Chicken tikka masala is delicious. Al Copeland helped us understand how much better the world could be if someone developed and sold us more delicious food.
Ali Ahmed Aslam may not really have invented chicken tikka masala, just as Al Copeland did not invent spicy fried chicken. And the fact that chicken tikka masala drew influences from South Asia but really came out of Glasgow no more detracts from how wonderful it is than the fact that Al Copeland’s spicy chicken drew influences from black Louisiana cuisine but really came from a boisterous white businessman.
No one “owns” culture or cuisine. The people who tear-up Israeli food festivals or denounce Elvis Presley for “appropriation” are just bullies who wish to worsen the human condition by preventing us from enjoying the fantastic innovations that can occur when people bring together and promote various cultures.
So, tonight I encourage you to drink a Kirin beer (Japanese drawing on German influence) while enjoying a slice of pizza (American drawing upon Italian influence) after giving thanks to a single, loving God (Global drawing upon Jewish influence). And let’s raise a toast to Ali Ahmed Aslam as the newest recipient of the Al Copeland Humanitarian Award.
As world events are reminding us right now, nothing is more appealing to us – to all of us – than a really compelling story. The stories we tell ourselves shape the inner world that we mentally live in, and in doing so, ultimately shape not only who we are as individuals but the social world we live in together. No service is more valuable to the world than that of getting our stories straight.
A while back I stumbled across the amazing story of Richard Montañez. The moment I read it, I immediately put him down on my list of future Al nominees. And pretty high on the list, too. How could I not nominate for The Al a man who, while working as a janitor for Frito-Lay, noticed that he and his Hispanic co-workers did not themselves tend to buy Frito-Lay products because none appealed to their tastes, and came into work with his own home-brewed recipe for a new super-spicy Cheeto and sold it to the corporate execs, bringing the world what would become Flamin’ Hot Cheetos?
I mean, if the story of how Al became Al is that he brought the world spicy chicken, how much more Al is story of the man who brought the world spicy Cheetos?
Part of what was so compelling about Montañez’s story was simply that he is so good at telling it. He was raking in speaking fees of up to $50,000 and writing multiple bestselling memoirs, recounting his janitorial days when he would come into work with little sandwich bags filled with Cheetos he had doctored in his home kitchen/laboratory; how word began getting around and he unexpectedly landed an audience with the bigshots; how some at Frito-Lay weren’t happy that a Hispanic janitor was getting out of line and disrupting the corporate suite with his ideas.
I wasn’t the only one who noticed Montañez’s story. The professional storytellers in Hollywood did, too. They sunk millions into a full-dress movie, with stars and everything, to tell Montañez’s story.
But a funny thing happened to Montañez’s story. This year, the movie Flamin’ Hot was released, not in theaters, but on streaming. And it got no buzz, disappearing quickly into the bottomless miasma of the streaming library.
Why? Because the publicity for Flamin’ Hot declares that Montañez’s story is “a true story.”
And it isn’t.
We know this thanks to one of the other people who was impressed when he first heard Montañez’s story: Sam Dean. A journalist for the Los Angeles Times, Dean had even promoted Montañez when writing about Hispanics in the world of food. But Dean is cut from the same cloth as Al winner Hunter Scott and nominee Ryan Petersen, and actually did what reporters are supposed to do: shoe-leather reporting.
Late last year, as Flamin’ Hot was making its way toward what would have been a blockbuster debut, Dean published a blockbuster of his own – a profile of Montañez with a title that doesn’t beat around the bush: “The Man Who Didn’t Invent Flamin’ Hot Cheetos.”
Interviewing former Frito-Lay employees and checking public records, Dean pieced together the true story: “Flamin’ Hots were created by a team of hotshot snack food professionals starting in 1989, in the corporate offices of Frito-Lay’s headquarters in Plano, Texas. The new product was designed to compete with spicy snacks sold in the inner-city mini-marts of the Midwest. A junior employee with a freshly minted MBA named Lynne Greenfeld got the assignment to develop the brand – she came up with the Flamin’ Hot name and shepherded the line into existence.”
Montañez’s story was an elaborate self-promoting grift, much like that of the “fictional autobiography writer Rigoberta Menchu” whose Nobel peace prize helped launch The Al.
Frito-Lay, for obvious reasons, had not been eager to publicly contradict Montañez’s story. But when Dean showed up with the receipts, they finally issued a statement: “None of our records show that Richard was involved in any capacity in the Flamin’ Hot test market….We have interviewed multiple personnel who were involved in the test market, and all of them indicate that Richard was not involved in any capacity in the test market….That doesn’t mean we don’t celebrate Richard, but the facts do not support the urban legend.”
