Kevin MacDonald: Ethnic Diversity and Multiculturalism in Wisconsin

Kevin MacDonald: Simon Krajsa’s current TOO article “Racial Diversity and Crime in Green Bayhits home with me because I grew up in Oshkosh, 50 miles to the south. It’s sad to see the transformations of the area since I was a kid; it’s a lesson that the revolution is not confined to Southern California, Texas, and New York.  The whole Fox River Valley was completely White when I was growing up. People noticed it when a Black person came up from Milwaukee to go fishing. There were maybe one or two Jewish families in town. The only Mexicans were migrant workers who lived outside of town on the farms and left after the harvest.

The only mildly significant diversity was religious. There were various Protestant denominations and there were still ethnically Polish Catholic congregations that were separate from the other Catholic churches. I think we Catholics did feel a bit separate from the Protestants, especially the well-off Protestants. (They were more German than WASP.) But the divisions didn’t seem very important (ethnicity wasn’t an issue) and there was a certain amount of mobility among the groups. In any case, no one felt like an outsider. We certainly did not have the intense hostility toward the WASP elite that has been so typical of Jews.

I have gone back to Oshkosh regularly in recent years and at least on the surface nothing much has changed. The non-White population seems invisible, but, as in Green Bay, there is in fact a substantial non-White population there.  In Oshkosh the main non-White group is the Hmong, a clan-based group from Southeast Asia with very high fertility, originally brought in as refugees by high-minded Christians from Wausau. Women begin having children at an early age and  have as many children as possible. Oshkosh now has Hmong Service Centers, churches, advocacy groups, festivals, and student groups at the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh. They have a long history in Asia of retaining their culture and not assimilating.

It’s a very adaptive culture that has been given a strong boost by generous social service benefits provided by the state. Indeed, the Hmong population in Wisconsin is exploding. Based on state estimates, these are the increases in a 5-year period for the main counties settled by the Hmong in Wisconsin:

Winnebago (Oshkosh) 20%; Marathon (Wausau) 13%; Brown (Green Bay) 54%; Outagamie (Appleton) 80%; Dane (Madison) 130%; Milwaukee (34%); Manitowoc (43%); Sheboygan (69%)

This is a very high rate of population increase by any standard. Whatever else one might say, the Wisconsin I grew up in is on the way to oblivion.

Bookmark and Share

Our Unethical Financial Elite

Writing on Jewish involvement in the ongoing financial disaster is not something I relish. It’s not really my cup of tea because financial issues are not my area of expertise. But I do think the issues should be discussed at TOO.

When the meltdown began, the Internet was full of angry comments blaming Jews, much to the chagrin of the ADL. This is because it is common knowledge that Jews are vastly overrepresented among Wall Street executives. In the 1990s, Benjamin Ginsberg noted that 50% of Wall Street executives were Jewish, and it’s doubtless at least that high now.

As Kevin Phillips has pointed out, since the 1990s, economic expansions have not benefited the middle class; rather, they have benefited the financial elite. Financial services and complex financial products have assumed an ever larger percentage of the American economy, while manufacturing has steadily declined to the point where their relative percentages of the American economy have reversed.

And the entire pyramid is erected on a house of cards. Phillips writes:

My summation is that American financial capitalism, at a pivotal period in the nation’s history, cavalierly ventured a multiple gamble: first, financializing a hitherto more diversified U.S. economy; second, using massive quantities of debt and leverage to do so; third, following up a stock market bubble with an even larger housing and mortgage credit bubble; fourth, roughly quadrupling U.S. credit-market debt between 1987 and 2007, a scale of excess that historically unwinds; and fifth, consummating these events with a mixed fireworks of dishonesty, incompetence and quantitative negligence.

In the public mind, the firm most closely associated with Jewish financial power is Goldman Sachs. Ever since the financial meltdown, GS has been defending itself (e.g., here) against an avalanche of charges focused not only on financial improprieties but also on its ties to the government (e.g., Matt Taibbi and a series of articles in the New York Times, e.g., here.)

A document placed into the Congressional Record by Rep. Darryl Issa (R-CA), described in an article on Bloomberg.com strongly suggests corruption at the pinnacle of the financial profession. GS underwrote $17.2 billion of the $62.1 billion in the Collateralized Debt Obligations (CDO’s) that were insured by AIG — more than any other firm. Essentially, banks underwrote toxic securities and then bet against them. An observer notes, “It sounds to me a little bit like selling a car with faulty brakes and then buying an insurance policy on the buyer of those cars.”

