Suddenly I’m anti-American. I think it began with that ghastly Park Avenue couple I met a couple years ago on a trip to my old school, which I wrote about in Chronicles. She was a white blonde from Texas; he a white Jew from New York. She called the great Robert E. Lee a traitor; he told an obviously false story about being racially discriminated against in the ’60s tennis tournament circuit. I knew that circuit well, having competed in it myself, along with many top Jewish players who experienced no such discrimination. I was astonished and outraged that such well-off people would come up with such rubbish.

Since then it has gotten worse.

A friend recently asked why I sound like Jane Fonda circa 1968 whenever I talk about the United States. I explained that the New York media hyenas and Washington, D.C., political phonies have turned Uncle Sam into a monster. 

I don’t blame Average Joe American, I told him. It wasn’t shopkeepers or bus drivers who thought the best way to deal with America’s out-of-control crime was to defund the police and release criminals without bail. It wasn’t America’s normal working-class folks who championed the notion that children should make irreversible surgical choices about their genitals. And it’s not average, ordinary, hardworking Americans who insist the way to promote free speech is by censoring speech, or that the way to end racism is by classifying everyone by race and treating each race differently.

I could have gone on, but I think my buddy was convinced. The latest media attacks on the Supreme Court, for rightly ruling that race should no longer play a part in university admissions, helped make my case. After all, why should an underqualified son of a black doctor be given priority over the well-qualified son of a Vietnamese refugee? Yet this has raised the hackles of the scummy types at The New York Times, and the word is out to destroy the reputations of the Court’s conservative justices.

American universities are in such bad shape that students who try to be racially “colorblind,” or who state their intention to treat everyone the same, are penalized in one way or another by professors, administrators, and fellow students. Being colorblind is not acceptable in academia; one must be “woke,” acknowledge one’s “privilege” and recognize the victim status of certain races.

By now, woke is no longer a cult but an established career path through which useless types claim cultural status. Large swathes of elites such as professors, journalists, lawyers, and heads of corporations find relevancy in becoming inquisitors, while social media, libraries, galleries, and museums exclude viewpoints that are judged to be reactionary. Savonarola and Torquemada have nothing on these worms.

Which brings me to our old friend, Russian President Vladimir Putin, now a Hitler-like hate figure compared to the supposedly saintly Volodymyr Zelensky. Putin often refers to the West as spiritually depraved, and in his eyes America is a country of sex changes, drag queens, transgenderism, and LGBTQ. I hate to say it, but he’s not far wrong. What is one to think when a poll of Brown University students found that 38 percent identified as not straight? I suppose the students feel that they must conform with the present reality in which normality is bad and deviancy good.

Abnormality is certainly the norm on the East Coast and in certain progressive states like California, where euphemisms like “substance-use disorder” are used to excuse alcoholics and drug addicts, while extreme obesity, especially in black American women, is described as body positivity.

If a Martian were to visit our skies, what would he or she report back about us Americans? I’ll wager it would be something like this: 

In America, people who shoplift, loot, and steal are generally not arrested or punished, while the police who attempt to stop them are depicted in the country’s media as the real villains. The leaders of America’s institutions are chosen not for intelligence, honesty, and competence, but for race.

Unlike on Mars, where we promote rather than punish our best, Americans are obsessed with a concept called equity, in which the best society is one in which everyone is as dumb, poor, and untalented as the society’s most dumb, poor, and untalented people.

Worst of all, Americans teach their children to be ashamed of their ancestors. It is a spectacle of self-destruction and degeneracy, and I am counting the minutes until I get back to Mars.

Read the words of the Martian and weep, dear readers. ◆