The race-IQ question remains the most controversial in all of American discourse. In this column, however, I’m going to step back from my hectic and hilarious week dismantling the tweets of outraged midwit Will Stancil, who has been inadvertently conducting a one-man marketing campaign for my new greatest-hits anthology Noticing: An Essential Steve Sailer Reader: 1973-2023 (the paperback is $29.95 with free domestic shipping if you enter the discount code STANCIL).
Instead, I’ll reflect upon some of the more difficult philosophy of science questions raised by the race-IQ conundrum. There are, it appears, good reasons not to be too confident that whichever side you come down on is definitely the right one.
I’m not going to run through all the data, but let’s start by reviewing a few basic facts.
There is no valid controversy today over whether racial differences in cognitive test scores exist. Although many Americans are shocked when they hear that whites outscore blacks on average (although they tend to be less shocked when they hear that Asians average higher than whites), this might be the most exhaustively documented finding in the history of the social sciences.
Nor is there much informed dispute anymore over whether or not IQ tests are measuring something real and fairly important.
Nor is there any evidence that IQ tests are biased against blacks in the sense that blacks perform better on average in real life than on the tests. They don’t.
Nor is there any evidence that a valid IQ test could be developed that makes the race gap disappear. There has been tremendous demand for one since the 1960s, but nobody has ever managed to come close to inventing it.
So what happens is that when somebody manages to make clear these truths, the discussion among smarter people immediately switches to whether The Gap is genetic or not.
In many ways, though, it’s not terribly important for practical purposes whether IQ disparities are due to nature or nurture, because after more than a half century of our society obsessing over how to close The Gap, we’ve made little progress and lately have more or less given up hope that some kind of educational reform will do the trick. We don’t have much of a clue how to get blacks to catch up, and we may well be making their performance worse by catering to their worst instincts, just as we’ve managed to raise their homicide and car crash rates during the Black Lives Matter era.
This then quickly becomes an argument over whose fault it is and who must therefore pay.
Old-fashioned liberals argue that it’s due to the environment—for instance, that poverty means that African Americans tend to drive more Nissans than Lexuses, which must be depressing their IQs—and surely can be rectified by spending more on social programs. Mr. President, we must close the Lexus Gap!
(There are indeed some historical examples of peoples raising their average IQs, often at the same time as they raised their average heights. Perhaps the two best documented are the Japanese in the postwar period and the South Koreans in the late 20th century. But did they succeed through welfare rather than through hard work?)
New-fashioned wokes argue that low black IQ scores must be due to white evilness, for which the only cure for this and for whatever else ails blacks is reparations, now and forever. For example, the official San Francisco reparations commission concluded that black San Franciscans should be guaranteed an income of $97,000 for the next 250 years.
Both explanations imply much higher taxes. At present, taxes are race-neutral, but in the future it might well be argued that only whites should have to pay taxes going to reparations. Equity requires your home equity be expropriated.
Because there is no money involved, the alternative explanation that blacks and whites evolved differently—as Harvard’s superstar geneticist David Reich informed the shocked, shocked Fleet Street hack Angela Saini: “Black Americans are mostly West African in ancestry and white Americans tend to be European, both correlating to genuine population groups that were once separated at least partially for seventy thousand years in human history….”—is considered unmentionable in polite society.
Note that the banned Bell Curve hereditarian hypothesis that one part of the race gap is due to nature and another part is due to nurture is much less extremist and much more plausible than the politically correct conventional wisdom’s theory that 100 percent of the gap must be due to nurture.
In contrast, my default assumption has long been that nature and nurture are probably divided up somewhere around fifty-fifty. That seems vastly more prudent than the orthodox dogma that all of the influence on intelligence is due to environment and none due to heredity.
Still, this doesn’t mean that the genetic theory is a slam dunk. One problem with the plausibility of the hereditarian hypothesis is that it’s extremely limited in its possible scope. We know, more or less, how genetic inheritance works, which means that the theory might be definitively falsified.
Under the Popperian philosophy of science, it’s admirable to formulate a hypothesis that can be falsified. On the other hand, that also means your idea could be debunked once and for all. In contrast, we are pretty much clueless about the limits of how social constructionism might possibly work. And that means that the 100 percent nurture theory can’t be finally falsified because somebody might always be able to concoct a new theory explaining away unfortunate empirical results. If you subscribe to a more woozy, hand-waving nurturist theory, you might be able to gin up a persuasive rationalization to slide out from unwanted data.
For example, consider a type of race-IQ study that has been undertaken for the last century: Does racial admixture correlate with IQ? If the hereditarian hypothesis is correct, then in mixed-race people, the more white ancestry they have, the higher should be their IQs on average. If that’s not true, then the idea that nature is important is in big trouble.
Jim Holt’s 2009 review in The New York Times of a book by Richard E. Nisbett arguing that the cause of the race gap was purely environmental asserted that admixture studies were this close to blowing up the Bell Curve theory.
Among his more direct evidence, Nisbett cites impressive studies in population genetics. African-Americans have on average about 20 percent European genes, largely as a legacy of slavery. But the proportion of European genes ranges widely among individuals, from near zero to more than 80 percent. If the racial gap is mostly genetic, then blacks with more European genes ought to have higher I.Q.’s on average. In fact, they don’t.
But, in reality, for the first 90 years of admixture studies, we didn’t have an accurate enough way to assess individuals’ ancestry. Looking at them didn’t do the trick, as anthropologist Margaret Mead pointed out in 1926. What we needed, Mead argued, was some way to accurately measure subjects’ racial genealogy.
Well, we finally have DNA tests of ancestry that are quite reliable. So, recently, our society has developed magnificent databases of around 10,000 young people for whom we have both DNA and IQ, such as the Philadelphia Neurodevelopment and Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development projects. Analyses of these databases could have falsified the theory that genes play a major role in IQ.
But they did not.
Instead, the results turned out in line with nature being more dominant than nurture in determining IQ.
Still, that’s hardly definitive because the social constructionists can always come up with some new explanation, such as that American whites are notably more racist (or “colorist”) toward blacks who are five percent white (the 16th percentile among self-identified African-Americans) than they are toward blacks who are 27 percent white (the 84th percentile).
I doubt that that’s terribly true because I don’t think most whites pay much attention to those kind of ancestral subtleties among blacks. This isn’t Brazil where colorism reigns supreme. Instead, America has always subscribed to a one-drop rule for the binary sorting of individuals into the big boxes of Black or Not Black.
For example, I no doubt pay more attention to race than most whites, and while I could tell you that quarterback Patrick Mahomes is pale and quarterback Lamar Jackson is dark, I really haven’t noticed color distinctions among most black celebrities. Who is darker? Will Smith or Snoop Dogg? Personally, I mentally categorize both as members of the black race and don’t worry much about how black they are.
But even if we could someday prove my critique of colorism, defenders of social constructionism would just then come up with another excuse rather than declare their theory falsified. In contrast, hereditarianism is more falsifiable, so even though it’s a more reasonable guess, it’s more at risk.
Here’s a sad and textbook case of how companies all too often use the strong-arm of government to destroy their competition.
The online gambling industry in America spent years and years fighting against the powerful Las Vegas casinos to make online sports betting legal in the states. They won a historic Supreme Court case in 2018 that struck down the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act, a federal ban on sports betting throughout the United States.
The court recognized this law as a protectionist racket — and, for better or worse, almost overnight the floodgates were opened in most states for legalized online sports betting.
But now the kings of the hill in the online sports betting world — led by FanDuel and DraftKings, the same companies who profited so much from that court’s wise decision to deregulate — are using the same flawed legal logic that they argued against to make popular sports fantasy league wagering illegal.
Just like the bricks-and-mortar casinos that they fought against for years, the online betting association is flexing its political muscle to try to extinguish this new competition.
They have good reason to be worried. The fastest growing sport in America — in terms of participation and revenues — is fantasy league sports. You can play while planted on the couch on your cellphone.
