Table of Contents

Cover Endorsements

Preface to the 2016 Edition

RACE, ETHNICITY, AND SOCIAL POLICY

America's Decline

Commentary (Letters) • August 1992 • 600 Words

How to Grab the Immigration Issue

The Wall Street Journal • May 24, 1994 • 1,000 Words

Immigration or the Welfare State?

Policy Review • September 1994 • 4,100 Words

Against Prop. 187

The Los Angeles Times • October 3, 1994 • 900 Words

Sinking Our State

Reason • November 1994 • 1,500 Words

Value Added: Why National Review Is Wrong About Immigration

National Review • November 7, 1994 • 1,900 Words

CCRI vs. Prop. 187

The Los Angeles Times • March 12, 1995 • 900 Words

Immigrants and American Values

The Rockford Institute Family in America • May 1995 • 800 Words

Immigration Mockery

The Los Angeles Times • May 21, 1995 • 600 Words

Big Brother, Meet Big Sister

The Los Angeles Times • June 12, 1995 • 800 Words

Bilingualism vs. Bilingual Education

The Los Angeles Times • October 19, 1997 • 1,000 Words

Alpert-Firestone: Recipe for Chaos

The Los Angeles Times • February 26, 1998 • 700 Words

Some Minorities Are More Minor than Others

The Wall Street Journal • November 16, 1998 • 800 Words

New Yorkers Hate Bilingual Ed

City Journal • Winter 1999 • 400 Words

The Right Kind of Outreach for the GOP

The Weekly Standard • March 1, 1999 • 2,600 Words

California and the End of White America

Commentary • October 1999 • 8,600 Words

How to Speak the GOP's Language

The Wall Street Journal • February 24, 2000 • 800 Words

The Right Way for Republicans to Handle Ethnicity in Politics

The American Enterprise • April 2000 • 3,200 Words

Losing the Peace on English in the Schools

National Review • June 13, 2000 • 1,400 Words

How the Republicans Lost California

The Wall Street Journal • August 28, 2000 • 1,300 Words

The Gift of English

City Journal • Autumn 2000 • 400 Words

Above the Law in Arizona?

National Review • January 12, 2001 • 700 Words

Bilingual Education Lives On

The New York Times • March 2, 2001 • 700 Words

Trimming the Emperor's New Clothes

National Review • May 22, 2001 • 800 Words

The Bilingual Burden of Republican Guilt

The Wall Street Journal • May 24, 2001 • 1,400 Words

Rocks Falling Upward at Harvard University

National Review • October 26, 2001 • 800 Words

Will Riordan Run on "English"?

The Sacramento Bee • December 23, 2001 • 1,000 Words

Habla Usted Ingles?

The Wall Street Journal • October 31, 2002 • 500 Words

The Myth of Hispanic Crime

The American Conservative • January 26, 2010 • 5,500 Words

Immigration, Republicans, and the End of White America

The American Conservative • September 19, 2011 • 12,300 Words

Race, IQ, and Wealth

The American Conservative • July 18, 2012 • 7,500 Words

The East Asian Exception to Socio-Economic IQ Influences

The American Conservative • July 18, 2012 • 1,100 Words

No Quotas, No Elite Public High School

The American Conservative • October 30, 2012 • 1,200 Words

The Myth of American Meritocracy

The American Conservative • November 28, 2012 • 26,200 Words

Statistics Indicate an Ivy League Asian Quota

The New York Times • December 19, 2012 • 700 Words

Racial Quotas, Harvard, and the Legacy of Bakke

National Review • February 18, 2013 • 800 Words

How Social Darwinism Made Modern China

The American Conservative • March 11, 2013 • 8,300 Words

Race/IQ: The Jason Richwine Affair

The American Conservative • May 13, 2013 • 2,400 Words

Race and Crime in America

The Unz Review • July 20, 2013 • 7,300 Words

California Republicans Vote to Restore “Bilingual Education”

The Unz Review • May 7, 2014 • 1,400 Words

English and Meritocracy: The Gullibility of Our Political and Media Elites

The Unz Review • May 15, 2014 • 1,800 Words

Does Race Exist? Do Hills Exist?

The Unz Review • May 22, 2014 • 2,300 Words

Asian Quotas in the Ivy League? "We See Nothing! Nothing!"

The Unz Review • May 27, 2014 • 1,500 Words

Meritocracy: Will Harvard Become Free and Fair?

The Unz Review • January 19, 2016 • 1,100 Words

Bilingual Education Programs Fail Our Students

The San Diego Union-Tribune • August 5, 2016 • 800 Words

Bilingualism vs. "Bilingual Education"

The Unz Review • September 12, 2016 • 2,600 Words

A "Grand Bargain" on Immigration Reform?

The Unz Review • October 3, 2016 • 4,700 Words

Racial Discrimination at Harvard

The Unz Review • October 22, 2018 • 10,300 Words

Racial Politics in America and in California

The Unz Review • November 12, 2018 • 7,400 Words

An Open Letter to the "Alt-Right" and Others

The Unz Review • December 24, 2018 • 2,000 Words

Immigration, Building a Wall, and Hispanic Crime

The Unz Review • January 14, 2019 • 5,800 Words

The Political Bankruptcy of American White Nationalism

The Unz Review • July 27, 2020 • 3,400 Words

Will California Restore Affirmative Action?

The Unz Review • September 18, 2020 • 1,400 Words

White Racialism in America, Then and Now

The Unz Review • October 5, 2020 • 24,900 Words

ECONOMICS AND FINANCE

Trade Disaster Deferred

The Sacramento Bee • July 9, 1995 • 900 Words

Taking Stock

The Los Angeles Times • August 25, 2002 • 900 Words

China's Rise, America's Fall

The American Conservative • April 17, 2012 • 6,600 Words

Raising American Wages...by Raising American Wages

The New America Foundation • November 15, 2012 • 3,900 Words

Paying Tuition to a Giant Hedge Fund

The American Conservative • December 4, 2012 • 1,300 Words

No Immigration Amnesty Without a Minimum Wage Hike

Salon • May 18, 2013 • 700 Words

NR on TNR on Unz on Minimum Wage/Immigration

The Unz Review • July 1, 2013 • 1,700 Words

Open Borders, American Elites, and the Minimum Wage

The Unz Review • November 11, 2013 • 1,700 Words

A $12 Minimum Wage: Transforming Policy Idea into Political Reality

The Unz Review • December 4, 2013 • 2,500 Words

Raise the Minimum Wage to $12 an Hour

The New York Times • December 5, 2013 • 600 Words

Conservatives for More Welfare

The Unz Review • December 30, 2013 • 1,000 Words

How California Can Raise All Boats

The Los Angeles Times • January 5, 2014 • 900 Words

Rightwingers for Higher Wages

The Unz Review • January 9, 2014 • 1,800 Words

The Minimum Wage and Illegal Immigration

The Unz Review • January 22, 2014 • 1,600 Words

Raising the Minimum Wage Isn't an "Anti-Immigrant" Idea

The Unz Review • February 2, 2014 • 1,600 Words

Higher Minimum Wage Would Help Immigrants, Taxpayers

The San Jose Mercury News • February 2, 2014 • 600 Words

The Conservative Case for a Higher Minimum Wage

Fox & Hounds Daily • February 3, 2014 • 1,200 Words

What's Good for America is Good for Wal-Mart, and Vice-Versa

Forbes • February 11, 2014 • 1,100 Words

Should We Cut the Minimum Wage?

The Unz Review • February 18, 2014 • 1,400 Words

Walmart, Peter Thiel, the Weekly Standard, and Other Dog-Biters

The Unz Review • February 26, 2014 • 1,300 Words

Understanding the CBO Analysis of a Minimum Wage Hike

The Unz Review • March 10, 2014 • 1,700 Words

The Huge Economic Productivity of Divine Monarchs

The Unz Review • April 15, 2014 • 1,600 Words

Our Elite Colleges Should Abolish Tuition

The New York Times • March 30, 2015 • 500 Words

Meritocracy: How Harvard Currently Soaks the Rich...Such as NYC Public Schoolteachers

The Unz Review • February 4, 2016 • 2,300 Words

Meritocracy: Harvard PR vs. Factual Reality

The Unz Review • February 15, 2016 • 1,200 Words

Solving Silicon Valley's Immigration Problem

The San Jose Mercury News • May 12, 2016 • 600 Words

MEDIA AND REALITY

Far East

The Economist (Letters) • May 3, 1986 • 500 Words

Why Books Matter

Unpublished • June 1, 2000 • 800 Words

The Life and Legacy of Lt. Gen. William Odom

The American Conservative • September 8, 2008 • 2,500 Words

Was Rambo Right?

The American Conservative • May 25, 2010 • 1,300 Words

Chinese Melamine and American Vioxx: A Comparison

The American Conservative • April 17, 2012 • 1,800 Words

The Long Decline of The London Economist

The American Conservative • April 27, 2012 • 1,900 Words

Buckley's Unlikely Heir

The American Conservative • August 23, 2012 • 1,100 Words

Two Cheers for Heresy on Global Warming

The American Conservative • September 24, 2012 • 1,200 Words

Our American Pravda

The American Conservative • April 29, 2013 • 4,500 Words

John McCain: When "Tokyo Rose" Ran for President

The Unz Review • March 9, 2015 • 4,200 Words

Why The American Conservative Purged Its Own Publisher

The Unz Review • May 29, 2018 • 5,800 Words

What Google and Facebook Are Hiding

The Unz Review • May 24, 2020 • 3,400 Words

Ideological Purges and the Lord Voldemort Effect

The Unz Review • July 14, 2020 • 3,800 Words

Google and the John McCain Cover-up

The Unz Review • August 6, 2020 • 1,800 Words

Half a Pulitzer Prize to the Wall Street Journal

The Unz Review • August 23, 2020 • 1,800 Words

31,000 Words Missing from The Atlantic and The New York Times Sunday Magazine

The Unz Review • September 9, 2020 • 2,900 Words

Glenn Greenwald Escapes His $100 Million Webzine

The Unz Review • November 1, 2020 • 2,700 Words

IDEOLOGY AND POLITICS

The Goldwater Papers

California Political Review • May 1993 • 1,400 Words

The Horcher Affair

Unpublished • December 1994 • 800 Words

Educational Nonsense and Vouchers

The Sacramento Bee • January 3, 1999 • 1,700 Words

Voucher Veto

The Nation • May 3, 1999 • 1,100 Words

Federalism vs. Roe vs. Wade

The Wall Street Journal • June 16, 1999 • 800 Words

California Republicans as the Party of the Poor

The Sacramento Bee • August 22, 1999 • 1,000 Words

Politics is Up for Sale in California

The Los Angeles Times • August 26, 1999 • 800 Words

Too Many Guns and Too Many Gun Laws

Unpublished • September 1, 1999 • 800 Words

Gay Marriages Today, Polygamy Tomorrow?

The San Francisco Chronicle • October 8, 1999 • 700 Words

McCain-Feingold Loses; There Is an Alternative

The Wall Street Journal • October 20, 1999 • 800 Words

Democrats' Double Standard On Campaign Reform

The New York Times • March 10, 2000 • 600 Words

High Noon for Vouchers

National Review • June 20, 2000 • 1,600 Words

Dishonest Campaign Reform is Worse Than None

The Los Angeles Times • October 1, 2000 • 800 Words

Darwinian Evolution

The American Spectator (Letters) • February 2001 • 300 Words

Ballots for Dollars

National Review • February 27, 2001 • 600 Words

The Conservative Monkey Wars Revisited

Unpublished • March 1, 2001 • 1,200 Words

How I Made Mitt

The American Conservative • June 26, 2012 • 1,000 Words

The Government Employee Who May Have Saved a Million American Lives

The Unz Review • March 30, 2020 • 1,800 Words

Our Disputed Election

The Unz Review • January 14, 2021 • 2,000 Words

FOREIGN POLICY AND NATIONAL SECURITY

Avoiding a New Cold War with China

AsianWeek • June 24, 1999 • 700 Words

Patriotism and Idiocy

The New Republic (Letters) • November 26, 2001 • 300 Words

Rounding Up Arabs, Blacks, and Jews

Salon • December 6, 2001 • 1,100 Words

Israel's Future: Kachism or Nothing

Commentary (Letters, Abridged) • January 2002 • 600 Words

Sharonism vs. Building a Wall

The Sacramento Bee • April 28, 2002 • 1,600 Words

30,000 American Dead in Iraq....Noooo Problem!!!

LewRockwell • April 13, 2004 • 500 Words

The Torricelli Precedent

LewRockwell • April 15, 2004 • 600 Words

Bananas and Republics

LewRockwell • May 14, 2004 • 400 Words

If You Can't Trust Chalabi-the-Thief, Whom Can You Trust?

LewRockwell • May 24, 2004 • 700 Words

Averting World Conflict with China

The American Conservative • December 13, 2018 • 1,800 Words

CLASSICAL HISTORY

The Surplus of the Athenian Phoros

Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies • Spring 1985 • 10,400 Words

The Brothers of Alexander the Great?

The Journal of Hellenic Studies • November 1985 • 2,700 Words

The Chronology of the Elean War

Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies • Spring 1986 • 6,200 Words

The Chronology of the Pentekontaetia

Classical Quarterly • May 1986 • 10,800 Words

THEORETICAL PHYSICS

Unorthodox curvature interactions, black holes, and inflation

Physical Review D • December 15, 1984 • 5800 Words

MERITOCRACY QUANTITATIVE APPENDICES

The American Conservative • November 21, 2012

Appendix A: Estimates of American Jewish Population

Appendix B: Distribution of American Racial/Ethnic Groups

Appendix C: Racial/Ethnic Enrollments at Elite Universities

Appendix D: Jewish Enrollments at Elite Universities

Appendix E: Estimated Distribution of NMS Semifinalists

Appendix F: Winners of Leading Academic Competitions

Appendix G: Harvard College Phi Beta Kappa Inductees

Appendix H: Relative Enrollments at Elite Universities

Cover Endorsements

With high intelligence, common sense, and advanced statistical skills, presented transparently and accessibly, Ron Unz has for decades been addressing key issues in a rapidly changing America, enlightening us on the implications and effects of bilingual programs in American schools, clarifying the issues around crime and immigration so often distorted in political and popular discussion, placing the question of an increased minimum wage effectively on the national agenda, and addressing most provocatively the issue of affirmative action and admission to selective colleges and universities, revealing some aspects of this ever disputed question that have never been noted or discussed publicly before. He is one of our most valuable discussants and analysts of public issues.—Nathan Glazer, Professor Emeritus of Education and Sociology, Harvard University, and author of Beyond the Melting Pot.

Few people on the planet are smarter than Ron Unz or have more intellectual curiosity. This fascinating and provocative collection of essays explores a remarkable range of topics, many of them high profile, some of them arcane. Unz's analysis is always serious and invariably challenges prevailing wisdoms, which is to say there are a lot of controversial arguments in this book. No one is likely to agree with every one of his conclusions, but we would be better off if there were more people like Ron Unz among us. —John J. Mearsheimer, the R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago, and author of The Israel Lobby.

Ron Unz is a brilliant essayist. His interests run from ancient history and black holes to contemporary issues like racial quotas and the minimum wage. He moves swiftly to the heart of a subject with cogent analysis and limpid argument. This collection of essays sparkles with unexpected gems ranging from critiques of the mainstream press to appreciation of dissenters from common wisdom such as General Bill Odom and Alexander Cockburn. In every paragraph of these essays the reader enjoys a penetrating intelligence at work. —Nicholas Wade, former writer and editor for The New York Times, and author of Before the Dawn, The Faith Instinct, and A Troublesome Inheritance.

Over the past two decades as an original thinker and writer Ron Unz has tackled complex and significant subjects such as immigration, education, economics, race, and the press, pushing aside common assumptions. This book brings together in one volume these pieces from a variety of publications. Unlike other essayists on culture and politics, Unz shreds ideology and relies on statistical data to support his often groundbreaking ideas, such as his 2010 essay on “The Myth of Hispanic Crime.” And his 2014 efforts to put a $12 an hour minimum wage bill before California voters is an example of how the action of an individual can draw public attention to an issue he believes is necessary for the economic health of the Republic. Anyone reading this book will learn a great deal about America from an incisive writer and scholar who has peeled back layers of conventional wisdom to expose the truth on issues of prime importance today. —Sydney Schanberg, Pulitzer-Prize winning former reporter and editor for The New York Times, whose story inspired the 1984 film The Killing Fields.

Provocative and fearless, sometimes infuriating, and quite often, persuasive. And when American's low-wage workers get their coming big raise, the apostate conservative Ron Unz will deserve a decent share of the credit. —Prof. James K. Galbraith, author of The End of Normal and Welcome to the Poisoned Chalice: The Destruction of Greece and the Future of Europe .

Preface to the 2016 Edition

When considering a collection of previously published articles, unexpected patterns may appear. Such was the case as I reviewed the contents of this book, containing works originally written over a span of thirty years.

The earliest of my pieces are academic papers on the history of Classical Greece, attempting to reconstruct the true events of that era from sources that are often fragmentary, unreliable, and contradictory. Scholars in that field must seek to extract a measure of factual reality from a mountain of propaganda and distortion, knowing full well that embarrassing details are often completely omitted from the narratives of our informants.

While doing such research during the early 1980s I often told my friends how different ancient historical analysis was from that of modern times since “everyone knows” the basic facts about the wars and other major events of the twentieth century.

I was naive. There is a fitting symmetry that one of my earliest papers provided a careful analysis of the source material indicating that Alexander the Great had younger brothers whom he murdered when he came to the throne, while one of my most recent articles applied the same sort of critical analysis to present-day evidence, suggesting that the Vietnam military record of supposed war-hero Sen. John McCain may have actually been rather similar to that of the notorious “Tokyo Rose” of World War II fame. Over the last dozen years I have discovered that we live within the distorted matrix of “American Pravda,” and that determining the true events of our world requires much more effort than merely scanning the morning headlines of the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal.

These writings also trace the evolution of my views in topics of race, ethnicity, and social policy, long my primary area of focus and the one that accounts for more than half the pages of this volume. In late 1999 I published a 9,000 word cover story on California's racial transformation in Commentary, flagship organ of the neoconservative movement. That exposition took a strongly positive view of the immigration trends in our society, a stance I had also taken in numerous previous pieces. But a dozen years later America's economic landscape had greatly changed, and when I published my 12,000 word sequel describing the racial transformation of our entire nation, it ran in The American Conservative—a leading anti-neoconservative outlet—where I argued that immigration levels were now far too high, also outlining a viable political strategy to curtail them.

That latter suggestion proposed a very large hike in the minimum wage, and this topic soon became the focus of much of my subsequent writing and political activity, which had previously had little connection to economic issues. I would like to think that my work has played a significant role in helping to move that important idea back to the center stage of American political life.

And then there is “The Myth of American Meritocracy,” the title piece of this collection, running well over 30,000 words with its many footnotes and appendices. Although our elite educational institutions have almost entirely ignored the massive, quantitative documentation that racial discrimination and endemic corruption lie at the heart of our allegedly meritocratic society, many of their victims have come to recognize the injustice of their situation, and I strongly doubt that our current system will long survive unchanged.

But why a book?

In an age when the Internet has so rapidly displaced traditional printed matter, does a bound collection of my writings make any sense, especially since nearly all of these are already available online?

I think so, and if you are holding this book in your hands, you might agree.

Different types of media are suitable for different forms of writing. The sort of short opinion pieces that once graced the op-ed pages of our vanishing newspapers are conveniently browsed on the web, just like the numerous informal blog posts that have largely replaced them. With attention spans dropping, much political debate is circumscribed by the 140 characters of a Tweet, but it is difficult to imagine such transitory sloganeering having much value in printed form. Meanwhile, popular fiction of any length is easily digested on a tablet or kindle, since a story is often read in short snatches of time, with the reader moving forward and rarely looking back.

But my own writings tend toward serious non-fiction of considerable length, with over half this book consisting of major articles running 4,000 words or more, many of them much longer than that. I find that material of such heft is best read in printed form, and a stack of twenty or thirty 8.5”x11” sheets obtained from a website is far less convenient for such purposes than the pages of a professionally typeset book.

Examine the table of contents, explore the pages herein, and judge for yourself whether this product is worth the paper on which it was printed.

America's Decline

Commentary (Letters) • August 1992 • 600 Words

The May issue of COMMENTARY—containing the second round of your debate on American decline, and mostly attacking Edward N. Luttwak’s thesis on the “third-worldization” of America—arrived simultaneously with the nationwide wave of riots, looting, and arson, which fully confirmed Mr. Luttwak’s position.

One must separate the two parts of his argument. America’s relative economic decline, a… consequence of the much-desired recovery of Europe and Japan from the ashes of war and the brilliant rise of newer Asian states, is a perfectly natural and healthy event….

But the decline of American society in absolute terms over the last three decades is unmistakable. Gargantuan budget deficits, driven by the unstoppable growth of redistributionist “entitlement programs,” are pushing our nation to bankruptcy and financial collapse. Street crime has risen greatly in most cities and many suburban enclaves. . . . exacting direct and indirect costs estimated at $200-$300 billion each year. The schools of our major cities are increasingly being equipped with metal detectors, at a cost of tens of millions, considered the only means of dissuading teenagers from bringing guns into the classroom and shooting one another. And in the heart of New York City, an underclass mob shouting “Kill the Jews!” can corner and stab to death a young rabbinical student from Australia, as part of what is arguably the worst outbreak of worldwide anti-Semitic violence in five decades.

None of these examples of complete social collapse or the many others cited by Mr. Luttwak appears to bear any causal link to the economic successes of European and Asian nations. Indeed, it is almost a slur on the third world to describe them as such; they would be as unthinkable in many of the world’s poorer nations as they were in the America of just twenty or thirty years ago….

Then there is the Los Angeles riot. During the same period that the U.S. government was issuing a travel advisory warning Americans to avoid trips to Sierra Leone, because of a military coup and urban fighting, Japan and several other nations were issuing similar advisories against trips to major American cities, for much the same reasons. We saw scenes of Korean shopkeepers, armed with automatic weapons, defending their lives and property against mobs intent on destroying both, with the forces of state authority nowhere to be seen. When the government of an urban, solidly developed nation such as South Korea is forced to protest the lack of protection from mob violence afforded its ethnic nationals in America’s second largest city, we realize how low we have sunk….

As Robert L. Bartley correctly pointed out in his original rebuttal to Mr. Luttwak, some crucial sectors of the American economy are competitive, even tremendously so, notably entertainment, biotechnology, and computer hardware and software. . . . But these successes cannot long survive the decline of our system of government finance, our endlessly litigious tort system, and a level of personal safety in our major cities below that of Bangkok or Bombay. In an increasingly mobile world, America’s best and brightest may soon begin to consider fleeing our urban centers for ever more distant suburbs, or, if they choose to retain urban amenities, the great cities of Europe or Asia.

The enemy behind America’s decline into third-world status is not Japan, or Korea, or Europe. It is ourselves.

How to Grab the Immigration Issue

The Wall Street Journal • May 24, 1994 • 1,000 Words

The Republican Party has within its grasp long-term political control over several states, including California and Texas, the nation’s two largest (the Census Bureau reported this week that New York has slipped to third place). If it misses this historic opportunity, the consequences will probably not be victories for the Democrats, but instead the likely rise of ethnic separatism with dangerous consequences for America’s political stability.

The reasons are simple. Immigrants, primarily Asian and Hispanic, soon will become politically dominant in California and elsewhere, and their political allegiances will certainly determine the future of several states. Today, 30% of California’s population is Hispanic and 10% is Asian. Although for various reasons these groups currently represent just 10% of the electorate, nearly half of all children born in California are Hispanic. And even if immigration (both legal and illegal) ended tomorrow, Asians and Hispanics are destined to become a majority within a decade or so.

This might seem a boon to the Democrats. After all, most Asian and Hispanic voters today are registered Democrats, with Asian and Hispanic elites usually being very liberal. The Democrats’ support for bilingual education, multiculturalism and affirmative action would seem to cement their position.

But consider this. California Hispanics have regularly given national or statewide Republican candidates 40% to 50% of their votes, with conservative Republicans often doing especially well. California Asians have generally given Republicans a higher percentage of their vote than have Anglo voters. In fact, Hispanics are classic blue-collar Reagan Democrats, with the social and economic profile of Italian-Americans or Slavic-Americans. Asians are similar to Jewish voters, but without liberal guilt. Both should naturally become the core of a Reaganite GOP.

These immigrants will certainly not long remain Democrats. The three most anti-immigrant groups in American society are blacks, union members and environmentalists, and these are the three core constituencies of the Democratic Party, especially of its liberal wing.

The rise of xenophobia in black neighborhoods become evident during the 1992 Los Angeles riots, which were anti-immigrant pogroms more than anything else, with whites being merely a secondary target. And the nativist feeling among many environmentalists can be gauged by the genesis of the Federation for American Immigration Reform, a leading anti-immigration group that has its roots in the environmental movement. The obvious incompatibility between immigration and an extensive social welfare state (in which low-skilled newcomers are mouths to feed rather than hands to work) only reinforces Democrats’ antipathy to immigration.

Thus it’s no surprise that some of the most virulently anti-immigrant rhetoric in California is coming from such liberal Democrats as Sen. Barbara Boxer and Rep. Anthony Beilenson. (It is interesting to note that Pete Wilson, the leading anti-immigrant figure in the Republican Party, is both an environmentalist and a believer in the social welfare state.)

It’s true that some crucial non-Asian and non-Hispanic segments of the Democratic Party are pro-immigrant, or at least cosmopolitan (Jews, academic and media elites, top business executives). But although many in these groups have long recognized the failure of welfare policies and the harms of bilingual education and affirmative action, they have usually been unwilling to attack these programs directly. Once it becomes absolutely clear that these policies inevitably lead to anti-immigrant sentiment, these groups will split into pro-welfare state and pro-immigrant wings, with the pro-immigrant wing drawn toward the Republican Party. In fact, this has already begun to occur.

Under the right circumstances, this can be the issue that sparks a massive rollback of the welfare state and the ethnic group policies of the last 20 or 30 years, with these changes being backed by a dominant political alliance of Asians, Hispanics and conservative Anglos.

The danger is that anti-immigrant sentiment will come to dominant the Republican Party, the way it does the Democratic Party. Conservatives and Anglos have become enormously angry and frustrated over the growth of crime, welfare, affirmative action and the general decay of their society. This resentment is “politically incorrect,” and beneath the surface, but still extremely strong, and may have helped to inspire the Perot phenomenon. Direct expression of hostility toward the black underclass or the current welfare system is immediately denounced by a united phalanx of the media and political elites. However, the anti-immigrant views of extreme liberals such as Ms. Boxer and Mr. Beilenson provide the necessary political cover for conservatives to redirect their anti-welfare-state sentiments against immigration instead.

Take away such liberal policies as the welfare state, bilingual education and affirmative action, and survey data indicates that opposition to immigration among Republicans dwindles to insignificance. And it’s important to note that these liberal policies don’t have any deep support among ordinary immigrants, who tend to be self-reliant, entrepreneurial and assimilationist. For example, almost half of California’s native-born Asians and Hispanics marry into other ethnic groups.

Yet most politicians—even within the Republican Party—are riding what they see as an irresistible tide of anti-immigrant sentiment. Such individuals are sacrificing the long-term future of the Republican Party—and of California itself—for momentary political gain.

This is dangerous. Within a decade or two, California might contain a large voting block of immigrants and their children, perhaps one-third to one-half of the electorate, alienated from both political parties. Combined with the continuing growth of bilingual and multicultural policies in the schools and ethnic separatist ideologies among college-educated elites, this will create the potential for the rise of a new political movement or party emphasizing ethnic and linguistic separatism. At best, California could slide into becoming a sunny Quebec; at worst, it could turn into something much more serious.

In 1820, Thomas Jefferson described the slavery conflicts culminating in the Missouri Compromise as a “firebell in the night.” Unless intelligent actions are taken by Republican Party leaders, our current immigration debate may someday be viewed in much the same light.

Mr. Unz, a Palo Alto businessman, is challenging Gov. Pete Wilson in California’s June 7 Republican primary.

Immigration or the Welfare State?

Which Is Our Real Enemy?

Policy Review • September 1994 • 4,100 Words

Immigration has recently become a lightning rod for America’s deepest fears of social chaos and national decline. Millions worry that immigration is rapidly transforming America into a third-world country, with crowded, violent cities, under-educated and low-skilled labor, and an ethnic spoils system replacing America’s tradition of constitutionalism and individual rights. Concerns are rising that immigrants are abusing the generosity of our welfare state, and will become an enormous burden on taxpayers. And because a large number of immigrants are Spanish-speaking, many Americans fear that continued immigration, especially from south of the border, will result in the balkanization of our country into different language and ethnic groups, ultimately leading to the sort of social tensions afflicting countries from Canada to Ukraine to, in the worst case, Bosnia.

These are legitimate concerns, but the problems that Americans rightly fear are not due to immigration itself, but to the wrong-minded social policies of our government. State-sponsored affirmative action, bilingual education, and multiculturalism are promoting dangerous levels of ethnic group tensions and conflict. And our welfare system is breeding pathological levels of crime and dependency–not primarily among immigrants but among native-born whites and blacks.

A country in which 22 percent of white children and 70 percent of black children are born out of wedlock need not look to immigrants as the source of social breakdown. The underlying problems are government policies whose emphasis on group rights promote ethnic tensions and a welfare state that encourages individuals to destroy their own families.

Immigrant Blessing

With proper government policies, immigrants are a blessing. We saw this with earlier waves of immigration, as America absorbed and assimilated tens of millions of foreign immigrants of every language, religion, and ethnicity. By 1900, some 20 percent of America’s total population was foreign-born, and an additional 10 percent arrived in the following decade. Today’s immigration rate is only a fraction of this level. Millions of impoverished, poorly educated Jews, Slavs, and Italians became proud and productive Americans through a public school system that emphasized English language skills and American culture, and a society that provided economic opportunity rather than government entitlement. The Ellis Island tradition was harsh but fair: Immigrants with illnesses, or who were otherwise likely to become a burden on society were excluded, while those with willing hands were allowed through the Golden Door. This is the tradition to which America should return.

Even today, despite government policies that foster dependency, the immigration of the last three decades has still been a strong net positive for the American economy. Anyone walking the streets of New York City or most other major urban centers sees that the majority of the shops are owned and operated by immigrant entrepreneurs, often in ethnically defined categories–Korean grocers, Indian newsstands, Chinese restaurants. It is obvious that most of these shops would simply not exist without immigrant families willing to put in long hours of poorly paid labor to maintain and expand them, in the process improving our cities. In Los Angeles, the vast majority of hotel and restaurant employees are hard-working Hispanic immigrants, most here illegally, and anyone who believes that these unpleasant jobs would otherwise be filled by either native-born blacks or whites is living in a fantasy world.

The same applies to nearly all of the traditional lower-rung working-class jobs in Southern California, including the nannies and gardeners whose widespread employment occasionally embarrasses the upper-middle-class Zoe Bairds of this world, even as it enables their professional careers by freeing them from domestic chores. The only means of making a job as a restaurant busboy even remotely attractive to a native-born American would be to raise the wage to $10 or $12 per hour, at which level the job would cease to exist–this is Economics 101.

Though immigrants are frequently blamed for the severity of California’s current economic problems, there is no connection whatsoever between the two. Massive numbers of jobs have been lost because of the wind-down of the defense aerospace industry, the bursting of the 1980s real estate bubble, and the enormous costs of environmental and work-place regulations, none of which have any obvious connection to immigration. Furthermore, immigration levels (both legal and illegal) reached new heights during California’s sustained economic boom of the past decade.

