Affirmative Action/Minority Preferences

An Open Letter to Liberals

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My Dear Friends,

It’s a hard time to be a liberal.  I know, because I used to be one.  Or rather, I still am one, but a true liberal, unlike the many fake liberals out there.  Allow me to explain.

Long ago, as an idealistic college student, I valued my high moral principles, my faith in the vague notion of human equality, my trust in authorities, and my open-mindedness.  I believed that most people in positions of power were well-intentioned, if a bit misguided, and that political and economic situations ran into trouble mostly because of bad luck or the occasional bad actor.  I believed that people had to be judged as individuals, and that any assessment of entire groups constituted a sweeping generalization or a caricature that lacked merit.  I believed all people and all races could live together; I believed that we owed something to the less-fortunate of society, no matter who they were.  I believed that, by and large, the American system worked, and that the best would move up in society and prosper.  And I believed that most everyone shared these views.

But I later found out that I was wrong on nearly every count.  Years of hard thinking, research, discussion, personal experience, and observant daily life proved the deficiency of my former views; one by one, they eroded away.  I found out that group characteristics are real and objective, and that they are indicative of broad social trends, even if there exist many individual exceptions.  I saw systemic actions in academia, media, government, and business to promote certain values, to disparage other values, and to advance a certain worldview or mindset that benefited specific people.  I realized that corruption in social institutions was far deeper and more entrenched than I dared believe.  I came to see that religion—and specifically Christianity—was a malevolent force in society, one that again served to benefit a certain group of people at the expense of many others.  I came to understand that much of history was distorted, misrepresented, or outright falsified.  I thought I lived in a largely open-minded and liberal world, but I discovered, to my dismay, that I lived in a controlled and manipulated world.

The final straw, for me, was the realization that many people in positions of authority also knew about many of these things but that they either said nothing, covered them up, or actively participated in them.  In short, I realized that I had been lied to or otherwise deceived on a massive scale, for years, by people at virtually every level of society—people that I trusted and respected.

I don’t know about you, my liberal friends, but if there is one thing I hate in this world, it is being lied to by people in authority.  I can forgive ignorance and I can forgive naiveté, but willful deception is unforgiveable.  “You knew better,” I said (figuratively) to people in power; “You knew this was wrong, you knew what was going on, but you said nothing.”  Worse: “You sustained it, and you profited from it.”  This permanently destroyed my simple-minded liberalism.

Let me offer a few specifics, starting with the question of race.  I had virtually no contact with Blacks growing up, at least until late high school.  I vaguely considered this a good thing, given that my limited knowledge of Black culture was based on those living in our inner city, which was a decidedly unpleasant place to live.  But they had their sphere of life, we had ours, no big deal.  Then when I came to apply for college, I ran into the issue of affirmative action, which was just coming to a head at that time; racial quotas were ruled illegal, but race could still be used as a factor in college admissions.  I was admitted with no problem, but other classmates did not get in, and it is unclear how many lost places to otherwise less-qualified Blacks or other minorities.

The official justification for affirmative action in university admissions has always been “to remedy past and current discrimination”; but how does that relate to the less-qualified Black who got in?  Was it discrimination that caused him to be less-qualified in the first place?  And why penalize my 18-year-old friend who never discriminated against anyone?  Are the children paying for the sins of the fathers?  (How very Old-Testament!)

And was it really helping the less-qualified Blacks, to let them in, only to have them struggle and fail at disproportionately high rates?  According to recent data, 68% of Whites graduate within six years of university study, versus just 45% of Blacks.  Why is that?  Can it be “systemic racism”?

Be that as it may, affirmative action might be tolerable if there were an actual plan with actual objectives.  But there was not; there never is, with our liberal administrators.  If they had said, “Look, we need affirmative action to break the cycle of Black families without college degrees.  So, we need to do this for 20 years, to raise a full generation of degreed Blacks.  Then, everything will be even, and we can go back to normal, merit-based admissions.”  Had they said this, and provided some data supporting it, I might have gone along.  But of course they said no such thing.  Obviously—does any sane person think that after 20 years of preferential treatment, that Blacks would thereafter perform at levels equal to Whites?  Of course not!  Thirty years?  Fifty years?  Of course not.  The reality is that our liberal overseers want affirmative action forever.

This is an admission of failure.  It is an admission that Blacks are congenitally incapable of performing at levels equal to Whites, and that American Whites must pay for the “sins” of slavery forever.  In short, there is no solution to the “Black problem” in America.  Short of ridding ourselves of Blacks, we must pay the price forever.  Or such is the liberal state of affairs.

And then there was history.  I had always been a sort of World War Two buff, and was always fascinated by the German story, by Hitler’s life, and by the drama and grandeur of the entire event.  So it took me a while to realize that World War Two shows up a lot in popular discourse—in fact, far more than might reasonably be expected from an event that was several decades ago and was largely played out on other continents.  And of course, the coverage was so routinely slanted that, for a long time, I never really noticed it.  It took me years to ask myself very basic questions: Why is it that every aspect of Hitler’s Germany gets negative coverage?  Why is Hitler the universal measuring rod for evil?  Why is ‘Nazi’ synonymous with ‘bad’?  Why do we hear so much about the Holocaust?

At about the same time, as I was progressing in my “liberal” education, I started thinking more about the Jewish situation.  Growing up, I had never known any Jews—or at least, none that were public.  Once in college, I encountered a fair number of guys in the residence halls that were, shall we say, rude; they were known to us as “the guys from New York.”  They were loud, pushy, obnoxious. …  Oh well, I said to my liberal self, people are people.  Just stay out of their way.  And don’t make any plans to visit NYC!

Only late in my schooling did I realize that “the guys from New York” were all, to a man, Jewish, and that this fact might well be significant.  I then discovered that my campus was something like 15% Jewish—in a state that was maybe 1% Jewish.  Wait, how does that happen?  Then I realized that my university president was a Jew, that nearly half of the Board of Regents were Jews, and that a large chunk of my humanities professors were Jews—wait a minute, how does that work?  Common sense and basic liberal values dictate that if 1% of my state is Jewish, that roughly one out of a hundred of my fellow students and teachers should be Jews, that one out of a hundred college administrators should be Jews, and so on.  If that were not the case—as it clearly wasn’t, by a factor of 10 or more—then that could only be due to some “systemic racism” in favor of Jews.  Is that fair?  Could all those buildings named after wealthy Jewish donors have something to do with it?  No, never, I told my liberal self.

As I progressed into grad school, earned a PhD in philosophy, and became a lecturer at my alma mater, I became aware of the “BDS” movement—the campus efforts to boycott, divest, and sanction Israel over actions in the occupied territories.  Objectively, the case was clear: Israel was in violation of international law, flouted UN resolutions for decades, engaged in periodic episodes of abuse and torture of the Palestinians, inflicted collective punishment, and committed murder, war crimes, and crimes against humanity.  It was an open-and-shut case; of course, any thinking, ethical person would have to agree that Israel was in the wrong—criminally so—and that any moral institution would want to dissociate itself, at least, from such evil.  This was the bare minimum.

So why, then, was virtually all BDS action led by students?  Or so I wondered.  Aren’t faculty ethical as well?  Don’t they claim to be liberal also?  Didn’t many of them have personal histories with Vietnam War protests?  Why weren’t they active in BDS?  And the same with the administrators—the nominal “leaders” of the university.  Shouldn’t they be blazing the trail, pushing for BDS on all fronts?  Wouldn’t that be the best of all messages, from a liberal institution to its liberal student body: that we refuse to invest in, and profit from, cruelty and injustice?  Wouldn’t that be a real lesson for the students?

Oh, no!  The faculty—apart from myself and a literal handful of brave individuals—were invisible on the topic; “we don’t want to get political,” they said.  And the university administration was worse: they actively opposed BDS.  They began imputing ill motives to student and faculty leaders on BDS; they began rigidly enforcing “campus security” rules that no one had ever seen before; they worked to marginalize campus support; and they ensured that no word of publicity got out about any BDS actions.  (If there is one thing that universities hate, it’s bad publicity.)  When pressed for explanations for their resistance, administrators routinely spouted lines about how their investments are “not political” and how “donors give money for specific reasons” and therefore, somehow, the university could not divest from Israel—even though they did precisely that to South African apartheid years before.  And purely academic boycotts against Israeli scholars or institutions never got so much as a single word of support.

And this, my liberal friends, was 20 years ago!