There are now some 50 million Americans who draft players (that’s half the fun) and compete for money by scoring points based on how well their draft picks perform statistically (for example, by scoring a touchdown) in the actual game played on the field or on the court. The fantasy leagues are so popular that they dramatically increase TV nationwide audiences for regional games — not just when the hometown team is playing. Fantasy has spread to baseball, soccer, basketball (pro and college) and even the TV show “The Bachelor”!
Fantasy leagues have evolved from a weekend hobby in fraternities 20 years ago to giant payoffs and big business. The estimates range widely about how much money is bet every year — because much of the revenues are never reported to the government. But the Sports Management Degree Hub estimates about $18 billion exchanged hands in 2022, up from less than $5 billion a decade ago. Drafting players can go for as little as $2 to as much as $5,000 in high-stakes games.
At issue is whether fantasy sports leagues are like a roulette wheel and are pure games of chance, or whether they are games of skill that require players to make smart draft decisions like a general manager to build a “winning” team. The Sports Betting Alliance, a lobbying arm of traditional online gaming firms, recently brought a complaint in Wyoming that the fantasy leagues are “sports betting sites … operating under the guise of fantasy sports.” They claim these are illegal, unlicensed and unregulated gambling establishments that must be shut down. The Wyoming Gaming Commission bought the argument, and under lobbying pressure, other states are looking at doing the same.
The Wyoming decision overturns nearly a century of precedent that games of skill are treated differently from games of chance in federal and state law. If the gaming commissions — which naturally want to regulate as much of the industry as possible to expand their powers — don’t back down and the Sports Betting Alliance wins the day here, either the online fantasy leagues go out of business, or they will be hobbled by a thicket of complicated and costly government regulations. Either of these options are just what the fantasy league competitors are seeking.
But what the state gambling regulators can’t identify is why there is any problem here that needs fixing. The public is not being harmed. The leagues are wildly popular with 50 million Americans. Can they all be wrong — or wronged here?
No. Clearly, the only “victim” here is the gambling industry itself, which is acting like a mafioso boss who objects to a competitor invading his monopoly. Instead of taking a tire iron to the perpetrators, they rush to the courts for protection.
Here’s something you can bet on: If FanDuel and their buddies prevail with this tactic of siccing government regulators on their competition, the biggest losers will be the tens of millions of Americans who have fallen in love with fantasy sports.
To borrow a sports metaphor, the courts should simply say: No harm, no foul.
Can I call ’em or what?
From September 2023: “The GOP is lucky as hell that Dems haven’t realized just how unstoppable a ‘1994 Democrat’ would be today, especially in city and state elections.”
By “1994 Democrat” I meant a Dem who’s tough on crime, against open borders, and not into the tranny shit (which wasn’t even an issue in ’94) while still being pro-choice.
“Should Democrats ever realize that going back to that 1994 vibe would be an ultimate stake through the heart of a GOP that’s dying among swing voters thanks to Trumpism on one end and pro-life extremism on the other, GOP losses would be profound, and that’s saying a lot considering how substantial those losses have already been over the past five years.”
And guess what? John Fetterman got the memo. Not necessarily from me, because the point I was making was actually one of my most obvious. So obvious, in fact, that even a man recovering from a stroke could grasp it.
Only today’s rightists are dumb enough to never see the most obvious move on a chessboard (that’s what happens when you play in 4D).
By bringing back the “Blue Dog Democrat”—taking on the Biden Administration on crime and open borders (indeed, becoming Biden’s loudest Democrat critic regarding immigration), taking on his own party over the hypocrisy of removing Santos while coddling Menendez, protecting U.S. Steel, taking on the CCP over grabbing American land, taking on “the Squad” over Muslim terrorists, and even daring to mention the genocide of whites in South Africa—Fetterman’s become, according to polls, “the most popular senator in America,” with a 76 percent approval rating (and only 7 percent disapproval).
After Fetterman defiantly told NBC News, “I am not a progressive,” he became a target of Pennsylvania’s far-leftists, who feel “betrayed.” Because yeah, in his earlier years, Fetterman seemed to be one of them. But then he had the “1994 Democrat epiphany.” Just a week ago Fetterman told the NY Post that “the progressives left me.” Police defunding, open borders, Hamas…he didn’t betray them, they betrayed him.
I tried to make this point in 2022: Stroke victims aren’t retards; they’re just trapped in a state of speech and movement impairment. Perhaps I’m hypersensitive because, thanks to the hypertension I get from some of you folks, my stroke risk indicator reads “tomorrow at 3:27 p.m.” But two years ago I made it clear that “Fetterman is a retard” was a bad strategy.
And that’s another thing about the guy. He’s willing to take positions that ally him with folks who called him a retard, the people who, seeing him at his worst, mocked his affliction and ridiculed his recovery. His positions don’t seem influenced by personal grudges.
You cannot get more not-Trump than that. Trump has no positions beyond personal grudges.
Now let’s take a look at how some high-profile MAGAs are reacting to Fetterman embracing Blue-Dogism.
Like Poso the Clown, who tweeted:
Fetterman is running an angle on talking like average Pennsylvanians so that he can undercut Trump later this year when he campaigns with Biden across Pennsylvania This is clearly an op and there’s a lot of people falling for it
An “op.” It’s all an “op.”
Fetterman’s doing exactly what every politician should be doing—he’s representing the views of his constituents, and he’s becoming popular in his state in order to help his party. That’s how it’s supposed to go, Poso you cretin. Only those who’ve lost touch with reality see normalcy as an “op.” It’s like how a septum-pierced face-tatted nipple-ringed tranny would see Grace Kelly as ugly. When you’ve lost touch with reality, the normal seems abnormal; your perspective becomes inverted.
Only a moron so lost in conspiratorial thinking and so acclimated to a political party that only knows how to shoot itself in the foot, only knows how to ignore its voter base, and only campaigns on flights of fancy instead of brick-and-mortar issues could watch a politician doing the smart, correct, and effective thing and say, “It’s an op!”
Replying to Poso, MAGA mega-influencer “D.C. Draino” added:
Smart take by Poso Fetterman may be saying things we agree with recently, but he’s still a Democrat and will be supporting Joe Biden in the pivotal swing state of PA this fall Stay frosty Don’t boost his credibility
Poso: “Don’t fall for it!”
Draino: “Don’t boost his credibility!”
Enough with the fucking don’ts, you Rain Men. How about a do?
Do replicate his success. Do as he does.
But no. The MAGA influencers who insist on seeing everything as an “op” are marching rightists ever more rapidly off the sanity cliff.
Can you imagine if this Fetterman thing catches on? If more Dems start embracing reality as GOPs flee from it? All the rightists shouting “uniparty” will, ironically, be the ones who bring about one-party rule, as Republicans lose election after election.
Last week, after Amy Coney Barrett swung the vote against Texas regarding the border, high-profile MAGAs took to Twitter to declare that Barrett is “compromised” and an “op.” Tucker Carlson ranted that he no longer trusts her.
WTF? She’s exactly who she claimed to be. She’s a single-issue baby-waby-saving Papist. If it doesn’t involve abortion, she ain’t interested. You knew this! You can trust Barrett…she told you who she was, and you cheered. What the hell made you think she had any concern about slowing Third World immigration? Have you seen her fucking family? She adopts black and brown kids like Mia Farrow on speed.
Here’s Tucker back in 2020, alongside Candace “the Jews are our misfortune” Owens, applauding Barrett for being an anti-abortion zealot, a waby-firster. Tucker knew what he was getting, and now that he got it, his only choices are, admit his own stupidity and short-sightedness, or scream (in high-pitched Tucker voice) “FALSE FLAG! PSYOP! COMPROMISED!”
Ann Coulter called this at the time, and she called it perfectly. She warned about Barrett; she even suggested better candidates for Ginsburg’s seat. But nobody listened. Because the MAGA right has only two settings these days: “follow unthinkingly” and “scream conspiracy when you step in poo because you were following unthinkingly.”
