Greetings and welcome to this 80th performance of the Carnival of Fools! I love it when we perform in front of a giant canvas, one of those well-executed Hollywood matte paintings that provide added production value to our predictable B-movie political fare. After all, the Carnival is typically so grubby and workaday that it’s refreshing to take this charade outdoors every now and then and use the grand scenery to our advantage.
So let us repair this week once again to the mountainous countryside of Iran — the northeastern part farthest beyond the reach of American/Israeli air power, that is — and act out our domestic monkeyshines amid a backdrop of bombs and unanswered questions about a war with no clear end in sight.
Battle of the Undesirables
Naturally this brings us first to the state of Illinois, which for reasons known only to Illinoisans is bothering to hold a primary election tonight. As readers no doubt already know, Illinois handily doubles as America’s closest analogy to war-torn Iran: a population gripped with fear, huddled helplessly near a capital under constant assault; an incoherent polity saddled with a barren and inhospitable southern region populated mostly by angry ghosts; a state sagging under the weight of an implacably entrenched regime of extremists determined to rule to rack and ruin. We, the souls of the damned, bid you beware this land of ancient corruptions, haunted by the demons of history!
And absolutely nothing about that promises to change for Illinois, either today or in November. We are run — from Chicago on down to the cornfields — by incompetent spendthrift Democrats who are failing to even pay interest on debts that their predecessors accumulated decades ago. Yes, Illinois is the Land That Hope Abandoned, and today is just another primary Tuesday commemorating that loss. (Hope, in fact, officially relocated to the state of Indiana last month after Republican Governor Mike Braun offered it a series of unbeatable tax incentives.)
But we ragged Republican survivors still have to eat somehow, and what we’re left with to feed ourselves is the runoff from internecine Democratic bloodshed. (Trust me, it’s surprisingly nourishing.) The real action in Chicagoland won’t come until 2027, when half of the city’s Democratic leadership will be knifing one another in a desperate bid to be the last man standing to replace doomed Mayor Brandon Johnson — stand by for updates! — but until then, there’s still the progressive agonistes in Illinois’s ninth (and safely Democratic) district to tide us over.
Illinois’s ninth, represented until now by retiring fossil Jan Schakowsky, is famous as our most prototypically “white liberal” district — and this in a state known for its grotesquely drawn congressional lines. This is the district that, even with its currently spavined, gerrymandered form, contains some of the richest and most upscale of the northern Chicago suburbs, including Evanston as well as such historically Jewish enclaves as Skokie and Buffalo Grove.
And with Schakowsky’s retirement, the seat has become a jump ball among various Democratic factions, the most obstreperous of which is represented by the unavoidable Kat Abughazaleh, a “Squad”-like ultra-progressive (and romantic partner of current Onion owner Ben Collins) who is endorsed by all of the most infamous Democratic antisemites you know. Abughazaleh is a self-identified “social media influencer” — an outsider pick running as the grassroots progressive in a safe district. Has she gotten herself arrested protesting ICE? Of course. Does she vociferously denounce Israel? You don’t get Ilhan Omar’s and Rashida Tlaib’s full-throated endorsements any other way! Is she running on outrage against Donald Trump’s war on Iran? What else is there to run on?
Abughazaleh, with her proud “from the river to the sea” pro-Hamas activist politics, is not the “establishment pick” — not in a district centered on Skokie, Ill., mind you — but she is threatening to take the nomination away from the man who is: boring pol and Evanston Mayor Daniel Biss. She has based her campaign on support from her progressive media friends and “viral” campaigning, which in a youth-oriented district has thus far been good enough to put her within striking distance of Biss.
And I hope she wins. Yes, I know she’s trash, and her politics are trash, but keep in mind what kind of race we’re talking about. Abughazaleh may be endorsed by Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib, but Biss is endorsed by Liz Warren, Tammy Duckworth, and the Congressional Progressive Caucus. There are no good guys here. You ask me to choose between the Literal Worst and its runner-up? I choose pain and recrimination. Let’s go, Kat — I need you to replace my lost love Jasmine, after all. May the Democrats disgrace themselves tonight.
Mojtaba Khamenei Is a Fitting Replacement for His Dad
Some good news from a war whose progress Americans remain staggeringly in the dark about: Iran apparently has a new supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei. I know nothing about the guy except what I read in the papers, which in this case is perfect for my purposes: Mojtaba is the son of the late, seasonably departed Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and his election confirms that the mullahs have devolved into hereditary succession in their extremity. So much the better: As an American, I prefer to know whose specific head we’re supposed to be hunting at any given moment.
