Hollywood's Last White Nationalist

If you're the sort who lets the fickle proclivities of film critics affect your judgment of the actual quality of movies, you've surely concluded that M. Night Shyamalan's talents have been in a state of sad and hopeless decline for nearly a decade.

The same cultural commissars who unanimously praised The Sixth Sense (1999) and generally approved of Unbreakable (2000) and Signs (2002) began to turn on their once-favored cinematic prodigy when The Village was released in 2004; since that pivotal turning point in elite collective taste, they have never looked back. It is as though the India-born, Philadelphia-raised director has committed some unforgivable cinematic sin against the Holy Ghost, as far as critics are concerned -- one suspects that even if he were to deliver the next Citizen Kane or Vertigo, it would still be greeted with a sour, bitter, contemptuous hate-loogie from the representative sampling of scribblers at Rotten Tomatoes, and the kind of accompanying astronomically low "rotten" score on the "tomato-meter" usually reserved for Pauly Shore or Larry the Cable Guy joints.

In point of fact, however, Shyamalan's latest, The Last Airbender, an adaptation of the popular fantasy anime series, is his first truly "bad" film. While visually stunning, Airbender features wince-inducing acting and dialogue, along with a convoluted plot and an overall pomposity of tone that even drains it of any charm it might otherwise possess. But of course, the real tempest in a teapot surrounding this big-budget summer film (which did surprisingly well in its first week of release, given the bloodsucking competition from Eclipse as well as the requisite critical bloodletting that follows any Shyalman release) is something unrelated to questions of its filmic worthiness. Rather, it concerns the "race-bending" the director daringly employed in the making of Airbender, casting young white actors in roles presumed to have been meant for Asians.

Numerous commentators have railed against Shyamalan for his alleged -- what else? -- "racism" and insensitivity. For his part, Shyamalan has somewhat petulantly argued back that as a nonwhite director, he can't truly be racist, and that his critics are the real racists for choosing to attack him in such a manner. A careful examination of Shyamalan's cinematic canon, however, renders his "nothing to see here; move along" stance on this controversy somewhat disingenuous. Even leaving the racial politics of Airbender aside, it is easy to discern a certain subversively pro-white sensibility manifesting itself throughout the entire M. Night oeuvre.

For one thing, in an age where multiculturalism is all the rage, and everyone feels pressure to show he's "down" with people of other races, Shyamalan unflinchingly sticks with white characters in predominantly white settings, in which sensitive yet stoic white heroes win the day.

Think of Bruce Willis in Sixth Sense and Unbreakable, Joaquin Phoenix in Signs and The Village, or Mark Wahlberg in The Happening. Though black, Hispanic, and Asian faces are occasionally seen, the Philadelphian auteur appears utterly uninterested in bending over backwards to fill any type of racial quota in his films.

In fact, M. Night scarcely seems interested in non-whites at all. Looking over the casts of nearly all of his films, one is struck by their relentless Caucasoidian orientation. The only black character of any importance is Samuel L. Jackson's in Unbreakable, and he (it is worth noting) turns out to be the villain.  The only Hispanic of note is the exceedingly white-looking John Leguizamo in The Happening, who plays Mark Wahlberg's buddy and gets killed off halfway through. A certain loudly-squabbling North Asian mother and daughter serve as broadly comic relief in Lady in the Water, but are of little relevance to the plot; like the numerous Asian extras in The Last Airbender, they show up briefly, deliver a few lines, and then are gone.

The only non-white race that occasionally plays a significant role is Shyamalan's own: the high-caste "Aryan" Indian: dark-skinned but statuesque, lordly, and aristocratic. In Lady in the Water, Shyamalan himself appears as a man who has written a brilliant book that will soon change the course of history and usher in a reign of peace and goodwill.

(Critics pounced on this moment as instance of Shyamalan's runaway egotism on display, not suspecting that he may have simply been ironically riffing on his own reputation for narcissism, winking at the camera all the while.) In Airbender, high-caste Aryan Indians appear en masse as a race of arrogant, imperious and domineering "fire people," who aim to usurp the authority of the gods and rule the world in their place. The white characters in the movie, by contrast, seek to restore balance between the various races of the earth by doing their best to repel the nefarious, genocidal designs of the "fire kingdom."

But certainly the most blatant example of Shyamalan's partiality to whites is on display in The Village, which also happens to be his most powerful film to date. Here, the story revolves around a group of Caucasians who flee modern life and crime-filled urban settings in order to start a utopian pastoral community in the midst of a deep forest. The group even adopts traditional Victorian-era clothes and cultivates formal, old-style manners of speech in order to inculcate an atmosphere of virtue and goodness (the audience at first thinks the film is set around 120 year ago, before a "twist" reveals that it's all happening in the present).

The Village -- whose praises I have sung elsewhere -- is many things at once: a cerebral monster movie, a parable on the nature of innocence and evil, and a sensitive examination of the permissibility of extreme responses to rampant social and moral decay. But it is also, ineluctably, a generally sympathetic treatise on white separatism. The prevalence of violent crime in what the Villagers call "the towns" is relentlessly invoked throughout the movie, at times in horrifying detail; one would need to be dense indeed to escape the suggestion that this all-white group, formerly from downtown Philadelphia, set up their rural colony in part to escape victimization at the hands of urban blacks.

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 Alternative Right readers will recognize that I do not point out these aspects of M. Night Shyamalan's aesthetic tendencies to condemn him. An artist must follow his muse, chase what interests him. For whatever set of reasons, this highly talented and largely misunderstood filmmaker of Eastern heritage seems largely taken with white, Western men, women, and children, and moreover enjoys portraying such people in a sympathetic and heroic light. One is almost tempted to express gratitude that someone has such inclinations in our day and age. Yet it should not escape our irony-detector that the one person most fearlessly treading this artistic path in plain sight is non-white himself.

Black Professor Opposes Disparate Impact

Black Harvard Law Professor Randall Kennedy doesn't believe the new tax on tanning is discriminatory.

Mention the new "tan tax" in a major news outlet and cries of discrimination and reverse racism often follow.

The complaint surfaced on reader comment boards to blogs and news Web sites back in December, when it became clear that the levy -- a 10 percent surcharge on the use of ultraviolet tanning beds -- was likely to be included in the new health-care overhaul bill. Since then, it's been repeated by conservative commentators such as Rush Limbaugh and Doc Thompson, a fill-in host for Glenn Beck who intoned in March, "I now know the pain of racism."

When an article about the fallout from the tax -- which took effect last week -- appeared on the Washington Post's Web site Wednesday, dozens of commenters questioned the tax's legality.

The case can seem deceptively simple: Since patrons of tanning salons are almost exclusively white, the tax will be almost entirely paid by white people and, therefore, violates their constitutional right to equal protection under the law.

But does the argument have any merit? Not remotely said Randall Kennedy, a professor at Harvard Law School specializing in racial conflict and law.

"There is no constitutional problem at all, because a plaintiff would have to show that the government intended to disadvantage a particular group, not simply that the group is disadvantaged in effect," he said.

That’s the exact opposite position that the government takes when it comes to anti-discrimination and affirmative action laws.

As Steve Sailer has explained, if you give a test that whites do too much better on than blacks the Feds may want to come and know why, and they won’t need a shred of evidence that you intended any discrimination. It's called disparate impact.  

I believe that if the tax was on hair weaves our Harvard professor would take a different view.

All that being said, I detest whites who tan.

White Women, Dark Children

Why are American white women so anxious to adopt a “dusky little heathen” child from the Third World?

It’s the latest fad of the White Woman Saviour, and it carries high status. A white American women must adopt a Third World child (preferably a non-white) to really keep up with the savior image. It’s a grand American tradition, dating back to the early 19th century Christian missions. Only today, you don’t have to be Christian at all. You just have to be white, female, (and preferably single). Look at Laura Ingraham, famous “conservative” radio talk show host. One child (Maria, a Guatamalan girl) wasn’t enough. She had to adopt a Russian boy, Dmitri.

