Edward Snowden’s leaks about the spying capabilities of the US government and Silicon Valley have ignited speculation about what the emerging “surveillance society” portends. Still, we’ve long endured many varieties of spying and tracking, and some lessons can be learned from the past.

The news last week that the US government had collected Verizon’s “metadata” on who had called whom when and from where was widely seen as a stunning revelation. Timothy B. Lee of the Washington Post warned:

For example, having the calling records of every member of Congress would likely reveal which members kept mistresses, which could be used to blackmail members of Congress into supporting a future president’s agenda. Calling records could also provide valuable political intelligence, such as how frequently members of Congress were talking to various interest groups.

Likewise, Jane Mayer reported for The New Yorker:

…in the world of business, a pattern of phone calls from key executives can reveal impending corporate takeovers.

And yet informed observers have assumed for most of this century that American telephone metadata may well already be available to a foreign military-intelligence complex via hypothesized “backdoors” coded into complex commercial software.

In December 2001, Fox News’ chief political correspondent Carl Cameron delivered a four-part series on Israel’s surveillance of American targets. For unexplained reasons, Fox disappeared Cameron’s series down the memory hole later that month, although copies of the episodes survive on the Internet.

Cameron drew attention to Israel’s strategic initiative to dominate communications software. For example, Amdocs is “the market leader in Telecommunication Billing Services.” This firm is publicly traded and registered in the tax haven of Guernsey.

It sounds dull, yet the CEO from 2002 to 2010 was Dov Baharav. In 2011, Israel’s formidable defense minister Ehud Barak appointed Baharav the new chairman of Israel Aerospace Industries Ltd., the government-owned arsenal that builds fighter jets. In other words, the boring-sounding billing guy may be connected.

Cameron reported for Fox back in 2001:

Amdocs has contracts with the 25 biggest phone companies in America, and more worldwide. The White House and other secure government phone lines are protected, but it is virtually impossible to make a call on normal phones without generating an Amdocs record of it.…But sources tell Fox News that in 1999, the super secret National Security Agency, headquartered in northern Maryland, issued what’s called a Top Secret / Sensitive Compartmentalized Information report, TS/SCI, warning that records of calls in the United States were getting into foreign hands – in Israel, in particular. Investigators don’t believe calls are being listened to, but the data about who is calling whom and when is plenty valuable in itself.

Cameron assured viewers:

US intelligence does not believe the Israeli government is involved in a misuse of information, and Amdocs insists that its data is secure.

But that was false for American tech companies. Why should we assume that Israeli-run firms would be less cooperative with their own nation’s intelligence community? Indeed, Israel’s booming high-tech sector appears to be intimately related to its spy works, just as Silicon Valley emerged out of America’s Cold War efforts.

In 2012, James Bamford reported in Wired:

According to a former Verizon employee briefed on the program, Verint, owned by Comverse Technology, taps the communication lines at Verizon, which I first reported in my book The Shadow Factory in 2008.…At AT&T the wiretapping rooms are powered by software and hardware from Narus, now owned by Boeing, a discovery made by A&T whistleblower Mark Klein in 2004.

What is especially troubling is that both companies have had extensive ties to Israel, as well as links to that country’s intelligence service, a country with a long and aggressive history of spying on the U.S.

Forbes reported in 2007 that many Israeli high-tech firms are founded by alumni of Unit 8200:

Unit 8200 is the technology intel unit of the Israeli Defense Forces’ Intelligence Corps. And one thing about it is clear to all—Israel’s high-tech world is “flooded” with Unit alumni, as entrepreneurs and company founders or junior and senior executives.

American whistle-blower William Binney, who resigned from the National Security Administration to protest its Orwellian trajectory, told Bamford:

In fact, according to Binney, the advanced analytical and data mining software the NSA had developed for both its worldwide and international eavesdropping operations was secretly passed to Israel by a mid-level employee, apparently with close connections to the country….

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But what goes around comes around:

But Binney now suspects that Israeli intelligence in turn passed the technology on to Israeli companies who operate in countries around the world, including the U.S. In return, the companies could act as extensions of Israeli intelligence and pass critical military, economic and diplomatic information back to them.

What could you do if you knew who was calling whom?

The Efficient-Market Hypothesis taught at every MBA program says that you can’t beat the market consistently without trading on inside information, which is illegal. Economic theory thus implies that Wall Street should have become a low-margin commodity business, much like being a wheat farmer in South Dakota. A glance at the Forbes 400, though, suggests this hasn’t quite happened yet.

To get some sense of the long-term effects of constant electronic surveillance, one of the more intriguing perspectives comes from examining federal investigations into financial malfeasance, such as insider trading. If the government is in the mood, it can subpoena emails, phone records, and even order wiretaps to see if financial players know more than they ought to know.

For example, former McKinsey CEO Rajat K. Gupta, a member of Goldman Sachs’s board of directors, was convicted of insider trading for calling his billionaire buddy Raj Rajaratnam 23 seconds after he was done hearing from Goldman CEO Lloyd Blankfein that the vampire squid was going to announce a terrible quarter in late 2008.

Virtually nobody has been convicted of wrongdoing in the mortgage meltdown that set off the great crash of 2008, but the largest individual fine was the $67.5 million levied on former Countrywide Financial CEO Angelo Mozilo.

Much of the SEC’s case against Mozilo was based on frank emails the Ventura County golfer occasionally sent his executives, such as his sensible 2006 critique of Countrywide’s zero-down subprime mortgage: “In all my years in the business I have never seen a more toxic product.”

In other words, what plunged hyper-salesman Mozilo into the minimal amount of legal trouble he has endured were some of his rare moments of prudent management when he emerged from his Always-Be-Closing frenzy long enough to notice the looming risks.

One lesson to be learned is: Don’t use email, text messages, or anything else that leaves a digital trail. Face-to-face communications offer less legal danger, because in court who can remember exactly who said what?

Perhaps that explains something about the mysterious failure over the last couple of decades of what used to be called the Information Superhighway to decentralize elites. We were all promised that in the Age of Cyberspace it wouldn’t matter where we lived. No more having to live near an expensive, crowded city. Freedom!

Instead, it turned out that three metropolitan areas–New York, Washington, and San Francisco/Silicon Valley—became far richer, while much of the rest of the country got poorer.

It seems strange today, when the financial industry is so concentrated in the short stretch from Greenwich, CN to Jersey City, but back in the 1980s the biggest figure on Wall Street wasn’t on Wall Street. Instead, junk-bond king Michael Milken worked on Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills. Milken had to put up with inconveniences to live in his native San Fernando Valley, such as being at his desk at 5AM every day to account for the three-hour time difference with New York. Yet even before the Internet, it could be done.

Then the elder Bush Administration nailed Milken on insider-trading charges and he went to prison for 22 months (which would be astonishing under the current Democratic administration).

One lesson that the financial industry may have drawn from the travails of these far-flung Californians is that it doesn’t pay to be so far away that communication inevitably leaves digital trails.

This doesn’t mean the government is defenseless against insider trading carried out in random restaurants in Greenwich. As Charles Ferguson pointed out in Inside Job, the state always has the ability to work their way up to Mr. Big by arresting some Manhattan call girls, getting them to roll over on Wall Street traders, then going after their managers who might have some dirt on the man in the corner office.

But that’s grittier police work than merely imposing electronic surveillance. The Obama Administration has shown little appetite for taking the Street to the mat.

What are some of the advantages of having the means to know who calls whom in the US? We can only speculate, but it’s perhaps not wholly coincidental that Israel has become a highly prosperous country, with investment flooding in. Moreover, the Israeli government is extremely popular in Washington, with Prime Minister Netanyahu receiving 29 standing ovations the last time he addressed Congress.

It could well be that Israel doesn’t actually have these snooping capabilities. But it apparently hasn’t hurt Israel that so many Washington and Wall Street insiders assume that Israel knows their secrets.

Recent incidents of Muslims behaving badly—such as the butchering of British soldier Lee Rigby by two Islamic-convert African immigrants, the riots in Stockholm, and the never-ending revelations about numerous Pakistani pimps “grooming” very young white English girls for being gang-banged by their relatives—has European elites terrified…of European commoners.

For example, last week the European Parliament secretly voted to retroactively strip French nationalist Marine Le Pen, who won 17.9% of the national vote in the first round of the 2012 presidential election, of parliamentary immunity for comments made during her successful campaign for a law against prostration in the streets of France, opening her to prosecution for “hate speech.”

Similarly, the frequently feckless English police responded to the carnage in Woolwich by arresting social-media users.

British leaders repeatedly swept the Muslim statutory gang-rapist phenomenon under the rug for over a decade. Way back in 2001, Nick Griffin of the British National Party began to point out that Pakistani pimps in Britain were targeting white girls under 16.

It’s most useful to think of this practice not so much as pedophilia—a bizarre fetish—but as economically rational whoremastering. Pakistani pimps focus on recruiting very young postpubescent English girls because they are so naïve.

As we’ve seen in recent years, Muslim male-chauvinist cultures that treat females like dirt tend to nurture males who have a knack for living off women’s earnings. Thus, Albanian pimps have come to dominate the European sex-slave trade. And the various Chechen layabouts who have been in the news in America since the Boston bombing have displayed a remarkable gift for getting attractive women to throw their lives away on them.

In contrast, women-respecting Swedes seldom make talented pimps.

In the many Pakistani grooming cases in England, Ali G types would convince silly little white girls that they were their boyfriends, provide them with drugs, then browbeat them into proving their love by having sex at a party with all the pimps’ Uncle Jamaals.

The genius of the system is that the pimps don’t pay the girls, not even their room and board. After each party, they dump them back at their moms’ council flats.

Is this rape?

Of course. These girls are adolescents, far too young to give consent to being gang-banged.

Is it racial?

Feminist Susan Brownmiller’s 1975 bestseller Against Our Will famously argued that “rape is a crime not of lust, but power.” That’s obviously missing much of the point. And yet conquest and rape seem to go together.

It might seem insane that this kind of Bronze Age predatory pattern would work so well in a sophisticated country such as England, but that’s exactly why it worked: Noticing patterns is now derided as “stereotyping.”

Moreover, the highest priority in Europe is to never provide any fodder for right-wing organizations. Thus, a decade ago when a Channel 4 documentary crew working on a snoozer about social workers in Bradford stumbled upon this widespread practice, the police insisted that Channel 4 postpone the documentary because it might help the BNP in upcoming elections. The network complied.

Slowly, very slowly, it has become ever so slightly more respectable to mention this horrific practice. In 2011, former Labour government Home Secretary Jack Straw spoke out gingerly after two pimps were convicted:

Pakistanis, let’s be clear, are not the only people who commit sexual offenses, and overwhelmingly the sex offenders’ wings of prisons are full of white sex offenders. But there is a specific problem which involves Pakistani heritage men…who target vulnerable young white girls.

The Guardian tut-tutted:

The former home secretary Jack Straw has been accused of stereotyping Pakistani men in Britain after he accused some of them as regarding white girls as “easy meat” for sexual abuse.

In the Tory Telegraph last month, Sean Thomas wrote about Nick Griffin’s role:

As long ago as 2001, Nick Griffin, the leader of the BNP, was making claims about Asian grooming gangs. In 2004 he repeated these allegations in a speech clandestinely recorded by the BBC for a TV documentary, Secret Agent. He was arrested and charged with inciting racial hatred.

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So Griffin is a hero for risking prison to alert the nation to this horrific pattern of abuse? Wrong. According to The Telegraph, when you stop and think about it, the decade’s delay was mostly Griffin’s fault:

No doubt Griffin feels vindicated today: for telling the truth before anyone else. And yet, paradoxically, it was his thuggish intervention that gave society another excuse to ignore the scandal. And thus the abuse continued.

Strikingly, the Pakistani pimps and johns seem astonished that anybody would object to their behavior. If the girls’ parents cared about protecting their daughters, in their view, they would keep them locked up at home like good Muslims do.

The pimps seemed convinced that since their victims’ families haven’t organized lethal vendettas against them like any honorable Pakistani family would, they must not have cared.

Moreover, since the English people hadn’t carried out mass communal violence, such as burning down Pakistani neighborhoods in the time-honored South Asian manner, clearly they didn’t mind.

And if the English government didn’t want Pakistanis to act Pakistani, they wouldn’t let them into England, now would they?

You have to admit the defendants have a point.

It’s difficult for Americans to grasp precisely why European elites are so terrified of populist organizations such as the BNP or the ascendant English Defence League that they instinctively cover up the crimes of barbaric foreigners.

