absolute ruin — until some other wiser philosopher sent him two servants. His greed burned all his bridges. His extravagance blew all his savings. His pride led him to all kinds of embarrassment. Proof (like with Solomon) that teaching wisdom and living it are two completely different art forms.

In the end, Bion’s life proved two things. First, that the middle years, when we're healthy and strong and successful, are fleeting — a mere season. And we need to save up money and raise children and good-will for the end of it**. As another “great philosopher” put it,

When I was younger, so much younger than today
I never needed anybody's help in any way
But now these days are gone and I'm not so self assured
Now I find I've changed my mind, I've opened up the doors

And second, that you can make fun of religion all you want; but you came from Someone and you’re going back to Him whether you like it or not. So before cracking too many jokes, make sure you distinguish between Him and the gullibility, the hypocrisy, and the misplaced zeal of His goofy-ass followers.

Yours,

-J

June 9th, 2026

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*Taking the lowest seat (as I’ve mentioned before) doesn’t just mean putting yourself in last place forever. The goal is always to finish in first.

What, after all, is a great businessman? Someone who knows how to deliver the goods. And what is a great leader? Somebody who can get you somewhere you want to go. What is a great doctor, a rock star, a lover, or a sage? Somebody who knows how to fix you, how to make you feel, how to make you shine. To “be somebody” you have to first do something. And the key is, it has to be for somebody else. The very neediness of man is the source of our greatness.

As the poet Rumi put it,

Every craftsman searches for what’s not there to practice his craft.

A builder looks for the hole where the roof caved in.

A water carrier chooses the empty pot.

A carpenter stops at the house with no door.

Workers rush toward some hint of emptiness, which they then start to fill.

Their hope is for emptiness, so don’t think you must avoid it.

Emptiness contains what you need!

Dear soul, if you weren't friends with the vast nothing, why would you always be casting your net into it, and waiting so patiently? This invisible ocean has given you such abundance, but still you call it “death” — that which provides you sustenance and work.

Does this mindset of looking for needs and filling them make you a leader or a servant? The answer is both — but one has to come before the other. And if you get it backwards, you finish in last.

**Regarding being famous and dying alone, Samuel Johnson writes in The Rambler,

It is not possible to be regarded with tenderness except by a few. That merit which gives greatness and renown diffuses its influence to a wide compass, but acts weakly on every single breast. It is placed at a distance from common spectators, and shines like one of the remote stars, of which the light reaches us, but not the heat.

The wit, the hero, the philosopher, whom their tempers or their fortunes have hindered from intimate relations, die, without any other effect than that of adding a new topic to the conversation of the day. They impress none with any fresh conviction of the fragility of our nature, because none had any particular interest in their lives, or was united to them by a reciprocation of benefits and endearments.

This is really much simpler than it sounds. If you want to be great to somebody — to be adored, and idolized, and missed — don’t be the President. Just be a good dad.

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It’s said that when God created the earth, one third of the angels disapproved and went rogue. 67% is a solid D or a failing grade in school, but in presidential polls it counts as a solid win — certainly better than President Trump right now, who ranks far lower than God did at creation, but is nearly as good in his own opinion.

The highest approval rating any president ever got was 90% for George W. Bush in 2001, but we feel this is unfair since he hadn’t done anything, was about to botch everything, and technically he cheated. He had all the heavy lifting done for him by Osama Bin Laden. To prove this, right after Dubya we rank his dad, who got 89% for kicking ass instead of getting his ass kicked. But dad raised taxes, so we fired him.

Then there’s FDR in 1945, riding high at 84% right before Harry Truman got 87% for nuking Japan — another so-so president saved by a war crime. And JFK comes in at 72 in 1961 for doing God-knows-what. Proof that in America, cuteness will get you practically anywhere. We know he certainly ranked higher with every lady except his wife.

Lyndon B Johnson comes in at 78% in 1963, mainly for wrecking every bulwark of greatness in the whole country, from immigration to welfare to whether you can fire losers. God created the Milky Way and He gets only 67%; LBJ ruined it and he got 78.

(As an honorable mention, Bill Clinton gave China “special trade relations,” taking an angry, broken, treacherous and communist nation from rock-bottom to superpower, and making sure American jobs went overseas to slave labor. And how is he rated? Very well it turns out, ending with 65% — the highest exit poll for any post-war President. Mostly because the economy “did well” while falling apart).

And what about last place? Not willing to be outdone in anything, the worst rating is also George W. Bush at 19% in 2008 — mostly because he had done things by then. What goes up must come down, they say. Second we have Harry Truman at 22% in 1952, first because of the economy, and next that we had to fight the communists he’d spent the whole last war saving. And third we have Richard Nixon at 24% in 1974 because of the Watergate Scandal — due to the fact that Americans, at the time, had no idea how bad the scandals would be by 2015. And why would we behave so badly? Mostly because we were demoralized and replaced due to policies set by Lyndon B Johnson.