Since most newcomers tend to be on the lower end of the wage scale, and many have children in public schools, they initially do tend to cost local governments more in services, mostly education costs, than they pay in sales and income taxes. This is the source of Governor Pete Wilson’s current lawsuit against the federal government to recover the “costs” to California of illegal immigration. The same could probably be said, however, for all members of the working class having young children. The real culprit is our outrageously inefficient public school system, which spends much and delivers little. Furthermore, Jeffrey Passel of the Urban Institute has shown that because of their age profile, even working-class immigrants generally pay much more in federal taxes (primarily Social Security withholding) than they receive in federal benefits, so we might well say that immigrants are helping us balance our federal budget deficit, as well as allowing our low-end service industries to survive.

Professional Necessity

But immigrants are crucial not just to industries reliant on cheap, low-skilled labor. Silicon Valley, home to my own software company, is absolutely dependent upon immigrant professionals to maintain its technological edge. A third of all the engineers and microchip designers here are foreign born, and if they left or if their future inflow were cut off, America’s computer industry would probably go with them. In fact, many of the largest and most important technology companies of the 1980s in California and elsewhere were created by immigrants, including Sun Microsystems, AST, ALR, Applied Materials, Everex, and Gupta. Borland International, a premier software company worth hundreds of millions of dollars, was founded by Philippe Kahn, an illegal immigrant. These immigrant companies have generated hundreds of thousands of good jobs in California for native Americans and have provided billions of dollars in tax revenues. Without immigrants, America’s tremendous and growing dominance in the industries of the future, such as computer hardware and software, telecommunications, and biotechnology would be lost.

Ironically, while several of the most parasitic sectors of American society–politicians, government bureaucrats, and trial lawyers–are almost entirely filled with native-born Americans, each year a third to a half of the student winners of the Westinghouse Science Talent Search–America’s most prestigious high school science competition–come from immigrant families, often quite impoverished. America’s elite universities have student bodies that may be 20 percent Asian these days, and crucial fields like science and engineering are often half or more immigrant.

No Cause for Alarm

Obviously not all immigrants are scientists and entrepreneurs; many are welfare recipients and criminals. Large numbers of Americans are worried that recent immigrants contribute disproportionately to crime, welfare dependency, and social decay, and that their non-European origins will exacerbate America’s growing ethnic strife, eventually leading perhaps to separatist ethnic nationalism.

These concerns are frequently overstated. A recent National Review editorial made much of the statistic that 20 percent of California’s prison inmates are immigrants, but this is hardly surprising in a state where 20 percent of the general population are immigrants. Similarly, even George Borjas, an economist opposed to current immigration, has admitted that the national welfare dependency rate among non-refugee immigrants is nearly the same as that of the general population, 7.8 percent versus 7.4 percent, despite the often poor education and relative poverty of many newcomers. A recent University of Texas study focusing on all forms of public assistance found that 20 percent of immigrant households in California were recipients compared with 26 percent of native-born households; for Mexican immigrants and non-immigrant Anglos, the numbers were 18 percent and 19 percent respectively. None of this data on immigrants seems cause for great alarm.

Contrasting signs of immigrant advancement and assimilation are quite widespread. Just recently, a top high school valedictorian from San Diego was discovered to have immigrated illegally from Mexico as a child. This followed a similar case of a Mexican illegal who graduated as a valedictorian in San Francisco. In California the 10 most common names of recent home-buyers include Martinez, Rodriguez, Garcia, Nguyen, Lee, and Wong, with the Nguyens outnumbering the Smiths two to one in affluent, conservative Orange County.

In fact, nearly half of California’s native-born Asians and Hispanics marry into other ethnic groups, the strongest possible evidence of assimilation at work. These intermarriage rates are actually far higher than were those of Jews, Italians, or Poles as recently as the 1950s.

Exaggerated Danger

Or consider those places in America where the deepest unspoken fears have already been realized, and white Americans of European origin (“Anglos”) have already become a minority of the population. San Jose, California–the 11th largest city in the nation–is one such example. It has a white population of less than 50 percent, and contains mostly Asian and Hispanic immigrants–comprising some 20 percent and 30 percent respectively–including large numbers of impoverished illegal immigrants. San Jose has a flourishing economy, the lowest murder and robbery rates of any major city in America–less than one-fifth the rates in Dallas for example–and virtually no significant ethnic conflict.

Similarly, El Paso, Texas is the most heavily Hispanic (70 percent) of any of America’s largest 50 cities, but also has one of the lowest rates of serious crime or murder, with a robbery rate just half that of Seattle, an overwhelmingly white city of similar size. The American state with the lowest percentage of whites in the population–about one third–is Hawaii, hardly notorious as a boiling cauldron of ethnic conflict and racial hostility between whites and non-whites. And the statistics show that despite its heavy urbanization, Hawaii has among the lowest serious crime rates of any state in the nation.

Hispanic involvement in recent urban riots and disturbances has been greatly exaggerated by the media. For example, the 1991 Mount Pleasant riot in a Hispanic neighborhood of Washington D.C. has regularly been cited as an example of Hispanic immigrant volatility, even though on-the-scene observers have pointed out that the rioters were primarily black. Similarly, in Los Angeles, nearly all the rioting was by native-born blacks, although Central American immigrants joined in some of the later looting. Heavily Mexican-American East Los Angeles was nearly the only part of the city untouched by any significant rioting or looting.

Threat and Opportunity

For conservatives, the immigration debate should be viewed both as a major threat and a major opportunity, each rooted in simple demographics and voting strength. For example, 30 percent of California’s current population is Hispanic and 10 percent is Asian, with the vast majority being from immigrant families of the last two decades. Add in other immigrant groups such as Iranians and Armenians, and the total comes to nearly half the general population, and with enormous demographic momentum (half of all children born each year are Hispanic alone). Although current immigrant voter registration is very low–Asians and Hispanics total just 10 percent in most elections–this will change, and even if all immigration, both legal and illegal, ended tomorrow, immigrants and their children would soon dominate California politically. The demographics of states like New York, Florida, and Texas are moving in similar directions. Furthermore, the dramatic economic success of Asian immigrants should soon make them a major source of political funding both in California and nationwide.

This is potentially a very good thing for conservatives. Most Hispanics are classic blue-collar Reagan Democrats, with the same social and economic profile as Italian-Americans or Slavic-Americans. They are largely working-class, family-oriented, and socially conservative, with a strong commitment to traditional religion, either Catholic or, increasingly, Evangelical Protestant. Hispanics might well have remained John Kennedy or Scoop Jackson Democrats, but the party of George McGovern and Bill Clinton has little attraction for them.

Asians, similarly, are much like Jews in their professional and socio-economic profile, but without liberal guilt. The socialist legacy of Eastern European intellectuals and the Roosevelt New Deal has made Jews a bedrock base of the Democratic Party, and is very different from the anti-liberal Confucianist tradition found in most Asian cultures. The small-business background and hostility to affirmative action of Asians leaves them a natural constituency for conservatives as well.

This analysis is not the mere wishful thinking with which Republicans periodically discuss raising their dismal percentages of the black or Jewish vote. Although nearly all of California’s prominent Asian or Hispanic political figures are liberal Democrats, ordinary Asians and Hispanics have regularly given the Republicans 40 to 50 percent of their vote. For example, in 1992, George Bush received a higher fraction of the Asian vote (40 percent) than he did of the Anglo (“white”) vote (33 percent), while Bruce Herschensohn, a very conservative Republican senatorial candidate, won 44 percent of Asian voters and 40 percent of Hispanic voters in his race against Barbara Boxer. Richard Riordan, a moderate Republican, was elected mayor of Los Angeles in 1993 with similar shares of the Asian and Hispanic vote, despite running against Michael Woo, Los Angeles’s leading Asian-American politician. And Governor Pete Wilson won his tight 1990 race against Dianne Feinstein because of the high percentages he received from Asians (58 percent) and Hispanics (47 percent), as well as whites (53 percent). By contrast, the black vote for each of these Republican candidates was in the 10 to 15 percent range.

Nearly every significant Republican victory of the past decade in California has depended on immigrant votes, and these totals have been achieved despite the fact that the California Republican Party has rarely, if ever, nominated an Asian or Hispanic for statewide office. So long as the Republican Party does not throw away its opportunity by turning anti-immigrant, these percentages should rise substantially as immigrants grow in affluence and younger Asians and Hispanics rise through the ranks to become Republican leaders. Matt Fong, a Chinese-American and this year’s Republican nominee for state treasurer, is one example.

Pushed into the GOP

Furthermore, there is a high likelihood that the Democratic Party will do its own part in pushing immigrants into the Republican camp. The three most anti-immigrant constituencies in America are blacks, union-members, and environmentalists, and these are core elements of the Democratic Party, especially its liberal wing.

The rise of black xenophobia and the criminal pathology in many black neighborhoods, along with black proximity to immigrant areas, has led to repeated ethnic violence. It culminated in the Los Angeles riots, which were actually anti-immigrant pogroms more than anything else, with whites being merely a secondary target of the rioters. Even prior to the riots, the death rate of Korean shopkeepers in black neighborhoods was as high as that of American soldiers in the Vietnam war, and popular rap songs have focused on subjects like burning down all the Korean shops in black neighborhoods. The media has consistently failed to report or emphasize the large numbers of rapes and murders committed by blacks against Asians, many of which look suspiciously like so-called “hate crimes.”

Similarly, black-Hispanic tensions in California have risen enormously since the Los Angeles riots, during which Hispanic families with small children were attacked and brutalized by black mobs; also, a substantial percentage of the shops destroyed were Hispanic-owned. Since such conflict between “minority” groups does not conform to the dominant liberal paradigm, it is largely ignored in the mainstream media, but perfectly well recognized by the Asian and Hispanic press.

No FAIR

On the policy level, important environmentalist groups such as Zero Population Growth and the Carrying Capacity Network have adopted a strong anti-immigration line, and the most prominent anti-immigration organization, the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), has its origins in the environmentalist movement. Such hostility to immigration is rooted in the role that immigration plays in increasing America’s population and birth rate, and generating economic and industrial growth, all anathema to fervent environmentalists. Since most immigrants hail from crowded Third World nations in Latin America and Asia, one might also suspect that a mental image of immigrants turning the empty expanses of America’s natural beauty into another densely populated Hong Kong is also at the back of environmentalist concerns.

Then, too, there exists an obvious incompatibility between immigration and an extensive social welfare state, in which low-skilled newcomers are mouths to feed rather than hands to work. Even the most stubborn liberal Democrats must realize that extending America’s generous welfare benefits to all Third World inhabitants who cross our borders would quickly bankrupt any economy, and cause the collapse of the modern welfare state. Witness the recent Democratic proposal to fund national health care by eliminating various social benefits for legal immigrants, a position maintained despite the outrage of Hispanic and Asian Democrats. It is no coincidence that immigration is a much more dramatic political issue in California, which has an extensive welfare state, than in Texas, which does not.

These facts underlie the anti-immigrant rhetoric of Senator Barbara Boxer, Representative Tony Beilenson, and other prominent California liberal Democrats. Boxer has advocated such measures as building a defensive wall across the Mexican border, to be patrolled by the National Guard, while Beilenson has proposed amending the Constitution to deny the right of U.S. citizenship to immigrant children born in America. Proposals that the media only recently used to demonize as nativist the Buchananite right wing of the Republican Party have now become the common currency of the left wing of the Democratic Party. All of these forces are inevitably driving the Democratic Party toward an anti-immigration stance, and there is no policy change that can avert this conclusion. It is no coincidence that Governor Pete Wilson, a leading anti-immigrant figure in the Republican Party, is a very liberal Republican, being both a strong environmentalist and a firm believer in the social welfare state.

Thus, if used properly, immigration could serve as the issue that breaks the Democratic Party and forges a new and dominant conservative/Republican governing coalition. Certain major segments of the Democratic Party, aside from the Asians and Hispanics, are pro-immigrant or at least cosmopolitan, including Jews, academic and media elites, and top business executives. But they have neither the numbers or the fervor of the anti-immigrant elements, and, just as in the related issue of the Democratic Party’s gradual reversal of its historic support for free trade, they will eventually be pushed aside.

Furthermore, although many in these pro-immigrant Democratic groups have long recognized the failure of welfare policies, and the harms inflicted by bilingual education and affirmative action, they have usually been unwilling to attack these programs directly. Once it becomes absolutely clear that these policies inevitably provoke widespread anti-immigrant sentiment and simply cannot be reconciled with America’s traditional openness to immigrants, these Democratic groups will split into pro-welfare state and pro-immigrant wings, with the pro-immigrant wing being drawn toward a pro-immigrant Republican Party.

Sacrificing the future

Under the right circumstances, this can be the issue that sparks a massive rollback of the welfare state and the ethnic group policies of the past 20 or 30 years, with these dramatic changes being backed by a dominant political alliance of Asians, Hispanics, and conservative Anglos.

Yet many Republican politicians are riding what they misperceive as an irresistible tide of anti-immigrant sentiment and attempting to move the party in a strongly restrictionist direction. Such individuals are sacrificing the long-term future of their party–and of America itself–for momentary political gain, and working to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. Republican support for reasonable levels of legal immigration and for a well-funded Immigration and Naturalization Service to deter illegal entry is perfectly appropriate: All sovereign nations control their borders. But for a country facing so many real problems–a disastrous welfare system and the urban underclass that it has fostered, horrifying levels of crime, and an outrageously expensive system of civil litigation–to grow hysterical about immigration–which is actually a net plus to our economy and society–seems the height of irresponsibility.

Back to Ellis Island

Instead, the Republican Party should focus its efforts around those core policies that would serve to unite rather than divide conservative natives and immigrants (see survey results in sidebar). These should include absolute opposition to affirmative action policies in all their many guises, which Thomas Sowell and others have shown inevitably lead to heightened ethnic conflict wherever in the world they are implemented. Also, we must return our public schools to the teaching of our unifying English language and our common American culture, and eliminate the native-language instruction and divisive multiculturalism programs that could fragment our society. George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Abraham Lincoln are just as relevant heroes for the children of Asian and Hispanic immigrants today as they were for the children of Italian, Slavic, and Jewish immigrants at the turn of the century.

We must also dramatically roll back our well-intentioned but failed welfare state, whose costs have been far greater than the $4 trillion spent directly since 1964. Massive social welfare programs have left us with a combined legacy of gigantic annual budget deficits and very high tax levels, which severely depress our economic growth. But even more serious have been the severe social pathologies generated by these programs, overwhelmingly among the native-born, which have left large portions of nearly all our major cities devastated wastelands. All of this would have been unimaginable 30 years ago.

Removing from the welfare rolls the 10 percent of recipients who are immigrants is certainly a necessary and proper action for our government to take, but it will not save our society unless we apply the same measures to the other 90 percent who are native born. And combining these two actions would serve as a sure means of winning rather than losing crucial immigrant votes. Our goal must be to return our entire society to the values of individual liberty, community spirit, and personal self-reliance that once characterized the American spirit, drawing from the traditions of the Western frontier and Ellis Island.

SIDEBAR: Political Scapegoats

In December 1993, while considering a primary challenge to Governor Pete Wilson of California, I commissioned an extremely detailed survey of 1,200 Republican primary voters, with one of the main sections being an analysis of their views on the crucial issue of immigration.

At first glance, the results seemed to confirm the conventional wisdom on illegal immigration with the respondents rating “stopping illegal immigrants at the border” at 4.3 in importance (on a scale of 1-5), second only to crime control (4.5), and slightly ahead of job creation and tax limitation. But when voters were then asked the reasons behind their immigration concerns (in two parallel subsamples of 600 each, dealing with illegal and legal immigrants respectively), neither illegal nor legal immigrants were viewed as taking jobs away from other Californians, as committing much crime, or as generally turning California into a “Third world” state. The only issues that raised significant concerns were the financial drain of illegal immigrants on welfare (4.1), fears that legal and illegal immigrants weren’t learning English in the schools (3.2 combined), and anger that legal and illegal immigrants and their children would benefit unfairly from affirmative action (3.3 combined).

Next, respondents were informed that some studies showed that most illegal/legal immigrants were paying taxes, obeying laws, trying to learn English, and weren’t on welfare; by better than 2-1 the response was that under such circumstances, immigration was not a serious problem in California. Following this, the respondents indicated by a margin of nearly 4-1 that they agreed that immigrants were being unfarily blamed by politicians for problems like crime and welfare, which were more connected with the native-born urban underclass than with legal or illegal immigrants.

Finally, a subsampled of 600 was informed that a hypothetical candidate believed that immigrants — both legal and illegal — were being scapegoated by politicians, and that if welfare benefits were cut and bilingual education and affirmative action stopped, then immigration would again become an actual plus for California. A majority of the subsample agreed, and more significantly, the voters of this subsample were willing to support the hypothetical candidate on a sample ballot just as strongly as were the other 600 subsample: A pro-immigration stance had incurred no political cost. All of this data indicate that the immigration issue is largely a proxy for concerns about welfare, affirmative action, bilingual education, and multiculturalism, and is much broader than it is deep.

The result of my actual gubernatiorial primary race supports this conclusion. Despite my complete lack of name recognition or political experience, my being outspent nearly four to one by Governor Wilson, and my public opposition to immigrant bashing, in just eight weeks of campaigning I raised my support from 8 percent to 34 percent by election day, including nearly half of all Republican voters age 50 and under.

Against Prop. 187

The Los Angeles Times • October 3, 1994 • 900 Words

In 1942, during a period of sharp wartime hysteria, Californians blackened our state’s good name by overwhelmingly endorsing the imprisonment of all Japanese Americans, most of them native-born U.S. citizens and nearly all deeply loyal to America. Only one member of Congress, Sen. Robert Taft of Ohio, the leading conservative Republican of his day, opposed this measure directed against “enemy aliens,” which otherwise passed unanimously. Robert Taft had principles.

Today in California, the current political hysteria about illegal immigration, inflamed by cynical politicians who believe in nothing except their own election victory, has brought us to a similar moral precipice. Recent polls show strong public support for Proposition 187–the “Save Our State” initiative–directed against illegal immigrants.

At first glance, the measure, which prevents illegal immigrants from receiving public services, might appear quite attractive to opponents of California’s overgrown social-welfare state. After all, if rolling back the tide of wealth redistribution has to start somewhere, why not with recipients who aren’t even legal residents? Add to this California’s horrendous budget deficits, and any measure that purports to save tax money sounds extremely attractive.

Proposition 187 is extremely attractive, until one actually reads the measure. In practice, 187 would be an unimaginable disaster for California, with regard both to personal liberty and to state finance.

Consider a few simple facts. Illegal immigrants are already ineligible for state welfare assistance or food stamps, and their estimated use of the medical services that 187 would prohibit is quite low, just a tiny fraction of 1% of California’s huge budget. The only substantial government cost associated with illegal immigration is through the public school system.

Illegal immigrants make up perhaps 5% of California’s population and most are in their prime working years, 25 to 40; those with children obviously make use of the public schools, and the sums involved are sizable. So one of the central thrusts of Proposition 187 is to root out these immigrant children (most of whom are U.S.-born citizens) from the public schools.

How to do this? By turning teachers and administrators into de facto INS agents, forcing them to investigate the family background of each and every child in their school, at enormous effort and expense, and report to the authorities those whom they suspect may have a father or mother who entered the country illegally.

Having schools encourage small children to inform on the status of their parents has heavy totalitarian overtones; even the Soviet Union abandoned this practice after Stalin’s death. In recent years, we all have heard reports of school drug-education programs that proudly persuaded students to turn their parents in for drug use. And Christian groups have expressed alarm over attempts by the schools to monitor home religious practices. Officially establishing our public schools as agencies of family investigation and arms of government law enforcement, as Proposition 187 would do, is not a happy precedent for us to set.

The initiative only gets worse. Since the authors view immigrant workers with as much alarm as they do immigrant layabouts, the measure mandates a five-year prison sentence (or $25,000 fine) for any illegal immigrant who uses false identity papers in pursuit of gainful employment. A state that pays generous welfare benefits to those unwilling to work and imprisons those who do work defies rationality.

Although estimates vary, perhaps upward of 1 million of the illegal immigrants currently employed as California’s gardeners, housemaids, hotel workers or construction laborers have some form of false identity document. At the same time, California’s bloated and inefficient prison system has average annual costs of $23,000 per inmate. Turning hundreds of thousands of our hard-working, tax-paying, minimum-wage gardeners and nannies into prison inmates at a cost of tens of billions of dollars hardly seems a sensible means of solving our state’s budget problems.

And Proposition 187’s school-monitoring provisions would only increase the use of false papers. To prevent their 6- or 7-year-olds from being expelled from school, many immigrant mothers will undoubtedly acquire false documents and risk a five-year prison sentence. Imagine a California that sends mothers to prison for trying to keep their children in school!

How do the principal advocates of the initiative respond to such criticism? One of them told me that much of the initiative is “obviously unconstitutional” and would be thrown out by the courts. Another was confident that judges would refuse to enforce the parts of the law that are obviously unjust. A fervent grass-roots activist had the simplest defense: 187 was intended to be unworkable and bankrupt the state, thereby forcing Washington to finally “do something” to stop illegal immigration, such as putting land mines along the border.

Today’s immigration troubles are an inevitable consequence of our having built a social-welfare state in which newcomers are mouths to feed rather than hands to work. But instead of rolling back government spending, Proposition 187 would extend government control and investigation into all of our daily lives and those of our children while bankrupting our state several times over.

Most Californians view illegal immigrants as unwanted house guests. One very effective means of getting rid of such guests is to set your house on fire and burn it to the ground. This is Proposition 187’s solution to illegal immigration. It would be a financial and social disaster for California, and the worst moral disaster for our state since the internment of Japanese Americans. No decent Californian should support it.

Sinking Our State

Reason • November 1994 • 1,500 Words

If the road to hell is paved with good intentions, then the Save Our State immigration initiative on California’s November ballot represents a superhighway.

At first glance, the measure, which prevents illegal immigrants from receiving public benefits, might appear quite attractive to opponents of California’s overgrown social welfare state. After all, if rolling back the tide of wealth redistribution has to start somewhere, why not with recipients who aren’t even legal residents?

Even the staunchest libertarians who believe in open borders don’t believe that illegal immigrants should receive financial subsidies from the country they enter. Add to this California’s horrendous budget deficit, and support for any measure which purports to save tax money seems assured. Indeed, according to a Field poll, the measure, which will appear as Proposition 187, enjoys 64 percent support.

So much for theory. In practice, Prop. 187 would be an unmitigated disaster for California, with regard both to personal liberty and to state finance.

Consider a few simple facts. Illegal immigrants are already ineligible for state welfare assistance or food stamps, and their estimated use of medical services is quite low, just a small fraction of 1 percent of California’s $57 billion budget. The only significant government cost associated with illegal immigration is therefore through the public school system, which immigrant children attend. Illegal immigrants make up perhaps 5 percent of California’s total population, and most are in the prime working years of 25 to 40; those with children obviously make use of the public schools, and the sums involved are substantial. So one of the central thrusts of the SOS initiative is to root out these immigrant children (most of whom are actually American-born citizens) from the public schools.

How to do this? By turning public school teachers and administrators into de facto INS agents, forcing them to investigate the family background of each and every child in their school, at enormous effort and expense, and to report to the authorities those whom they suspect may have a father or mother who entered the country illegally. Having schools encourage small children to inform on the status of their parents has heavy totalitarian overtones, and the practice was even abandoned by the Soviet Union soon after Stalin’s death. In recent years, there have been scattered reports of American school drug-education programs that have persuaded their elementary school enrollees to turn their parents in to the police. Establishing our public schools as agencies of government law enforcement, as SOS would do, is not a happy precedent.

The initiative only gets worse. Since the authors view immigrant workers with as much alarm as immigrant lay-abouts, the measure mandates a five-year prison sentence (or $25,000 fine) for any illegal immigrant who uses false identity papers in pursuit of gainful employment. Although estimates vary, perhaps upwards of 1 million of the illegal immigrants employed as California’s gardeners, housemaids, hotel workers, or construction laborers have some form of false identity documents.

Meanwhile, California’s bloated prison system has average annual costs of $23,000 per inmate. Turning hundreds of thousands of hard-working, tax-paying minimum-wage gardeners and busboys into prison inmates–at a cost of tens of billions of dollars–hardly seems a sensible means of solving the state’s budget problems. A state that pays generous welfare benefits to those who don’t work and imprisons those who do defies rationality.

And Prop. 187’s public school provisions make false papers even more likely. To keep the public schools from expelling their 6- or 7-year-old children, many immigrant mothers will undoubtedly acquire false documents and risk a five-year prison sentence. For the land of liberty to flood its prisons with identity-card violators seems an abomination.

How do the principal advocates of the initiative respond to these charges, which I raised with them privately during my recent Republican primary challenge to Gov. Pete Wilson? One prominent SOS supporter claimed that much of the initiative was “obviously unconstitutional and would be thrown out by the courts. Another felt that judges would refuse to enforce a law so clearly unjust. But one fervent grass-roots activist had the simplest defense, arguing that SOS was intended to be unworkable and bankrupt the state, thereby forcing Washington to finally “do something” to stop illegal immigration–such as planting land mines along our southern border. And these are the views of the initiative’s supporters!

Despite its anti‚welfare state trappings, then, Prop. 187 is extremely bad law, and is not a measure any sincere conservative or libertarian should support. It also masks the real issue in California and elsewhere, which is not illegal immigration, but immigration period.

Nearly all those groups in the forefront of the crusade against illegal immigration are just as hostile to the legal kind and are simply using the former issue as a stalking horse for the latter. And aside from the environmentalists (who oppose immigration as a source of economic and population growth) and union members (who hate immigrants as much as Japanese cars and for the same reason), most of the opposition to immigration has strong racial overtones, since the majority of America’s new (post-1965) immigrants have been Asians and Hispanics.

There is a great unspoken fear that the existence of ethnic separatist policies such as affirmative action and bilingual education combined with large-scale immigration will lead to the balkanization of our society, and that our welfare system will cause lesser-skilled immigrants to follow the black underclass down the path to a seemingly endless cycle of dependency and crime. The future growth of a gigantic and hostile immigrant underclass terrifies white middle-class Californians, living in a state that is already 30 percent Hispanic and 10 percent Asian.

Those fears are understandable, but unsupported by the facts. The overwhelming majority of California’s immigrants are self-reliant and entrepreneurial, with strong families and low welfare-dependency and crime rates. America’s Asian and Hispanic population is largely composed of immigrants and their children, and these groups seem more a source of hope than of fear.

Signs of economic advancement and assimilation are widespread. Just recently, a high-school valedictorian from San Diego was discovered to have emigrated illegally from Mexico as a child; this follows a similar case of a Mexican illegal immigrant who graduated at the top of her class in San Francisco. In California the 10 most common names of recent home buyers include Martinez, Rodriguez, Garcia, Nguyen, Lee, and Wong, with the Nguyens outnumbering the Smiths 2 to 1 in affluent, conservative Orange County. In fact, nearly half of California’s native-born Asians and Hispanics marry into other ethnic groups, the strongest possible evidence of assimilation at work. Those intermarriage rates are far higher than were those of Jews, Italians, or Poles as recently as the 1950s.

Or consider those places in America where the deepest (usually) unspoken concerns have already been realized, and white Americans of European origin (“Anglos”) have already become a minority of the population. San Jose—the third largest city in California and 11th largest in the nation—is one such example. It has a white population of less than 50 percent and contains mostly Asian and Hispanic immigrants—20 percent and 30 percent respectively—including large numbers of impoverished illegal immigrants. San Jose has a flourishing economy, the lowest murder and robbery rates of any major city in America (less than one fifth the rates in Dallas, for example), and no significant ethnic conflict.

Or consider El Paso, Texas, the most heavily Hispanic (70 percent) of any of America’s largest 50 cities. It also has one of the lowest rates of serious crime or murder, with a robbery rate just half that of Seattle, an overwhelmingly white city of similar size. The state with the lowest percentage of whites in the population (about one third) is Hawaii, hardly a boiling cauldron of racial hostility. And despite its heavy urbanization, Hawaii has among the lowest crime rates of any state in the nation, with less violent crime than Idaho and Nebraska.

Furthermore, immigration remains crucial to some of the most important sectors of the American economy. Silicon Valley depends upon immigrant professionals to maintain its technological edge. A third of all the engineers and chip designers there are foreign born, and if they left (or if their future inflow were cut off), America’s computer industry would probably go with them.

In fact, many of the largest and most important technology companies of the 1980s in California and elsewhere were created by immigrants, including Sun Microsystems, AST, ALR, Applied Materials, Everex, and Gupta. Borland International, a premier software company worth hundreds of millions of dollars, was founded by Philippe Kahn, an illegal immigrant. Those immigrant companies have generated hundreds of thousands of jobs for native Americans and have paid billions of dollars in taxes. Without immigrants, America’s unchallenged dominance in such industries as computer hardware and software, telecommunications, and biotechnology would be lost.

Today’s unfolding immigration debate amounts to an attempt to snatch economic defeat from the jaws of victory. California’s Prop. 187 is an early round in that debate, and it represents a referendum on the concept of immigration. If it wins, America loses.

Ron K. Unz, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, received over a third of the vote in his Republican primary challenge to Gov. Pete Wilson of California.

Value Added: Why National Review Is Wrong About Immigration

Immigrants are a net benefit to the nation and a natural Republican constituency---if the party doesn't blow it

National Review • November 7, 1994 • 1,900 Words

This journal has performed a valuable service by clarifying the immigration debate. Rather than choosing the safe path of attacking only illegal immigration, NR has correctly pointed out that illegal immigration is dwarfed by legal immigration; that legal and illegal immigration share a wide range of important characteristics; and that most of the key arguments against the one apply to the other as well.  Just as the debate about NAFTA became a referendum on free trade in general, so the controversy over illegal immigration is a proxy for a critical reappraisal of post-1965 immigration policy.

With the underlying issue clear, reasoned debate should be possible on the pros and cons of immigration.  And on those pros and cons I differ sharply with NR. The evidence shows that the immigration of the last thirty years has been a large net benefit for America, as well as an important source of strength for political parties espousing conservative principles.

Anyone walking the streets of our major cities sees that the majority of the shops are owned and operated by immigrant entrepreneurs—Korean grocery stores, Indian newsstands, Chinese restaurants.  Most of these shops simply would not exist without immigrant families willing to put in long hours of poorly paid labor to maintain and expand them, in the process improving our cities. In Los Angeles, the vast majority of hotel and restaurant workers are hard-working Hispanic immigrants, most of them here illegally, and anyone who believes that these unpleasant jobs would otherwise be filled by natives (either black or white) is living in a fantasy world.

The same applies to nearly all the traditional lower-rung working-class jobs in Southern California, including the nannies and gardeners whose widespread employment occasionally embarrasses the Zoe Bairds of this world (even as it facilitates their careers). The only means of making a job as a restaurant busboy even remotely attractive to a native American would be to raise the wage to $10 or $12 per hour, at which point the job would cease to exist.

Since most newcomers tend to be on the lower end of the wage scale, and since many have children in the public schools, they do tend to cost local governments more in services than they pay in sales and income taxes. (The same could probably be said for most members of the working class with young children.) This is the basis of California Governor Pete Wilson’s lawsuit over the “costs” to California of illegal immigration.  Yet the real culprit is our outrageously inefficient public-school system.  Furthermore, because of their age profile, even working-class immigrants generally pay much more in federal taxes (primarily Social Security withholding) than they receive in federal benefits. So we might equally say that immigrants are helping us balance the federal budget.