A major difference between the US and Europe is that almost every European country has a rudimentary set of localist/nationalist organizations for young men already in place due to the more organic nature of sports over there.

The English Defence League, for example, emerged in part out of soccer hooligan firms.

Note that in the World Cup quadrennial soccer tournament, England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland all compete separately: This gives the newer English Defence League an advantage in striving against the older British National Party for the loyalties of young English soccer fans. The appeal of Britain is in decline with the winding down of the conflict in Northern Ireland, so England is increasingly the locus of natural loyalties.

In the US, however, spectator sports were organized from the top of society down, which has largely kept them from being a vehicle for mass populism. For example, American football evolved among rivalries between universities with national pretensions: Harvard v. Yale, Army v. Navy, and Notre Dame v. USC.

Similarly, professional sports in the US always had a strongly corporate, upper-middle-class air. For instance, the most celebrated game in professional football history, Broadway Joe Namath’s New York Jets’ victory over the Baltimore Colts in the 1969 Super Bowl, was a victory for the national media’s home team.

In the 1890s, baseball’s sole major league, the National League, was being taken over by Irish brawlers such as the crafty John McGraw of the Baltimore Orioles. Thus, ballparks attracted a lower class of fan. In 1901 entrepreneur Ban Johnson founded the rival American League to provide a more honest and gentlemanly version of the game that would appeal to WASP and German-American families. Johnson’s league has remained dominant for most of the last eleven decades.

In contrast, European soccer clubs mostly emerged from their indigenous communities. European soccer teams sponsored local youth leagues that served as feeder systems for talent. American college basketball coaches, though, are lauded not for their training, but for scouring distant slums to recruit genetically gifted one-and-done stars.

In recent decades, European soccer has been corporatized, with importation of South American superstars and fairly successful efforts to suppress hooliganism by making the spectator experience more genteel, like that of American football. Still, unlike American sports, soccer furnishes the skeleton of a system by which nationalist loyalties could potentially be organized.

This scares European elites. To them, Pakistanis are no challenge. Sure, they’re good at gang-raping little girls, but they’re hardly a threat to the establishment. It’s European men—with their talent for self-organization—who frighten Europe’s ruling class.

Krysten Ritter

The golden age of television sitcoms petered out in the late 1990s when NBC couldn’t convince Jerry Seinfeld to come back for one more season despite offering him a salary of $110 million. (His three costars would have been paid a total of $66 million.)

Similarly, as the salaries of the cast of Friends approached over $140 million annually (one million per episode for each, with Jennifer Aniston getting more), networks began to search for business models that weren’t as dependent upon the expert interplay of unique personalities.

In 2000, the triumphant debut of Survivor on CBS demonstrated that audiences would be almost as fascinated to watch nobodies compete for (as Dr. Evil would say) one…million...dollars.

Meanwhile, cable networks such as HBO and AMC found that they could ensnare higher-end viewers in long-running soap operas.

Yet old-fashioned sitcoms remain potential money-gushers because they are best suited to syndication. Once a viewer finds out who wins American Idol or what happens to Don Draper, nobody is particularly interested in watching again. On the other hand, the likable, competently made sitcom about Caltech nerds, The Big Bang Theory, is on track to rank first in the Nielsens this year in both primetime and syndication.

The shot at that kind of money continues to attract tremendous talent to the sitcom, even if the genre doesn’t generate much buzz. Thus, perhaps the most brilliant sitcom of the decade is ABC’s almost unknown screwball comedy of 2012 with the unwieldy title Don’t Trust the B——in Apartment 23.

ABC pulled the plug in January with eight episodes left unseen. Fortunately, ABC.com, Hulu, and iTunes will be offering the lost episodes online through June 2.

In the show, June (played by Dreama Walker) is a nice, wholesome blonde from Indiana who moves to Manhattan to start her dream job working for Bernie Madoff the day he’s hauled off in handcuffs. Defeated but undaunted, she gets a waitress job and a roommate, lovely ex-model Chloe (the slightly pop-eyed Krysten Ritter, a cartoon Audrey Hepburn), who turns out to be a sociopathic Holly Golightly fleecing naïve newcomers. 

But amoral Chloe is also cooler than everybody in Indiana put together—for instance, her best friend is June’s girlhood crush, Dawson’s Creek star James Van Der Beek (as portrayed by Dawson’s Creek star James Van Der Beek). Will Chloe corrupt June before June’s corn-fed decency reforms Chloe?

This comedy was created by Nahnatchka Khan, who got her start with Malcolm in the Middle, the high-energy live-action Simpsons. She seems to identify more with her male supporting characters in a manner reminiscent of Camille Paglia. Van Der Beek, for instance, is affable in his masculine arrogance. (“Because I’m a celebrity” is his levelheaded explanation for every privilege he’s afforded.)

Apartment 23 treats virtually every sacred cow in current American culture with gleeful contempt. June’s boss at the coffee shop, meek mulatto Mark (Eric Andre), who worships June from afar, is virtually the only Obama parody in American entertainment. The joke is that, unlike the president, poor Mark inherited his white parent’s level of self-esteem.

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James’s personal assistant Luther (Ray Ford) is a portly black man who, just as his name suggests, looks much like that new 30-foot-tall statue on the National Mall of Martin Luther King—except that he’s flamingly effeminate. (In a series full of scene-stealers, Luther is the funniest of all.) These days, you aren’t supposed to portray gays on TV as less masculine than straights. And you definitely aren’t supposed to take Martin Luther King’s name in vain. 

In the spirit of Chloe’s superfluous malice, are these intentional jabs at America’s two most untouchable racial icons? Why not? These days, who would even be aware of the show’s lack of reverence? As far as I can tell, nobody on the Internet has even noticed these jokes.

More fundamentally, Apartment 23 is a show about two women that demonstrates zero respect for feminist dogma. Chloe is as vicious toward June as city girl Gwendolen is to country girl Cecily in Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, a play that appears to be a model for Apartment 23’s war on sentiment, cliché, and cant. 

The storyline’s meandering arc seems intended to eventually riff on Earnest’s plot of babies lost and found. I suspect Chloe’s long-suffering mother and June’s opportunist mom somehow had their newborns switched in the maternity ward. 

Already, at the end of season two, James discovers that the man he calls “Dad” isn’t his real father. His mother elucidates that his biological father was one of the summer stock cast of Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, but his mother can’t remember which brother. “It was the 70s,” she notes.

Later, James explains to Chloe and June, “My real father is one of these seven dancers,” showing them a photo of seven leaping bearded chorus boys.

The always hovering and ever helpful Luther squints at the picture and pokes his finger, “Gay, gay…and gay.”

“My real father is one of these four dancers,” James patiently amends. 

At the series’ best, Chloe’s elaborate conspiracies against other characters are contrived not out of base motives for personal gain but out of aristocratic disdain for anything common. She’s an artist of living, an avenging angel who punishes anyone who doesn’t meet her inordinate standards of cynicism.

Things are funny because they are true—truer than many like to admit in this Age of Schmaltz. Not surprisingly, this high comedy failed to capture a mass audience on broadcast television.

Frank Sinatra

Ever since Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan, the D-Day landings in northern France have increasingly come to stand in for all of the American experience in World War II. That’s understandable but unfortunate because it’s hard to grasp postwar America without examining the influence of other theaters of war.

Just as the American doughboys’ involvement in World War I led to the Jay Gatsbys not staying down on the farm after they had seen Paris, WWII action outside northern Europe explains some otherwise puzzling features of America’s postwar golden age.  

For example, the fight against the Japanese furnished California with a national epic. After the war, the Golden State filled up with ex-servicemen who had passed through California in 1942-1945 and vowed that if they made it back alive, they were going to raise a family in the sunshine. They brought back from Hawaii not just a comic penchant for Tiki torches, but, more lastingly, for board-riding—first surfing and then skateboarding, laying the foundation for X Games culture.

If the War in the Pacific gave Americans more of a yen for the sun, the now largely forgotten War in Italy (1943-45) set off a craze for all things Italian—such as dining, movies, and singing—that improved postwar American nightlife.

The invasion of Italy started off well with General Patton’s successful landing in Sicily. The Italians soon overthrew Mussolini and sued for peace. But the Germans took over and staged a brilliant fighting retreat up the Apennines.

While the war in Italy proved a miserable slog, American GIs fell in love with Italy. At least since German painter Albrecht Durer’s trips across the Alps around 1500, Italy has often been considered the world’s greatest tourist destination.

A new genetic study helps illuminate how nurture and nature worked together to make Italy a place where you definitely want to visit although you might not want to live there. Geneticists Peter Ralph and Graham Coop’s paper The geography of recent genetic ancestry across Europe reveals that Italians stand out for their genealogical “deep structure.” Razib Khan called attention to Ralph and Coop’s statement that “different groups within Italy share as little recent common ancestry as other distinct, modern-day countries.…”

While much of northern Europe, especially the Slavic regions, has been swept repeatedly by vast invasions, prehistoric and historic, modern Italians are largely living in the lands of their ancestors. The deep structure of Italian culture—the sense that today’s Italians are exquisitely adapted to their particular cities and villages—is palpable to the visitor. Perhaps the finest cinematic portrayal of Italian culture’s rootedness is the Sicily chapter in The Godfather.

Or consider Florence. Not only was Tuscany the center of the Renaissance six centuries ago, it was home to the artistically advanced Etruscan civilization when Rome was a minor-league city-state.

The bulk of today’s Italian population appears to have family ties in their regions going back before Imperial Rome at least to the Greek settlements in the Age of Archimedes and to the Gauls crossing the Alps around 400 BC Ralph and Coop note:

In addition to the very few genetic common ancestors that Italians share both with each other and with other Europeans, we have seen significant modern substructure within Italy that predates most of this common ancestry, and estimate that most of the common ancestry shared between Italy and other populations is older than about 2,300 years.…

Not only haven’t Italians been intermarrying much with non-Italians, they haven’t been intermarrying much even with other Italians beyond their own valleys. My wife’s great-grandfather, for instance, was considered a moonstruck romantic for wooing a girl not from his own village high in the Apennines, but from the town down in the valley, requiring a 500-meter climb back up after each date.

But this deep structure also means that Italian families have been stabbing each other in the back for centuries, which may help explain why Italy doesn’t work as well as, say, Finland.

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The first beneficiary of America’s Italian Boom was a 28-year-old New Jersey native (and a student of the bel canto style of Italian opera singing) named Frank Sinatra. As a 15-year-old bobbysoxer, my late mother-in-law saw Sinatra sing at an 11 AM show in 1945, one of nine performances the old pro turned overnight sensation was doing per day in Chicago. It seems odd that the first teen idol, the predecessor of Justin Bieber, was the weathered Sinatra, but it makes sense in the context of the sudden American infatuation with all things Italian.

American palates also benefited. French cuisine had long been fashionable in America, but it was always marketed as a formal luxury. The postwar American affection for cheap but tasty Italian food was immortalized in the spaghetti-eating scene in the 1955 Disney feature Lady and the Tramp.

Italian movies likewise found an audience in America. As a symbol of newfound American sophistication, voluptuous Italian starlets proved especially popular. In 1961, Hollywood gave the Best Actress Oscar to Sophia Loren for the Italian-language movie Two Women about the Marocchinate of 1944. (By the way, this now neglected event helps explain why the Italians were less enthusiastic about postwar North African immigration than northern European countries: In 1944, a French general incentivized his Moroccan Muslim colonial troops to take Monte Cassino by promising them 50 hours to pillage and rape Italian civilians.)

The American impact on postwar Italy was subtler. In contrast to the Bush Administration, which was surprised in 2003 that overthrowing the Iraqi government would lead to looting, the Roosevelt Administration at least came up with a plan for Sicily.

To keep from slowing down General Patton’s tanks, certain members of the Sicilian-American community volunteered to have law and order in newly liberated Sicily maintained by their friends—i.e., friends who had friends. Perhaps these Sicilian men of respect had not been particularly active in public affairs since Mussolini’s crackdown on the Mafia, but they were ready to take up their pre-fascist responsibilities in the new post-fascist order.

The Roosevelt Administration’s revival of the Sicilian Mafia in 1943 didn’t do postwar Italy much good, but it at least had positive payoffs in the quality of American movies from the 1970s onward.

Q. What’s the single most horrible thing that former Heritage Foundation analyst Dr. Jason Richwine wrote in his 2009 Harvard Ph.D. dissertation IQ and Immigration Policy?
A. Presumably, the following widely quoted sentence that was featured in Dylan Matthews’s original Washington Post story:

No one knows whether Hispanics will ever reach IQ parity with whites, but the prediction that new Hispanic immigrants will have low-IQ children and grandchildren is difficult to argue against.