So far President Trump is doing horribly in the polls — mainly for trying to undo the worst things all the presidents did before him. This means manning the border, sending back third-world illegals, bringing jobs back from China, putting an end to riots and lawlessness, ending DEI as far as possible, prosecuting welfare fraudsters, letting people speak truth on Twitter, cleaning up the FBI and the military, trying to make voting fair again, taking on Big Food and Big Pharma, and beating the shit out of Cuba, Iran, and Venezuela. For attempting these things he was ranked a measly 33%, mostly because of inflation. Combined with Bush 1’s tax hikes and Clinton's boomtown, this proves that American priorities aren’t always in the right place. But they’re certainly always in the same place.

All things considered, this puts God’s rating pretty high — especially since He was getting rated by angels, whose standards are (in this writer’s opinion) a little bit rigid. He would probably have done better if He'd lowered the price of gas. But we can thank God that at least He wasn’t ranked by Americans, who would have polled Him at 85 for flooding the world, 23 for nuking Sodom and Gomorrah*, and a 55 score on Rotten Tomatoes for the four Gospels, women, and the synapses we used to rank Him.

Yours,

-J

June 1st, 2026

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P.S. A glaring question might be asked here. Why is George W Bush first? And why is he joined at the top by a list of mediocrities, ne’er-do-wells, and nincompoops? Where are Washington, Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, Thomas Jefferson — the ones who built this place? Where are the ones who conquered all the way to Texas and California? The ones who wrote the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence? The ones who didn’t open the border to the third world, or bury us in debt, or ruin our schools, sell us to banks, mire us in wars, break our laws, tax us to death, and embarrass us overseas?

We’re left with one of two options. Either polls hadn’t been invented yet, or Americans are retarded. And depending on the subject and the year, my money is on both. (Maybe, counting my blessings, I should just be happy Americans did the reverse and put them on the money. But then again we put “In God We Trust” there too, and we know how much Americans actually take after Him).

We know why George W Bush was dead last. By the end of his term the money-men had robbed and wrecked the economy. They escaped with Golden Parachutes and George Bush bailed out their companies. We were mired in two unwinnable wars and we destabilized a good chunk of the Middle-East. Because of this, millions of “refugees” — single, military-aged Islamic men — were flooding our allies in Europe. Our border was flooded by illegals and the national debt was going sky-high. He started the trend of directly bribing the American people, in times of trouble, with cash deposits. He created a surveillance state which was used to spy on and prosecute innocent Americans. We saw pictures of Arabs getting tortured, sans-trial, in secret off-shore facilities. In practically every serious metric Bush was a failure. He was given the world and decided to screw the pooch.

*Why would God get 85 for flooding the world and 23 for nuking Sodom and Gomorrah? Because in America, that is currently both the public opinion and the law.

Right now it’s legal to burn the American flag (which represents all of us) and a “hate crime” to tire-burn a rainbow crosswalk (which represents maybe 5-10%). In America you can wish everyone fire and brimstone, but if you just wish it to blacks, you’re out of every job except food trucks and construction.

In this country it's okay to hate “your own people” or the whole country; but the act of putting art into your distaste — of thinking, of preference, when working in any sizable business — is verboten.

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I don't consider watching sports a necessary prerequisite to being a man. Depending on the sport, playing them is more like it.

I consider knowing sports stats and knowing Pokemon stats to be exactly the same level of manly. So for those of you who keep calling my Man Card into question every time the draft comes up and I’d rather take a nap, here are a list of things that make a man really manly — and sometimes even god-like. I fit a good chunk of these, but I'd like to fit as many as I can.

1. Diagnosing and fixing your own car, or building or remodeling a house.

2. Being the leader of an effective, ass-kicking, money-making team, or a military unit.

3. Having muscles.

4. Being an expert in philosophy, history, economics, theology, law, or politics.

5. Being able to take punches, literally and metaphorically, and give them.

6. Running into danger when people need your help.

7. Catching flying objects when they're coming at your face — without flinching.

8. Publicly admitting that 99% of the time the police are useless in an emergency, and opting to be your family's first armed line of defense.

9. Being well-versed in Moses’ laws and Solomon’s proverbs.

10. Keeping a cool head when the public is going hysterical for some cause, and even going against it.

11. Knowing the difference between telling the truth and running your mouth.

12. Admitting when you're wrong.*

An objection might be made here. Can’t a woman run a kick-ass business, or be familiar with Plutarch or Schopenhauer, or turn a robber into Swiss cheese? Yes, alongside some others listed here, and I would argue she’d be more of a woman. The people who misunderstand me here forget the opposite of a man isn’t a woman. A man who fails to be a man doesn’t become a woman. He just fails to distinguish himself from the boys.

The eternal fight of manhood isn’t to distinguish yourself from the does, but to make yourself visibly superior to the fawns and the other young bucks. This is how you get the best does — and also how you make the best fawns.