The Immigrant Edge

Immigrants are crucial not just to industries that rely on cheap, low-skilled labor.  Silicon Valley, which is home to my own software company, depends on immigrant professionals to maintain its technological edge. A third of all the engineers and chip designers here are foreign born, and if they left, America’s computer industry would probably go with them. In fact, many of the most important technology companies of the 1980s, in California and elsewhere, were created by immigrants, including Sun Microsystems, AST, ALR, Applied Materials, Everex, and Gupta.  Borland International, a software company worth hundreds of millions of dollars, was founded by Philippe Kahn, an illegal immigrant.  These immigrant companies have generated hundreds of thousands of good jobs in California for native Americans and have provided billions of dollars in tax revenues. Without a continuing influx of immigrants, America’s tremendous and growing dominance in sunrise industries would rapidly be lost.

If the above list of technology companies seems unfamiliar to NR‘s writers, this highlights an important underlying reason for NR‘s anti-immigrant stance.  Most public-policy writers travel in narrow literary, political, or legal circles and have minimal contact with the worlds of science or technology (just as most technologists and entrepreneurs ignore politics). But the money and prestige of Silicon Valley will decisively turn against the Republican Party if it adopts an anti-immigrant stance, just as they would if it decided to oppose free trade.

While several of the most parasitic sectors of the American society—politicians, government bureaucrats, lawyers—are almost entirely filled with native Americans, each year one-third to one-half of the student winners of the Westinghouse Science Talent Search (America’s most prestigious high-school science competition) come from immigrant families, often quite impoverished.  Many of America’s elite universities have student bodies that are 20 per cent Asian, with immigrants often accounting for half or more of the science and engineering students. National Review itself is not averse to seeking talent from abroad, notably including its leading anti-immigrant theorist (Peter Brimelow) and its editor (John O’Sullivan), both themselves recent immigrants, albeit from an Anglophone country.

So much for the purely economic side of the immigration ledger. The greater immigration concerns resonating among conservatives today are social and frankly racial: that the post-1965 immigrants, overwhelmingly Asian and Hispanic, contribute disproportionately to crime, welfare dependency, and social decay, and that their non-European origins will exacerbate America’s growing ethnic strife, leading perhaps to separatist ethnic nationalisms.

If this scenario does not come to pass, it will not be for want of trying by the government.  State-sponsored affirmative action, bilingual education, and multiculturalism seem designed to promote ethnic conflict, while our welfare system breeds pathological levels of crime and dependency.  But America’s ethnic policies and welfare system would doom our future irrespective of immigration, and there is little evidence that the problems have any relation to immigrants, the overwhelming majority of whom are entrepreneurial and assimilationist.

A recent NR editorial made much of the statistic that 20 per cent of California’s prison inmates are immigrants. But this is hardly surprising in a state where 20 percent of the residents are immigrants. Contrast this with the truly alarming fact (unmentioned by NR) that blacks in California are incarcerated at nearly ten times the rate of the non-black population.  Similarly, NR‘s emphasis on the welfare dependency rate among non-refugee immigrants (7.8 per cent, versus 7.4 per cent for the general population—hardly a dramatic difference) seems like grasping at straws.

NR ignores the many countervailing indicators of immigrant advancement and assimilation.  In California, for example, the ten most common names of recent home buyers include Martinez, Rodriguez, Garcia, Nguyen, Lee, and Wong, with the Nguyens outnumbering the Smiths 2 to 1 in affluent, conservative Orange County.  Of California’s Asians and Hispanics who were born in this country, nearly half marry into other ethnic groups, the strongest possible evidence of assimilation. These intermarriage rates are actually far higher than were those of Jews, Italians, or Poles as recently as the 1950s.

Or consider places in America where Peter Brimelow’s deepest fears have already been realized, and white Americans of European origin (“Anglos”) have become a minority of the population. San Jose, California, the 11th largest city in the nation, is one example, having a white population of less than 50 per cent, with the balance consisting mostly of Asian and Hispanic immigrants, including many illegal immigrants. San Jose has a flourishing economy, the lowest murder and robbery rates of any major city in America (less than one-fifth the rates in Dallas, for example), and virtually no significant ethnic conflict.

Similarly, El Paso, Texas, is the most heavily Hispanic (70 per cent) of America’s fifty largest cities, but it also has one of the lowest rates of serious crime, with a robbery rate just half that of Seattle, an overwhelmingly white city of similar size. The American state with the lowest share of whites in the population (about one-third) is Hawaii, hardly notorious as a boiling cauldron of ethnic conflict and racial hostility. And despite its heavy urbanization, Hawaii has among the lowest serious crime rates of any state in the nation.

Along Racial Lines

The sad truth is that both crime and ethnic conflict today are almost entirely correlated with the presence of a black underclass, purely native and generally with American roots far deeper than most of NR‘s staff or subscribers have. Confusing America’s severe racial problems in this area with its comparatively minor immigrant tensions is as dishonest as it is politically unwise.

This dishonesty has been reinforced by the shameful deceit of the media in such matters. For example, the 1991 Mount Pleasant riot in a Hispanic neighborhood of D.C. has often been cited, not least in NR, as an example of Hispanic immigrant volatility, even though on-the-scene observers have pointed out that the rioters were primarily black.  Similarly, during the Los Angeles riots the reluctance of the police to arrest black rioters and the attempt by the liberal media to portray the riots as a united multicultural uprising against the “system” blurred the fact that the rioters were almost all black, although Central American immigrants joined in some of the later looting.  Heavily Hispanic East Los Angeles was one of the few parts of the city untouched by rioting or looting.

The political danger of an anti-immigrant position for Republicans is a consequence of demographics and voting strength.  Today, 30 percent of California’s population is Hispanic and 10 percent is Asian, with the vast majority being first- or second-generation Americans.  Add in other immigrant groups classified as white, such as Iranians and Armenians, and the total comes to nearly half of California’s population.  Other large states, such as Texas and New York, have similar profiles.

Although immigrant voter registration is currently low—Asians and Hispanics account for just 10 per cent of California’s voters in most elections—this will change. Even if all immigration (both legal and illegal) ended tomorrow, immigrants and their children would soon dominate California politically. Furthermore, the economic success of many Asian immigrants should soon make them a major source of political funding.

This is potentially a very good thing for conservatives. Hispanics are classic blue-collar Reagan Democrats, much like Italians or Slavs, whose strong social conservatism should naturally move them toward the Republican Party. Asians can best be described as being like Jews without liberal guilt, and their small-business background and hostility to affirmative action make them natural Republicans as well.

This analysis is not mere wishful thinking. Although nearly all of California’s prominent Asian and Hispanic political figures are liberal Democrats, ordinary Asians and Hispanics have regularly given the Republicans 40 to 50 per cent of their vote, with Asians often voting more Republican than whites. Nearly every statewide Republican victory of the past  decade depended on immigrant votes. So long as the Republican Party does not throw away its opportunity by turning anti-immigrant, these percentages should rise as immigrants grow in affluence and younger Asians and Hispanics rise through the ranks to become Republican leaders.

And since three of the most anti-immigrant constituencies in American society are blacks, union members, and environmentalists, it is likely that the Democratic Party will help push immigrants into the Republican camp.  The virulently anti-immigrant leftist Senator Barbara Boxer (D., Calif.) is a notable example of this important trend. For the Republican Party to turn anti-immigrant would be a suicidal blunder.

Mr. Unz, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, received more than a third of the vote in his Republican primary challenge to California Governor Pete Wilson.

CCRI vs. Prop. 187

The Los Angeles Times • March 12, 1995 • 900 Words

California, the leader in national trends, is approaching another crossroads: We can confront the challenges of our ethnic diversity either through the means symbolized by last November’s Proposition 187 or by those of the proposed civil rights ballot initiative.

Although it began as a measure eliminating government benefits for illegal immigrants, by the end of its bitter, divisive campaign, Proposition 187 had become a symbolic battle for ethnic dominance between Anglos and Latinos. The television images of anti-187 mass marches festooned with Mexican flags galvanized white support for the initiative, while pro-187 forces routinely characterized California’s many immigrant nannies and gardeners as a foreign army of invasion, reconquering lands lost in 1848. The ethnic nationalist rhetoric on both sides was a terrible portent for California’s future. The actual details of the initiative itself–an appallingly drafted measure mandating, among other things, five-year prison sentences for immigrant mothers who send their children to public school–were ignored as the vote became a crude test of raw ethnic political power. Nearly two-thirds of Anglos voted for 187 while almost 80% of Latino voters opposed it. Since far more Anglos are registered voters, the measure passed handily.

The descent of California politics into a battle between ethnic blocks is hardly surprising. For three decades, liberal social policies have regularly promoted group rights over individual rights, and it was inevitable that similar ethnic nationalism would spread into the white majority population. The entire anti-immigrant backlash in America, which extends far beyond illegal immigration, draws heavily from whites’ fear of having their rights trampled by ever-increasing numbers of ethnic minorities. A highly detailed private survey that I commissioned ranks affirmative action as one of the top reasons whites cite for hostility to new immigrants, easily outweighing fears of job loss or cultural conflict, and this is very plausible.

Consider a Californian of Italian ancestry. He may have nothing against immigrants in principle; his own grandparents probably were immigrants. But he is aware that when his children apply for admission to UCLA or compete for a job, they may very well be denied their dream in favor of Latinos, even those whose qualifications are substantially lower. Can we blame such an individual for resenting immigrants and voting to discourage their entry?

Anger grows when a major cable network is up for a tax break worth $400 million if it can be acquired by black entrepreneur Frank Washington. Or when a court decree in San Francisco explicitly denies some Chinese Americans the right to attend the city’s top high school because they exceed a numerical quota. Or when the Los Angeles Fire Department follows hiring practices that have the effect of “no whites need apply.” These extreme examples are the inevitable consequence of accepting the un-American notion that individuals should be rewarded or punished by the government based on their ancestry rather than their individuality. There can be no middle ground.

A spiral of ever-deepening group conflict is particularly dangerous for a society with California’s ethnic diversity. Nearly 30% of Californians are Latino and 10% are Asian, with the overwhelming majority of these groups being new immigrants and their children. Add in the 7% of Californians who are black, and the many hundreds of thousands of Egyptians, Iranians and other non-Europeans whom our government bizarrely classifies as “Anglo,” and it is obvious that far less than half of our population is of European origin. Even if all immigration, legal and illegal, ended tomorrow, the long-term demographic trends are apparent when nearly half of all children born each year are of Latino origin alone. The potential for a sharply divided California is at hand.

But so is the means for California’s salvation. The civil rights initiative scheduled for the 1996 ballot would ban government-sponsored racial preference programs in our state and ensure that government treats each Californian as an individual rather than as a faceless member of a particular ethnic tribe. This measure, whose principles were among the cornerstones of my gubernatorial campaign last year, will drain the poison seeping into our society.

Abolishing ethnic preferences must transcend partisanship. Today’s affirmative action is actually a last, terrible legacy of the Nixon Administration. The initiative’s organizers are making every effort to attract the endorsement of prominent Democrats, from President Clinton on downward. Ironies abound: Clinton’s chief of staff is Leon Panetta, who as a young Nixon Republican played a crucial role in formulating these very policies.

Over the years, temporary benefits by which an overwhelmingly white majority chose to compensate a small black minority for the ills of slavery and Jim Crow have metastasized into an enormous “diversity” industry. Forbes puts the cost to our national economy at $200 billion to $300 billion a year, comparable in size to our entire federal budget deficit.

That policies so wrong-headed and unpopular have survived and grown is a testament to the moral cowardice of leading politicians of both parties, afraid of directly challenging minority preferences for fear of being slandered as “racists.” Even Ronald Reagan, so bold and forceful on other issues, could have ended most such federal programs by executive order with a simple stroke of his pen, but he avoided that fight.

Either California’s multiethnic society re-establishes the principle of equality of opportunity for all–whites included–or grim days lie ahead. Either we pass the civil rights initiative or face an endless series of future Proposition 187s, each worse than the last.

Immigrants and American Values

The Rockford Institute Family in America • May 1995 • 800 Words

Immigrant alarmists often claim that current policies are leading America to a “clash of cultures.” There is certainly some truth in this claim, but an actual analysis of which cultures are clashing, and why, might surprise many conservatives.

Consider a recent book on California’s Mexican immigrants written by a group of social-service professionals from the Stanford University community. Titled Understanding and Working with Parents and Children from Rural Mexico, it is designed to build understanding between American suburbanites and Hispanic immigrants, whose cultural customs and behavior might often seem bizarre and disturbing at first glance. And what are those strange, foreign customs? As one example, children rarely talk back to their parents or other adults—as one researcher put it, they are used to being “seen but not heard.” Hispanic immigrants also put a heavy emphasis on “caring about the family, the extended family and friends; a spirit of cooperation and loyalty rather than individualism and competitiveness.” They strongly prefer that care of children be provided by parents and other family members instead of professional day-care centers, which seems very peculiar to these professional social workers. Even more alarming, Hispanic immigrants are willing to discipline their children by spanking for misbehavior and value strict obedience, instead of American-style independence. Worst of all is the immigrant attitude toward the relationship between men and women: “the rigidity of gender role is a very big problem…that needs to change.” Hispanic mothers concentrate on caring for home and family, while fathers see their role as being provider and protector for wife and children, serving as the head of the household. Naturally, all these values and customs seem complete anathema to the liberal academics writing the book, and more than a little quaint to the affluent suburbanites who might read it.  But these were the conservative family values which built America, and they were generally unchallenged until America’s Cultural Revolution of the 1960’s.

The paradoxical notion that immigrants are often more committed to “traditional American values” than many present-day Americans is strongly backed by statistics. Whereas the traditional family consisting of a married couple with children is increasingly rare among white Americans—just a quarter of white households according to the 1990 Census—it accounts for nearly half of Asian and Hispanic immigrant households.

The welfare dependency rate for non-refugee immigrants of working age is a negligible two percent, about half the rate for America’s white population. Criminality is also relatively low, with non-citizens being imprisoned at a lower rate than their share of the American population. America’s most heavily Asian and Hispanic cities such as San Jose, Honolulu, and El Paso have some of America’s lowest crime rates. During the Los Angeles Riots, the only safe portion of the city was heavily Mexican East LA. Perhaps much of this is due to immigrant religiosity, which is far higher than that of the general population, and inclines toward traditional Catholicism or Evangelical Protestantism. Most immigrant neighborhoods seem more like a part of America during the 1940’s or 1950’s than like a part of America today. I felt very safe in a largely immigrant section of New York City during the years I lived there.

What then of the recent anti-immigrant backlash in California, a state otherwise known for its tolerance of “alternative lifestyles” and hedonism? The 1990’s saw the implosion of a speculative real estate bubble and major cutbacks in the federal-government spending upon which so many millions of middle-class California jobs depended, leading to hard economic times. Personal values rooted in nothing beyond material consumption cannot endure even a temporary end to affluence, and the collapse of California’s optimism was profound.

Under such circumstances, a desire for scapegoats is natural, and immigrants—content to lead a simple life centered on work, home, and church while earning their living as nannies or gardeners—are an obvious target.  Their very happiness is an implicit reproach to those who have lived their lives dedicated to material wealth alone.

None of this should imply that immigrants are somehow immune to the forces of family disintegration which our welfare state has subsidized over the past few decades. Immigrant children tend to become substantially less church-going, law-abiding, and hard-working—thus more “American”—than their parents. And a few immigrant groups such as Puerto Ricans, Laotians, and Cambodians have rates of family-breakdown and welfare dependency that approach those of the black underclass. But this only reinforces what we already know concerning the terrible corrosive power of America’s failed social welfare state. And in the upcoming struggle to roll back that system, conservatives should recognize that immigrants can be crucially important allies.

Mr. Ron K. Unz, chief executive officer of Wall Street Analytics in Palo Alto, California, challenged Governor Pete Wilson in the 1994 Republican primary, winning 34 percent of the vote.

Immigration Mockery

The Los Angeles Times • May 21, 1995 • 600 Words

The revelation that Gov. Pete Wilson, leading scourge of the undocumented, had himself employed an illegal immigrant housekeeper will certainly deepen our political cynicism. Wilson joins the sorry band of hypocrites Dianne Feinstein and Michael Huffington, both of whom made the crusade against illegal immigration the centerpiece of their senatorial campaigns and were then revealed as having entrusted the sanctity of their homes to undocumented employees.

Aside from reinforcing the popular stereotype of politicians as liars and hypocrites, there is a deeper lesson to this story. Based on the examples of Wilson, Feinstein and Huffington, not to mention those of my own relatives and acquaintances, I would guess that most middle- and upper-middle-class families in California have at least occasionally employed a gardener, nanny, cleaning woman or handyman whose legal documentation would not stand scrutiny. Laws that are routinely violated by most of the population are laws that breed disrespect for the rule of law. This was the enduring lesson of he Prohibition Era of the 1920s, during which America’s political elite denounced bootleggers by day and drank themselves silly in speak-easies by night, certainly one of the sorriest periods in our national history.

California has always had large numbers of illegal immigrants from south of the border, often at far higher levels than today. Two million illegal California residents applied for amnesty in 1986 under the Immigration Reform Act of that year, while unknown numbers of others remained underground. Today, the Immigration and Naturalization Service estimates the number of illegals in the state at 1.5 million or so, with an additional net inflow of 150,000 per year–less than one-half of one percent of the state’s population–and a sizable fraction of these are well-educated Canadian and European visa over-stayers, who arouse little fear or media attention.

Several of California’s most important industries, including agriculture and tourism, rely heavily on undocumented labor. What if that pool suddenly became unavailable? Persuading unemployed aerospace engineers to pick tomatoes or clean hotel toilets for a living is unlikely to succeed, and forcing California’s huge long-term welfare underclass to take these jobs is even less plausible. How many business executives would feel comfortable if they knew that their offices were cleaned each night by native-born Americans with a long history of drug addiction and imprisonment, the only segment of the population likely to accept such work?

The illegal immigration “solutions” proposed by grandstanding politicians are often worse than the problem. Democrats have regularly proposed dangerous big-government schemes, such as a national identity card, a federal computer database to continually track the activities of all American citizens, or even asset forfeiture–confiscating without trial the property of those who employ undocumented workers. Having the federal government seize ownership of several million private homes in California would hardly boost sagging real-estate values. Foolish Republican proposals like Proposition 187 have leaned more toward punishing illegal immigrants through imprisonment, thus salvaging our state budget by turning minimum-wage nannies into $23,000-per-year wards of the state.

For a state facing so many real crises–a disastrous welfare system and the urban degradation it has fostered, horrifying levels of crime, an outrageously expensive system of civil litigation, and hatemongering racial preference programs–to focus political attention on janitors and farm workers seems the height of irresponsibility.

All sovereign nations must control their borders, and reducing illegal immigration through a larger border patrol seems a reasonable approach to the problem. But hysteria is unwarranted. The confident, prosperous California of the 1980s certainly never viewed gardeners and housekeepers as a mortal threat to our survival, and restoring such confidence and prosperity should be the primary goal of our elected officials. California faces larger problems than Michael Huffington’s beloved nanny.

Big Brother, Meet Big Sister

The Los Angeles Times • June 12, 1995 • 800 Words

Timothy McVeigh, alleged perpetrator of the Oklahoma City bombing, is said to have believed that, while he was in the Army, the government implanted a microchip tracking device in his buttocks. Most of us would dismiss this as the ravings of an obvious madman. But to Sen. Dianne Feinstein, McVeigh is just a bit ahead of his time; she is a believer in “biometric” tracking of all of us. She proposes, as part of legislation for tougher control of illegal immigration, a national identity card for every man, woman, and child in America.

Captivated by advanced technology, Feinstein says that such a card could include a magnetic strip or microchip containing a digitized form of each citizen’s vital statistics, photograph, fingerprint, voiceprint and retina scan. The card would be linked to massive new federal computer databases, and would be presented whenever an American applied for employment or government benefits. The card would have to be renewed annually, presumably requiring refingerprinting to verify identity.

Now, subjecting every American to the humiliation of annual citizenship checks could hardly win popular support if presented purely as an employment program for tens of thousands of new federal document inspectors and file managers; an overriding justification must be found. In past decades, the magic words national security might have persuaded Americans to meekly sacrifice their traditional liberties. The Cold War is no more, but Feinstein has found an equivalent: the current “war” against illegal immigration. Once the 260 million legal inhabitants of America have been scanned, everyone caught with their fingerprints not on file might be presumed illegal and deported or imprisoned, solving the problem once and for all.

Whether Dianne Feinstein actually cares so deeply about the scourge of illegal immigration remains open to considerable doubt. Aside from happily placing her own home in the care of an illegal alien some years back, she strongly supported throughout the 1980s various San Francisco ordinances that declared the city a “safe haven” for all illegal immigrants and prohibited any local cooperation with immigration authorities. But politicians follow the polls, and if catching all those illegal nannies and gardeners now requires every American citizen to carry a microchip, so be it. Gov. Pete Wilson endorsed much the same approach just before the 1994 election when he said that actual Proposition 187 would probably require establishment of a national ID card.

Compared to Feinstein’s proposal, Pat Buchanan’s foolish idea of building a massive wall across the thousand miles of our southern border is far less harmful to American freedom.

A national ID database represents the slipperiest of all civil liberty slopes. A system employing tens of thousands of government clerks and administrators and costing tens of billions of dollars to build and operate would surely not remain limited to catching illegal nannies. Why not use it, at virtually no additional cost, to track convicted child molesters as well? Who would dare object? Why not then also track the movements of convicted murderers. And rapists. And drug dealers and felons in general. And fathers behind on their child support. And tax-evaders. And “political extremists.” Members of “religious cults.” Drug addicts. AIDS carriers. Gun owners. With each turn of the political cycle, left and right would add their favorite batch of social enemies to the surveillance list.

Or consider employment issues. Since every private employer would have to obtain federal authorization before offering any individual a job, a database record of race, ethnicity and gender could be used as an extraordinarily direct means of enforcing future affirmative action regulations. Imagine business owners receiving computerized responses such as “employment permission denied; you already employ too many white males.”

Perhaps considerations such as these have persuaded the Clinton Administration, Sen. Ted Kennedy and other leading liberal members of Congress to put aside any civil liberty concerns they might have and fully endorse legislation along the lines of Feinstein’s “Big Sister” proposal. Some moderate Republicans such as Sen. Alan Simpson of Wyoming and Rep. Lamar Smith of Texas are also on board. However, leading conservative Republicans and libertarians–House Majority Leader Dick Armey of Texas, strategist Bill Kristol, the Cato Institute, the National Federation of Independent Business–are absolutely opposed, as are civil liberties groups such as the ACLU.

Requiring the law-abiding 98% of American’s population to carry a national ID card or undergo retinal scanning is un-American in the strongest sense of the word, and the only long-term beneficiaries of such federal policies would be the recruiting sergeants of the Michigan Militia. Our fractured society already contains large numbers of violent and paranoid individuals terrified of imaginary government plots against their freedom. Politicians who would give true substance to such fears by affixing microchips to every American’s identity must be held accountable for the likely consequences. One Oklahoma City bombing is enough.

Bilingualism vs. Bilingual Education

A system that ensures failure is kept alive by the flow of federal dollars. A 1998 initiative would bring change

The Los Angeles Times • October 17, 1997 • 1,000 Words

As each new microchip and fiber-optic cable shrinks the circumference of our world, more and more Americans recognize the practical importance of bilingualism. Even today, entrepreneurs or employees fluent in Chinese, Japanese or Spanish have a distinct edge over their English-only peers.

But if other languages such as Chinese or Spanish are of growing world importance, English ranks in a class by itself. Although English is not and never has been America’s official national language, over the past 20 years it has rapidly become the entire world’s unofficial language, utterly dominating the spheres of science, technology and international business. Fluency in Spanish may provide a significant advantage, but lack of literacy in English represents a crippling, almost fatal disadvantage in our global economy. For this reason, the better public and private schools in Europe, Asia and Latin America all provide as much English as early as possible to young children.

During this same period, many of America’s own public schools have stopped teaching English to young children from non-English-speaking backgrounds. Influenced by avant-garde pedagogy and multiculturalist ideology, educational administrators have adopted a system of bilingual education that is usually “bilingual” in name only.

Too often, young immigrant children are taught little or no English–in Los Angeles, only 30 minutes a day, according to the school district’s longstanding bilingual master plan. This is based on the ridiculous notion that too much English too early will damage a child’s self-esteem and learning ability. Hundreds of thousands of these American schoolchildren spend years being taught grammar, reading, writing and all other academic subjects in their own “native” language–almost always Spanish–while receiving just tiny doses of instruction in English, taught as a foreign language.

As one might expect, the results of such an approach to English instruction are utterly dismal. Of the 1.3 million California schoolchildren–a quarter of our state’s total public school enrollment–who begin each year classified as not knowing English, only about 5% learn English by year’s end, implying an annual failure rate of 95% for existing programs.

Defenders of the status quo argue away these devastating statistics by claiming that 5-year-old children normally require about seven years to learn a new language and actually have much more difficulty learning second languages than teenagers or adults; these are academic dogmas with absolutely no basis in reality.

On the other hand, the dreadful flaws in the current classification methodology are kept well hidden. In California, children from immigrant or Latino backgrounds are categorized as not knowing English if they merely score below average on English tests, meaning that unknown numbers of children whose first and only language is English spend their elementary school years trapped in Spanish-only “bilingual” programs.

The real dynamic driving this bizarre system is special government funding. School districts are provided with extra dollars for each child who doesn’t know English. This generates the worst sort of perverse incentive, in which administrators are financially rewarded for not teaching English to young children or pretending that they haven’t learned the language; schools are annually penalized for each child who becomes fluent in English.

Under such a scheme, the widespread educational fiction that young children require seven years to learn English suddenly becomes understandable, as a necessary, enabling myth. And although no one has been able to properly document the total amount of supplemental spending on children limited in English, the annual total for California certainly exceeds $400 million and may be as much as $1 billion or more, sums that can buy a tremendous amount of silence or complicity.

Unfortunately for its profiteers, “bilingual education” is completely unworkable as well as unsuccessful. Even after 20 or 30 years of effort, California has had absolutely no luck in finding the enormous supply of properly certified bilingual teachers to match the 140 languages spoken by California schoolchildren. All sides in the debate agree that the old-fashioned “sink or swim” method of learning English is the worst alternative, yet more California schoolchildren today are submerged into this approach than are in properly structured bilingual programs, although courts have ruled the former unconstitutional and the latter legally mandatory. “Bilingual or nothing” in practice often means “nothing.”

These facts may only now be coming to the attention of California’s affluent white elite, but they have long been well-known to the current system’s primary victims, powerless Latino immigrants and their children. Over recent years, there have been a series of spontaneous protests against “bilingual education” by angry parents, most notably the 1996 Latino boycott at Los Angeles’ 9th Street Elementary School, which directly inspired our “English for the Children” initiative campaign.

The initiative, targeted for next June’s ballot, would end bilingual education in California by making it truly voluntary. Parents could still have their children placed or kept in a bilingual program, but only if they took the affirmative step of seeking a waiver. Since public opinion surveys, including a recent Los Angeles Times poll, have consistently shown 80% to 85% dislike for the current program among its supposed beneficiaries, voluntary bilingual programs will become very few and far between. And those programs that do survive our initiative by attracting genuine parental support are probably worth preserving. In a state as large and diverse as California, even the most unlikely program may occasionally succeed due to specific local conditions or unique individuals.

But either way, all of California’s immigrant schoolchildren finally will be granted the right to be taught English, the universal language of advancement and opportunity, supplementing their own family languages. Only by ending our failed system of bilingual education can we foster the true growth of bilingualism and the unity and prosperity of our multiethnic society.

Ron K. Unz, a Silicon Valley Software Entrepreneur, Is the Chairman of the “English for the Children” Initiative Campaign. in 1994, he Challenged Incumbent Gov. Pete Wilson for the Republican Nomination.

Alpert-Firestone: Recipe for Chaos

Giving school boards total authority over methods means potential for reversal at every local election

The Los Angeles Times • February 26, 1998 • 700 Words

If a pending state Senate bill purporting to reform bilingual education becomes law, it could ignite ethnic tensions in California for years to come.

The fundamental principle behind the bill, co-sponsored by Sen. Dede Alpert (D-Coronado) and Assemblyman Brooks Firestone (R-Los Olivos), is local control–namely, placing most decisions on language acquisition policy in the hands of locally elected school boards. But supporters seem not to have thought through the real-life consequences of their proposal.

First, the Alpert-Firestone bill would have almost no actual impact on the half a million California schoolchildren currently locked into our system of Spanish-only bilingual education. The overwhelming majority of these students are in just a handful of huge school districts–nearly half are in the Los Angeles Unified School District alone–and the elected school boards and educational administrations of these districts are absolutely and totally committed to maintaining bilingual education programs. Placing decision-making in the hands of these same individuals is simply a means of ratifying the status quo.

The secondary and unintended consequences of the Alpert-Firestone bill are damaging, rather than merely ineffective.

There are about 7,000 elected school board members in California and tens of thousands of other individuals who eagerly eye these seats, which often represent the starting rung on the ladder of political advancement. School board elections receive minimal media coverage and have very low voter turnout, while most candidates are underfunded and therefore desperate to find some issue–any issue–by which to separate themselves from the pack and draw potential supporters to the polls.

By placing bilingual education policy squarely in the hands of local school boards, passage of the Alpert-Firestone bill would provide every prospective school board candidate from San Diego to Yolo County with the lure of the hot-button political issue of bilingual education. And this would be a severe threat to the well-being of our schools.

Although the vast majority of Californians of all backgrounds dislike bilingual education, supporters are far better organized and more politically active than opponents, which helps to explain its long-standing survival in the face of failure and unpopularity. In low-turnout school board races, energy and activist organization often outweigh raw polling numbers. Both pro- and anti-bilingual candidates might find raising the issue to be in their political interests, if only to mobilize their base. Campaigns on potentially divisive social issues are almost inevitably dominated by the most strident forces on both sides, who symbiotically feed off each other’s extremist rhetoric. It has required forethought and tremendous effort to prevent this from being the immediate fate of our own “English for the Children” (Proposition 227) initiative drive, and our continued success over the next few months is by no means completely assured. If thousands of local school board candidates each year are bludgeoning each other with the bilingual education issue, one can easily imagine the level of ethnic haranguing and counter-haranguing that would quickly result. The dreadful busing wars of the late 1970s might seem localized and tame by comparison.

Since bilingual education is widely unpopular, except among a fraction of Democratic activists, passage of the Alpert-Firestone bill would probably provide a long-term political advantage to partisan Republicans. This may explain the overwhelming Republican support for the legislation when it was introduced last year.

Support for the Alpert-Firestone bill by the California Teachers Assn. and other union organizations is much more difficult to understand, since the measure gives local conservative activists the one political weapon that might regularly overcome the organizational and financial advantages of union-backed school board candidates in most local districts.

But neither sincere liberals nor sincere conservatives should support a measure that could turn language education into a permanent political football. Consider the utter incoherence of educational policy in a possible “swing” school district: A 4-3 pro-bilingual school board majority might preserve bilingual programs, then be replaced at the next election by a 4-3 anti-bilingual majority committed to eliminating them, only to revert to a 4-3 pro-bilingual majority promising to restore them–all in a matter of just a few years. The very real possibility that educational policy for immigrant children could change after every school board election is a recipe for utter chaos.

