Many constituencies of discontent seem to have coalesced into a unified front with the objective of destroying the founding principles and proven long-held values of the United States. This intersectional dissent is represented by the BIPOC/LGBTQ+ flags flying seemingly everywhere in place of the Stars and Stripes.
Broadly speaking, these constituencies are deconstructionists, seeking to take apart nearly everything that had made America great and reassemble it in their preferred order. They seem to assume everyone will get along once the capitalist, white, heterosexual, Judeo-Christian, Constitutional, patriarchal society is relegated to the dustbin of history or the reeducation camps.
What are these constituencies and what new reality do they plan to deliver that will make all the evils they’ve experienced in the United States disappear in the rearview mirror of history? [Cont.]
TMZ, the celebrity news site, has always been pretty stupid (along with its readers), but I thought this headline had to be a joke. When have you ever heard of a news story involving someone who isn’t famous saying a word? Apparently TMZ’s audience is so woke and unfamiliar with the core value of freedom of speech that a stranger uttering the two-syllable word “nigger” is as news worthy as an actual crime. Readers are expected to react with horror: “How could this happen? What is the country coming to? What can we do to halt this unbearable assault on our sensibilities?”
What ever happened to “Sticks and stone can break my bones but words will never hurt me”? TMZ never even reveals to whom the dangerous word was addressed, if anybody.
A Delta passenger was caught on video using the n-word while being escorted off a flight by cops … after allegedly screaming “death to America” and pretending to shoot fellow travelers. Video circulating on X shows the unruly passenger being removed from a Delta flight Thursday, which was scheduled to travel from New York City’s JFK International Airport to Atlanta.Law enforcement sources tell TMZ … the passenger has been identified as Jerome Anixter, a 60-year-old Brooklyn man, who was arrested and charged with assault, disorderly conduct, resisting arrest and obstructing governmental administration. We’re told Port Authority Police responded after Delta reported a disruptive passenger who appeared intoxicated while the plane was at the gate preparing for departure. ..
And so we see what TMZ considers, in order, worst, bad, and least bad: the uttering of a word, “Death to America,” (a threat) and “pretending to shoot fellow travelers.” (With what, his finger? But that still can constitute criminal assault).
TMZ is also deliberately trying to get the man, whose disruptive behavior seems to have fallen well short of actress Selma Blair’s recent flying freakout, attacked or killed by some anti-hate speech vigilante by branding him as a racist. Nice. If that word is the lead, then presumably simply using the word would justify a TMZ story if the guy didn’t do anything else. Perhaps we can look forward to future news flashes like “DoorDash delivery man says “Poopy-head”! and “Dog-walker says supercalifragilisticexpialidocious!” If the non-famous are going to be publicly shamed for mere words now, the least TMZ could do is start headlining real affronts to communication with headlines like “Woman on bus says “Statue of limitations!” or “Teacher uses “Irregardless”!
This is The Great Stupid, my friends. Banishing it from the culture will be like trying to get rid of bedbugs.
There are some manifestations of “The Great Stupid” that, sorry not sorry, I refuse to concede even a millimicron of tolerance for. If you think the idiotic notion that only actors of the same race and ethnicity of a character in a movie, TV show or stage play can be ethically cast in the role is high on the Ethics Alarms intolerance list you are right (and you’ve been reading EA for a while), but my disgust for that woke crap is but a mole on a bee’s knees compared to the bonkers assertion that the same limitation applies to the voice actors in cartoons.
Way back in 2017 I wrote several posts about the ejection of Apu, the Indian immigrant “Kwik-E-Mart” owner on “The Simpsons,” from the show’s cast after an outbreak of political correctness outrage over the fact that the character was voiced by versatile non-Indian actor Hank Azaria. Azaria used a comic exaggeration of a stereotype Indian accent.
As I look back and re-read the main article in the group for the first time since I wrote it, I wonder if that kerfuffle wasn’t the true beginning of The Great Stupid, which I generally mark as getting fully underway in 2020.