It was also in spending time with our Arab students that I heard murmurings about the “so-called Holocaust.”  Whoa, what’s up with that?  I did a little digging and quickly realized how little I knew, and also how hard it was to find straight answers to apparently simple questions—questions that no one else apparently considered important.  Like:  When and how did they determine that 6 million Jews died?  Where were they killed?  By what means?  How did those infamous gas chambers work?  And where are the bodily remains today?  I was frankly shocked to learn how little clear information was available on this most-important historical event.  As I researched the topic, it quickly became obvious that much of the current story was wrong. The many false witnesses, the internal contradictions, the biased and coerced “confessions,” the technical impossibilities, and the practical absurdities—not to mention the striking fact that claims of “6 million suffering Jews” had been in the news for years, decades, before WW2; all this was highly damning for the conventional story, in my opinion.

As a now-waning liberal, I assumed that others would be curious about this as well.  But when I began to even mention this to my liberal friends, they said things like, “Well, that doesn’t matter,” or, “Everyone knows that the 6-million story is false.”  Really?  Everyone?  But we all just pretend like it’s true?  Why?  To placate whom?  And if it doesn’t matter, why is it thrust into our face so often?  Why are Holocaust books mandatory reading in our schools?  Why does every third film seem to have some reference to Hitler, Nazis, or the Holocaust?  Why is simply asking questions about it prohibited by law in 19 countries?  Why is that?  My liberal friends had no good answers.

A bit more digging on my part, and other troubling questions arose.  Why does the US pump $3 billion to $6 billion annually to Israel as “foreign aid”?  Why do we so often vote alone, or with a handful of client nations, with Israel in the UN?  Why do we provide them with diplomatic cover?  Why are so many of their enemies also our enemies?  Why are so many of our recent military engagements targeted against Israel’s enemies?

Thus I ran directly into the Israel Lobby—otherwise known as the Zionist Lobby or the Jewish Lobby.  I quickly realized that most of the major players in the Israel Lobby were Zionist Jews, that most American Jews were Zionists, and that there was near-unanimity that Jewish interests must be protected at home and Israeli interests protected abroad.  This unanimity is transferred to Congress, where, depending on the context, between 90% and 100% of Representatives and Senators regularly vote in favor of Jewish/Israeli interests.  This is not speculation; it is a matter of public record.

Why?  Money.  I soon learned that at least 25% of Republican money, and at least 50% of Democratic money, comes from Jewish sources.  This, to me, was truly astonishing.  According to Open Secrets, there are something like 13,800 lobbying organizations in Washington.  And yet, of all these, one group donates between 25% and 50% of all campaign funds.  Imagine if you were living off regular donations from 13,000 wealthy friends; and that one friend consistently gave you half of all your money each year, and that the other half was divided amongst the other 12,999 friends.  Which friend would be your best friend?  Who would you listen to the most?  Who would you most like to please?  No surprises there.

In an interview with Tucker Carlson from last year (20 June 2024), US representative Thomas Massie made some interesting statements about the leading component of the Jewish Lobby, AIPAC.  Every congressman, he said, has an “AIPAC minder” or “babysitter,” who watches over you, tracks what you do, and makes sure you do “the right thing.”  And if you don’t do “the right thing,” they will slander you in the press and they will fund a pro-Israel opponent in your next election.  No other lobby does anything close to this.  Perhaps you should watch this interview, my liberal friends—but no!  You absolutely hate Tucker Carlson!  Neither he nor his guests can possibly have anything of value to say!

We need to realize what this means.  It means we have one lobby that works on behalf of American Jews, who constitute perhaps 2% of the US population, and that their interests totally dominate everyone else’s interests:  seniors, students, other minorities, the needy, the disabled, environmentalists.  And I mean, totally dominate; unless your interests happen to align with American Jews, you have almost no chance of getting a fair hearing.  It also means that we have one American lobby that works, globally, on behalf of Israeli Jews, who constitute some 0.19% of the world’s population, to the detriment of the remaining 99.8% of humanity.  What’s up with that, my liberal friends?  Are you satisfied with that situation?  Is it fair?  Is it just?  No?  What are you doing about it?

Perhaps you have been a bit too bamboozled by our American, and Western, media—a media that uniformly operates on behalf of Jewish and Israeli interests. Do you doubt me?  Why are no anti-Israeli or anti-Jewish viewpoints or opinions allowed in any branch of mainstream media?  Why has that been true, for decades, at least?  Do you need proof?  Why are all five of the major American media conglomerates—ABC/Disney, Warner Discovery, NBC/Universal, Fox Corp, and Paramount—owned or operated by Jews or Zionists?  (Shall we check the names?  Oh, no, never that!)  Why are the top five Hollywood studios—Disney, Universal, Sony Pictures, Paramount, and Warner Bros.—run by Jews or Zionists?  In a fair and just world, only 2% of these corporations would be Jewish-owned—which means, in all likelihood, none of them; but in fact, Jews own or manage all of them.  Why is that, my liberal friends?  Do you not care?  Do you not believe in fairness and justice?

My friends:  Let’s bring this up to the present day.  It is clear and beyond dispute that Jews in America, and in Europe, have a virtual monopoly on the press, on academia, and on our so-called democratic governments.  Any monopoly is dangerous, but a Jewish monopoly is deeply and profoundly dangerous, as the world can see in Gaza.  To date, officially over 50,000 people, mostly women and children, have been killed.  Likely the actual numbers are double or triple that.  Some may have been armed fighters, but surely 95% were unarmed civilians.  And yet America, and the world, does nothing, says nothing.  Mass murder and genocide before our eyes, and…nothing.  Worse than nothing:  America supplies weapons and cash to the killers, and political cover in the UN, and the world does…nothing.

What are individual Jews doing?  Worse than nothing; they support the action.  According to surveys from last year, around 80% of American Jews and perhaps 90% of Israeli Jews support the ongoing war effort.  Yes, they want their (now) 59 hostages back, but they think nothing of the 50 or 100 Gazans killed every day, on average, over the course of the year-and-a-half slaughter.  “Cease fire for the hostages!” they scream; but they want neither true peace nor true justice.  If and when they get their hostages, then the ethnic slaughter will surely press ahead unimpeded.  It is Old Testament vengeance in the 21st century.

And what are you doing about all this, my liberal friends?  Wringing your hands?  Feeling badly?  Silently condemning it?  How is that working?

And what are you saying or doing to those who are taking serious, direct action against the Jewish monopoly that has a stranglehold on America and Europe?  Are you helping those people?  Praising them?  No!  You are condemning them!  You call them ‘evil,’ ‘Nazis,’ and ‘far-right extremists’!  You call them ‘haters,’ ‘bigots,’ and best of all, ‘White supremacists’!  Why, the Jewish Lobby couldn’t do a better job themselves if they tried!  And there you are, doing their job for them, attacking those who might expose the danger.  Why?  Are Jews threatening you?  Holding a gun to your head?  No?  Then why do you work so hard on their behalf—my “liberal” friends?

Here is how I see it:  The state of affairs in the world today is like a big sandbox.  And the powers-that-be need to contain your thinking and your outrage, and so they direct it away from the actual cause—themselves—and toward other things.  In this way, they confine you to half the sandbox.  The liberal, leftist Jews who donate to, and run, the Democratic Party, and who monopolize the mainstream media, want you to see the Republicans, or Trump, or conservatives, or White men, as the enemy.  They do everything in their power to demonize these groups.  One need only glance at CNN, or MSNBC, or the New York Times, or the Washington Post, to see that this is true.  For their part, the ‘right wing’ media (Fox) and the Republicans are just as anxious to demonize the leftist Democrats; again, watch any episode of Fox’s evening commentary shows.

But strangely enough, both parties, who hate each other with such vehemence, are in agreement on just one special issue:  Jewish and Israeli interests, which they both bend over backward to serve.  Recall any presidential debate of the past few decades: all candidates and all parties are emphatic that they alone are the “true friends of Israel,” and that they alone can best tackle “the evil of anti-Semitism.”  And you, the viewer, are left with choosing between a left-leaning “friend of Israel” and a right-leaning “friend of Israel.”  Some choice, isn’t it?

In this way, they trap you in half the sandbox: You only see the enemy of their choosing: either “the right” or “the left.”  But never “the Jewish Lobby.”  That’s the half that you are missing.  In fact, you are not even allowed to know that that half exists.  Anyone who dares venture there is, by definition, a “far-right extremist” and “a hater”; and since both the left and the right agree on that, it seems like a unanimous decision.  Clever, isn’t it?