Ron Unz Is Chairman of the “English for the Children” (Proposition 227) Initiative Campaign. E-mail: Info@onenation.org

Some Minorities Are More Minor than Others

The Wall Street Journal • November 16, 1998 • 800 Words

With the victory of Washington state’s Initiative 200, which ends affirmative action in government hiring, contracting and education, supporters of racial preferences have asked us to imagine an America in which members of some ethnic groups are virtually excluded not only from state university campuses but elite institutions in general.

But no imagination is actually needed, for this is already the case today, and has been for years. In a telling irony, current affirmative action policies are more the cause than the cure for these gross imbalances.

From the very beginnings of affirmative action in the 1960s, its underlying justification has always been that it resolves the problem of “underrepresentation.” The basis for this argument is the view that the elite institutions of our society should reflect the diversity of America’s society, and that if certain groups–such as blacks or women–seem to be receiving less than their statistical share, discrimination (whether conscious or unconscious) is the likely culprit. In fact, many diversity advocates believe that society should correct for such imbalances even absent any discrimination whatsoever.

But for all the endless discussion over the origins and cure for chronic demographic underrepresentation, there has been near total silence regarding the flip side of the issue, namely demographic overrepresentation. The underrepresentation of some groups is an inevitable consequence of the overrepresentation of other groups, and one issue cannot be properly addressed without the other.

Consider Harvard College. Over the past few years, black enrollment has averaged 8% and Hispanic enrollment 7%. Despite Harvard’s longstanding commitment to affirmative action (recently reiterated in a widely discussed new book co-authored by Harvard’s ex-President Derek Bok), these levels are substantially lower than their 12% and 10% representation in the general population, and there are periodic complaints by ethnic activists that Harvard is insufficiently committed to “diversity.”

But these numbers become much less surprising when we examine Harvard’s enrollment more closely. For example, Asians comprise between 2% and 3% of the U.S. population, but nearly 20% of Harvard undergraduates. Then too, between a quarter and a third of Harvard students identify themselves as Jewish, while Jews also represent just 2% to 3% of the overall population. Thus, it appears that Jews and Asians constitute approximately half of Harvard’s student body, leaving the other half for the remaining 95% of America.

Under these circumstances, chronic underrepresentation of other ethnic groups—with or without affirmative action—is mathematically inevitable, and the only real issue is the allocation of such underrepresentation. Since black and Hispanics are virtually guaranteed a certain number of slots, and Harvard also admits a considerable number of foreign students, the number of remaining slots is further reduced. In fact, it seems likely that non-Jewish white Americans represent no more than a quarter of Harvard undergraduates, even though this group constitutes nearly 75% of the population at large, resulting in a degree of underrepresentation far more severe than that of blacks, Hispanics or any other minority groups.

Furthermore, even among non-Jewish whites there is almost certainly a severe skew in representation, with Northeastern WASPs being far better represented than other demographic or religious groups such as Baptists or Southerners. (It’s hard to know for sure, since Harvard doesn’t release breakdowns of the student body by religion.)

These facts should make supporters of affirmative action very uncomfortable. Large numbers of rejected applicants from these underrepresented groups doubtless have much higher admissions scores than many black or Hispanic admittees–as well as the unique cultural experiences prized by diversity advocates–and are much farther from parity with their share of the general population. Thus, current affirmative action policies actually act to increase rather than decrease ethnic underrepresentation at the college.

Other than repealing the laws of mathematics, the only solution available to supporters of affirmative action would be to adopt a policy aimed at drastically reducing the number of Asians and Jews at Harvard, thereby furnishing more spots for other groups. But Asian and Jewish organizations would surely object, and the policy would be controversial to say the least.

This entire ethnic dilemma is present to a greater or lesser degree at most of our other elite educational institutions: Yale, Princeton, Stanford, Berkeley and so on. And partly because these universities act as a natural springboard to elite careers in law, medicine, finance and technology, many of these commanding heights of American society seem to exhibit a similar skew in demographic composition.

Seen in this light, the well-known hostility of “angry white males” toward affirmative action programs may represent less the pique of the privileged and more the resentment of the discriminated-against. If the recent Presidential Commission on Race had sought to engage in sincere analysis rather than merely indulge in empty rhetoric, difficult issues such as this one should have been central to their debate. That it was not suggests why the commission has been a failure from the start.

Ron K. Unz, a Silicon Valley software developer, was the author of Proposition 227, the successful California initiative to dismantle bilingual education

New Yorkers Hate Bilingual Ed

City Journal • Winter 1999 • 400 Words

For 25 years, California’s indefensible bilingual-ed system forced many of the state’s 1.3 million non-English-speaking children to take their classes in their native tongue, guaranteeing that few became proficient in the English they need to succeed in America. No more: in June, Californians overwhelmingly supported Proposition 227, a ballot initiative junking the system in favor of public school kids being taught English as soon as they enroll. But, at least if we believe a recent front-page article in the New York Times, bilingual ed is so wildly popular with New York’s parents, politicians, and voters that the Empire State actually plans to expand it.

Recent polling data, however, tell a strikingly different story about what New Yorkers really think of bilingual ed. In late October, the respected polling firm Zogby International asked 1,411 likely New York voters if they would support a law “which would require all public school instruction to be conducted in English and for students not fluent in English to be placed in an intensive one-year English immersion program.” The results were astonishing: 79 percent said yes, while only 14 percent said no. Support was broad and deep: 87 percent of Republicans and 72 percent of Democrats agreed with the proposed law, Hispanics favored it by a two to one margin, and 75 percent of city voters gave thumbs up. The survey’s large size greatly increases the reliability of these numbers.

Clearly, contrary to the Times’s assertion, there’s a hidden sea of popular discontent with New York’s bilingual-ed system. How to capitalize on it, though, to change the system? Unlike California, New York doesn’t allow citizen initiatives, and getting one launched in New York City—which does—is difficult and costly. The best route would be for a leading New York political figure to focus a re-election campaign on liberating New York’s public school kids from bilingual ed. Governor George Pataki, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, and former Bronx borough president Herman Badillo are education reformers all, and each has strong pro-immigrant credentials to protect him from charges of immigrant-bashing—the preferred tactic of bilingual ed’s fierce defenders. Any one of the three could successfully make the argument that immigrant kids need to learn English fast and thoroughly if they’re to succeed in America, and that bilingual ed doesn’t do the job.

New York’s Latino and Asian schoolchildren deserve the same chance to master English that teachers once gave to millions of Italian and Jewish and Greek immigrant kids, opening for them a future of opportunity.

The Right Kind of Outreach for the GOP

The Weekly Standard • March 1, 1999 • 2,600 Words

Republican leaders, worried about their party’s lack of success among ethnic minorities, are reaching for just the wrong remedy. The GOP, they say, should stress symbolic ethnic outreach, while downplaying its principled opposition to affirmative action, bilingual education, and multiculturalism. As a result, “diversity” is now a watchword in GOP candidate selection, choice of convention speakers, and House leadership battles. But to no avail. The Republicans’ electoral catastrophe in California last November demonstrates the utter bankruptcy of the strategy of “me-too” diversity-mongering. Rather, it is staunch adherence to conservative principles that turns out to be good politics as well as good policy.

Underlying the GOP rout in California was a demographic trend that is ominous for Republicans: The 1998 elections were the third in a row that saw California’s increasingly numerous non-white voters — already 35 percent of the electorate — shunning Republican candidates up and down the ticket in unprecedented numbers. Against such a tide, Republicans could not afford mistakes.

Dan Lungren’s campaign for governor recognized the challenge and followed every textbook prescription for outreach to California’s vast Hispanic and Asian and smaller black populations. Lungren emphasized his friendliness toward immigrants, campaigned vigorously in minority neighborhoods, spent considerable time and advertising money on Spanish-language media, and ducked or actually opposed any ethnically charged issues such as Proposition 227, “English for the Children,” the ballot measure overwhelmingly passed in June 1998 that replaced the long-standing system of bilingual education in California schools with intensive English instruction. But none of these efforts seems to have attracted minority voters. Lungren ran a weak campaign, and the day of his humiliating 20-point defeat, two exit polls put his share of the Latino vote at 17 percent and 23 percent respectively; his support among Asians and blacks was similarly dismal. He could probably have done about this well without spending a dime on ethnic outreach.

As for the Republican statewide slate generally, it was far more ethnically diverse than its Democratic counterpart — the eight candidates included two Latinos and Matt Fong, the Asian-American challenger for Barbara Boxer’s U.S. Senate seat — yet fared little better than Lungren among minorities. Just two GOP candidates won, both white male incumbents who massively outspent weak Democratic challengers and still barely eked out victories. Apparently, non-white Californians just don’t trust Republicans, even those who campaign on or personify inclusiveness. Furthermore, squishy Republican rhetoric may have annoyed the conservative California base, which stayed home in droves, making way for what may have been the greatest Democratic landslide since 1932.

What went wrong? Until 1994, statewide and national Republican candidates could regularly count on 40 percent or more of the Latino vote in California, and their strength among Asians often exceeded their white support. Pete Wilson’s 1990 campaign for governor against Dianne Feinstein, for example, attracted 47 percent of Hispanics, 58 percent of Asians, and just 53 percent of whites, a fairly typical achievement for Republican candidates. (Black support for Republicans in California was usually close to its national level of 15 percent, but since California’s population is only 7 percent black, the political impact was minimal.)

All this changed in 1994, first with the GOP’s support for Proposition 187, the ballot initiative to eliminate public schooling and other government benefits for illegal immigrants and their children, then with the emergence of the immigration issue as a centerpiece of state and national Republican party politics. The party favored curbing illegal immigration. Initially, legal immigrants (who deeply resent their illegal counterparts) seemed to support the drive to rein in illegal border-crossings. But the tenor of the public debate soon shifted. The rhetoric, images, and policy proposals put forward by both sides seemed to expand the targeted group to include the 90 percent of resident immigrants who are legal and, by implication, all Americans of Asian or Latino ancestry. Gov. Pete Wilson rode Prop. 187 to a landslide reelection in November 1994, but when he told reporters that the measure was intended to help send “Jose” back to Mexico, a lot of voters named “Jose” got angry. (“Jose,” symptomatically, has now become the most common boy’s name in both California and Texas.)

Then in 1995 and 1996, congressional Republicans led by Sen. Alan Simpson and Rep. Lamar Smith came close to pushing through the most sweeping restrictions on immigration since the nativist backlash of the 1920s. Extremist groups, such as Voice of Citizens Together (VCT), which had led the charge for Prop. 187, began loudly to denounce third- and fourth-generation Mexican-Americans as agents of the reconquista, intent on returning the Southwest to Mexican rule. And in the final stages of the Dole presidential campaign, millions of dollars’ worth of television advertisements running in California denounced the nefarious role of illegal “Asian money” in funding Bill Clinton and the Democrats, even though the sums involved were a small fraction of the total, and subsequent investigations revealed that comparable amounts of illegal “Asian money” obtained by RNC chairman Haley Barbour had helped finance the Republican takeover of Congress in 1994 (not to mention the billion or more in Korean money that has funded conservative media outlets including the Washington Times over recent decades).

The result was a catastrophic hemorrhaging of Asian and Latino support for Republicans in the 1996 elections and a huge surge in the naturalization of immigrants, who overwhelmingly registered as Democrats, all without any countervailing growth in Republican support among “angry white males.” The Dole campaign and Republicans generally suffered unexpected defeats in California, Florida, and Arizona — states with large immigrant populations — and were weakened elsewhere in the country. Terrified Republican leaders soon dumped the immigration issue as a political loser and abandoned their attack on affirmative action and other positions perceived as “guilty by association.” Newt Gingrich, until then a fierce champion of “English-only” policies, suddenly began supporting increased funding for bilingual education and statehood for the Spanish-speaking commonwealth of Puerto Rico. In California, Dan Lungren performed a similar about-face.

But you can’t unscramble an omelet, and the deep emotions unleashed in 1994 by Prop. 187 — which, had the courts not struck it down, would have expelled hundreds of thousands of immigrant children from California public schools — are still viscerally present in immigrant neighborhoods years after that vote. Such feelings cannot be countered by a few bland 30-second TV spots claiming “I’m-a-nice-Republican-who-likes-Latinos.” Even today, there are reports in the mainstream press (and all the more in the immigrant newspapers) regarding the deportation of legal residents who have lived their entire adult lives in this country to homelands they can barely remember because of, say, a single 15-year-old drunk-driving arrest. Such blatantly unjust results of the Republican-sponsored immigration legislation of 1996 remain a bleeding wound for the GOP.

It is the iron law of politics that a handful of “hot” issues like the cruel expulsion of immigrant children from school and the unjust deportation of longtime legal residents can create a powerful political alignment in a given community that years of political outreach and millions of dollars’ worth of feel-good advertising cannot overcome. Thus, the nativist and anti-Catholic Republican policies of the 1920s caused generations of Jews, Italians, and Slavs to remain unswerving Democrats until the advent of Ronald Reagan. The Republicans have gone far toward similarly alienating Latinos and Asians, especially in California, ground-zero of the immigration wars.

Nationally, the ethnic outlook for Republicans is bleak but somewhat less so. Many large states with huge Hispanic populations such as Texas and Florida avoided the bitter immigration wars when their Republican leaders refused to follow California’s lead on the issue. Local Republican candidates who were on the “right side” on immigration have done quite well among Hispanics. Gov. George W. Bush recently captured nearly half the Mexican-American vote in his landslide reelection victory, despite relying on the sort of outreach effort that would have failed dismally in California’s far more difficult political terrain.

But even in California, political lines and ethnic loyalties are not always predictable. Some of the state’s leading Democrats — including senators Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer — opportunistically clambered aboard Pete Wilson’s anti-immigration bandwagon in 1995 and 1996 and earned the lasting scorn of Latino and Asian leaders with this political betrayal; Feinstein’s unexpected decision not to seek the governorship in 1998 probably stemmed from this underpublicized fact.

Most interesting of all is the ethnic opening for Republicans in California suggested by the surprising course of the campaign for Prop. 227. When the anti-bilingual-education measure first gained visibility in mid-1997, political pundits said it completed the trilogy of ethnicity-charged ballot measures, the others being Prop. 187 in 1994 and Prop. 209, which largely ended state-sponsored affirmative action in 1996. Republican and Democratic party leaders agreed — the former nervously, the latter with glee — that this “third strike” would further mobilize immigrant voters and cement their loyalty to the Democratic party, which was expected to vigorously oppose the initiative. Frightened Republican leaders, from state party chairman Mike Schroeder on down, dumped decades of ideological support for English in the schools and declared their opposition to a measure they deemed certain to inflame immigrant hostility.

But California’s immigrants had a different view. During nearly a year of intensive campaigning and media coverage, a dozen major nonpartisan statewide public opinion polls showed that Prop. 227 enjoyed a wide and consistent lead among Asians and Latinos, with support often higher among immigrants than among whites. Given immigrants’ eagerness to have their children learn English and their firsthand awareness that the bilingual instruction their children were receiving in the schools was failing to teach them, these numbers were unsurprising. Partly for this reason, prominent Latino Democrats rarely spoke out against Prop. 227 during the campaign, and when they did, their opposition was often more nuanced and equivocal than that of the skittish (and hypocritical) Republican leaders.

In the end, several million dollars in unanswered anti-227 advertising (largely paid for by A. Jerrold Perenchio, the non-Latino Republican billionaire owner of America’s Spanish-language Univision television network) in the final two weeks of the campaign managed to drive Latino support for Prop. 227 below 50 percent. But the measure still ran some 20 points ahead of the statewide Republican candidates, including Lungren, whose public denunciation of 227 ironically was used as a centerpiece of the “No” media campaign. It’s also worth noting that Prop. 227 ran almost as strongly among California Latinos as Gov. Bush recently did among Texas Latinos, despite the gigantic advertising disadvantage of the former and advantage of the latter. Finally, private polling conducted three months after the vote on Prop. 227 revealed that Latino support for the measure had already reverted to the 65 percent range, its level prior to the massive “No” advertising campaign.

In the long run, however, Latino public opinion on Prop. 227 is far less politically potent than the actual effects of the measure in the schools. Unlike Prop. 187 (which was drafted in direct contradiction of a Supreme Court decision, and therefore was largely symbolic) and Prop. 209 (which directly affected only a few thousand college students and government contractors), Prop. 227 has vast practical as well as symbolic consequences.

Over the past few months, Prop. 227 has already altered the life chances of the 1.4 million California schoolchildren classified as not fluent in English. Despite resistance and obstructionism on the part of school districts wedded to the status quo, the number of students enrolled in bilingual programs fell statewide by over 80 percent between June and September 1998, and those bilingual programs that survive appear to have substantially increased their English content as a defensive move. Since children are likely to learn English much more quickly if their schools teach it to them, these changes should reverberate throughout California’s educational system, from kindergarten through college. Recent front-page articles in the Los Angeles Times and elsewhere report that former bilingual-ed teachers are astonished at how quickly and easily their students are learning English.

Last year, partly because of the political pressure generated by the 227 campaign, California’s legislature independently voted to require that all students be given standardized tests, in English, in a range of academic subjects, with the scores aggregated and made available school-by-school and district-by-district on the Internet. The results in general were embarrassing — California students ranked substantially below the national average — but the scores of limited-English students were dreadful, with the mean around the fifteenth percentile and huge numbers of students below the fifth percentile. These children could barely read or write a word of English, sometimes after many years in California schools.

If the changes wrought by Prop. 227 succeed in raising immigrant test scores even to the twentieth or twenty-fifth percentile, any residual opposition to “English for the Children” seems likely to collapse. Just as it has recently become very difficult to find prominent California Republicans who admit they supported Prop. 187, prominent Democrats may soon squirm when forced to explain why they opposed teaching immigrant children English in school. And since the Republican party of California endorsed Prop. 227 (over the vigorous opposition of its own top leadership), the language issue may provide Republicans entree to Latinos and immigrants in general.

All non-partisan polls and surveys have indicated that immigrant parents place the highest value on learning English, for themselves and their children. In fact, the single largest source of advertising on Spanish-language television are schools and tutoring services that teach English, while “Aprender Ingles” (Learn English Here) is among the commonest storefront signs in Latino immigrant neighborhoods. Proposition 227 was the most sweeping call for dismantling native-language instruction in thirty years, going far beyond anything ever proposed by Ronald Reagan. Moreover, Prop. 227 was the fruit of a low-budget, grassroots campaign vigorously opposed by the president of the United States, the chairmen of the California Republican and Democratic parties, all four candidates for California governor, every major public and private union, nearly every political slate, and every educational organization. The proponents were outspent in advertising by some 25-1. Yet the measure won by 61-39 percent, one of the largest victories of any contested California initiative in twenty years. Even under the most unfavorable possible campaign-spending conditions, it carried almost 40 percent of the Latino vote and 60 percent of the Asian vote. This demonstrates the drawing power of the English education issue for immigrant voters.

By contrast, the wretched performance of the diversity-conscious 1998 Republican ticket in California shows that generic feel-good Republican advertising aimed at California Latinos cannot overcome the toxic legacy of Pete Wilson and Prop. 187. What would have real meaning for voters, however, is the heartfelt testimony of mothers and fathers whose children were rescued from crippling English illiteracy by the passage of Prop. 227.

Among likely presidential candidates, Steve Forbes campaigned for Prop. 227 last fall, a heartening sign. George W. Bush and John McCain, on the other hand, remain defenders of bilingual programs. Is it too much to hope that in 2000, the Republican ticket will unflinchingly adhere to one of the party’s bedrock (and hugely popular) principles — assimilation through the teaching of English in school — thereby also attracting immigrant families in large numbers back into the party that many of them until recently called home?

Ron K. Unz, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, was the author of Proposition 227 and led the campaign to pass it in 1998.

California and the End of White America

The unprecedented racial transformation of California and its political consequences.

Commentary • October 1999 • 8,600 Words

SUMMARY

Californians of European ancestry—“whites”—became a minority near the end of the 1980s, and this unprecedented ethnic transformation is probably responsible for the rise of a series of ethnically-charged political issues such as immigration, affirmative action, and bilingual education, as seen in Propositions 187, 209, and 227. Since America as a whole is undergoing the same ethnic transformation delayed by a few decades, the experience of these controversial campaigns tells us much about the future of our country on these ethnic issues.

Our political leaders should approach these ethnic issues by reaffirming America’s traditional support for immigration, but couple that with a return to the assimilative policies which America has emphasized in the past. Otherwise, whites as a group will inevitably begin to display the same ethnic-minority-group politics as other minority groups, and this could break our nation. We face the choice of either supporting “the New American Melting Pot” or accepting “the Coming of White Nationalism.”

• • •

At some unknown date during the late 1980’s, and with no attention paid whatsoever, whites became a minority in California.

The silence surrounding this momentous event, without precedent in American history, is quite understandable. It was the late Reagan era, a time of economic boom and the approaching end of the cold war, and racial issues had temporarily receded from visibility. Then, too, California enjoyed a reputation as being among our most cosmopolitan, open, and optimistic states, better known for its flourishing economy and hippies and beaches than for racial conflict; this reputation had been confirmed in 1982 when the nation’s largest state came within a hair’s-breadth of electing Tom Bradley as America’s first black governor.

Besides, on the historic transition date in question, official statistics would have indicated a shrinking but still substantial white majority. The bizarre framework of federal racial classification–which divides all mankind into Asians, blacks, Hispanics, and “other” whites–places blond, blue-eyed, third-generation Argentinian-Americans who speak not a word of Spanish in the category of minorities, while dark-skinned Muslim immigrants from Egypt, speaking not a word of English, are labeled members of the white majority. In this Alice-in-Wonderland perspective, the huge inflow into California of hundreds of thousands of Iranians and Armenians and Egyptians had acted to “whiten” the state, partially balancing the huge simultaneous inflow of Vietnamese and Mexicans and Somalis.

But the irrationality of official statistics did not prevent Californians of European ancestry from recognizing that they were fast becoming a minority within their own state–and their unease about this situation would soon be reflected in the political landscape. During the 1994, 1996, and 1998 election cycles, three ballot measures with strong racial and ethnic overtones–Propositions 187 (illegal immigration), 209 (affirmative action), and 227 (bilingual education)–explosively probed the delicate fault lines of California’s new multiethnic society. Each of these widely popular initiatives drew far more media coverage and generated far greater emotion than did the candidates for statewide or national office who shared their same ballot. Taken as a whole, they are certain to loom large in any political history of late-20th-century America, long after those candidates have been forgotten.

Because the three measures dealt with questions inevitable in an ethnically diverse society, examining the very different campaigns surrounding them can tell us much not only about California today but, since national demographic trends lag behind those of California by only a generation or two, about how our larger political world is likely to evolve as Americans of European ancestry fall increasingly into minority status during the first half of the new century. Two alternate futures present themselves–which might be labeled the new American melting pot and the coming of white nationalism–and the recent politics of California lends some plausibility to each. America’s continued viability as a nation may well depend upon which of these two paths we choose.

II

UNTIL THE late 1960’s, California had probablyhad less experience with racial politics than most of America’s other large states. Its Asian community, although the nation’s largest, was still negligible in size and power, amounting to just 2 or 3 percent of the general population and lacking significant political influence. Hispanics had not yet been invented as an American racial group by federal bureaucrats, and so were perceived much like Italians, Arabs, or other darker Caucasians of marginal social status; in any case, their numbers were probably well under 10 percent of the state, with an economic profile ranging from the most prestigious landowning families to poor migrant farmworkers who crossed national borders without notice or concern. And as for blacks, America’s prototypical minority, few lived in California prior to World War II, and even afterward their numbers never rose above 7 percent, by far the lowest such proportion of any major state in the union. Thus, in 1970, government statistics would have described California as 90-percent white, and most Californians, on the basis of their own experience, probably would have concurred.

Then, over the next decade and a half, some two million documented foreign immigrants–over a quarter of America’s total–entered the state, further augmented by a continuous flow of illegals and additional millions of foreign immigrants relocating from other states. By 1990, California’s Latino population had more than tripled; Asians had increased almost fivefold.

Most of these immigrants were young, and often they came from societies where seven or eight children to a family were not uncommon. Although the cultural influence of their new American environment quickly reduced their typical family size to three or four children, the immigrant birthrate still far outpaced that of affluent whites, many of whom had anyway already passed their child-bearing years. This large difference in natural increase meant that, by 1991, California was recording more Hispanic than white births, despite an official white population more than twice as large; if immigrants officially classified as white were excluded from the total, the white/nonwhite ratio would have been more lopsided still.

It was, inevitably, in the public schools that the earliest signs of ethnic transformation became visible to California’s middle class. Within just a few years, large urban school districts had shifted from overwhelmingly white to overwhelmingly minority, with many of the remaining “whites” actually being immigrants or their children. As early as the 1980’s, some 140 different languages were spoken in California schools.

This made for a potentially dangerous situation, ripe for scapegoating. For even as the Latino and Asian populations were growing exponentially, California’s electorate remained overwhelmingly white. Immigrants, being younger and less affluent, with low rates of naturalization and few ties to public issues, mostly ignored the political process: although, by 1990, Latinos and Asians constituted some 40 percent of the state’s population, they were just 10 percent of its voters. This political vacuum permitted a small number of Left-liberal ethnic activists to stake an uncontested claim to represent the views of ordinary Asians and Latinos. Despite the fact that these activists, generally second- or third-generation Americans, had no real ties to the immigrant population, their shrill cultural and linguistic demands–often modeled on those of their black allies–regularly served to annoy and unnerve California’s white political majority.

AND YET, until the early 1990’s, California’s rapidly transforming and potentially combustible society seemed to be leading a charmed life. Elderly whites might grumble at the vast number of “foreigners” everywhere; communities undergoing especially rapid ethnic succession might exhibit bouts of “English Only”-ism; white students at UCLA might jokingly refer to themselves as attending the “University of Caucasians Lost among Asians.” But all in all, ethnic tensions seemed surprisingly minimal.

One helpful factor here was California’s ongoing economic boom, fueled by the massive Reagan defense buildup, which provided jobs for everyone from white aerospace engineers to Mexican construction laborers. The powerful agribusiness lobby, heavily dependent on undocumented farm labor, also exerted enormous influence in state politics, ensuring that moderate pro-business leaders like then-Senator Pete Wilson hewed to a position of de-facto support for high levels of illegal immigration.

And it was not just moderate Republicans like Wilson who held pro-immigrant views; so, too, contrary to stereotype, did many prominent conservatives. The entrepreneurship and economic dynamism of most immigrants, the strong family values and Catholic faith of Latinos, the fierce anti-Communism of Cuban and Vietnamese refugees–these did not go unnoticed during the Reagan era. In 1984, during the heated debate over the Simpson-Mazzoli Immigration Act, none other than right-winger Patrick J. Buchanan had denounced the proposed legislation as mean-spirited toward hard-working illegal immigrants, and as late as the 1990 publication of his conservative call-to-arms, Right from the Beginning, Buchanan was still casually referring to illegal immigrants (let alone to legal ones) as stalwarts of American optimism and economic advancement. Fiery Bob Dornan had originally unseated a Democratic incumbent in his Orange County congressional district thanks to a local influx of anti-Communist Vietnamese refugees, and his unbending anti-abortionism regularly won him many Latino votes; in his appearances on Rush Limbaugh’s radio show, Dornan scathingly denounced anti-immigrant activists.

If the Right could find little fault with immigrants during this period, liberals and the Left often showed greater hostility. Environmentalists pushing for slow-growth economic measures often locked horns with Latino (and black) elected officials from working-class districts where the paramount issue was jobs rather than “quality of life”; the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), America’s premier anti-immigration lobby, had been founded in 1978 by radical environmentalists. In another sector of the liberal universe, unionized white workers found themselves being priced out of the market by increasingly skilled immigrants. Even Cesar Chavez’s United Farm Workers urged a crackdown on Latino illegal immigrants.

But the main source of conflict, especially in the Los Angeles metropolitan area, was friction between immigrants and blacks. During the 1980’s, as large numbers of Mexicans and Central Americans began displacing blacks from their traditional neighborhoods, the competition for housing, jobs, and political power became fierce. At the same time, Asian shopkeepers, primarily Koreans, had begun to dominate small-scale commerce in black neighborhoods, replacing previous (usually nonblack) owners or reopening abandoned properties. Such changes were natural, even beneficial; but, at a moment when high unemployment and the growing impact of the crack epidemic had produced considerable racial xenophobia among blacks, they generated severe resentments.

All this formed a background to the huge, spontaneous riot in Los Angeles that followed the 1992 acquittal of police officers in the Rodney King case and that inspired similar, smaller riots elsewhere. With the breakdown of public order, large numbers of poor Central American immigrants near downtown Los Angeles joined in the looting, allowing the politically-correct media to portray the riots–falsely–as a united, multicultural uprising against the white power structure. In fact, the rioters were overwhelmingly black, and their primary targets were immigrant Hispanics and Asians, particularly Korean shopkeepers, who lost some $400 million in destroyed property. (The freeing of a Korean shopkeeper convicted of killing a black teen had been a strong contributing factor in the riot.)

THE EFFECT of the 1992 riots on California’s ethnic politics cannot be exaggerated. Although few white neighborhoods were directly threatened and fewer whites were killed or injured, the plumes of smoke from burning buildings and the gruesome television footage almost completely shattered the sense of security of middle-class Southern Californians. Suddenly, the happy “multicultural California” so beloved of local boosters had been unmasked as a harsh, dangerous third-world dystopia. Scenes of Uzi-toting Korean shopkeepers exchanging fire with shadowy rioters made even California’s so-called “model minority” seem alien and threatening. And the large numbers of Latinos arrested (and often summarily deported) for looting caused whites to cast a newly wary eye on gardeners and nannies who just weeks earlier had seemed so pleasant and reliable. If multicultural Los Angeles had exploded into sudden chaos, what security could whites expect as a minority in an increasingly nonwhite California? The often divisive rhetoric of self-appointed ethnic activists hardly provided comfort.

Other factors, too, contributed to the tension. The end of the cold war and the resulting defense build-down had led to a deep recession in early-1990’s California, and the shrinking economic pie produced a sense of statewide despair. For many whites, this economic decline came to be symbolized by the images of unemployed Latino laborers–large numbers of them undocumented–who gathered in small knots each morning at suburban street corners, hoping for contractors to give them a day’s work. A twenty-year real-estate bubble had also burst, and aging suburbanites, now thinking of relocating elsewhere, were suddenly faced with the reality that their homes–their principal financial asset–were worth only a fraction of what they had been a few years earlier. Orange County, just south of Los Angeles, had originally grown to maturity as a leading receptacle of earlier white flight; now several of its own larger cities like Santa Ana and Anaheim had suddenly become heavily populated by immigrant Latinos and were increasingly poor.

Terrified of social decay and violence, and trapped by collapsed property values, many whites felt they could neither run nor hide. Under these circumstances, attention inevitably began to focus on the tidal force of foreign immigration.

III

THE FIRST California political figure to raise the immigration issue was Tom Houston, a liberal Democrat from Los Angeles who had served as deputy mayor under Tom Bradley and was now attempting to succeed his ex-boss. From late 1992 through the primary election in the spring of 1993, Houston focused relentlessly on the fiscal and social threat posed by illegal aliens, ranging from the increased burden on the city’s social-welfare system to crime and gang violence.

Although Houston lost, his positions generated strong populist support and attracted major media coverage. Moreover, his ideological credentials as a liberal Democrat provided cover for others eager to raise the same issue but fearful of being branded “racist.” Within months of the mayoral race, a whole raft of immigration-related measures had been introduced into the state legislature, and top-ranking politicians, presumably driven by polls and focus groups, were eagerly presenting their sound-bites on the local evening news. Senator Barbara Boxer, a Left-liberal Democrat, urged the construction of a border fence with Mexico, to be manned by California’s National Guard; Senator Dianne Feinstein, a moderate Democrat, advocated a huge increase in the border patrol; and Pete Wilson, California’s moderate Republican governor, proposed denying U.S. citizenship to the American-born children of illegal immigrants.