I should add that Poso’s current obsession is that Taylor Swift is an “op.”
“Ye tried to warn us about the Taylor Swift psyop and we didn’t listen,” he tweeted last month.
Now, that’s a stark contrast. Poso credited a mentally ill Holocaust-denying Hitler fanboy for trying to warn us about an imaginary “psyop,” whereas Coulter tried to warn us about something genuine with real-world consequences. That so many of you will side with Poso on this, that so many of you will think he’s the real “truther,” scares the crap outta me.
Currently, the top “psyop” being sleuthed by tards like Poso, Carlson, and Trump’s anencephalic attic child Darren Beattie (Barrett often cites Beattie as proof that fetuses without brain stems can be viable) is the January 6 pipe bomb incident. Turns out it was an FBI (you guessed it) op!
The proof it was an op? The FBI hasn’t caught the culprit yet.
Beattie will happily walk you through hours of security camera footage from when the devices were discovered, pointing out that this pedestrian walks one way when he should’ve walked the other, and this guy…look at his face! He doesn’t sport the expression I’d wear while walking down a street, so he must be a fed!
These “sleuths” fail to provide any motive for the op; the amateurish “bombs” were placed at GOP and Dem HQs, neither went off, no one was hurt, and the incident didn’t affect the J6 narrative in a way that helped or harmed the left or the right, Pelosi or Trump.
Beattie and Carlson make a huge deal out of the fact that a small group of children was allowed to walk past the DNC HQ after investigators were alerted to the device.
“A-ha,” screams Carlson! “Aglughalughlewoo,” screams Beattie (the closest he can come to human speech, lacking a frontal lobe). “This is PROOF it’s an OP! If they didn’t already know the device was a FAKE, a PLANT, why’d they let children near it?”
Uh, if it had been an “op,” wouldn’t the feds have gone out of their way to make a huge deal about “protecting” those kids? Knowing there were cameras everywhere, wouldn’t they have acted as heroes? “Get back! RUN! Booooooomb!” The passivity of the investigators doesn’t seem to reflect the attitude of people who’d created a hoax to sow fear and panic.
Carlson and Beattie (the detective team of Holmes and Yoyo) point out that Kamala Harris wasn’t whisked to safety as a precaution when the devices were found.
That’s proof of an op.
Also, Nancy Pelosi made a big deal of running for her life when the J6ers stormed the Capitol.
That, too, is proof of an op.
If you react lackadaisically, that’s proof of an op—it means you know there’s no real danger. If you react dramatically, that’s proof of an op—it means you’re hamming it up to exploit the fake threat.
Rightist sleuths know the words “double” and “bind” when used separately (Nick Fuentes at In-N-Out: “Gimme a double-double.” Ali Alexander in line behind him: “And one for the BDSM teen boy I’m about to bind”), but don’t put those two words together; it’ll be lost on them.
Isn’t it possible that the FBI hasn’t caught the device-planter not because of an “op” but because of incompetence?
See, here’s why this “op” thing is damaging beyond just being stupid. So far, 2024’s been dominated by stories about the “competence crisis” that’s largely resulted from DEI policies. Diversity hires Third Worlding the nation. Highlighting the competency crisis is the best way to sell voters on supporting the dismantling of DEI (even many liberal voters don’t want to be on a plane when the door flies off).
If everything that happens is a delicately planned, meticulously carried-out op, then we don’t have a competency crisis. We have a steady hidden hand guiding all events. Sure the hidden overseers may be evil, but they’re certainly competent. Skilled, even.
By labeling everything an op, the right’s folding its best hand. Competency crisis is exactly the message that white working-class male voters—the ones most at risk of not being hired because of DEI—need to hear right now.
But no. As a Pennsylvania stroke victim displays actual competence, the reality-detached right dismisses competence as a talking point in favor of “we’re in the Matrix” fantasies of excessively competent hidden rulers faking our daily life.
Hey…what if Poso and Tuck are the real ops?
Given a choice, I’d rather drag the right back to reality. But that ain’t happening, so I might as well turn the paranoia against the paranoid.
Maybe the true “ops” are the guys screaming “op.” Maybe they’re the conspirators!
I’m just asking qwestchins…and maybe trying to lead you away from that poop you’re unthinkingly marching toward.
I once knew a self-employed person who was delighted to receive a letter from HMRC, the British equivalent of the IRS, informing him he owed them £0 in tax for that year. Excellent news, he thought. Then he began getting a further series of legally intimidatory letters from the taxman, threatening to take him to court for nonpayment of this very same impossible sum. Contacting a helpline, he was told not to worry, it was just some silly administrative error “to do with computers” which would all soon be sorted out.
And yet still the legal letters kept coming. In desperation, he did the only thing he could think of doing: He wrote out a check for £0 payable to HMRC. Seemingly, this act of inhuman logic acted to propitiate the computer’s circuits, and the letters stopped arriving. To the black-and-white, binary world of the database involved, it seemed that to owe the taxman nothing meant literally to owe him nothing.
False Horizons
Very possibly HMRC were foolish enough to be using the incredibly faulty computerized databases also used by the British Post Office, the subject of a major scandal over here in the U.K. of late. Flaws in the Post Office’s Horizon accounting system, designed by Japanese software giants Fujitsu, led hundreds of perfectly innocent sub-postmasters to be wrongly accused of financial fraud, leading many into imprisonment, bankruptcy, or suicide.
Although it was blatantly obvious Horizon didn’t work properly and that the alleged unprecedented crime spree was a figment of the system’s online imagination, still nobody in power saw fit to admit so. Why? Besides the usual corporate corruption and cowardice, one key reason was the apparent fact that most of those overseeing the running of Horizon simply did not understand how it worked, just possessing a sort of blind faith that, as it was all computerized, it must automatically have functioned perfectly. Unlike mere flawed human beings, computers could never be wrong or mistaken, you see: That’s why my old acquaintance once ended up owing one £0.
Also surely a factor was the quite mad fact that, ever since 1999 (the very same year Horizon entered public service, curiously enough…), it has been an inarguable facet of U.K. law that evidence provided for the prosecution from within the bowels of a computer system is, as a matter of “legal presumption,” deemed automatically to be infallible and reliable! Talk about rewriting physical reality by simple act of government fiat: Even the transgender crowd might think that one’s a bit unrealistic.
A Complete Waste of Energy
How “infallible” are our massive modern-day corporate computer programs, really? Not very, it would seem. Just before Christmas, another such database scandal hit the headlines when the famous cross-dressing British artist and potter Grayson Perry suddenly had his energy company, EDF, try to up his monthly electricity bill via Direct Debit from £300 to £39,000, a trivial 130-fold increase (at least according to my on-laptop calculator—if this is incorrect, it only goes to prove my point further). It seems Perry received about fifteen bills “out of the blue” demanding this lunatic sum, which he was informed would be deducted from his account that very same day.
According to Perry, he had to spend “about three hours at least [on the phone] trying to get some sense out of a call center, but you’re talking to a computer, really, so it was very frustrating.” The problem was that the brain-dead cyborgs on the other end of the line “would just sort of say, ‘Well, it says £39,000—that’s how much we’re going to take.’”
Whilst it is true that, as a leading potter, Mr. Perry would naturally have an expensive kiln to maintain, it should have been obvious to anyone with so much as half a working brain cell that even the ovens at Auschwitz wouldn’t have cost £39,000 a month to operate—but still, the computer said that’s what he owed the company, so that must be what he owed the company, isn’t it, especially since those incredibly sensible 1999 alterations to English law?
Does Not Compute
Fortunately for Grayson Perry, he was an award-winning, eminent artist with a massive Twitter profile, who was soon able to attract attention to his plight and be invited to publicly and accurately call EDF a bunch of crooks and dickheads on national media, so the database error here was quickly sorted out—but, as he asked the BBC, “What is it like if you’re some vulnerable [i.e., non-rich, non-famous] person and this happens to you?”