So what are the real issues involved is this social phenomenon?

White women are obviously still operating on the grand old Christian missionary template. But what about the “single mom” bit? Is that an extra, thrown in to aggrandize the nobility of motherhood? Is that about self or about the child? What happened to the father figure? Is that not important any more? Ingraham is quite forthright about her Christianity (Catholic). Is the father figure not in that picture?

And why the craze for foreign babies? America has plenty of “home grown” infants and children available. Shouldn’t an American patriot mother’s first concern be for American babies? Why the rush to bring alien children here? Are Third World (or even European) countries anxiously adopting American children? Of course not. Let’s be honest: America is the dream country. America is where everyone wants to come. America is the place they want their children to come.

Angelina Jolie really dramatized the role of the American white woman savior grabbing up the darkest, blackest babies, from deepest, darkest, most miserable Africa (as well as Cambodian, Vietnamese, and possibly Syrian). She and Madonna. That’s the extreme, of course. That is the zenith of the white woman savior image. Shall we not ask, however, why she didn’t adopt an American Negro child, if race was the issue? Or why not simply adopt an American white child? Is there something wrong with that? Or, is it not dramatic enough to suit the heroic vision of self-importanc? Do these white women have any knowledge, or even concern, about the foreign child’s present and future feelings, or the adopted child’s psychological development?

It is difficult to avoid the immediate conclusion that these American white woman saviors are acting out their own sense of superiority and advantage. (Some might say, guilt, but, that’s not too likely.) They are romatically reaching out to the farthest corners of the globe to save a desperately lost and innocent child. What could be more noble, more heroic, more American? (Key focus here is on “noble”, and “heroic,” that is to say, on the woman’s feelings.)

Alas, it doesn’t always work out so well. One white woman savior family in Shelbyville, Tennessee figured they got a bad deal, and sent their little alien angel back to Siberia. Russia threatens to suspend all American adoptions? Please! A great blessing it would be. What do we need 61,600 Russian kids over here for? What about the American kids that need adoption? May all foreign countries quickly follow Russia’s suit. No more non-American babies adopted by Americans!

This whole international adoption routine is all a social status scheme. It insults all countries, who love to hate America anyway– while obviously trying to take every possible advantage of America. Americans disgrace America when they fall into this flesh fad of adopting foreigners. Sure, there are some wonderful stories. Fairy tale stories. It truly is a splendorous dream, and it has worked out beautifully in some cases, or certainly as well as anyone could ever expect when a child is taken from its home and put in another, foreign home, and of a dramatically different race.

But that’s not really the point. This is about nationalism, or, we should say, patriotism versus individualism. The individual fantasy can, unfortunately, often override the good of the community, or the country. It is as if a white woman savior sees America as the best nest of the world, and she wants to bring up the worst of the worst here. This makes her feel, in fact, patriotic. What more noble thing could an American white woman do? Yet, objectively, in terms of the America, this “customary” call for the world’s most unfortunate needs to be reevaluated–especially when there are American-born children in dire straights. Is it less patriotic for an American woman to reach out to Americans?

I think we can dispense with the foreign vision at this point. Our Kenyan President has certainly reduced the American image to one disdained, having offended just about every important country in the world, and having done little or nothing for those in greatest need. Barry “Obama” Soetoro, as the great Black Father has done everything he can to denigrate America (and glorify himself), so that foreign countries see America only as a free ticket to a home, a Cadillac, and a college education–while these things must be denied white Americans.

America has had enough of foreigners. Take it from an Indian. It is time to close the doors. Nationhood demands it. No one would ever expect a Kenyan to become tribal chairman of the Arapaho, or a Nigerian to become chief of the Cheyenne. No one would expect a Saudi Arabian to become Prime Minister of Israel. Yes, an alien, lying black African became president of the United States–but that’s only because of the white liberal Communist traitors manipulating their way into power. It isn’t because it was the right, moral thing to do. It was an Oedipal thing to do. It was, collectively, a Freudian thing to do, perverted, self-destructive, and uneducated.

I say American white woman should adopt American white children. This business of bringing in the “dusky little heathen” is racism. It is an incredibly careless, selfish move, actually. It is bad for the child, and for the country. Yes, it is a noble instinct in the American white woman. It truly is. But, it is gone awry at this point, and needs advice and guidance.

Perhaps the white race needs some humility at this point. The white woman should honor her own white race. Does she feel above race? Does she really feel so suprior to other races as to save them? I say her white “racial” capital has used up. She needs to love her own race. If she doesn’t, she is a curse to the country. Beware.

"...and I was angry at white people"

It was really only a matter of time before Righteous Black Rage was used as a defense in a rape trial.  

Why We'd Fear Black Militias

They’ve found a new double standard.

Imagine that the inauguration of President George W. Bush had sparked an explosive rise in African American militia groups. Suppose thousands of heavily armed black men began gathering at training camps in wooded areas throughout the country, devising military tactics for "taking back their country" after what they believed was an electoral coup.

Do you think Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney would have reacted to a black militaristic buildup as coolly as President Obama has to the phenomenal growth of white militias?

Since Obama took office last year, the number of white militias has shot up from about 170 to more than 500, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, which monitors extremist groups in the United States. Armed with enough firepower to take on a police department, some of these groups are honing their sniper skills using photographs of Obama for target practice.

They cling to the delusion that the nation's first black president is somehow a subversive working for Muslim extremists, and they aim to bring him down.

"If the people we saw running around armed to the teeth were black, I think their organizations would be destroyed in a matter of hours," Mark Potok, director of the Southern Poverty Law Center's Intelligence Project, told me. "If people saw on their TV screens photos of black militia members shooting at images of a white president, I don't think they would last."

First of all there are black armed organizations called street gangs and they’re killing more people this hour than any white organization will in the next ten years.  We don’t see them training in the woods because that requires too much planning and coordination.

But the point may be that street gangs aren’t generally political and as far as that goes there is a double standard on the militia issue.  There are a few legitimate reasons for this.  The first is that whites have a history of responsible firearms use.  There are rural parts of America where young children are given guns to take care of.  If they tried that in the inner cities they’d need dump trucks to clear the bodies each weekend.  We have a prudent fear of black men with guns that no amount of political correctness will ever beat out of us.

The second thing we have to consider is what kind of ideology a black militia would have.  Presumably it would be socialist and for forced integration.  In contrast to whites with their guns who want to be left alone, looting and aggression would be the raison d'être of any black armed force which thought the Republicans were white supremacists holding them down.  We’d fear them more than any group with a libertarian ideology and rightfully so.

Black Men Can't Kick

Soccer -- fútbol, Fußball, futebol, football -- is the world’s most popular sport, and literally hundreds of millions of people are now watching the 2010 World Cup. The championship has also attracted the interest of many non-sports fans since it’s being held in South Africa and marks the first ever World Cup held on the African continent.

The media coverage of the event -- at least the American coverage on ABC and ESPN --monotonously details the alleged evils of apartheid and the glories of the Soweto riots.  Various segments between matches portray Nelson Mandela as little short of a god and faithfully follow Hollywood’s White Devils/Black Angels script. Needless to say, there is no discussion of ANC terrorism or the murders of over 4,000 white farmers since the end of apartheid.

Race is also on display on the pitch and for all the talk of diversity, multiculturalism, and a global community, most of the 32 teams in the field feature racially exclusive teams.

European and South American teams dominate world soccer and have won every single World Cup. But to make the event a truly global affair, there are quotas for each region so that everyone feels represented.