Yours,
-J

January 8th, 2020

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PS: The things listed above are mostly different, I think, from raw, physical masculinity. But raw and physical masculinity isn't something to be left out. Country music is in fact the last scene in these United States, barring some strains of Christian worship, where a baritone sounds right at home — and this I think is a great part of its appeal.

A woman who goes to a country show usually sees a man who sounds like he belongs with the fields or the rivers or the mountains — who has stubble, tight jeans, and makes you feel like he could walk off the stage and immediately get somebody pregnant. Or at the very least change a tire. This puts him in overt superiority to the gay and scrawny eunuch of pop music — usually left-wing men who look like they either smell, or have a disease, or came from the ghetto, or from outer space. Either way you know they can’t save you in a fight.

I theorize a good country singer is to modern, masculinity-starved women like catnip; and his voice and lyrics are so soothing they're willing to overlook the banality of the music. There's no famous drummer like Keith Moon in country, and no guitarist known for his fingerwork like Angus Young. In country there's the singer, the whole singer, and nothing but the singer.

At country shows you won’t see anything revolutionary, but because of this reliance on high testosterone and an overwhelmingly sturdy, almost obvious sound, the kinds of women country attracts are many times top-notch as far as biology is concerned. They tend to be warm and natural and have long hair. I've met plenty of other women who've liked other music and turned out alright; but the ones who love sad lyrics and chest hair are the ones you want on a warm summer night. (It could also be argued, on the other hand, according to country's lyrics, that these women will ruin you).

*One of the finest things about me, I think, is my ability to apologize. Because I have the spark of life in me I'm wrong often and embarrassingly; and when I am I take the initiative — and quickly**. I expect mistakes out of myself and from others. I'm ready to forgive and ready for forgiveness. I have yet to deny anyone who apologizes. My anger is swift and brutal but I can end it in an instant. I know of nobody, except the lost cause and the unrepentant, whom I've left behind for dead.

Thus one of the worst things to me about feminists is their insistence that women shouldn't have to apologize — “like a man doesn’t.” A man who screws up through his own fault and refuses to admit it might be a man, but he's bad at it. He takes no responsibility for himself and his actions, the crucial and obvious foundation of all manhood. He sees the bridge of all trust and progress and he burns it.

Thus a woman who refuses to apologize so she can be “equal with men” is much worse than a bad man. She's a halfwit modeling herself blindly after the worst men. She claims all men as her equals, and then makes the jackass her guru.

**A recent example is the other day when Kobe died. Someone at work said it was sad and I said that it wasn't. I made the argument that much better men had died this year, and we shouldn't waste our energy mourning another worthless baller.

The next day I was treated to a slew of evidence that Kobe wasn't just a rando who played sports, but a devout Catholic, a solid family man, and a hard-working, good-exampling all-star American. So I went back to this coworker and told him I'm an assclown. I had judged a great man because he played in the company of ne'er-do-wells and nincompoops and professional jugglers. I was right of course that we put too much stock in sports and sport players. But most of us were never good enough to rub shoulders with Kobe — or with Pat Tillman.

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Before any Republicans accuse me of being a hopeless idealist, a traitor, or another conservative milquetoast, I want to say one thing. And it’s that if anybody deserves to lose their vote, it’s Democrats.

A quick look at the cities they run proves they shouldn’t be allowed to run a dog park*. Detroit was called Motor City and The Paris of the Midwest. San Francisco was called The Golden City. Chicago was the Paris of the Prairie. Cincinnati was The Queen City of the West. Philadelphia and Boston were both called The Athens of America. Nobody calls them these names anymore — unless of course they’re being sarcastic.

Memphis, Portland, New York City, Seattle, New Orleans, Minneapolis, Los Angeles, and even Washington DC were also known at one time as beacons of civilization — remarkable for culture, industry, and architecture. Now each of them is known for rape and murder, robberies and race riots, junkies, white and capital flight, bad schools, rotting factories, infrastructure on the fritz, and crazy people shitting on streets. And somehow, despite being full of third-worlders, white false Christs and killer clowns, they’re still some of the most unaffordable places to live in the US. A hell of a legacy for the left wing — or, more appropriately, a legacy from hell.

What this proves is that, if we require testing to drive a car, we ought to test people before letting them drive a city. This test should include basic economics, civics, and, in a city of 300,000 or more, a test about the structure of state and city governments. But this is almost beside the point. In any remotely democratic environment, stupid people have always been allowed to vote. And I remind you that people always think the person who votes against them is stupid anyway.

Thus the whole point of a republic isn’t to enforce all the most brilliant ideas. It’s to not let one arrogant and selfish group bulldoze all the others. It’s the belief that if any group oversteps its boundaries, the pain itself should lead the other people to fix it. In other words, the real question today in our republic is whether stupid people should be allowed to cheat.