But the Gaza war is a true eye-opener, isn’t it, my liberal friends?  Your fellow liberals have been raised from birth to be hyper-sensitive to everyone’s needs, everyone’s concerns, everyone’s feelings.  Slavery was wrong (of course); colonialization was wrong (yes); and it is the Whites of the world who inflict “systemic racism” on all the people of color (wrong).  Every oppression of a “person of color,” every attack on a vulnerable minority, was seen as the gravest of social ills—until Palestine.  Then, everything changed.  There, the “people of color” are now terrorists, or terrorist sympathizers, or supporters of terrorism, and thus need to be shot, bombed, burned, and otherwise destroyed by the righteous Israeli Jews.  The 2.4 million people of Gaza are now to be held collectively responsible for the actions of a few resistance fighters.  They will be moved here, moved there, and finally removed, as the Israeli Jews complete their ethnic cleansing.  And they will do so with the support of 80% of American Jews and 90% of Israeli Jews.

And what if you should object to these state crimes, my liberal friends?  Oh, I’m sorry, you’re screwed.  Should you choose to join an encampment on your local campus, the university police will haul you off to jail, perhaps expel you from school, and perhaps get you fired—as happened to one young Arabic lady just last week, at my own esteemed alma mater.  Also, the local Hillel Jewish students will photograph you, identify you, and post your personal information online, just to make it harder for you to get a job, join a social group, or become active in any way.  And if you happen to be a foreign student, or a foreigner of any kind, you risk getting booked and deported—by our Jewish-friendly president Trump.  All for protesting a genocide!

So:  Where does this leave us, my liberal friends?  Or perhaps you no longer call yourselves ‘liberal’?  A wise move, my friends!  But are you now conservative?  Oh no, of course not—another wise move.  You are coming to learn that simplistic, dualistic, Manichean terms like ‘liberal,’ ‘conservative,’ ‘left,’ and ‘right,’ are now almost meaningless, so distorted has their meaning become.  Perhaps you are learning that the power structures of America and the West have such a notable Judean orientation that this fact alone becomes decisive in thinking about social dilemmas and social conflicts.  Perhaps you are learning that those “liberals” in academia and politics are really only liberal when it serves their interests; otherwise, they become positively authoritarian.  Perhaps you are learning that Israeli brutality in Gaza is not a consequence of one bad leader but rather a reflection of the mindset of an entire people.  Perhaps you are learning that ‘far right’ is a functional synonym for ‘opponent of the Jewish Lobby.’  And perhaps you are learning that many on the ‘far right’ are at least partially justified in their righteous indignation at the national and global state of affairs.

For my part, call me a true liberal: from the root word liber, ‘free.’  I prefer to live free, think free, speak free, and act free.  But I can’t do this in present-day America, or in present-day Europe, or else the Jewish-oriented powers-that-be will come down upon me with an Old Testament vengeance.  This is a fact.  Therefore, let us (1) openly state this fact, (2) openly state our objection to this fact, and (3) work to create a society and a world where this is not a fact.  What could be more important than that—my liberal friends?

David Skrbina, PhD, is a former senior lecturer in philosophy at the University of Michigan.  He is the author or editor of several books, including The Metaphysics of Technology (2015) and most recently, The Jesus Hoax (2nd edition, 2024).

Too Dumb for Harvard? Lemon’s Too Dumb for Twitter

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Too Dumb for Harvard? Lemon’s Too Dumb for Twitter

Interviewing Elon Musk this week, former CNN host Don Lemon demonstrated the real-life consequences of affirmative action.

Interestingly enough, Lemon himself is an affirmative action beneficiary who miraculously hung on at CNN despite committing one moronic gaffe after another (maybe he’s just got television magic!). The only CNN on-air personality to handle himself worse was Jeffrey Toobin.

Lemon was baffled by Musk’s claim that “if we lower standards for what it takes to become a board-certified surgeon … then more people will die than if we don’t lower the standards, therefore we should not lower the standards.”

This was apparently Lemon’s first encounter with the logical sequence known as a “syllogism.”

Lemon’s response: “Do you understand how by saying just that standards are being lowered that you’re implying that they’re being lowered because people are less skilled and less intelligent, and you’re talking about people of color?”

What on Earth do liberals think “affirmative action” is? (And when I say “liberals think,” of course, I’m speaking figuratively.)

Does Lemon understand that when universities fight like wildcats to hide their Black students’ SAT scores, they are also kind of implying Blacks are less skilled and less intelligent?

Last year, during the part of a multimillion-dollar lawsuit known as “discovery,” Harvard University finally coughed up the data. If — you’ll pardon the expression — “newsman” Lemon had followed the news, he would know precisely how much standards had been lowered for Black students.

Applicants in the top “academic decile” (GPA plus standardized test scores) were accepted in the following percentages: Asians: 13%; Whites: 15%; Blacks: 56%. Perhaps more jaw-dropping, in the fifth academic decile — not quite Harvard material — the percentages were: Asians: 2% (musicians); Whites: 3% (football players and Jared Kushner); Blacks: 22%.

People who’ve been paying attention were shocked. Good lord, who are the 44% of blacks in the top academic decile who DON’T get into Harvard? What kind of horrendous character defect do they have? Do they all submit “C-I-L-L My Landlord” as their personal essay? How can it not be 100%?

Nonetheless, Lemon asked Musk, “Why do you think they’re lowering the standards for minority doctors?” To his credit, at no point did Lemon cry out, “I thought we agreed there’d be no math during this interview!”

The Manhattan Institute’s Heather Mac Donald has been documenting the total abandonment of standards at medical schools for years. Before choosing your heart surgeon, you might want to review the statistics she’s laid out most recently in her book, “When Race Trumps Merit.”

In 2021, the average White score on the MCAT was at the 71st percentile. The average black score was at the 31st percentile.

Whereupon medical schools began dropping the MCAT altogether. Henceforth, some students (guess who?) would be offered admission on the basis of their “strong appreciation of human rights and social justice,” as The Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai puts it. In other words, would-be physicians can now skip those chapters on chemistry and physiology as long as they watch the Source Awards.

The lowered standards persist throughout medical training. Step 1 of the United States Medical Licensing Exam (USMLE), given after the second year of medical school, allows students to begin practicing medicine and “matches” them to a residency. But it seems that the average score for Black students is a full standard deviation below the score for Whites and Asians.

Although the test is multiple-choice and graded by computer, in January 2022, the USMLE dropped grades for Step 1 and converted it to “pass/fail.”

So now, instead of medical students being matched to specialties that play to their strengths, they are randomly assigned to residencies for which they may have little aptitude or interest. You know, the same way they assign on-air talent at CNN. It’s a brilliant method for training the next generation of doctors.

Also, starting next year, open-heart surgery will be graded “pass/fail.”

Responding to Musk’s claim that the “probability that someone will die I think at some point is high,” Lemon said, “but that’s a hypothetical that doesn’t mean it’s happening.”

In fact, it already has happened, countless times, all over the country — but notoriously, to the most famous affirmative action doctor of all: the Black applicant who took Allan Bakke’s place at the medical school of the University of California at Davis. Here was an incompetent Black doctor whose medical errors couldn’t be brushed under the rug, though affirmative action proponents did their best.

Dr. Patrick Chavis openly admitted that he never would have gotten into medical school without UC-Davis’ affirmative action program. Sen. Teddy Kennedy, The New York Times and the Nation magazine all touted Chavis as an affirmative action success story! Unlike Bakke, who went to work at the Mayo Clinic, Chavis was serving a disadvantaged community and “making a difference in the lives of scores of poor families,” as Sen. Kennedy said.

Yes, he was making a difference in his patients’ lives, mostly by shortening them. Dr. Chavis’ liposuction surgery left one patient bleeding, vomiting and urinating uncontrollably. But instead of taking her to a hospital, he let her bleed in his home for another 40 hours. By the time she managed to escape and check herself into a hospital, she’d lost 70% of her blood. (To be fair, she looked amazing when bikini season rolled around!)

Miraculously, she lived, as did most of his other liposuction patients who ended up in the emergency room. One, Tammaria Cotton, did not.

But the affirmative action cover-up can never end: It took the California medical board a year to suspend Dr. Chavis’ license, with patient advocates screaming bloody murder at such a pathetically slow response.

You think Bakke could have killed a patient to so little fanfare?