Frito-Lay could take a lesson in how to stand by your people and your products from Al nominee Adam Butler at Kraft-Heinz, but that’s for another day.
While Dean’s story is the one that has unfolded this year, I simply couldn’t give him the nomination without also honoring another journalist, Jacqueline Keeler of the San Francisco Chronicle, who a year earlier took down an even more important fraud. The title of her profile is as subtle and circumlocuitous as that of Dean’s: “Sacheen Littlefeather Was a Native American Icon; Her Sisters Say She Was an Ethnic Fraud.”
In 1973, the founder of NAMBLA won an Academy Award for his performance as Vito Corleone in The Godfather. He refused to receive the award himself, and sent “Sacheen Littlefeather” to accept it on his behalf. As Keeler writes: “Claiming Apache heritage, she spoke eloquently, to a backdrop of boos, of the mistreatment of Native Americans by the film industry and beyond.” She spent the rest of her life speaking in this role on the abuse of Native Americans by Hollywood.
And apparently she was well qualified to lecture Hollywood about misrepresenting Native Americans! Keeler put in the shoe leather to prove that Marie Louise Cruz – “Sacheen Littlefeather” – had no Native American ancestry. Keeler’s extensive research traces Cruz’s invention of her false identity and shows that her specific claims are contradicted by tribal records.
Frazer Harrison/Getty Images
Her biological sisters, Rosalind Cruz and Trudy Orlandi, confirmed this to Keeler, expressing anger at their sister’s betrayal of her Mexican ancestry: “I mean, you’re not gonna be a Mexican American princess,” Orlandi said to Keeler. “You’re gonna be an American Indian princess. It was more prestigious to be an American Indian than it was to be Hispanic in her mind.”
The problem with the new world being created by wokeness is not the desire to reexamine the world we have inherited with a critical eye. The problem is not even the radical commitment to overturn existing institutions where justice requires it. The problem is that the elite class who have gained power through the rhetoric of wokeness are firmly committed to the view that facts don’t matter – that there is no “truth” other than the stories we tell ourselves (“narratives,” if you want to sound hifalutin) and that the only test of whether a story is true is whether it serves our moral purposes.
Ultimately, this reduces to: “If acting on a belief produces the kind of world you want, the belief is true.”
Truth and falsehood are thus determined solely by our wishes – ultimately, by the barrel of a gun.
And the thing that the woke have, almost without exception, refused to realize is that once we get rid of the old idea that “truth” involves correspondence to objective reality, this lowering of the epistemic guardrails will not weaken – it will greatly strengthen – the atavistic darkness of the far Right. There is nothing at all stopping racists, misogynists, nationalists, etc. from building a world based on brutally enforced conformity to “narrative” in exactly the same way the woke do. That has always been the nature of their enterprise. How thoughtful of the woke to roll out the red carpet for them.
Commitment to truth as correspondence to objective reality was never a mask for reactionary power. It was in fact revolutionary – the only true wokeness, the only revolutionary spirit worthy of the name – and that not by happenstance but by logical necessity. Commitment to truth as correspondence to reality cannot be reactionary; it must always inspire revolution, and only it can inspire a revolution worth having.
The signal service Keeler and Dean provide by their willingness to stand firm against fashionable narratives that everyone in their social world wants to be true is to help rebuild the guardrails that protect the humane things – the good, the true and the beautiful, which constitute the ultimate revolutionary agenda – from the nihilistic abyss.
As elite universities are over-run with mobs of modern-day brown-shirts praising mass slaughter, rape, and kidnapping, I would like to offer a variant on William F. Buckley’s quip that he “would rather be governed by the first 2,000 people in the telephone directory than by the Harvard University faculty.” I would rather be ruled by Chad Kroeger, JT Parr, and their crew than the graduates of elite universities.
For a long time, a dozen highly selective universities prepared a large proportion of the people who held powerful positions in government, business, and culture. That era is coming to an end. The increasingly non-meritorious selection of students for those universities, the declining quality of the research and teaching at those institutions, and their failure to shape the moral character of their students in preparation for assuming leadership positions in society is destroying the brand reputations of these universities. It won’t happen overnight, but expect to see a lot more people from state universities in mid-America in these positions of power and a lot fewer from the Ivies.
The students active in Greek life who cheer on the football team after getting a good buzz at the tailgate with their future spouse are much better qualified to run the world than are majors in decolonial queer studies who march around campus shouting, “Intifada!” The grown-ups in responsible institutions are waking up to this reality.