I watched each opening round game and noted the races of all 11 starters for each squad. All five sub-Saharan Africa squads (Nigeria, South Africa, Ivory Coast, Ghana and Cameroon) start all blacks. All three Asian teams (Japan, South Korea and North Korea) start all Asians. The one North African team (Algeria) starts all Arabs. The eastern European teams (Slovenia, Slovakia, and Serbia) start all whites.

Australia and New Zealand are not soccer powers but each qualified this year. Australia starts an all white team and New Zealand starts 10 whites and one aboriginal (probably a Maori).

Latin American teams are a mixed bag racially, much like the region itself. The races of some of the players are often hard to pinpoint. Are they mestizos or darker skinned whites of Portuguese or Spanish descent?

The three white nations of Latin America start mostly white sides. Argentina starts nine or 10 whites with one or maybe two mestizos. Uruguay starts nine whites with one clear mestizo and one clear Negro. Chile starts seven or eight whites with three or four mestizos.

Mexico and Paraguay have a starting 11 consisting of a mixture of whites and mestizos.  Honduras starts eight mestizos and, surprising, three blacks.

Brazil starts four whites and seven players who are black or racially mixed.

The United States again made the tournament and has a decent shot of advancing to the next round of 16. Racially, the team starts seven whites and four blacks. Mestizos are now about 15 percent of the U.S. population, but there are only three Hispanics on the team and one of them -- Carlos Bocanegra -- is clearly a white Hispanic. The two mestizos are backups and there are no Asians or Middle Easterners on the U.S. squad. The U.S. is being overwhelmed with millions of soccer-mad immigrants every year. Why aren’t these people making the national team?

So far, most nations of the world have teams that racially represent their people. Black Africans, Asians, Arabs, and Eastern Europeans (God bless ‘em) can support teams that reflect them 100 percent. Whites in Australia and New Zealand can still proudly support a team that looks like them.

Blacks are overrepresented on the Brazilian side, but most Latin American nations have squads that reflect their racial demographics. Americans are no doubt used to blacks being overrepresented on national sports teams, but the current squad has enough whites so that it is not viewed as alien -- like the often all-black U.S. national basketball team.

We are constantly told that multiculturalism and diversity are unalloyed blessings. But of course, white nations are the only countries that are enjoying these blessings -- and it is starting to show in the national squads of the Western European teams.

Italy has won four World Cups including the last one in 2006. They cling stubbornly to the view that Italians don’t need blacks to win World Cups and still start an all-white (and, with one exception, all-Italian) side. This year’s team is pretty old and may not be a threat to win it all. But it will no doubt go far into the tournament.

Germany has won three World Cups and is always a threat to win it all. This year’s starting squad can be described -- depending on your definition of white -- as either all-white or as nine whites and two Turks. Like Italy, the Germans have stubbornly resisted starting supposedly superior black players.

France has shown no such resistance. Historically not a soccer power, they won their only World Cup in 1998 with four black starters and apparently attributed the victory to having more blacks. They have consistently fielded seven blacks starters since and this year is no exception as the four true Frenchmen who start for France stand out on the pitch. The French side represents Africa and not the traditional French nation. Happily, the side is beset with squabbling and will probably go home early this year.

England won their only World Cup in 1966 with an all-white side but is perhaps going the way of France. They started a bare majority of whites over blacks in their first round game. They may start 7 whites for the next game but the team is trending black. Perhaps if England is bounced from the tournament in the first round it will change things. The team disappointed in a first round draw versus the U.S.

Spain is the favorite to win the whole thing. Like the Italians, the Spanish are all white and have found great success lately. The winners of the 2008 European Cup are loaded with talent but inexplicably lost to Switzerland in the first round. If they can regroup and win their first World Cup it will be another major argument against the Africanization of European soccer.

Portugal also has an outside chance to win the whole tournament. Led by the great Cristiano Ronaldo, the squad starts 10 whites and one black.

The Greeks round out a solid Southern European contingent with an all-white side.

A few years ago, the Netherlands seemed on the verge of becoming another France. This year’s squad starts nine whites but has several black substitutes who will see playing time. Like Portugal, they have an outside shot at winning the World Cup.

Denmark has 10 whites and one black who distinguished himself by accidentally hitting the ball into his own net and losing the first game for the Danes.

Switzerland starts two blacks and an Arab. But the team still retains an overall European identity and pulled a huge upset over Spain in the first round of games.

By looking at the 32 squads we can learn some lessons in terms of race, immigration, and demographics. Because of immigration, the complexion of Western Europe is changing, and it is showing up in the composition of soccer teams that used to be all-white up even into the 1990s.

Since only white nations let in millions of people of different races, they are the only countries to be effected by demographic change. Asians, Africans (both Arab and black) and mestizos can be sure their national soccer teams will always represent them. If Eastern Europe can hold the line on immigration, they can also be confident that their teams will always reflect them as well.

Australia, New Zealand and the U.S. are also being heavily hit by Third World immigration, though it has yet to have a major impact on the complexion of their squads. But for how long?

Another lesson is that it is mainly blacks who are changing the face of the Western European soccer teams. There are many more Arabs and Middle Easterners in France and the Netherlands than blacks. Why are these significant minorities absent from the starting lineups? In England, there are many more Pakistanis, Indians, and Bangladeshis than blacks. Yet they are not represented on the national team. As noted, mestizos and Asians have yet to make an impact on the U.S. side.

A proper HBD response might be that blacks are better athletes than whites, and much better athletes than Arabs, Asians, and mestizos. But that is certainly not reflected in the World Cup results. All-black African sides are losers who have never come close to contending for the World Cup, though soccer is universally played throughout the Dark Continent. Some might say they need better training and coaching, but all black African teams are currently coached by whites. Even the Asian sides usually outplay the all-black nations. Though they enjoy home field advantage, the record of the all-black teams at this writing is a pathetic one win, four losses, and two draws. It is possible that none will advance to the next round of 16.

On a more political note, I noted the typically fawning news coverage the media have given South Africa. They have not been too curious about the robberies of players and fans and the killings (one victim was Nelson Mandela’s great granddaughter, which kept him from the opening ceremonies) that have occurred around the event.

Several commentators have referred to the “the rainbow nation” of South Africa without wondering why the national team is all black. This is especially ironic as the ANC has mandated quotas for the sport of rugby to ensure some black representation in this white-dominated sport.

On a positive note, it looks as though this year’s champion will be a nation with an all-white or almost all-white side. Argentina and Germany looked particularly good in the first round of play and Spain, Portugal, Holland and the Italians cannot be counted out. Only Brazil, with a racially mixed squad, will threaten white dominance of the World Cup this year.

Let’s enjoy it while it lasts.

Feds Demand Balkanization

The Federal Government is taking steps to make sure Americans vote sufficiently along racial lines.

PORT CHESTER, N.Y. — Arthur Furano voted early – five days before Election Day. And he voted often, flipping the lever six times for his favorite candidate. Furano cast multiple votes on the instructions of a federal judge and the U.S. Department of Justice as part of a new election system crafted to help boost Hispanic representation.

Voters in Port Chester, 25 miles northeast of New York City, are electing village trustees for the first time since the federal government alleged in 2006 that the existing election system was unfair. The election ends Tuesday and results are expected late Tuesday.

Although the village of about 30,000 residents is nearly half Hispanic, no Latino had ever been elected to any of the six trustee seats, which until now were chosen in a conventional at-large election. Most voters were white, and white candidates always won.

Federal Judge Stephen Robinson said that violated the Voting Rights Act, and he approved a remedy suggested by village officials: a system called cumulative voting, in which residents get six votes each to apportion as they wish among the candidates. He rejected a government proposal to break the village into six districts, including one that took in heavily Hispanic areas...

Vote coordinator Martha Lopez said that if turnout is higher than in recent years, when it hovered around 25 percent, the election would be a success – regardless of whether a Hispanic was elected.