Even worse, according to the article, they knew the car had faulty brakes. Managers of the CDO’s were substituting bundles of mortgages that they knew full well were deeply troubled. Unethical behavior is strongly implicated. An observer notes that the banks should have to explain how they managed to buy protection from AIG primarily on securities that fell so sharply in value. “If these banks had insight into the underlying loans because they had relationships with banks, originators or servicers, that’s at the least unethical.”

GS received $14 billion from the government when AIG was bailed out; the New York Times also reportedthat GS also received substantially more money from the AIG bailout as a result of a prior agreement with Societe Generale, a French bank that also received AIG bailout money from the US government. Finally, the New York Fed promoted a cover-up that prevented this information from coming out sooner.

The article makes clear that there are still many details that remain unknown about these transactions.

David Brooks noted in the NYTimes,

Fifty years ago, the financial world was dominated by well-connected blue bloods who drank at lunch and played golf in the afternoons. Now financial firms recruit from the cream of the Ivy League. In 2007, 47 percent of Harvard grads went into finance or consulting. Yet would we say that banks are performing more ably than they were a half-century ago?

Quite clearly they are not. The rise of a Jewish elite in the US is problematic for a great many reasons — most obviously because the Jewish elite remains motivated by ethnic paranoia and hostility toward Western cultural traditions, particularly Christianity. However, the behavior of the financial elite in the case of the recent meltdown is not something one would expect to see in a healthy society. Quite a few of the details remain unknown, so that it is difficult to get a clear image of how individual Jews and Jewish networking contributed to the meltdown. (By all accounts [e.g., here], Robert Rubin, Larry Summers, and Alan Greenspan were instrumental in getting rid of regulations on trading derivatives that would have prevented the meltdown.) The indications that Goldman Sachs was at the center of the meltdown strongly suggests that the Jewish role was important. GS has not commented on Issa’s document or the Bloomberg article.

Nevertheless, at this point there is a strong suggestion that the financial elite behaved much more like an organized crime syndicate than as an elite with a sense of civic responsibility or commitment to the long term viability of the society. Whereas organized crime stems from the lower levels of society, this meltdown was accomplished at the very pinnacle of society — the Ivy League grads mentioned by Brooks, the wealthy financial firms and investment rating agencies, the strong connections with government that facilitated the bailout and failed to provide scrutiny while it was happening. It seems highly doubtful that all this would have happened with the former elite — the people whom Brooks disdainfully describes as “well-connected blue bloods who drank at lunch and played golf in the afternoons.”

Phillips concludes with a quotation from British colonial secretary, Joseph Chamberlain, made in 1904 to a gathering of his country’s financiers:

Granted that you are the clearinghouse of the world, [but] are you entirely beyond anxiety as to the permanence of your great position? . . . Banking is not the creator of our prosperity but is the creation of it. It is not the cause of our wealth, but it is the consequence of our wealth.

That is the problem going ahead. The US has sacrificed wealth-production in favor of finance, and this has doubtless resulted in huge financial rewards to a few people at the very top. But it’s really hard to see how most of us are going to benefit from this transformation in the long run. A society without a healthy, civic-minded elite is doomed.

Bookmark and Share

Jousting with CSULB students

The Daily 49er, the student newspaper at CSU-Long Beach, asked me write an op-ed giving my side of things. This was after a big push by radical students to my disrupt classes and get me fired, including quite a few letters and articles in the Daily 49er. My article is here. Whoever writes the headlines changed it from its original: “Academic left opposes free speech, academic freedom and the legitimate interests of White Americans” to “Academic ‘left’ opposes free speech, academic freedom.” ‘Left’ is now in quotes, suggesting, I guess, that it doesn’t really exist, and ignoring completely the main topic of the article: the legitimacy of White interests. The headline writer will go far in journalism.

Probably not a lot new about it, except I am trying to emphasize more how the left changed in the 1960s from being pro-working class to being pro-multicultural and pro-mass immigration. The deep structure there, although I don’t mention it in the article, is that the Jewish intellectual movements that became dominant had given up on the revolutionary potential of the White working class because they had supported fascism. The only solution was to import an entirely new people.