That’s why we need more role models like Chad and JT to teach young people about how to chill with your bros. In case you are not familiar with Chad and JT, they take advantage of the public comment sessions that virtually all local governments offer to express their views. Their public comments have a lot more wisdom to offer than the average American Studies or Sociology class.
In one of their early efforts, Chad and JT urged the City Council of LA not to ban house parties. Chad testified to “stop this future atroxity.”
In this more recent testimony, Chad and JT reject the despair of the “pessimizers” and offer a plan for how the Casa de la Gente can bounce back. Taylor Swift should date the Speaker of the House.
And in this classic, Chad and JT, along with JT’s mom, ask the City of Laguna Beach to create a Shmole Relocation Program to boke the shmole in their crew. They explain their jargon in this video better than the average ethnic studies professor.
Because Chad and JT are showing the way for young people to take back the country from pampered radicals, I nominate them again for the Al Copeland Humanitarian Award.
The delight of good food and the justice of political liberalism – what could be more Al-worthy? Ali Ahmed Aslam’s achievement reminds us why the two are connected.
It’s not hard to see why! When Ali passed away last year, the Times of India waxed poetic in its obituary:
Food is like life. It is a work in progress and has uncountable versions. Over 4 lakh [hundred thousand] years of collective knowledge and experience have gone into figuring out the basics of human culinary experience, not to talk of gourmet cooking, which is another level of a nuanced approach to food.
Food has other life-like attributes, too. It has no known beginning, no discernible end, has no finality of perfection or nadir of banality. It belongs to all, with no possible claims to a patent for a sense of ownership.
Now, folks, I do have to admit, when I eat one of Mildred Day’s Rice Krispie treats, I do have my doubts about whether the Times is right about food having “no finality of perfection.” And I have definitely eaten a meal or two in my time that could call into question the assertion that food has no “nadir of banality.”
But the Times got one thing right – food belongs to all. You’ve heard all the quips: Egg rolls were invented in America. Hawaiian pizza was invented in Canada. French Fries are Belgian. Swedish meatballs are Turkish.
And chicken tikka masala is Scottish, thanks to Ali Ahmed Aslam, known to all as “Mr. Ali.” Born in what is now Pakistan in 1945, he came to Glasgow as a young boy. His father opened the first Indian restaurant in Glasgow in 1959, and he followed suit, opening the delightfully named Shish Mahal restaurant in 1964.
Legend has it that Ali invented chicken tikka masala in the 1970s after a customer complained his chicken was too dry. As with most legends, the particulars are disputed. The muse of history has delicately draped a veil of uncertainty over the exact origins of the dish. But there is no question that Ali popularized it through decades of hard work and sacrificial service to his community through his successful business. It was Ali who made chicken tikka masala, as his obituaries unanimously proclaim, the national dish of Great Britain.
How was it possible for chicken tikka masala rather than, say, shepherd’s pie to become Britain’s national dish? And how can people maintain any stable sense of identity and belonging in a world where such fluidity is possible?
Food belongs to all, as the Times so beautifully puts it, because beauty itself in all its forms – like the good and the true in all their forms – belongs to all. We experience beauty, including a beautiful meal, first and foremost not as British or Brazilians or Bhutanese, not as men or women, not as moderns or ancients, but as human beings.
Of course the experience is always filtered through our particularities. I don’t experience chicken tikka masala in exactly the same way as a Scottish or Chinese person does. That’s why humans are social creatures, and need one another. None of us sees the whole picture, and we grow as we appreciate one another’s different experiences within and across community. Those who are not humble enough to learn something from other cultures do not understand even their own, for they lack a frame of reference.
But however varied our particular experiences, our collective participation in a shared human nature and the essential sameness of the good, the true and the beautiful for all of us must come first. Without that, no growth from any exchange of different experiences, no justice and no community, is even possible. If we are not all humans together, experiencing in our different ways the same basic human things, the gap between cultures, and even the gap between individuals, can never really be bridged.
There is only power – a boot stamping on a human face, forever.
But I think Washington said it best, in a context we would do well to remember:
The Citizens of the United States of America have a right to applaud themselves for having given to mankind examples of an enlarged and liberal policy: a policy worthy of imitation. All possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship It is now no more that toleration is spoken of, as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people, that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights. For happily the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens, in giving it on all occasions their effectual support.
After he passed, Ali’s son posted on social media:
Dad came to the UK in the late 1950s, about 1958 or 1959 and they were from a very, very, very poor background. He made Glasgow and Scotland his home, he did not look back.
He was Glaswegian and Scottish first. He was very, very proud of being Glaswegian, very very proud of being Scottish, and it was very important to him. He set up a lot of charities and he donated a lot of money because he was from such humble beginnings.