"I think we'll make it," she said. "I'm happy to report the people seem very interested."

But Randolph McLaughlin, who represented a plaintiff in the lawsuit, said the goal was not merely to encourage more Hispanics to vote but "to create a system whereby the Hispanic community would be able to nominate and elect a candidate of their choice."

That could be a non-Hispanic, he acknowledged, and until exit polling is done, "it won't be known for sure whether the winners were Hispanic-preferred."

Is there nothing too petty for Holder’s Justice Department?  A little town of 30,000 needs to have its election rigged so Hispanics win?

This is a perfect example of why conservatives who approve of mass immigration from the third world aren’t thinking hard enough.  No non-racial issue could ever prompt the feds to look into the voting practices of a small village.  And on no non-racial issue would conservatives be such push overs.  

That means that if the Hispanic population is growing the only way for this not to lead to bigger government is for conservatives to stop being scared of the “racist” charge.  Since at this point this seems like the most unlikely thing in the world we will have see the state usurp more and more power.  

Those able to think for ourselves read stories like this noticing these patterns and assume that others must be coming to the same conclusions.  But your average Joe Sickpack or even movement conservatism isn't very good at putting seemingly unrelated stories about school achievement gaps, voting rights legislation, healthcare disparities, etc. together.  He needs to have things spelled out for him and right now nobody's opposing the multicultural state from a libertarian or classical liberal position, much less a racialist one.  Not Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck or Michelle Malkin. Not Tea Party radicals who wear wigs and carry assault rifles.  Not the Ron Paul movement (notice Rand Paul denying that his position on private discrimination is anything but hypothetical as if the state is race nuteral today).  The 99% of conservative leaning America that doesn't read Alternative Right, VDare or Steve Sailer has no idea this is going on. 

For these reasons, I don't believe that the Left has come close to maximizing the benefits it could potentially derive from racial politics.

While ads like Rick Barber’s are encouraging, it’s fascinating how people will hint at secession and revolution but not even mention in their litany of complaints against the state the Diversity Jacobinism Washington imposes on us. I predict that liberals will come to rely on racial egalitarianism more and more as an excuse for a powerful, centralized state.  Raise taxes?  White America erupts.  Add a new entitlement program?  They start showing up with guns at rallies telling you that they’re going to take their country back.  Require private businesses to discriminate against whites and all but set up a quota system for election results?  Listen to the crickets chirping! If you find one area of your enemy's defense line completely undefended-or better yet, the enemy refuses to notice when you attack him there-and resistance everywhere else is fanatical the decision of where to send the bulk of your army is a very easy one.

Immigration: Secession Is The Solution

It is often amusing to observe the attempts of left-wing proponents of “immigrants’ rights” to depict themselves as noble defenders of the oppressed and downtrodden against tyrannical and exploitive elites. As is often the case with leftists, reality diverges sharply from their beliefs. There are few issues where elite opinion and the views of “the common people” are more in conflict than on the immigration issue, and “the people” come down firmly against open borders. One study on this question from 2002, and commissioned by no less than the Council on Foreign Relations, indicated that among others discrepancies between elite and popular opinion, 60 percent of the public regards the present level of immigration to be a "critical threat to the vital interests of the United States," compared to only 14 percent of the nation’s leadership, a 46 percentage point gap.” The study concluded that “even on such divisive issues as globalization or strengthening the United Nations, the public and the elite are much closer together than they are on immigration.” Of course, the first epithet to be thrown against advocates of immigration restriction is “racist.” Yet, the research shows that a majority of each of America’s largest minority groups likewise opposes open borders. Sixty-eight percent of African-Americans, fifty-seven percent of Asian-Americans, fifty-six percent of Hispanics, and fifty-percent of Jews agree that immigration rates are too high at present. Plenty of voices that are critical of mass immigration can be found among other minority ethnic groups as well.

The principal reason for the sharp difference between public and elite opinion on this issue is that immigration policy as presently constituted involves an upward redistribution of wealth, power, and resources. Mass immigration involves the suppression of wage levels by increasing the supply of labor, provides clients for social services bureaucrats and other public sector institutions, creates additional constituents for political parties, and new recruits for ethnic lobbies. The ideological interests of self-congratulatory cultural elites are likewise enhanced. All of this is well-known, of course. Yet, the degree to which immigration is directly enhanced and subsidized outright by the state is often underestimated. An article by Rob Freeman at The Occidental Quarterly provides a shocking overview of how deeply ingrained into the system this situation actually is. It is a situation that imposes great costs on ordinary people in terms of lower wages and higher unemployment, taxes, diminished quality of schools and other public institutions, reduced availability of social services, crime and increased ethnic conflict, loss of community cohesion, neighborhood blight, and eventual demographic overrun and cultural dispossession. In other words, open borders is essentially a tool of class warfare being waged by elites against the peasants, i.e. us ordinary people. Sam Francis coined the term “anarcho-tyranny” to refer to this system whereby the state demands the authority to intrude into areas of society previously or traditionally recognized as inviolable, while slacking on the job with regards to the traditional or conventional responsibilities of government, e.g. crime control and border defense.

Imagine a scenario where immigration is taken out of the hands of elites and made accountable to public opinion, say, along the lines of the Swiss system as Srdja Trifkovic has described it:

Switzerland has the toughest naturalization rules in Europe. If you want to become Swiss you must live in the country legally for at least 12 years—and pay taxes, and have no criminal record—before you can apply for citizenship. It still does not mean that your wish will be granted, however, and the fact that you were born in Zurich or Lugano does not make any difference. There are no "amnesties" and illegals are deported if caught. Even if an applicant satisfies all other conditions, the local community in which he resides has the final say: it can interview the applicant and hold a public vote before naturalization is approved. If rejected he can apply again, but only after ten years.

If every city, town, or county in the United States were suddenly granted veto power over immigration or naturalization requests, we can be relatively certain that mass immigration would end overnight. Virtually all of the “red counties” depicted on the typical electoral map would halt immigration tomorrow, and so would most of the majority-black big cities. This would leave only trendy liberal areas like Santa Cruz or Madison, border areas where immigrants and their immediate descendents are already a majority, and plutocratic/bureaucratic headquarters like New York, L.A. and D.C., to continue with the “come one, come all” approach. Of course, the Swiss model would never be allowed under the present federal leviathan, so its implementation would have to be accompanied by secession, which would further curb immigration by halting federal subsidies to it. It is unlikely that the present trend towards demographic overrun and cultural dispossession will be reversed as long as the present regime/ruling class maintains power, just as it was unlikely that political and economic reform of a genuinely substantive and enduring nature could have been achieved in Russia if the Soviet system has survived. Therefore, more extreme paths toward cultural self-preservation need to be explored.

Empathy Depends on Race

Some evidence that racism is natural.

(Health.com) -- Humans are hardwired to feel another person's pain. But they may feel less innate empathy if the other person's skin color doesn't match their own, a new study suggests.

When people say "I feel your pain," they usually just mean that they understand what you're going through. But neuroscientists have discovered that we literally feel each other's pain (sort of).

If you see -- or even just think of -- a person who gets whacked in the foot, for instance, your nervous system responds as if you yourself had been hit in the same spot, even though you don't perceive the pain physically.

Researchers in Italy are reporting that subtle racial bias can interfere with this process -- a finding with important implications for health care as well as social harmony.

And immigration policy more than anything, if we desire a society where, you know, people care about their fellow citizens.

In the study, which appears in the journal Current Biology, people of Italian and African descent watched short film clips that showed needles pricking black- and white-skinned hands. As they watched, researchers measured the participants' empathy (i.e., their nervous-system activity) by monitoring sensors attached to the same spot on their hands. They also tracked the participants' heart rates and sweat-gland activity, a common measure of emotional response.