There are some interesting comments on the article. Two Mexican activists seem bent on getting rid of Whites as fast as possible. I should hope that would alert White students that their future is not too bright in Mexifornia if things continue as they are. Then there’s the one by Doug Kauffman. I think he’s the one who called me a Nazi in front of my students. He seems quite concerned about Jewish issues.

Bookmark and Share

Edmund Connelly: Steve Sailer gets it

Edmund Connelly: Now I’ve got more reason to like Steve Sailer. He recently showed again on his VDARE blog why I’ve recommended him so strongly. Recall my two columns last year recommending his work—see here and here. I really think he does a great job at quantitatively showing how Jews have become the new elite in our society. And he does a pretty good job at pointing to some Jewish behavior that the MSM doesn’t always want to acknowledge. 

His blog here paints a pretty clear picture again. His column is a coment David Brooks NYTimes column extolling the virtues of the new meritocracy compared to the bad old days when the WASPs ran the country. Brooks claims that “we have opened up opportunities for women, African-Americans, Jews, Italians, Poles, Hispanics and members of many other groups.”

In reality, however, the big winners from this “meritocracy” are Jews. Sailer points out that 

 In 2009, 35% of the Forbes 400 are from one ethnic group that makes up only 2% of the population. So, is “The Power Elite” really that much more diverse today?

If you break down Brooks’ list — “African-Americans, Jews, Italians, Poles, Hispanics”– by membership in the 2009 Forbes 400, you come up with:

African-Americans: 1 (Oprah)
Jews: 141
Italians: 14
Poles (and all other Eastern Europeans): 6
Hispanics: 2

Similarly, if you look at the 2009 Atlantic 50 ranking of most influential pundits, it’s half Jewish, versus 2% black and 0.5% Hispanic.

In other words, this increased “meritocratic diversity” among the elites that Brooks is writing about essentially consists of the rise of Jews over the last century.

The fact is that the new order is reasonably seen as less of a meritocracy than a new form of clubbiness where ethnic ties among Jews ease the way into top positions. Ethnic cohesion is certainly the main story of the Jewish academic and intellectual elite that constructed the Culture of Critique in the academic world, and the vast overrepresentation of Jews in the media elite mentioned by Sailer suggests it’s the same story there. Indeed, Jews are vastly overrepresented as students in elite academic institutions even controlling for IQ.

This new elite based on ethnic networking is at least as corrupt as the old WASP elite and its family ties. The new elite reacts with angry aggression and charges of “anti-Semitism” if one even mentions that they are in fact an elite.

The old elite had a sense of civic responsibility and national interest. As Sailer notes, the new elite seems to care nothing about the long term success of the society as a whole:

The unspoken implication of Brooks’ analyses is that American Jews should start thinking of themselves less as oppressed outcasts who need to go for whatever they can get while the getting is good, and start thinking of themselves more realistically as the core of the New American Establishment. Thus, American Jews should realize that, like the Protestant Establishment of yore, their privileged position as a de facto leadership caste bestows upon them corresponding duties to conserve the long-term well-being of the overall nation rather than to indulge in personal and ethnic profit and power maximization.

But the terrifying reality is that the Jewish ascendancy remains hostile to the traditional people and culture of America. Jews continue to earn like Episcopalians (actually more than Episcopalians) and vote like Puerto Ricans. They are the financial backbone of the Democratic Party and its coalition of non-White ethnic groups. (83% voted for Obama.) The organized Jewish community is a major pillar of support for massive, non-White immigration that will add 100 million non-Whites to the US in the next few decades.

The new elite is definitely not about conserving America for the long term success of the society as a whole. It’s about ethnic paranoia, ancient hatreds, and the desire to completely transform the society at the expense of its traditional people –elite and non-elite alike — at whatever the cost to the society as a whole. Hey, when it falls apart, just take the money and run to Israel.

Sailer makes it pretty clear that Brooks was not connecting the obvious dots: Since Jews took over America, things have definitely changed for the worse for White Americans.

Bookmark and Share

Edmund Connelly (email him) is a freelance writer, academic, and expert on the cinema arts. His most recent TOO article is “Farewell, My Dear WASP

"It’s Not the Arguments"

A recent TOO piece offered an argument for the importance of solid funding for the success of any media venture, TOO included. The basic idea is an important one to discuss — that high status confers influence. Indeed, the importance of high status is a critical ingredient of theories of influence in sociology, and psychologists have argued that attraction to high status is part of our evolutionary heritage.

