On Monday I discussed some typical crimes in big blue cities: Dexter Reed earning himself a 21-gun-salute by shooting at Chicago cops; St. Louis mayor Tishaura the Terrible (move over, Ivan!) blaming store owners for being robbed by thugs she allows to roam free; and San Fran’s brilliant plan to force bankrupt businesses to continue operating, because shoplifters need to exercise their constitutional right to loot.
Today I’d like to talk about a different kind of crime, one involving two of my favorite things: stupid high-status criminals, and sweet, sweet schadenfreude. And I’ve got two great examples.
The first one comes from Scotland, sadly enough. I hate to say it, but the Scots are now giving the Scandinavians some stiff competition in the race to see who can make their ancestors roll over in their graves the fastest.
Just a scant 1000 years ago – when Imhotep Pelosi was a dewy ingenue celebrating her 700th birthday – Norsemen were legendary warriors, and the Scots were the hillbillies of Europe (in the best possible way), having forced the Romans to give up their incursions and build Hadrian’s Wall.
Today, too many descendants of Vikings are beta males who embrace the EU and take orders from the Hague, and the once-proud Scots are castigating themselves for being too white (in Scotland!) and adopting insulting “hate crimes” speech codes into law.
They’ve somehow wound up with a goofball named Humza Yousaf as First Minister. (Because apparently somebody challenged them to find a minister more hateful than Louis Farrakhan and Jeremiah Wright, and they said, “Hold my haggis, and watch this!”)
Yousaf – yes, of Clan Yousaf, from the highlands – led the push to pass the “Hate Crime and Public Order Act,” which became law on April Fool’s Day, fittingly enough. As with all such laws, it was passed on the promise that it would be used to stop hatred and bigotry, and never to quash free expression.
But as with all such laws everywhere, “hate speech” always boils down to “speech that those in power don’t like.” As soon as I read about the law, I figured that it would likely be wielded as a weapon against whoever is the Scottish equivalent of people wearing MAGA hats. (Maybe lads in William Wallace Windbreakers, or Don’t Tread on Me Kilts?)
(If those don’t exist yet, I’d like to copyright them right now.)
And indeed, the law has gone terribly wrong, right out of the gate. But what I didn’t anticipate – and what restores a little of my faith in the Scots – is in what schadenfreude-tastic ways it would go hilariously wrong!
In the first 48 hours after the law took effect, Scottish police were swamped with 4,000 official complaints! Obviously, the cops have no time or resources to deal with this deluge of whining, as opposed to doing, you know, actual police work. Instead, as a story in The Guardian put it (and that’s the last time you’ll see me citing that lefty rag with approval), “It has resulted in an almighty omnishambles.”
As a language nerd, I LOVE that phrase, and am determined to work it into future columns on a semi-regular basis. (Ex: “The mob of Biden-voting looters began with some garden-variety tumultuous conduct, but then escalated to the point of creating an almighty omnishambles!”)
Many of the first 4000 complaints apparently dealt with J.K. Rowling (about which more in a minute), but another big chunk had to do with the malicious minister himself, Hamza Yousaf!
Because it turns out that the Ham-ster went on a rant in 2020 about how racist Scotland is, citing as his evidence the vast majority of government positions that are held by whites. (In Scotland!) (Unexpectedly!)
The culmination of his speech featured him spitting out “white” after each position’s title with visceral disgust. (“The lord president, white! The chief constable, white! Every high court judge, white!”)
Since the hate crime law was passed to supposedly fight racial hatred, I love that the minute that the law took effect, many Scots trolled Hamza by aiming complaints at him for his own racial animus, hoisting him on his own petard.
I mentioned J.K. Rowling, who has now officially become a hero of mine. She’s taken all sorts of abuse from the usual suspects for displaying the best kind of Scottish stubbornness on the issue of “transgender women” – who, as everyone knows, are dudes.
I hold her in similarly high regard as I hold my third-favorite African-American (after Clarence Thomas and Thomas Sowell): Elon Musk. Both Musk and Rowling achieved great wealth, and could have continued to bask in public approval if they had just acquiesced to the elite censors and kept their mouths shut.
We’ve all heard the cliché that someone is wealthy when she has “f**k you” money, but Adam Carolla has pointed out that REAL wealth is having “f**k me” money. I.e. you can afford to lose $20 billion by overpaying for Twitter, just because you value free speech.
Or you can afford to sacrifice the social capital represented by Harry Potter money by refusing to repeat the lie that men can be women.
When she heard about the new law, Rowling went before cameras and threw down the gauntlet, saying that she would never bend the knee and lie about gender, and daring Hamza and his army of woke bullies to charge her and jail her.