I think the Post Office Horizon scandal answers that question quite succinctly: You go broke, you go to prison, or you kill yourself. According to an EDF spokesman, however, any ordinary, obscure, and unknown proles who suddenly receive a monthly bill for £12bn “do not need to worry” as “unusual changes to direct debit amounts can sometimes occur when there is an erroneous [computerized] meter-reading recorded in the system”—sometimes occur why, though?
The spokesman doesn’t say, presumably because he doesn’t know, because nobody does. Therefore, EDF supposedly had “robust interventions” in place whereby actual fully qualified humans, with flesh hearts as opposed to tin ones, would examine obviously absurd new billing amounts and log and correct them as electronic errors: “In almost all such cases, system errors are rectified and prevented, without customers being impacted.”
If that’s really the case, then why did the alleged “human” at the call center try to argue with Mr. Perry that he really did owe them £39,000 for his central heating that month? Well, the EDF spokesman did say “almost all” such cases, not “absolutely all”—as they have millions of customers nationwide, perhaps that helpful word “almost” allows them to get away with merely emptying the bank accounts of, say, five or six helpless old ladies per calendar month, an acceptable price to pay for the immense benefit to EDF themselves of sacking as many employees as possible and replacing them all with far cheaper to maintain machines.
Postman Paranoid
What can us few remaining humans do to resist? Today, you can’t avoid using smart devices in some capacity—even to read this article. And if governments and corporations input your details into their servers, how can you prevent them? But one thing you can do is to stop mindlessly “increasing the attack surface,” as computer specialists phrase it, by refusing to computerize any and all aspects of your life that just don’t in any sense actually require it.
Consider “smart homes,” where you control all your formerly non-sentient devices, like freezers, lights, TVs, heaters, faucets, and ovens, from apps or by voice commands issued to Siri-style digital assistants. Things can easily go wrong here: Hackers could access your smart toilet and flush it so hard you get sucked down instantly into the sewers like a child’s dead goldfish.
Or maybe your smart home could falsely frame—and then punish—you as a racist? Last May, a man named Brandon Jackson found that access to his Amazon account, which helped control his home utilities, had been blocked after his electronic doorbell had supposedly been used to make “racist remarks” to a non-white Amazon delivery driver. As nobody was in, the doorbell had actually said “Excuse me, can I help you?” but the driver, wearing earphones, had misinterpreted badly—especially as Jackson himself was also black, and therefore most unlikely to program his doorbell to pointlessly shout the word “NIGGER!” at all-comers.
Nonetheless, once Amazon received this allegation, they immediately shut down Jackson’s web-linked smart-home devices for a week, potentially rendering his home unlivable by cutting off his heat, light, and electricity. Fortunately, Jackson happened to be an engineer at Microsoft, so he actually knew how such things operated and had a backup smart assistant ready to use instead, rather than having to cook dead mice by candlelight from hereon in, but not everyone is so lucky.
As some firms now advertise the incredible “opportunity” to gain access to your smart home via app-operated locks rather than traditional physical front-door keys, the prospect of being made homeless by a PC now raises its ugly head. Caught carelessly making a joke about George Floyd that Jeff Bezos’ chief motherboard doesn’t like? Better get used to living out on the streets: The opening flaps of cardboard boxes are still operated manually by hand, at least for now.
Penis Why?-Trap
Even more unnecessary than computerizing your home, however, is the truly senseless act of computerizing your own penis. Apparently, there are some weirdos out there who absolutely love the idea of their genitals being imprisoned within online-enabled remote-access plastic chastity cages; then they can hand control of their cock over to their wife/girlfriend/local postmistress, who gets to control access to it via locking/unlocking the abomination with an app.
As a specific sales feature, such contraptions come with no manual override—which makes it awkward when, as reportedly happened to one customer named Sam Summers, hackers got into his own $190 Chinese-manufactured Cellmate Chastity Cage and then sent him a text message to the basic effect that (as another alleged victim reported, although the firm itself denies it) “Your cock is mine now.” Initially, Mr. Summers, being a demonstrable pervert, thought this was from his partner, and found the communication quite arousing. Then it turned out it was from ransomware cyber-pirates, who demanded $1,000 in BitCoin to free his Nelson Mandela.
After he paid, they demanded more, so Sam resorted to the toolshed to liberate his tool. His hammer being no use, he had to buy some bolt-cutters from a home-improvement store and cut the thing off himself (the cage, not his actual thing), leaving him with penile injuries so severe he was unable to have sex for a month. The product’s slogan, appropriately enough, was “Love Hurts.”
“These digital things, you cannot trust them,” Summers concluded. Indeed not. So perhaps best not to go ahead and ram your own penis into one of them, then, eh?
Yet are we all not forcibly placed in a similar position to Mr. Summers today, whether we like it or not? In our ever-more-digitized age, when it comes to having your metaphorical balls clamped within the ever-tightening vice of unfathomable and unaccountable Horizon-style online database systems by faceless governments, utility companies, internet giants, and global mega-corporations, it appears we all now have to whip our sensitive bits out and meekly submit to having them crushed by potential financial blackmailers.
And, if one of us should ever fall disastrous victim to such a faceless online Leviathan, if and when matters are eventually sorted out for us by legally “infallible” algorithm, what wholly inadequate redress will we actually end up being given by our new electronic overlords in the end? How about getting an uncashable check through the post for £0?
The Week’s Most Humping, Lumping, and Border-Jumping Headlines
EXTERMINATION CHARGING STATION
You can’t spell “never again” without “EV.”
Last week Elon Musk faced a revolt from Tesla owners fed up with the lack of “supercharger” stations to jolt up their vehicles. According to Tesla enthusiasts in NYC, it takes an average of 90 minutes waiting in line to get access to the chargers.
Sure, everyone’s in a sentimental mood these days regarding Jimmy Carter; dude’s wife died, and the man himself has reached “stage-4 Biden” on the dementia scale.
Still, Carter nostalgia is no reason to re-create 1970s gas lines. Especially when there’s no actual gas involved.
For his part, last week Musk—as his Tesla customers mourned the lack of juice—was in Poland mourning the lack of Jews. Musk toured Auschwitz with Ben Shapiro (they got in half-price because Shapiro has a season pass). Walking through the gates of the Birkenau train depot, the VIPs and their entourage were met with a Jumbotron playing archival film of Jewish transports arriving at the camp in 1944. The solemn footage was interrupted by a black guy hawking Geico, because even Auschwitz streaming isn’t ad-free these days (unless you spring for Auschwitz+, which gives you access to the new talk show John Goodman’s Gas Chamber, in which the renowned actor interviews newsworthy guests in an enclosed room while eating chili).
Musk hasn’t been the only high-profile VIP to visit Auschwitz recently; California Governor Newsom, secretly hoping that Biden beats Carter to the Pearly Gates (kýrie malaison), recently made a trip as well. When told that the Auschwitz train tracks have sat dormant and decaying for almost eighty years, the “totally not running” Dem presidential contender, reflecting on his state’s trillion-dollar twenty-year-unused fossilized “high speed rail” lines, remarked, “Damn, those Nazis were good.”
THAT OLD BLACK MAGIC
There’s a standoff in Texas! After SCOTUS ruled that the Biden Administration can dismantle the state’s razor-wire border barriers (courtesy of swing vote Amy Coney Barrett, who was concerned that the deadly obstacles might slow the flow of Third World children for her to adopt), Texas Governor Abbott is standing…well, sitting firm.
It’s the Alamo all over again. Except in this war against Biden, the rallying cry is “Remember the a-lame-o.”
And when Kamala Harris cackled her support for dismantling the barriers, the cry became “Remember the a-lay-ho.”
And when Pete Buttigieg tried to intervene, he inspired the cry “Remember the a-gay-bro.”