We see this repeatedly in the key institutions throughout the West, including the media and the academic world. Jewish influence basically stems from their influence on all of the high ground of the culture. The revolution of the Left was a top-down revolution that began in the most prestigious academic and media institutions and then spread to the lower reaches of the media and the K-12 educational system.

For all its espousal of egalitarianism, the academic world is a hierarchical system in which the highest levels are rigorously policed to ensure ideological conformity because any leak in the system would mean that non-conformists would benefit from institutional prestige. This, of course, is exactly why John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt caused such a panic attack in the ranks of the Israel Lobby. Mearsheimer and Walt weren’t just two easy-to-ignore guys from some college no one heard of; nor were they members of an easily marginalized group, such as Arabs. They were well-known and academically productive professors from prestigious institutions — the University of Chicago and Harvard respectively. This resulted in a full-fledged smear campaign emphasizing “shoddy scholarship” (typically made by Jewish activist organizations or others without the least experience as scholars) and charges of being anti-Semites on a par with the authors of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. When all else fails, …

Another example is E. O. Wilson, the Harvard biologist who in 1975 stunned the academic left with the publication of Sociobiology: The New Synthesis. Wilson included a chapter applying evolutionary thinking to humans — a topic that had been expunged from the social sciences ever since the triumph of Boasian anthropology in the 1920s. Wilson was already well-known as an entomologist and ecologist, and his position at Harvard gave him immense authority.

The Left went into full-fledged moral panic mode, led by high-profile attacks from Richard Lewontin and Stephen Jay Gould — both of whom were also at Harvard and were discussed in Chapter 2 of Culture of Critique as examples of leftist Jewish intellectuals who undermined evolutionary and biological approaches in the social sciences.

The Israel Lobby and the Left won these battles ultimately. Politicians are loathe to cite Mearsheimer and Walt, and it is unthinkable that they could attain positions in the government where they could directly influence US foreign policy. Tamer versions of evolutionary psychology are tolerated, but arguments related to ethnic interests (Salter), the reality of ethnic and racial differences (Jensen, Lynn, Rushton), and my writing on Jewish influence on culture have been expunged from the mainstream media. I have sometimes thought that my ideas would be more influential if I held a position at Harvard. But the reality is that occasional lapses from decorum have been managed quite effectively.

The result is that Whites are intellectually and culturally insecure. Any cultural confidence they have must buck the tide of elite opinion which is constantly telling them they are racists who owe whatever success they have in life to “White privelege” or other inventions of the Left. As I noted elsewhere, “one of the greatest triumphs of the left has been to get people to believe that people who assert white identity and interests or who make unflattering portrayals of organized Jewish movements are morally degenerate, stupid, and perhaps psychiatrically disturbed. Obviously, all of these adjectives designate low status.”

The revolution may well begin because of the rage of non-elite Whites. But it won’t be successful until the elite bastions of anti-White opinion are breached. And that will not be an easy fight to win.

Bookmark and Share

AR Conference Cancellation: What About White Victims of Terrorism?

This weekend was to have been the American Renaissance conference, a fantastic gathering of white advocates from across the Western world.  Its cancellation was forced, as most know by now, because of pressure and terroristic threats received by three (or four?) hotels that were to have hosted.  The anti-white and left-wing elements are gleeful about this development, naturally.

I don’t personally know all the details, and this was actually the first of about four or five conferences in a row that I would have missed (financial reasons, in part).  So I’m casting about in the dark here, but here is what I would like to see.

1.  A thorough investigation by federal law enforcement.  Whether the FBI, the civil rights division at the Department of Justice (criminal or civil sections) or Homeland Security, this entire episode screams out for agents to look into what happened.  Imagine if the NAACP had to cancel a conference because of similar threats.  What would law enforcement’s reaction be?  Swift, fierce and overwhelming.  Law enforcement should set up a sting.  It would be so easy — and bound to catch someone, as the anti-whites are increasingly convinced they’re untouchable.  Yes, most white advocates laugh at the notion that the federal government would ever investigate crimes against us — but don’t be too sure.  Not everyone in federal law enforcement is sitting around itching for the death of the white race, believe me.