The liberal political order replaces the strict cultural homogeneity of ancient societies with complexity, ambiguity and fragmentation. People look at their neighbors and don’t immediately recognize themselves in those very different faces and very different lives.
We have not yet figured out how to maintain social solidarity under these conditions. The humaneness and generosity of a Mr. Ali will always find its dark mirror image in the depravity of those who, for whatever reason, simply cannot find their way to the place where a man born in Pakistan can be proud to be “Glaswegian and Scottish first.” And where others can genuinely see him that way as well.
But let us make no mistake about our alternatives, of which we have only two. We can press forward into the unknown, into the fog of liberal ambiguity, or we can attempt to lift the fog by the application of violence. And not just any violence, but a special kind of violence: Violence that is not restrained by any recognition of our shared humanity, not restrained by any awareness that the good, the true and the beautiful are in the end binding on all of us together.
Like I said, I’d rather have chicken tikka masala.
While Machen would be an inspired choice in any year, this year is particularly appropriate to recognize his humanitarian contributions as it marks the 100th anniversary of what is widely considered his greatest work. Originally published in 1923, Machen wrote Christianity and Liberalism in response to the growing influence of theological liberalism and modernism in the United States, and in particular the Presbyterian church, of which he was a minister. However, while he was first and foremost a theologian, he wrote and spoke extensively on education. For the purposes of the “Al,” I’ll focus on his humanitarian contributions to education.
Much of modern thought on private school choice traces back to Milton Friedman’s 1955 essay, “The Role of Government in Education,” in which he argued that government could fund education without running schools and that competitive pressures would improve the quality of schools. Notably, his argument emphasized the importance of parents exercising choice for their children.
Two decades before Friedman penned his essay, Machen had already begun articulating the arguments for parental school choice. “A public-school system, in itself, is indeed of enormous benefit to the race,” he wrote in Christianity and Liberalism. “But it is of benefit only if it is kept healthy at every moment by the absolutely free possibility of the competition of private schools… once it becomes monopolistic, it is the most perfect instrument of tyranny which has yet been devised.”
Machen was absolutely opposed to the public school tendency to usurp parents’ authority to oversee their children’s moral education. Since modern education was more interested in process than in knowledge (and modernist teachers more interested in method than in content), modern education attempted to compensate for the lack of moral instruction through the imposition of “morality codes” in Machen’s day. These he found “vicious” as they were both “faulty in detail” and “wrong in principle” (1926, “Shall We Have a Federal Department of Education?”). He opposed the Lusk Laws and other attempts to standardize the teaching profession that emphasized method over content. Modern attempts to infuse morality into education have proven equally disastrous, whether through social and emotional learning or Holocaust education, which has in some cases served to promote anti-Semitism.
In addition to supporting educational liberty, Machen was also a proponent of religious liberty, his second broad humanitarian contribution in education. While it is generally true that Protestants in Machen’s day put their eggs in the public school basket, passing Blaine Amendments and other measures to restrict the religious liberty of Catholics and other groups, Machen serves as a notable example of a Protestant academic who favored religious liberty for all groups. In Christianity and Liberalism, he lamented the treatment of Catholic children in Oregon, many of whom were forced to attend public schools despite the objection of their parents. The publication of Christianity and Liberalism in 1923 predated the conclusion of the Oregon case Pierce v. Society of Sisters, which was decided by the Supreme Court in 1925 in favor of parents. In a 1926 speech, he lauded Justice McReynolds, who delivered the unanimous opinion of the Court, for establishing the “great principle” that the child is not the mere creature of the state.
Machen’s third broad humanitarian contribution to education comes through his opposition to federal power in education. He was an active member of the Sentinels of the Republic, a libertarian organization whose goal was to resist expansion of federal power. Speaking at a gathering of the Sentinels, he warned that the formation of a federal Department of Education “would be the very worst calamity into which this country could fall.” He testified before Congress on behalf of the Sentinels, “I do not believe that the personal, free, individual character of education can be preserved when you have a Federal department laying down standards of education which become more or less mandatory to the whole country.” Machen’s testimony helped defeat the passage of the proposed federal department in 1926.
Would that we had more humanitarians like Machen! Since his death in 1937, many of the modernist reforms he opposed have passed, including teacher certification and the formation of a federal department of education. But the spirit of his core conviction in parental choice lives on in the year of universal choice, one hundred years after the publication of Christianity and Liberalism. For these reasons, I heartily endorse J. Gresham Machen for the Al Copeland Humanitarian Award.
Well, this year we will hand out our sixteenth annual Al Copeland Humanitarian of the Year Award. It’s an honor that’s old enough to drive! And it’s the only thing not driving us insane these days.