I’m re-posting the whole piece below (fixed some typos!) because 1) I really like it, 2) I still agree with every word, 3) there has been a new development in the story and 4) this extended episode is really stupid. After the character was banished—Azaria didn’t help by blathering apologies and refusing to voice Apu because to do so would be racist (he’s talented by not very bright)—I never watched “The Simpsons” again, not even in re-runs. As I wrote in “The Problem With Apu?,”
I would love to know why Indian-Americans feel all the other characters in the show can be outrageous stereotypes and extreme caricatures, but Apu is unacceptably offensive and insensitive. This is contrived victimization. One cannot reasonable compare the Indians feasting on bugs and chilled monkey brains in “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom” to Apu because 1) Apu is entirely benign: he is one of the smartest, sanest and nicest characters in “The Simpsons,” and 2) he’s a cartoon. Cartoons are always exaggerated, and if they are not, they aren’t funny. They also aren’t cartoons.
The dilemma this kind of victimization gotcha! creates for writers and artists should be obvious: if all they are going to get is complaints, why have an Indian character at all? Apu was one of the very first characters of Indian descent to be in any TV series. “The Simpsons” deserves credit, not blame. I don’t take offense that the main character in the show, a bald, white guy, is portrayed as an insensitive cretin. His father, Abe, is elderly, and talks like a stereotypical vaudeville old man. His stories wander; he falls asleep mid-sentence. We used to tease my late father, when he got lost in one of his rambling stories, that he was beginning to sound like Abe Simpson. He got it. Lionel Hutz, sadly deceased, was a lawyer who became transfixed when he heard an ambulance siren. Cletus the Slack-jawed Yokel is as cruel a caricature of a poor rural hick as one will ever see. (But funny!) Professor Frink, the local scientific genius, has thick glasses and talks like Jerry Lewis. Ned Flanders, an Evangelical Christian, is an absurdly mild-mannered do-gooder. Officer Wiggum, the Chief of Police, is always eating donuts. Mr. Burns, the town tycoon, is a polluting, conniving, murdering, cackling personification of evil. There are two frequently appearing Italian characters: one is a Mafia leader, and the other makes pizza, has a big, curled mustache and talks like Chico Marx.
I could go on and on, literally, because there are over a hundred such characters, all of them stereotyped and extreme, all of them effective comic devices. I wish there was a Greek-American character on “The Simpsons.” He would be a restaurant owner, and have curly hair, a big laugh, and olive skin. He would regard anyone who wasn’t Greek as a lower species, speak a weird hybrid of English and Greek around family, listen to balalaika music, and tend to hug people so hard they passed out. My relatives would see the humor in the exaggerations, and I would not issue a screed titled “The Problem with Stavros”…
The New York Times announced that Sunil Malhotra, an actor of “South Asian descent,” will now perform Apu in a non-funny accent. Apu returns in this year’s Halloween episode of “The Simpsons.” Malhotra did a fatuous Variety interview in which described “his doubts about voicing Apu,” saying that he had walked away from offers to voice other South Asian characters in the past when he felt they were caricatures. Uh, Sunil? Apu is still a cartoon. Cartoons are caricatures by definition. How is it more respectful to smart Indian-American characters to have them voiced by morons?
“It had been eight years since Apu had spoken on the show, and it got me thinking: Did the writers’ room look different now?” Malhotra said to Variety. “Could they bring him back in a way that acknowledged and apologized for past mistakes? Could I make the character my own, and reclaim him in some way?”
Ugh. As Rhett tells Scarlett, “Frankly my dear, I don’t give a damn.”