I’m not sure how many of the initial complaints filed about her were authentic whining from the leftist thought police, and how many of them were trolling from liberty-loving Scots, but either way, it worked out great. Hamza’s government backpedaled furiously, putting out hapless spokes-weasels to insist that they would never apply the new law to people like Rowling or honest disagreements like hers. (And all throughout the land, there were spit-takes of Scotch in every pub.)
I’m looking forward to watching the Scottish government squirm and suffer in the coming months, until they will hopefully be forced into an ignominious repeal of the law, just like Portlanders had to re-criminalize hard drugs, and Dem pols have had to scramble to re-fund the police.
Speaking of spineless acquiescence to leftist bullies, it’s been maddening to watch one blue city after another allow pro-Hamas idiots to block major roads – the Golden Gate bridge, a major road leading to O’Hare in Chicago – while the cops are forced to stand by and let the madness go on.
That’s why counter-examples are so refreshing. I probably don’t have to tell you that DeSantis sent in the cops and quickly dragged off and arrested a bunch of protestors in Florida last week. (Man, I hope we can someday have that guy as our president!)
But you might not have heard of little Pomona college in CA, where a mob of pro-terror Hamas supporters were arrested after they took over a campus building on April 5th. Nineteen of them were suspended and charged with crimes. Sure, the charges are only misdemeanors, but for California, that’s a great start.
As always with this kind of protest, their chants were pedestrian at best. Along with the usual tired ones (“From the river to the sea…”), their only even half-decent one was, “Stop the killing, stop the slaughter, Gaza has no food or water.” You’d think that such a large group of losers with no prospects for gainful employment and a lot of time on their hands could do better.
In fact, here’s one off the top of my head, just to challenge them: “We find Israel’s actions heinous, See? our thoughts come from our anus!”
You’re welcome, keffiyeh-wearing morons!
But the greatest recent example is the one you’ve probably already seen: Riddhi Patel, the toxic little firebrand who went on an epic rant aimed at the city council in Bakersfield. After a slow start, she dialed it up to 11, and what she lacked in basic logic, she more than made up for in 180-proof bile.
By her second sentence, she had already achieved lift-off: “I don’t have faith that you will do this. You guys are all horrible human beings, and Jesus probably would have killed you himself.”
(Um. I’m no Thomas Aquinas, but I think you may have missed a few of the subtleties of Jesus’ main idea there, Riddhi.)
Within a minute, she was up to, “I hope one day somebody brings a guillotine and kills all of you motherfrienders!”
For the toxic icing on her genocide cake, she expressed outrage that the council recently installed metal detectors and extra police. “You guys want to criminalize us with metal detectors, we’ll see you at your house. We’ll murder you!”
Got that? “How dare you unfairly suggest that we might be dangerous in any way? Just for that, we’re going to break into your houses and slaughter you!”
Well done!
Miraculously, Riddhi was arrested right after her speech, and charged with 18 felony accounts involving threats to terrorize, and given a bail of $1 million! When she appeared in court two days later, she was crying like a baby.
Three quick notes: 1. After watching her getting cuffed and hauled away, her fellow protestors “have since distanced themselves from Patel’s desire to kill.” I’ll bet they have!
2. Nearly all of her young fellow protestors were wearing covid masks. In April of 2024! (Virtue signaling has turned into “low IQ signaling.”)
3. The issue she was so outraged about was that the Bakersfield city council wouldn’t pass a resolution calling for a ceasefire in Gaza.
As if the villains running Hamas would be sitting around a long table in their lair, planning their next mass murder, when a messenger enters with a note. After reading it, the head terrorist would announce mournfully, “We were just about to gang rape more hippie chicks and burn more Jewish babies alive, but I’ve just learned that we’ve lost the Bakersfield city council! That’s it, pack up the tents. The jihad is over!”
I see two kinds of protestors in these mobs. First are the dead-eyed sociopaths who aren’t kidding around – they’d throw their “Queers for Palestine” co-losers off a rooftop in Gaza so fast it’d make your drag-queen tiara spin. Thankfully, this type seems to be in the minority.
The majority are cosplaying narcissists like Riddhi. And as we have seen in Bakersfield, Pomona, and Vanderbilt – and in most of the red states – they are cowards, and most fold and flee at the first sign of serious pushback.
If we had met her type with a little taser therapy, a set of cuffs and a night spent in a county jail starting with the first George Floyd riot, how much of the chaos and destruction of the last 4 years could have been avoided?
By the way, a California judge – citing among other things that Riddhi Patel doesn’t appear to own any firearms – has cut her bail in half.
D’oh! This is why you can’t have nice things, California. Hamas delenda est!
Martin Simpson 