Don’t like the choices the world is offering you? Turn to The Al for uplifting alternatives!
Yes, it’s time for The Al – and just to be completely clear, that’s not “Al” as in AI, it’s “Al” as in Al!
That’s right, the Nobel Peace Prize has been awarded, so it is time once again to honor those who have bettered the human condition with the Al Copeland Humanitarian of the Year award! Nominations can be submitted by emailing a draft of a blog post advocating for your nominee. If Jay likes it, he will post it with your name attached. A winner will be announced after Halloween.
Al Copeland may not have done the most to benefit humanity, but he certainly did more than many people who receive such awards. Chicago gave Bill Ayers their Citizen of the Year award in 1997. And the Nobel Peace Prize has too often gone to a motley crew including unrepentant terrorist, Yassir Arafat, and fictional autobiography writer, Rigoberta Menchu. Local humanitarian awards tend to go to hack politicians or community activists. From all these award recipients you might think that a humanitarian was someone who stopped throwing bombs… or who you hoped would picket, tax, regulate, or imprison someone else.
Al Copeland never threatened to bomb, picket, tax, regulate, or imprison anyone. By that standard alone he would be much more of a humanitarian. But Al Copeland did even more — he gave us spicy chicken.
The 2022 winner of The Al was Hunter Scott, who at age 12, after doing a school project on the 1945 sinking of the U.S.S. Indianapolis, began a campaign to posthumously vindicate its captain, Charles McVay III. As Scott’s evidence amply demonstrated, McVay had wrongly taken the blame for the death of most of his crew in shark-infested waters because of the petty vindictiveness and cowardice of an even worse species of shark: ass-covering bureaucrats. Scott hunted and devoured his prey ahead of a small but especially fearsome frenzy of nominees, including FedEx founder Fred Smith and United States founder George Washington.
The 2021 winner of The Al was Ken “Heinie the Tank Buster” Adam, a German Jew expatriate who dropped bombs for the RAF and then helped Hollywood studios avoid bombs, especially by inventing the Bond villain volcano lair. Adam burst forth at the apex of a mountain of excellent nominees, including Nazar Mohammad Khasha, who gave his life for his right to mock the Taliban; Christopher Lee, real-life embodiment of The Most Interesting Man in the World; Ryan Peterson, who actually did shoe-leather reporting on the supply chain crisis instead of just bloviating about it; Joseph Friedman, inventor of the bendy straw; and John and Justine Glaser, integrationist inventors of the black and white cookie.
The 2020 winner of The Al was Nat Love, who overcame enormous adversity and injustice to live a magnificent American life: “I think you will agree with me that this grand country of ours is the peer of any in the world, and that volumes cannot begin to tell of the wonders of it.” Love conquered all amid a field including Nick Steinsberger, who helped pioneer fracking; Charles Hull, who invented 3D printing; and Hans Christian Heg, an immigrant abolitionist hero whose statue had been torn down by a “justice” mob.
The 2019 winner of The Al was Mildred Day, who brought parents and children together over delicious goodness by inventing the Rice Krispie Treat – following in the fine tradition of Al Copeland himself, improving the human condition by bringing us great food. Day came out of the Al oven ahead of political pranksters Chad Kroeger and JT Parr; and Bob Fletcher, who helped three Japanese-American families in California keep their farms after WWII-era internment.
The 2018 winner of The Al was Joy Morton, who was the first to find a way to effectively induce lots of people to consume iodine and thus prevent goiters – by marketing it, turning it into a profitable comparative advantage for his salt company. Morton was saltier than a whole shaker’s worth of salty nominees, including Great Course lecturer Elizabeth Vandiver, musical disintermediator Leo Moracchiloli, Magic: The Gathering inventor Richard Garfield, scofflaw tech recycler Eric Lundgren, lemonade-stand paladins Adam Butler and Autumn Thomasson, and Virginian general in the Union Army George Henry Thomas.
The 2017 winner of The Al was Stanislav Petrov, who literally saved the world from nuclear destruction by refusing to follow Soviet orders to retaliate against what he suspected (as was later confirmed) was a false warning of a US strike. It’s not quite as important as bringing the world spicy chicken, but it’s pretty close! Petrov nuked an impressive set of runners-up, including Whittaker Chambers, witness against communism; Justin Roiland and Dan Harmon, creators of Rick and Morty; and Russ Roberts, author and host of EconTalk.
