The 10 most perversely improbable events of the last 10 years
NFL players did not used to suffer cardiac arrest at 25.
The last 10 years has seen some improbable events: a celebrity entrepreneur becomes president; a president’s son forgets to retrieve his incriminating laptop from a repair shop; and a white guy who can’t jump dominates the NBA. Although improbable, none of these events is unnatural. All have some basis in logic and evidence. Each, for the sane at least, is less a source of alarm than of wonder.
Not so for the PIEs – the Perversely Improbable Events. Ten years ago, had someone taken the bet, anyone predicting the events that followed could have bought Epstein’s island with his winnings. Jeffrey Epstein, of course, no longer lives there. In a wildly improbable sequence of events in 2019, his prison guards allegedly feel asleep while the cameras malfunctioned, allowing the convicted pedophile to hang himself in his jail cell with his secret client list intact. Who’d a thunk it?
Grab Your Wallets: The Reparations Game Is Rigged
Two weeks ago, I participated in a debate on reparations hosted by the American Public Square and later televised by KCPT, the PBS station in Kansas City. If I didn’t know
Professional wrestling has nothing on the reparations game
beforehand that the game was rigged, I did by the time the edited debate hit the airwaves. Grab your wallets, folks. The reparations crowd is coming for your money.
The concept behind American Public Square is a reasonable one. Troubled by the increasing polarization of the electorate, former ambassador to Portugal Allan Katz founded the organization to bridge the partisan divide through civil discourse.
The programming skews left, as does the audience, but the forum provides contrarians like myself an opportunity to burst the occasional bubble. Some years back, for intense, I participated in a discussion on Muslims in which the on-site “fact-checker” came to my aid more than once, as did the ringer of the “civility bell.” I cannot say I converted anyone to my viewpoint, but in my strategically congenial way — “Honey, he’s not the monster I thought he was” — I may have forced a few people to question their assumptions.
The Duping of Arnold Schwarzenegger . . . and an Awakening for RFK, Jr.?
Providentially perhaps, last week I happened to watch the Netflix three-part series on Arnold Schwarzenegger as I was reading the eye-opening book by Mary Nicholas and Paul Kengor, The Devil and Bella Dodd: One Woman’s Struggle Against Communism and Her Redemption. The latter provides a useful framework for understanding the former.
To be sure, Schwarzenegger is no communist. Like the early Bella Dodd, however, he has been a dupe of what is arguably a communist conspiracy. More alarming still, the man who recruited him to that conspiracy is now running for president: Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. The question remains whether Kennedy, like Dodd, has seen the light.
Schwarzenegger has always meant well. I believe he still does. The first two parts of “Arnold” show him at his ingenuous, flag-waving best. Through sheer self-actualization, he gleefully conquers the sport of bodybuilding and the madness of Hollywood. In 1990, he described the political philosophy that guided his quest in the introduction to a PBS series hosted by Milton Friedman.
The Reparations Success Story That Isn’t
On June 7, I was one of five panelists, two of us white, to participate in an American Public Square discussion on the subject of reparations for African Americans. The discussion will 
air multiple times on the Kansas City PBS station KCPT.
The producers chose me because I have a book coming out on a related subject, Untenable: The True Story of White Ethnic Flight From America’s Cities. They figured my self-interest would overcome my sense of self-preservation. Finding a second panelist to challenge reparations in an era as fraught as our own took a good deal more effort.
If this were Hollywood Squares, the middle square would have gone to Robin Rue Simmons, a congenial black woman in her mid-40s from Evanston, Illinois. Having flown in for the occasion, Simmons was the event’s star attraction. In 2021, it was she who, as an alderman, prodded the City of Evanston to adopt the nation’s first reparations program to go by that name. (READ MORE: The Ignored Reason Reparations Make No Sense)
Michelle Obama’s ‘Black Flight’ Problem
Chez Obama, Martha’s Vineyard
Michelle Obama appears to be the next Democrat figurehead. In a May 14 Wall Street Journal op-ed, Douglas Schoen and Andrew Stein give voice to a fear that has been haunting those deranged by the very thought of Donald Trump: “He could be elected president again in 2024.” These two savvy Democrats understand how vulnerable President Joe Biden is, both politically and medically. To prepare a “backup plan,” they speed through the likely suspects for a substitute but soon realize that none is viable. The “strongest candidate by far,” they conclude, is a seeming outlier, former first lady Michelle Obama.
As recently as April, Michelle disavowed her interest in running for president — or at least seemed to. “At no point,” she told Oprah Winfrey, “have I ever said, ‘I think I want to run.’ Ever.” Schoen and Stein hope Michelle can be persuaded. Los Angeles filmmaker Joel Gilbert believes she already has been. In his doggedly researched film and book, Michelle Obama 2024, Gilbert makes a compelling case that Michelle’s post–White House persona has been crafted for just this moment.
Remembering America’s most disastrous reparations scheme
Either to expiate their guilt – or to exploit the guilty – city council members in Evanston, Illinois, recently approved the nation’s first actual reparations program. Sensing that arguments about slavery and Jim Crow would not have much purchase in this youthful city, the activists focused on housing, a grievance of more recent vintage.
Thus, the Restorative Housing Program, as it’s called, addresses the harm allegedly caused by “discriminatory housing policies and practices and inaction on the City’s part.” In their urge to create new homeowners, Evanston activists seem blissfully unaware of what happened the last time the nation writ large attempted to put the unready in homes they were unprepared to sustain. It’s time for a friendly reminder.
Kansas City’s core has survived better than most. But while living in fear, can the center hold?
Driving down Ward Parkway on a languid spring evening not long ago I had that rare moment of genuine deja vu. All at once it was that sparkling June day when I first arrived in Kansas City and drove the length of Ward Parkway from the Country Club Plaza to very near its southern end. I had never seen anything quite like this – a sylvan 40-block stretch of stately homes and sculpted shrubbery right in the middle of a city.
In my experience, cities collapsed. The affluent, if they stayed, retreated into wary enclaves girded by iron fences whose spiked points spoke angry volumes to friend and foe alike. I had the chance to revisit my own past in researching my new book, Untenable: The True Story of White Ethnic Flight from America’s Cities. By the time we moved to Kansas City the neighborhood of my New Jersey youth had become just that: untenable.
Question for Durham: Was It All to Impress A Woman?
Not since John Hinckley shot President Reagan to impress actress Jodi Foster has a lovesick suitor caused as much political havoc as the FBI’s Peter Strzok did in pursuit of FBI attorney Lisa Page. Or so, at least, it would appear.
The House Judiciary Committee this month will have a chance to probe this and other lines of inquiry with former special counsel John Durham as it regards his investigation of the apocryphal Trump-Russia connection. Although a useful guide, the Durham report never got beyond the shallow end of the deep state. Congress needs to go deeper.
Both Page and Strzok were in a position to shape outcomes. In 2016, while their courting was still more or less covert, the 35-year-old Page served as an advisor to then-FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe. The 45-year-old Strzok, despite his adulterous affair, was promoted later that year to be deputy assistant director of the FBI’s counterintelligence division.