The New York Times took no notice of the affirmative action doctor’s grisly liposuctions, except a brief notation in his obituary years later, after he was gunned down in an attempted carjacking. In paragraph 7, the Times extravagantly described Chavis’ medical malpractice thus: “He was accused of mistreating eight liposuction patients, one of whom died.”

Or, as Lemon repeated on autoplay: “There’s no actual evidence of what you’re saying.”

Then there was Martin Luther King Jr. Hospital in South Central Los Angeles — or “Killer King,” as the locals dubbed it. A “symbol of justice and political power to many black people,” the Los Angeles Times reported in a Pulitzer Prize-winning story, “the majority of its staff has always been black.”

“Entire departments,” the Times investigation found, “are riddled with incompetence, internal strife and, in some cases, criminality. Employees have pilfered and sometimes sold the hospital’s drugs; chronic absenteeism is rampant; assaults between hospital workers are not uncommon.”

Despite having “abnormally high salaries for ranking doctors,” Killer King paid out “more per patient for medical malpractice” than any of the state’s 23 other public hospitals or medical centers.

So there’s loads of “evidence” that affirmative action kills, despite the best efforts of our universities, medical system and media to hide it. Of course, if you mention the evidence, you’ll be called a “white supremacist.”

See? No evidence.

     COPYRIGHT 2024 ANN COULTER

How It Got This Bad

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Gregory Hood, American Renaissance, September 22, 2023

Richard Hanania, The Origins of Woke: Civil Rights Law, Corporate America, and the Triumph of Identity Politics, Broadside Books, 2023, 288 pp.

If you build it, they will come.

That’s the message of Richard Hanania’s The Origins of Woke. It’s not that power defeats ideology, but that power, as expressed through laws, regulations, and court decisions, can spawn ideology. It’s a message American conservatives won’t like, and it’s therefore something they need to hear.

The American Right loves to expose, explain, and deconstruct the ideological evolution of the progressives who have been defeating the Right for the last six decades. Christopher Rufo’s America’s Cultural Revolution is the latest example. Pat Buchanan’s The Death of the West inspired campus radicals of my generation. The one time in my life I spoke to the late Andrew Breitbart, he credited William Lind’s views on Cultural Marxism as what most influenced his politics. Breitbart’s own maxim, “politics is downstream from culture,” is now a slogan for movement conservatives.

Richard Hanania tells us we’re wrong — and he’s probably right. He argues that critics of wokeness are blind to why these extreme beliefs have been all-conquering. “[W]hat I found strange about the anti-wokeness side of the debate was that its proponents seemed oblivious to the extent to which the beliefs and practices they disliked were mandated by law.” (vii) Dr. Hanania argues that Breitbart’s rule can promote political passivity, because “culture versus politics” is a false distinction, especially with a government that nearly dominates the economy.

The best part of this book for rightists should be its attention to concrete power politics and specific policies as laid down by courts and bureaucracies. Dr. Hanania cites James Burnham and notes that a managerial elite was inevitable but that “there was nothing inevitable about a portion of this class taking on social engineering as a career.” (67) The best leftist organizers, notably the notorious Saul Alinsky, would probably agree with him. Alinsky was famously dismissive of ideological purity, emphasizing appeals to interest while building coalitions. Politics is about power and transferring resources to your side, not about the ways policies express a political philosophy.

Dr. Hanania defines “three pillars” of wokeness: the belief that disparities can be explained only by discrimination, that speech must be restricted to overcome such disparities, and that a bureaucracy is necessary to “enforce correct thought and action.” The first two define whether a person or idea is woke, while the third shows how wokeness is enforced. Some may protest that this gives critical theory short shrift, but that’s the point. A historical perspective, he argues, “provides many reasons to doubt theories that blame any particular philosophy or religion for what has happened.” He instead emphasizes the “primacy of politics over ideology.” (9-10) “Long before wokeness was a cultural phenomenon, it was law,” he says, with the key to its success being its “hidden, indirect nature” because civil rights law “involves constantly nudging institutions in the direction of being obsessed with identity and suppressing speech, all while it speaks in the language of freedom and nondiscrimination.” (10) It’s deceptive and thus hard to combat.

Dr. Hanania cautions us not to indulge the conservative temptation to rage against the whole system, nor to believe the system was carefully constructed to be this effective. Instead, while legislators thought they were abolishing “a caste system in the South,” “politicians and government bureaucrats in institutions like the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) and the Department of Labor” got around the text of the law to achieve equality of outcome. The Supreme Court banned race quotas but blessed the concept of disparate impact, arguably the worst possible outcome because it was so vague. “Nothing is explicitly allowed, or prohibited,” Dr. Hanania says.

Republicans — notably when Richard Nixon expanded affirmative action to government contracts and President George H.W. Bush signed the Civil Rights Act of 1991 — may have been worse than President Lyndon Johnson. Nixon gave protected categories (an ever-expanding group) special privileges, and the 1991 act expanded the scope of lawsuits and complaints of “discrimination” and “harassment,” and “disparate impact.” Republicans, even after the Republican Revolution, with the supposed conservative Newt Gingrich as Speaker, shied away from ending affirmative action when they had the chance. “Sometime in 1995,” Dr. Hanania says, “Republican leaders apparently concluded that winning the public relations battle over affirmative action was hopeless, and they stopped talking about the issue.” (168)

President George H.W. Bush signs the Civil Rights Act of 1991.

George W. Bush expanded the scope of disability cases even further, with the ADA Amendments Act of 2008 — and got an overwhelming bipartisan majority. In all of these cases, there was seemingly no thought about the long-term consequences of providing a rich market for activists and lawyers exploiting ethnic and other grievances, nor did “free-market” Republicans seem to consider the economic costs. Dr. Hanania argues that Republicans are growing more combative on these issues, even though “wokeness” is now a powerful force with well-funded activists and secure bases in academia and the media. The woke empire was created in a fit of absent-mindedness, at least at the highest levels.

“Diversity” — a value with almost religious importance in modern America — was the byproduct of Justice Lewis F. Powell Jr.’s opinion in University of California v. Bakke (1978), which permitted universities to consider race, while banning quotas. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg’s dissent, which mocked banning quotas but allowing the same goal “through winks, nods, and disguises,” was more coherent and honest. (13) Dr. Hanania says that in the years after the decision, diversity went from almost unmentioned to a major concept discussed in the press and then the standard justification for race preferences. “We can see the invention of a concept in real time.” (13) Where did it come from? “It was basically the creation of one judge acting out of either political timidity or intellectual laziness.”

Violence also works. Citing Hugh Davis Graham and John Skrentny, Dr. Hanania argues that inner-city riots convinced Washington “to go beyond color-blindness and adopt policies like affirmative action and minority set-asides in order to buy social peace.” (14) Bureaucratic decisions from decades ago also “determined which groups were protected and which were not,” leading to such absurdities as the invention of “Hispanics” (which includes white Spaniards) and calling Arabs “white.”

Perhaps the saddest and yet most symbolic example of government fumbling is the reason why “sex discrimination” is such a force in American law and culture today: Rep. Howard Smith (D-VA) inserted it into the Civil Rights Act as part of an effort to kill the bill because he thought people would think it too absurd. Legislators didn’t understand what they were unleashing. The lesson is that if the law opens a space, power will fill it and come up with an ideology to justify it, and that ideology will be driven to its logical conclusion, no matter how ridiculous. Those who have the tightest focus on the issue and the most to gain — the bureaucrats who administer the new rules — have little reason to restrain themselves.

The government decides which categories are relevant to public life, and which are not. It then goes about encouraging a system of data collection and record keeping to justify state intervention and private activism. Law influences culture, as individuals are financially incentivized to lean into accepted identities and play their assigned roles, and may come to genuinely believe that the box they are put in has deep historical, moral, and spiritual importance. All of this happens far from the democratic process; civil rights laws as passed by Congress, incomplete and vague, serve as the justification for bureaucrats and judges to remake society. (92)

We take identity categories for granted so often that we often fail to reflect on their arbitrary nature. Some may laugh at the author’s hypothetical example of French and Italian Americans calling themselves “Romance Americans,” but that’s less absurd than Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (AAPI) being lumped together and giving us campaigns such as “Stop AAPI Hate.”

Different ethnic groups can be joined together or split apart depending on the financial and political incentives, but the arbitrary nature of the process doesn’t prevent ethnic activists from taking it very seriously. Addressing the “Great Replacement,” Dr. Hanania says that “what neither side seems to have noticed is that the idea of the great replacement derives from government racial classifications and their downstream effect on culture.” (105) Thus, Arabs and Persians are “white” and therefore slow the Great Replacement. Some “Hispanics” are white, but — statistically — speed the Great Replacement. None of this makes the issue less divisive.