Q. Why does that sentence get so many people so angry?
A. Because, while it’s easy to point and sputter, it is difficult to argue against.

Everybody has that sinking feeling in the pit of their stomach that Richwine is telling the obvious truth, which doesn’t make him popular. He had to be crushed pour encourager les autres.

Q. But it would be depressing if this were true!
A. Indeed, it is. But the social sciences are supposed to help us make better decisions about the future, not to slather us in schmaltz. Back in 2002, I conducted an interview with Harvard cognitive scientist Steven Pinker during his book tour promoting The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature. I asked him if we aren’t all better off if people believe that we are not constrained by our biology and so can achieve any future we choose. Pinker replied:

People are surely better off with the truth. Oddly enough, everyone agrees with this when it comes to the arts. Sophisticated people sneer at feel-good comedies and saccharine romances in which everyone lives happily ever after. But when it comes to science, these same people say, “Give us schmaltz!” They expect the science of human beings to be a source of emotional uplift and inspirational sermonizing.

Q. But what about “Give us your tired, your poor?” What about “America is a nation of immigrants?” What about “Ariel Castro’s American Dream?”
A. Schmaltz.

Q. How can America survive without these sacred myths?
A. America survived fine for a couple of hundred years without the current schmaltz. When I was a boy in the 1960s, we had different schmaltz. The national myths then were all about cowboys and settlers, not immigrants.

The contents of the national myths serve to demonstrate current ethnic power. The descendants of Ellis Island-era immigrants are on top now, so they’ve rewritten history to make their ancestors sound central. This post-hoc score-settling is no doubt fun, but it’s obviously a stupid way to decide immigration policy.

Q. So what are the facts about Hispanics?
A. Hispanics average lower in IQ and in other kinds of test scores, such as SATs, GREs, school achievement tests, and military enlistment tests. Hispanics also average lower in real-world accomplishments that correlate with test scores. Moreover, they have been underperforming for as far back as records go, with little evidence of much change. That’s why they’ve received affirmative action for over four decades.

Q. Why does IQ matter for immigration policy?
A. Because IQ correlates with lots of good things, such as paying more in taxes than you consume in welfare.

Q. But only Nazis want better people!
A. Every institution in the United States of America—except the United States of America—strives for better human capital. Elite colleges, for example, use IQ-style tests to reject huge numbers of applicants.

Similarly, both Canada and Australia have immigration policies designed to make life better for current citizens by selecting the smartest, hardest-working applicants (much like American colleges do). Not surprisingly, the children of their immigrants score higher on the international PISA test than do the children of natives. As Richwine notoriously noted, this isn’t true for America, although it easily could be.

Q. Who cares about test scores besides the Ivy League?
A. The military. A disproportionate number of Hispanics don’t qualify to enlist. A 2009 RAND Corporation report for National Defense Research Institute, Military Enlistment of Hispanic Youth: Obstacles and Opportunities found that “Hispanics are underrepresented among military recruits.”

A major reason for this is that to get into the military these days, you have to score on the Pentagon’s entrance exam (the AFQT) at least at the 31st percentile (what the Pentagon calls Category IIIB). RAND reported:

Only 36 percent of young Hispanic high school graduates would score in AFQT Category IIIB or above, compared with 68 percent of white high school graduates. A key implication of this result is that increasing the high school graduation rate among Hispanic youth may not lead to comparable increases in enlistment eligibility.

Q. Is the AFQT an IQ test?
A. It resembles the SAT more than does a culture-free IQ test such as the otherworldly Raven’s Progressive Matrices. That’s because the military has no use for recruits who are naturally bright but who don’t speak English or are illiterate. But performance on the AFQT correlates very strongly with standard IQ tests; so military psychometricians consider the AFQT scores to be virtually synonymous with IQ scores.

Q. Why are IQ tests evil, while the school achievement tests mandated by the Bush-Kennedy No Child Left Behind Act are good?
A. Spin. In terms of who scores well on them, there’s not much difference. Most tests, no matter what their purpose, correlate surprisingly well. As Johns Hopkins sociologist Robert Gordon has said, life is an IQ test.

Q. Are IQ tests biased against Hispanics?
A. Probably a little less than these more socially acceptable tests.

Obviously, language can be a big issue. If you can’t read English, you won’t do well on the SAT, but you might do well on the Raven’s IQ.

On the other hand, we don’t see much of the pattern among Hispanics that is very clear among Asians: higher math than verbal scores.

In one sense, IQ tests have been very good for Hispanic immigrants. Hispanics tend to do better on IQ tests than they do in school, probably because they tend to come from cultures that are apathetic about education. Hispanics average higher than African Americans on IQ tests, yet they have been less ambitious about getting higher education, with higher high-school dropout rates than blacks. IQ testing has repeatedly demonstrated that Mexican Americans should get more serious about education, which is a valuable lesson.

Q. Does the rank order of how groups perform on cognitive tests ever change?
A. Sure. When I first got interested in the social sciences in 1972, the usual rank order of cognitive performance was Oriental, then Caucasian, Chicano, and black. Now, it’s Asian, then white, Latino, and African-American. So everything is different.

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Q. Who is Christopher Jencks?
A. He’s one of the three Harvard professors who approved Richwine’s dissertation. Jencks is perhaps the most distinguished left-of-center American social scientist of my lifetime.

I’ve been following the science of test scores since Jencks published Inequality: A Reassessment of the Effect of Family and Schooling in America in 1972 when I was 13. Jencks concluded his meta-analysis with a call for socialism:

As long as egalitarians assume that public policy cannot contribute to economic equality directly but must proceed by ingenious manipulations of marginal institutions like the schools, progress will remain glacial. If we want to move beyond this tradition, we will have to establish political control over the economic institutions that shape our society. This is what other countries usually call socialism. Anything less will end in the same disappointment as the reforms of the 1960s.

My letter to the editor was published in the March 16, 1973 edition of National Review:

Having read Ernest van den Haag’s article on Christopher Jencks, I am reminded of an old psychiatry joke: A psychotic (egalitarian, in this little morality story) says, “All people are equal, and I’ll fight anyone who says I’m wrong.” A neurotic (Jencks) says, “People aren’t equal, and I just can’t stand it.”

Q. But how can test-givers tell who is Hispanic?
A. They just ask them. It’s called “self-identification.”

Q. But is that scientific?
A. It’s good enough for government work. The government spends billions to count Hispanics, and it’s all done just by letting anybody check whether or not they are Hispanic.

Q. But how do we know that Hispanic test scores won’t suddenly change?
A. Well, I’ve been following this question for over 40 years. Jencks has been following it longer. So far, they haven’t. Maybe you are right, or maybe Professor Jencks is right. Personally, I’d rather bet the country on Jencks’s assessment of the evidence.

Q. But if Hispanics are an ethnicity, not a race, how can we know that the next generation of Hispanic immigrants won’t be very different?
A. I could imagine one event that would drive up new Hispanic immigrants’ children’s test scores substantially: another revolution in Mexico. If rich white Mexicans, like the world’s richest man Carlos Slim, had to flee for their lives from Mexico, the next generation of Mexican newcomers might be a lot like the prosperous Cubans who arrived in Miami after Fidel.

But the way immigration from Mexico has been working since the end of the last revolution almost a century ago is via family chain migration. New immigrants tend to belong to the extended families of old immigrants.

Q. But that’s genetic determinism!
A. Actually, it’s both nature and nurture. If, say, a young fellow from Sinaloa moves in with his uncle in East LA, the newcomer shares a lot, genetically and culturally, with the old-timer.

Q. But are you saying that Mexican immigrants don’t assimilate?
A. No. There are big statistical differences in years of education between the immigrants and their children. After that second generation, though, progress slows. The biggest study so far of Mexican Americans (by Chicano sociologists Vilma Ortiz and Edward Telles) didn’t find additional educational improvement in the third, fourth, or fifth generations. Their findings fit my experience of daily life in Southern California over the last half-century.

Q. But Mexicans never lived in America until just recently, so how can anybody know anything about Mexican Americans?
A. In California, there were 415,113 Hispanics in 1940 and 2,738,513 in 1970. Some of them were even world-famous. When I was born in 1958, the greatest tennis player in America was Pancho Gonzales, a cholo from South-Central Los Angeles.

Q. But what about all the high-achieving Hispanics?
A. What about them? Where are they?

There are more Hispanics in America (over 50 million) that there are in Spain, yet the number of high achievers is strikingly low.

Think about it. There are 14.5 million Hispanics in the state of California. Where are they in Hollywood? Where are they in Silicon Valley?

There are perhaps four million Latinos in Los Angeles County, yet few are distinguished in the entertainment industry other than those who first became famous in their own countries’ movie industries, such as Salma Hayek. Last year I looked through the last couple of thousand Oscar nominations, both in the glamor and technical categories. At that point, there hadn’t been a Mexican-American nominee (in the sense of having spent some formative years in America) since Edward James Olmos in Stand and Deliver back in the 1980s.

Similarly, where are the Mexican-American tech tycoons of Silicon Valley? The Hispanic share of the workforce in Silicon Valley is tiny and declining. Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook fame recently launched a pro-Gang of Eight immigration lobby funded by three dozen tech heavyweights, none of them Hispanic.

Q. But doesn’t the GOP have to pass amnesty and purge all its realists to get this Richwine thing behind it so it can win the Hispanic vote?
A. That conventional wisdom is 180 degrees backwards of standard human psychology. People respect strength and integrity. Publicly bullying a scholar for telling the truth just encourages them to bully you.

Why in the world would the Latino-American media stop recirculating allegations that some Republicans believe Latino-Americans have a lower average IQ? What’s in it for them? The American Establishment is demanding racial resentment from Hispanics, and some Conquistador-Americans will make sure to supply it.

Of course, why would the demand for purges end just because amnesty is passed? Instead, the passage of amnesty will be seen as validation for redoubling the witch hunts for anybody who notices that Hispanics, on average, aren’t as smart as whites. Since Hispanics certainly don’t perform as if they were as smart as whites, some poor bastards will continue to notice that fact, which will then lead to more manufactured outrage and demands for purges. Lather, rinse, and repeat…forever.

Q. But aren’t Hispanics shooting up in terms of educational attainment?
A. Back during the Bush Bubble, it was common for Latinos to drop out of high school to work construction. Since jobs disappeared a half-decade ago, more have been hanging around high school long enough to graduate and start community college. However, SAT scores have barely budged—last year the College Board announced that only 23 percent of Hispanics who took the SAT scored high enough to have a good chance of graduating from a four-year college.

But one long-term change for the good in social policy was the abolition of most bilingual education in California by Ron Unz’s Proposition 227 in 1998. It largely stopped California public schools refusing to teach in English at just the age when they can most easily learn a second language. Today, most Mexican high-school students in California speak English with their friends. Thus, there is very little demand in Los Angeles for Hollywood blockbusters dubbed into Spanish. Kids these days want to hear Robert Downey Jr. in English.

In general, the recession appears to have somewhat improved Hispanic behavior versus the disastrous Bush years: fewer dropouts, less illegal immigration, and lower birthrates. Perhaps Latinos have turned a corner permanently? The test will come if the economy ever recovers.

Q. How can Hispanics raise their IQs?
A. The most likely way is by raising their children better. And the most likely way for them to raise their children better is by having fewer children so they can concentrate more parental energy and resources per child. The one group that is raising test scores is the Asians, and we have Amy Chua’s testimony on how they do it: Tiger Mothering. Asians have low fertility and they concentrate enormous effort on their small number of kids. Maybe if Latinos try having fewer children, in a generation a Yale Law professor named Amy Chavez will write Battle Hymn of the Jaguar Mother.

Unfortunately, the 1986 amnesty set off a vast baby boom among ex-illegals, driving the foreign-born Latina total fertility rate up from 3.2 in 1987 to 4.4 in 1991, with dire effects on California schools.

Q. Would the proposed new amnesty do the same as the last amnesty?
A. Why take the chance?

Q. Is there a fund where I can donate to help Jason Richwine and his wife pay for disposable diapers and the like for their two small children?
A. Not that I know of, but I’ll publicize it if a legitimate one gets started.

Elrod House

With Iron Man 3 hauling in $174 million at the box office last weekend, this is a good time to pay tribute to a great architect whose hold on the American imagination is finally getting the respect it deserves: John Lautner.