"White observers reacted more to the pain of white than black models, and black observers reacted more to the pain of black than white models," says the lead researcher, Alessio Avenanti, Ph.D., an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Bologna.

The researchers also showed clips of a needle pricking a hand painted bright purple. Both the Italian and African participants were more likely to empathize with this intentionally strange-looking hand than with the hand of another race, which implies that the earlier lack of empathy was due to skin color, not just difference. "This is quite important, because it suggests that humans tend to empathize by default unless prejudice is at play," says Avenanti.

That's one way to look at it. Another is that we naturally empathize with other living creatures that aren't humans who are members of other races. Or proximity leads to distrust.  But of course this is instead blamed indirectly on stereotypes, social conditioning, blah, blah, blah. The article even seems to suggest at the end that this could be used to justify affirmative action type policies for doctors, lest blacks not get treatment from people who feel their pain.

Once again, a healthy society flows with the current of human nature rather than demand we swim against it.  Achieving social harmony is difficult enough without the "blessing" of diversity.

The Civil Rights Myth

How is it possible that RandPaul could have been so unprepared for Rachel Maddow's persistent questioning on the race issue? He claimed on her TV program that civil rights "hadn't been a real pressing issue on the campaign." Yet his National Public Radio interview on May 19 shows that he has been down this road before, similarly dodging questions and talking around the issue, while indicating confusion when the subject of race was brought up. According to Frank Rich, Paul had been known to express his views on race as far back as 2002.

Wasn't there time between that little NPR fiasco and the Maddow debacle for his advisers to sit him down and sort out the preferred approaches on all kinds of subjects? You know, "This is the way we're gonna handle this issue." He does have advisers, doesn't he?

How could it come as a surprise that race, of all subjects, would be front and center for any candidate, especially a declared Republican? Such lack of insight betrays a peculiar denseness. The subject of race is a "pressing issue" in every campaign and will remain so, as long as white men like Rand Paul can so easily be backed into a corner and put on the defensive. Maddow simply picked up on Paul's obvious discomfort during the previous NPR interview and ran with it.

Besides his repeated protestations that he abhors racial discrimination in all forms, Paul felt the need to reassure us that he is not a racist by revealing that he gets emotional and weepy when listening to a Martin Luther King Jr. speech. That may tell us something about his vulnerable mental state, but nothing else. (By the way, though a black woman, King's tiresome, sentimental pulpiteering has never left me teary-eyed.)  I've written endlessly about the brainwashing of whites, but even I didn't believe it to be this thorough.

I misread Rand Paul entirely. I thought that he wanted to make a point of getting particular ideas into circulation, and not that he cared whether he succeeded in winning political office, certainly not at any cost. If the political route was too degrading, I thought he might make use of the publicity he had acquired during the primary period to add a critical voice to mainstream propaganda. But the lure of office and the power it brings is, apparently, tantalizing. Even this "purist" libertarian could not resist backing down from his principles. I had assumed he would chuck the entire effort if it meant he'd be expected to prevaricate and become a dissembler -- i.e., act like a "real politician."

When pressed by the cunning Ms. Maddow, I half expected Paul to declare: "Yes, this is what I believe. Those who own private property have the right to reject from their premises whomever they wish. If this is unacceptable to voters, then I will not hold office." In other words, Take your stinking Senate seat and stick it!

In an article filled with improbable hypotheticals, and meant to be a defense of Paul, the Future of Freedom Foundation's Jacob Hornberger, referencing the 1964 Civil Rights Act and its legal coercions, asks, "Why were liberals so intent on forced integration of private businesses?"  Before answering that question, let's take a step back.

Remember, the problem to be solved by a section of the Civil Rights Act was that of public accommodations. When traveling and in need of food, sustenance and overnight shelter, what were blacks to do, since white establishments, especially in the South, generally rejected their presence.

No one bothers to ask why this posed a problem in the first place, because so little is known or cared about the incentives that drove blacks to create multitudes of institutions throughout the segregation period, even before slavery was officially ended. These were institutions such as restaurants, stores, motels and movie theaters. There were banks, insurance companies, newspaper publishers. It is assumed that all blacks were helpless victims, financially crippled drudges, with no resources to pool among themselves. In fact, most of black entrepreneurial success originated in the South, the poorest region and the one of greatest need.

White liberals were so intent on forced integration of white businesses because it never occurred to them to put the onus on blacks themselves, and to ask, Why should whites, or any other group, be compelled to go against their preferences to satisfy yours? Why aren't you taking care of these matters and fulfilling your own needs? At one point in our history, circles of resourceful blacks did exactly that.

There were blacks asking these impertinent questions of one another. "Where's our self-respect?" so many black men asked in another time. It flew out the window when forced integration flew in. How is it possible to win the respect of others, if you produce nothing?  This question was already being asked back in 1852 by the black Abolitionist Martin Delany, who denounced middle-class blacks that long ago for desiring only to ride on the coattails of whites. These elites were determined not to risk their own capital. Such people earned the scorn of enterprising blacks, who did take risks.

Why didn't whites support those blacks who, back in the 1950s and 1960s, challenged the strategies of the proliferating numbers of civil-rights leaders, and who insisted that blacks must not be taken down the road of dependency? One reason is that ever since the days of Abolition, whites had grown used to having this mass of people to pity. These black victims of the "bad" whites made the "good" whites feel expansive and noble, as they still do. The graphic depictions of past sufferings relentlessly offered up by the NAACP suited these whites just fine.

There were persevering blacks who understood early on that greater independence comes through the ownership of businesses and land.  Thomas Sowell has pointed out that even minimum skills and resources can be applied to create and develop modest businesses out of which the most ordinary person can earn a living.  With this understanding, the wise educator Booker T. Washington, in the early 20th century, urged poor blacks to emulate the immigrants who often began with almost nothing yet managed to elevate themselves and families.

Many blacks took Washington's advice. In fact, it's documented that thousands did. The reason that Washington formed the National Negro Business League was due to the prominence of so many black-owned businesses, especially in the South.

However, see what happened to some ambitious blacks in Charles Smiley's Chicago, when their elites disapproved of too much enterprise among them, for fear that such independent activity might inhibit the movement for integration. After all, if whites see that we can do for ourselves, the fearful ones worried, they won't employ us in their more financially advanced companies and other establishments, and ease our paths to prosperity. Those black men who felt shamed by such attitudes and worked towards self-sufficiency were summarily censored and vilified by fervent integrationists.

Blacks once had some of the best teachers and mentors steering them in the right direction, that of economics. However, the opponents among them, who strove only for "social justice" and "equality," the theme so beloved by whites, were determined that recalcitrant entrepreneurial types would not mess up their game plan. See what they did to S.B. Fuller. And they were at it again, in a more contemporary fashion in the mid-1990s, when they set out to destroy John Goode. The elites were not dumb. They surmised that the strategy of "civil rights" would lead more quickly to greater power than they could acquire at a slower economic pace.  

This is the key to why so much terrible stuff befell blacks and ultimately befell the country. The elites who ran such organizations as the NAACP cared nothing about the overall health or long-term welfare of the group, but only about how they might take short cuts to power via the beneficence of whites.  

With the help of their white compatriots they managed to turn what was essentially an economic problem to be solved into a moral crusade. And the typical white ate it up. After all, economic solutions would not have led to all that Freedom-Riding and marching and anthem singing. Oh, how those white folks loved all that melodrama! And still do. 

Their worship of Martin Luther King is so ridiculous as to make one's head spin. Those few dissenting whites who dare to rant about King's Communist affiliation have no idea of the deeper, more serious implications involved in King's playing the role of mentor to black males. The total acceptance of King by whites, confirmed when this preacher was granted a federal holiday, fixed for all time the notion that the path on which he took blacks was the only correct one.