Is “white” as arbitrary and meaningless as “AAPI”? Many don’t think Middles Easterners are part of our race or civilization. White advocates would argue that “white” is not just a cultural but a biological category, and that the Founders wrote it into the 1790 Naturalization Act. But even if white identity were entirely arbitrary, The Origins of Woke shows that even small bureaucratic changes can produce sincere and emotional conceptions of group identity. If whites didn’t exist, the government could invent them — for purposes benign or malevolent. Dr. Hanania suggests that racial identities are likely to grow stronger with time.

Wokeness undermined representative government. What we call “civil rights” has little to do with what elected representatives thought they were voting for.

At various points throughout the debate over the Civil Rights Act, critics of the bill expressed concern that it might do x. In response, supporters of the bill would say, “no, it won’t do x,” and the two sides would agree to a compromise that involved entering a clause into the bill in effect saying that “x is prohibited.” Usually within a decade, the EEOC [Equal Employment Opportunity Commission] and the federal courts would do x anyway. (39)

Wokeness leads to tyranny. Dr. Hanania explains that with the concept of disparate impact, “basically everything is illegal and the government will decide which violations it goes after.” This just doesn’t invite corruption; it practically defines it.

Finally, wokeness makes us cowards. “Businesses must display ‘EEO Is the Law’ posters, which tell the world that an employer both practices affirmative action and does not discriminate based on race,” says Dr. Hanania. “Citizens are thus socialized to engage in doublethink, not question official dogma on sensitive issues, and walk on eggshells when faced with the demands of noisy activists within institutions, no matter how unreasonable they might be.” (22)

Dr. Hanania emphasizes that he is not attempting to track every way “wokeness as law” affects our lives, but for newcomers, he will seem exhaustive. A table provides the key doctrines (affirmative action, disparate impact in the private sector, disparate impact in government funding, anti-harassment law, and anti-harassment in women’s sports), the legal basis, what it does, the way it is enforced, and its effects. Another table shows what can be done to roll back some of these destructive policies. These tables are a greater accomplishment than entire books about the philosophical problems with liberal doctrines on race. Dr. Hanania’s detailed histories of the regulations, executive orders, court decisions, and laws (which are arguably the least important in determining what really happens) are invaluable.

Dr. Hanania’s thesis isn’t totally comprehensive. If we accept that seemingly minor battles birthed the swelling cancer of wokeness, we must still contend with its larger triumph throughout the entire Western world, especially the Anglosphere. The United Kingdom, New Zealand, and Canada are worse than America when it comes to meddling in social relations for the benefit of non-whites, and there seems to be less resistance to white shaming. The rest of Europe — certainly anything coming out of Brussels — isn’t much better.

Dr. Hanania notes that wokeness in France may even be stronger than in the United States because of hate speech laws, but there is more resistance to le wokisme (considered an American cultural invasion) in elite circles and arguably less regulation of everyday speech. However, wokeness is still advancing in France alongside demographic transformation, as well as in Germany, the Netherlands, and the rest of Europe. Dr. Hanania praises France for not collecting data on race or forcing companies to do so, but while this might pose an obstacle to “wokeness,” it hasn’t reversed or stopped demographic transformation or anti-white policies. We can accept that cultural change is downstream from politics, but everything is downstream from demography. Surging numbers of non-whites will lead to politicians willing to use race-based programs to win their support and electorally overwhelm whites. Why demographic change is occurring, who is behind it, and what they hope to gain are important questions.

Dr. Hanania frankly admits that his book is directed towards Republicans because Democrats refuse to talk about these questions. “While Americans debate taxes and foreign policy, culture and identity issues appear to be what is truly motivating many of the nation’s most prominent activists, media figures, and political leaders on both sides, along with the mass of their voters,” he says. (1)

Wokeness isn’t just a reflection of institutional incentives, although one could argue that ideology tends to follow interests. Mr. Rufo’s book may have focused on ideology, and such a history is needed to explain why activists were willing to use such aggressive tactics to get Ethnic Studies departments and other programs established even before the “woke” revolution really took off. The two books are often compared, and it’s probably better to read Mr. Rufo’s book first to learn how the movement first arose, while Dr. Hanania explains how it established itself within our system.

Dr. Hanania’s argument is that there is a solution to these problems within the system, but it requires action from people who can actually get elected, make policy, and appoint judges and staffers. This may happen because fewer Republicans care about being called racist. They can even fight “wokeness” by working with the original language and intent of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. (Dr. Hanania thinks repealing it is politically unrealistic.) Ron DeSantis’s presidential campaign — which looked more promising when this book was written — could be a herald, with his boast that the Sunshine State is the place where “woke goes to die” and his successful fights against DEI and ESG (Environmental, Social, Governance) policies. Leading candidate Vivek Ramaswamy wrote a blurb for The Origins of Woke.

Dr. Hanania’s acceptance of political tribalism might be surprising to his Substack readers and his X followers. He is openly contemptuous of the downward mobility of the Republican base, the antics of anti-vaccine activists, and of Republicans who support Donald Trump because they want to be entertained. He has also written about the ways diversity really is a strength and sees no contradiction between accepting the reality of racial differences in IQ and wanting more immigration. He is what we might call a cognitive supremacist, who wants a meritocracy of the intelligent, market access to elite human capital (and therefore relatively loose immigration), and few drags on productivity and efficiency in the interests of equity (to please leftists) or of tradition and ethnic solidarity (to please rightists). Of course, he’s not saying political tribalism is good — it’s just the way it is now, and people who want to change policy must accept it.

We may think Dr. Hanania is wrong about some things. In fact, he’s wrong about a lot of things. However, someone who accepts the reality of the racial achievement gaps isn’t obligated to embrace white identity politics, let alone become a zealot. In turn, we are under no obligation to abandon our views because we agree with much of his thesis. What he wants for “wokeness” is what we want, and his criticism sharpens our thinking.

It may even be argued that only someone like him could write this book. If the price is simply a few sneers at white working-class voters or at the far-right, that’s a small price to pay for progress. When it comes to racial politics on the American Right, those who can do something won’t, and those who would do something, can’t. Someone who really understands the importance of these issues may become a public race realist or white advocate — which means forfeiting any chance of political, bureaucratic, or judicial office. In contrast, Republicans who are in positions of power are naïve or cowardly, desperately avoiding controversy, accepting leftist rhetoric at face value, and almost apologizing for their position. That is Dr. Hanania’s story. Dedicated left-wing judges, bureaucrats, and activists take any opportunity to expand their power and shift the culture. Republicans dreamily go along with it, thinking that they are being nice or, more likely, not thinking at all. I’d prefer that people who despise me but understand this issue be in power rather than people who pay lip service to our issues but are easily rolled.

But even if it is politically advantageous, will Republicans act? It requires a great deal of public pressure on a conservative to make him do the right thing, and changes to regulations and executive orders require dedication and detailed knowledge because the bureaucracy can’t be trusted. Conservative judges have already been a disappointment. “In contrast to disparate impact, affirmative action in college admissions has been in conservatives’ crosshairs for decades, and by the time this book is released, Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard may have already been decided,” Dr. Hanania says. (198) It has, and the conservatives did the same thing Dr. Hanania bemoans throughout the book: outlawed racial discrimination, while leaving loopholes that will let colleges keep discriminating by fiddling with racial identity statements and downplaying objective criteria for admission. Outright quotas would be more honest and therefore better.

Dr. Hanania’s assumption that anything can be done has therefore already taken a major hit; the conservative legal movement has already blown a priceless opportunity. Bureaucrats, activists, and institutions must be given no loopholes. The Origins of Woke amply shows why we can’t trust in their good faith or reasonableness.

Stopping highly motivated small groups who get large subsidies extracted from an easily distracted and ignorant population is a big problem for a democracy, even if it’s racially homogenous. Race makes things worse. Many non-whites think they are fighting a holy crusade against “racism” while whites, at best, are making a vague stand for individualism. An overall collapse in living standards doesn’t mean there will automatically be a successful reaction — Venezuela, Zimbabwe, and South Africa are proof of that. Sometimes things just fall apart and stay that way. Wokeness could grow to the point that it chokes the whole economy. Dr. Hanania himself once suggested a “strongman” might be a way out of the mess because “liberals always win,” but this also has costs and we don’t have a strongman. Dr. Hanania now emphasizes his support for liberal democracy and insists the system offers a path to victory for conservatives, who, he argues, actually have been winning on guns, homeschooling, and other issues.