Because gerrymandering is cheating. And our states have been gerrymandered badly for a long time — most usually to benefit Democrats. But when Texas accused Democrats of leaving the border open, thus flooding Texas with illegal immigrants and giving representatives and electoral votes to New York and California, Texas redistricted to “balance things out” — one obvious cheat for another.

California responded by nearly shutting Republicans out. Then Virginia tried to shut Republicans out, and their state Supreme Court, with great reason, said they broke constitutional law in the way they tried to do it. The court said you had to do the wrong thing in the right way — and the federal Supreme Court agreed. They said there’s no federal right to stop anyone from shutting out the other party in any state. Amazingly, according to federal law, it’s only illegal to shut out a race.

This made things even hairier, because the entire South had already been gerrymandered to favor blacks. Now the whole South is trying to undo it, and whether right or wrong, the Democrats are crying foul — primarily because they’re losing. Democrats say they had to gerrymander the South because the South had a history of shutting out black votes. Which, if you look at a district map, is the same case Republicans could make about being entirely shut out of New England**. (Currently, Republicans comprise about 40 percent of New Englanders, and get zero elected representatives in Congress. Black people make up around 20 percent of the South — and before 2026, due to race-based gerrymandering, they picked about 15 seats. All of which went to Democrats).

I’m not saying Democrats have a good case against the South. I’m also not saying Republicans are all right. Some of the redistricting Republicans are doing — such as splitting Memphis into three distinct districts — is clearly a power play. What I’m saying is that if we don’t quit all this cheating, we’ll quickly find ourselves in a race to the bottom. Once we’re convinced that votes are either fake or don’t count, there’s no peaceful resolution available. You either make voting fair or it’s “taxation without representation.” And nobody should know better about how that ends than Americans.

The big obstacle we have to get over to fix all this, other than cheaters, is psychological — and it's called “clock setting.” Clock setting is when you start your story when the other guy struck first. It doesn’t say why he hit you, and thus pretends you didn’t do anything to deserve it. It’s a cheap move designed to wipe away your sins and rob the enemy of all merit — like saying your husband punched you without saying you hit him over the head with a frying pan first. Or like saying Christians tried to steal The Holy Land without mentioning the Muslims already stole it from Christians. Or saying what Germany did to Jews without explaining what communist Jews were trying to do to Germany (hint: it already happened in Soviet Russia***). In this case Democrats and Republicans both say the other drew first blood. I’m here to tell you why that almost doesn't matter.

Gandhi said an eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind because once you start looking at the paper trail, almost everyone can accuse their enemy of drawing first or clock-setting. And once you go too far back in the chain of events everything begins to get silly. One moment you’re fighting because somebody socked you in the nose. And the next you’re arguing because Charles VI took Naples from Spain.

So if you want to know where to really begin a conflict, a better question would be where does it end? Jesus said blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God. This is because any idiot can start a war; but it takes a certain kind of man to make peace. And heaven can only be filled with the latter.

Thus the best solution to cheating in elections isn’t to cheat back, but to remove all grounds for accusation. It would be to end birthright citizenship immediately for children of illegal aliens. It would be to count only citizens on the census, thus denying extra representatives and electoral votes to anyone who wouldn’t be allowed to vote anyway. It would be requiring an ID at voting booths, giving everyone a federal holiday to vote, and getting rid of electronic voting. It would also get rid of ballot harvesting and (aside from the military) voting-by-mail — two common causes of legitimate suspicion. And finally, we should force every state to have a bi-partisan commission for redistricting, to ensure nobody is allowed to do any gerrymandering.

The alternative to this is cheat or be cheated. And to be frank, in the long run, on this level, I think the Democrats have a history of winning***.

Yours,

-J

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*An important question might be asked here. If Republicans are so great, why do Democrats run all the biggest cities? Why, in the last 50 years, have they owned the most centers of industry and culture?

My answer is simple. You can’t turn a village into an industrial society with leftism. Leftism can only thrive where some other non-leftist has already built something great. Leftism is a taking of capital — not a making of capital. Unlike business, which creates products and services which didn't exist, leftism is a reimagining and repurposing of wealth that already exists. Thus leftists are strongest only where there is capital to take. By nature, leftism is parasitic.

A city can only get big because geniuses build big things. Then it attracts people who who can't dream stuff on their own, but need good jobs. Then, once the population swells, people show up who are allured by the anonymity, the opportunity, the novelty and sex of a big city, and can barely hold the worst jobs.

Once a city reaches this state, the geniuses usually get cocky and greedy and overstep their boundaries. The booming market drives home prices up, displacing the incapables and the natives, at which point the leftist shows up, calling attention to the crimes and/or indiscretions of the geniuses. And he woos the job-holders, the racial “minorities,” and the proletariat with promises of loot.

At which point the genius is either cut down to size, or he packs up his bags and high-tails it somewhere else.

