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Scotland’s New Leader: White

As of late March, after the appointment of the Zambia-born Vaughan Gething as the First Minster of Wales, the only country in the British Isles with a white leader — albeit a female one — was Northern Ireland.

In April, a white male named Simon Harris replaced the brown-and-gay Leo Varadkar as the Republic of Ireland’s Taoiseach, meaning that the two nations comprising the Emerald Isle were both led by whites.

Last Tuesday, Scottish lawmakers approved the appointment of 60-year-old John Swinney as their nation’s next First Minister. He will replace Humza Yousaf, a Muslim whose parents had immigrated from Pakistan.

Yousaf resigned in late April after a coalition between his Scottish National Party and the Green Party crumbled. In his resignation speech, he described his white successor as “one of the most empathetic, kind, and compassionate people” he’d ever known. He also exploited his resignation as yet another opportunity to slam the nation that was tolerant (or masochistic) enough to have him as its leader as being filled with “racist bigots”:

Young Humza Yousaf could never have imagined he would be able to lead this country . . . I was six years old when I was first told to go home, and I am afraid since then it has been a regular occurrence — in fact, almost daily if you look at my social media feeds. . . . So to have the opportunity to defy the far right, to defy the racist bigots who told me to go home, to be in a position to serve my home, to contribute to public life in my home, and to have the opportunity to lead my home — that has been the most tremendous honor that I didn’t think was reserved for people who looked like me.

In June of 2020, while the Summer of Floyd was raging and Yousaf was Scotland’s Justice Secretary, Yousaf felt the need to decry the nation’s unremitting and unforgivable whiteness, repeatedly spitting out the word “white” like a cat disgorging a nasty fur ball from its throat:

The driven snow

In 99% of the meetings I go to, I’m the only non-white person in the room. But why are we surprised when the most senior positions in Scotland are filled almost exclusively by those who are white? Take my portfolio alone. The Lord President: white. The Lord Justice Clerk: white. Every High Court judge: white. The Lord Advocate: white. The Solicitor General: white. The Chief Constable: white. Every Deputy Chief Constable: white. Every Assistant Chief Constable: white. The head of the Law Society: white. The head of the Faculty of Advocates: white. Every prison governor: white. And not just justice. The chief medical officer: white. The chief nursing officer: white. The chief veterinary officer: white. The chief social work adviser, white. Almost every trade union in this country is headed by people who are white. In the Scottish government, every director general is white. Every chair of every public body is white. That is not good enough.

It makes a man wonder how many of Pakistan’s leaders are Pakis. And in the near-impossible event that Pakistan would appoint a white man as its leader, I wonder how long he’d remain alive if he gave a public speech whining about how the nation was predominantly led by Pakis. An hour?

Ann Coulter: “The Core Around Which the Nation’s Values are Formed Is the WASP”

While we’re on the subject of browns vying to lead majority-white nations, last Wednesday failed Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy hosted Ann Coulter on his podcast for a cleverly-titled episode called “The N Word: Nationalism.” The unremittingly bony Coulter told Ramaswamy:

I agreed with many, many things you said during your campaign, in fact probably more than most other candidates when you were running for president. But I still would not have voted for you because you’re an Indian. . . . [That] doesn’t mean we can’t take anyone else in — a Sri Lankan, a Japanese, or an Indian — but the core around which the nation’s values are formed is the WASP. . . . We’ve never had a president who didn’t have at least partial English ancestry.

I believe that Coulter is wrong about the latter assertion, since both of Martin Van Buren’s parents were “of pure Dutch extraction.” And if there are two things I know about Ann Coulter, it’s that she hates being called “bony” as well as being proved wrong.

Coulter, who once told Nikki Haley (born Nimarata Randhawa) to “go back to your country,” added that if one of Ramaswamy’s two sons married a Daughter of the American Revolution, she would “definitely vote for them for president.”

Ramaswamy seemed to take it all in stride, posting on X:

.@AnnCoulter told me flat-out to my face that she couldn’t vote for me “because you’re an Indian,” even though she agreed with me more than most other candidates. I disagree with her but respect she had the guts to speak her mind. It was a riveting hour. The TRUTH podcast is back https://t.co/neVjKSs6e9

— Vivek Ramaswamy (@VivekGRamaswamy) May 8, 2024

.@AnnCoulter told me flat-out to my face that she couldn’t vote for me “because you’re an Indian,” even though she agreed with me more than most other candidates. I disagree with her but respect she had the guts to speak her mind. It was a riveting hour. The TRUTH podcast is back

Taiwan-born Congressman Ted Lieu condescendingly accused Ramaswamy of being a self-hating brown man:

I wasn’t surprised that Ann Coulter made a racist statement about Vivek.

What surprised me is the weakness and lack of self respect of @VivekGRamaswamy. He’s actually promoting this episode and praising the person who spewed raw racism to his face. I feel sorry for Vivek. https://t.co/XAxOrWTK1J

— Ted Lieu (@tedlieu) May 9, 2024

I wasn’t surprised that Ann Coulter made a racist statement about Vivek.

What surprised me is the weakness and lack of self respect of @VivekGRamaswamy. He’s actually promoting this episode and praising the person who spewed raw racism to his face. I feel sorry for Vivek.

Someone named Richard Spencer accused Coulter of being a “cheap and petty racist” and a “bitch” who peddles “ignorant bigotry”:

Ann Coulter is representative of much of the Republican constituency and the Southern Strategy in general. She is, essentially, a bigot in favor of limited “gummit.”