Turns out the United Nations is using U.S. tax dollars to pay for the migrant caravan invasions. Worse still, according to Axios, the new enrichers are bringing not just crime and disease but witchcraft! Apparently, Afro-Latin immigrants are re-embracing Santeria and other brujería in order to “reconnect with their roots” (which American black women do every day when they rip out each other’s weaves during fast-food brawls).
Voodoo hasn’t exactly paid dividends for the Haitians. They live in sewers, die by the score from disease, poverty, and violence, and every few years a hurricane or earthquake kills a million of ’em. If you’ve ever been to Haiti, the place isn’t protected by brujeria but poo-jeria, and the only thing it wards off is cleanliness.
Axios quotes Eric Labrado, “who owns a witch shop in Austin, Texas,” as saying “brujería opens up a lot of doorways to get back to our history.”
Well, if one’s “history” involves slithering in human waste, it would seem that razor wire would bring back fond memories. By making illegals crawl under barbed wire through rivers of filth, Governor Abbott’s giving the newcomers a deeply spiritual, indigenous experience.
Remember the urinal-amo.
SÍ, SIGH, SUE
Of course, it’s not just Texas that’s having immigrant issues. “Sanctuary city” Chicago’s flooded with illegals, and the local blacks don’t like it, especially as the newcomers have been showered with freebies.
In Chi-town, EBT’s supposed to mean “Emmett’s Bountiful Till,” not “Every Bean gets Tacos.”
The rebellion against Chicago’s largesse toward illegals is being led by a black Democrat named Cata Truss, not to be confused with Truss-a-Cat, a company that will come to your home and tie up your cat so you can open a can of tuna without being pestered (if that sounds like a poor business model, it’s still turning more of a profit than the L.A. Times).
Truss told the FP that migrants are ruining Amundsen Park, “the crown jewel of the black community” (because if you walk through there with jewels, you get crowned).
“They’re giving migrants all the things we’ve been asking for since we came here in chains,” Truss declared as she walked through the no-down-payment house given to her by BofA as part of its “Homes for Homies” housing initiative while direct-depositing the six-figure check from her DEI job yelling at whites five hours a week as she fries up a Fabergé egg omelet paid for by PPP funds that were supposed to go to an orphanage (“It taste like crap, but dang, it crunchy”).
Truss’ lawsuit is backed by the local NAACP, which also backs the far-left mayor’s sanctuary city policies. When asked how the esteemed org can, at the same time, support illegal immigrant welfare while also suing to stop it, Chicago NAACP chief LaDunceford Tardamon took a drag on a joint and said, “Got any fries?”
The Truss lawsuit is complicated by the fact that nobody outside of Chicago cares about Chicago—the windy city that makes all other Americans say “blow me.”
WAR OF THE NOSES
The Oscar noms are out! And this year’s Best Actor contest is shaping up to be a hoot.
Correction: a hooter.
As a Puerto Rican once asked, “D’ju knows who’s gonna win?”
Yes, Jew nose is who’s gonna win.
The two main contenders: Bradley Cooper, the handsome gentile who, in his role as Leonard Bernstein, employed a fake schnoz that looks like Woody Woodpecker’s beak. In the film, the honker is put to good use in the scene in which Bernstein pecks out Steven Sondheim’s eye while going “hah-hah-hah-HAH-hah!”
Up against Cooper is Cillian Murphy, a gentile who went the opposite route to play Alan Oppenheimer. Rather than sporting a Groucho nose, Murphy (this is true) ate nothing but one almond a day for three months to emaciate his face so that his own nose appeared larger.
Even if he doesn’t win, Murphy’s book The Bergen-Belsen Diet: A Frank Approach to Jewface is already a bestseller.
Snubbed for a nom was Helen Mirren, who portrayed Golda Meir in a flop that earned only $6 million at the box office (though some say that figure’s inflated).
Mirren played Meir with a snout from the Jimmy Durante collection, though she was quick to tell Vanity Fair that it wasn’t a “fake nose” per se, but just “fake bridge and tip.” Her nose hairs were unaltered, so of course you can’t call it a “fake nose”!
The big question: Where do professional Jewish whiners stand on the Great Nasal Battle? Where’s the ADL? Where’s Sarah Silverman, who sees swastikas in sandwiches yet performed alongside Cooper in Maestro?
One can hear Wiesenthal Center dean Marvin Hier (nose courtesy of the Heckle and Jeckle collection): “It’s da ultimate posthumous defeat for Hitlah! We’ll make all da gentiles wear Jew noses, so when da next Holahcaust comes, dey can’t tell us apaht.”
Stupid as that sounds, it’s not nearly as reality-detached as the guy who thought Bradley Cooper’s “pre-op Laura Loomer” beak looked even remotely realistic.
GA-GAZA
Like a herpes cold sore, Taylor Lorenz can’t stop returning. The Washington Post’s fraudulent “Gen Z” social media reporter, who’s actually in her 40s or older (as a “social media” reporter, it’s only appropriate that she’s a living meme: “how do you do, fellow kids?”), has shifted focus from canceling legitimate journalists, doxxing rightists, and weeping about mean tweets, to becoming the poster girl for “long Covid,” which she claims to have.
One could say that Lorenz is the “WWII pinup girl” for the battle against long Covid, but that would muddy the waters, as Lorenz is so old she actually was a WWII pinup girl.
Claiming to have “neverending Covid” (Limahl’s follow-up to his 1984 hit), last week Lorenz blasted every other human in America for no longer locking down and masking up. Indeed, she claimed that the Covid “variants” created by you are “committing genocide in Gaza.”
Substituting germs for Jews is either the worst anti-Jew libel in history, or the best pro-Jew deflection.
Lorenz went further, claiming that your refusal to mask means that she can’t go to the grocery store to buy food (she was going to say “buy bread for my family,” but then she realized she’s such an odious creature, she has no family).
But wait…if Lorenz has “permanent Covid,” why is she worried about catching it? She’s old enough to remember AIDS (hell, she’s old enough to remember polio), and the thing about that disease was, once you got full-blown AIDS, you couldn’t get AIDSier.
Rock Hudson: “I’m worried about getting more AIDS.”
Marc Christian: “Sweetie, your blood cells lost so much white, your doctor calls your arteries Detroit. Your white-count’s so low, it could be a Harvard freshman class. Your blood vessels are so nonwhite, bacteria won’t walk through them at night. Bend over, Rock-baby—you’ve nothing to lose.”
If Lorenz believes she has forever Covid, doesn’t that mean she’s the menace? The Typhoid Mummy? (Get it? She’s old.) And even the most strident anti-mask anti-lockdowner probably wouldn’t mind if Lorenz were forcibly quarantined for the rest of her life.
Nobody would mind.
It is a trope of many intellectuals that to stack shelves in a supermarket, or to work at a supermarket checkout, is the worst fate that can befall a human being. Such a job is regarded as the very epitome of dead-endedness, though a dead end is what we are all progressing toward anyway, and many people do not particularly want excitement on the way to that inevitable dead end. They want peace and tranquility instead: As some of my patients used to ask, “Can’t you give me something to stop me thinking, doctor?” It was not any particular thoughts that they wanted to cease to think: It was thought as such.
Be that as it may, there is interest to be found in supermarkets, for example in people’s choice of comestibles. I often look at what people buy and am appalled. It is almost as if they trusted nothing that had not been processed in a hundred factories and added to by a thousand chemicals. What they eat is natural only in the sense that everything that exists is natural. The products they choose may be given names suggestive of pastures, meadows, flowers, mountain ranges, and so forth, but the list of contents in microscopic letters on the back reads like an advanced textbook of chemistry, organic and inorganic. But at least all the purchasers have to do to prepare the stuff is to heat it up, which is about as far as their culinary skills extend.