Wilson’s main innovation was to frame the issue as one of fiscal responsibility: he argued that the cost of providing government services to illegal immigrants was prohibitive. This had some plausibility, since most such immigrants were poor and the taxes they paid probably did not cover the cost of the education their children received in the public schools–though the same could be said of all lower-income residents, immigrant and nonimmigrant alike. But other claims advanced by Wilson–that, for instance, California’s generous welfare arrangements served as a magnet to impoverished foreigners–were false and demagogic: nearly all immigrants came for jobs, not welfare.

Plausible or not, the governor’s charges resonated widely among California’s recession-plagued white electorate. Despite clear visual and personal evidence that Latinos and other immigrants were enormously hard-working and filled every available job niche of the California economy, the common white stereotype of darker-skinned peoples as especially prone to government dependency proved irresistible. “Stopping welfare for illegal immigrants” became a powerful slogan.

The results were immediate. Wilson, whose popularity during the recession had plumbed all-time lows, saw his approval rating shoot up almost overnight. Because his initial targets were illegal immigrants, pro-immigrant politicians such as members of the state’s Latino caucus were trapped between the difficulty of defending illegality and the embarrassment of falling silent before Wilson’s attacks upon portions of their own community. By late 1993, illegal immigration seemed to have established itself, alongside crime and education, as a major potential issue in the 1994 statewide elections.

The sharp distinction between illegal and legal immigrants would become a standard tag line of nearly all political rhetoric during the immigration wars of the next two or three years, both in California and around the nation. Wilson’s own exceptionally effective campaign ads featured gritty black-and-white footage of illegal aliens scurrying across the Mexican border like an army of subhuman invaders, but then balanced this harsh image with reverent shots of the Statue of Liberty and of legal Latino residents taking the oath of U.S. citizenship. Pro-immigrant groups merely provided different body language for the same basic message: legal immigrants good, illegal immigrants bad.

Yet, despite strong rhetorical consensus on this distinction, both perceptions of reality and reality itself suggested something quite different. For one thing, activist anti-immigration groups like FAIR or Voices of Citizens Together (VCT) saw no difference between the two categories, and merely used illegals as an effective stalking horse for an attack on immigration in general. Then, too, public sentiment in California was quite confused on the matter, with polls showing that most voters believed the overwhelming majority of immigrants were illegal even though illegals probably comprised no more than 20 percent of the total. To most people, “illegal immigrant” was simply a synonym for “poor immigrant” or “bad immigrant” or perhaps even “Mexican immigrant.”

The history of immigration policy added another layer of complication, not to say irony. Legislation championed by then-Senator Wilson in 1986 had granted amnesty to some three million illegal immigrants, the bulk of them residents of California. Thus, by 1994, a significant fraction of California’s “good” legal immigrants had only recently been “bad” illegal immigrants, having been transformed by a stroke of the pen. And this amnesty led to still further complications, since many newly legalized Mexican workers had subsequently brought their wives and children to live with them, generating a maze of intermingled relationships: in a typical immigrant household the husband might be an amnestied legal resident, the wife and older children illegals, and the younger children native-born American citizens.

BUT ALL such details and nuances were to be submerged completely as California’s 1994 election campaign eventually became a massive referendum on the single subject of illegal immigration. In the spring of that year, a fringe group of anti-immigrant activists led by a failed accountant named Ron Prince had quietly begun to gather signatures to qualify the “Save Our State” (SOS) voter initiative for the November ballot. Under its later, official designation as Proposition 187, the measure became a watershed event in the national politics of race.

The initiative banned all nonemergency government services for illegal immigrants and their children–a simple and reasonable-sounding proposal until one realized that it would force the immediate expulsion of hundreds of thousands of immigrant children from public schools throughout California. In one draconian clause, the measure stipulated that mothers who attempted to use false documents to keep their children in school would receive mandatory five-year prison sentences; in another, it required teachers and doctors to report immediately to the INS any individuals they “suspected” of being illegal immigrants, thus raising the specter of a wave of ethnic witch-hunts. Reflecting its grassroots origins, the measure was poorly drafted and highly ambiguous, and was written in explicit defiance of a 1982 U.S. Supreme Court decision, Plyler v. Doe, requiring public education for all children, documented or otherwise.

None of these seemingly fatal flaws lessened the overwhelming popularity of Proposition 187, which represented to most voters a revolt against a governing elite whose economic and social policies had brought the Golden State to its knees. Although initially skeptical, Wilson gradually embraced the proposal, ultimately making it the centerpiece of his own reelection campaign–so much so that by election day, according to some polls, more voters were aware that Wilson supported 187 than that he was the state’s incumbent governor or much of anything else about him.

The campaign itself was exceptionally divisive, among the most bitter in the state’s history. With even California’s “moderate” governor calling for the expulsion of 300,000 children from California schools, implicit sanction was given to far more extreme words and deeds. At one point, Proposition 187 chairman Ron Prince told an audience of conservative activists that “you are the posse and SOS is the rope,” while others regularly declared that the measure would finally drive the encroaching hordes of illegal aliens back to Mexico. Among immigrant families ignorant of American law, frightening rumors spread that the initiative authorized physical attacks on the undocumented, a perception reinforced by the unfortunate coincidence that “187” was also American police code for “homicide.” The suggestion of a popular conservative talk-show host that the state offer a cash bounty for each “illegal immigrant” shot proved that such anxieties were not entirely unfounded.

Unwise or provocative behavior by anti-187 groups fed in turn both fear and backlash among whites. In October 1994, a coalition of grassroots pro-immigrant groups led a protest march and rally of 70,000 mostly immigrant Latinos through Los Angeles, perhaps the largest political demonstration in California history. Although the event was entirely peaceful, many of the marchers carried flags from their various Latin American countries of origin, and the images of that sea of foreign flags in downtown Los Angeles, endlessly reprinted and retelevised, seemed to confirm the worst suspicions of white Californians that they were losing control of their state to unassimilable aliens. Coming just three weeks before the election, the heavily covered march guaranteed the initiative’s passage.

THE SWEEPING 59-percent victory of Proposition 187 in November 1994 represented a political earthquake. Not only did its coattails carry Governor Wilson–who before he embraced the measure had been the most unpopular incumbent in California history–to a lesser landslide of his own, but Republicans gained a majority in the state assembly for the first time in three decades and picked up four seats in California’s congressional delegation. The very fact that the highly flawed initiative had triumphed in the face of universal opposition by the state’s editorial boards–and condemnation by many prominent national conservatives like Jack Kemp and William J. Bennett–only heightened the impact. Success succeeds, and California Republicans believed that they had found a magic formula for long-term political realignment.

To some concerned observers, the active ingredient in that formula seemed, rather, an incipient form of white nationalism. But heady Republicans ignored such concerns, just as they discounted fears of a minority backlash. Since implementation of the blatantly unconstitutional measure was quickly blocked by federal court challenges, they reasoned that the vote would remain essentially symbolic, and that immigrant anger would surely fade. They also pointed out that, although Wilson’s Latino vote had been cut in half from 1990, his black support had risen to a full 20 percent, remarkable for a GOP candidate. At least in California, Republicans saw the immigration issue as attractive not just to whites but to some minorities as well.[1]

Nor were Republicans alone in drawing such conclusions. Senator Dianne Feinstein, California’s most prominent Democrat, had herself effectively used the immigration issue to survive a surprisingly strong challenge by her opponent Michael Huffington; in content and style, her campaign’s television barrage of immigration ads had been almost indistinguishable from Pete Wilson’s. Although Feinstein did ultimately declare herself against Proposition 187, her opposition was grudging and late, and following the measure’s triumph she immediately repositioned herself as the national champion of massive cuts in legal immigration, hoping to outflank Wilson and the Republicans on that emerging front. Against illegals, she also proposed the immediate introduction of a mandatory National Identity Card, together with the annual fingerprinting of every man, woman, and child in America. As for Bill Clinton, who read the same election returns and the same polls, he soon declared his support for sweeping “immigration-reform” legislation in Congress, featuring the most drastic cuts in entry numbers since 1924.

IV

EVEN AS national political leaders were digesting the sudden prominence of the immigration issue, a second ethnically-charged initiative entered upon the California stage.

For several years, two obscure academics had been trying to attract interest in their proposed measure banning governmental affirmative action, but without success or visibility. Now, in the wake of Proposition 187 and its national impact, the me dia had begun to recognize the political potential of proposals from such unlikely sources, and by the early months of 1995, the so-called “California Civil Rights Initiative,” targeted for the 1996 ballot, was being widely hailed as the next big thing in California and the hottest of national hot-button issues. According to early media accounts, fearful and angry whites, the driving force behind Proposition 187 and the national Republican sweep in 1994, had found a new and hardly surprising goal: ending the entrenched system of racial discrimination against white people known as affirmative action.

Initial polling figures on the proposed measure, later designated Proposition 209, indicated the expected high levels of support among white Californians. More startlingly, they also revealed almost equally strong support among both Asians and Hispanics, and a near-even split among blacks, historically the group that benefited the most from affirmative action. Gun-shy Democratic leaders, previously unshakable in their support of these controversial programs, now viewed the initiative as an unstoppable political freight train, to be avoided rather than directly opposed.

Even Willie Brown, California’s long-time Democratic Speaker of the Assembly and perhaps America’s most powerful black elected official, began to consider support for an effort to place the measure on the June 1996 primary ballot so as to prevent it from being used as a November general-election issue against Democrats. Senator Feinstein’s campaign chairman endorsed the initiative and began negotiating with its backers over the prominence of Feinstein’s role in the eventual campaign. And on the national stage, President Clinton announced the formation of a commission to review affirmative action, a move widely seen as providing him with the necessary political cover to reverse his longstanding position and abandon the now-controversial policy. After 30 years of apparent inviolability, America’s system of affirmative action appeared–like Communism–on the verge of collapsing without even a fight.

In California, as elsewhere, governmental affirmative-action programs were seen as being of little interest to nonblack minorities like Latinos or Asians, few of whom worked in the public sector. Indeed, as the attack on these programs began, some Latino leaders, expressing their anger at the scanty black support they had received during the Proposition 187 campaign, indicated that they might return the favor by sitting on their hands during the fight to come. As for Asians, they–even more than whites–had been denied opportunities by ethnic-preference programs; the explicitly restrictive quota on Chinese students at San Francisco’s elite Lowell High School had been an Asian-American cause célèbre for several years. Thus, at first glance, the alignment of interest groups reinforced the polls in suggesting that no clear white-versus-nonwhite divide would be found on this issue.

Little wonder, then, that at this stage, Proposition 209 struck some observers as a potential counterweight to Proposition 187. Perhaps–the reasoning went–if the anti-immigrant elements behind Proposition 187 could be kept at a distance, it would be possible to win a strong mandate across all ethnic lines for the elimination of ethnic favoritism. Even where immigration was concerned, extensive private polling had indicated that the primary factor in white hostility was less the fact of immigration itself than balkanizing policies such as affirmative action, bilingual education, and multiculturalism, all of which were (rightly) seen as blocking traditional patterns of assimilation; remove the policies, and the hostility evaporated. And now, one of the most pernicious of those policies appeared about to fall before an amazingly broad ethnic coalition. Its demise could defuse white anger, allay nonwhite fears, and reaffirm the tradition of American pluralism.

BUT IT was not to be. Governor Wilson, triumphant from his reelection sweep and now exploring a presidential race, decided to add opposition to affirmative action to his portfolio of national issues, where it would help balance his otherwise “liberal” positions on abortion, gun control, and gay rights. Although, as recently as December 1994, Wilson had reaffirmed his decades-long support for minority preferences, by February 1995 he was promising a national crusade to reestablish equality of opportunity under the law. With the encouragement of Ward Connerly, a black supporter whom he had appointed to the governing board of the University of California, Wilson began a lobbying campaign to persuade the university’s regents to end ethnic preferences in admissions immediately.

Wilson’s entrance into the battle provided a tactical boost, but it led to a strategic calamity. Because of 187, immigrants, Latinos in particular, viewed him as a demonic force, and 209, instead of being perceived as an antidote to 187, quickly became transformed in their eyes into its anointed successor. In addition, what had looked at first like a nonpartisan movement to abolish an unfair system was now taking on the appearance of a cog in a poll-driven presidential campaign, with Wilson’s own about-face being seen as an exceptionally cynical move.

When the Wilson presidential bid collapsed, as it rapidly did, foes of the initiative took heart, the more so since its supporters were showing an obvious lack of unity, competence, or significant financial resources. Any hope of enlisting prominent Democrats in the campaign evaporated. The Republican party now stepped in, rescuing the campaign financially while assuming complete control, and installed Connerly as its public face. Despite the latter’s efforts to prevent the measure from appearing narrowly partisan, the Proposition 209 effort soon became largely a get-out-the-vote adjunct to the 1996 campaigns of Bob Dole and other GOP candidates.

This proved disastrous. Blue-collar Reagan Democrats, among the strongest foes of racial preferences, abandoned the measure in droves. With extraordinary obtuseness, Republican television spots directly linked Proposition 209 with Proposition 187, leading to a precipitous drop in Latino and even Asian backing. For nearly two years, polls had shown Latino support matching that of whites; in the wake of the Republican media campaign, Latinos ultimately voted against the measure even more strongly than did blacks. Proposition 209 failed even to carry a majority of Asians, the group with the most to gain from ending quotas in university admissions.

In the end, 209 did win, but by a mere eight-point margin, just a quarter of what earlier polls had predicted. Moreover, from a narrowly Republican perspective, the measure failed in its primary duty of pulling party candidates to victory. On the contrary, from Dole on down, the GOP suffered a series of crushing defeats throughout California. Chagrined Republicans now concluded that the whole idea of ending affirmative action had energized the opposing base of minority voters much more than the supporting base of white conservatives. Instead of blaming their own tactics, they instead began to backtrack on the issue itself as much and as far as was quietly possible, figuring that so racially-charged a topic was just too risky to exploit effectively. Since most Republicans had never been comfortable dealing with these matters in the first place, the decision came easily enough.

But the most unfortunate consequence of the final vote was precisely the impression it conveyed of ethnic polarization. California’s whites had overwhel mingly voted one way, its nonwhites overwhelmingly the other. Many opponents of immigration now cited this fact as proof that the interests of minorities inevitably diverged from those of whites, with no common ground possible. To more extreme voices, the victory of numerous Latino candidates in the 1996 elections signaled that California had been lost to America, and that a Latino secessionist movement–foreshadowing the eventual splintering of the country at large–was already visible on the horizon.

V

INTO THIS heated landscape now entered the last of the three ballot measures, Proposition 227, aimed at dismantling bilingual education but propelled from an unexpected quarter.

During 1996, as political attention focused on the presidential contest and Proposition 209, a small group of Latino immigrant parents in downtown Los Angeles, frustrated that their children were not being taught English–in practice, “bilingual education” in California meant Spanish-only instruction–began a public boycott of their local elementary school. With the help of a media-savvy Episcopal priest and longtime immigrant-rights activist named Alice Callaghan, the boycott attracted considerable coverage, gaining the support of Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan and eventually forcing the school district to capitulate and move the students to English classes. The matter seemed closed, but it was not.

At this point, the story of Proposition 227 merges with my own, and thus requires a brief digression. My political activities in California had extended back a few years, beginning with a decision to challenge Pete Wilson for renomination in the Republican gubernatorial primary of 1994; running on a pro-immigrant and anti-affirmative-action platform, I won 34 percent of the vote. In that same year, I played a prominent role in the (unsuccessful) campaign to defeat Proposition 187 and, after that, in the (more successful) effort to block anti-immigration legislation in Congress. I had also hoped to involve myself heavily in Proposition 209, but was understandably rejected once Wilson’s operatives gained influence in the effort.

As a strong believer in American assimilationism, I had long had an interest in bilingual education. Inspired in part by the example of my own mother, who was born in Los Angeles into a Yiddish-speaking immigrant home but had quickly and easily learned English as a young child, I had never understood why children were being kept for years–sometimes many years–in native-language classes, or why such programs had continued to exist and even expand after decades of obvious failure.

The miserable record of bilingual education was evident from official statistics: a full quarter of all children in California public schools were classified as not knowing English, and 95 percent of these children failed to learn English in any given year. In fact, schools were paid extra for each child who did not know or had not learned English–a clear incentive for retaining them in a native-language program against all logic and against their parents’ wishes. The law authorizing this system had actually expired a decade earlier, but since the state government was deadlocked on the matter, bilingual education remained mandatory almost everywhere.

Ending this failed and legally dubious program, which was now even forcing some parents to picket their own children’s schools, seemed the ideal target of a voter initiative, and I decided to make such an effort. In broad terms, my goal was to provide for the assimilationist approach to American ethnic diversity the same opportunity to demonstrate its appeal and popular support that Proposition 187 had provided, disastrously, for ethnic nationalists on all sides.

Nothing could be more obvious than that immigrants themselves assigned enormous importance to learning English and to ensuring that their children learned English. Yet because of bilingual education, the completely opposite impression had been created, namely, that immigrants were ardently demanding that America’s public schools help maintain their family’s native language and culture. If executed properly, I believed, a campaign to eliminate these programs could attract substantial, perhaps overwhelming, support from immigrants themselves, thereby helping to puncture the mistaken anxieties of California’s white middle class.

But I also recognized that in many respects the political climate was extraordinarily inopportune for such an effort. The ethnic wounds inflicted by 187 had been reopened by the destructive handling of 209, and for a Republican like myself to jump in with a proposal to dismantle the bilingual cornerstone of Latino public education was to risk a terrible explosion. In order to mitigate the risk, it was absolutely crucial that the ballot measure be properly perceived as being both pro-immigrant and politically nonpartisan.

With regard to the former, my own pro-immigrant credentials provided some credibility, but not enough. So I began recruiting a cadre of key supporters: Alice Callaghan, with decades of unswerving left-wing activism on behalf of immigrants and their children; Gloria Matta Tuchman, a Latina and California’s most prominent anti-bilingual activist; and Jaime Escalante, of Stand and Deliver fame, perhaps America’s most renowned public-school teacher and himself a Latino immigrant long opposed to bilingual programs.

But no less crucial was to avoid the deadly embrace of California’s numerous anti-immigrant activists, who were likely to jump immediately aboard such a campaign. Since their touchstone had become the elimination of public spending on immigrants, I drafted my own “English for the Children” measure to save no money but rather to appropriate an additional, if rather modest, $50 million a year for English-literacy programs aimed at adult immigrants. The maneuver succeeded, provoking the strong opposition of 187 activists to our entire initiative.

THIS LEFT the various political establishments.For different reasons, both leading Latino and leading Republican figures maintained a stunned silence throughout most of the campaign. My meetings with the former were cordial; many Latino leaders seemed privately as skeptical of bilingual programs as I, but concerns about a revolt by their activist base prevented them from considering an endorsement, even after public polls consistently showed Latino support for the measure running in the 70- to 80-percent range. As for Republican leaders, they were terrified by the prospect of a minority-voter backlash of the sort their own ham-fisted campaign for 209 had provoked; despite nearly 90-percent Republican support in polls, they, too, mostly distanced themselves from the measure.

Teachers’ unions were similarly conflicted. The late Albert Shanker, founder of the American Federation of Teachers, had for years been among the most vocal national critics of bilingual programs, but his successors had generally made their peace with the program. Most rank-and-file teachers, however, continued to view the system as a scandalous failure, and resented the extra pay and perks that went to bilingual instructors. In October 1997, over the strong opposition of union leadership, a grassroots referendum campaign in the gigantic Los Angeles local garnered 48 percent of the vote for a proposal making support for Proposition 227 official union policy.

All these splits, so surprising to journalists, were extremely helpful to our campaign. When Proposition 227 first appeared on the scene, it seemed almost certain to be perceived as “Son of Proposition 187”–another test of raw political power between California whites and Latinos. Instead, the story we emphasized was one that pitted the common sense of ordinary people–white and Latino, Democrat and Republican–against the timid political elites of all these groups, unwilling to challenge the special interests that benefited from a failed system. Our message to the media was populism without xenophobia, and it resonated widely. Every poll or news story highlighting the widespread Latino dislike of bilingual programs helped reassure moderate and liberal whites that our measure was not anti-minority, while simultaneously persuading conservatives that Latinos and other immigrants shared their own basic values and assimilationist goals.

But there was also a countercampaign, which in resources and funding could hardly have been more dissimilar to our own. Our statewide effort consisted of just three full-time workers, myself included, together with a handful of volunteers whose main role was to participate in public debates and respond to media inquiries. By contrast, “No on 227” was a traditional, well-funded operation led by ace Democratic political consultant Richie Ross and a veteran campaign staff, backed by a field operation of thousands of local activists. It counted the public support of President Clinton, the chairmen of both the state Republican and Democratic parties, all four candidates for governor, every educational organization, every public and private union, and nearly every newspaper. Our opposition was to spend millions on a coordinated barrage of radio, television, and print advertisements; our own campaign was forced to rely almost entirely upon stories in the free media.

Still, despite this monumental imbalance, our foes faced challenges of their own. From the start, public opinion had overwhelmingly and consistently favored “English for the Children” across all ethnic and ideological lines. Although “No on 227” boasted the support of a coalition of pro-bilingual partners, any direct defense of bilingual education was out of the question: nearly everyone knew that the existing system was a failure. No more feasible, given the pro-immigrant credentials of Proposition 227’s main backers and strong immigrant support in the polls, was any attack on the measure as mean-spirited or 187-like. Indeed, such a tactic, by creating an ethnic divide over the measure, might actually backfire by solidifying white support for it.

THE ULTIMATE strategy chosen by the anti-Proposition 227 forces was breathtakingly cynical. This coalition of Latino activists, Democratic operatives, and educational organizations attempted, 187-style, to provoke a white taxpayer backlash by portraying the measure as a huge government “giveaway” to immigrants because of the extra money earmarked to assist adults in learning English. (The entire sum of $50 million amounted to an annual $1.50 per Californian.) Simultaneously, a completely different advertising message, aimed at California’s Latino audience, claimed that the problems with bilingual programs had recently been fixed and that Proposition 227 would actually prevent children from learning English in school.

These nakedly dishonest tactics shredded the credibility of the anti-227 campaign, which received a further blow when its major financial backer was discovered to be A. Jerrold Perenchio, a Republican billionaire and close ally of Governor Wilson. Not himself Latino or Spanish-speaking, Perenchio derived his fortune from his ownership of Univision, the Spanish-language television network, and thus had an obvious economic motive in preventing Latino children from learning English in school. Not only did Univision blanket California with anti-227 “advertorials,” broadcast free of charge, but the leading Democratic and Republican candidates for governor counted Perenchio as their largest financial donor, and all of them starred in Perenchio-funded anti-227 commercials.

When voting day finally arrived, Proposition 227 passed in a landslide, gaining 61 percent of the vote across ethnic and ideological lines. True, the “No” advertising campaign, which outspent our “Yes” campaign by about 25 to 1, took its toll, reducing by over a third the 62-percent Latino support the initiative had enjoyed before the start of the television barrage. But since advertising campaigns merely rent support rather than buy it, Latino backing for Proposition 227 in post-election polls soon returned to its earlier levels. More importantly, the actual dismantling of bilingual-education programs in the wake of 227 proceeded with minimal Latino opposition anywhere in California.

Under the measure, parents who wish to place or keep their children in a bilingual program can apply for a waiver, but few have done so. Within months of the vote, the number of students in bilingual education had fallen to about a tenth of its previous levels, and numerous follow-up stories in the press have featured glowing accounts of parents thrilled that schools are finally teaching their children to read, write, and speak English. There have been almost no signs of the immigrant unhappiness or resistance to English-language classrooms that had been confidently predicted by ethnic activists and anti-immigrant ideologues alike. Proposition 227 had tested the case for a return to assimilationist policies in public education and had proved it both popular and workable.

VI

THREE RACIALLY-CHARGED issues, with three different contours and consequences. What is their meaning for our national future?

Since before the Declaration of Independence, the “American Dilemma”–to borrow the title of Gunnar Myrdal’s classic 1944 work–has indeed been that of race, and it has cast a huge shadow over our entire political life. But that dilemma has had clearly circumscribed limits: namely, the longstanding coexistence and conflict between a (usually poor) small African-American minority and a (usually less poor) large European-American majority. This framework was constant throughout our history, from Jamestown through the Civil War to the civil-rights era of the 1960’s, and even today it completely dominated the thoughts of those who led President Clinton’s National Commission on Race.

Until recently, those aspects of the American experience that did not fully conform to this bipolar, black-white paradigm were either squeezed into place or overlooked with little effect. Thus, tens of millions of penniless European immigrants around the turn of the century were initially viewed as “aliens of a foreign race” but, through the ideology and the reality of the American melting pot, were transformed into “whites” within a generation or two. Relatively small populations of “others”–Asians in California, American Indians throughout the country–were either assimilated into mainstream society or generally ignored as distinct American racial groups. And, as we have seen, Hispanics were not even classified separately from other Caucasians prior to the 1970 census.

In many respects, the civil-rights/Great Society era of the 1960’s represented the culmination of this vision of America. A shamed but wholly dominant white society created a cornucopia of social-welfare and social-engineering programs (Headstart, busing, affirmative action), largely aimed at blacks and intended to serve as partial atonement for the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow while easing black entrance into the American dream. But the ideology that evolved to justify these programs also radically changed the terms of the American social compact, replacing the emphasis on assimilation with an emphasis on ethnic difference.

Two further events occurred simultaneously with the completion of the old American racial agenda, and they drastically magnified the impact of this ideological change: the passage of the 1965 Immigration Reform Act, which reopened America to large-scale immigration after a 40-year hiatus, and, as a direct consequence of affirmative-action politics, the creation of the Hispanic racial category.

Over the past 30 years and at a growing pace, more than 25 million new immigrants–80 percent of non-European origin–have entered America, and they and their descendants now constitute a rapidly growing fraction of our total population. Well over half of these new immigrants have been Hispanic, and this ethnic group–today defined in racial terms, with all the attendant special treatment under official government policies–will by itself represent between 20 and 25 percent of America by the middle of the approaching century, at which point Americans of European origin will have become a minority of the population.

A future America in which both whites and all other ethnic groups see themselves as minorities will be far different from our traditional majority-white/minority-black society. Since the 1960’s, the deepening ideological decay of the American melting pot, especially among the journalists and intellectuals who shape our thoughts, has transformed our official self-image from that of a nation of individuals living in a common culture into that of a nation of groups arrayed against one another in an ethnic spoils system. Multiculturalism and “diversity” thoroughly dominate our nation’s schools and politics and public discourse, encouraging minorities to exercise influence through the mobilization of ethnic or racial grievance. Under this framework, the rise of a similar ethnic-grievance movement among America’s emerging white minority is likely, perhaps inevitable.

Already there are early warning signs of such a movement. Public schools are reporting interest in white student clubs, and white firefighters associations and European-American pressure groups are forming in California. Although so far these developments and others like them are minuscule, and the individuals involved make every effort to avoid even a hint of extremism, evolving white-bloc politics could eventually develop a white-nationalist orientation or fringe. Elements of white nationalism have been the unspoken subtext behind the rise of extremist militia groups and the appearance of populist third parties, and represented the obvious core of the anti-immigration movement of the mid-90’s.

AS THE first major state to face the political reality of a shrinking white minority, California has become the laboratory of America’s ethnic future. The verdict of its recent experiments is a mixed one. From the distance of five years, the raw emotions evoked by Proposition 187 may seem as if from another world. Not only has the initiative itself died a lingering death in federal court, but the subsequent, far more moderate 1995 federal legislation that it inspired, removing various social-welfare benefits from legal and illegal immigrants, has also largely been repealed. And where Democrats like Dianne Feinstein once worked hard to outdo Pete Wilson in anti-immigrant fervor, now Republicans like George W. Bush work no less hard to showcase their facility with the Spanish language.

In part, this change is surely traceable to our transformed economic and political landscape. During 1994, America was facing difficult economic times, and California in particular was struggling through its deepest recession of the century; today we are in the midst of a seemingly endless boom, led by California’s high-tech economy. In addition, political movements targeting immigrants have had the unintended consequence of generating an unprecedented wave of naturalization and voter registration among Latinos and Asians, with these groups doubling their share of the California vote between 1990 and 1998. Politically vulnerable communities are no longer so politically vulnerable.

But surface appearances are deceiving. Underlying social dynamics, whether in California or in the nation at large, have not changed, and ethnic conflict, temporarily submerged, has far from disappeared. To the contrary, given the nature of the demographic processes now at work in the country, the potential for such conflict is growing rather than diminishing, and any sudden crack in our unprecedented economic prosperity might well be the occasion for its revival.

This need not occur. The overwhelming evidence is that today’s immigrants are at least as economically productive and socially assimilative as their European predecessors, with low rates of crime, welfare dependency, and social instability. Asians have followed the pattern of high academic achievement and economic entrepreneurship exhibited by America’s Jews before them, while Latin American immigrants have demonstrated much the same social conservatism and working-class values as Italians or Slavs. (One remarkable sign of their assimilationism is the high rate of conversion to evangelical Protestantism among Latin American immigrants.) As the campaign for Proposition 227 proved, today’s immigrants are no less eager than yesterday’s to have their children merge into our English-language society. Most significantly, nearly 40 percent of third-generation Asians and Latinos are intermarrying, usually with whites, a figure far greater than the intermarriage rates of Italian-Americans or Greek-Americans with other ethnic groups as late as the 1950’s.

It is therefore a tragedy of the first order that, even as the reality of the American melting pot remains as powerful as ever, the ideology behind it has almost disappeared, having been replaced by the “diversity” model and by the politics of grievance. A social ideology that allots to blacks and Latinos and Asians their own separatist institutions and suggested shares of society’s benefits cannot long be prevented from extending itself to whites as well, especially as whites become merely one minority among many minorities. Before it is altogether too late, those who support this status quo must realize that the diversity prescription contains the seeds of national dissolution.

America today stands as one of the very few examples in history of a large and successful multiethnic society. If we are to continue and extend our success–which is hardly foreordained–we can only do so by returning to the core principles of Propositions 209 and 227: ethnic assimilation, and individual equality under the law. Otherwise, we face the very real threat of future movements along the lines of Proposition 187, each worse than the last, and on a national scale. There are few forces that could so easily break America as the coming of white nationalism.

Ron Unz, here making his first appearance in COMMENTARY, has written on public policy for the Weekly Standard, the Nation, the Wall Street Journal, and other publications. A Silicon Valley entrepreneur, he was the author of California’s Proposition 227, the “English for the Children” initiative to dismantle bilingual education, which passed in 1998.

Footnotes

[1]. The fault line between native-born and immigrants in California paralleled almost precisely the line separating whites and blacks on the one hand from Asians and Latinos on the other, thus heightening the racial character of the immigration issue. This was not (and is not) the case elsewhere. New York, for example, was second only to California in its concentration of legal and illegal immigrants, and suffered from even greater economic and welfare problems. But for a number of reasons, including the much more variegated makeup of New York’s illegal immigrant population, which numbered multitudes of Irish, Italians, and Africans in addition to Asians and Latinos, attacks there even on illegal immigrants never much entered the portfolio of Republican-party leaders. Even at the height of the immigration wars, New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani defied national party leaders by publicly defending his city’s population of undocumented residents. A measure like Proposition 187 was a complete nonstarter in New York from day one.