It was comforting to believe that no shame was attached to black negligence and other forms of middle class treachery that led to the disappearance of hundreds of commercial establishments and, more importantly, the non-development of many more.  It was much more gratifying to point to the "immorality" of whites who initially refused to forego their own individual rights at the behest of the black cause.

For many blacks, it was often incongruous, when not downright infuriating, to watch as members of their race heroized the act of "sitting in" at a lunch counter while demanding respect from the white store owner. Surely, only the most blinding delusions could have prevented such people from recognizing this clear demonstration of their own lack of self-respect. (It is hard to keep from laughing when viewing part of an actual Woolworth lunch counter that has been preserved as a Holy Relic.)

The Harvard-educated economist Andrew Brimmer, who had served in three Presidential administrations and was a member of the quintessential black bourgeoisie, was, in the early 1960s, already citing the deaths of black-owned "restaurants, barber shops, hotels, hardware stores and mortuaries." But Brimmer was not lamenting this loss. As a staunch integrationist, desirous of all the goodies that would come from more intimate contact with whites, he approved the disappearance of black-created institutions and the industrious souls who had launched them.

Multiply the likes of Andrew Brimmer by the thousands, and you will see what the ordinary black was up against during that consecrated 1960s period, so beloved and celebrated by whites, who were still smarting from the recent riots and other mayhem.

Had not the promise of integration in the 1950s and 1960s brought out so many black opportunists and outright charlatans, who moved into leadership positions, we might have seen a rejuvenation of the spirit of enterprise that prevailed years before. And maybe those unconstitutional sections of that Civil Rights bill would never have been contemplated because they would have been considered irrelevant.

Where were the so-called conservatives and libertarians? Was Barry Goldwater the only public figure to suggest that there was something wrong with this picture? For all their talk about personal and individual responsibility, notice how libertarians dismiss such foundational thinking when it comes to blacks. Libertarians are no different from the liberals they rebuke -- a fact that Rand Paul has made clear.

The responses to Maddow need not have been couched in theoretical gobbledygook, but in common-sense reality based on the manner in which people prosper in a capitalist country. The reason why the Civil Rights Act was wrong is because blacks should be held to the same standards as all citizens, and the Constitution forbids the government from removing the rights of one set of citizens (white property owners) in order to exalt the rights of another.

Those middle-class blacks in the 1960s who were the most vociferous protestors for biased race laws should have been reminded of their past history, as cited above. If their recent ancestors, during what had been called "the worst of times," had been able to provide much-needed products and services, why should the rights of others now be abridged in order to accommodate the desires of this class?

Although these bourgeois types would deny it (for obvious self-interested reasons), by the 1960s, it was clear that there was nothing preventing blacks with resources from taking advantage of a market niche, which would not only be profitable to them but beneficial to masses of people.

You can be sure that no sooner had black business people begun to open new restaurants and constructing hotels and other commercial establishments targeted to black customers, their white counterparts would have rushed to get in on this lucrative market. If Congress had resisted the social pressures and stood by the principles in the Constitution, what was supposedly a race problem would quickly have been resolved. And imagine, the black bourgeoisie would have had to compete in order to prosper. Or as Martin Delany put it, the black man could no longer sit while the white man produced, but would have been forced to "endeavor to rival his neighbor, in honorable competition."

The One Successful Panderer

In two articles I could’ve predicted were coming this week Frum Forum worries that Rand Paul will turn minorities away from the Republican Party while Paul Gottfried denounces Republicans for worrying about such a possibility and kissing up to Martin Luther King.

This got me to wondering if pandering to nonwhites on a large scale ever works.  I checked the state by state exit polls of 2008 Senate races to see whether any Republicans were able to capture the all elusive black vote.  Using Senate races is better than presidential election data, where it’s the same person in each state.  Having a wide variety of characters helps us determine whether there’s any candidate or election strategy out there which can cross the racial divide.  Here are the results, going from most to least popular GOP candidates among African-Americans.

Tennessee-Alexander 26%
Kentucky- McConnell 13%
South Carolina-Graham 13% 
New Jersey-Zimmer 13%
Iowa-Reed 10% 
Alabama-Sessions 8%
Texas-Cornyn 8%
Virginia-Gilmore 7%
Mississippi-Cochran 6%
Michigan- Hoogendyk 5%
Georgia-Chambliss 4%
Delaware-O’Donnell 3%
Illinois-Sauerberg 2%
Louisiana-Kennedy 2%
North Carolina-Dole 1%

The first and most obvious question we have to ask is, what did Lamar Alexander do?  His popularity is based on his winning over black women, who were nine percent of the electorate in his state and gave him 30% support.  Black males were only two percent of the Tennessee voting public, and a little algebra tells us that they probably voted around eight percent for Alexander, though CNN apparently didn’t think the sample was big enough to give us any numbers for them.

The New York Times noted Alexander’s success about a week after the 2008 election, telling us that the Senator “had a record of appointing blacks to government and education positions.”  He wasn’t shy in letting the voters know it either, as this ad demonstrates.

One local blogger called the message “After You Vote For Barack Obama, Vote Lamar.”  Alexander also secured the endorsement of the black mayor of Memphis.  It’s worth pointing out too that the Republican was a two term governor and incumbent, giving him all the name recognition one could hope for.

So if a Republican can somehow get liberal black Democrats to vouch for him, appoint a lot of blacks to high places, be the most well known state politician and run against a weak opponent he can sometimes get a massive quarter of the African-American vote.  The question is whether they can do that without demoralizing significant parts of the much larger white electorate.

Update: A commentator writes "May I point out that 'Lamar Alexander' sounds very plausibly like a typical black name?"

I hadn't thought of this.  Imagine the typical Memphis voter hearing all these black voices on the radio praising "our boy Lamar" and all he's done for the community.  It's certainly plausible that many of them thought that he might be "one of us," and not just politically.  I must confess that this certainly works against my name recognition theory, but polls tell us that more than half of Americans can't name their Senators.  I suspect governors are better known, but Alexander was in that position a long time ago.

Civil Rights Kowtow

I'm shocked to hear about Rand Paul's recent caving-in to the liberal-neocon establishment. From the evidence it would seem that our minimal-government senatorial candidate from Kentucky regrets he could not have marched with MLK during the civil rights demonstrations of the 1960s. Never mind the fact that vocal opposition to King and to both his tactics and rhetoric extended from National Review (when it was still a recognizably conservative publication) to the New York Times, and from WFB to Will Herberg, and Harry Jaffa. We are now supposed to bow down before all the authorized Civil Rights Icons, and this is especially true for Republicans, whose electoral support among blacks since they began their ritualistic groveling has shrunk from about 10 to two percent. With a little more kowtowing, the GOP and Rand Paul may succeed in driving the numbers even lower.

As for Rand Paul's comment that set off the media hysteria, it was bland enough to have been ignored, if GOP magnates and civil rights leaders had not weighed in. Does Congressman (and House Minority Leader) John Boehner honestly believe that Paul's failure to back every jot in the 1964 Civil Rights Act, including the enforcement of non-discrimination in accommodations in Title I, would cause a mass defection of his otherwise likely voters to the opposition? Will Paul's share of the black vote now shrink because of his seemingly tactless reservation about one title in the Civil Rights Act? How the hell can the GOP get "government off our backs," if Title I and the agency it requires for its enforcement legitimate constant government incursions into the workplace?

The worst form of government incursion I can think of is the relentless attempt by public administrators to socialize us in accordance with the latest formulations of PC. What Rand Paul suggested during a lucid moment is that we might begin our counteroffensive by reconsidering the government's mandate to re-educate us socially and culturally, a mandate that the Civil Rights Act most definitely provides. Given the purpose that the candidate wished to pursue, it seems that he was offering an exceedingly modest beginning to an almost insuperable task. A more reasonable beginning is to repeal the entire act and all the federal directives imposed afterwards in pursuit of non-discrimination everywhere in our society. The same thing should be attempted at the state level, although the states have more constitutional right on their side when they engage in leftist social engineering.