The US Bureau of Labor Statistics says that in 2023 alone, more firms migrated to red Florida and Texas than any place else — a relocation of HQs numbering in the hundreds. And by contrast, no state lost more firms than blue California, Illinois, and New York. Among these illustrious losses over the years are Chevron, Tesla, Oracle, Charles Schwab, Hewlett Packard, Citadel, McKesson, X (formerly known as Twitter), AECOM, FICO, Public Storage, Dutch Bros and SpaceX. Hollywood itself has fled to places like Canada and Georgia. JP Morgan has more employees in Texas than in New York now, and Goldman Sachs is building a giant campus in Dallas. Starbucks shifted thousands of jobs to Nashville. Boeing moved their 787 engineering and assembly teams to South Carolina. And Amazon is relocating thousands of jobs out of Seattle and Washington to avoid excruciating taxes.

According to Seattle's KOMO News, dozens of Washington’s major companies, including Alaska Airlines, Amazon, Costco, Microsoft, Nordstrom, PSE, Zillow, T-Mobile, Redfin, Virginia Mason, WaFd Bank, Weyerhaeuser, Puget Sound Energy, and the freaking Seattle Mariners, just sent a letter to the governor, begging him to revise the state’s new taxes and budget. They cited “the largest tax hikes in the state's history,” and “a threat to the state’s economic stability.” The response from Democrat leaders was that the big producers can suck it.

The Association of Washington Businesses now reports that one out of every four businesses is openly considering leaving Washington.

***Are leftists really better at cheating?

Leftism, at bottom, is the idea that the system is rotten and it has to be broken. Conservatism, at face value, is the idea that a system is worth keeping and has to be preserved. Thus one of us values process, decorum, and fair-play more than the other.

Leftists are made by definition to cheat. Conservatives are almost designed by God to be cheated.

****How involved were the Jews in the spread of communism? Orlando Figes notes, in his history of the Russian Revolution, that the chief rabbi of Moscow once joked The Trotsky's make the revolutions and the Bronsteins pay the bills.

**Because all this talk of districts and cheating is hard to picture, here are some pictures.

This is the map Virginia Democrats tried to use, which was shot down (thank God) by the state Supreme Court:

This is how rotten it was:

Below is the current shutout of Republicans in New England, which has been this way for a long time:

Below is a comparison between Republicans getting shut out in Massachusetts and Democrats getting shut out in Tennessee. Note: this is the Tennessee map before Republicans redrew it, splitting Memphis into three districts, and eliminating the last Democratic stronghold:

And finally, this is a map of what the South has looked like for a while, and what it could look like by the end of the year — right in time for midterms:

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Starship Troopers is such a rich and solid book that now I use it as a litmus test. A man can have any number of objections to Heartburn, or Anna Karenina — hell, even to the Bible. But if he picks up Starship Troopers and says it’s “okay” I wonder if something is deeply wrong with him as a man. And if he tells me the book is "fascist” I have a hard time believing he bears the image of God.

The reason this sounds bombastic is because almost everybody my age saw the movie first, and it was written and directed by a couple of weenies. Paul Verhoeven and Edward Neumeier were such a couple of soyboys, in fact, that they turned the fiercely masculine, anti-communist, duty-and-honor space epic into a campy, silly parody of itself. And why? Because they didn’t like Heinlein’s vibe, and they really wanted to piss off the fanboys.

So they hired Doogie Howser to play military intelligence. They dressed him in an SS uniform to highlight “the dangers of fascism” — a tactical mistake, since he was the best-dressed guy in the entire movie. They had people do backflips while playing high-school football. They had men and women showering together and serving side-by-side in the infantry. And probably worst of all, they had the space marines, 300 years into the future, leading janky, directionless charges that look like they came from 300 years in the past.

The mechanized armor? Totally left out. Corny propaganda reels? He added them in. The bug wars that were almost a footnote in the novel were the main feature of the movie, and every conversation of real depth and insight was totally nixed. I admit Starship Troopers is a fun movie. But that’s primarily because it's stupid.

In the novel the best parts are Johnny Rico's flashbacks and boot camp. There you’ll find conversations about what makes the young act out, why the West is falling apart, who should get to vote and why, and why communism doesn’t work. There are short treatises on what a soldier is and what makes a good one, why self-discipline is an essential virtue, and why struggle is the only thing makes life valuable. If that last part left you scratching your head, definitely pick up this book.

Starship Troopers is brimming with a militaristic and almost Roman virtue. It was written by a man's man who loved being in the Navy, served honorably, and always looked back on it with fondness. He held no illusions about what makes society run well and where Western Civilization was heading, and he put these things in a space story about men fighting bugs because writing it that way was fun.

The prose is solid and straight-forward even seventy years later. The book itself is short and sweet, and the narration by R.C. Bray on Audible is perfect. The Marines put it on their list of recommended reading up until the reign of Barack Obama, when it was deliberately cut. (If this doesn’t tell you everything you need to know about the book, go pick up the autobiography of Chandler Bing instead).