No matter where they’re filmed or when they’re set, the Iron Manmovies take place, at least aesthetically and psychologically, in the shiny, optimistic, future-infatuated Southern California that peaked in the early 1960s. Billionaire Tony Stark’s Iron Mansion in Malibu, which the evil Mandarin demolishes in Iron Man 3, is a fictitious CGI homage to the sometimes hilarious—but often surprisingly lovely—science-fiction houses and coffee shops, gas stations, and motels that Lautner erected all over the Los Angeles area from the 1930s into the 1980s.

Academics despised Lautner, but airplane and movie people loved him, and they do to this day. Quentin Tarantino has set many a scene in a Lautner-inspired eatery, such as Jack Rabbit Slim’s in Pulp Fiction.

Lautner, a protégé of Frank Lloyd Wright, was the finest exponent of the boyish fantasy school of design—Tom Swift books turned into cantilevered Googie drive-in restaurants—that is the indigenous style of the Southern California car culture in which I grew up. Lautner’s school of commercial architecture required an unprecedentedly broad and affluent middle class, one perhaps never seen in world history before Los Angeles in the 1940s.

Lautner is said to have invented the Googie-style of commercial architecture with three Coffee Dan’s restaurants. After the war, this Lautner Look became the embodiment of the postwar economic boom as the American masses attained disposable income, mobility, and a hankering for style uninhibited by the dictates of elite taste. In 1952, Columbia U. professor and modernist mandarin Douglas Haskell derisively coined the term “Googie architecture” in response to Lautner’s 1949 Googies Diner in West Hollywood at the corner of Sunset Boulevard and Laurel Canyon.

The heart of Googie America might have been the stretch of the eastern San Fernando Valley between Lockheed Airport (now called the Bob Hope Burbank Airport) and the movie studios near the Hollywood Hills. Burbank would have been a fitting home for Disneyland (where the Googie Tomorrowland was the culmination of SoCal futurism). But Walt Disney, whose contributions to the 1964 World’s Fair inspired Iron Man 2, couldn’t find enough contiguous land near his studio.

Today we are constantly informed that the American Dream is about immigrants coming to America, but back then, it was about Americans, after years of sacrifice during the Depression and WWII, finally being able to afford to drive a new car to a new restaurant. When average people such as my mother and father (who, after a spell at a flying car company, worked at Lockheed for four decades) had some cash, they liked to go to the sweeping metal-and-glass Bob’s Big Boy drive-in on Riverside Drive in Burbank. Bob’s was just down the street from the hot-rod studio of George Barris, the King of the Kustomizers, who helped inspire Tom Wolfe’s literary breakthrough The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby.

While getting a Ph.D. at Yale, Wolfe had spent years hanging out with architecture students being indoctrinated in Yale’s dour Bauhaus purism. Wolfe’s 1963 visit to Southern California, with its flat class structure of skilled technicians who could afford to spend money pursuing their own techno fantasies, came as a liberation that ignited his titanic career in American letters.

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According to Chris Jepsen’s delightful Space Age City website, Googie architecture is a cross between the visions of The Jetsons and The Flintstones, with maybe some Polynesian volcano-god style tossed in, too. (Guys who fought in the War in the Pacific, the national epic of Southern California, came back with a taste for Tiki.)

To Jepsen, Googie embodies an entire eschatology:

Man left his caves and grass huts and through hard work and ingenuity has built an amazing modern world. Tomorrow he will conquer any remaining problems and colonize the rest of the galaxy. However, for all his achievements and modern science, man will never lose touch with the natural world and his noble roots.

Lautner was largely slighted or ignored by academia, and he seldom received commissions from committees. Instead, USC professor William Pereira, a sci-fi devotee, tended to get the big contracts in Southern California, such as for his Brutalist campus for the University of California at Irvine campus. (It’s best known for standing in for the dystopian monkey prison in Conquest of the Planet of the Apes.)

In contrast, Lautner’s clients were typically local businesses or individuals. He once said that his clients were “either rich bastards or poor geniuses.” Fortunately, there were enough of both in mid-century SoCal to keep Lautner afloat. For example, the immense Star Trek-like house Lautner completed in 1979 in Palm Springs for Bob Hope, whose main house was just off Riverside Drive, was recently put on the market for $50 million.

Lautner was constantly on the verge of going out of fashion. The populist popularity of his Googie commercial designs damaged the cachet of his upscale homes. In the 1970s, however, he managed to rebrand himself, not unreasonably, as an ecological architect—he’d always been brilliant at integrating interiors with California’s pleasant outdoors. Lautner’s ability to conjure up the design right for a unique site distinguished him from other strongly imaginative architects.

Back in the late 1970s, my friend Les, who grew up in Studio City two doors down from science-fiction novelist Jerry Pournelle, was determined to get a job with Lautner. The old man was once again out of style, but Les was convinced he was the greatest architect in Los Angeles. For a week, he sat in Lautner’s dusty, Philip Marlowesque waiting room, hoping Lautner would give him an interview despite his lack of architecture experience. Each day the curmudgeon would sweep past him without a glance. Finally on Friday, a draftsman didn’t show up for work. Lautner glanced up and muttered, “Do you know mechanical drawing? Well, make yourself useful.”

Les is an architect in London today.

In the Hollywood Hills looking north to Burbank is the most notorious Lautner home, the 1960 Chemosphere House which served as a bachelor pad in the Charlie’s Angelsmovie. For a young aerospace engineer who owned a sheer cliff, Lautner designed a flying saucer on top of a 30-foot-tall pole. The family of six rode a funicular up to their UFO.

Granted, the sensational Cinemascope-like views didn’t make up for the quotidian disadvantages of living in one of the inspirations for the Jetsons’ house. To make a Frisbee-shaped residence work, you would really need a flying car.

But back in Burbank in 1960, did anybody doubt that the advent of flying cars would be long delayed?

The future isn’t what it used to be, and that’s a shame.

Americans can learn much from Israel. It’s an increasingly prosperous nation that grapples manfully with its problems. For example, when the Israelis put up a fence along the border to keep out illegal aliens (or “illegal infiltrators,” as the Israeli government calls them), they put up a fence.

I especially admire how Israelis enjoy what might be called “effective freedom of speech.” While I treasure the legal protections provided by the First Amendment, the increasing tendency of Americans to pass up moneymaking opportunities that might be deemed “controversial” makes America duller and dumber.

In contrast to America, in Israel you can, say, go see the latest Mel Gibson action flick in a movie theater.

Why? Don’t Israelis know that Gibson is controversial?

The Israeli attitude, however, is: Why not? If some people in Tel Aviv will pay good shekels to see Gibson’s Get the Gringo, then somebody else in Tel Aviv will charge them to show it.

Similarly, in Israel, you can write openly about one of the more interesting and important subjects of our era: Jewish wealth. For instance, the Israeli-American centrist think tank Jewish People Policy Institute reported in 2010: “World Jewry today is at a historical zenith of absolute wealth creation.”

Forbes Israel, the Tel Aviv offshoot of the American business magazine, has a cover story on Jewish billionaires. The Israeli edition has made up a list, drawn from Forbes‘s overall ranking of the world’s 1,426 billionaires, of the 165 richest Jews in the world.

The billionaire on the cover is cosmetics heir Ronald Lauder, president of the World Jewish Congress. His $3.6 billion makes him, according to Forbes Israel, the world’s 69th richest Jew. (By the way, Lauder has one of those rare New York City concealed-carry permits.)

In America, this just isn’t done in the mainstream media, even though it’s obvious and fairly easy to do.

Sure, Forbes has been publishing its rankings of rich people for three decades.

Moreover, counting by ethnicity is something that the government, corporations, and foundations have been doing assiduously since the late 1960s.

And these days, it’s easy to look up most well-known individuals’ ethnicity on the Internet. Wikipedia, for example, usually states the subject’s ancestry immediately after the table of contents. (That reflects a major change in our culture’s emphasis. At bedtime, I often browse in my 1971 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica. Biographical entries back then were quite reticent about ethnic backgrounds.)

Still, there’s one ethnicity that’s never counted in polite circles in America…except by other Jews, who do it constantly.

You can use Google Translate to convert the Forbes Israel richest Jews ranking from Hebrew into awkward-but-adequate English. Thus, “165 billionaires [sic] Jews constitute 11% of global billionaires list, and common wealth reaches $812 billion,” or an average of $4.9 billion per Jewish billionaire.

Jews are usually said to comprise about 0.2% of the world’s population, so 11% of the world’s billionaires means they’re doing pretty well.

Here’s my count of Forbes Israel‘s list, with Jewish billionaires as a fraction of the country’s total number of billionaires:

US 105/442 = 24%
Israel 16/16 = 100%
Russia 12/99 = 12%
Canada 6/29 = 21%
Brazil 6/45 = 13%
UK 5/37 = 14%
Ukraine 3/10 = 30%
Monaco 3/3 = 100%
Australia 3/22 = 14%
Spain 2/20 = 10%
France 2/24 = 8%
Germany 1/58 = 2%
Hong Kong 1/39 = 3%

According to Forbes Israel, the ten richest Jews are Oracle magnate Larry Ellison, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, casino king Sheldon Adelson, Russian-American Google guy Sergey Brin, other Google guy Larry Page, corporate raider Carl Icahn, Hungarian-American money trader George Soros, Russian oligarch Mikhail Fridman, Russian-American tycoon Len Blavatnik, and Lebanese-Brazilian banker Joseph Safra.

Page’s conclusion brings up an obvious question: Who is a Jew? Generally, non-rabbinical Jewish organizations, such as Forbes Israel, tend to attribute Jewishness generously to individuals perceived as good guys, such as the popular Page. In turn, it’s common to quibble when the topic is anybody who isn’t popular. (Thus, you’ll often see it argued that, say, Einstein was obviously Jewish despite not being religious, while Trotsky can’t be considered Jewish because he was not religious.)

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In the odd case of Page, we know that his mother came from a Zionist household and had moved to Israel, but the background of his father, the late computer-science professor Carl Victor Page, is obscure. A Google search reveals only that his paternal grandfather had been an autoworker and labor activist, and that his father despised religion.

The Page family seemed to have cherished an old-fashioned socialist belief that in the future, ancestry would no longer matter. Ironically, the wife of Page’s partner Brin, Anne Wojcicki, cofounded that quintessential 21st-century company 23andMe, which offers DNA testing for genealogy enthusiasts.

The true problem with Forbes Israel‘s list is neither ideological nor ethical. Instead, it’s a slapdash affair with poor quality control. Forbes Israel palpably undercounts the number of American Jews on the Forbes 400 list of the richest Americans. (In 2012, it took a minimum net worth of $1.1 billion to make the 400, so everyone on the Forbes 400 is a billionaire, but a few hard-up billionaires with only $1.0 billion didn’t make the Forbes 400.)

The highest quality analysis of the Forbes 400 list by ethnicity is the one updated periodically by human-sciences blogger n/a at his race/history/evolution notes website.

To check which of the competing lists is more accurate, I’ve searched the first 21 names on which n/a and Forbes Israel disagree.

In one case, Forbes Israel categorizes as Jewish a man who appears to be a WASP, cable TV sultan Amos Barr Hostetter Jr., while n/a rightly classifies him as Northwestern European.

The other 20 disagreements consist of Forbes billionaires left off the Forbes Israel list that n/a denotes as Jewish.

I rapidly found that for 16 of those 20, n/a has a slam-dunk case based on readily accessible online evidence. For example, the Wikipedia article on former American Enterprise Institute chairman Bruce Kovner ($4.3 billion) states: “Kovner was born into a Russian Jewish family.…”

Two of the disputed 20, Orange County real-estate baron Donald Bren and Indianapolis Colts owner James Irsay, are the product of mixed marriages.

That leaves only two of n/a‘s 20 whom I couldn’t easily document: banker Bernard Saul II and Miami TV station owner Edmund Ansin. The first has a stereotypical Jewish name, while the second is a relatively rare name that has left me stumped. Ansin’s father is said to be an immigrant from Ukraine who opened a shoe factory in Worcester, MA.

In general, I found that n/a‘s accuracy is better by far.

Overall, n/a states that 140 of the Forbes 400 rankings of richest Americans, or 35 percent, are Jewish.

Perhaps that 35 percent figure is slightly overstated by fully counting individuals of mixed backgrounds, such as Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer. Then again, n/a may be missing a roughly similar number of non-Jewish names of billionaires who are a half or a quarter Jewish in their mother’s lines, so it may all balance out.

In general, however, the question of how to count people of partial Jewish ancestry is, no matter how fascinating in theory, still difficult at present. The current denizens of the Forbes 400 (average age 66) largely come from generations when mixed marriages were fairly rare, so solving this methodological issue can reasonably be deferred for a few more years.