More than 100 Harvard affiliates gathered in Harvard’s Zimmer Hall Plaza Thursday night to protest sexual violence, calling on the University to strengthen protections for survivors and reform its handling of harassment complaints. The rally was part of a nationwide day of action calling for justice for Jane Doe, a former Cornell University student, and Kendall D. Francis, a Louisiana State University student, who have both alleged sexual assault. Organizers at Harvard also issued six demands, including an independent grievance process for harassment and discrimination complaints, expanded resources for survivors, and the reopening of two diversity offices shuttered in July 2025…
“Jane Doe” is Lucy Craig, who has become one of the most improbable “Believe All Women” icons yet after suing seven male colleagues at Cornell for sexual assault despite massive evidence that she was a willing—well, you know. The only words that spring to mind are in bad taste. Women are disgracing themselves in this Ethics Train Wreck and apparently don’t care. My Leftist social media friends have decided that the Cornell 7 are rapists despite both the school and a district attorney determining that Craig’s claims are not credible; after all, she only sued after she was disinvited from a Halloween Party given by the same fraternity where she made whoopie, as Eddie Canter would say. But Lucy got her revenge: Cornell has cancelled that party and all others at fraternities for the rest of the school year. So there! New York’s woke Democratic governor Kathy Hochul appointed a special prosecutor who had already announced that she had decided the men were guilty despite her assignment of running an “independent” investigation. (Your host is quoted in this story about that...)
The LSU case? I don’t know anything about it, and I suspect the Harvard demonstrators don’t know much about it either, but someone figured out that Lucy’s tale is too thin to base a “nationwide day of action” on even in The Age of the Great Stupid (and before mid-terms).
How does a dubious rape claim at Cornell relate to the need for more “diversity” offices at Harvard? Why don’t these affiliated organizations also demand that the MLB divisional play-offs be expanded from five games to seven? Or that the official language of the U.S. be changed to Swedish?
The rest of the Crimson report is equally risible:
That’s Kelly Carnes above, the recently-hired executive director of the apparently insane Baltimore Rock Opera Society. After the blonde, white female returned from Burning Man with newly braided cornrows (above), her organization began receiving complaints from the staff regarding her choice of hair style. Cultural appropriation, you know. Can’t have that.
Carnes, who apparently has a habit of exploring daring hair displays…
…was fired, being told only that she and her new job were “not a good fit.” She had adopted the cornrows, she says, to deal with the desert where Burning Man is held annually. I wouldn’t regard a white woman’s cornrows as especially daring almost 50 years after “10” —Hello, Bo!
but The Great Stupid is full of nasty surprises.
The society’s board was especially stupid, publicly acknowledging “concerns” over their organization’s new executive director’s cornrows and that it was “taking the matter seriously.” It also said it planned to revise its anti-discrimination policy and require anti-racism leadership training, which apparently means that whites are racist when they adopt styles, behavior or dress that emulate our African American brothers and sisters. The board advised her not to attend a town hall that was called to discuss the controversy. That’s always a bad sign: they said that to Gene Hackman in “Hoosiers” when the town was meeting to fire him as the high school basketball coach for trying to teach the kids team play. Then the town’s star player got up and said he would only play if they let Gene keep coaching…wait, where was I?
I wonder if and when enough people will wake up to the fact that when they vote for progressives, this is the kind of culture they are voting to live in. You know: hysterical, power-mad, and insane.
The footwear and apparel company Converse was attacked this week by the woke social media mob for an ad in a new sneaker campaign. It featured the bottom half of a person wearing a white garment and holding a pair of black sneakers.
The shadows that suggest the outline of a long, tapering triangle was obviously reminiscent of the pointed hood of a Klan robe, see. And the lighting makes the black sneakers look like someone is being hanged. The sneakers are black, get it? And have a single leg in two shoes, or something. The alleged lyncher was K-pop singer Karina wearing a skirt and holding a pair of Chuck 70 X sneakers, but never mind: some genius figured out this was another opportunity to hold 21st century America guilty of racism.
Naturally, Converse groveled an apology, thus ensuring more of this crap from the race-baiters and political correctness thugs. “We’re sorry,” Converse said in an emailed statement. “We understand why this image is deeply upsetting and recognize that we got this wrong. We removed it from our channels and are working to remove it everywhere it appeared,” the statement added. “This should not have happened and we will do better.”