And that's why I use Heinlein as a litmus test. With other great books you catch a whiff of charm, and wit, and wisdom. With this one there’s a strong musk of testosterone and honor — and like so many other virtues, you can only smell it if you have it.

Yours,

-J

May 11th, 2026

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Years of my spiritual insights, deft criticisms of social contagions, and talk of things like reason and virtue might lead somebody out there — poor bastard! — to think of me as a saint. But the real secret to my happiness is I know I’m a clown.

I get better every year at mastering the Cardinal Virtues, of course; but what I’m best at is the unmentioned virtue that doesn’t win you any statues, and that virtue is humility. I should have gotten a trophy for it by now, but people think this defeats the purpose — and they’re wrong.

Humility is the art of knowing your place*. You can reach for the virtues but you can’t always be them — at least not for too long, and a humble person knows it. Once you think you are them you get knocked off your pedestal, and it’s embarrassing; so the most comfortable place to set up base camp is low. You can climb from this sea-level position for short bits of time and aim and posture all you like, and get lots of spiritual exercise, and dream; but you can’t fall from it, so that’s where you should try to put yourself. Because gravity is real, and it always wins. Genius today, idiot tomorrow**.

People like to praise humility and then pretend like getting humbled is a terrible thing — as if realizing your limitations and getting a level head are a disgrace. What “getting humbled” means is you got your brains back. You landed on sure footing. No longer run amok by dreams of your own grandeur, yodeling light-headedly in the too-thin air of jagged mountaintops, you sit quietly on the fertile grasslands of reality — unshook by whatever it is you really are.

No delusions here of your own perfection. No surprises or pretenses or trap doors or landslides. The cynic maintains his happiness by leveling the world***. The humble man stays happy by leveling himself. Pride goes before a fall isn’t a likelihood, but a certainty. You start taking yourself too seriously and that’s when you turn out to be the punchline.

Unlike the other virtues, humility isn’t impressive — but it’s lovable. It might not get you ballads, but it can win you allies. It isn’t pretending you’re the same as everyone else — a bald-faced lie, when you really consider it****. Humility looks like asking forgiveness before the other party even suggests it, being the first to reach out and end a quarrel, listening to the other side’s ideas and really considering their merits, making jokes at your own expense*****, adapting to a situation instead of continuing in the wrong direction, being a general and sleeping on the ground with your troops, asking for help when you don’t know what to do, and crawling around on all fours with your children on your back. Humility sounds small but it allows you to encompass all of life, to grow into better things, to make and keep allies and good friends and devoted followers, to impart a good idea when others would just fight over it. I said the virtues bleed into one another, and they do. Humility isn't an exception, and when you really start talking about it, it looks a hell of a lot like prudence.

Yours,

-J

May 5, 2021

*What does a man with a really big ego forget? That family are the only people who really love and care about you, and almost everybody else is just a mercenary.

One of them cries for you when you’re down. They’ll search for you forever if you ever go missing. And if they can’t find you, they’ll always wonder where you are. The other one forgets you when you stop making them laugh, or earning them cash, or helping them win, or getting them off.

We could love our neighbors more, but this would probably just end in disaster. God gave us small families because we’re guaranteed to lose them, and we can only handle the heartbreak so many times. We’ve been blessed to forget the rest of us — so I thank God I’m able to be forgotten.

**H.L. Mencken writes of cynicism,

One of the most curious human delusions lies in the theory that cynics are unhappy men — that cynicism makes for a general biliousness and malaise. It is a false deduction, I believe, from the obvious fact that cynics make other men unhappy. But they are themselves among the most comfortable and serene of mammals; perhaps only bishops, pet dogs and actors are happier. For what a cynic believes, though it may be too dreadful to put into formal words, at least has the merit of being true — and truth is ever a rock, hard and harsh, but solid under the feet. A cynic is chronically in the position of a wedding guest who has known the bride for nine years, and has had her confidence. He is a great deal less happy, theoretically, than the bridegroom. The bridegroom, beautifully barbered and arrayed, is about to launch into the honeymoon. But the cynic looks ahead two weeks, two months, two years. Such, to borrow a phrase from the late Dr. Eliot, are the durable satisfactions of life.

***The Psalmist says there are six – psych, seven! – things the Lord hates, and one of them is haughty eyes. Personally, I would have guessed He laughs at them, because once I start thinking I’m great I end up laughing at myself.

****Just because I’m humble doesn’t mean I’m average. I don’t think of myself as equal to junkies and I don’t measure myself by Joe Plumber. If I fly above them it’s because I size myself up with King David. To keep humble, to keep level, is also to keep from sinking into the sewers — by constantly judging yourself by the angels. Are you great? Compared to what?