The 2016 winner of The Al was Master Sergeant Roddie Edmonds, who ordered all the POWs under his command to identify themselves as Jews, foiling a Nazi attempt to separate Jewish prisoners and kill them, and refused to back down even with a gun to his head. Edmonds held firm among a very competitive field of nominees, including Tim and Karrie League, founders of Alamo Drafthouse movie theaters; political humorist Remy Munasifi; and humorous political journalist Yair Rosenberg.
The 2015 winner of The Al was internet humorist Ken M. He not only made us laugh by making idiotic comments on social media (which would have been enough), he revealed with his humor the ridiculousness of trying to change the world by arguing on the internet. Ken M laughed off a strong field of nominees, including Malcolm McLean, inventor of shipping containers; Gary Gygax, creator of Dungeons and Dragons; and John Lasseter, founder of Pixar.
The 2014 winner was Peter DeComo, the inventor of the Hemolung Respiratory Assist System. To save a life, DeComo drove all night to retrieve a lung machine from Canada, then demonstrated incredible quick wits when border control tried to block its entry into the US because it had not yet been approved by the FDA. DeComo smuggled his win past a worthy field, including Marcus Persson, the inventor of Minecraft; Ira Goldman, the developer of the “Knee Defender”; Thomas J. Barratt, the father of modern advertising; and Thibaut Scholasch and Sébastien Payen, wine-makers who improved irrigation methods.
The 2013 winner of The Al was musical satirist Weird Al Yankovic. Weird Al brings joy to people of all ages, while puncturing the pretensions of puffed-up celebrity entertainers. He lampooned an impressive set of nominees, including performer/skeptics Penn and Teller, crowdfunding website Kickstarter, and WWII industrialist Bill Knudsen.
In 2011, The Al went to Earle Haas, the inventor of the modern tampon, proving that advances in equal opportunity for women come from entrepreneurs more than government mandates. Haas cycled to the front of the pack amid a strong flow of nominees: Charles Montesquieu, the political philosopher; David Einhorn, the short-seller; and Steve Wynn, the casino mogul.
The 2009 winner of The Al – in the first year the award bore that name – was Debrilla M. Ratchford, who significantly improved the human condition by inventing the rollerbag. She rolled to victory over Steve Henson, who gave us ranch dressing; Fasi Zaka, who ridiculed the Taliban; Ralph Teetor, who invented cruise control; and Mary Quant, who popularized the miniskirt.
Also noteworthy from 2009: History’s greatest monster, William Higinbotham, was declared permanently ineligible to receive The Al. He remains the only individual thus disqualified. In (dis)honor of Higinbotham, The Higgy award has been bestowed on (un)worthy candidates annually since 2012.
Al Copeland himself was honored in 2008 as the official humanitarian of the year of Jay P. Greene’s Blog. The award was renamed in his honor the following year.
Send in your nominees, and we’ll see you at Halloween with the winner!
OCPA carries my article on how it isn’t enough to pass a school choice policy; it’s imperative to help parents and schools get enrolled in the program quickly:
It’s essential to take this problem seriously. Getting participation rates up quickly is essential to the political survival of school choice programs. These programs strike right at the heart of a coalition of special interests that profit by exploiting the education monopoly. These interests will do whatever it takes to kill newly created programs.
Fortunately, the movement has a lot of experience with this and has a knowledge base to draw upon. And it will be needed:
The most difficult problem is that the families that need these programs most have the greatest difficulty accessing them. In general, the further up you go on the socioeconomic scale, the more plugged in to information systems people are (so they hear about the program) and the more time and ability they have for navigating bureaucracy (so they can use the program). The further down you go, the harder it is both to spread the word and to get people signed up.
Those who suffer with PLDD, which The Higgy is meant to (dis)honor, try to boss other people with the delusion that doing so benefits those being bossed around. It doesn’t really matter whether the bossing is based on something true or false. It’s all for a good goal, so that justifies everything. This is probably what Peter Daznak was thinking when he organized a group letter of public health experts to The Lancet in February 2020 asserting that considering the possibility that Covid originated from a lab leak was dangerous conspiracy thinking and needed to be squashed. As Matt noted in his nomination, those who signed the letter didn’t know then and probably still don’t know now whether Covid originated from a lab or the wild.
In some ways, they didn’t really care whether it was true or false as long as the letter achieved something that they thought was good. That good might be maintaining positive relations with the Chinese government, getting stronger cooperation from China with global health organizations to combat the virus, avoiding the possibility that people would wrongly blame Chinese individuals for collective responsibility for any leak, avoiding scrutiny of the EcoHealth Alliance’s relationship with the lab in Wuhan, or some other thing they valued. When people do bad things, they can almost always rationalize to themselves that they are doing something good.