“Wokeness” may be different. The question is whether conservatives really want to win on this issue, at least enough to withstand furious opposition from a campaign to roll back so-called “civil rights.” Gun owners and homeschoolers are more committed than the average person who wants to ban guns or homeschooling. With wokeness, it’s the reverse. The fight against it is a struggle for free speech, freedom of association, economic freedom, and the marketplace of ideas. Unfortunately, the media will never frame it that way and those who benefit from it will never surrender. White advocates have yet to find conservative leaders with the will to carry out policy changes. Defeating identity politics may require a countervailing movement of white identity politics.

Such a solution is unlikely to satisfy Dr. Hanania and he probably thinks it’s extreme and unnecessary. I hope he’s right and I’m wrong. The Origins of Woke may be best seen as a guide not to white advocates or even conservatives, but to liberals. It is an off-ramp for moderates who want to consolidate the civil rights revolution while reigning in wokeness before it generates a backlash in which white identitarians claim power. Rather than trying to cancel Dr. Hanania, they’d be wise to take his advice. If they don’t, we can take The Origins of Woke as a guide for where to begin, but certainly not where to end.

About Gregory Hood

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Mr. Hood is a staff writer for American Renaissance. He has been active in conservative groups in the US. You can follow him on Gab.

Why do intellectuals support affirmative action?

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The Supreme Court’s ruling against affirmative action in college admissions met with dismayed, hostile and sarcastic reactions from intellectuals, meaning the media, academics and others who make a living out of conveying ideas to the public.[1] This was predictable, but why are they like this? Why do intellectuals support affirmative action?[2]

Many do so out of an attachment to the doctrine of essential racial equality, which tells them that the races are inherently the same. Seeing that they do not perform the same, and especially that Black people do considerably less well than others, they think that Black people’s performance must have been depressed by environmental factors such as their mistreatment by Whites. To make up for this, affirmative action is needed.

This is a poor rationale for affirmative action since there is nothing to suggest that the races are inherently the same, nor is there any evidence of the supposed mistreatment. To deal with the first problem, the intellectuals call anyone who points it out a racist. To deal with the second, they go back to the Jim Crow era or even to slavery, where mistreatment can be found, and say that the present generation is still affected, therefore it must be compensated. This argument also fails, if only because it is not just Black people whose ancestors were mistreated. Everyone probably has ancestors who were mistreated in one way or another, yet we do not seek to identify these long-dead individuals so that we can compensate their living descendants.

A second rationale refers to equal opportunities. These are weasel words, which on the intellectuals’ interpretation do not denote a requirement of justice. The intellectuals will argue that not all candidates sitting a given test have the same opportunity to pass it because some of them had to stay up all night looking after their sick mothers whereas others got a good night’s sleep. The tired ones are predominantly Black, they will find, therefore affirmative action must be taken. But justice does not require equal opportunities in this sense, which would be impossible to arrange. It requires equal treatment, which can easily be arranged by having all the candidates sit the test at the same time in the same hall with the same amount of time to complete it. No more elaborate concept of equal opportunities is needed.

A third rationale refers to the presumed value of racial diversity. Black students without the test scores needed to get into college must still go there, says this rationale, so that White students can benefit from their presence. This is just silly.

The urge of Whites to favour Blacks can be strong. The purpose of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was to end racial discrimination in employment. To underline this, soon after the Act was passed, President Johnson issued an executive order stating that employees must be taken on and treated without regard to race. Before long, hiring goals for Blacks were being introduced, not only at the behest of organisations like the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People but also by the Department of Labor itself.[3] Already in the 1920s it was customary for Black students at New York University to be marked two grades higher than Whites for a given level of work.[4]

On the day the Supreme Court announced its decision, Harvard officials sent a letter to the university community, which contained all the vagueness, evasion and general waste material that characterises politically correct language. It also invoked all three rationales for affirmative action mentioned above.[5] “Diversity and difference are essential to academic excellence”, it said. Diversity of what? Difference between what? If it meant diversity and difference of race, how can these help anyone attain academic excellence? Doesn’t Harvard know that academic excellence is attained by talent and hard work?

The letter stated that to prepare leaders for a complex world, “Harvard must admit and educate a student body whose members reflect, and have lived, multiple facets of human experience”. If one can live a facet of experience, what makes Harvard think that not enough of these facets would have been lived by a student body selected on merit? Black people might be especially unlikely to add to the total number of such facets since they are not known for being adventurous. How many of Harvard’s Blacks are likely to have climbed a mountain or even gone for a walk in the countryside? How many will have visited an art gallery or museum?

The letter went on to say that Harvard must be a place of opportunity, “whose doors remain open to those to whom they had long been closed”. Presumably by “those to whom they had long been closed” it meant Black people of the past to whom doors were closed because they were Black. Apparently Harvard finds the historical existence of such people a sufficient reason for letting in Black people who lack the qualifications required of the other races.

But affirmative action works, say the intellectuals, and point to their poster boys. An early one was Patrick Chavis, who in 1975 was among the first Black students to be admitted to medical school when had he been White he would have been rejected.[6] When he set up in practice after graduating, a journalist named Nicholas Lemann called him a living and breathing refutation of the claim that racial preferences favour unqualified Blacks over better-qualified Whites. How he thought that this had been refuted is a mystery since it is the very definition of affirmative action and its whole point. Anyway, misfortune struck Chavis when in 1997 his licence was suspended as he was deemed grossly negligent, incompetent and a danger to public health. He could not perform “some of the most basic duties required of a physician”. Two patients nearly died as a result of his botched operations; a third did. Presumably the intellectuals quietly took down that poster.

A famous beneficiary of affirmative action is Justice Clarence Thomas, who bitterly regrets accepting a place at Yale after clearing a specially lowered bar. The burden of being suspected of being less bright than his White peers is one that he had to bear for decades.

One person who escaped affirmative action is Anthony Brian Logan, who after growing up with drug addicts and criminals in his family worked tirelessly in various jobs before putting himself through a local college and starting up as a graphic designer. He went on to create a successful YouTube channel, where he puts out a video each day with excellent commentary on current affairs. In his opinion, Blacks who aspire to go to Harvard and are let in without the grades required of the other races are misguided. They find it hard to keep up and would have been better off at less well-known but perfectly adequate colleges that would not have treated them as special cases.

The fact that the intellectuals have no good argument for affirmative action does not diminish their support for it. For them it is not a matter of argument; it is a matter of fending off the thought that Black people are innately inferior to Whites, which would mean that they as Whites belonged to a superior race. To them this thought would be more than they could bear. They would see death camps on the way. Lifelong programming and continuing social pressure have prevented them from being able to see that relationships of superiority and inferiority are universal facts of life and nothing to be afraid of.

Another reason intellectuals might have for supporting affirmative action is that they believe in racial discrimination on principle. They do not share the general view that institutions should treat all alike without regard to race; they think they should have a favourite race and do all they can to benefit members of that race without a thought for the others. These are the anti-racists.

Yet another reason could be that the intellectuals want to avoid Black violence. After the Supreme Court decision, the commentator John Derbyshire wrote a piece saying three times that meritocratic college admissions were unacceptable.[7] His first justification for taking this view was a non sequitur: “The meritocratic option is unacceptable because of race differences in intelligence”. How do race differences in intelligence mean that colleges should not select applicants on merit? Derbyshire referred to a report which stated that if Harvard selected on merit, less than one per cent of its students would be Black. He didn’t say why this would be a problem.

His second justification was that if Harvard stopped favouring Black people — and he saw a loophole in the Supreme Court ruling that will let it continue doing this — “the oceans would boil and the earth would crash into the sun”. Perhaps by this he meant that if a serious attempt were made to abolish affirmative action, there would be an outcry, particularly on the part of Blacks, who might riot. We don’t want that, so colleges had better continue discriminating in their favour.

Going back to the intellectuals who passionately believe in essential racial equality, one might wonder who they are trying to benefit. They admit Black students to college on the basis that they have the intelligence that theoretically is in them but unrealised, which makes student populations look as they would do if things were as the intellectuals wished, then point to the results as though they proved that things really are this way. “Look at all these Black students!”, they say. “Who says Blacks aren’t as intelligent as Whites?” The point seems to be to allow them to perform a trick which they can then claim was no trick rather than try to help the Black students, who can only sink or swim with the intelligence at their disposal. Perhaps their passion comes from the struggle between the two sides of their double-think.