Jews are usually said to make up about two percent of the US population and perhaps three percent of the older generation that dominates the Forbes 400. Therefore, Jews are roughly 17 times more likely per capita to make the Forbes 400 than is the rest of the American population.

This 35 percent Jewish figure has been fairly stable since n/a started his analyses in 2009. The first careful analysis of the Forbes 400 was performed by Nathaniel Weyl back in 1987, when he found 23 percent were Jewish. That suggests a sizable increase in Jewish representation among plutocrats over the last generation. Yet bear in mind that’s only one data point from the past. I’ve been casually following the Forbes 400 for 30 years, and membership shifts frequently due to various bubbles.

n/a has also done a quick and dirty look at Forbes‘s global list of 1,426 billionaires (#1, by the way, is Lebanese-Mexican Carlos Slim). Unlike Forbes Israel‘s estimate of 11 percent Jewish, n/a comes up with over 17 percent. Note that this is pretty much of a SWAG for Eastern Europe, where it’s harder for an Anglophone to look up biographical information. Still, this estimate would mean that per capita, Jews are a little over 100 times more likely to become billionaires than the rest of the human race.

In summary, as an Israeli might tell you, an informed opinion is better than an uninformed one.

Grozny

Over the last few days, as I watched both the homicidal antics of the Boston Bomb Brothers and the characteristically competent Tom Cruise science-fiction movie Oblivion, I was reminded that one of the least expected developments of my lifetime has been how the vast majority of the world’s population is no longer expected or even encouraged to be liberal. At least they are not asked to be “liberal” in the mid-1960s Star Trek sense, meaning obeying a universalist ethic that values all individuals equally.

Instead, the world’s six billion or so nonwhites are now told to be as conservative as possible. I’m using “conservative” in the sense of being naturally ethnocentric, of having loyalties emanating in a concentric pattern, radiating outward from self and nuclear family to extended family, clan, tribe, nation, religion, or race.

Thus, in the 21st century, practically nobody thinks that there is anything wrong with blacks voting almost universally for Barack Obama because he’s black. Those blacks are merely expressing their admirable racial solidarity.

Likewise, consider the immense marketing campaign for amnesty that was proceeding so smoothly until those Chechen immigrants started acting so Checheny. Almost the entire Establishment has been inciting racialism among Mexican-American voters. The press has been demanding that Mexicans get angry if any American dares stand up for laws against illegal immigration. Why? Because keeping Mexican nationals out of America is an insult to their race.

The notion that a Republican politician could stand up and ask Mexican-American voters to demonstrate their loyalty to America by voting against illegal immigration because it is, on the whole, bad for their fellow American citizens is simply unthinkable today. Asking Mexicans to think in sophisticated legal terms such as “citizen” instead of crude biological terms such as “race” has become too advanced for today’s advanced thinkers.

The Tsarnaev Brothers lived in the absolute heart of liberal intellectual America—in Cambridge, Massachusetts, less than two miles from both Harvard and MIT. Therefore, you can be confident that they were never instructed that they owe anything to the country that let them in.

That would be insensitive. Instead, they should display pride in Chechen culture.

Of course, it would be bigoted for anybody to notice anything about Chechen society, such as its ancient tendency toward valor and violence. These two maniacs come from a long tradition of brave psychos. The Tsarnaevs acted out on the streets of Boston a traditional role in Chechen culture, the abrek wild men who leave behind all domestic comforts to devote their lives to vendettas against enemy ethnicities.

Chechens play a remarkably large role in classic Russian literature, greater than any single American Indian tribe does in American letters. The Chechens were admired by Pushkin, Lermontov, Tolstoy, and Solzhenitsyn for the adamantine atavism of their bandit barbarism. Their absolute lack of Christian universalist guilt fascinated and appalled the great Russian writers.

For example, Tolstoy’s novel The Cossacks is about the Christian ethnic group that intermingled Russian and Chechen mores. Tolstoy described the influence of the “half-savage Mohammedan tribes” on the Orthodox Cossacks:

Living among the Chechens the Cossacks intermarried with them and adopted the manners and customs of the hill tribes, though they still retained the Russian language in all its purity, as well as their Old Faith.…Even now the Cossack families claim relationship with the Chechens, and the love of freedom, of leisure, of plunder and of war, still form their chief characteristics.

On the other hand, unlike everybody from Barack Obama to Tamerlan Tsarnaev, people descended from European Christendom are not allowed the simple ethnocentric pleasure of rooting for their own kind. They alone must be liberal.

Over time, however, the essence of modern liberalism has decayed from universalism and fair play to priding oneself on one’s “leapfrogging loyalties” in siding with The Other rather than those annoying fellow citizens to whom you feel morally superior. Cinematic examples include the Marine who joins the noble blue space Indians in Avatar and the Boer bureaucrat who helps the feckless flying saucer refugees in District 9.

Yet even whites still enjoy the fundamental appeal of rooting for their own. Occasionally, this is allowed in entertainment at the nuclear family level, such as in the unsurprising surprise hit Taken, in which Liam Neeson flattens much of Paris to retrieve his daughter from Muslim pimps.

More allegorically, the urge to cheer on the home team empowers conservative anti-alien sci-fi films such as Oblivion because white Americans are allowed to fight for the whole human race. As Ronald Reagan, who understood a bit about movie logic, explained to the UN in 1987: “I occasionally think how quickly our differences worldwide would vanish if we were facing an alien threat from outside this world.”

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The most surprising moment in Oblivion comes when Cruise’s hero, a repairman on a post-apocalyptic Earth, rappels into the dusty hulk of the New York Public Library and grabs a book. It turns out to be the least fashionable volume imaginable: Lays of Ancient Rome, Thomas Babington Macaulay’s 1842 collection of patriotic ballads that inspired a generation of Victorians. (The young Winston Churchill’s only success at Harrow was winning a prize for memorizing 1,200 of Macaulay’s lines.)

In Oblivion, Cruise opens the volume to the Republican Roman legend of Horatius at the bridge. He volunteers to defend his home city against invaders with the conservative words:

And how can man die better
Than facing fearful odds,
For the ashes of his fathers,
And the temples of his gods?

Yet in Baron Macaulay‘s own lifetime (1800-1859), this poet, statesman, and historian was not considered a conservative. Instead, he was recognized as a prodigy of progressive Victorian virtues, the epitome of British self-confidence in the triumph of their advancement.

But Macaulay’s renown has faded as he came to symbolize the Dead White European Male, attacked both from the right for his “Whig Interpretation of History” and from the left for his role as the most brilliant administrator of the Raj in India.

Conservative historians have denounced Macaulay’s amazingly readable History of England as contrived to portray all of history as merely leading up to the Whigs’ Reform Act of 1832. Still, a list of the great Whigs of the English-speaking world—in which Macaulay finds himself in company with John Locke, Adam Smith, Benjamin Franklin, Edmund Burke, George Washington, Henry Clay, Abraham Lincoln, and Charles Darwin—should give even the truest Tory pause.

To contemporary liberals, however, Macaulay’s impatience with cultural relativism puts him beyond the pale. Convinced of the superiority of English culture—“all the historical information which has been collected from all the books written in the Sanscrit language is less valuable than what may be found in the most paltry abridgements used at preparatory schools in England”—Macaulay successfully argued that all education in India be carried out in English.

By making English the national language of the Indian elite, Macaulay thereby laid the basis for what prosperity India now enjoys in software and call centers. But the Indians who express appreciation for him today are mainly the Untouchables, who admire his disdain for the Hindu culture that oppresses them. Dalit intellectual Chandra Bhan Prasad remarked in 2006: “Imagine, if we had only followed indigenous study, we would be like Afghanistan or Nepal today.”

Strikingly, Macaulay was not English. He was of Scottish Highlander descent, and his vivid description of his Gaelic-speaking marauder ancestors’ barbarism would sound familiar to the Russian greats writing about the Chechens. Macaulay wrote that before 1745 a visitor among the “Wild Scotch”

…would have found that robbery was held to be a calling, not merely innocent, but honourable. He would have seen, wherever he turned, that dislike of steady industry, and that disposition to throw on the weaker sex the heaviest part of manual labour, which are characteristic of savages. He would have been struck by the spectacle of athletic men basking in the sun, angling for salmon, or taking aim at grouse, while their aged mothers, their pregnant wives, their tender daughters, were reaping the scanty harvest of oats.

Eight years later, Tolstoy similarly wrote of the Chechen-influenced Cossacks:

The Cossack spends most of his time in the cordon, in action, or in hunting and fishing. He hardly ever works at home.…A married woman has to work for her husband from youth to very old age.…

Yet Macaulay considered anyone who argued for the overall superiority of the Highland Gaelic customs over the Lowland Saxon civilization a Romantic fool.

Similarly, in his notorious Minute on Indian Education, Macaulay noted in passing:

Within the last hundred and twenty years, a nation which had previously been in a state as barbarous as that in which our ancestors were before the Crusades has gradually emerged from the ignorance in which it was sunk, and has taken its place among civilized communities. I speak of Russia.…And how was this change effected? Not by flattering national prejudices.…

Somehow, I doubt that Macaulay’s pragmatic attitude toward ethnicity—that national progress is not encouraged by flattery—was ever conveyed to the Tsarnaev Brothers in Cambridge’s culturally delicate taxpayer-supported schools.

Robert De Niro

Covert agendas play a sizable role in the gun-control debate. If you were to pay attention solely to the handful of homicide cases the press emphasizes, you would assume that the country’s biggest problem is white males committing mass shootings. Yet the total death toll from all mass shootings in the entire country over the last three decades is only about as bad as 2012’s murder count in Chicago alone.

As I pointed out in “Guns and Race” a couple of weeks ago, an obscure Obama Administration report noted that blacks accounted for 56.9 percent of all gun-homicide offenders over the years 1980-2008. During that era, blacks comprised about 13 percent of the American population, so the black rate of gun homicides was far greater than that of the rest of the population.

Here’s a graph from another federal source, a 2011 Centers for Disease Control study of age-adjusted death rates, Homicides – United States, 1999-2007:

Being a graph of victimization rates, it somewhat understates the racial gaps in murder rates, but it will do.

Don’t assume that white liberals are unaware of black and Hispanic crime rates merely because they get so angry with you for mentioning “hatestats.”

White liberals appear to be frustrated that white conservatives don’t help them disarm dangerous urban minorities who depress their property values. Sure, the Second Amendment was all very fine in 1791, but we need political assistance taking guns away from black and brown gangs.

Yet the notion of white racial solidarity is so unspeakable that all white liberals can do is pretend that the main menace requiring more gun control is rural whites. Not surprisingly, this slander doesn’t make red-state whites feel more inclined to help their city cousins disarm minorities.

Conversely, a seldom mentioned reason why some white gun owners own guns is so, if worse comes to worst, they can shoot themselves.

The white rate of gun suicides is much higher than the black rate. This isn’t widely recognized because so many gun suicides are old men with terminal diseases who decide to take the quick way out, even if it leaves an awful mess for their womenfolk to clean up. White gun suicides tend to be lowest in urban Catholic states and highest in rural, well-armed, and not very religious Protestant states in the West.

Newspapers seldom mention suicides by the hopelessly ill, so the statistics on gun deaths can be startling, even to the worldly. For example, as part of a gun-control campaign back in 1989, TIME Magazine printed the stories of all 464 people killed by firearms in one week. I flipped through TIME’s portfolio on the outbound flight of a business trip I took with one of Chicago’s top lawyers. The attorney, an urbane fellow whose brother later became a US Senator, looked the magazine over on the way back, then articulated the same reaction I had left unsaid: “Wow, I didn’t know so many old guys shot themselves.”

In contrast, everybody knows that blacks commit vastly more violent crimes than whites per capita. This seldom aired but widely surmised statistic is central to understanding the confused debates over gun control.

Consider billionaire media mogul Michael Bloomberg, mayor of New York City for the last eleven years, who has made himself the leading advocate of stricter gun-control laws across the country. In his own city, Bloomberg has presided over an extraordinary system of police harassment of young black and Latino males (whom NYPD officers refer to as “the right people”). By early 2012, the NYPD was stopping and frisking 2,200 individuals per day, nearly 85 percent of them African American or Hispanic.

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New York City has had strict gun-control laws for about a century. (Celebrities, the rich, and the politically connected, however, can often score an NYC concealed-carry permit. A 2002 Newsday article reported that private citizens licensed to pack heat on the streets of Manhattan included Robert De Niro, Harvey Keitel, Howard Stern, Donald Trump, Steven Seagal, William F. Buckley, Chazz Palminteri, Winthrop Rockefeller, Don Imus, and Buddy Hackett.)