2.  Consideration by American Renaissance organizers of civil legal options.  A lawsuit against the hotels, against Fairfax County or D.C. government, against law enforcement, against One People’s Project — whoever else could be named.  Breach of contract, outrageous conduct, prima facie tort, tortious interference, interference with First Amendment rights of assembly and speech, interference with civil rights, emotional distress… you name it, there’s a cause of action, if not a hundred.  Who is this Daryle Jenkins?  Or Jeffrey Imm?  What do these men know about what happened?  Did they encourage illegal activity?  Or civilly tortious activity?  Who are their financial backers, and could those sources be reached?  This option may go nowhere, but it’s worth thinking about.  As a civil defense attorney, I saw the absolute fire-bombing a plaintiff’s attorney could accomplish with nothing but a well-pleaded complaint and discovery.  If you can lay waste to a company because one employee claims sexual harassment — bringing the CEO on down to the cleaning lady in for day-long depositions — imagine what else you could do.

3.  Coverage by the press.  The press hates white advocacy, but they love a juicy story.  “White supremacist conference cancelled” is a juicy story, and there are plenty of people to talk to and comment.  A good reporter should do some digging around.  He (or she) might come up with gold.  If not the NYT, how about the Village Voice?  If there’s no legal recourse here, this must at least be known to the general public, who can usually be expected to say “I don’t agree with those guys, but they should have the right to speak.”  We as white advocates cannot let this incident go undocumented and forgotten, like a modern-day Katyn.  Are you listening out there, journalists?  Jared Taylor will speak to the press, and Lord knows the SPLC will, too.  It’s all packaged up and ready to go… unless, of course, you actually have zero sympathy for white advocates being prevented from meeting, and actively seek to suppress that story because it would present them in too sympathetic a light.  I will be watching, I can assure you.  And I know damn well some of you know about this incident.

4.  Strategizing by white advocates about how to stop this in the future.  This has already been going on, and lots of good ideas have come out, like more-public (i.e., government-run) or private venues.

What’s so depressing about this episode is that it can’t really be called a “wake-up call” for white advocates.  We already know exactly how marginalized we are.  We know exactly what the stiff consequences are for standing up publicly on these issues.  We’ve seen violence against our people.  We’ve seen our people fired from their jobs.  We can’t get paid ads run in publications.  We know CPAC wouldn’t allow us a table.  So, this really is a hard blow.

Could the speakers have their comments recorded and uploaded to the AmRen site for youtube-style viewing?

Christopher Donovan is the pen name of an attorney and former journalist. Email him.

Bookmark and Share

Second Fundraising Appeal: Why support The Occidental Observer?

Kevin MacDonald: The United States is headed for a political crisis. Patrick Buchanan wonders “Is this how democracy ends?”  Debt is skyrocketing and it is politically impossible for the Democrats or Republicans to deal with it — at least partly because of the rage of the tea partiers. These are the middle and lower middle class Whites who feel that the country is being taken away from them.

On the other hand, while rage builds among the middle and lower middle class Whites, the message has not reached educated Whites. George Will points out that the Republican Party “recently has become ruinously weak among highly educated whites.”

The Republican Party can’t win without their populist base, and yet it’s virtually certain that the Republicans will do nothing to give them what they really need. The Beltway Conservatives don’t even mention immigration as an issue, even though, as the Center for Immigration Studies tells us, wherever immigrants settle the percentage of the vote going to Republicans has declined. The Republican Party has become a White party. Whatever short term successes they have — and they figure to do well this year by milking the rage and the money of the tea partiers, they are doomed to electoral defeat in the long run.

American politics has become racialized. The United States and the rest of the Western world are undergoing an existential crisis. Our culture is coming under intense pressure with the rise of multiculturalism and continuing high levels of non-White immigration. We can see the changes all around us, and yet discussion of public policy related to these issues in the mainstream media is contained within a hopelessly narrow space.

We at The Occidental Observer are determined to change this. In this, our second fundraising appeal, we are asking readers to contribute financially to TOO’s success and increased visibility. It is important to get our message out in the most professional manner possible.