How to Speak the GOP's Language

The Wall Street Journal • February 24, 2000 • 800 Words

John McCain’s victory in Michigan was impressive, but he would have lost badly if not for the crossover votes of Democrats and independents. The crucial March 7 primaries in California and New York are both closed to non- Republicans, so Mr. McCain must now concentrate on winning GOP votes. One issue can win him the support of Republicans, especially in California, and also broaden his appeal should he make it to November. Mr. McCain should take a strong stand against so-called bilingual education.

The Republican establishment, including George W. Bush, has been AWOL on this issue, notwithstanding the unmistakable success of California’s Proposition 227, the June 1998 ballot measure that abolished most “bilingual education” and required immigrant children to be taught English. Proposition 227 was opposed by the political leadership of both major parties and opponents outspent supporters 25 to 1, yet it still triumphed in a 61% landslide, while attracting Hispanic support matching Mr. Bush’s in his Texas re-election drive the same year.

The 20 months since the initiative’s passage have seen a significant rise in the academic performance of California’s 1.4 million immigrant students. Newspapers throughout the state — nearly all of which editorially opposed Proposition 227 — now carry glowing accounts of the ease and speed with which immigrant children have learned English together with other subjects, with ex- bilingual teachers even admitting that they themselves would today vote for the measure.

Reinforcing this wealth of anecdotal evidence, the San Jose Mercury News conducted a study showing that hundreds of thousands of immigrant students in 227 classes achieved academic test scores ranging from 20% to 100% higher, depending on grade level and subject, than those who remained in traditional bilingual programs — all after less than a year of the new curriculum. Few educational reforms have produced such dramatic results, and at no cost whatsoever.

National polls have demonstrated enormously broad and deep support for extending such opportunities to immigrant children outside California. A Zogby International survey of 1,949 voters conducted in late 1998 showed that 84% of Republicans and 72% of Democrats — including huge majorities of every ethnic, political and geographic grouping — favored requiring public schools to use English immersion. Another Zogby survey, of 1,411 New Yorkers, showed that feelings in the Empire State — with its long and proud immigrant tradition — were especially strong, with Republican support for a Proposition 227-type measure approaching 90%.

The response of the Republican establishment has been a cowardly silence. A small number of leftist multicultural activists still oppose teaching English to immigrant children, and this tiny but shrill group apparently holds a veto over Republican policy in this area. Since impoverished immigrant families neither donate millions to Republican coffers nor vote Republican in large numbers, it is obvious that most Republicans care not one whit whether the children in these families receive an adequate education in our schools.

George W. Bush has been especially weak, repeatedly defending the failed bilingual status quo. This provides a tremendous opportunity for Mr. McCain. If he forthrightly declares that all children in American schools should be taught how to read and write and speak English, neither Mr. Bush nor Al Gore will have an easy time explaining to voters why they disagree.

Mr. McCain has long supported bilingual programs. But he has also shown, by becoming a convert to the cause of campaign-finance reform, that he has the courage to change his mind. The evidence from California is ample reason for him to do so.

Taking such a stand would require Mr. McCain to buck an important backer, Republican billionaire A. Jerrold Perenchio, who owns the Univision Spanish- language television network. Mr. Perenchio, America’s leading defender of Spanish-only instruction in public schools, contributed millions of dollars to the campaign against Proposition 227. If Mr. McCain proposed a national policy so clearly against the economic interests of a leading supporter, he would prove yet again that he is a leader not influenced by political contributions.

Today, our national policies of ethnic separatism — the so-called multiculturalism of the left, of which Spanish-only instruction is an important element — loom enormous in our universities and the media, but have almost no support among ordinary voters, either immigrant or native. No national leader, Democrat or Republican, has yet had the courage to step forth and burst this ideological balloon. If Mr. McCain now does so, he may gain both the presidency and the gratitude of millions of immigrant families.

This would be good for the Republican Party, too. During the mid-1990s, leading Republicans like former Speaker Newt Gingrich and former California Gov. Pete Wilson proposed expelling millions of immigrant children from our public schools. It’s hardly surprising that many immigrants grew to hate the GOP. If John McCain (or George W. Bush for that matter) now proposed keeping these children in school and also teaching them English, much of this bitter legacy might finally be put to rest.

Mr. Unz, a Silicon Valley software entrepreneur, was the author of Proposition 227

The Right Way for Republicans to Handle Ethnicity in Politics

The American Enterprise • April 2000 • 3,200 Words

AFFIRMATIVE ACTION. Immigration. Bilingual education. Over the past few years, these issues and broader matters of ethnic politics have become the stuff of nightmares for Republican candidates around the country.

On the one hand, ethnic issues are tremendously important to the future well-being of our large and diverse society. They are the hottest of hot buttons for many voters, and several ballot measures on ethnicity-related social problems have turned out to be immensely popular-for instance, Proposition 187 (eliminating public services to illegal immigrants), Prop. 209 (ending affirmative action), and Prop. 227 (dismantling bilingual education), which all won huge victories in vote-rich California. An anti-affirmative action measure did even better in Washington State, and additional referenda on these topics are coming in other states.

Yet these same ethnic issues-including the popular ballot measures mentioned above-are widely believed to have created disastrous problems for the Republican Party by scaring away minority voters and leaving Republicans with a harshly negative image. With the elite national media always quick to espy bigotry when Republicans talk about race and ethnicity, many conservative politicians have recently decided to avoid these issues altogether.

Attempts to bridge the chasm between conservative activists and minority voters have recently caused many prominent Republicans to stammer their way through terminological contortions aimed at avoiding controversy. Thus, presidential candidate George W. Bush may oppose “quotas” and have his doubts about “affirmative action,” but he is all for “affirmative access. ” Governor Bush has similarly announced his support for those bilingual education programs “which work.” To most voters, minority or otherwise, these rhetorical flourishes are merely platitudes. Such content-free symbolism may lessen a candidate’s vulnerability, but it eliminates any possibility of developing a mandate on these critical subjects. Such a stance is merely a polite means of saying “no comment.”

The conservative tendency to confront these issues on a case-by-case basis, with no overarching framework or broader social vision, further courts disaster. Attacks on prevailing policies seem scattershot, politically opportunistic, and purely negative in tone. Liberal critics are quick to respond, “But what do you offer instead?”

The solution to these political obstacles is a broad social vision which connects various controversial policies in an old and accepted framework easily understood by all: the melting pot. For most of the last century, assimilation and the ethnic melting pot were regarded as fundamental aspects of the American experience, promoted by liberals and conservatives alike. Returning national policies to the principles of the melting pot should become the primary Republican goal on ethnic issues.

A “NEW AMERICAN MELTING POT” would not be a cartoonish one-way street of forced integration into the dominant white culture, as “multicultural” activists charge. Over the past couple of centuries, America’s mainstream culture has widely diverged from its original Anglo-Saxon heritage through the admixture of foreign elements. Our language, our cuisine, our high and popular cultures contain important elements from the Germans, Italians, Slavs, Jews, blacks, Asians, and others who today compose well over half our national population. American assimilation has always been a two-way street.

Assimilation is also variable in its speed and extent. A Chinese-born Stanford Ph.D. in engineering with a job in Silicon Valley and a house in the suburbs is likely to assimilate much more rapidly than a poorly educated Chinese immigrant living and working as a short-order cook in a Chinatown. But for most of our history, thorough assimilation into the mainstream has been a process taking generations rather than years, and alarmists concerned about today’s ethnic and language enclaves of Mexicans or Chinese should recognize that similar enclaves of Italian Americans or Jewish Americans dominated the New York City landscape for generations following their arrival.

Today, the American melting pot is both far stronger and far weaker than it has ever been before. The reality of assimilation has grown with the rise of electronic media and America’s ubiquitous English-language popular culture, which now dominates the world. A recent study by the National Immigration Forum indicates that over half of U.S. immigrants already spoke English “well” or “very well” upon their arrival, and after ten years of residency, that figure climbs to more than three-quarters. The vast majority of third-generation Asians and Latinos speak only English at home.

Cultural and economic assimilation are also quite rapid. Today, a quarter or more of Hispanics have shifted from their traditional Catholic faith to Protestant evangelical churches, a religious transformation of unprecedented speed, and one obviously connected partly to their absorption into American society. And more than 70 percent of foreign immigrants have achieved the middle-class distinction of becoming homeowners within 30 years of their entry into America.

The strongest measure of assimilation-intermarriage across ethnic lines-illustrates today’s assimilationist reality. As late as the 1960s, intermarriage rates for white ethnic groups such as Jews and Italians were as low as 5 percent or less. But today, not only Jews and Italians but also American-born Asians and Latinos marry outside their ethnicity in a third to a half of all cases. By most measures, the assimilation of Asian and Latino immigrants is proceeding far more rapidly than that of white immigrant groups who arrived early in the twentieth century. Thus in California the number of “multiracial” births recently passed the combined total of black and Asian births.

Yet at the same time that the reality of the melting pot has grown, the ideology behind it-even the very term itself-has been driven out of public discourse. Today, the contrary concepts of “maintaining diversity” and “fostering multiculturalism” are the purported goals of liberal elites in universities, the news media, and elsewhere. Leaders of ethnic advocacy groups are assumed to be speaking on behalf of millions of their co-ethnics, and the Democratic Party chooses its convention delegates based on strict ethnic and racial criteria. American assimilation has become the powerful reality that dare not speak its name.

HOW WOULD A REVIVED “melting pot” principle apply to some of the difficult ethnic issues in politics today?

First and foremost, our public schools and educational institutions must be restored as the engines of assimilation they once were. America is now in the midst of one of its largest immigration waves, bringing to dwell among us millions of foreign-born or first-generation arrivals who lack good knowledge of English or of our historical traditions and national institutions. Our schools once met similar situations by teaching English to students as rapidly as possible, together with the civics lessons and American history which turned Italian or Polish children into good Americans. Today, schools often do not, and instead keep millions of immigrant students in native-language programs in which barely a word of English is used-sometimes for many years. In history and social studies classrooms, “multicultural education” is now widespread, placing an extreme and unrealistic emphasis on ethnic diversity instead of passing on the traditional knowledge of Western civilization, our Founding Fathers, and the Civil and World Wars.

Although changing an entire educational curriculum is difficult, requiring nearly all children to be taught to read, write, and speak English as soon as they enter school is legally easy and enormously popular. In 1998, California’s Proposition 227 passed in a landslide despite facing the united opposition of both the Democratic and Republican Party establishments and being outspent some 25-1 in advertising; it ran 20 to 30 points ahead of Republican candidates among blacks, Asians, and Latinos. Results since the election have proven the people right and the party establishments wrong, as test scores of the students who moved into English immersion classes have risen 20, 40, or even 100 percent compared to similar students who remained in bilingual programs, all after less than one year of the new curriculum.

Public opinion surveys on requiring English in the schools are also quite remarkable. More than three-quarters of likely voters support federal legislation “which would require all public school instruction to be conducted in English, and for students not fluent in English to be placed in an intensive oneyear English immersion program,” according to Zogby polls. Support is overwhelming across all geographical, ethnic, political, and even ideological lines. Yet despite this near unanimity of opinion, government policy has been (and, except in California, remains) completely contrary.

Similarly, current public school curricula which glorify obscure ethnic figures at the expense of the giants of American history have no place in a melting pot framework. Multiculturalist ideology, which claims that Asian students can only identify with Asian heroes, black students only with black heroes, and so forth, is not only demeaning and divisive, it is also false. Earlier this century, children of Jewish and Italian families, who entered school with scant knowledge of American culture and often barely even speaking the language, soon saw themselves as just as much the political inheritors of George Washington as Americans whose ancestors had arrived on the Mayflower. Black leaders such as W. E. B. DuBois believed they had as much claim to the legacy of Western civilization and American government as any white citizen. Individual families must remain free to preserve as much-or as little-of their own traditional ethnic heritage and culture as they desire, but our public schools should provide a single, unifying American culture rather than encouraging ethnic fragmentation. Today’s immigrants deserve such support.

OUR CURRENT SYSTEM of affirmative action-preferences based on race or ethnicity-also becomes completely indefensible under a melting pot analysis. Given current high intermarriage rates, even classifying a particular individual ethnically can be almost impossible. Consider a child whose four grandparents are Asian, Hispanic, Armenian, and Italian-the kind of mix growing ever more common. At the University of California at Los Angeles, Asians and Armenians are over-represented, while Hispanics and Italians are underrepresented. So should our hypothetical child be given a boost or held back? And who should decide this?

Furthermore, the broad ethnic categories on which affirmative action is based-such as “Asian” and “Hispanic”-are meaningless. Chinese and Hmong have almost nothing in common, with the former being massively over-represented in elite institutions and the latter massively underrepresented. Most Cuban Americans are well-to-do, while most Puerto Ricans are poor; why grant them both preferences on racial grounds? And by what absurd logic does the son of an affluent, blond, thirdgeneration Argentinean American not speaking a word of Spanish (or the child of a black millionaire living in Beverly Hills) end up categorized as a “disadvantaged minority”?

The obvious solution to all these obvious contradictions is to replace ethnically based affirmative action with special assistance based on socio-economic factors. To the extent that some ethnic groups such as blacks or Hispanics are disproportionately among the poor or the poorly educated, they would disproportionately benefit from such programs, but poor whites or Asians would receive help as well. Programs and benefits aimed at the disadvantaged must use objective criteria such as poverty or lack of education, not skin color.

Besides being far more just and workable than our ethnically based spoils system, such a colorblind approach would demonstrate the commitment of Republicans to enhancing opportunities for the truly poor, while today’s system sets aside admissions quotas and business contracts for the country-club members of favored races. Poor whites and poor Asians who now overwhelmingly vote Democratic might have a new reason to consider the Republican Party. There would also be better targeted help for poor blacks and Hispanics, since the benefits of current affirmative action set-asides are mostly scooped up by more affluent and privileged members of those groups (which is why the minority-group establishment fights so hard to preserve the status quo).

A strong and forthright stand in favor of assimilation should be combined with an equally strong and forthright stand in favor of beneficial immigration. Under an assimilationist framework which supports and expects integration into American society, many public concerns about immigration will disappear. Then it becomes possible to be pro-immigrant in a way that will reassure Asians, Hispanics, and others who have sometimes felt under attack.

GOOD POLICIES MUST ALSO BE good politics in order to have a chance of becoming a reality. How would an assimilationist agenda play in the political arena?

Thanks to today’s trendy multiculturalist status quo, promoting assimilationism will generate considerable controversy. Left-wing academic and media elites regard “the melting pot” as fighting words. But such controversy can be extremely useful, since harsh attacks by ardent multiculturalists will be offPutting to most voters. And the wide media coverage generated in the process will help attract public interest and ultimately a mandate for change. A sensible and sensitive call for assimilation will defuse most potential opposition, leaving the loudest contrary voices-diehard supporters of ebonics and Spanishonly instruction-isolated as extremists. Half of winning a victory is picking the right enemies, and these could not be better.

On the other hand, any attempt by Clintonized Democrats to co-opt assimilationism or borrow its language while ignoring its substance would be very difficult, if not impossible, given the vehemence of the multiculturalist Left. While nearly 80 percent of ordinary Democrats support ideas like requiring the public schools to teach English, many left-wing activists will fight to the last ditch against this, and denounce as a traitor any Democrat leaning in that direction. Liberals will face a desperate choice between numbers and intensity@ and lose either way.

As for the minorities and immigrants who are the principal subjects of the melting pot agenda, few votes will be lost and perhaps many will be gained. Although Asians are a tiny fraction of today’s electorate, within a generation their growing numbers, wealth, and presence in elite institutions will give them influence similar to that of American Jews. And Asians are among the most assimilable of American groups, with an enormous emphasis on learning English and intermarriage rates often at 50 percent or above. Asians will also benefit most from the end of racial preferences in academic institutions. A pro-immigrant, pro-assimilationist agenda is almost tailor-made for winning Asian support.

And contrary to some misperceptions, America’s huge and rapidly growing Hispanic population should also be receptive. Although a small core of Hispanic activists (many of whom are native-born and speak not a word of Spanish) are in the forefront of the multiculturalist and bilingual camps, their views have little relation to their alleged followers, who support English in the schools in landslide numbers. The improved school results among Hispanic children now resulting from the rollback of bilingual education will marginalize these activists, and destroy their remaining credibility. What ambitious Hispanic politician will dare to oppose an educational reform that has a demonstrated possibility of eventually doubling the academic performance of his constituents’ children?

Though the concept of the melting pot may grate on cultural leftists of all ethnicities, it actually resonates deeply with most Hispanics, Mexicans in particular. Unlike Chinese, Koreans, or Japanese, who come from effectively mono-ethnic societies with few assimilationist traditions, Hispanics recognize themselves as a fusion of European and Indian cultures. The very common term mestizo-meaning “mixed”-is the self-description of most Hispanic immigrants. It is no coincidence that when Time devoted an issue to American ethnic trends, the attractive face on the cover-a computer-generated composite of hundreds of actual Americans of every race and ethnicity-looked very Hispanic. The “melting pot” is as Hispanic as rice and beans.

An assimilationist approach might also attract surprising support from traditional liberals (especially Jews) who have a history of stressing common bonds among the races. It was Kennedy acolyte Arthur Schlesinger Jr. who published one of the earliest forceful attacks against multiculturalism, The Disuniting of America. National polls show Jewish opposition to bilingual education running at close to 90 percent. Individuals who themselves learned English as children, or whose parents did so, often have even stronger feelings on this issue than citizens several generations removed from the immigrant experience.

Similarly, replacing race-based preferences with new assistance based on socio-economic status could peel supporters away from the Left. In many respects, the policies now advocated by multicultural ists are closer to the ideas advocated by racialist reactionaries in the 1920s and ’30s than to any truly progressive policy. Public support for a melting pot alternative could attract a principled core of traditional liberals who would provide tremendous credibility for an assimilationist push. The power of this issue might, for instance, help raise Jewish support for Republicans from the negligible 15 percent or so at which it has long been stuck.

Using these issues to raise black support for Republicans-also generally around 15 percent-is far less likely. Blacks, especially those living in immigrant-rich cities, are vehement foes of bilingual education, which provides an opening to them, but that is not enough to overcome the drag of the other assimilationist policies proposed here. Whereas an older generation of black leaders from DuBois to Martin Luther King would have had grave doubts about affirmative action, and rejected multiculturalism out of hand, a considerable number of today’s most prominent blacks are explicit separatists, and finding a popular black leader who opposes ethnic preferences is almost impossible (even leading black Republicans such as Colin Powell and J. C. Watts won’t break with affirmative action).

Further, intermarriage rates between blacks and other groups are minute compared to those for Asians or Hispanics, and there is considerable sentiment that blacks whose spouses are of a different ethnicity have betrayed their community in some way (similar sentiments are sometimes expressed by Jewish activists toward Jewish intermarriage, but those rates are now over 50 percent and the issue is more of a religious one). Since middle-class blacks are disproportionately employed in the public sector or in large corporations-places where affirmative action policies have the greatest influence on career advancement-there is obviously a strong personal as well as ideological stake in maintaining race-conscious policies. Nonetheless, with so few blacks supporting Republicans now, a sincere and principled assimilationist approach could hardly do worse than today’s Republican silence and squishiness.

UNDER THE INFLUENCE OF Bill Clinton, American elections have recently turned to the small and the symbolicurging school uniforms, for instance, or allocating 0.01 percent of the federal budget to some high visibility program better left to the states anyway. Such a political strategy cuts risks, and Republican candidates and office-holders, eyeing Clinton’s success, seem to be following a similar path. But while such micropolitics may be successful against other micro-politicians, it would have little chance against a campaign centered on a sincere and widely popular Big Idea.

Assimilation can be that Big Idea for Republicans. It represents a powerful, positive vision, a clear solution to some of America’s most intractable and controversial problems, appealing across ideological and partisan lines. A spirited campaign to revive the melting pot would encounter heated opposition, but that opposition would be shrill and extremist, and the attention drawn in the process would be a good thing politically. Although many rank-and-file Democrats and liberals would be attracted to the concept, a hard core of activist opposition would prevent Democratic candidates from easily stealing the issue.

Unifying our increasingly multiethnic society is a project of the highest importance. Large political rewards will flow to those with the courage to move us in that direction. As a Republican, I hope that the courage and wit necessary may be found somewhere within the leadership of my own party.

Physicist, turned software entrepreneur, turned political activist Ron Unz organized California’s successful 1998 ballot initiative that rolled back bilingual education.

Losing the Peace on English in the Schools

National Review • June 13, 2000 • 1,400 Words

Today, on the important issue of whether immigrant children should be taught English in American schools, the Republican party is in danger of having won the war but lost the peace.

For nearly thirty years, the Republican Party has been on record as opposing so-called bilingual-education programs, which all too often amount to Spanish-only instruction for immigrant children in public schools. For nearly thirty years, the Democratic party has generally favored these programs. During all those long decades, the endless battle was generally confined to empty rhetoric, with the loudest voices on the one side often representing none-too-subtle xenophobia and nativism and those on the other preaching ethnic separatism and Anglophobia. Denunciation of bilingual programs became a typical, if minor, applause line in conservative speeches, while praise for such programs filled the same role for liberal oratory. Regardless of which party controlled Congress or the White House, almost nothing substantive was ever proposed, let alone enacted.

English-only advocacy organizations discovered the issue was an outstanding fundraising tool, with U.S. English alone raising and spending some $200 million over a ten-year period, nearly all of it going to fundraising expenses and general administrative overhead. Very little effort went into determining whether the bilingual programs were succeeding even by their own standards, or were desired by the immigrant Hispanic parents on whose behalf they had been established. And bilingual programs steadily expanded from the pilot projects of the early 1970s to eventually include millions of students around the nation by the mid-1990s.

Then, in 1996, a leftist former Catholic nun in Los Angeles led a group of poor immigrant Hispanic parents in a boycott of their Spanish-only school — they wanted their children taught English instead. That boycott sparked the “English for the Children” initiative campaign, which qualified Proposition 227 for the ballot in 1997 and achieved a landslide 61% victory in June 1998, despite being outspent some 25-1 in advertising. The measure required all California schoolchildren, under normal circumstances, to be taught English — and effectively dismantled the state’s thirty-year-old system of bilingual education.

Initial legal challenges were overcome in just a few weeks, and as the new school year began in September 1998, the better part of a million California students who had previously been enrolled in bilingual programs of various types began English-immersion classes of various types. Threats of massive resistance on the part of bilingual activists just faded away, and tens of thousands of Spanish-language textbooks were junked or returned to their publishers for refunds. While some school districts dragged their heels in implementing the law and bilingual programs were not completely eliminated, they were enormously reduced in size — by up to 90%, according to some official estimates.

Better still, the early and continuing news reports of the results of this educational transformation — by the same “liberal media” allegedly so biased against conservatives and conservative causes — were amazingly, glowingly positive, citing parent after parent and teacher after teacher about how well the new curriculum was working and how quickly and easily immigrant children were learning English. Even former bilingual-education teachers who had fought Prop. 227 tooth and nail told reporters that if the election were held again, they might well vote in favor of the measure.

And in July 1999, these anecdotal accounts of tremendous success were reinforced by quantitative data, as the release of California’s new student test scores showed huge gains for 1.4 million immigrant students, an average of 20% statewide, with much lower increases in those districts which had resisted implementing Prop. 227 and much greater jumps — of 50% or more — in those districts which had most strictly followed the new law.

Polling data soon revealed astonishing levels of national and regional support for this type of curriculum. In late 1998, a national Zogby poll of over 1,900 voters showed 77% support (and only 19% opposition) for the idea of requiring all public-school instruction in English, crossing all lines of ethnicity, geography, ideology, and political party. A separate Zogby poll of 1,400 New York voters around the same time showed even greater support: 79% to 14%. Other polls have demonstrated the intensity of the support, by showing net swings of up to 40 points or more toward candidates supporting English in schools.

Such a political windfall appears quite rarely: an overwhelmingly popular and overwhelmingly successful proposal that fulfills part of an endlessly promised ideological agenda. The California Republican party had endorsed Prop. 227, while President Bill Clinton and the California Democratic party had opposed it. The Republicans merely had to hold a few press conferences, declare their victory, and capture the issue for years to come, while Democrats worked to explain away their mistaken opposition.

Instead, the Republican response was the following: dead silence, followed by retreat.

California Republican gubernatorial candidate Dan Lungren had opposed Prop. 227 in his primary, and maintained his opposition through to November, losing to Democrat Gray Davis by a 20-point margin, and also running 20 points behind Prop. 227 among both Hispanics and the general electorate.

The Congressional Republicans, once so eager to expel hundreds of thousands of immigrant kids from public schools and remove their birthright American citizenship, suddenly decided that teaching English in American public schools was far too controversial and racially charged a proposal to deserve their support.

Both Gov. George W. Bush and his Presidential rival, Sen. John McCain, both endorsed the merits of bilingual education (with a few disclaimers) and declared their opposition to any requirement of “English in the schools.”

Following these national leaders, moderate and even mainstream conservative Republicans began avoiding the issue as much as possible, leaving support for English largely to elected officials from the Pat Buchanan wing of the party, who tended to combine that position with extreme opposition to Hispanic immigration and immigrants in general, and whose support often did more harm than good.

But even while Republicans have been distancing themselves from an overwhelmingly popular issue, shrewd and opportunistic Democrats, especially in California, are doing the exact opposite. Gov. Gray Davis had strongly opposed Prop. 227, but promised to respect the will of the people; and there can be no complaints on this score. Not only has he vetoed several bills passed by the liberal Democratic legislature aimed at weakening Prop. 227 or removing some of the English-testing requirements, but he recently named Nancy Ichinaga — a leading advocate of English-immersion programs — to the State Board of Education, and also proposed a sevenfold increase in the budget for the adult English-literacy programs established by Prop. 227. Gov. Davis has now arguably moved to the “right” of the national Republicans on the bilingual-education issue.

If the national Democrats follow his lead, the Republicans could be in deep, deep trouble. Few prominent Hispanic public figures still believe in bilingual education, but nearly all (except for Cubans) are partisan Democrats, and most would much rather see Al Gore in the White House and Richard Gephardt in the Speakership than defend failed bilingual programs to the last trench. If Gore were to unveil a major initiative to spend billions of extra dollars each year to teach English as rapidly as possible to America’s new immigrants and their children, his stock would rise rapidly among both immigrants and non-immigrants, with the endorsement of leading Hispanics giving him all the necessary cover against any charges of “racism” or “pandering.” An Al Gore forcefully arguing that Hispanic schoolchildren should be taught English against a George W. Bush suggesting they should be taught Spanish might even threaten to bring Texas into the Democratic column.

Fortunately, the Republican wall of cowardly silence on this issue may be starting to crack. Just last week, Arizona congressman Matt Salmon endorsed the 227-type ballot measure scheduled for the November ballot, becoming nearly the first significant elected Republican in the nation to take such a stance. He was flanked at his press conference by 50 or more Hispanic immigrant parents and their children — wearing “English for the Children” T-shirts and carrying “English for the Children” signs — many of whom had driven hundreds of miles that morning to attend. The founding president of the California Association of Bilingual Educators, once a foe of Prop. 227 and now a convert, flew in from California to lend his weight to the effort. The television cameras and print photographers recorded an almost perfect political tableau: a courageous white Republican officeholder being cheered by dozens of Hispanic immigrants — parents, children, and community activists.

Too bad it wasn’t George W. Bush.

Ron Unz, a Silicon Valley software entrepreneur, was the author of Prop. 227

How the Republicans Lost California

The Golden State isn't too liberal for the GOP. Its leaders simply scared away immigrant voters

The Wall Street Journal • August 28, 2000 • 1,300 Words

Just 10 years ago, California was a GOP bastion, regarded as the cornerstone of the Republican Electoral College “lock.”

The 1990 elections merely confirmed this impression, with the GOP winning its third gubernatorial race in a row, its fifth of seven. Two years earlier, the 1988 presidential race had marked the sixth straight California victory for the Republicans, with only Barry Goldwater’s 1964 debacle marring an otherwise unbroken chain of GOP victories stretching all the way back to Ike’s 1952 landslide. In national politics, California was about as safely Republican as Wyoming or Idaho.

Yet today all this has been transformed, with huge California — which now has almost the population of Texas and New York combined — being viewed as the most solidly Democratic state in the nation after tiny Hawaii. Although the state’s economy, cultural influence and political weight are greater than ever before, its Democratic alignment is now seen as so permanent that it recently inspired a sour-grapes cover story entitled “California Doesn’t Count” in The Weekly Standard, a leading publication of the conservative Beltway.

But California does count. Given today’s electoral map, any Republican able to carry California would almost be guaranteed the White House; the vanished Republican “lock” would reappear. And following the completion of the 2000 Census, California’s congressional delegation will swell to nearly twice the size of New York’s, with enough contested seats to allow the Golden State’s voters by themselves to determine control of the House of Representatives.

Furthermore, California’s influence is far greater than ever before. Since World War II, California has been recognized as America’s trendsetter in social and economic matters. Increasing globalization has now elevated Hollywood and Silicon Valley to being the entire world’s dominant influences in culture and technology. California may not count to conservative Washington pundits, but to the rest of the world it counts perhaps as much as America’s other 49 states combined.

Yet if California has risen, the fortunes of its Republican Party have fallen to the point of near collapse. The Democrats hold both U.S. Senate seats, seven of eight statewide offices and huge majorities in each house of the state Legislature. In the 1998 governor’s race, Democrat Gray Davis, a dull and rather uninspiring campaigner, crushed his well-funded Republican opponent in the greatest California political landslide in 40 years.

What happened to the Republicans? The media’s conventional wisdom holds that California’s population is far too liberal on the social issues — abortion, gay rights and gun control — for today’s conservative GOP positions to be viable. But while Californians are indeed more socially liberal than Texans or Pennsylvanians, this contrast is often exaggerated. This is largely because most members of the media themselves tend to be socially liberal, and their trips to California usually take them to trendy San Francisco and the west side of Los Angeles, rather than to California’s vast agricultural Central Valley, whose values are closer to those of Oklahoma than of Greenwich Village.

Moreover, California’s relative social liberalism compared with the rest of the country has probably not changed much over the past 30 or 40 years. As far back as the 1960s, the Golden State enacted one of America’s most liberal abortion laws, the national gay rights movement began in San Francisco and the waves of California student protests eventually helped create the left-liberal George McGovern wing of the Democratic Party. Yet during all these years, Californians consistently voted for Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and George Bush, as well as numerous conservative candidates for governor and U.S. Senate.

Immigration and anti-immigrant Republican politics were the colliding forces that forever swept away this old world of California politics.

By the end of the 1980s, vast waves of foreign immigration, mostly from Asia and Latin America, had changed California into a state that was nearly half nonwhite and nearly half immigrant. But since few members of these new immigrant families were registered voters and many were not even citizens, they had minimal electoral impact, and political leaders largely ignored California’s ethnic transformation.

To the extent that Republicans did notice, they were cautiously optimistic. Statewide and national Republican candidates had traditionally carried nearly half of the Asian and Latino vote in California, and Republicans expected this pattern to continue with newer Asians and Latinos. In 1990, moderate Republican Pete Wilson won his gubernatorial race by combining strong opposition to “quotas” with pro-immigrant and pro-Latino themes, thereby carrying 47% of the Latino vote and doing even better among Asians than among whites. Bruce Herschensohn, a very conservative Republican, did almost as well in his unsuccessful race for the U.S. Senate in 1992.