You can tell the social class of people by simply looking at what they buy. Partly, of course, it is a question of money, but only partly. The higher the proportion of fresh food chosen, the higher the social class. As for alcoholics, they buy edibles as if eating were a regrettable necessity and rather a waste of money. They buy as little and as cheaply as possible: They do not want to eat into their drinking money. It is as if they knew dietary recommendations perfectly and had decided to do as near the opposite as they could. Dostoyevsky said that if a perfectly benevolent and well-intentioned government existed (a wildly unlikely hypothesis), people would do the opposite of its injunctions merely to exercise their freedom. Fortunately, no such government is necessary to prove the determination of people not to follow good advice—which, as La Rochefoucauld pointed out, is in any case easier to give than to take.
If I were to work at a supermarket checkout—another kind of employment that will soon disappear—I am sure that I should find it very difficult to refrain from commentary on the customers’ purchases. “How can you buy this disgusting rubbish?” I would ask. “It isn’t even cheap, contrary to what you suppose.”
Nowadays, people are prepared to eat cakes with sky-blue icing, or sky-blue ice cream. Fifty-five years ago I held a dinner party at which I dyed potatoes either red or blue, my hypothesis being that my guests would be prepared to eat the red potatoes but not the blue: red being a possible color for a natural food but blue being obviously artificial. And so it turned out: People (of my own age) would eat the red but not the blue potatoes.
It would be interesting to repeat the experiment today. It might well be that people are now so disconnected from nature, and so accustomed to the artificial, that they would be prepared to eat blue potatoes.
From time to time, I find shopping lists either dropped or thrown onto the street in my little town in England (the English have become the most slovenly people in the world, in their disposal of litter as in their dress). I pick up these lists and read them: They are interesting both as to form—bad spelling—and content, which is to remind people what they have gone out to buy. The very idea of a shopping list, incidentally, is now distinctly old-fashioned, implying as it does some kind of self-discipline rather than action on impulse, so that one might presume that the people who make—but also discard, whether deliberately or accidentally—shopping lists are of above average self-control. Most people seem to shop, at least in supermarkets, as if they were wandering about until inspiration emanating from the shelves struck them. Few are those who enter with a fixed purpose, adhere to it, and leave once they have bought what they set out to buy.
But even shopping lists catch people in flagrante delicto, as it were, just before or just after they have committed crimes against nutritional good sense. Good God, I think, they give this stuff to their children, it is almost a form of child abuse. The problem is that mothers ask their children what they would like to eat tonight, and with the bad sense that is natural to children, or to humans, the children always reply that they want whatever is bad for them. And the mothers, fearing an outburst of petulance, immediately comply. Thus, an asymmetric war is set up between mothers and children: the mothers having all the power, but the children having the whip hand.
Therefore, it was a pleasure the other day to pick up a shopping list from the ground that concerned only the person’s dog. What unconditional love it bespoke!
Dog food
Treats [the above evidently not being sufficient}
Grooming products and brushes
Dog toys
Towels and blankets
Poo bags [for when the dog is taken for a walk in the town]
Puppy pads
Bone sale
As the fertility rate declines, so the number of dogs increases; and I have to admit that, these days, I myself find relations with dogs rather easier than those with humans, of almost any age. My impression is that people have become more difficult of late years, more complex in an uninteresting way, possibly because of the habit, not of reflecting on themselves, but of thinking and talking about themselves. Possibly my difficulty is part of the aging process, which in this case is mine; but never, so it seems, have so many people been so incompetent in the art of living, notwithstanding all the advantages they have enjoyed in their lives.
Theodore Dalrymple’s latest book is Ramses: A Memoir, published by New English Review.
Of all the Congress critters in the Democrat section of the zoo that is the House of Representatives, one of the more execrable is Ted Lieu from Zimbabwe on the Pacific, formerly known as the state of California. He’s mostly a backbencher, but he’ll never miss an opportunity to whore himself in front of the TV cameras at any opportune moment where he can distort an issue so it denigrates America and elevates leftism. Lieu has a rather colorful résumé, to say the least:
(1) Considers unrestricted taxpayer-subsidized abortion-on-demand at any stage of pregnancy a right
(2) Government-controlled health care via single-payer health
(3) Mandatory affirmative action in both the private and public sectors
(4) Abolition of the Second Amendment
(5) Opposes voter ID and election integrity
(6) Radical anti-oil “climate change” hoaxer
(7) Favors outright nationalization of banks instead of bailouts
There’s also his thinly veiled anti-Semitism and constant fantasizing about eliminating Donald Trump and the 73 million people who voted for him, and so on and so on and scoobie doobie doobie. Ho hum. Ted Lieu is hardly an outlier in the Democrat Party. These days, he’s run-of-the-mill.
In any case, with a crashing economy, an intentional border invasion displacing Americans with third-world peasants, a fiasco of a foreign policy that has emboldened our enemies while endangering us and our allies, and domestic policies that have turned anything not inherently Democrat or leftist into “an existential threat to our precious democracy” (*vomit*), you’d think Lieu would have his hands full sponsoring legislation that might alleviate those problems. Or, more likely, exacerbate them since Ted Lieu and his party, aided and abetted by the RINOs of the Grand Old Potemkin party, are the ones responsible for the disasters in the first place, but I digress.
So, with everything going up in flames all around us, what is a major legislative priority for Ted Lieu?
The push for glue trap bans is being led by the radical leftist group PETA which claims several large retailers have stopped selling the glue traps as well as companies and institutions that have sworn off using them. Lieu’s main objection is that the glue traps are cruel to rats and mice….
Rodent control is not for the squeamish. It involves killing disease spreading, food eating, property damaging rats and mice that are a threat to human health and safety. Bait traps, glue traps, poisons and electric shock traps all have elements of pain and cruelty. The question is what role, if any, should the federal government have in regulating rodent control and how would it be enforced: Armed FBI raids at dawn on rat-infested apartments or family farms over glue traps for rats and mice?
Emphasis mine, but hold that thought for a moment. As stated, in terms of triage, this is the equivalent of calling for the medics during H-hour on Omaha Beach and demanding to be treated for a hangnail. Yet, when you think about it, as repulsive as Ted Lieu and his leftism are, you have to admit that for once, he’s actually doing his job, or more to the point what his job and the job of the other 434 Reps are, or ought to be: writing and voting on bills.
Whatever image PETA projects about fighting animal cruelty, the useful idiots who fall for that guff are in fact supporting yet another Communist front group whose specific goal in the broader war on free market capitalism is going after food, clothing (especially fur), and animal experimentation, among other things. Of course, like every other radical activist group, they embrace the mantra of “by any means necessary,” with their support for the terrorist group the Animal Liberation Front.
It’s funny how Klaus Schwab and the Bond villains of Davos are pushing for us peons to “eat zee bugz!” in order to save the planet, yet not so long ago PETA insisted that using RAID and Roach Motels was tantamount to committing genocide. To be on the right side of history, they insisted you must trap and release roaches. No, really.
For sure, glue traps are indeed “not for the squeamish” and are, to say the least, not a pleasant way to go for rodents and other small critters. But is it the purview of the federal government to pass legislation that bans them? More to the point, would you prefer that the EPA merely issue a regulation that bans the manufacture and sale of glue traps?
To get to the crux of the biscuit of that highlighted quote above, “What role should the federal government have in regulating rodent control anything?”
For me, it is axiomatic that every piece of legislation that the Democrat Party has ever succeeded in passing has made us poorer, sicker, less free, and either creates or exacerbates whatever societal problem and dislocation it putatively was put forth to solve. Yet I can, for lack of a better word, commend Ted Lieu for at least in this instance respecting the Constitution. Presenting a bill before Congress, getting it passed in both chambers, and ultimately having the president sign it into law is the way our government is supposed to operate, and yet for decades, the legislative branch has ceded its authority in governance to the executive branch; specifically the unelected bureaucracy.