New York City’s strict gun-control laws didn’t do law-abiding citizens much good after liberal Republican John Lindsay’s election as mayor in 1965. New York cops reacted to official hostility from on high by retreating to the donut shop for much of their shift. They couldn’t get in trouble for violating anybody’s rights if they weren’t doing anything. Not surprisingly, violent crime rose rapidly, making Central Park notoriously dangerous after dark.

Over the last 20 years, though, the Democrats have lost five straight mayoral elections in New York City, largely due to the legacy of violent crime, which peaked during David Dinkins’s ill-fated 1990-1993 Administration. (New Yorkers salved their liberal consciences by voting 81 percent for Obama in 2012, but that’s mostly symbolism: The mayor’s race is what matters in New York.) Pro-police political leadership has reenergized the vast and munificently paid NYPD, and the crime rate has dropped.

It appears that from Mayor Bloomberg’s perspective, an armed citizenry—at least below the Bobby De Niro level of A-listness—is an impediment. Who wants do-it-yourself crimefighters blazing away at bad guys but probably plugging random pedestrians instead when the NYPD’s response time to critical incidents is under five minutes?

The way Mayor Bloomberg seems to see it, all that anybody needs to deter crime is a $3.9-billion police-department budget and the heartfelt conviction that civil-rights laws apply only to Southern rednecks, not to New York billionaires. If your little town can’t afford New York’s 34,500 uniformed officers, well, you should have chosen your level of wealth more wisely.

Baroness Margaret Thatcher

In 1999, I was interrogated on suspicion of being an Irish Republican Army terrorist plotting to assassinate Baroness Margaret Thatcher with a letter bomb.

I was startled by a phone call from the police chief of the Maryland town where the former prime minister was going to attend a conference that weekend. He said, “The bomb squad’s robot just about to throw this heavy package addressed to you at the hotel into the Chesapeake, but then I figured I’d give you a call to find out if you can explain what it is.”

This was not wholly unreasonable because in 1984 the IRA had blown up Mrs. Thatcher’s hotel in Brighton the night before the opening of the annual Tory convention. Undaunted, she delivered her opening address on schedule at 9:30 AM. Afterwards, the IRA announced with sinister reasonableness, “Today we were unlucky, but remember we only have to be lucky once. You will have to be lucky always.”

I finally grasped what the chief was talking about and fulsomely attested that the package for me was not, actually, plastique. As a speaker at the conference, I had paid a printer to do up 1,000 new business cards and FedEx them to the hotel. After about ten minutes of discussion, the poor cop was finally convinced that tearing open my parcel wasn’t going to leave only a smoking crater behind.

What’s fascinating is the IRA-like level of hate directed at Mrs. Thatcher over the last 40 years by the British arts and entertainment caste. (It’s worth mentioning the small number of British artists with the independence of mind and courage to support Mrs. Thatcher: off the top of my head, I can think of Tom Stoppard, Mick Jagger, David Lean, Alec Guinness, John Gielgud, Kingsley Amis, and Philip Larkin.)

Among American politicians, only Nixon elicited as much rage from literati, and that could be semi-excused by their aversion to Nixon’s cunning personality. But Thatcher was Nixon’s opposite in deviousness: She was the most forthright public figure of her age, the least politic of politicians.

At the Heritage Foundation conference in 1999, I sat during Mrs. Thatcher’s after-dinner address with General William Odom, the former head of the National Security Administration who later became the leading military voice against the Iraq invasion. Odom, who had spent eight years in West Germany with the US Army, leapt up during the question-and-answer session to grill her over her worries about German reunification after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. (Mrs. Thatcher, who spent her adolescence getting bombed by a unified Germany, had warned fellow European leaders in December 1989: “We defeated the Germans twice. And now they’re back!”)

Afterwards, the Baroness walked over to our table to resume her argument with Gen. Odom over German unification. They went at it like a baseball umpire and manager quarreling over a play at the plate. I sat there wide-eyed. Finally, Odom said something like, “During the Revolutionary War, my ancestors hid behind trees and shot your ancestors wearing those stupid redcoats!” Mrs. Thatcher laughed and invited all of us to accompany her to the bar, where she and Odom shot the breeze amiably for a couple of hours.

(Was German political reunification a good idea? Like Chou En-lai’s opinion of the French Revolution, all I can say is that it’s too soon to tell. But we know now that Mrs. Thatcher was absolutely right to keep Britain out of the ruinous euro project bonding the BMW 7 Series of the German economy to the Vespa scooter of the Southern European economies.)

It’s difficult in 2013 to grasp how different the world was when Mrs. Thatcher became prime minister in 1979.

Consider taxes. The top marginal tax rate in Britain was an absurd 83 percent on earned income and 98 percent on investment income. Today, England is often the first choice of residence for the global rich, but in 1979 even many English rock stars were tax exiles. Thatcher cut the top bracket to 40 percent, jolting the British economy.

During the 1979 Winter of Discontent that led to Thatcher’s election, Britain was falling apart. Ray Davies memorialized this era of work stoppages and inflation in The Kinks’ 1979 heavy metal-disco song “Superman:”

<blockquote>There was a gas strike, oil strike, lorry strike, bread strike.…Gas bills, rent bills, tax bills, phone bills</blockquote>

The chaos during the last Socialist government, in which garbage piled up on the streets and even corpses weren’t buried because government gravediggers were on strike, stemmed from the ruling party’s fundamental financial conflict of interest. The Labour Party had been founded to represent the trade unions’ interests. But after the nationalization of the major industries, Labour governments wound up in wage negotiations with fiduciary responsibilities to both the owners (theoretically, the British public) and to the employees (union members) to help them extort as much in wages and goldbricking as possible.

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England is not Italy, where people think it natural to find workarounds to corruption and dysfunction. For many centuries, the English have preferred a national government that is if not authoritarian at least authoritative. Thatcher sold off most of the nationalized industry and tamed labor lawlessness. In turn, Tory victories induced the Labour Party to modernize itself by cutting its fiduciary tie to trade unions.

Similarly, foreign affairs were radically different during the ominous Cold War. As Gen. Odom pointed out in his 2000 book The Collapse of the Soviet Military, by the mid-1980s the Soviet Union had 5.3 million personnel in uniform and 53,000 tanks pointed at Western Europe. This threat was several orders of magnitude greater than any we’ve had to deal with in this century.

The danger was not that the aged hacks of the Kremlin had an Alexandrine urge to conquer the world, but that that they would continue to be tempted into foreign adventures to shore up their rule at home by bullying abroad.

From 1976 onward, the Soviets deployed SS-20 intermediate range nuclear missiles, which, in the Cold War’s bizarre but terrifying logic, were destabilizing precisely because they weren’t intercontinental ballistic missiles that could threaten the United States.

NATO had long deterred the vast Red Army by threatening to respond to a Warsaw Pact offensive in the Fulda Gap with battlefield nuclear weapons and then, it was often fatalistically assumed, intercontinental nuclear missiles. But Moscow’s development of an accurate intermediate range missile that could conceivably confine World War III to Europe was a political breakthrough that spotlighted the central psychological weakness of NATO: Would the US, protected by the Atlantic, and the UK, protected by the English Channel, launch ICBMs to save West Germany?

Really?

Charles de Gaulle had pulled France out of NATO in 1967 because he preferred that France control its own nuclear weapons. But West Germany, as the loser in World War II, was not allowed to have its own nuclear deterrent.

So if the Anglo-Saxons wouldn’t risk their homelands for the West Germans, why shouldn’t the West Germans negotiate submission to the Soviets on Finland’s mild terms before World War III rather than on the terms that East Germany got from Stalin after World War II: ruin and rape?

To forestall this not altogether unreasonable line of thought, Thatcher, Jimmy Carter, Helmut Schmidt, and other NATO leaders signed an agreement in 1979 to install their own intermediate-range Pershing missiles in Europe by 1983. The idea was to give NATO a semi-credible deterrent that wouldn’t require an American president to push the button to launch missiles from North Dakota.

In response, the KGB promoted a “nuclear freeze” (a once vast political movement so forgotten today that it doesn’t even have its own Wikipedia page) to persuade voters in the West to instead acquiesce in intermediate-range missile inferiority and thus set in motion the consequent Finlandization.

In the spring of 1982, this Soviet model of foreign meddling to lessen domestic vulnerability was suddenly replicated at the other end of the world when the Argentine military dictatorship responded to demonstrations in Buenos Aires by seizing Britain’s Falkland Islands. Mrs. Thatcher dispatched the Royal Navy eight thousand miles, losing five ships to a brave and resourceful Argentine air force. Ultimately, the Brits won an improbable victory. The next year, the Argentine military was permanently driven from political power, while Mrs. Thatcher won reelection.

Even more importantly, the year after the Falklands War, the anti-nuclear freeze right won the historically decisive West German election. Mrs. Thatcher’s display of Anglo-Saxon resolve in the Falklands, where little besides principle was at stake, helped persuade West German voters to reaffirm their alliance with the ascendant Anglo-Americans. In retrospect, this 1983 failure of the nuclear freeze movement doomed the Soviet Union.

Understandably, the triumphs of the 1980s have inclined Republican politicians in the United States to run ever since as if it’s always 1980, with tax cuts and more military spending as the best solutions for what ails us now. But the greatest statesmen and stateswomen solve some problems—such as 98 percent tax rates and the Red Army’s 53,000 tanks—permanently, leaving their heirs with new tasks.

With gun control, murder, and race much in the news, it’s worth noting that the Obama Administration has solved its longstanding problem that, according to the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics, blacks commit the majority of homicides in the US.

For years, the press has been explaining that more gun control is necessary to keep white men from killing everybody. For example, last Friday the Washington Post featured an opinion article that began:

Imagine if African American men and boys were committing mass shootings month after month, year after year. Articles and interviews would flood the media, and we’d have political debates demanding that African Americans be “held accountable.”

Friday is a slow day in the news business, so it appears to have become an attention-seeking tradition in the prestige media to post extremely stupid anti-white articles on that day, such as the one involving that “mysterious” murder of the black gay politician in Mississippi from four Fridays ago.

Much to the displeasure of the press, however, unwelcome commenters on articles about guns and murder often post links to the Administration’s own “Race” Web page on the Bureau of Justice Statistics’ Homicide Trends website. There, federal bean counters stated:

In 2005, offending rates for blacks were more than 7 times higher than the rates for whites.

Initially, the Obama Administration dealt with the difficulty that blacks were committing murder so much more often than whites by not updating the Homicide Trends website. For years, BJS’ Web page was stuck on 2005.

(By the way, isn’t “Bureau of Justice Statistics” a pretty awesome-sounding agency title, at least from a superhero/nerd standpoint? Granted, it’s not “Strategic Air Command,” but it’s still kind of cool.)

But that didn’t stop troublesome Internet commenters from quoting the 2005 statistic.

Recently, however, the Administration has come up with a much better solution.

No, the White House didn’t actually figure out how to stop blacks from committing such an outsized fraction of all murders.

Obviously, gun control isn’t going to do the trick. Many homicides are a byproduct of the illegal drug trade. And blacks are responsible for 65.6 percent of drug-related homicides according to the BJS.

And, as you may have noticed, the drug business seems to thrive despite stringent drug control. Federal agents are constantly smashing down doors and seizing drugs. Unlike guns, which last for decades, most of the narcotics in the country get consumed every few weeks or so. And yet, a new supply of illegal drugs always seems to show up.

(If you wanted to stop drug trade murders in the US, you’d let Costco sell 100 grams of Johnson & Johnson brand cocaine for $99.99. Of course, applying the Magic of the Market to lowering the legal price of cocaine would cause other problems, such as thousands of coeds suffering brain aneurysms every Spring Break.)

No, rather than solve the problem of blacks committing a disparate number of murders, the Obama Administration has instead deleted the offending Web page. Now, when you type http://bjs.gov/homicide/race.htm into your browser, you get “This webpage is not available.” (It is still archived here.)

Why did this useful federal website vanish? Maybe it’s the Sequester. What better way to balance the budget than to fight the High Cost of Computing by shoving unwelcome Web pages down the memory hole?

If you are persistent, you can still dig up this information by downloading various PDF files created by BJS statisticians. (I’ve found the old BJS website buried in a PDF here; but dumping it into a non-interactive format makes it ugly and hard to use…which seems to be the point.)

At present, the best source for Obama Administration data on homicides by race is a 2011 PDF by Alexia Cooper and Erica L. Smith of the BJS: “Homicide Trends in the United States, 1980-2008.”