All this changed with California’s deep recession of the early 1990s, as high unemployment and economic misery provoked an anti-immigrant backlash among California’s white political majority. Immigrants were blamed for stealing jobs and lowering wages; their children were seen as a huge burden to the expensive and overcrowded public-school system. Anger at immigrants focused on those without documentation, and surveys revealed that white Californians mistakenly lumped most immigrants into the illegal category.

Enraged grassroots activists of all parties mobilized against illegal immigration, a populist and somewhat xenophobic crusade that eventually gave rise to Proposition 187, a 1994 ballot initiative. This controversial measure was intended to immediately expel some 300,000 young immigrant children — many of them American-born citizens — from California public schools if their parents lacked legal documentation.

Gov. Wilson, in an uphill re-election race against the terrible economic tide, had originally refused to support this extremist proposal and even tried to prevent it from reaching the ballot. But observing its enormous popularity, he ultimately chose to use it as the centerpiece of his gubernatorial campaign. Mr. Wilson spent millions on television spots showing gritty images of Mexicans dashing across the border, provoking the crudest stereotypes of dark-skinned hordes swarming into California for welfare and crime. With an electorate mired in recession and 85% white, Mr. Wilson’s wedge-issue strategy carried him to a landslide victory.

Proposition 187 was quickly ruled unconstitutional, and the political impact of Mr. Wilson’s harsh television commercials might soon have faded. But his political success inspired the newly elected Republican Congress to spend much of 1995 and 1996 repeatedly attacking the rights and benefits of both legal and illegal immigrants. For immigrants, the only means of defense was naturalization and registration, and they did both in unprecedented numbers, roughly doubling California’s Latino vote between 1992 and 1998. Most of these new voters regarded both Mr. Wilson and his Republican Party as their mortal foes. Demographic trends indicate that California’s Latino vote will continue to rise about one percentage point each year for the next 30 years.

Latino and other immigrant voters tend to be socially conservative, blue-collar Reagan Democrats, and they eventually might warm to a Republican Party message; they voted more strongly than any other group against gay marriage in the March initiative campaign. However, being working-class, they are overwhelming pro-union, and whereas Mr. Reagan’s union sentiments were strong, today’s Republicans regard the American labor movement as their archenemy. If Republican anti-immigrant policies pushed California’s immigrants into the Democratic Party, Republican anti-union policies may help to keep them there.

These are the enormous difficulties facing any Republican campaign in California, notably that of George W. Bush. For all his pro-immigrant outreach and Spanish-language advertising, the California Field Poll shows Gov. Bush trailing Al Gore by 34 percentage points among California Latinos and 13 points overall, not too different from where Bob Dole stood at this stage. We’ll see whether Mr. Bush narrows the gap by November.

Mr. Unz led the successful 1998 campaign for Proposition 227, which dismantled California’s bilingual-education system.

The Gift of English

It’s past time for New York to scrap bilingual ed

City Journal • Autumn 2000 • 400 Words

In June 1998, Californians overwhelmingly approved Proposition 227, the controversial ballot initiative that replaced the state’s bilingual-ed system with English-immersion classes. No more would California’s public schools force non-English-speaking immigrant kits to take their courses in their native tongue, guaranteeing that few would ever gain the proficiency in English they need to get ahead in America. Despite resistance from some local school districts and bilingual-ed advocates, nearly a million immigrant students, most of them Hispanic, transferred into the new English-immersion system.

The results are in, and they’re striking: in just two years, the standardized test scores of immigrant students rocketed up 40 percent. The Oceanside Unified District that followed Proposition 227 to the letter saw its second-grade immigrant scores go from the 21st to the 47th percentile, meaning that the children of poor, often illiterate, Spanish-speaking farmworkers have nearly reached the national average for suburban white kids from middle-class English-speaking families. In stark contrast, neighboring Vista Unified, a district of similar size and demography that stubbornly kept most of its kids in bilingual classes, watched most immigrant scores fall this past year.

English immersion’s dramatic California success has broken through the silence and misinformation that has long surrounded America’s disastrous 30-year bilingual-ed experiment. Newspapers from coast to coast, including the New York Times, trumpeted the results; television networks showed Hispanic children who didn’t speak a word of English at the school year’s start now reading, writing, and speaking English fluently after just nine months’ immersion. Now Arizona stands poised to abolish its segregated bilingual classes in a statewide ballot initiative this November.

Will this wave of English instruction reach New York City, where 150,000 immigrant kids remain imprisoned in bilingual ed? Indications are that the New York press would now fully support a shift to English immersion. More important, doing away with the bilingual-ed system resonates with the vast majority of New Yorkers, many of whom are just a couple of generations removed from the old country. Several recent Zogby polls have found that between 75 percent and 80 percent of New York residents support a requirement that public school teaching be entirely in English. The support crosses ethnic and ideological lines, so it’s a political no-brainer.

Unfortunately, New York City schools currently operate under a 1974 consent decress that forces all Spanish-speaking public school kids to receive their instruction in Spanish. Mayor Rudolph Giuliani should go to court to get this order lifted. The gift of English to his Hispanic constituents’ children would be a truly lasting legacy.

Above the Law in Arizona?

Some kind of conservative

National Review • January 12, 2001 • 700 Words

In recent years, Republicans have regularly charged that liberal Democrats tend only to enforce those laws that they support and ignore those laws they regard as misguided. Although the evidence for this criticism is mixed at best, demands for reestablishing the “Rule of Law” have become a staple of partisan Republican attacks on an allegedly arrogant liberal establishment.

Even if these charges are generally true, the post-election results of the “English for the Children” initiatives in Democratic California and Republican Arizona provide a strong counter-example to this pattern. Both these initiatives, which won by huge landslides, require the dismantling of established bilingual-education programs and that immigrant children instead be taught through English immersion programs.

In California, Prop. 227 was opposed by virtually every elected Democrat in the state (and most Republicans), but following its 1998 passage, was generally implemented by that state’s Democratic governor, Democratic superintendent of schools, and other top officials. Although there have been ongoing disputes over legal interpretation, and considerable local resistance in some individual school districts, all elected officials from Day One claimed that they would honor the letter and spirit of the law.

However, Wednesday’s Arizona Republic carried a shocking front-page story highlighting Republican Superintendent Lisa Graham Keegan intention to ignore Arizona’s Prop. 203 almost entirely, substitute her own pro-bilingual policy views for the explicit and overwhelming desires of Arizona voters, and maintain Arizona’s existing bilingual programs essentially unchanged if she personally judged them to be successful. Faced with such shocking statements, the reporter naturally called Ms. Keegan to confirm her positions before the story went to press, and she stood by her views, essentially “Keegan to Prop. 203: Drop Dead.”

Remarkably enough, it fell to Democratic State Senator Joe Eddy Lopez, leader of the anti-Prop. 203 campaign, to urge that the new law be honored and warn bilingual advocates that they faced personal legal penalties if they disobeyed the measure.

Fortunately for Arizona’s immigrant students, the provisions of Prop. 203 contain extremely sharp legal teeth. The measure allows parents of Arizona schoolchildren to file personal legal actions against any administrator or elected official who refused to comply with the new law, and hold them personally liable for damages and legal expenses; furthermore, if found guilty, such resisters are also immediately removed from office and banned for five years.

As I noted to reporters who called for comment, since many hundreds of thousands of Arizonans voted for Prop. 203, Ms. Keegan’s arrogant resistance would quickly result in millions of dollars in personal damages, bankrupting her and also removing her from office. These simple facts — plus widespread calls in Arizona for Ms. Keegan’s impeachment — are probably the reason that the following day’s Arizona newspapers carried accounts that Ms. Keegan was now backing away from her resistance.

Unfortunately, these articles also prove that despite over two years of intense media coverage of Prop. 203, Ms. Keegan has apparently still never bothered to read the actual text of the measure she should be enforcing. She claims that Prop. 203 provides no guidelines on how much or how little English teachers are allowed to use in the classroom; the actual text says “nearly all” instruction must be in English.

The strangest part of this story is that in recent years, Ms. Keegan had — for no good reason — become the national darling of conservative Republicans on educational matters, this despite her generally disastrous educational policies in Arizona. For example, Keegan was widely perceived as the front-runner for Secretary of Education in President Bush’s Cabinet, until a front-page lead story in the New York Times brought national attention to the remarkable incompetence of her statewide testing policy, her leading policy initiative.

That AIMS test was so poorly designed that nearly 90% of students failed statewide, a test which almost all students fail being obviously as bad as no test at all.

The infinite gullibility of American’s national conservative movement — of which I suppose I am generally considered a member — never ceases to amaze me.

Bilingual Education Lives On

The New York Times • March 2, 2001 • 700 Words

PALO ALTO, Calif.—In 1974, the New York City Board of Education signed a federal consent decree with Aspira, a Hispanic education and advocacy group, requiring that students who speak limited English be taught almost exclusively in their native languages.

Today, this decree requiring bilingual education still governs the schooling of some 170,000 students in the five boroughs. Most students who fail a test of English competence are placed automatically in bilingual classes, in which they learn subjects like math and social studies in their native languages. They can be switched out only at a parent’s insistence. Some students linger in these classes for six years or more.

Although the seven members of New York City’s Board of Education unanimously adopted this week a basket of purported reforms, they declined to challenge that underlying court order, leaving them merely to tinker at the edges of a disastrously failed policy.

The board suggested that immigrant students should no longer automatically be placed in bilingual programs, but as advocates for these programs have already made clear, this policy certainly seems to run headlong into the court order, which requires exactly that.

The new board policy requires students to remain in bilingual programs for no longer than three years under normal circumstances. New York state law already has this time limitation, but waivers allow many districts to ignore this restriction. The meaninglessness of Tuesday’s vote is indicated by its unanimity. Real change on such a contentious issue would hardly be won by a 7 to 0 vote. In effect, the board decided to declare victory and go home, which hardly addresses the roots of the problem.

What are those roots? Our national system of “bilingual education” in New York and elsewhere has been based on the notion that immigrant students benefit from being taught for years — sometimes many years — in their native language, while they gradually learn English. Although such programs might have some plausible benefits if aimed at older, teenage immigrants, most of the country’s more than 3 million limited-English proficient students are American born, and many of the remainder arrive as infants.

Thus, the vast majority enter public schools at the age of five or six, when children can most quickly and easily learn another language; instead they are placed in native-language programs, receiving perhaps an hour of English each day. Since most of these students in question are Hispanic, the most accurate translation of “bilingual education” is Spanish-almost-only instruction.

Does teaching Hispanic students in Spanish help them learn English? In 1998 this seemingly endless debate over the efficacy of the program received a dramatic test. California voters overwhelmingly approved Proposition 227, generally replacing bilingual education with English immersion classes. Although bilingual advocates had predicted academic disaster, mean percentile scores in standardized tests for California’s 1 million Spanish-speaking students rose. For example, among second graders, the average reading score of a student classified as limited in English rose to the 28th percentile from the 19th percentile in national rankings. In math, the average score for these students increased to the 41st percentile from the 27th.

Furthermore, districts like Oceanside that diligently adhered to the new law showed the sharpest gains. In the second grade, for instance, the average reading score of students in Oceanside initially classified as limited in English jumped to the 32nd percentile from the 13th, according to preliminary state figures.

New York is waiting for the same kind of reform. But hundreds of local bilingual education teachers and activists remain vehement foes of change. Faced with pressure from bilingual activists to do nothing and pressure from the media to do something, the conflicted leaders of New York schools have decided to do nothing but call it something. Two generations of failed bilingual instruction in New York City schools should be more than enough.

Ron Unz, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, is chairman of English for the Children, which led the campaigns to dismantle bilingual education in California and Arizona.

Trimming the Emperor's New Clothes

National Review • May 22, 2001 • 800 Words

Given the landslide victories of ballot measures to dismantle bilingual education in California and Arizona, national media coverage of the dramatic rise in subsequent test scores, and the growing possibility of similar efforts in Colorado and New York City, it is hardly surprising that Congress would consider inserting bilingual-education reform into its omnibus package of federal education legislation.

Unfortunately, it is equally unsurprising that the resulting proposal of the IQ-challenged Republicans represents merely modifying the color and style – and increasing the fabric cost – of the Emperor’s New Clothes.

Having fully accepted the general theory that keeping Hispanic immigrant children in Spanish-only classes for years is the best and most effective means of teaching them English, the Republican-controlled Senate decided that the obvious failure of these existing programs was caused by lack of funding. Therefore, the Senate voted 2-to-1 to quadruple federal funding for bilingual education.

Since the limiting factor in the growth of bilingual programs throughout America has usually been the shortage of bilingual (i.e. Spanish-language) teachers, many of these additional federal billions will likely be spent on training and recruiting additional teachers, perhaps from Spain and Mexico. The obvious result will be more Spanish-language teachers, more Spanish-language classes, and fewer immigrant students being taught English.

On the House side, fiery ultra-right-winger Tom Tancredo has courageously championed an amendment encouraging school districts to keep Hispanic children in Spanish-only classes for no longer than three or four years, with a loss of up to 20% of bilingual funds being threatened should schools fail to comply. Considering these Senate and House provisions together means that schools that keep Hispanic students in Spanish-only classes for four years or less will receive a 300% boost in funding, while those that keep Hispanic students in Spanish-only classes for (say) eight or ten years will receive merely a 220% increase in cash. Such a harsh blow will clearly break the will of the stubborn bilingual lobby.

Tancredo himself has been a fierce critic of current immigration policy, and in prior years proposed eliminating all legal immigration from Mexico and elsewhere. Perhaps the millions of immigrant children who will remain in America’s publicly funded Spanish-only classes will take the appropriate hint, and deport themselves away, thereby solving immigration problems.

All humor aside, the proposed three- or four-year limit on bilingual education demonstrates a complete misunderstanding of local realities, as proven by the many states where similar limits have already been tried and found unworkable.

More than half of all limited-English students are American-born, and most of the remainder arrive as young children, meaning that the vast majority begin school in America at just five or six. Yet most official statistics still seem to indicate that these students have been enrolled for less than three years as late as the fourth or fifth grade, a logical impossibility.

The reason is simple. Struggling immigrant families move often, and students seldom stay at a given school for more than three years. The lack of comprehensive national or statewide records thus allows bilingual advocates to quietly restart the “clock” every time a student enters their school. Since bilingual theorists claim that enrollment in their programs should go on for at least five to seven years – or perhaps even longer – many, many years of Spanish-only classes are the almost inevitable consequence of this deceptive three-year requirement.

In any event, younger children have a far easier time learning English than when they grow older, and a proposed system in which they are taught only Spanish during their early years in school, then transferred to English classes once they can no longer easily learn that language, helps to explain the great “mystery” of Hispanic educational underperformance and high drop-out rate. Maintaining this system is well in keeping with the Alice-in-Wonderland nature of so much Congressional legislation.

Although the conservative Republicans who control Washington seem unwilling to take a stand, they are not the only elected officials in America. For example, in liberal Massachusetts, a Democratic state senator has now introduced legislation that would follow California’s path in replacing bilingual education with intensive English immersion. The “English” issue seems to be reaching critical mass in the Bay State.

Perhaps at some point in the future, Washington’s right-wing Republicans will begin to notice the powerful “English” tide in liberal bastions such as Massachusetts and New York City, and discover the political courage to act accordingly.

Ron Unz is chairman of English for the Children, which led campaigns to dismantle bilingual education in California & Arizona.

The Bilingual Burden of Republican Guilt

The Wall Street Journal • May 24, 2001 • 1,400 Words

Just a few years ago, congressional Republicans overwhelmingly supported proposals to expel a million or more Hispanic children from American public schools.

Now, perhaps in a misguided attempt to expiate that political sin, the Republican-controlled Senate has voted by an overwhelming two-to-one margin to quadruple the federal budget for Spanish-only bilingual education programs, largely aimed at those same children. The Republicans, apparently, are now willing to allow immigrant youngsters to remain in school, but are determined to prevent them from learning English, even if that policy requires importing thousands of teachers from Mexico and Spain.

Such desperate Republican actions are hardly surprising. For some of the mid-1990s, the Republican Party came close to making hostility to immigrants and immigration a core element of its political portfolio. Disoriented in the post-Reagan era, and reeling from the disastrous 1992 defeat of President Bush, many Republicans saw the immigration-fueled, come-from-behind landslide re-election victory of Gov. Pete Wilson of California as a signpost to national success. Raising the terrible threat of immigration — dramatized by gripping television spots showing hordes of dark-skinned foreigners attempting to invade America — seemed a powerful political weapon.

Compelling Mix

Under President Reagan and earlier, the Republicans had been as pro-immigrant as the Democrats — and perhaps even more so. In 1984, Mr. Reagan’s compelling mix of strength and optimism had won him close to half the Hispanic and Asian vote, despite the overwhelmingly Democratic registration of both those groups. Many of the libertarian gurus of the congressional Republicans who gained power in 1994 glorified free immigration almost as much as they did free markets.

None of that mattered. Hard economic times and the attendant social strains had produced an apparent public backlash against immigrants, as indicated by opinion polls. Political consultants quickly flagged immigration as a powerful wedge issue, tremendously appealing to nervous blue-collar workers, anti-immigrant blacks, and perhaps even a broader white electorate grown uneasy over the pace of demographic change. Not only had Mr. Wilson won in California, but immigrants appeared the ideal political scapegoat: Many were undocumented, most of the rest were not citizens, and factors of youth, poverty and apathy led to very low voting rates among the remainder. Locating a socially marginal group that may be demonized without risk of retaliation at the polls is a political consultant’s dream.

And so from late 1994 through most of 1996, a raft of remarkably harsh proposals were enshrined in the Republican Party platform or received the endorsement of the vast majority of congressional Republicans, led by Immigration Subcommittee chairs Sen. Alan Simpson and Rep. Lamar Smith.

Immigrants — even naturalized U.S. citizens — were to be denied public benefits available to all other Americans. Immigrants guilty of quite minor criminal offenses decades earlier were to be deported to homelands they sometimes barely remembered. Legal immigration to America was to be drastically cut, or perhaps eliminated entirely. American-born immigrant children were to be denied their 14th Amendment rights of citizenship because of the status of their parents. And most shockingly, huge majorities of the congressional Republicans voted to follow the path of California’s Proposition 187 and expel from American public schools a million or more young immigrant children, simply because of who their parents were.

Most of these measures ultimately failed to pass, though, as intended, they left a deep mark on public sentiment. But whereas their primary political architects had hoped they would galvanize the anti-immigrant vote in the 1996 elections, they instead served to energize and motivate millions of Hispanics and Asians, contributing greatly to Republican defeats that year.

In Florida, for example, Cubans who normally went 70% or 80% Republican (and who recently gave George W. Bush an unprecedented 90% of their vote) split their support almost evenly between Bill Clinton and Bob Dole, costing the latter that hitherto solid Republican state. Similarly, a huge anti-Republican tide among Arizona’s Hispanics helped put Barry Goldwater’s rock-ribbed home state in the Democratic column. And the 1996 elections became merely the first of an endless series of political disasters for California Republicans.

Republicans had to swallow long-term demographic trends, which forecast increasing numbers of immigrant votes. If immigrants and their children became a Democratic voting block as solid as blacks or Jews, the Republicans would permanently lose the largest states — California, Texas, New York, Florida and Illinois — leaving places like Idaho and Wyoming as their national base. Suddenly, pro-Hispanic and pro-immigrant figures such Govs. George W. Bush of Texas and Jeb Bush in Florida became the likely saviors of the national party. Meanwhile, party operatives airbrushed Pete Wilson out of all their candidates’ photos.

Here, the fable of the cat that sat on a red-hot stove becomes relevant. Just as that chastened creature never sat on another hot stove — nor on a cold one either — the badly burned Republicans became increasingly skittish on any public matter with an ethnic tinge, regardless of its particulars or its popularity. The same candidates who had fearlessly suggested expelling a million Hispanic children from school now cowered at any criticism from tiny groups of leftist Hispanic activists, who represented few beyond themselves.

In 1996, Newt Gingrich had bombastically called for establishing English as America’s official national language — whatever that means. Yet only a year later, one of his top congressional priorities had become gaining statehood for Puerto Rico, in a bizarre attempt to win Mexican-American votes. Most recently, many of America’s top Republican leaders are supporting a new general amnesty for illegal immigrants, the very people they had demonized a few years earlier.

The current Republican position on whether public schools should teach English to immigrant children is another attempt at penance — a misguided one, in this instance. Overwhelming majorities of Hispanic immigrants want their children taught English as quickly as possible, and their feelings are shared by nearly everyone else in America (including, privately, most teachers’ union leaders and Hispanic politicians). Yet this policy has always been opposed for a mixture of historical and symbolic reasons by small but very vocal groups of Hispanic activists.

In 1998, fear of such groups led the bulk of California’s Republican Party leaders to actively oppose Proposition 227, aimed at replacing bilingual education with intensive English immersion. Nonetheless, and despite being outspent some 25-to-1 in advertising, the measure passed in a landslide, was rapidly upheld in the federal courts, and implemented statewide at the beginning of the 1998 school year. Within months, newspapers carried accounts of the remarkable popularity and success of the new English immersion program, among teachers and students alike, with scarcely a dissenting word to be found anywhere.

Then last year, the New York Times documented the dramatic 40% rise in mean percentile scores of over a million immigrant students after less than two years of the new curriculum, with the Mexican-American founder of the California Association of Bilingual Educators proclaiming himself a born-again convert to English immersion. Numerous liberal editorial writers and columnists affirmed their support for a nationwide elimination of these disastrous bilingual programs. Last November, the voters of Arizona took their advice, passing a similar measure by an even wider margin than in California.

Faded Rhetoric

Given this remarkable national momentum, the surprising response of the Republican Party — which has nominally opposed bilingual programs for three decades — has been to declare defeat and go home, endorsing the faded rhetoric of the bilingual education industry, and now proposing to quadruple the federal budget for these failed programs. But while the combined House and Senate versions of the current proposed legislation would increase financial support by over 200% even for those programs that kept immigrant children in Spanish-only classes for a decade or more, others have reacted differently.

Small groups of parents, teachers, and community activists — usually Hispanics or liberal Democrats — are organizing to dismantle these harmful programs in Colorado, New York City, and New Jersey. Recently, a Democratic state senator in liberal Massachusetts introduced legislation to do the same. Unlike all too many Republicans, these individuals have clear consciences on immigration matters and actual personal contact with immigrant parents.

It would be a great tragedy if Republican guilt over their immigration sins of yesterday leaves them trailing liberal Massachusetts and New York City in choosing to do the right thing today.

Mr. Unz, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, led the successful 1998 campaign for Proposition 227, which dismantled California’s bilingual-education system.

Rocks Falling Upward at Harvard University

National Review • October 26, 2001 • 800 Words

While most Americans have been transfixed by the terrifying prospect of massive deaths from anthrax or suicide bombers, a few in our society fear an even greater horror: the fanatic defenders of Spanish-almost-always instruction see their doom in an “English” initiative heading toward the November 2002 Massachusetts ballot.

Although the vote on “English” is over a year away and our signature drive not even yet completed, well over 400 such fervent Boston area bilingual partisans jammed themselves into Harvard University’s Askwith auditorium last week for a debate on the measure. The standing-room-only crowd came to cheer their champion, Shattuck Professor of Education Catherine Snow, one of America’s foremost bilingual theorists, and curse their personal bin Laden, yours truly.

For me, the debate brought back many fond memories from our 1998 California campaign for Proposition 227: the universally hostile intensity of the large crowd, the assorted protest signs, the “No on Unz” armbands, and the almost identical arguments made by Prof. Snow against our Massachusetts initiative. This last point seemed rather odd, since while consistency in public position might ordinarily be considered praiseworthy, factual reality has changed enormously over the past three years.

In particular, the test scores of over one million immigrant students in California have risen by more than 50% since 1998, with those school districts most rigorously embracing Prop. 227 having actually doubled their academic performance. And since these remarkable results had been highlighted by a front-page lead story in the New York Times and similar stories in the Boston Globe and almost every other major media outlet in America, I had expected such facts to have reached even the cloistered denizens of the Harvard Faculty Club.

When I queried my opponent on the matter of these test scores, she responded that, while a 50% rise in test scores of over one million students after less than two years was “interesting,” she was uncertain whether such results were statistically significant, and suggested that a scientifically controlled fifteen-year longitudinal study be undertaken to answer this question. The professor then pointed to the five books on bilingual education that she had brought along to the debate, claimed that they proved the success of the program, and suggested that such books should carry far more weight than anything that had recently happened to the test scores of a million students in California.

Even more determinative was her response to my accusation that bilingual education was largely based on the bizarre theory that the older you are, the easier it is to learn another language, with adults being best at new language acquisition and small children having the most difficult time. Since Professor Snow was in fact the originator of this unusual theory, she courageously defended it, again citing her books as proof. At these statements, a small hush of unhappy disbelief settled over many of the most vigorous bilingual proponents in the audience.

Once upon a time, a Harvard professor of Theoretical Reality developed an exciting new theory that rocks fall upward. Although numerous illiterate bricklayers and drunken carpenters disagreed with this conclusion, their opinions counted for nothing in the academic world, where PhD’s and endowed chairs are the keepers of truth. And as the years went on, that Harvard professor’s students and disciples and colleagues propagated her views on the upward falling of rocks far and wide in their books, articles, and lectures.

Eventually, congressional hearings were held and new federal safety ordinances drafted. It was required that all houses be securely anchored in solid bedrock to prevent them from flying into the sky, and that all students in school learn their lessons while standing on their heads lest they injure themselves while falling into the ceiling.

Over the past 30 years, many millions of young immigrant students in America have been required to learn their lessons while standing on their heads, and many of them have had their educations and their lives destroyed as a consequence. History will not be kind to the individuals who brought this policy about, nor to those whose cowardly and silent acquiescence allowed it to continue.

A few weeks ago, Americans witnessed the enormous devastation that a small handful of fanatically committed individuals can wreak upon society. Perhaps it is now time for ordinary Americans to be willing to take a stand against those similarly tiny groups of educational terrorists in our midst, whose disastrous policies are enforced upon us not by bombs or even by knives, but simply by their high-pitched voices. Americans must remain silent no longer.

Ron Unz, a theoretical physicist by training, is the chairman of English for the Children, currently leading initiative campaigns to dismantle bilingual-education programs in Massachusetts and Colorado.

Will Riordan Run on "English"?

The Sacramento Bee • December 23, 2001 • 1,000 Words

As former Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan gears up for his campaign to challenge Gov. Gray Davis, he faces some serious obstacles.

First, no incumbent California governor has been defeated for a second term in 60 years, and Davis — an experienced, somewhat ruthless campaigner with over $30 million in his war chest — is hardly among the most vulnerable. As memories of last winter’s energy crisis have faded, Davis’ approval numbers have climbed, though not as much as those of other politicians.

Also, although Riordan’s very moderate positions on hot-button social issues such as abortion, guns and gay rights may help to establish him as Davis’ most formidable challenger in socially liberal California, they simultaneously alienate much of the conservative base of his own party, leaving him vulnerable to a divisive, perhaps bloody Republican primary. Neither of Riordan’s Republican opponents is a conservative icon — venture capitalist William Simon, Jr. is something of a political blank slate while Secretary of State Bill Jones has himself long been seen as a moderate. But both are now actively repositioning themselves as conservatives to blunt Riordan’s overwhelming advantages in money, endorsements and political stature.

Riordan is therefore faced with a dilemma. If he follows the traditional route of running right in the primary, he may open himself to charges of opportunism, while providing Davis with powerful ammunition for the general election.

But if he emphasizes his liberal or moderate positions, he risks a primary defeat or very narrow win. Furthermore, although Riordan’s unscripted sincerity represents part of his general appeal, that very characteristic leaves him far less effective at opportunistic repositioning than a career politician such as Davis. Unlike most elected officials, Riordan tends to say what he truly believes, regardless of the hand wringing of his advisors.

But perhaps that’s the exact solution. During the 1998 campaign for Proposition 227, the initiative that dismantled bilingual education in California, Riordan ignored the unanimous verdict of his political advisors and endorsed the controversial measure. He then underscored that endorsement by contributing $250,000 of his own money to an independent advertising campaign on its behalf. He had previously intervened to support the immigrant Latino parents of Ninth Street Elementary, whose widely publicized boycott against bilingual education had originally sparked the initiative.

By supporting these efforts to require our public schools to immediately teach English to immigrant children, he was simply continuing his long record of support for educational reform and immigrant issues, positions that had helped win him a remarkable 62 percent of the overwhelmingly Democratic Latino vote during his reelection drive.

On this issue of “English in the schools,” Riordan stood virtually — and courageously — alone. Although many prominent Latino elected officials, teacher union leaders and educational experts had long privately questioned the disastrous results of Spanish-almost-only programs, almost none would risk the denunciations of bilingual activists by voicing such views in public.

In the end, such activist pressure led nearly every prominent political figure to oppose Proposition 227: President Bill Clinton; the chairman of the state Republican Party and the chairman of the state Democratic Party; all four candidates for governor, Democrat and Republican alike, who together starred in a powerful television commercial urging a No vote; and a host of others. But despite this array of opponents, and despite being outspent by some 25-to-1 in advertising, the Proposition 227 campaign triumphed in a huge 61 percent landslide.

The verdict of history has now proven that California’s voters — and Riordan — were right, and the timorous naysayers wrong. Within less than two years of the new Proposition 227 curriculum, the mean percentile test scores of over a million immigrant students rose by an average of 40 percent, and actually doubled in those districts that most completely eliminated their bilingual programs.

The founder of the California Association of Bilingual Educators has admitted that he was wrong for 30 years, and become a leading advocate for English immersion. Local journalists have found that numerous other former bilingual teachers and administrators have quietly come to that same conclusion, while immigrant Latino parents are thrilled that their children are finally being taught English. The major national media — from the New York Times to the Washington Post to CBS News — have proclaimed the success of English immersion, and voters in Arizona, Massachusetts and Colorado have adopted or are likely to adopt similar measures.

California politicians have recognized this success and adjusted their positions themselves accordingly. During 1998, Gov. Gray Davis starred in television commercials opposing Proposition 227, but has since defended the measure against legislative proposals to weaken it and has appointed leading opponents of bilingual education to his state Board of Education. Although Board President Reed Hastings had also opposed the California measure, as a Boston native, he recently endorsed its Massachusetts clone and contributed $20,000 to that campaign.

But Dick Riordan was there first, when these others were not. Besides being enormously successful as educational policy, support for English immersion runs nearly 85 percent among Republicans, and even higher within the conservative base of the party. By some measures, the intensity of the issue is actually far greater than that of other supposedly hot-button social issues such as abortion or gun control, and might be enough to carry a Republican Party primary.

Davis can hardly attack Riordan for taking the same position as Davis’ own appointees to the Board of Education, and anyway “English” has nearly 3-to-1 support among the Democrats and independents who will decide the general election. Most important, Riordan truly believes in “English.” Nearly four years ago, Dick Riordan took a courageous stand on requiring our schools to teach English to immigrant children. Now that history has proven him right, he has only to continue emphasizing that stand and that issue, and he may well become California’s next governor.

About the Writer

Ron Unz, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, led the 1998 English for the Children campaign for Proposition 227.

Habla Usted Ingles?

The Wall Street Journal • October 31, 2002 • 500 Words

It’s fair to say that when arguably the most liberal Democratic state in the U.S. has abandoned bilingual education, it is indeed an idea whose time has passed.

In recent months, the home of Harvard and Michael Dukakis, and the only state that voted for George McGovern in 1972, is rediscovering the value of good English. Over the past 12 months, a dozen or more statewide surveys have shown overwhelming support among Massachusetts voters for “Question 2,” the initiative to dismantle bilingual education and require all public school instruction to be done in English.