Recall Malig-Nancy Pelosi’s infamous boast during opening salvos of the Obamacare debate, “We’ll go through the gate. If the gate’s closed, we’ll go over the fence. If the fence is too high, we’ll pole vault in. If that doesn’t work, we’ll parachute in, but we’re going to get health care reform passed for the America people.” In other words, by hook or by crook, figuratively and in her case quite literally. “Going through the gate,” I assume, means attempting to pass a bill through Congress. More often than not, bills, especially of the Democrat-leftist variety that are attempts at wholesale “fundamental transformation” of society, people, and their relationship to the government (which was intended to be the dominant element), are extremely difficult to pass via regular order. Obamacare is kind of a bad example since it passed, but the way in which it was passed via a completely corrupt procedure nevertheless undergirds my assertions.
This is where Pelosi’s allusion of her party as figurative second-story men reveals the game. Remember the Democrats got creamed in the 2010 midterms, but the damage was done. They managed to put fully one-sixth of the American economy under government control. And by government control I mean leftist control. Barring a miracle, forever.
Yet perhaps a miracle is on the horizon, one that could denude the nearly absolute, unchecked power of the administrative state and perhaps devolve power back to local governments and ultimately the individual.
The United States Supreme Court heard oral arguments in two companion cases, Relentless Inc. v. U.S. Dept. of Commerce and Loper Bright v. Raimondo on Wednesday. The bottom-line question before the court concerned whether Congress authorized the Department of Commerce to charge fishing businesses the cost of government-mandated observers on their rigs.
But answering that question requires the Supreme Court to first decide whether to overturn the landmark case of Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council, the namesake for the Chevron doctrine, which requires courts to defer to an agency’s interpretation of an ambiguous statute so long as the agency’s interpretation is “reasonable.” That’s what Wednesday’s arguments were all about—Chevron and whether the Supreme Court should do away with Chevron deference.
A blackletter law definition of Chevron deference is easy to provide. As noted above, it is a legal principle that requires courts to defer to an agency’s reasonable interpretation of an ambiguous statute. But Wednesday’s hearing showed the contours of the doctrine are far from clear, with the justices jousting with the solicitor general, who represents the Department of Commerce, over the meaning of “ambiguous.”
A statute is “ambiguous,” Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar said, “when the court has exhausted the tools of interpretation and hasn’t found a single right answer.” But as Justice Gorsuch noted in response, just the prior year, a government attorney claimed he could not define “ambiguous.”
What the Chevron decision from 1984 boils down to was SCOTUS giving the unelected bureaucrats of the EPA the power to issue rules and regulations that had the force of law to essentially regulate the activity of Chevron. Without oversight and without any say from the electorate. By extension, it weaponized every agency in government to have that power. Now it becomes easy to see why the Democrats are always so exercised when a Republican president has the chance to nominate a SCOTUS justice, because a bench populated by Scalias, Thomases and Alitos will effectively shut the window on Pelosi and saw off her pole vault.
As for Ted Lieu and legislating glue traps out of existence and many other inane, trivial bills, they have no place being debated in Congress. Some might argue that life is way too complicated for ordinary people to be trusted to make the right decisions (the horror!). A cursory look at how government has managed our affairs indicates we have very little to lose should we take away Malig-Nancy Pelosi’s giant clown gavel, and crucially the unaccountable apparatchiks of the unofficial fourth branch of government who wield the real power. The final say on glue traps should ultimately be decided by the individual American citizen and the marketplace. The same goes for automobiles to gas stoves to health insurance and everything under the sun.
Now, that’s a radical idea.
The New York Times put Charles Murray on the cover of its Sunday Magazine, calling him “The Most Dangerous Conservative.”
That was after he co-wrote the book, The Bell Curve, which argued that different ethnic groups have, on average, different IQs. As Murray puts it in my video this week, “Blacks on average have a lower IQ than whites. However, whites are not at the top. East Asians, on average, have a higher IQ than whites. Ashkenazi Jews have higher IQs.”
Other researchers agree.
An article in ScienceDirect journal puts it this way, “East Asians and their descendants average an IQ of about 106, Europeans and their descendants about 100, and Africans and their descendants about 85.”
But many people don’t believe it. Many don’t even want such topics discussed.
Last time Murray tried speaking to college students, a mob shouted him down.
“They’re angry at you because you’re perpetuating racism,” I tell Murray.
“These kids,” he replies, “never read a word of anything I’d ever written.”
That’s probably true. It’s more likely that they just read slander against him from smear sites like the Southern Poverty Law Center.
They call Murray a “white nationalist” and claim he says, “White men … are intellectually, psychologically and morally superior.”
“I’ve never said anything remotely like that!” says Murray.
“Do you believe that Blacks are intellectually inferior?” I ask.
“If you give mental tests to a representative sample of whites and a representative sample of blacks,” he says, “there will be about a one standard deviation difference. To then translate that into people being inferior and superior is idiotic.”
He goes on to say that there are other differences between racial groups.
“I don’t think there’s been a white winner of the 100-yard dash in the Olympics for a zillion years.”
Actually, 20 years. A white woman won 20 years ago; a white man hasn’t won for 40 years.
It’s probably because some Black people have more fast-twitch muscles fibers, says Murray.
I don’t see why saying that is controversial. It’s just obvious that there are differences between groups.
But Murray has been canceled.
It’s too bad.
Everything should be talked about. People who don’t agree with Charles Murray should debate him, not shun him.
He is good at revealing unpopular truths.
He once had a job working for the government, evaluating social programs. He discovered that the “War on Poverty” was not lifting people out of poverty. In fact, programs like welfare perpetuated poverty.
He wrote a book about that titled Losing Ground.
It soon became a bestseller, and influenced presidents from both parties. Welfare “reformers” Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton cited Murray’s work. Clinton said, “Murray has done the country a service.”
Then Murray wrote In Pursuit of Happiness and Good Government — a book that changed my thinking.
He describes his time as a Peace Corps volunteer in Thailand. He watched Thai government “experts” create what they said would be a “model community.” They gave the village a fishpond, a rice cooperative, a health clinic. But this aid diminished community activities.
“They weren’t as happy as they used to be,” says Murray. “I saw what government looks like from Bangkok and how it looks to the villager. It’s the same in the United States.”
The United States has spent $25 trillion (so far) on our War on Poverty. But the poverty rate has stayed about the same. Instead of eliminating poverty, the War created a new “underclass” — fatherless kids who give birth to other fatherless kids — generations of families who become dependent on government handouts.
Yet the programs keep growing.
“Aren’t you upset?” I ask Murray.
“I’m deeply depressed,” he says. “We have watched, in our own lifetime, our hopes and dreams turned to smoldering ruins.”
Then he smiles and says, “The good news is that old people are habitually too pessimistic.”
Charles Murray, an emeritus scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, has interesting ideas. They deserve to be heard, not shouted down.
I will do a second video, covering more of his work, in a few weeks.
Having lost a few (lots of) steak dinner bets on whether Trump would be the nominee (I said no), and nursing my bitter disappointment that it won’t be Florida’s miracle governor, Ron DeSantis, I asked one of the steak dinner champions his secret method.
Me: How did you know??? How could you possibly have imagined that GOP voters would be that stupid? They did the right thing in 2020 — red wave everywhere, except the presidential election. They elected Reagan over Bush and Donald Trump over 17 open-borders Republicans in 2016. How can they have suddenly become retarded???
I won’t be writing about the presidential election going forward, but do you think it would seem odd this week if I started writing cooking columns?
Him: The reason I knew is that I spent so much time mingling with the fringe in my youth. I can sense when the gangrene takes hold, when the loudest and craziest chase out the sanest while, at the same time, the “liddle peeple,” pure of heart but (as you said) easily duped, decide to sell the cow for the magic beans. It’s tragic; this whole year’s gonna be tragic. Though, if you’ll forgive the temerity, I’m not certain you’ll be able to stick to “I won’t be writing about the presidential election going forward.” You’re not gonna be able to suffer fools for 11 months.
Damn him, he’s right about that, too.
First, what on Earth happened to DeSantis?
1. His 20-point victory in 2022, when Republicans were wiped out in the rest of the country, made DeSantis disinclined to consider the advice of people who were just trying to help him.