Yes, Ann is a racist. But the moment someone, anyone, puts forward any sort of coherent nationalism or racialist… pic.twitter.com/zUtlQgFjDr

— Richard Spencer (@RichardBSpencer) May 8, 2024

Ann Coulter is representative of much of the Republican constituency and the Southern Strategy in general. She is, essentially, a bigot in favor of limited “gummit.”

Yes, Ann is a racist. But the moment someone, anyone, puts forward any sort of coherent nationalism or racialist ideology, she immediately moves into attack mode, falling back on “color blind” ideology.

That this life-long spinster dated Dinesh d’Souza — only to be passed over for Laura Ingraham (true story) — in no way invalidates the fact that she is a cheap and petty racist at heart. It only proves that she lacks self-esteem and, deep down, knows how unattractive she really is.

“Au contraire,” you say, “Ann is really ‘moving the Overton window’ by attacking Vivek for being an Indian.” Yes! She is, indeed, moving the Overton window . . . backwards! Towards ignorant bigotry combined with libertarianism — what the Republican Party has relied on for decades.

Let’s not forget that she, by her own admission, agrees with everything Vivek stands for — the fake nationalism and rampant bullshit that defined his campaign. Ann just wants someone who looks like Jerry Falwell to pronounce these platitudes. To this degree, she is a “White Suprematist.”

If anyone fully embodies the utter uselessness of “conservatism,” it is this bitch.

Someone named Joel Davis lauded Richard Spencer for his “excellent analysis”:

Excellent analysis. Conservatives who merely use racism haphazardly and incoherently to be interesting are simply discharging a repressed excess, reproducing the paradigm rather than challenging it. To truly challenge it one must embody racism authentically and holistically, but…

— Joel Davis (@joeldavisx) May 9, 2024

Excellent analysis. Conservatives who merely use racism haphazardly and incoherently to be interesting are simply discharging a repressed excess, reproducing the paradigm rather than challenging it. To truly challenge it one must embody racism authentically and holistically, but to do this one must leave conservatism behind.

What about leaving words such as “paradigm” and “holistically” behind?

“America’s New Death Valley”: Suicide Rates Spike in Central Wyoming County

Wyoming, which a friend of mine once described as “Mars with wind,” is America’s least-populated state. Its population barely cracks a half-million, but nearly nine out of every ten residents are white. According to the 2020 Census, only Montana has a lower quotient of blacks. But despite Wyoming’s refreshing lack of negritude, the Cowboy State has perennially suffered the country’s highest suicide rate, with Montana nipping closely at its heels.

Why would America’s two least-black states also be saddled with the country’s two highest suicide rates? For 17 years now, I’ve lived in Georgia, which “boasts” more blacks than any other state besides Texas, and it hasn’t exactly improved my mood.

A recent article in the Daily Mail titled “America’s new ‘death valley’: Inside the rural town where the suicide rate has mysteriously exploded to become ‘the fourth highest in the world’” attempts to probe a recent uptick of self-cessation in Natrona County, Wyoming, whose population is roughly 80,000, all but 20,000 of whom live in Casper.

Natrona County Coroner Jim Whipps, who apparently has never missed a meal, says that 12 people, most of them young, have committed suicide over the past four months:

It kind of started last fall, but case count is going way up on unnatural deaths. . . . This has been a different kind of year. . . . So far this year we are sitting on 12 in four months. . . . If you extrapolate that out, that is like 36 to 40 suicides that I can expect this year. . . . Our record-setter for this county was a couple years ago at 32 or 33. . . . Per capita, Natrona County has one of the highest suicide rates in the state, in the nation and, believe it or not, in the world.

In a 2023 documentary titled Turning Point: Ending Suicide in Wyoming, Whipps appeared helpless to explain why the state’s suicide rate was so high:

There’s been more research done on what’s going on around here from the altitude to the wind to the cowboy-up attitude that’s been prevalent in the state since its inception. . . . And nothing has panned out. There’s got to be something that’s different in the way that we think and formulate conclusions than a lot of the rest of the world, and I just don’t know what that is. . . . That’s probably one of the more frustrating things, because you can’t generalize it.

Whipps recently alleged that Natrona County suffers the world’s fourth-highest suicide rate.

On April 7 at Casper’s Eastridge Mall, a 14-year-old white boy named Robert Dean Maher died after being stabbed twice in the stomach with a stolen kitchen knife “by two other minors” who “were allegedly seeking revenge after Maher, who had called them ‘freaks’ a week earlier.” The “two other minors” have been arrested and charged with felonious conspiracy to commit murder. Their names are Dominique Antonio Richard Harris and Jarreth Joseflee Sabastian Plunkett, but I was unable to find photos of them. Based purely on their names, would it be unreasonable to assume they were among Wyoming’s 5,000 or so blacks?

Much has been made of “deaths of despair” among whites, and for a few years now I was under the impression that white Americans have higher suicide rates than any other race. Yet, this is not true — those classified as “American Indian/Alaska Native” kill themselves at rates even higher than whites do. Apart from whites and Injuns, all other racial groups have suicide rates below the national average.

Why might this be? What do whites and “indigenous” Americans have in common? One could make a solid case that they are both being demographically colonized and replaced by other groups, which leads to the sort of ennui and despondency that makes self-erasure seem appealing.