This brings me back to the point I've made before, about Republican pathologies, from which Rand Paul has apparently not escaped. GOP candidates feel driven to ingratiate themselves with those who despise them. In contrast, Democrats, and particularly liberal Democrats, behave with more dignity. They have no trouble writing off those groups they're not likely to attract. By the way: I'm still waiting for Chuck Schumer to apologize to Bob Jones University for having failed to take biblical Christian moral positions as a senator. I'm also waiting for Hillary to address the Right to Life organization and to promise to devote the remainder of her life to fighting abortion.

Needless to say, none of this will happen, because Democrats do not act like Karl Rove, John Boehner and (I'm ashamed to say) Rand Paul. Democrats know they're on the left, even if they dissemble in some congressional districts, in order to pick up a few votes, before going on to Congress where they'll vote with Obama. But the rhetorical concessions, e.g. on gun right issues, are purely cosmetic, and they do not involve the acts of self-debasement that Republicans typically engage in while trying to conciliate the civil rights lobby. Even more importantly, the Reps get nothing for their crawling. Those they're reaching out to, wouldn't touch them with a ten-foot pole, and those on the traditional right, as opposed to Pavlovian Republican voters, are understandably turned off. It is truly upsetting that someone who seemed a superlative candidate from our perspective should practice the usual Republican boot-licking -- and within days of his primary victory. Perhaps I was expecting too much from him.      

More of a Conversation About Race

Craig Bodeker joins Richard to discuss his 2008 film, _A Conversation About Race_, as well as his upcoming projects.

How Paul Should've Handled Maddow

A few people have written about how they think Rand Paul should’ve handled his appearance on Rachel Maddow and other similar interviews. Here’s Christopher Donovan’s way of defending freedom of association.

Robert, the Civil Rights Act wasn’t about expanding rights, it was about taking them away — from Whites. Everyone’s got a right to decide whom they’ll associate with, and whom they won’t. This is probably the most fundamental right. The government has no business dictating who our associates will be. This may be awkward and painful at times, but that’s life. How would you feel if the government forced you to host three Ku Klux Klansmen at your condo in D.C.?

When I was watching the Maddow video I thought of how cool it would be if Paul said “What if government decided that there wasn’t enough integration in our personal lives too? Of my three children, do you think one should be forced to take a black spouse?” though I certainly didn’t expect it. To a libertarian both a business and a home are private property that government must respect; unfortunately we must face the fact that there’s a sharp difference in most people’s minds. Even Americans who own their own businesses feel there’s a distinction between where they work and where they eat, sleep, socialize and raise their families. So comparing the Civil Rights Act to mandatory intermarriage or being forced to hang out with Klansmen isn’t going to work.

That being said, I do think that there are politically smart ways not to back down. How about this

It’s funny that the media has been going after me for defending freedom of association when they don’t question any politicians who advocate affirmative action about those beliefs. If you truly believe that all people should be treated equally, how does one advocate not the freedom to discriminate, but mandatory discrimination? If a major corporation or university came out and said “We want to hire the best person for each job or admit only the best students by some kind of race blind criteria,” that would for all practical purposes be illegal. Do you think that’s right? Why don’t you question Speaker Pelosi, President Obama or my opponent about their views on affirmative action? I have made ending affirmative action a central part of my platform. Anybody who defends the practice has no right lecturing me or any American on the evils of racial discrimination.

This is a political winner, allows one to still be a libertarian and even lets the politician take a "more anti-racist than thou" posture.  I don't see the downside.   Since no one ever does this, I must be missing something. But what?

Plan B: Shame the Parents

Since taking your children away from you for seven hours a day to be brainwashed with multicultural propaganda hasn't yet gotten them to say the right things early enough, it's time to shame the parents. 

Anti-racists shouldn't worry too much though, for by the time they're as old as the kids in this video TV and public education have done their job.  

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Lunatics in Charge

At the website of the National Association of Scholars, an anonymous victim of the educationist racket explains much of what you need to know about why Johnny can't read, write, or calculate (without a calculator). Briefly, it's because teacher's training today is totally controlled by mad folk.

His remarks are "based on a public lecture that the author presented to students interested in issues of campus free speech":

"First, you have to understand that educational policy is consumed by the achievement gap, which is the disparity between groups of students on most educational measures...I don't just mean that this is the number one priority. It's the only priority...Nothing else matters. No Child Left Behind was entirely about the achievement gap and measuring schools to see if they'd closed it. Obama's Race to the Top is just another take...again, focusing on testing and this time holding teachers responsible if they can't get low-performing students to improve."

And, second, you have to understand that, in ed-school, there's only one permissible take on "the achievement gap, its cause and solution" - i.e., "the progressive view...which holds that social injustice, institutionalized racism, white prejudice, and other societal ills cause the achievement gap." Express any doubt on that point - even to the rather timid extent of suggesting, along with those horrid right-wing extremists, the Thernstroms, that differing cultural values may play some role here - and the sociopaths who run the place will do everything in their power to destroy you. Fortunately, in the author's case, they didn't quite succeed (though they did frighten him into anonymity).

So what do our progressive educational overlords really want? They "want to fix the achievement gap by moving underachieving students closer to high-achieving students...who will model desirable behavior..." I.e., for these people, unless your child is an underperforming member of one of the officially approved minorities, they really couldn't care less about what's best for him. So far as they're concerned, his only use is to sit next to the previously mentioned under-achievers in class and to "model desirable behavior" for them. And if, instead, it's the bad habits of the underachievers that end up rubbing off on the better students? No problem. There's more than one way to reduce an achievement gap.

A Darwinian Left

To me, it's seemed over the last half decade or so that the op-ed writers of the New York Times need to spend more time reading the science section of the same paper. In the last couple years, we've seen a piece that comes dangerously close to admitting that important genetic differences between the races exist, more than a few articles fairly summarizing the finding that IQ is highly hereditable, and even a report on evidence that non-Africans -- and non-Africans only -- have ancestors from a different species. 

Throughout this period, there's been no perceptible change in the Times's political writing. 

While it may be unfair to suggest that accepting the findings of the social sciences should make every liberal drop everything he believes in and join the Alternative Right, I think that the Left does have to rethink quite a few issues if it's not going to ignore behavioral genetics or psychometrics.  

No leftist has taken the implications of human biodiversity more seriously than philosopher Peter Singer. Depending on your perspective, he is either one of the most rigorous and consistent thinkers of the analytical tradition or the perfect example of what happens when man takes godless Utilitarian ethics to its logical conclusions. Once in a while his name shows up in headlines on conservative websites over articles and blog posts on what's wrong with the modern world.  Kathryn Jean-Lopez, for instance, argues that since he's "known to be a proponent of infanticide, perhaps nothing he says or writes should thereafter raise eyebrows" but continues that because he's a Princeton professor, contemporary writers must take his ideas seriously. 

In the philosopher's own words, Singer believes "that the life of a fetus (and even more plainly, an embryo) is of no greater value than the life of a nonhuman animal at a similar level of rationality, self-consciousness, awareness, capacity to feel, etc., and that since no fetus is a person no fetus has the same claim to life as a person. "

Now it must be admitted that these arguments apply to the newborn baby as much as to to the fetus... If the fetus does not have the same claim to life as a person, it appears that the newborn baby does not either, and the life of a newborn baby is of less value to it than the life of a pig, a dog, or a chimpanzee is to the nonhuman animal.  Thus while my position on the status of fetal life may be acceptable to many, the implications of this position for the status of newborn life are at odds with the virtually unchallenged assumption that the life of a newborn baby is as sacrosanct as that of an adult.