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Because this valuable document might someday follow the Web page into oblivion, I’d like to reproduce here some of the more striking contents for the sake of posterity.

On page 2, this Obama Administration document reads:

Based on available data from 1980 to 2008—

Blacks were disproportionately represented as both homicide victims and offenders.…The offending rate for blacks (34.4 per 100,000) was almost 8 times higher than the rate for whites (4.5 per 100,000).

Of course, PDF files are much more daunting to the public than a simple HTML Web page. PDFs are a pain to download and they are particularly annoying to copy and paste from. That quote above required a couple of minutes of work to eliminate weird line breaks and even weirder random spaces within the words.

And PDFs are ridiculously hard to copy graphs from. I had to grab the ones in this article using the antiquated screen capture technique.

Figure 19 from the BJS PDF shows that a plurality of all homicides over the last couple of decades have been black-on-black. (By the way, the BJS is one of the very few federal agencies that calls Hispanics white. So this white homicide-offending rate lumps in all the Latino killers with the white killers.)

The government divides non-domestic murders up into stranger versus friend/acquaintance killings. Stranger killings are the more destructive of cities. Black-on-white/Hispanic killings make up a little under one-fifth of all stranger homicides and outnumber white/Hispanic-on-black stranger killings about four to one.

Here are some more fascinating facts from the Obama Administration:

Across the 29 years from 1980 through 2008, blacks comprised 52.5 percent of all homicide offenders (Cooper and Smith, Table 1), even though they only made up about 13 percent of the population.

With gun control a hot topic, it’s worth noting that the report says that African Americans committed 56.9 percent of all homicides with a gun (Cooper and Smith, Table 7).

You know that stereotype of young black males as dangerous? According to the White House, it’s true:

While young black males have accounted for about 1% of the population from 1980 to 2008…(b)y 2008, young black males made up about a quarter of all homicide offenders (27%) (Figure 23b).

So young black males commit about 27 times more murders than their fair share of the population.

Interestingly, gun fans will appreciate the fact that blacks are also highly overrepresented among “justifiable homicides” (Cooper and Smith, Table 14), carrying out 42 percent of the roughly 260 citizen-on-felon killings per year.

Of the felons dispatched for good cause by black citizens, 93 percent of the crooks were also black. That means that about seven or eight times per year in the United States, a black citizen kills a white criminal committing a felony. In contrast, that seems like it happens about seven or eight times per night on television. If you are a black good guy who shoots a white bad guy, make sure to call the William Morris Agency right away about getting an agent to handle the movie rights to your story.

Image of thug with gun courtesy of Shutterstock

What do people really mean by the word “vibrant?”

Until the disco era, “vibrant” was used only rarely, mostly in connection with vibrations, literal or metaphorical. A quick search online finds no examples of “vibrant” in the works of George Orwell or John Updike, one in Evelyn Waugh‘s (“that silence vibrant with self-accusation”), and two in Vladimir Nabokov‘s. (Humbert Humbert looks up to a “vibrant sky” through “nervous” rustling branches.)

According to Google’s Ngram, “vibrant” was an occasionally used word from the 1920s into the early 1970s. But then its share of all the words in books roughly quadrupled by the mid-2000s (when a few people finally started to make fun of it).

In 2013, it’s hard to avoid the word. For example, on Monday, President Obama announced, “Immigration makes us stronger—it keeps us vibrant.…”

Similarly, when new Secretary of State John Kerry paid a visit to German Chancellor Angela Merkel last month, he announced that the American-German relationship is “one of our strongest, most vibrant alliances.” (Is “vibrant” the post-Cold War version of “dynamic?”)

And downtowns are always vibrant, or will be Real Soon Now: “Planners in Maine Envision Vibrant Downtowns.”

In particular, “vibrant” comes up relentlessly in real-estate-related articles. Vibrancy is the nirvana of urban planning.

Every so often these days, the word is used reasonably. For example, the Washington Post‘s obituary last weekend for 94-year-old Cuban jazz great Bebo Valdes said he “helped create a vibrant, melodic style of music.” Presumably, most styles of music are more or less vibrant, but it’s hard to begrudge this usage.

Since roughly the disco era, however, “vibrant” has been the utility infielder of journalistic adjectives. If you wish to communicate to readers that they are supposed to think positively about something or someone but you can’t come up with reasons that are plausible, discreet, or acceptable in polite society, just toss in the word “vibrant.” As your mother would have taught you if she were a contemporary newspaper editor, if you can’t think of anything nice to say, just say “vibrant.”

Before the Vibrancy Era, “vibrant” didn’t necessarily have positive connotations. Nabokov’s 1948 short story Symbols and Signs, for instance, told of an incurably deranged man to whom “Man-made objects were…hives of evil, vibrant with a malignant activity that he alone could perceive.…”

But now, “vibrant” is a synonym for “doubleplusgood.”

That’s why earthquakes are not “vibrant.” For example, if you Google “vibrant” and “earthquake,” you can find references to Haiti’s “vibrant literary community” and the “vibrant Haitian civil culture,” but not to that unfortunate country’s 2010 earthquake.

And yet questions remain, especially about the manifold ways the word is used in writing about communities.

In New Orleans, for example, why are both the post-apocalyptic Lower Ninth Ward and the prelapsarian Garden District, where Angelina and Brad like to lunch, frequently described as vibrant? Why are Latino communities always vibrant? Why is downtown Dubuque, Iowa vibrant, while Valparaiso, Indiana is not merely vibrant, but visionary? Why are contemplative art galleries considered essential to vibrancy?

Mostly, “vibrant” serves as a placeholder. For example, in January, The New York Times headlined an article about a not-too-bad black neighborhood in homicidal Chicago: “Diagnosis: Battered but Vibrant.” It’s a polite thing that white people say when they can’t think of anything else.

Often, vibrant is used to signify “growing.” Reporters especially like to find Mexicans “vibrant” as a tribute to their swelling numbers. In The New York Times last year, Adam Nagourney wrote redundantly about Los Angeles’s “vibrant and expanding population of Mexican-Americans.” In this context, “vibrant” signifies “minority…but not for long!”

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And yet when white people talk about a place full of white people as being “vibrant,” what do they mean?

The more I’ve thought about urbanist uses of the word, the more I’ve come to believe that underlying all the goodthink euphemisms, there lurks a Platonic essence of an honest definition. I believe that if you strip away the phony tinsel of vibrancy, you’ll find the real tinsel underneath.

Nobody has gotten more mileage out of the V-word than Dr. Richard Florida, who spent the last eleven years giving speeches at up to $35,000 a pop to local civic leaders on how they can bring vibrant urbanism and urban vibrancy to their hick burgs. Since it’s impossible to talk about Florida’s economic geography theory without getting the professor hopelessly confused with the state, I’ve long called him Dr. Vibrant.

His shtick has been that having a lot of gays, immigrants, and artists—the “creative class”—will bring profitable industry to town. If you are wondering why gay marriage has become such a popular cause among Chamber of Commerce types, don’t overlook Dr. Vibrant’s relentless speechmaking. He’s been presenting gays to local burghers as a sort of magic talisman of prosperity. It’s gone over great with provincial worthies who are a little vague on whether or not Silicon Valley is in San Francisco.

In my observation, the arrow of causation runs largely in the opposite direction: gays, immigrants, and artists follow the big-money boys. If, say, Clarksdale, Mississippi still has more farmers than bohemians, it’s primarily because Clarksdale is poor.

If a place is rich enough, it will soon fill up with Dr. Vibrant’s kind of people. For example, in the late 1970s, I went to Rice U. in Houston. After OPEC raised the price of oil in 1973, Houston overflowed with skyscrapers and homosexuals. Did the gays bring the giant oil companies to Houston, as Dr. Vibrant’s theory implies? No, the high price of gasoline brought extra money to oil-company employees, who gave much of it to their wives, who sometimes spent it on dresses and decorating.

Competing economic geographer Joel Kotkin (whose less fashionable but more sensible shtick is that the suburbs are a nice, affordable place to raise a family) has recently taken a swipe at Dr. Vibrant. Kotkin points out that in the Obama Age, when the economy’s precarious vitality is ironically dependent on the politically retrograde energy and agriculture sectors, the lowest unemployment rates are frequently found in places with more natural resources than people. (Dr. Vibrant angrily responded.)

Still, I don’t think North Dakota will wrench the mantle of vibrancy from Lower Manhattan anytime soon. (At present, the neighborhoods north of Wall Street, with their countless chic restaurants, look like all the romantic comedies in the history of the world are being filmed there simultaneously.)

That’s because I have an ultra-reductionist theory of what people really mean when they honestly think of a place as “vibrant.”

They mean that there are attractive women walking around at night.

That’s it.

My four decades of watching beautiful women have revealed that they tend to be found in prosperous places. Indeed, if you have lots of good-looking women, then the dynamic artists, gay boutique owners, and immigrant busboys will take care of themselves.

Civic leaders of America, despite what Dr. Vibrant has told you, all you have to do to have your town considered “vibrant” is to attract attractive women.

Also, to get people to say you have “good schools,” just get good students.

Please make your checks for $35,000 out to “Cash.”

Scripps College graduates

While reading up a couple of weeks ago on the Oberlin College KKK fiasco, I became fascinated by the various Web pages at colleges such as Oberlin, Smith, Scripps, and similar advanced, lesbian-heavy institutions for the documenting of “microaggressions.” Since the Ku Klux Klaxon can’t be sounded every week (at least not yet), in the meantime young people are encouraged to fondle and document for posterity the subtlest of slights they feel they’ve suffered.

As I pored over the microaggressions endured by victims/students at expensive liberal-arts colleges, it struck me that this ongoing dumbing down of America is a joint project of both sexes, with men and women each contributing their own special something.

In the wake of the Obama campaign relaunching the Battle of the Sexes a year ago, it’s worth noting that the peculiar contemporary version of ressentiment that assisted the president’s reelection can’t be blamed on either sex alone. The current mode, of which microaggressions websites are only the outer edge, combines female conformism and self-absorption with male abstraction, aggression, and gang loyalty.

First, though, what are microaggressions?

The Smith College site explains:

A microaggression is a brief and commonplace daily verbal, behavioral, or environmental indignity, whether intentional or unintentional, that communicates a hostile, derogatory, or negative slight or insult….

So far, that definition sounds pretty much like the stuff of human life. At many a family reunion, I only learned on the ride home that, say, Aunt Sue’s effusive thanks to Cousin Linda for her present was actually a devastating putdown that my lumbering male brain was simply too rough-hewn to register.

In fact, “microaggressions” could be an apt description of the matter of much of British literature and theater, such as the works of Jane Austen, Lewis Carroll, Evelyn Waugh, and John Cleese. The Brits may be the all-time world champs at blandly hurling microaggressions from their stiff upper limits.

For example, in Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, the rich country girl Cecily righteously announces, “When I see a spade, I call it a spade.” The rich city girl Gwendolen impassively replies, “I am glad to say that I have never seen a spade. It is obvious that our social spheres have been widely different.”

Not all of literature is confined to microaggressions, however. In The Iliad, for instance, Achilles expresses his lack of rapport with Hector by dragging the Trojan prince’s dead body behind his chariot.

This knack that the English had developed 3,000 years after the wrath of Achilles for keeping their hostility toward each other swathed in formal manners may help explain their success at conquering other countries. The ability to keep one’s internal aggressions micro aided the British in such external macroaggressions as the subjugation of India. It’s likely not a coincidence that the Victorian English-speaking cultures that invented most of today’s major sports (which limit male violence with objective rules of fair play) also came to dominate the world linguistically and militarily.

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In contrast, the real-life alternative to microaggression is not nonaggression, it’s sputtering rage. Consider the talk page behind the party line Wikipedia entry on microaggression. A skeptic asks:

Could it be that some people, dare I say blacks or Hispanics, might be more than a little hypersensitive?

A true believer replies:

You clearly cannot understand what the article is talking about. Has none of it resonated with your stupid brain? Do you know nothing about history? Are you blind?

You might think that’s pretty funny, but you aren’t supposed to think anything at all. Screaming about microaggressions is a privilege only for the officially unprivileged, or as the Smith College definition concludes, microaggressions can only be committed against “people of non-dominant identities.”

According to Oberlin:

If you see or hear racist, heterosexist/homophobic, anti-Semitic, classist, ableist, sexist/cissexist speech etc., please submit it to us so that we may demonstrate that these acts are not simply isolated incidents, but rather part of structural inequalities.

The cult of microaggressions is not something that either sex could have developed wholly on its own.