Western societies have become cauldrons of competing ethnic groups where only one group — White people of European descent — may not explicitly assert their interests.  The tea partiers want something like the America they grew up in, but they may not say this because they will be tagged as racists by the media. These people are being pushed out economically and politically. They are less able to avoid the costs of multiculturalism: They can’t move to gated communities or send their children to all-White private schools. Their unions have been destroyed and their jobs either shipped overseas or performed by recent immigrants, legal and illegal.

But without direction and leadership, this movement will not be effective. The fact is that the domination of the mass media and the academic world by elites that are hostile to White identity and interests makes it very difficult for educated Whites to sign on to a White ethnonationalist movement. Such people are often vulnerable to economic pressures where they work, and, as college-educated people, they have a respect for mainstream academic and media institutions. Having been treated fairly in general, they trust the integrity of the basic institutions of the society. They identify with its basic ideology — America as emerging from its long dark night of evil into the glorious goodness and virtue of the multicultural future.

The Occidental Observer occupies a unique space on the Internet because it attempts to appeal to educated Whites. There is simply no other outlet that discusses the full range of issues related to White survival and interests with the same level of intelligence and intellectual honesty that can be found here. All of the theory and the data are on our side. There is no reason at all why educated Whites cannot be persuaded to see the world as we do and to explicitly advocate for a White identity and for White interests.

It is no secret that many of our articles deal with Jewish power and influence. Jews have become a financial, media, and academic elite, and the organized Jewish community is a pillar of the multicultural left that has transformed Western societies. The multicultural left has abandoned the White middle and working classes in favor of promoting policies that will completely eclipse the people and culture of traditional America. An important theme of many of our articles  has been that Jewish influence in the media has resulted in the denigration of all of our cultural traditions, especially the strong Christian religious traditions of our people. It has resulted in invidious portrayals of White people and their accomplishments that have become internalized among a very large number of our people.

Educated Whites must realize that whatever their current prosperity, their long term prospects for themselves and their children are going to be severely compromised in multicultural America. It makes no sense whatever for these people to ally themselves with the looming non-White majority and against the great majority of their own people.

This is a very difficult topic to discuss fairly and honestly. A large part of the problem is that even well-argued, factually-based discussions of Jewish power and influence are typically labeled “anti-Semitic” and are banned from mainstream discussion. The occasional lapses from this public decorum are aggressively policed by an imposing array of well-financed activist organizations. These organizations have no scruples about ruining careers or doing whatever else they see as necessary to maintain the status quo. They typically operate by creating moral panics aimed at shutting down any discussion of Jewish power and any discussion of the Jewish role in the decline of Whites in America and other Western societies.

Prior to the Internet, it was possible to relegate all discussions of Jewish power and influence to the fringes of the culture. But that is no longer the case. The Occidental Observer has a place on the web that is just as accessible as the New York Times or the Washington Post.

It doesn’t take billions or even millions of dollars to develop a presence in this new medium. But it does require a sound financial foundation. We have set up TOO on a shoe-string budget. The great majority of the writing and all of the technical work have been done as a labor of love by people who are self-motivated to contribute to this effort.

We have posted some exceptional material within these constraints. But volunteer labor can only go so far. Good writers are a rarity. For the reasons discussed above, It is difficult to find writers with the requisite expertise and commitment to the historical American nation and the West. It is only natural that writers would appreciate some compensation — even if it is far less than they would need to earn a living. Quite simply, they need the money.

Huge numbers of readers are not critical for our success. The anti-White revolution that has so far triumphed in America has been a top-down phenomenon. The next revolution will also likely be a top-down phenomenon in which ideas that are completely outside the mainstream are disseminated and gradually take hold among people who can make a difference, whether because they have money, writing ability, or skills in the political arena. 

The point is not how many people are reading TOO, although we are certainly growing in readership. (This pdf file of readership from February, 2009 through January 2010 shows that around 2500 unique users per day in the most recent month — over twice the readership of a year ago.)

The point is that some of the people reading it may be able to make a difference in the future.

I ask for your support on behalf of The Occidental Observer’s dedicated writers.

A significant number of small donations make a huge difference. Realize that at this time we are not a 501C3 tax-deductible organization.

At present, we have several ways to make donations. Click on this link.

Thank you.

Kevin MacDonald, Editor

Kevin MacDonald (Email him) is Editor of The Occidental Observer and is Professor of Psychology at California State University–Long Beach.