A final speculation is that contributing to these intellectuals’ inability to tolerate the thought of innate racial differences is the fact that they belong to a spoilt generation. They want the races to be the same; they don’t want to be superior. No one has ever told them that you can’t always have what you want.

[1] This use of the word “intellectuals” comes from Friedrich Hayek, 1998 (1949), The Intellectuals and Socialism, London: IEA Health and Welfare Unit, pp. 9-18.

[2] By “affirmative action” this article means discrimination in favour of Black people. It does not discuss discrimination in favour of Hispanics, women or other groups.

[3] Jared Taylor, 2004 (1992), Paved with Good Intentions, New Century Foundation, p. 126. The Executive Order was No. 11246.

[4] James Burnham, 1964, Suicide of the West: An Essay on the Meaning and Destiny of Liberalism, New Rochelle, NY: Arlington House, p. 197.

[5] The letter is quoted in V-DARE, June 30th 2023, “Nobody Wants An 0.76 Percent Black Harvard. The Oceans Would Boil, The Earth Would Crash Into The Sun” by John Derbyshire, https://vdare.com/articles/john-derbyshire-nobody-wants-an-0-76-percent-Black-harvard-the-oceans-would-boil-the-earth-would-crash-into-the-sun.

[6] William McGowan, 2002, Coloring the News: How Political Correctness Has Corrupted American Journalism, San Francisco: Encounter Books.

[7] V-DARE, June 30th 2023, op cit.

Three Heroic White Films

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I’ve put aside two hard-hitting essays regarding the ongoing assault on Whites in the United States because I suspect readers need a break from the relentless negative news we’ve all been exposed to. I confess I’m more than guilty of pointing out how rapidly the situation of Whites has become exceedingly bleak, I suffer from that situation in real life, and like readers, I need a break, too. So perhaps the current relative lull in The System’s assault on us will allow readers a chance to watch one, two or all three of the uplifting Hollywood films I’m going to recommend.

Thus, in this essay I will celebrate these three implicitly pro-White films that since 2016 have somehow survived the gauntlet of our modern commissars to emerge as honest, realistic stories of White men doing heroic deeds. No Numinous Negroes, no Wakanda, no “Jews to the Rescue.” Just White men like we really have been since time immemorial, placed now in modern technological settings that we White men have ourselves created. The three films are Deepwater Horizon, Sully (both 2016) and Only the Brave (2017).

*   *   *

Deepwater Horizon

Deepwater Horizon (2016) trailer

The disaster film Deepwater Horizon stars three A-List actors: Mark Wahlberg, Kurt Russell and John Malkovich. It tells the true story of a huge oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico that suffered a series of fatal explosions, resulting in a massive oil spill that made world headlines for weeks. Deepwater deals with hard men who work with their hands. They are the kind of men who keep America humming, putting gas in the tanks of the cars and trucks we drive, providing the backbone to the globe-girdling U.S. military, and keep toasty warm the homes of Americans in subzero locales such as Minnesota, Wisconsin and Michigan.

Mark Wahlberg plays the lead with grit and seriousness. He has a man’s job to do — and he does it.

Ditto for “Mr. Jimmy,” the rig manager played by an aging Kurt Russell. No cute jokes for either man or knowing winks at the audience. Instead, they are gruff, no-nonsense employees in the high-stakes world of oil drilling, where mammoth machines can chew up a man in an instant and hellish infernos can erupt from liquid gold far under the ocean. Deepwater Horizon captures these dangers in spades and blasts them out at you without mercy.

Kurt Russel as Mr. Jimmy

Not only is there non-stop suspense and action in this flick, there is also a depiction of the unyielding business pressures to get the job done no matter the cost or risks. Here we are treated to masterful dialog by the trio of engineer Wahlberg, rig manager Mr. Jimmy, and John Malkovich as Donald Vidrine, a senior British Petroleum supervisor.

I know little about the South, but it sounds as if Malkovich is using a Louisiana Creole accent, which I found fascinating. As Mr. Vidrine, he cloaks his no-nonsense demands in folksy sayings and metaphors, which Wahlberg and Russell take in stride. I’ve already listened to this dialog half a dozen times but could stand to listen to it a dozen more times. Experience the best part here.

John Malkovic as Mr. Vidrine

Once you’ve enjoyed the theater skills of the voices and dialog, watch it all again for the attempt to give an inside view into the workings of one of the biggest corporations on earth. I don’t think any knowledgeable film buff could watch this scene without thinking of Ned Beatty’s amazing soliloquy about the world of money in the 1976 classic Network. Both speeches are pure magic.

The business considerations as cause of the disaster out of the way, we next enter into the fires, explosions, deaths & injuries, and heroics of the men on the doomed oil rig. Truly it is a glimpse of hell.

Some crewmen survive, some die, some are gravely injured. One man selflessly sacrifices his life to save fellow crewmen, the vast majority of whom are White — and male. An exception comes in the form of a subcontractor position played by Gina Rodriguez, a Puerto Rican American actress. She has one line where she clearly makes a better decision than her male boss, but when the fires rage hot, she breaks into an uncontrolled panic and is saved by a daring and level-headed White male (Wahlberg’s character).

As we will see later with Only the Brave, Deepwater honors the eleven men who lost their lives by showing their photos at the end of the film. The postscript reads: “The blowout lasted for 87 days, spilling an estimated 210 million gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico. It was the worst oil disaster in U.S. history.” The men lost in that disaster were not “deplorables,” “insurrectionists,” “right-wing terrorists” or “White supremacists.” They were White men like our fathers, brothers, classmates and neighbors. They equal the Real America. It is proper that they are honored in this film.

*  *  *

Sully


Sully (2016 – watch trailer)

The second film of my trio is the Clint Eastwood-directed Sully, the true story of Captain Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger, who glided a crippled airliner away from the towers of New York City and safely landed on the frigid waters of the Hudson River. What is so wonderful about the film is the fact that it is so true to real life, something Hollywood is not always known for.

Let me explain with this little experiment. Think about the last time you walked through an American airport, particularly one that is heavily domestic. Who were the pilots in uniform you saw strolling down the corridors pulling their leather flight bags?

A Nice White Flight Crew  —  Airport (1970)

Admit it — you saw White males in uniform. That would make sense, since unlike most other professions today, piloting airplanes in America has remained in the vicinity of 95% White and male. This must gall liberals and social engineers, for these groups dream of a world of “equality,” that is, one in which White males are purged, punished, eliminated, or at least relegated to humiliating positions of impotence.

Sully came out in 2016 in the face of endless promotion of non-white diversity and “vibrancy,” going against all that Hillary Clinton and her vast entourage represented, and supported the reality that it is White males who built the public manifestations of Western civilization and to a large degree still keep it going.

Oh, how delicious it was to watch Tom Hanks as a competent, seasoned pilot, making the best decisions in only seconds.

Next to Hanks sits the first officer, played by Aaron Eckhart, who is tall, square jawed and tough. Dare I say he’s almost Aryan?

Hats off to Eastwood for casting Hanks and Eckhart as the cockpit crew of Sully. Further, most of the supporting cast is White as well. Real life, real celluloid representation. Sometimes, that’s all I can ask of Hollywood, a wish I don’t often have granted.

Actual Pilots “Sully” Sullenberger and Jeffrey B. Skiles

Because of its unvarnished heroism, I’m going to give a somewhat detailed description of the action in Sully. It was frigid in New York on January 15, 2009. “Sully” Sullenberger sat in the left-side seat, while first officer Jeffrey B. Skiles sat to his right. Skiles was slated to fly this leg of the journey, and the plane lifted off uneventfully, turning northwest. As it neared 3,000 feet, the A320 struck a flock of large Canada geese, some of which were ingested into the two engines. The collision resulted in a full loss of power. Coming at such a low altitude over a major city filled with skyscrapers, the situation was critical.

To provide backup power, Sullenberger switched on the tail-mounted APU, a generator which provides auxiliary power. The pilots had only seconds to decide whether to return to LaGuardia, try to reach Teterboro Airport on the New Jersey side of the Hudson River, or find some alternative. Drawing on his vast experience, Sullenberger determined that trying to reach either airport was a poor choice, so he opted to land on the calm winter waters of the Hudson. Passing less than 900 feet over the George Washington Bridge, the plane landed safely in the middle of the Hudson, where all passengers and crew were rescued by nearby boats.