But now the bad news: According to the New York Post, Iran’s new supreme leader may currently be brutally maimed, in a coma, and — would you believe the bad run of luck, in a place like Iran, no less? — also gay. Yes, Mojtaba was apparently a wispy Jack Schlossberg type, kept close to the family’s inner circle not because of his wits, but rather because of his stupidity and manifest unacceptability to the regime’s religious backers. For those familiar with the show Arrested Development, Mojtaba was the “Buster Bluth” of the Khamenei family, only without the hook. (Now, however, he may require one — if he ever wakes up.)
The Post says that when Trump was briefed about the matter, he “couldn’t contain his surprise and laughed aloud.” I can chuckle as well. I have no idea how this war will end, or even what stories will prove to be true after the fog of war lifts — I thought Ahmadinejad was dead, and now he’s apparently alive once again — but I can cheer the reduction of the Khamenei line down to its last effete Kennedyesque failson. I suppose this is what happens when you bomb a regime’s key decision-makers twice over as they gather to consider their options: Power eventually devolves to a comatose paraplegic.
Paul Ehrlich Leaves Nothing Behind Him Except Failure
“De mortuis nil nisi bonum,” the ancients used to say. But then again the ancients didn’t know Paul Ehrlich: academic biologist, popular economist, author of infamous tract The Population Bomb, and dead at the ripe old age of 93. (I’d like to think that in that case, they’d have found at least a few choice words.) So, although I know Noah Rothman already bit off a large chunk of this yesterday morning, allow me to add my own brief “vaya con diablo” to the single most destructive social economist the West has seen since the applied works of V. I. Lenin.
Ehrlich was famous for becoming, in the early ’70s, the mainstream face of what can only be called “anti-human environmentalism”: that radical strain of quasi-theological belief that regards humanity as an unnatural and corrupting blight upon the earth, and whose unyielding prescription is human population reduction. He merely cloaked his religious tenets in the then-trendy language of ecology and science, which meant that he found himself chanting from a recognizably old pseudoscientific psalter: the Malthusian apocalypse.
“The battle to feed all of humanity is over,” began the infamous opening of The Population Bomb. Ehrlich didn’t even bother offering solutions, only an enthusiastic counsel of despair. He predicted a “Great Die-Off” due to insufficient global agricultural capacity, and always with vivid, headline-grabbing flair: “Most of the people who are going to die in the greatest cataclysm in the history of man have already been born.”
Ehrlich was uniformly ironclad in his predictions of doom during his years of greatest celebrity, and he always had the same policy solution: Either stop people from being born, or if that proves impossible, make life as miserable as possible for the living — to discourage them from reproducing themselves. When confronted with any environmental situation, Ehrlich had great ease in identifying both the problem (humanity) and the solution (preventing humanity from spreading, coercively if need be). Therefore Ehrlich was at the forefront of fiercely arguing for third-world countries to forcibly sterilize their own citizens, and for the United States government to “legislate the size of the family.”
It was such a strident routine, in fact, that by 1980 University of Maryland economist Julian Simon had finally had enough and called him out on it. Ehrlich had, in line with his blooming enviro-pundit career, been half-assedly pontificating in Social Science Quarterly about the inevitable exhaustibility of the earth’s physical products — metals, rare earths, and the like — given booming global population numbers. (“Peak oil,” a phrase you don’t hear much anymore, is an intellectual echo of this worldview.)
With Ehrlich moving well beyond his original academic credentials and into amateur commodities speculation, Simon — who knew far more about markets than the celebrity biologist — decided to put Ehrlich’s arrogant certainty to the test: Let us stake money, he proposed, on whether inflation-adjusted prices of basic commodities will rise or fall over the next ten years, and the loser will pay the winner. Simon bet they would fall, Ehrlich that they would rise.
Needless to say, the outcome was famous — ten years and a billion extra humans later, Simon cashed a well-earned check — and what’s even more revealing is how sore a loser Ehrlich was about it: He refused to sign a paper check over to Simon himself under his own name, having his wife stroke it for him instead. The story became the stuff of legend to me as a young conservative in the ’90s. (As a Maryland kid myself, I once had the opportunity to meet Professor Simon. It went a bit like that Saturday Night Live sketch where Chris Farley meets Paul McCartney: “Hey . . . uh, remember when you made that bet with Paul Ehrlich and owned him? That was, like, really cool.”)
But it was treated as a footnote in the broader world of liberal arts and letters, where Paul Ehrlich continued to be feted until the day he died. A half century after his panicked pessimism about overpopulation seized hold of the zeitgeist, we live under elites who have subconsciously internalized the message of the Ehrlichians altogether too well and find ourselves facing a massive demographic collapse. Paul Ehrlich’s entirely fatuous beliefs, popularized and promoted by the media, went on to inform an entire generation of environmental activists, who drew a simple conclusion from his doomsaying: The bigger and bolder your warning of apocalypse, the more attention (and funding) you will get. The consequences be damned.
Until next week.