Machiavelli put it much better:

I point to the greatest of men as examples to follow. For men almost always walk along the beaten path, and what they do is almost always an imitation of what others have done before. But you can’t walk exactly in the footsteps of those who have gone before you, nor is it easy to match the virtues of those you have chosen to imitate. So a prudent man will always try to follow in the footsteps of great men and imitate the truly outstanding, so that, if he isn’t quite as skillful as they are, at least some of their ability might rub off on him. One should be like an experienced archer, who, trying to hit someone at a distance and knowing the range of his bow, aims at a point above his target — not so his arrow will hit the point he’s aiming at, but so, by aiming high, he can reach his actual objective.

*****A joke at your own expense is a weapon.

Make a joke about somebody else’s behavior and they might get offended. But if you’re both guilty they’ll laugh along with you, and if you’re trying to teach them something they’re more likely to buy it.

We all know that misery loves company. But probably moreso, so do the guilty.

A joke at your own expense is taking the lowest seat, as Christ commanded. And you’ll find that when you do it well, you get promoted from punchline to professor.

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-P.J. O’Rourke

Dear M,

I'm sorry to report this, but despite obviously being a philosopher, I've been banned from several big Facebook groups about philosophy.

We got off to a good start, but eventually they found out my positions on race and gender and that was pretty much the end of it. Their admins wanted to talk about what “the point of life” is, or which people you’d run over with a trolley (my answer is currently “the admins”), or whether we can know reality; and I decided I already knew reality is real and I wanted to make fun of it. Or rather the people inside of it. And by this I meant their sacred cows and pretensions.

To me this means they’re missing the whole point. Philosophy (proper) is too clean and narrow and technical to nerds — almost too mechanical, like pulling apart a clock. And that makes it something almost work-safe and controllable. But in my perspective philosophy is more like sex: something which can easily build a family or blow one up; a Catholic institution or a hotbed of rebellion; serious and comical at the same time; wild, and fertile, and messy, and organic. And if you tell people the truth it makes you feel kinda naked.

This makes me wonder how philosophers got classified with the invalids and video-gamers. In my sight philosophy makes a man more robust, and likely to get himself laid — or maybe socked in the nose. And if somebody throws a punch, philosophy should make you ready to dodge and throw one right back. How should a man take a punch, by the way? And do you think he deserved it? These are good topics for a philosopher — not Plato's stupid cave allegory, or the difference between “noumena” and “phenomena.”

In this sense it's more an art form or a dance than an arm-chair profession: a willingness to grow and tinker around; to try something better and push yourself harder; to smell, and see, and touch the beautiful, the electrical, the inexpressible — in some cases the forbidden. So far from being white-collar, philosophy should get your hands dirty. It should be brave, and charming, and manly, and true. It should be the kind of talk that gets people to stop and listen at a party, even if they can’t look like it. Even if they’re afraid to join in.

So you can read Schopenhauer’s essay on the senses if you want to. I’d rather hear his ideas on the sexes. And I don’t really care about Plato's “forms" or Aristotle’s metaphysics either. I want to hear all their statements on rhetoric, and marriage, and music, and politics — the more honest and the less modern the better. I want a variety of takes on living: some good so I can steal them, some bad so I can make fun of them. The last thing I want is a question of whether life is worth living. We’re all still alive, so I want a treatise on whether eggheads who ask this are worth kicking.

Thus a good question for a philosopher (in my opinion) is, is it ever okay to laugh when somebody dies*? Is the Sermon on the Mount really morally superior — or if we took it seriously, is it dangerous to society? If men and women are equal, where are all the woman geniuses? Shouldn’t you admire your therapist before accepting their therapy? Is “doing things” a rejection of the sovereignty of God? Is folly necessary to be happy? Should you be gracious on Easter or fight for a good cause? Why are secular heroes more interesting than saints? Are emotions the antithesis of reason — or the basis of it? What kind of woman is the most dangerous to marry? If the Holy Spirit inspires people, why is "The Devil's Music” so much better? And despite its critics, is it even possible to get rid of capitalism?

I believe many of these subjects are what others would call politics or polemics or morals or religion; but to me, they fall within the range of philosophy, and the nerds who style themselves “philosophers” don’t like that. They think philosophy is a sanitized side-gig to kill time. I prefer Socrates’ position: that philosophy exists to save lives. But eventually, this means people try to kill you. And then Socrates will sit on death row talking about that too.

Speaking of which, when the city of Athens condemned Socrates to die, Socrates shot back, “and nature has condemned them.” And when his wife told him “you die unjustly” he shot back, “would you prefer that I die justly?”

Two quips worthy of the name philosophy.

Yours,

-J

*There’s been some debate this year about whether you can laugh and say F ‘em when somebody dies. To quote Charlie Kirk, you can tell a lot about a person by the way they deal with somebody’s death. And he’s right: you really do learn a lot.

For instance, what do you do about a man who celebrates Charlie Kirk’s death? That means if he disagrees with you he’d shoot you, and I think we have a right to take him seriously. But what do you do about somebody who won’t laugh at an actual boob? Am I supposed to cry when a grown man sticks his hand in the tiger’s cage and gets bit? Am I supposed to start a GoFundMe when somebody attacks the cops and gets shot? How am I supposed to feel when a college-educated white woman, to prove racism is bad, goes hiking alone in Pakistan and ends up getting murdered? Do I have to feel bad when a rando fights for legalized drugs, and then gets ran over by somebody high on acid and chasing a leprechaun?