2. My case in chief: The six-week abortion limit, or as I call it, the “Republican Assisted Suicide Act.” By then, voters in five states, including two Trump won (Kentucky and Kansas) and one state he almost won (Michigan), had already overwhelmingly rejected the tiniest restriction on abortion. But why should DeSantis listen to anyone else? Twenty points, baby!
3. The white boots.
4. “Mamas for DeSantis.” Did anybody workshop that? In areas of Appalachia written about so eloquently by J.D. Vance, “mamas” would probably work. In the rest of the country, it’s total cringe.
5. Jeff Roe. When megadonors say they’ll never give a dime to any super PAC that employs “strategist” Roe, at least give it some thought. If your only reason for keeping him is that he won Iowa for Ted Cruz in 2016, it’s important to remember Cruz lost the nomination that year.
6. The Children. I, too, like to generalize wildly from my own experience, but DeSantis was running as if the entire voting population consisted of people with kids under the age of 18. In fact, that’s only about 20% of voters. (He also overestimates the intelligence of the average voter, but I’m not dinging him for that because I do, too — obviously.)
I hate to kick a guy when he’s down, especially when he gave such a terrific withdrawal speech, including this “endorsement” of Trump:
“Trump is superior to the current incumbent, Joe Biden. … I signed a pledge to support the Republican nominee, and I will honor that pledge. … We can’t go back to the old Republican guard of yesteryear — a repackaged form of warmed-over corporatism — that Nikki Haley represents.”
Oh, this reminds me, there’s also Point 7.
7. The god-awful phrase, No more pale pastels. We need bold colors. It sounds like Jeb-exclamation-point’s “I’m a disruptor!” — the sort of meaningless pablum that could be written only by a Republican political consultant.
But there it was, popping up in DeSantis’ withdrawal speech like the shark in “Jaws.” The consultant who wrote that “bold colors” idiocy should be fired immediately, rendered unemployable as a speechwriter ever again (unless any Democrats want him), and absolutely blacklisted from the 2028 DeSantis campaign.
And I hope there will be a 2028 campaign, which is why I’m providing these helpful pointers.
Second, a final note on Nikki Haley, since she’s not dead yet — not even deported.
A typical feminist, Haley demands to be treated like a disabled child whenever anyone criticizes her, while constantly boasting about how rough and tough she is.
She threw repeated tantrums at the GOP debates, one time calling Vivek Ramaswamy “scum” — a first for a Republican presidential contest! — and pouted her way through a debate with DeSantis, ending with her petulant refusal to face him ever again.
Another time, Haley acted as if it were rank sexism for Ramaswamy to call her “Dick Cheney in heels”?
Oh, please. That’s a pretty common way to compare one person to another:
George Bush is Bluto with a rich father.
Jon Tester is Chuck Schumer with a buzz cut.
Joe Biden is a vegetable with hair transplants.
But apparently, the only person who can refer to Haley’s heels is her — when she’s telling us what a badass she is. As she’s said a million times: “I don’t put up with bullies, and when you kick back, it hurts them more if you’re wearing heels.”
She seems to have kicked herself in the head one too many times with those heels. Here’s Haley’s explanation of Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on Israel, delivered at a CNN townhall on Jan. 4, 2024:
“I told you about that brutality on Oct. 7 in Israel. Right? Oct. 7 is Putin’s birthday. Who is the happiest man in the world right now? Putin.”
This is the pinhead the donors are trying to foist on us, showering Haley with campaign donations to keep her in the race against Trump. It’s like choosing between water torture and the rack. Either way, Democrats got the Republican nominee they wanted.
The massacre in Gaza has shoved the Ukraine war aside, which is just as well for Zelensky, who canceled the election he was about to lose and has outlawed rival political parties for the duration. I recently watched an interview the ex-comedian gave, and I must admit he comes through as a charming, honest, and warm person. Was I fooled by his act? Probably, but compared with his archenemy Putin’s thespian abilities, Volodymyr beats Vladimir hands down.
The Ukrainian leader’s life is a public melodrama, whereas Putin’s inner thoughts are a riddle wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma—Churchill’s description of Russia. The late Dr. Henry Kissinger, a great American statesman who cannot be compared to the morons running the US of A nowadays, got it right when he said that in order to understand Putin, “one must read Dostoyevsky, not Mein Kampf.” I knew Dr. Hank, as I once boldly dared to call him, only slightly, but I know Srdja Trifkovic, an all-knowing geopolitical expert, much better, as we both write for Chronicles, a conservative monthly. Both Dr. Hank and Srdja agreed that Russia’s soul has a hell of a lot to do with her wars, and no one better understood the Russian soul than Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky.
No nation takes its literature more seriously than Russia, and I thought of that tortured land when I recently walked into an American bookstore that contained mostly ghostwritten autobiographies of illiterate celebrities. “How can you not root for Russia?” I asked an appalled friend of mine whose father, Norman Mailer, was known to write the odd book or two.
Never mind. Russians still read Turgenev, Tolstoy, Chekhov, and Dostoyevsky, whereas Americans are busy canceling Hemingway, Mailer, Fitzgerald, and O’Hara. Russians can withstand wars and deprivations until victory is achieved, whereas Americans—according to my own father—were complaining that Coca-Cola was hard to find during World War II. According to Kissinger, Putin is “a character out of Dostoyevsky,” and as everyone but a Hollywood ignoramus type knows, Dostoyevsky’s life and writing were one long struggle with the demons.
The demons, needless to say, were both his own and those of Mother Russia. Dostoyevsky was transformed by having faced a firing squad—as close as one can get to death—before being reprieved and exiled, turning to God as a result. For the next 40 years his characters—mostly bad, tortured souls—all found Christ toward the end. He saw the Russian soul as being divided between the greatest evil and the greatest good, with both God and the devil ruling the world. The latter grants us great freedoms—as Americans enjoy their porn and drugs today, while accusing Putin of making Russia less free and other such crimes. The devil also guides Uncle Sam in his pursuit to reshape the world into a collective utopia and ideological conformity, and into blurring the sexes because the old devil is a trickster like no other. The devil says that an American cannot discriminate in favor of his own brother or sister, father or mother; he must love them less than abstract humanity. See what I mean by how tricky Satan is?
The American affectation of denied rights for newly minted oppressed groups I see as the devil’s work, because it annuls freedom in the name of collective happiness. These denied rights also include the legitimacy of the nation in the name of a global utopia. The ever-encroaching E.U. is a perfect example. Putin’s Russia, with its nationalist theme and opposition to the global vision of our Western political establishment, is seen as the great enemy, the one that needs to be canceled and eradicated.
What does all this have to do with Crime and Punishment? Well, as Srdja Trifkovic wrote, Putin going after Zelensky and NATO enlargement reminded him of Raskolnikov going after that horrid old woman. And just as hundreds of thousands of innocent Ukrainians and Russians have been killed in the process, so did the old hag’s innocent half sister, Lizveta, become collateral damage of Raskolnikov’s crime. And do you now see why Dr. Hank was correct in advising us to read Fyodor in order to understand Vladimir?
Do any of you remember when everything Russian was hunky-dory? When Yeltsin was in power and every crook in every corner of this earth was eager to do business with him? Well, what followed Boris was chaos, inflation, unemployment, crime, and, most likely, erectile dysfunction. It was only natural for Putin to emerge as a leader and hard man. We, the West, in our unlimited greed, had egged, enabled, and lionized the robber-baron crooks of the Yeltsin era. Putin put a stop to it and will never allow Russian lackeys to genuflect to Western robber barons and banks.
Russia has always been held in a certain antipathy by Western elites for reasons unknown, although I suspect they have a lot to do with the Russian deep belief in Christianity. What America should do is force Ukraine to sit down and talk. Just as it should force Netanyahu to never show his face again in any public forum. But Uncle Sam is greedy and scared and can only pick on midgets like the Syrians and Iraqis.