I wish I bought Converse merchandise so I could boycott the brand. Their craven behavior harms every American, the culture, society, commerce, kids, brains, everything. Just listen to these idiots:
“As a Black man and someone who loves Converse shoes, I find this very insensitive and distasteful,” Kendall Peacock, who runs the Education Firm, a tutoring and mentorship program in Atlanta, said on social media. “Deliberate racist intent hasn’t been established yet, but that doesn’t erase the impact,” he added.
Lee Merritt, a civil rights attorney based in Texas, posted on Instagram that Converse’s apology “doesn’t undo what got past legal, marketing and leadership at every step.”
Stephanie Schwartz, a social justice photographer, wrote on social media, “Every photographer can tell you, whoever did this ad knew EXACTLY what they were doing.”
I discovered the racist sneaker ad because Holly Mathnerd wrote about it on her exotic and eccentric substack. I can’t do better than Holly’s evisceration of the latest woke obsession, and besides, she’s sharp, she’s funny, she writes well, and she deserves attention. She wrote in part,
The graphic above was based on data from the U.S. Board on Geographic Names (BGN), White House executive orders, and U.S. Department of the Interior Secretary’s Orders to chart notable geographic renamings in the U.S. from 1963 to 2026.
While renaming two large bodies of water is certainly an unusually flamboyant example of changing names of geographical locales for political or other reasons, Trump’s contributions to the map certainly have plenty of company. The hysteria attached to the most recent “horror,” the renaming of Lake Ontario (Who. Cares.) is, in this context, wildly excessive.
It is also, as an astute conservative contrarian on my Facebook feed pointed out, hypocritical. The same people foaming at the mouth over the loss of “Ontario” to name a lake shared by the U.S. and Canada were all-in as schools, streets, plazas, parks, buildings and more had their names changed by wokesters when The Great Stupid spread its dark wings over the land. They applauded attempts to erase from cultural memory such crucial figures as Founders Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and George Mason, Presidents George Washington, Andrew Jackson, Woodrow Wilson, William McKinley and John Tyler, and important historical figures like Robert E. Lee and John C. Calhoun….and I’m not even talking about all the toppled statues.
As an aside, I saw for the first time, the brilliantly gold-refinished hyper-muscular horses and riders that grace D.C.’s Memorial Bridge as I crossed crossed from from the Old Dominion to the Lincoln Memorial. They look great, in stark contrast to their tarnished, ruined appearance for, oh, as long as I’ve lived in the area. But I bet the Trump deranged still hate the upgrade, because he did it. For example, a Trump-hater posted on X a representation of how Trump’s arch would block the view of the Lee Mansion in Arlington National Cemetery. Huh. So you wanted to pull down every statue of the General across the country, but his plantation’s mansion is sacred!
This kind of confirmation bias-driven sliming of law enforcement has become the norm since the Obama Administration and its leader’s unforgivable sanctification of Trayvon Martin as his crypto-offspring because Martin was black and got himself shot. The news media loves it, however, and you know, Freedom of the Press.
Bryan Axel Ramirez Gomez (above) died in February after starting a shootout with police in Elkhart, Indiana. His last stand lasted only a few second, because two police officers who were crack shots put him down quickly and safely despite others being close to the exchange. Yet that rather straightforward cause-and-effect result generated this headline from WNDU-TV, the NBC-owned affiliate in South Bend, about 20 miles from Elkhart, two days after the shooting:
The deliberately anti-law enforcement and pro-deadly punk story continued,
“The family of a 17-year-old killed by Elkhart police is calling for state investigators to take over the case as the community grapples with three separate shootings and a stabbing in a 48-hour span. Bryan Axel Ramirez Gomez died Sunday around 2 a.m. in an officer-involved shooting. A memorial now sits at High Dive Park where he was killed. Alfredo Ramirez-Gomez, the teen’s brother, spoke at a vigil for Bryan on Tuesday afternoon and demanded the release of police footage: “Bryan was a bright kid, he was a member of this community, this is where he grew up,” Ramirez-Gomez said. “As for his cause of death, we can’t really point fingers yet. We just ask and demand that the footage comes out from the car and from the vest.”