But the path to the Higgy is paved with good intentions. Once we abandon standards of truth-telling and acknowledging uncertainty, we develop the over-confidence required to boss others around and are prey to the self-delusion that whatever we want must be good for others. We don’t know Peter Daznak’s heart. But we do know that he organized an effort by self-interested experts to delegitimize reasonable inquiry into the origins of the Covid virus.
We highly doubt that the confident assertion that the lab leak theory was a crazy conspiracy achieved any of the good things Daznak and his colleagues may have imagined. But it is more likely that using their expert status to stymy reasonable inquiry may have made discovering the truth impossible and may have shielded those responsible from accountability. That accountability is not merely a matter of justice, which is important in its own right, but may help avoid future global-level catastrophes through deterrence and improved practices.
For this abuse of expert status to boss around others with recklessness about the truth, Peter Daznak is this year’s recipient of the William Higinbotham Inhumanitarian of the Year Award.
Daznak beat two other worthy nominees: Jennifer Dorow (nominated by Greg) and Yusuke Narita (nominated by me). Dorrow was certainly self-absorbed and destructive in her behavior by refusing to yield to another candidate from her party who stood a better chance of winning. But her self-absorption is not so much derived from the desire to boss around others (like a PLDDer) as from the regular politician desire to be the one receiving attention. It is still blame-worthy but not obviously PLDD to want to win a nomination even when one is not the best candidate for the party.
Narita is more like Daznak in that he uses his expert status to try to boss around others. But unlike Daznak, it is very unlikely that anyone is likely to listen to Narita other than the few dozen grad students in the Yale econ program compelled to take his courses and maintain his favor by agreeing with him. Daznak was more effectively mobilizing government officials to dismiss lab-leak investigations. That effectiveness made Draznak more worthy of The Higgy.
On February 19, 2020 a group of 27 public health officials published a joint letter in the medical journal Lancet that read in part:
The rapid, open, and transparent sharing of data on this outbreak is now being threatened by rumours and misinformation around its origins. We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin. Scientists from multiple countries have published and analysed genomes of the causative agent, severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), and they overwhelmingly conclude that this coronavirus originated in wildlife, as have so many other emerging pathogens.
This is further supported by a letter from the presidents of the US National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine and by the scientific communities they represent. Conspiracy theories do nothing but create fear, rumours, and prejudice that jeopardise our global collaboration in the fight against this virus. We support the call from the Director-General of WHO to promote scientific evidence and unity over misinformation and conjecture. We want you, the science and health professionals of China, to know that we stand with you in your fight against this virus.
We invite others to join us in supporting the scientists, public health professionals, and medical professionals of Wuhan and across China. Stand with our colleagues on the frontline
We speak in one voice. To add your support for this statement, sign our letter online. LM is editor of ProMED-mail. We declare no competing interests.
Competing interests were not declared, rather they were concealed.
I should note from the outset that I do not know whether COVID-19 originated in wildlife or in a lab. Neither do those who signed on to the letter, either today or back in 2020. Wuhan has both a wet-market and a laboratory that conducted experiments on bat viruses, and one of these two things is far more common in Chinese cities than the other and the pandemic started in (checks notes) Wuhan. Only someone deep in the throes of delusion inspired by self-interest or an utterly unsophisticated dupe would not want to explore the possibility of a lab leak.
Peter Daznak drafted the first draft of this letter, and an analysis found that 26 of the 27 original signatories had ties to the EcoHealth Alliance. After the publication of this letter, Daznak was appointed to a commission to explore the virus origins by Lancet and on another organized by the World Health Organization. Later he was removed from both. Sleuthing revealed that EcoHealth had made grants to the Wuhan Institute of Virology for experiments on bat viruses, that EcoHealth had engaged in some heavily criticized lobbying of the National Institute of Health officials in order to skirt rules specifically designed to prevent a pandemic, and that multiple safety concerns had been raised by Chinese officials regarding the security of the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Some of the signatories later said that it had been their intention to push back on the notion that Chinese officials had released the COVID-19 virus on purpose. You’d have to be a Roger Moore era Bond Villain to do such a thing and you’d be needing an incredibly reliable vaccine to create your post-pandemic utopia on the ashes of the old world, which China shows no sign of having. Allegedly Daznak himself insisted on keeping the statement “broad” in denouncing a lab origin.