The whole point of social liberalism is to debate the possibilities of cause and effect; and to say we can’t laugh at idiots, or even that saying “I told you so” is mean-spirited, or uncouth, or just plain wrong, undoes the whole point. Especially when somebody dies**.

There are lines to be drawn here like with anything else, and those can be reserved for a more respectable essay. But to censor the irony of Charlie Kirk’s death is to completely miss the whole gist of Charlie Kirk’s life. If Charlie said we ought to keep guns, repeatedly, in public, and then gets killed by the armed psychotic Democrat the Democrats warned us about, I think Democrats have a right to point that out. It’s one reason Democrats want us to ban them.

Do I think their arguments are good? For the love of Pete, fuck no. We need guns to protect ourselves from people like Democrats. What I’m saying is that if you have a policy, and somebody dies because we didn’t vote for the policy, you have a right to say “this is why we need the policy.” Even if the policy sucks. And even if the man who wants it is a dick. This is bare-minimum freedom of speech, and without it, nobody has a right to debate anything.

This being said, there’s only one kind of man who sincerely respects folly — and that is the person who practices it. Solomon says, The Lord laughs at the wicked, for He knows their day is coming. I would argue that sometimes it’s godly to laugh because a fool’s day already came. The big question isn’t whether we can laugh, but whether we’re okay with being laughed at. Here the Golden Rule is a double-edged sword — and we’re never quite sure whether it stings worst when the laughter is just or unjust.

**The truth is, when somebody dies in a stupid way I’m not always sure whether I’ll laugh or I’ll cry.

When I was young I thought of people as individuals. But now that I have kids sometimes I see people as a series of relations. Thus when the founder of Segway was riding his fruity little scooter and texting friends and drove off a cliff, my first instinct was to laugh. But then I think of him as somebody’s son and it isn’t so funny anymore.

And this is the whole point. Tears and laughter all come from the same place. Something went horribly wrong and it hurts — but if we can isolate the absurdity and the pain from the man, from his kids, from his parents, driving off a cliff while texting is a joke. The closer it hits the worse that it gets. The further off, the funnier. Most of the time, anyway.

Thus sometimes we feel terrible about laughing. And sometimes, when the behavior is so bad that we don’t want it anywhere near us or our kids, we couldn’t give less of a shit. It’s either us or the fool. So we use laughter as a weapon — as a lesson. And we hope the wordless sermon sticks.

P.S. Going back to "philosophy proper," the proliferation and establishment of what’s known as existentialism can be blamed mainly on one thing: the disappearance of God from the public consciousness.

Once God was out of the picture everyone asked, “what’s the point?” Which is why, in the age of Christendom, we got so many more interesting (and I would argue even more dangerous) philosophers. The ancient man was building on an unshakable foundation. The modern man doesn’t know whether to build at all. He’s trying to undo a negative, instead of doing something truly positive. The center of his existence isn’t really “how should I live,” but “why should I?”

Another angle on these weak-ass “philosophers” is more telling. Nietzsche writes, in the preface to The Joyous Science, about how he was deathly sick for a while, and how health — of all kinds, you might say — determines your whole view of life.

Assuming that he is a person, of necessity he also has his own personal philosophy: there is, however, an important distinction to be made. In some, their deficiencies philosophize, in others, their wealth and strength. The former have need of their philosophy, whether as support, reassurance, medicine, deliverance, exaltation or depersonalization; the latter merely regard it as a fine luxury, or at best the voluptuousness of a triumphant gratitude which in the end must inscribe itself in cosmic capitals on the heaven of ideas. [...]

After such self-interrogation and self-examination one comes to view all that has ever been philosophized with a keener eye; one more readily discerns the involuntary wrong turns, side streets, resting places and sunny spots of thought to which suffering thinkers, precisely as sufferers, are led and misled: from now on, one knows where the sickly body and its needs unwittingly urge, prod and entice the intellect — to sunlight, tranquillity, gentleness, patience, medicine, balm in some sense. Every philosophy which puts peace above war, every ethic with a negative conception of happiness, every metaphysic and physic that knows an end, a final state of any kind, every predominantly aesthetic or religious longing for some means to get away from, outside of, above or beyond the world, all these raise the question of whether illness has not inspired the philosopher. […] In all philosophizing so far it has not been a question of ‘truth’ at all, but of something else — namely of health, futurity, growth, power, life.

And that's the difference between me and the other modern philosophers. I don’t view this as just a match of good versus evil, or truth versus lies. I am robust, and handsome, and religious — and thus dynamic. And I’m up against the godless, the sexless, the unhealthy and the undisciplined — the dying.

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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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