Granted, the role of women is readily apparent in the obsession with propriety, with feelings over logic, and the dislike of impersonal principles. Yet on their own, women are less interested in logic, which makes their likes and dislikes more idiosyncratic. A woman can only be pregnant by one man at a time, so women normally put a huge amount of effort into thinking about individuals.

In contrast, these long, airless lists of identity-politics categories appeal to the Aspergery male systemizing mind more than to the female empathizing mind (to use Simon Baron-Cohen’s terminology).

The more alarming problem for the culture, though, is that identity politics’ enthronement of female subjectivity serves as an excuse for males to do what comes naturally: form teams, companies, gangs, or armies and do battle with other men. As Lenin, that exemplar of masculine mentality at its most toxic, liked to say, the central question is always: “Who? Whom?”

This male urge is the most constructive and destructive force in the social universe. So wise societies have restrained it and channeled it by appealing, in the name of sportsmanship and justice, to the male penchant for objectivity and logic.

Indeed, the idea that 21st-century politics is brewed from the worst of the two sexes may help explain the peculiar appeal of microaggression theory to lesbians and the non-cisgendered.

Marco McMillian

We are constantly told that the GOP is doomed because it’s the party of straight white men. That may well be true, but few have asked: How can the diverse Democrats hold together? How can special interests as different as blacks and gays be kept in sync?

The answer appears to be: The Obama coalition can stay together only by stoking resentment—and, indeed, hatred—of straight white men. This naked animus is rationalized by projecting the hate felt by the victorious Democrats onto the losers:

We hate straight white Republican men because…they are so full of…uh…hate. Yes, that’s the ticket: We hate them because they are hateful. No, wait, I mean, we hate them because they are hate-filled. They’re practically Ku Klux Klanners.

To service this Hunger for Hate, the prestige press assiduously generates the Democratic Party’s KKKrazy Glue by whipping up fear and loathing over hate crimes, even when they didn’t technically happen.

Last week we were solemnly informed of a one-man KKK rally at Oberlin College. (Apparently it was a lady in a blanket.)

Then the top story on washingtonpost.com last Friday evening was the “mysterious” murder back on February 26th of Marco McMillian. He was a black gay candidate for mayor of Clarksdale in Mississippi, a state with a “dark history of racial brutality,” as the Post helpfully reminded.

A hate crime, right? It’s Mississippi, so what else do you need to know? Clearly, a gang of homophobic redneck Christians had hunted down with their AR-15s the gay black activist bravely challenging Clarksdale’s white power structure. No doubt, County Sheriff Bull Connor III then covered it up, which must be why it’s still big news in the Washington Post a week and a half later.

Thus, a recent Google News search found 1,750 hits for “Marco McMillian” and “hate crime.”

Except for…well, except for everything.

First, the sheriff of Coahoma County, Charles Jones, is black.

And McMillian was running against a local black political dynasty. Clarksdale has had a black mayor for 20 of the last 24 years, Henry Espy. You might vaguely recognize the Espy name because Henry is the brother of Mike Espy, who was Bill Clinton’s first Secretary of Agriculture. One favorite in the race is the mayor’s son Chuck, who just resigned from the Mississippi legislature to run.

As mentioned in countless blues songs—Clarksdale is home to Robert Johnson’s “Crossroads,” where Highway 49 and Bob Dylan’s Highway 61 intersect—the Mississippi Delta is a poor place. Thus, political jobs are sharply contested. The Espy family has spent much time in court on corruption charges but always seems to come out on top.

(The 34-year-old McMillian had himself already figured in a financial scandal when he had been executive assistant to the president of Alabama A&M University. Improprieties in his pay led to the downfall of his boss.)

The New York Times, which embarrassed itself in its initial Oberlin assault-blanket story, actually did a reasonable job of hinting back on February 28th that the dead man’s family was suspicious of the local black power structure:

…the police said they had no reason to suspect that his death was a hate crime.…“I believe it was political,” said one family member.…“Maybe some people didn’t want him to run. Maybe he was a threat. They wanted Clarksdale to stay the same.”

The Times didn’t mention the race of who wants things to stay the same in Clarksdale, but it did link to the hereditary leaders’ pictures:

With the exception of a four-year period during the 1990s, the town has been led since 1989 by Mayor Henry Espy, who has announced that he would not seek another term. Those vying to succeed Mr. Espy include his son, Chuck Espy, a member of the Mississippi House of Representatives.

But how many journalists can be bothered to click on links before hyping their favorite obsession: white hatred and homophobia in Dixie? Very few, apparently.

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The bereaved family then issued a press release claiming that the victim had been “beaten, dragged and burned (set afire).” These words triggered a Pavlovian media mania, complete with stock references to the dragging death of James Byrd in Texas and the beating death of Matthew Shepard in Wyoming. (Texas, Wyoming, and Mississippi…why, they all voted for Romney!)

On March 5th, the Times tried to quell the hysteria with another surprisingly responsible story:

A Mississippi mayoral candidate who was found dead last week was not killed by being beaten, burned or dragged, the coroner said on Tuesday, challenging a statement from the victim’s family that the official said was misleading.

But that only had a modest dampening effect on the flames of press hatred.

The most striking thing about McMillian’s “mysterious” murder is its lack of mystery. There’s no need for conspiracy theories because the killer, a poor 22-year-old black man named Lawrence Reed, confessed last month. The cops didn’t even know the missing man was dead until Reed crashed the victim’s stolen SUV on February 26th, then confessed where he’d stashed the body. The auto accident, which might have been an attempt at suicide, happened moments after Reed, who had become friendly with McMillian at a Clarksdale bar, told female friends that he’d strangled the politician with his wallet chain.

That’s about as open-and-shut a case as there is. (The killer’s precise motivation will no doubt be argued over at the trial. Carjacking? Thelma & Louise-style rape resistance? Gay lovers’ quarrel?) But London’s Daily Mail had the black killer’s picture on February 28, more than a week before the Washington Post splashed the story.

One of the reasons the national media keeps making ever-stupider mistakes about local police-blotter items is that pragmatic wisdom about human beings is increasingly demonized as stereotyping. For example, there’s a two-word phrase that ought to have occurred to journalists when thinking about a case involving an affluent 34-year-old gay and a poor 22-year-old, and it’s not “hate crime.” Instead, it’s “rough trade.” But that term seems to have disappeared from public consciousness for being “homophobic” (i.e., not on GLAAD’s Approved List).

When my wife and I owned a condo in Chicago two decades ago, we suddenly started running into strung-out young men on our building’s interior staircase. Who was buzzing in 19-year-olds in black leather? And why?

We figured out that our upstairs neighbor, a fat, middle-aged, effeminate white corporate comptroller, had developed a taste for rough trade.

That’s not extremely rare. Some affluent gay men are fascinated by poor young men of a more masculine demeanor. The Wikipedia article explains:

Often the attraction for the gay male partner is finding a dangerous, even thuggish, partner who may turn violent.

Not surprisingly, bad things sometimes happen to wealthy gays who like to be alone with brutish yobs.

It wouldn’t have been terribly startling if my neighbor’s hobby of trading drugs for sex with barely legal boys had wound up getting him murdered. (I’m glad one of the hustlers he let into our building didn’t break into our condo.) The comptroller’s health soon failed, requiring a colostomy, and he sold his apartment to two male flight attendants who proved to be a wealth of stylish decorating tips.

In the Marco McMillian-Lawrence Reed case, the phrase “rough trade” should have gone off like an alarm in reporters’ heads back in February.

But the concept of rough trade has largely been prodded down the memory hole for the last 15 years. Thus, a Google News search for “Marco McMillian” “rough trade” brings up zero pages.

What happened to this useful concept? When the well-to-do Matthew Shepard left a bar with two meth-heads who were out looking to rob somebody to get a fix, the media hive-mind immediately decided to turn it into an iconic lesson about hate crimes rather than the felony murder it actually was.

Camille Paglia had the bad taste to point out about the Shepard murder:

It used to be called “rough trade”—the dangerous, centuries-old practice of gay men picking up grimy, testosterone-packed straight or semi-straight toughs.

She was excoriated for doing so. And most pundits have less courage than Paglia. So say goodbye to the notion of “rough trade.” As Orwell pointed out in the appendix to 1984, reducing our vocabularies benefits those with political power by making us all stupider.

The current identity-politics hysteria was launched about a year ago (conveniently enough for the Obama reelection campaign) with the news that an angelic black baby named Trayvon Martin had been gunned down by white racist George Zimmerman.

In the latest brouhaha, Oberlin, a (very) liberal arts college outside of Cleveland, immediately shut down all classes Monday to hold a frenzied, Cultural Revolution-style rally against the rising tide of racism because one student claimed to have spied a one-man Ku Klux Klan rally on campus in the wee hours of the morning.

The past year reminds me of a similar frenzy in the early 1990s that Bill Clinton rode to the White House. Do you remember the “Year of the Woman,” in which Clinton (of all people) ran as the nemesis of bosses who make passes at the women who work for them? No? Well, since nobody else seems to remember the recent past, it’s worth mentioning how these manias seem to start up in conjunction with Democratic presidential campaigns, then sputter on for years.

The Year of the Woman was kicked off 13 months before the 1992 election when the Democrats trotted out Anita Hill to accuse Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas of sexually harassing her back when they were bachelor and bachelorette. As far as I could tell, the two well-educated blacks would have made a well-suited couple, and, indeed, Anita remained on friendly terms with Clarence until after he married a white woman.

But to everybody else, Anita Hill’s office gossip was apparently the biggest news in world history. Or at least it was long enough to help get Bill and Hill into the White House, at which point the media’s interest in sexual harassment evaporated.

I pointed out back then that if sexual harassment consisted of making “unwanted sexual advances” to underlings, the Arkansas governor was surely–by the Law of Large Numbers–guilty and would eventually run into a scandal. Eventually he did in the Paula Jones lawsuit, which led to Monica Lewinsky and his impeachment. But by 1998, the press had forgotten all about Anita and the Year of the Woman.

Similarly, Oberlin’s ghostly KKKer is reminiscent of scores of campus hate fiascos of recent years. But who can remember anything?

While the college administration’s story of the campus Klansman has excited the national media, only two newspapers so far have bothered to call up the local cops to find out what really happened. One is the local North Coast Chronicle-Telegram of Lorain County, Ohio, which reported:

Oberlin College’s “Day of Solidarity” on Monday was sparked by a student who reported seeing a person wearing what appeared to be a Ku Klux Klan hood and robe near the college’s Afrikan Heritage House while driving through campus between 1 and 2 a.m.

College security officers responded to the area, but weren’t able to find a person wearing the infamous KKK garb.

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Oberlin police Lt. Mike McCloskey said that authorities did find a pedestrian wrapped in a blanket. He said police interviewed another witness later in the day and that person also saw a female walking with a blanket.

Oddly enough, the other is the leftist Guardian of London, which noted:

Lt Mike McCloskey of Oberlin police told the Guardian on Monday that officers were still following up the KKK sighting, but suggested that the only witness may have been mistaken.

In other words, KKK is the new UFO.

After the 1950s, the press slowly figured out that it shouldn’t get too worked-up over flying-saucer sightings. But Klansmen on the campus of what is perhaps the most frenetically liberal college in America? How couldn’t it be true?

Seeing racists under the bed is the latest manifestation of the adolescent hysteria that triggered the Salem witch trials in 1692.

But nobody much cares whether this horrifying hate crime went through the formality of taking place. This non-event has received enormous publicity (here’s Matt Lauer talking it up on Tuesday’s Today Show), just like all the other campus hate hoaxes and hysterias, because so many people want it to be true.  

The racial atmosphere in America is starting to resemble that bizarre 1980s-1990s frenzy over Satan worshippers purportedly molesting preschoolers. We live in an era in which hate-porn movies such as Django Unchained and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo win Oscars.

There is such a hunger in 2013 to sniff out racists and punish them that the actual shortage of racists is leading people to imagine that a girl in a blanket is a lone lynch mob.

It’s typical for the kind of incidents that create media furors to turn out to be hoaxes perpetrated by minorities. For example, Oberlin already had one of these tumults, complete with an official Two Minutes Hate rally, back in the 1990s. The coed who wrote an anti-Chinese slur on an Oberlin monument turned out to be Chinese.

Every so often, perpetrators of these hoaxes annoy the cops enough to get sent to jail, such as Claremont McKenna professor Kerri Dunn, who tried to frame her white male students after she painted anti-Semitic slogans on her own car.

But is anybody in the press ever held accountable for hyping the hysteria?