Singer's view of infanticide is a logical extension of his support for abortion rights. It's interesting that so much outrage over his philosophy comes from the Right, considering that what he's most often doing is pointing out the inconsistencies of the Left. To a Christian conservative, what's the big deal about another baby killer in a position of power if in your mind anyone who supports abortion rights is a baby killer? The fact that the logic in the passage above is impeccable is only a problem for liberals.

It took a man this honest to address the problems biorealism poses for liberalism. The year 2000 saw the publication of Singer's A Darwinian Left: Politics, evolution and cooperation. The book is no more than 70 pages, references included, but none the less it is a coherent attempt of a thinker trying to incorporate the findings on human nature, sex differences and the possibility of biological race differences into his worldview while remaining a true left-winger.  

To the author, the "most tragic irony of the past century is that the record of governments that have claimed to be Marxist shows that Marx got it wrong" on human nature. The fall of the USSR and the mainstream Left's abandonment of the goal of nationalizing the means of production mean that Western liberals need a new paradigm.  

The first question that we must ask of this project is, as Singer puts it, "Can the left swap Marx for Darwin, and still remain left?" And to arrive at an answer one must start with "what is essential to the left?" A leftist is one who cares deeply about the suffering in the universe and wants to do what he can to relieve some of it. We are told that liberals understand the principle of diminishing marginal utility. A dollar a day means much less to an American heart surgeon than it does to an Indian peasant. A caring leftist is outraged to be living in a world where the 400 richest people are monetarily worth more than the poorest two billion. Statistics like this alone are enough for the author to demand that we "work towards a more equal distribution of resources," even though he does not value equality for its one sake.  None of this -- the desire to alleviate suffering by redistribution, understanding the concept of diminishing returns -- necessitates that one take a position on human biodiversity. Therefore, there can be a Darwinian Left. 

Left gives us a short critique of the Darwinian Right before a brief history of how socialists and Marxists have fit an acceptance of natural selection into their ideologies. A few writers have made the mistake of deriving "ought" from "is."  If nature is ruthless and competitive, it doesn't make us obliged to encourage competition and ruthlessness. Another Darwinian right-wing criticism of the Left is exemplified in E.O. Wilson's statement that philosopher John Rawls hadn't thought through the "ultimate ecological or genetic consequences of the rigorous prosecution" of his conclusions. Singer believes that such statements are "to put it charitably, highly speculative." And even if it were proven that redistributionist policies helped the less intelligent and less responsible reproduce, science by itself can't tell us what traits we would like to have more or less of. 

This attempted refutation of the eugenic and anti-dysgenic conclusions of some biorealists is the weakest part of the book. Science can't tell us that being wealthy is better than being poor either, but Singer takes for granted the premise that the world's more indigent populations would suffer less if they had more wealth. It is simply illogical to then turn around and suggest that we should be morally neutral towards the cognitive characteristics that make a higher standard of living possible in the first place. Dysgenics isn't speculation either, it's happening. Whether policies traditionally associated with the Left create or perpetuate this evil isn't as easy to prove, but we can use common sense and evidence from the social sciences to see whether such is the case. 

Singer at least agrees with Wilson when the latter says that knowledge about human nature can at least make us aware of what the costs are likely to be when we seek certain political goals, especially egalitarian ones. He also hopes that evolution can help discredit pre-Darwinian ideas; the one claiming a dichotomous separation between human and nonhuman animals he sees as the cause of a great amount of evil.  

Readers might be surprised to know that Marx and Engels were somewhat enthusiastic about Darwin's Big Idea, or their interpretation of it at least. Marx believed that On the Origin of Species gave him a "natural-scientific basis for the class struggle in history." At Marx's funeral, Engels said that while Darwin taught us about the laws of organic nature, the man he was eulogizing similarly brought to light the laws of historical development. But as Singer points out, Engels revealed that he didn't understand Darwin's theory at all in his famous article "The Part Played by Labor in the Transition from Ape to Man," which was used by Soviet Lamarckians to show that their evolutionary theory was the true Marxist one. Whatever the founders of communism believed about the creation of man, a consistent theme in their writings was that the Darwinian laws were no longer applicable to modern humans. Modern liberals, Marxists and non-Marxists alike, continue to make the same mistake.

The very first thing that a Darwinian Left will have to give up is the "dream of perfectibility." Since the materialist theory of history is wrong, and undesirable behaviors are not caused by private property, white racism, government or any other man-made institution, they're part of who we are and thus here to stay.  Acceptance of biological facts will kill off utopianism in political life -- and not a moment too soon.

Singer divides human traits into three categories. First are those that show great variation cross culturally: food production, for example, along with religious institutions and forms of government. Then there are some things that seem to show a moderate level of deviation. Sexual relationships and some kind of racism or xenophobia fall into this category. Finally, there are human universals that show little to no variation: our social nature, concern for kin, hierarchy, and most controversially, sex differences. 

In every culture it's women who do most of the care-giving and men who tend to dominate political life and be responsible for the vast majority of violence. The author stresses that just because something is universal, doesn't mean we shouldn't work to change it, lest we fall into the "is/ought" trap once again.  On the other hand, studying human nature can help us predict what the results of our actions will be and clarify the cost-benefit analyses that are unavoidable when thinking carefully about politics or ethics.  

The science of human beings isn't all bad news for the Left.  Cooperation is as much of a part of nature as pitiless struggles for existence. A thought experiment can help us understand how we can build a more altruistic society. There are quite a few versions of prisoner's dilemma and the version of Left is as follows.  You and another person are arrested and charged with plotting against the government and interrogated separately. An officer tells you that if you both confess you get 10 years in jail each.  If one of you confesses and the other doesn't, the former is let off and the latter gets 20 years. If neither admits to the crime both are put in jail for six months and released. The investigator explains to you that no matter what happens your best bet is to confess. If your partner confesses and you do, too, you end up with only 10 years in jail instead of 20. If your partner remains silent and you cop to the crime, you walk free instead of waiting half a year for your freedom. The tragedy of the game is that if you both remained silent you'd be better off than if you both looked out for yourselves, but there's no way to coordinate cooperation, and there's no point in hoping to build trust as this is a one-time decision. 

Luckily, those are only features of this particular situation and not society at large. For a Darwinian Left, there's the hope that in communities where individuals deal with one another on a regular basis people can learn that altruism is best both for themselves and society at large.  

Singer concludes with what a Darwinian Left would and wouldn't be. It wouldn't deny the existence of human nature or claim that it is inherently good, search for utopia or assume that all socioeconomic inequalities are caused by discrimination. It would see what man has in common with other suffering creatures of the world and reject the exploitation of animals as a relic of a more philosophically primitive time.  A Darwinian Left must expect that people will work to gain status and look out for kin no matter what our social institutions look like.  Finally, it would hold on to the traditional values of the Left "by being on the side of the weak, poor and oppressed."

Many of the problems of Singer's left remain the same as those of the more traditional kind. Take for example his simplistic ideas about the distribution of resources.  A house worth five million dollars transported from Beverly Hills to a village in the Congo would lose all but a fraction of its value, as would a computer company that attempted to operate in a low-IQ nation. Since the monetary value of anything is subjective, and what gets made is subject to the desires of those who produce (or steal through the government), redistribution on a massive worldwide scale makes little sense.

Hopefully a Darwinian Left would understand that Marx didn't just get evolution and human nature fundamentally wrong but economics, too. And to accept heredity and reject the desirability of eugenics will always remain impossible for utilitarianism or consequentialism, two related philosophies that seem to square well with the inherent sense of morality of most people. Despite this, Singer is to be commended for honestly facing what science has been telling us over the past few decades and acknowledging that the philosophy of the Left needs to be revised in light of what's been established.

If only the New York Times would do the same.