Eckhart, Capt. Sullenberger, Eastwood and Hanks

Enjoy looking at the faces of White men like this while you still can. Unlike so, so many other “reenactment” and “based on” films and documentaries, Eastwood’s Sully panders not at all to liberal pieties, not even in minor roles such as air traffic controller or captain of a ferry boat. We don’t have the cheesy cabin ensemble of multiracial passengers, something ushered in by the likes of Airport 75 and other such dreck from the seventies. Sully is like the cast of The Waltons, imagined as if John-Boy had grown up and become a pilot like Sullenberger. No drinking, no drugs, no wild sex. Just traditional White Americans living their lives and dealing with the challenges life inevitably throws their way.

Surprisingly, despite its debut during the run-up to the Hillary-for-President season, the same press that so blatantly supported Hillary and savaged Trump as “literally the next Hitler” gave Sully overwhelmingly positive reviews. For instance, reviewer Simon Thompson awarded the film nine out of ten points, writing: “Sully is a beautifully balanced, classily nuanced and hugely engaging film that avoids all the clichéd pitfalls it could have slipped into. Tom Hanks gives one of the best performances of his career and Clint Eastwood’s direction is beautiful and rich. It’s not just a great movie, Sully is one of the best pieces of cinema that a major Hollywood studio has released this year.”

A reviewer at ebert.com wrote:

As Capt. Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger, the plain-spoken, cool-headed veteran pilot who pulled off the impossible under immense pressure, Tom Hanks once again reminds us why he continues to be Hollywood’s best personification of the all-American Everyman since James Stewart’s “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.” Who else is so good at encapsulating such red-white-and-blue values as never-say-die commitment, pride in a job well done, doing your duty no matter the cost and selfless courage in the face of disaster without being a goody-goody bore?

Even the Village Voice said kind things about the film: “This is a talky, mild-mannered drama about stoic, middle-aged white men exhibiting poise amid chaos and illustrating the sanctity of simply doing one’s job.”

If you’d like more background on Sully, see my original 2017 review here.

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Only the Brave


Only the Brave (2017) trailer

Only the Brave is another story about the lives of White men who get their hands dirty. Early on, we see a scene where a moderate forest fire is being handled by a hot and sweaty crew. Miraculously, there are no affirmative action minority hires in this scene, no tough Puerto Rican chick, no sensitive black guy. Just garden-variety White men — tough men. And the entire movie remains that way without exception. Even the men’s families are nice White people:

Like Deepwater Horizon and Sully, Only the Brave is based on a true story, the incredibly tragic demise of 19 out of 20 members of an elite firefighting crew called “Hot Shots.” On June 28, 2013, dry lightning ignited a fire near the hamlet of Yarnell, Arizona, just northwest of Phoenix. While the situations in the first two movies discussed above involved sudden accidents that unexpectedly overtook the White heroes, in Only the Brave, these firefighters knew they were always living on the cusp of danger, thus making these men the truest of heroes because they knowingly risked their lives to protect their fellow Americans.

The film is centered around crew chief Eric Marsh, played by a man’s man, Josh Brolin. At every turn, the film succeeds in portraying Marsh as a thoroughly admirable character who is a natural leader of men.

The film includes a number of softer scenes of Marsh with his wife, likely inserted to drawn some women to the film, but it is clear that Marsh’s life is out in the mountains facing fires that aim to kill him. I suppose that conflict with his wife provides some of the tension in the film, but the wife is grossly outclassed by Marsh’s masculinity and intense focus on his job. At one point, for instance, while the couple is sharing a candle-lit bath, the wife asks a taciturn Marsh, “Do ya wanna talk about it? Or do you wanna do your John Wayne thing?” Marsh remains silent.

Of course she already knew the answer. Immediately, the movie cuts back to the male action. How appropriate, though, that the wife referenced John Wayne, for this 2017 film and its characters belong back in the Wayne era when men were men and women were women. Right and wrong are clearly understood, and there is no hint whatsoever that these men’s world will soon be overtaken by foreign immigration, Black Lives Matter degenerates, or feminists running amok on the streets. America is still a White man’s country.

To be sure, these men are not cardboard characters lacking flaws. Indeed, they are human. Second to Marsh is Brendan, a young man who in the beginning of the movie is shown smoking meth, committing petty larceny, and getting one of his throw-away girlfriends pregnant. His struggle to grow into a mature man is a central theme of the movie, along with Marsh’s decision to take Brendan under his wing and keep him from reverting to an aimless drug addict. (Careful listeners will catch a fleeting conversation revealing that Marsh himself had addiction problems, so his decision to mentor Brendan is rooted in that sense of identification.)

Brendan indeed grows, slowly taking responsibility for his girlfriend and baby daughter. Like Marsh, however, his life is largely focused on the wild land, where all plant material is nothing more than “fuel” to a firefighter. None of the men here put their women or their wives above their duty and bonding with their firefighting brothers. Nineteen of them pay for this focus, too.

In short, one day the men are caught by unpredictable winds and overtaken by torch-like flames. Here it is not “toxic masculinity” that is pilloried but the very best traits in real men that are celebrated and duly honored. Death through sacrifice is the highest calling of the Granite Mountain Hot Shots.

Again out of character, Hollywood critics lavished praise on this traditional film, with the critics of Rotten Tomatoes praising in unison with average viewers the merits of the film. “Only the Brave’s impressive veteran cast and affecting fact-based story add up to a no-frills drama that’s just as stolidly powerful as the real-life heroes it honors.” Another wrote that, “Only the Brave is a visually splendid, spellbinding, and surreal movie that also happens to be an emotionally shattering, over-the-top ugly-cry for the ages.”

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Viewing these films is easy with Amazon streaming rentals, but for the same price you can buy new DVDs if you still have such archaic equipment lying around. Move fast, however, for our post-insurrection respite will likely not last long. In a thousand ways, The System has announced that characters like all the White men in the films just reviewed are now Enemies of the People. In self defense, will real White American men now show the bravery and determination seen in the noble acts of participants in these movies, as well as the real men they were based on? Time will tell.

 

Germany Rises as ‘Eurostan’ Looms Closer

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The new ‘Eurostan’ in the making: Countries impacted by the migrant crisis

The writing is on the wall. The old Germany of our Christian ancestors is in the process of being destroyed. And after Germany, Europe is the target.

The EU, as we all know who have eyes to see, has now become the United States of Europe in all but name — an undemocratic and despotic confederation of states without borders whose primary aim appears to be White Genocide — the slow and systematic destruction of the white indigenous people of Europe by means of uncontrolled mass immigration and mongrelisation.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel has been the main force behind the ongoing destruction of the Europe of our ancestors, the Europe of traditional values firmly rooted in its Christian ethos.

Under Angela Merkel’s auspices, Germany has heard its death knell. It has seen its great cities with their shimmering Gothic spires, and its peaceful towns and villages nestling in the green countryside, invaded by well over a million uninvited guests from lawless lands who have turned their nation into a multicultural zoo. German women are being raped and sexually assaulted literally every day of the year by migrants. And still Frau Merkel sits there smiling complacently amid the ruins of her country, making no attempt to turn back the tides of mounting terror. Read more

Vibrant Verse: British Poetry as Occupied Territory

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The British Isles have given more than their share to science, literature and philosophy. But in other ways they have done less well, as the great Somerset Maugham (1874-1965) noted in one of his short stories. This is a German woman talking to the English spy Ashenden:

“You English, you cannot paint, you cannot model, you cannot write music.”
“Some of us can at times write pleasing verses,” said Ashenden,
[and], he did not know why, two lines occurring to him he said them: “Whither, O splendid ship, thy white sails crowding, Leaning across the bosom of the urgent West?”
“Yes,” said Mrs Caypor, with a strange gesture, “you can write
poetry. I wonder why.”
And to Ashenden’s surprise she went on, in her guttural English, to recite the next two lines of the poem he had quoted. (“The Traitor,” 1928)

Mrs Caypor was right. The British Isles have never produced a composer to compare with Beethoven or an artist to compare with Michelangelo. They haven’t even come close. But Milton compares with Dante and other great poets have graced these islands, from Burns and Yeats in Scotland and Ireland to Wordsworth and Thomas in England and Wales, from the home-grown Chaucer to the adopted T.S. Eliot. Britain has a golden poetic tradition. You can say that without hyperbole or irony. Read more