The first paragraph in the above quote is really a piece of work- a true masterpiece of licking the boot stomping of a human face forever. Chinese officials were anything but “rapid, open, and transparent sharing of data.” For instance as Annie Sparrow related in Foreign Policy:
Instead of notifying the World Health Organization (WHO) about the outbreak of atypical pneumonia and evidence of human spread, the authorities censored information, concealed the virus, and silenced doctors who tried to warn their colleagues. Hospital leaders refused to authorize masks or other personal protective equipment (PPE) on the grounds that it would cause panic. As patients infected health care workers and health care workers infected one another, hospital leaders insisted that spread among humans was impossible—that no staff members were infected—even altering diagnoses that suggested otherwise.
Beijing’s official line through Jan. 19, 2020 was that the outbreak began in late December 2019, that all cases had been infected by an unidentified animal source at the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, and that no health care workers were infected. But even when the government conceded human spread on Jan. 20, it reported only a fraction of the real numbers.
…
Instead authorities engaged in a pattern of demonstrable lying and covering up, threatening doctors involved in early warnings and restricting information. On Jan. 3, 2020, when China formally acknowledged the pneumonia outbreak, authorities told the WHO they had no idea what was causing it. In fact, by then, the new coronavirus had been sequenced several times—beginning with Vision Medicals on Dec. 27, 2019; BGI Genomics on Dec. 29, 2019; Wuhan Institute of Virology on Jan. 2, 2020; and China’s CDC on Jan. 3, 2020. On Jan. 5, a consortium led by professor Zhang Yongzhen at Fudan University in Shanghai sequenced it, deposited it in GenBank, the U.S. public database of DNA sequences, submitted it to Nature, and shared it with China’s National Health Commission (NHC).
This letter is Exhibit A of the abuse of scientific “authority” and why many of us have drawn the unavoidable conclusion that grandees and technocrats are not to be trusted. Oh, and in addition his sketchy grant-making and lobbying may have been a single step upstream from causing a global pandemic that killed millions of people and damaged the lives of millions more. I am not certain about that last part, just that there was an obvious effort to cover up the investigation of the possibility of a lab leak through the abuse of authority. It is therefore my distinct pleasure to nominate Peter Daznak for the Higgy.
Some are born PLDD, some achieve PLDD, and some have PLDD thrust upon them.
As 2022 dawned, Jennifer Dorow was an obscure Wisconsin judge. Then she had the good luck, and the rest of us had the bad luck, to have a sensational, nationally watched mass-murder trial of a black nationalist who said Hitler was right to kill Jews and sympathized with the extremist “Black Hebrew Israelites” land in her courtroom.
Dorow clearly loved the spotlight, but her conduct of the trial was incompetent, as she repeatedly made irresponsible statements about the defendant’s courtroom conduct. While the defendant’s conduct in court was indeed outrageous – refusing to answer to his own name and regularly interrupting the judge, for example – Dorow’s unguarded comments attacking him went well beyond what was necessary to maintain decorum in her court.
Dorow’s inability to control herself could have opened up the defendant’s eventual criminal conviction to complications in the public eye, not to mention the appeals courts.
It seems Dorow just could not do her job, which was to maintain her composure and follow proper judicial procedure when deeply evil and unhinged people break the court’s rules. She seems not to have been able to prioritize the integrity of the court above her own sense of wounded pride in the face of her inability to control others.
Fortunately for Dorow, and for the criminal justice system, the defendant was so obviously guilty, and his courtroom conduct was so offensive to the jurors, that he was convicted in spite of Dorow’s incompetence.
But Dorow had tasted the spotlight, and wanted more.
The mass-murder trial had given her huge quantities of what is unfortunately called “earned” media. She began looking around for a way to leverage the trial publicity to advance herself.
So when Wisconsin had an election for a seat on the state supreme court this year, Dorow jumped into the race. Her conduct in the campaign continued to show both her incompetence and her growing signs of PLDD.
You will think I’m making this up, or at least exaggerating, but this is the stone-cold fact: At her first debate in the election, Dorow showed up with a binder full of answers.
Unfortunately, in spite of her constantly demonstrated incompetence, her much larger “earned” media profile allowed her to take the endorsements and the donations of many short-sighted, media-chasing political constituencies away from her main opponent on the Right, distinguished jurist Dan Kelly (a former professional colleague of mine).
Kelly, because he was the superior candidate on every metric other than who had presided over a national media-sensation murder trial, beat Dorow in the first phase of the two-phase election. But it was a long and bruising fight, and with massive pro-abortion money pouring into the state to fuel his general-election opponent, Kelly couldn’t come back.
Dorow’s PLDD appears to have cost the Right the most expensive judicial election in history.
But 2023 isn’t over. We can still give Dorow the victory she craves.
I nominate Jennifer Dorow for the 2023 William Higinbotham Inhumanitarian of the Year Award.
Posted by Jay P. Greene 
Jay P. Greene's Blog 