Right. “We can’t point fingers yet” but Ben Crump is on our auto-dial. The response is reflex: the family is angling for a big settlement from the city. Blogger Robert Stacy McCain points out:
I don’t understand this at all. Even for Seattle, the current controversy over the ex-chief of police is nuts.
The city’s far left Mayor Katie Wilson is under fire for the city’s botched handling of the Bite of Seattle mass shooting, which saw seven people shot with three dying. A toddler was among those wounded. Seattle Police issued a brief report to the public shortly after the shooting, urging everyone to stay away from the area, but nothing more for five hours, when a press conference was called. The city’s emergency alert system wasn’t activated, though this is exactly the kind of situation it was designed for.
Meanwhile, Police Chief Shon Barnes was out of town, as he is remarkably frequently. He was at a police convention in Dallas; since March, he’s also attended police gatherings in Washington, D.C., Detroit, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, and Baltimore. Barnes doesn’t reside in Seattle full time, you see. He lives part-time in Chicago, where his family is. Over the last six months, Barnes has been out of town for about seven weeks, including four trips to Chicago.
When he got back to his place of employment, Barnes got in the face of a reporter who dared to ask him whether reports were accurate that Barnes planned to be away from Seattle until mid-August, and whether his travel schedule might be a bit problematic. Barnes stepped into his questioner and said, “I don’t have to tell you where I go…,” before a city employee pulled the chief away from the reporter and out of the room. At another news conference, Barnes denied that he frequently travels or is routinely absent from the city, and said that he doesn’t travel as much as he would like to. He really said that.
Subsequently Mayor Wilson announced that Barnes had “resigned.” Incredibly, the Seattle City Council was troubled by that. City Councilman Bob Kettle said working with Barnes was going well—yeah, it all seemed to be going swimmingly!—and that firing him would just increase the city’s feeling of insecurity. Barnes lasted a year, and the city has had four police chiefs in just two and a half years.
Wait, let’s back up a bit. Why would any major city—Seattle is one, or at least used to be until it was engulfed by The Great Stupid—hire a police chief who wasn’t prepared to reside full time in that city, or at least nearby? Unless the individual was some kind of miracle worker, it makes no sense. Based on his biography Barnes is an anti-policing police advocate, a social justice warrior, and, of course, he’s black:
[Note: Flushed with unexpected good health, I promised yesterday to post on the unraveling Fauci scandal. 1) I wasn’t quite as recovered from the previous day’s cold, especially energy-wise, as I thought I was, and 2) I realized that today would be the more appropriate day for that post given that the arrogant Ethics Villain is testifying before Congress and Sen. Rand Paul would be, as the saying goes, “tearing him a new one.”Fauci gets his EA excoriation next, I promise.]
Just as a depressing number of people, either captured by the fascists of the Left or intimidated by them, deny that the Axis news media manipulates, censors and distorts facts and events to gain their ideological allies power “by any means necessary,” so do similar victims refuse to acknowledge the ideological capture of our educational institutions, with a few exceptions. My own two almae matres (Miss Rounds would never forgive me for writing “alma maters”) are prominent and despicable examples: Harvard College and Georgetown University Law Center, as I have documented extensively on EA.
Now comes a particularly egregious example of this dangerous phenomenon from Mt. Holyoke, one of the cluster of woke private colleges in northern Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Vermont along with Amherst, Williams, Smith, Wellesley, Dartmouth and Bennington.
Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts mandates that student organization leaders complete Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) training, and that they must develop “anti-racist plans” before the college administration will recognized them and allow them to hold sanctioned events. Without proof that an organization will be a full participant in promoting the Left’s anti-white, anti-male, anti-straight discrimination agenda, an organization will not be eligible for college funding. Chess club, drama club, Young Republicans, football team…it doesn’t matter: all the leaders of student groups must complete the required training before receiving official recognition from the college.
After a minimum of two student officers complete the training, each organization must create or update an “anti-racist plan.” Seriously? Did I just accidentally type the plot of a dystopian science fiction novel, like “1984” in reverse? I can’t believe I’m writing this.