It’s about time. Every national survey of Hispanics reveals that overwhelming majorities support English-only classes for their kids. A 2001 Zogby survey of 1,188 Hispanic adults found that 79% of Hispanic immigrants would support a requirement that all public-school instruction be conducted in English. And in places like Santa Ana, Calif., which have experimented with bilingual education, dismal test scores have sparked a grassroots revolt among Hispanic parents against Nativo Lopez, an activist who’s gone so far as to push for Spanish- only classes.

For decades, Al Shanker, the founder of the modern teachers’ union movement, was America’s strongest foe of bilingual programs. And the good news is that even now, while union leaders may bow to political pressure, most teachers do not. As recently as 1997, 48% of teachers in Los Angeles overcame the pleadings of their leaders and backed a union referendum to completely ban bilingual education in California.

In American politics, small but intense interest groups can dominate issues mostly ignored by the general population. California, a state of 35 million, may have never had more than just a few hundred hardcore bilingual activists, but since they were the ones committed to the issue, they blocked change for decades.

The last remaining pillar of support for bilingual programs is a small number of affluent, well- educated Anglo parents, eager to have their children immersed in Spanish-language “dual immersion” programs. Since these parents are vocal and organized, their views drown out the concerns of poor Hispanic parents whose children often fail to learn English properly as a result. One such parent, Tim Duncan, is leading the “No” campaign in Massachusetts.

Another, a billionaire heiress in Colorado named Pat Stryker, is now spending millions of dollars from her personal fortune, funding the most intensive advertising campaign in the history of that state in hopes of defeating Amendment 31, a similar measure on the November ballot. The dismantlers of bilingual ed in Colorado are led by a Hispanic activist named Rita Montero — whose own son was forced into a bilingual program against his will.

This David and Goliath struggle between the Hispanic activist and the Anglophone billionairess is an accurate metaphor for the national battle over English or Spanish in our public schools. The tide of history is running against Ms. Moneybags and her bilingual allies.

Mr. Unz is chairman of English for the Children, which has helped organize numerous ballot measures to dismantle bilingual education.

The Myth of Hispanic Crime

Talk TV sensationalists and axe-grinding ideologues have fallen for a myth of immigrant lawlessness.

The American Conservative • January 26, 2010 • 5,500 Words

According to Lou Dobbs, “a third of the prison population in this country is estimated to be illegal aliens,” and Glenn Beck regularly warns of “an illegal alien crime wave.” Congressman Tom Tancredo insists, “The face of illegal immigration on our borders is one of murder, one of drug smuggling, one of vandalism for all the communities along the border, and one of infiltration of people coming into this country for purposes to do us great harm.” Michelle Malkin adds an even more terrifying note, calling our borders “open channels not only for illegal aliens and drug smugglers, but terrorists, too.” Even as far back as 2000, the highly regarded General Social Survey found that 73 percent of Americans believed that immigration caused higher crime rates, a level of concern considerably greater than fears about job losses or social unity.

As Latino gangs have gained notoriety in the United States—particularly MS-13, dubbed the “The World’s Most Dangerous Gang” by usually restrained National Geographic—images of violent foreigners have come to dominate much of the national debate on immigration policy. A perception has taken root in the minds of the American public and many elected leaders that the greatest threat posed by mass immigration is crime.

In recent decades, most immigrants have been Hispanic; Asians, who constitute the other large portion of the inflow, are generally regarded as economically successful and law-abiding. Although many Hispanics are American-born, the vast majority still comes from a relatively recent immigrant background. So to a considerable extent, popular concerns about immigrant crime and popular concerns about Hispanic crime amount to the same thing. While fears of perceived racial insensitivity may force many critics to choose their words carefully, widespread belief that Hispanics have high or perhaps very high crime rates seems to exist.

But is this correct? Or are these concerns rooted in the same excitable and ideological mindset that produced endless stories of Saddam’s notorious WMD, with activists and their media accomplices passing along rumors and personal beliefs in pursuit of a political agenda rather than bothering to determine the facts? Does America face a Hispanic crime problem or merely a Hispanic crime hoax?

Personal experiences are no substitute for detailed investigation, but they sometimes provide a useful reality check. Since the early 1990s, I’ve lived in Silicon Valley, a region in which people of white European ancestry are a relatively small minority, separately outnumbered by both Asians and Hispanics, with many of the latter quite poor and often here illegally. On any given day, more than half of the people I encounter in Palo Alto are Hispanics from immigrant backgrounds. Yet my area of the country has exceptionally low crime rates and virtually no serious ethnic conflict. This confounds the expectations of many of my East Coast friends.

Prior to moving back to my native California, I lived for five years in Jackson Heights, Queens, one of the most heavily immigrant and ethnically diverse parts of New York City. There as well, white Europeans were a small minority and immigrants from various Latin American countries were the largest ethnic group, close to an absolute majority of the local population. On a typical afternoon or evening, probably 80 percent of the people walking the streets of my neighborhood were non-white, and on dozens of occasions I returned home from Manhattan on a late-night train, the only white face in the subway car. Yet in all my years of living there, I never encountered a hostile or menacing situation, let alone suffered an actual criminal attack. Hardly what one would expect from television images, let alone the wild claims made by conservative magazines or talk radio. The “thousands of brutal assailants and terrorists” City Journal’s Heather Mac Donald finds among our immigrant population must have moved into someone else’s neighborhood.

So were my personal experiences atypical? Or are the media and conservative movement portrayals so completely wrong? Hispanics will constitute a quarter of the American population within a generation or two according to current demographic projections, so this is an important issue for the future of our country.

The obvious way to answer the question is to consult the public FBI Uniform Crime Report database, which provides aggregated information on the race of all criminal suspects throughout America. Unfortunately, there’s a problem: Hispanic criminals are sometimes reported as “white” and sometimes not, rendering the federal crime data almost useless. Therefore, indirect means must be used to estimate the crime rate of Hispanics compared to whites. (Throughout this essay, “white” shall refer to non-Hispanic whites.)

One metric to examine might be relative incarceration rates, since most people who begin a life of criminal activity end up behind bars sooner or later—usually sooner. Furthermore, since so much of prison violence is along racial lines, correctional authorities are careful to record the ethnicity of individual inmates, and the aggregate data is made available annually by the Bureau of Justice Statistics. Indeed, over the years, prison-reform groups such as The Sentencing Project, as well as various federal judges, have used this official data to criticize the prison system for its massive overrepresentation of racial minorities among inmates relative to their share of the population.[1]

If we examine the data in the most recent 2008 BJS report, published in December 2009, we discover the total Hispanic incarceration rate, while far below that of blacks, is still almost 150 percent above the white average, having fallen a little from the 170 percent figure in 2000.[2] So perhaps those fearful commentators are right and Hispanics commit crimes at roughly two-and-a-half times the rate of whites in America.

The traditional liberal explanation for this would be that Hispanics are considerably poorer than whites, that poverty and racism cause crime, and that a white-dominated criminal justice system is likely to be biased against suspects of a darker hue. There may or may not be some truth in these common liberal arguments, but since the name of this magazine is The American Conservative, let us put them aside at least for now and consider other possible factors.

The most obvious of these are age and gender. An overwhelming fraction of serious crime is committed by the young, young males in particular. This has been the case throughout recorded history and remains true everywhere in today’s world. Almost all American crimes are committed by individuals aged 15-44, with the age range 18-29 representing the sharp peak of criminal activity. Also, the 14-to-1 ratio of males to females in the U.S. prison system provides a sense of just how heavily crime is a male phenomenon; for violent offenses, the ratio is even higher.

And as it happens, the age distribution in America for Hispanics and non-Hispanic whites is quite different. The median age for Hispanics is around 27, near the absolute peak of the prime-crime age range. But the median white age is over 40, putting nearly half the white population above the likely age range for committing crimes. While it is certainly true that Hispanic 23-year-olds have much greater criminal tendencies than white 45-year-olds, a more useful question is the relative criminality of Hispanics and whites of the same age. Also, many Hispanics are immigrants, and since immigrants are more likely to be male, there will be a gender skew in the general Hispanic population. Therefore, let us consider the Hispanic imprisonment rate relative to the number of males in the high-crime age range.

Suddenly the numbers change quite a bit, with the relative Hispanic-to-white total incarceration rate dropping by a third or more for several of the age cohorts. But even these lower figures may still be a bit misleading. As a recent front page New York Times story pointed out, over half of all federal prosecutions these days are for immigration-related offenses, and since a huge fraction of illegal immigrants are from south of the border, the 10 percent or so of U.S. prison inmates who are in federal custody might significantly distort our ethnic imprisonment statistics.[3] Anyway, offenses such as robbery, rape, murder, burglary, assault, and theft are almost always prosecuted in state courts, so it makes sense to separate these street crimes from cases of illegal nannies convicted of illegal nannying.

Another important reason to focus on state-level imprisonment data is the evidence of vast differences among regional criminal-justice systems due to various cultural and political factors. For example, whites in Oklahoma are incarcerated at a rate almost 300 percent higher than whites in New Jersey, and while some of this disparity may result from the greater criminal tendencies of white Oklahomans, it seems likely that the harshness of the local courts and sentencing guidelines may also play an important role. We should therefore try to compare Hispanic incarceration rates with those for whites on a state-by-state basis so as to minimize the impact of differences in local criminal-justice systems.

The most recent BJS publications do not provide state-by-state incarceration data broken down by ethnicity, but the 2005 BJS Bulletin did exactly that, and while relative Hispanic incarceration rates have fallen somewhat in the past five years, the drop has not been large. Therefore, we should be able to use the 2005 figures with confidence.[4]

Our first discovery is that even before adjusting for age, the overall Hispanic incarceration rate drops from 150 percent above the white rate down to just 80 percent above, presumably reflecting the exclusion of immigration-related federal offenses. We can now use census data to estimate the number of prime-crime-age young males in the two groups, and since there is some uncertainty in deciding which age range is most appropriate for normalization purposes, we should probably explore the results with several different choices, such as 18-29, 15-34, and 15-44.[5] (Many observers believe that the number of Hispanic illegal immigrants in America is sharply underestimated by the government; if so, this would correspondingly reduce the relative Hispanic imprisonment rate.)

The overall age-adjusted national imprisonment rates are shown in Chart 1. Hispanic incarceration rates are now between 13 and 31 percent above the white average, depending upon which age range we choose for normalization purposes. By contrast, the claims of extremely high relative black incarceration rates widely publicized several years ago by The Sentencing Project remain correct even after these age adjustments.

Next, if we examine the relative age-adjusted Hispanic imprisonment rate for individual states, we find huge variations. In a number of states, the Hispanic rate is below the white rate, sometimes far below. For example, whites in West Virginia, Arkansas, and Louisiana are imprisoned at three to four times the Hispanic rate relative to their share of the crime-age population. To some degree, this reflects the time-lag impact of the recent arrival of large numbers of Hispanics in these locations, since most of the white convicts entered prison years ago, but such low relative rates of Hispanic incarceration are still intriguing. And even in Florida, where Hispanics have been a large fraction of the total population for decades, the white age-adjusted imprisonment rate is still twice as high as the Hispanic rate.

Furthermore, contrary to official bureaucratic categories, Hispanics are hardly a monolithic ethnic group and actually exhibit large variations in their cultural traditions based on country of origin. The very low Hispanic imprisonment rate in Florida may reflect the considerable economic and social success of the Cuban community centered there. Another set of obvious outliers are the states of the Northeast, primarily the New York/New England region, in which relative Hispanic imprisonment rates generally run two to three times higher than the national Hispanic average, as shown in Chart 2. These exceptionally high Hispanic incarceration rates probably reflect the considerable social and economic difficulties long experienced by the large Puerto Rican and Dominican communities that have settled in that region.

The high incarceration rate for these Caribbean Hispanics may partially explain general perceptions of Hispanic crime rates. A large proportion of America’s intellectual, media, and political elite lives in the Northeast, in cities like New York and Boston, and if the Hispanics traditionally living in those areas have unusually high rates of criminal activity, there would be a natural if mistaken tendency to assume that this same pattern also applied to Hispanic groups throughout the country.

But outside the Northeast, the vast majority of Hispanics are Meso-American, being either from Mexico or Central America. Chart 3 summarizes the very different relative imprisonment rates for these groups by focusing on the most heavily Hispanic states outside the Northeast.

Moreover, if we consider weighted-average age-adjusted Hispanic imprisonment ratios excluding those outlying cases of the Northeastern states, we discover that the remaining figure moves into close parity with white incarceration rates. (See Chart 4.) Since Hispanics are still considerably poorer than whites, this is a striking result. Also, crime rates are always higher in densely populated urban areas than in suburbs or rural communities, and since Hispanics are three times as likely as whites to live in cities, their relatively low imprisonment rates become even more surprising.

Another important point to emphasize is the wide disparity in white incarceration rates throughout the country, even when adjusted relative to the number of whites in high-crime age ranges. For example, age-adjusted imprisonment rates for whites in large Southern states such as Florida, Texas, and Georgia may be 200 percent or even 300 percent higher than those for whites in large Northeastern or Midwestern states such as New York, New Jersey, or Illinois, as shown in Chart 5. Although it is impossible to disentangle completely how much of this gap may be due to higher criminality and how much due to harsher judicial systems, it seems likely that both play important roles. So even if the age-adjusted Hispanic incarceration rate is somewhat above the white rate—perhaps 15 percent higher on average—it still falls close to the center of the overall white distribution.

The substantial regional or cultural differences in apparent white criminality are easily illustrated when we consider the age-adjusted Hispanic/white incarceration ratios in the two most heavily Hispanic states, California and Texas, which together contain roughly half of all Hispanics living in the United States. If we normalize the incarceration rate to the number of males aged 15-34, California Hispanics are imprisoned at 9 percent above the local white rate, while Texas Hispanics are imprisoned at 14 percent below the local white rate. Since California is one of America’s most liberal “pro-minority” states and Texas one of the most staunchly “law-and-order” conservative ones, and the Hispanics in both states are overwhelmingly Mexican, these somewhat unexpected imprisonment ratios probably reflect the relative criminality of the local white populations more than anything else.

Another important question is to what degree Hispanic criminal activity is influenced by immigration status. While there is a widespread popular impression that immigrants, especially illegal immigrants, have a propensity for violent crime, actual studies almost invariably come to the opposite conclusion: for almost every ethnic group, Hispanic or otherwise, immigrant generations have lower rates of criminal behavior than their American-born children. This has resulted in concerned speculation that even if Hispanic crime rates today are relatively low, this situation may be temporary, and once the Hispanic population shifts from being mostly immigrant to mostly native-born, crime rates might skyrocket. A 2006 Migration Policy Institute study estimated that imprisonment rates are some eight times higher for American-born citizens of Mexican ancestry than for their immigrant co-ethnics.[6] If we can expect Mexican-American crime rates to rise 700 percent in the next generation, we should be very alarmed indeed.

But there are good reasons to doubt the plausibility of that horrific scenario. First, contrary to popular belief, the majority of today’s Hispanics are already American-born, and this is certainly true of those in the highest-crime age groups. For example, two-thirds of today’s Latinos aged 18-24 are American citizens by birth. This figure has risen from less than half 20 years ago, while crime rates have simultaneously plummeted nationwide, with relative Hispanic imprisonment rates also dropping significantly since 2000. If American-born Mexicans and Central Americans had the exceptionally high crime rates suggested in that 2006 study, it is strange that we have seen no evidence of this either in the trends of national crime data or in imprisonment statistics.

The major difficulty with the study’s evidence is that while prisons have an easy time gathering ethnicity data, determining the immigration status of convicts is far more difficult, and is generally based on self-reporting. Not surprisingly, most convicted felons are not eager to reveal their lack of citizenship and then face deportation once their sentences are completed, so the numbers must be taken with a grain of salt. In fact, a November 2009 paper by Steven A. Camarota and Jessica M. Vaughan for the Center for Immigration Studies raised serious doubts about the accuracy of these federal immigrant-imprisonment statistics, both based on the doubtful methodology employed and the huge, anomalous swings that occur on an ongoing basis.[7] For example, the official data seems to show a 28 percent decline in the number of incarcerated immigrants between 1990 and 2000, even as the total number of immigrants grew 59 percent, then a sudden 146 percent rise in incarcerated immigrants from 2000 to 2007, a period when immigrant numbers grew only 22 percent. Such changes seem highly implausible and lead to serious doubts that the gap between immigrant Hispanic and American-born Hispanic criminality is anywhere near as great as has been portrayed. Besides, since perhaps two-thirds of today’s highest-crime-age Hispanic population is already American-born, there is a strong upper bound on how much crime rates would rise in the future as that fraction gradually rises to three-quarters or more.

Aside from these imprisonment rates, perhaps we can also gain insight into Hispanic criminality from the crime rates themselves. As mentioned before, the federal statistics on the ethnicity of criminals are unreliable, but by matching the geographical distribution of crime with census data on Hispanic population percentages, we can gain strong circumstantial evidence about the relative criminality of Hispanics and whites.

The smaller the geographical unit we use, the more accurate our analysis will be. But while ethnicity rates can be found for individual zip codes, crime is reported by precinct, and matching these entirely different organizational units would be a major research undertaking. At the opposite end of the spectrum, doing calculations based on entire states provides little information since the populations and geographies are so large and often diverse, and important relationships would tend to remain hidden. The best compromise between effort and accuracy is to focus on America’s larger cities, for which both crime and ethnicity data are readily available. Furthermore, crime rates are much higher in densely populated urban areas, so by confining our analysis to these, we are eliminating some of the bias that would occur if we compared crime rates in rural areas with those in urban ones. The U.S. has fewer than 80 cities with populations of 250,000 or more, and of these, less than half are major cities with at least half a million inhabitants. Such small data sets are reasonably easy to analyze.

Take five minutes to consider the list of America’s urban crime rates provided on Wikipedia, and you will notice an intriguing pattern.[8] Nearly all of the most heavily Latino cities have low or even extremely low crime rates, and virtually none have rates much above the national average. Eighty percent Latino El Paso has the lowest homicide and robbery rates of any major city in the continental United States. This is not what we would expect to find if Hispanics had crime rates far higher than whites. Individual cities may certainly have anomalously low crime rates for a variety of reasons, but the overall trend of crime rates compared to ethnicity seems unmistakable.

But let us explore white and Hispanic crime rates in a more systematic fashion, drawing our data from the FBI Uniform Crime Report.[9] Consider the five whitest cities in America: Colorado Springs, Colorado; Fort Wayne, Indiana; Portland, Oregon; Lexington, Kentucky; and Lincoln, Nebraska. These cities’ populations average 76 percent white, 9 percent Hispanic, and 8 percent black. Their crime rates are generally far below the national urban average, with less than half the homicide and robbery rates and a 30 percent lower violent-crime rate. Perhaps we can consider these figures as a reasonable approximation to the general “white urban crime rate.” These crime averages may be partly due to the local black and Hispanic populations, but since these cities are so overwhelmingly white, this estimate for the white crime rates is about as close as we can hope to get.

One difficulty we encounter is that these heavily white cities are extremely small in population, with three of the five barely registering over the 250,000 threshold required even to be included in our urban analysis and the average size being less than half that for most cities in our list. But augmenting this list with larger, less white cities would introduce other inaccuracies, so we have no choice but to use these small-city white-crime figures as a benchmark, although with considerable caution.

Now let us consider the five most Hispanic cities in America: Corpus Christi, Texas; San Antonio, Texas; Miami, Florida; Santa Ana, California; and El Paso, Texas. Together they total over 3 million in population, averaging 68 percent Hispanic, 22 percent white, and 6 percent black. The ethnicities and crime rates of these cities are displayed in Chart 6.

Overall, the crime rates for these most heavily Hispanic cities are generally low, with violent crime 10 percent below the national urban average and the homicide rate 40 percent lower. On the other hand, the crime rates are still well above those of the white cities we considered above. In fact, the white homicide and violent crime rates are almost one-third lower. This provides some evidence for a higher Hispanic crime rate.

But this evidence is not particularly strong. First, the Hispanic cities are much larger than the white ones, with nearly double the average population. Also, Miami is an extreme outlier, with nearly twice as much crime as the other four Hispanic cities, and shifts the average considerably. If we exclude Miami, half the difference between the crime rates of the most Hispanic and the whitest cities disappears.

Even more striking, the average crime rates for the two most Hispanic cities on our list—Santa Ana and El Paso, each 80 percent Hispanic—are actually below our white urban average, and below the very low crime figures for 86 percent white Lincoln, the single whitest city in the nation. So although some heavily Hispanic cities have higher crime rates than some heavily white ones, the pattern seems very mixed.

Furthermore, if we consider the overall list of American cities, it is easy to find a number of those with sizable Hispanic populations—30, 40, 50 percent or more Hispanic—that have crime rates below our white urban average. If Hispanic crime rates were much higher than those for whites, this would seem very unlikely.

Similar evidence emerges if we restrict our analysis to major cities of half a million people or more and compare the average crime rates for the five most heavily Hispanic cities—Albuquerque, Dallas, Los Angeles, San Antonio, and El Paso—to the those of the five whitest—Oklahoma City, Columbus, Indianapolis, Seattle, and Portland. This time, the more Hispanic cities are the ones with the lower crime rates—10 percent below the white cities in homicide and 15 percent lower in violent crime. A particularly remarkable result is that gigantic Los Angeles—50 percent Hispanic and frequently perceived as a dangerous urban hellhole—has violent crime rates close to those of Portland, Oregon, the whitest major city in the nation at 74 percent. The Hispanic cities and their crime rates are displayed in Chart 7.

Here’s a final example, much closer to home. Consider two large and comparable American cities—San Jose, California and Seattle, Washington. Both are located on the West Coast, are overwhelmingly suburban and generally affluent, earn their living from the technology industry, are politically liberal, and have small black populations. Seattle is one of the whitest cities in America at 70 percent, with Asians being the largest minority; Hispanics number only 5 percent. By contrast, San Jose is over 50 percent larger in size and although mostly white and Asian, is one-third Hispanic, with a large number of impoverished illegal immigrants. Seattle’s crime rate is indeed low, but the crime rate in San Jose is actually much lower: one-third lower for homicide or violent crime in general and with less than half the robbery rate. In fact, none of the most heavily white major cities in America have crime rates anywhere near as low as one-third Hispanic San Jose.

These individual city comparisons may be quantitatively extended to urban crime rates in general by calculating the weighted-average correlation coefficient between the Hispanic percentage of a city and its various crime rates and performing the same calculation for the white-plus-Asian percentage as well. (Asians are a very small population in most cities, so it is convenient to combine them with whites; since all studies show Asians tend to have much lower crime rates than whites, this will tend to reduce the apparent white crime rate.) Whereas all the previous urban crime figures quoted were from 2008, the latest year available, we can obtain the separate correlations for the last several years in order to consider trends over time.

As Charts 8-13 indicate, the Hispanic and white-plus-Asian crime correlation rates are usually quite close and in many cases have converged to almost identical values, at least since 2005. Moreover, we must remember that all these ethnic percentage rates refer to the total population rather than the percentage of young males in the high-crime years for each group, and as mentioned earlier, the age distributions for Hispanics and whites are very different. In fact, if we repeat these same correlation calculations for the population of males aged 18-29, the Hispanic and white rates substantially diverge, with young Hispanics usually being associated with significantly lower urban crime rates.

A reasonable question arises: are all of these crime rates actual, or might they be statistical artifacts produced by widespread underreporting of crime in heavily Hispanic areas? We cannot absolutely eliminate this possibility, but for homicides the reporting rate is always close to 100 percent, and since for all these cities the homicide and other serious crime rates tend to follow very similar patterns, there is no evidence that any of these racial patterns were warped by substantial underreporting.

Finally, let us consider the historical crime trends in my native Los Angeles, America’s second-largest city. During the middle of the 20th century, it was by far America’s whitest large city—roughly 80 percent white European by ancestry—and was generally regarded as America’s middle-class suburban paradise. But as the decades went by, LA increasingly became a byword for violence, crime, and ethnic conflict, with the deadly Watts and Rodney King racial riots filling television screens across the country. These enormously negative social changes coincided exactly with the population becoming less white, and although relatively few analysts were willing to suggest a direct causal relationship, I suspect it was noticed by all but the most obtuse observers. As early as 1982, a future LA served as the setting for Ridley Scott’s dystopian film “Blade Runner,” in which violence, poverty, and sudden death for a vast non-white immigrant population exist side by side with the sybaritic luxury of a tiny remaining white elite.

Since then, these ethnic demographic trends have continued apace, and Los Angeles today ranks as America’s least white European large city. Half of the population is Hispanic, and many of these are impoverished illegal immigrants and their families. Yet all crime rates have been falling steadily over the last two decades, with homicide dropping a further 18 percent just last year. As Chart 14 illustrates, most major crime categories are now back down to where they were in the early 1960s, when the population really did look very much like the actors appearing in “Dragnet” and “Leave It to Beaver.” And indeed, violent crime is now roughly the same as for Portland, Oregon, America’s whitest major city.

This Los Angeles example also raises important questions about the official claims that Latino youths have exceptionally high rates of gang membership, 1800 percent higher than for whites. Los Angeles supposedly has among the worst Hispanic gang problems, yet the city’s actual crime rates are roughly the same as what they were back in the lily-white days of the early 1960s. So if these local gangs aren’t committing much crime, what exactly is the definition of a “gang”?

A cynical observer might draw a connection between the hundreds of millions of dollars the federal government distributes each year for gang-prevention programs and the zeal with which local officials uncover the severity of their gang problems. In the case of Los Angeles, public officials have held January press conferences each of the last several years hailing the unprecedented drops in serious crime rates. They often follow these up a few months later with contrary press conferences on the horrific state of local gang violence and the desperate need for increased federal funds to cope with this scourge. If the federal government pays cities to find gang problems, many city officials will surely oblige them.

Admittedly, all of the arguments presented here are somewhat statistical and circumstantial. Correlation does not prove causality, and it might be possible to come up with a complex and detailed set of ad hoc theories and counter-arguments to explain away the vast mass of apparent evidence indicating relatively low Hispanic crime rates. But such an approach places the burden of proof on the wrong side.

The evidence presented here powerfully refutes the widespread popular belief that America’s Hispanics have high crime rates. Instead, their criminality seems to fall near the center of the white national distribution, being somewhat higher than white New Englanders but somewhat lower than white Southerners. Taken as a whole, the mass of statistical evidence constitutes strong support for the “null hypothesis,” namely that Hispanics have approximately the same crime rates as whites of the same age.

We must bear in mind that most Hispanics are still of very recent immigrant origins and thus are considerably poorer than the average American. There actually does exist a connection between poverty and crime, even if liberals make such a claim, and since today’s Hispanic population has roughly the same crime rate as far more affluent whites, there is every reason to expect that this crime rate will drop further as Hispanics continue to move up the economic ladder. As the American Enterprise Institute’s Douglas Besharov pointed out in an important but insufficiently noticed October 2007 New York Times column, the last decade or two have seen an extremely rapid economic advance for most of America’s Hispanic population.[10] This rise may be connected with the simultaneous and unexpectedly rapid drop in urban crime rates throughout the country.

Meanwhile, the national debate over immigration remains contentious. Restrictionists can provide numerous completely legitimate arguments in favor of their position, ranging from economic competition and cultural conflict to national overpopulation and environmental degradation. But they will discredit these by including unsubstantiated claims about crime. Conservatives have traditionally prided themselves on being realists, dealing with the world as it is rather than attempting to force it to conform to a pre-existing ideological framework. But just as many on the Right succumbed to a fantastical foreign policy that makes the world much more dangerous than it needs to be, some have also accepted the myth that Hispanic immigrants and their children have high crime rates. Such an argument may have considerable emotional appeal, but there is very little hard evidence behind it.

Ron Unz is publisher of The American Conservative. He thanks Razib Khan for his assistance in obtaining the crime and ethnicity data from several public websites and for running the cross correlations of the data.

References

[1] “Uneven Justice: State Rates of Incarceration by Race and Ethnicity,” Marc Mauer and Ryan S. King, July 2007, The Sentencing Project.

[2] “Prisoners in 2008,” William J. Sabol, Heather C. West, and Matthew Cooper, December 2009, Bureau of Justice Statistics Bulletin.

[3] “Immigration Enforcement Fuels Rise in U.S. Cases,” John Schwartz, December 21, 2009, New York Times.

[4] “Prison and Jail Inmates at Midyear 2005,” Paige M. Harrison and Allen J. Beck, May 2006, Bureau of Justice Statistics Bulletin.

[5] American Ethnicity calculations are derived from the data provided by the Census Bureau, based on the 2000 Census for that year or the interim American Community Surveys for 2005-2008, available at http://factfinder.census.gov.

[6] “Debunking the Myth of Immigrant Criminality: Imprisonment Among First- and Second-Generation Young Men,” Ruben G. Rumbaut, Roberto G. Gonzales, Golnaz Komaie, and Charlie V. Morgan, June 1, 2006, Migration Policy Institute.

[7] “Immigration and Crime: Assessing a Conflicted Issue,” Steven A. Camarota and Jessica M. Vaughan, November 2009, Center for Immigration Studies.

[8] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States _cities_by_crime_rate, January 5, 2010, Wikipedia.

[9] Urban crime rates are derived from the data provided by the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report, available at http://fbi.gov/ucr/ucr.htm.

[10] “The Rio Grande Rises,” Douglas J. Besharov, October 1, 2007, New York Times.

Immigration, Republicans, and the End of White America

The sources of America’s immigration problems—and a possible solution

The American Conservative • September 19, 2011 • 12,300 Words

- Will mass immigration destroy the GOP?

- Can our middle-class society survive high immigration levels?

- Is there any political solution to our current immigration difficulties?

Last June the U.S. Census disclosed that non-white births in America were on the verge of surpassing the white total and might do so as early as the end of this year. Such an event marks an unprecedented racial watershed in American history. Over the last few years, various demographic projections from that same agency and independent analysts have provided somewhat fluctuating estimates of the date—perhaps 2042 or 2037 or 2050—at which white Americans will become a minority. This represents a remarkable, almost unimaginable, demographic change from our country of the early 1960s, when whites accounted for over 85 percent of the population and seemed likely to remain at that level indefinitely.

Many years of heavy foreign immigration have been the crucial element driving this transformation, but even if all immigration—legal and illegal—were halted tomorrow and the border completely sealed, these demographic trends would continue, although at a much slower pace. Today, the median age of American whites is over 40, putting most of them past their prime child-bearing years. Meanwhile, America’s largest minority group, the rapidly growing population of Hispanics, has a median age in the mid-20s, near the peak of family formation and growth, while both Asians and blacks are also considerably younger than whites. In fact, since 1995 births rather than immigration have been the largest factor behind the near doubling of America’s Hispanic population.

As in most matters, public perceptions of America’s racial reality are overwhelmingly shaped by the images absorbed from the national media and Hollywood, whether these are realistic or not. For example, over the last generation the massive surge in black visibility in sports, movies, and TV has led to the widespread perception of a similarly huge growth in the black fraction of the population, which, according to Gallup, most people now reckon stands at 33 percent or so of the national total. Yet this is entirely incorrect. During the last hundred-plus years, American blacks have seen their share of the population fluctuate by merely a percentage point or two, going from 11.6 percent in 1900 to 12.6 percent in 2010. By contrast, five decades of immigration have caused Asian Americans—relatively ignored by the news, sports, and entertainment industries—to increase from 0.5 percent in 1960 to 5 percent today, following the fifteen-fold rise in their numbers which has established them as America’s most rapidly growing racial group, albeit from a small initial base.

These national changes in racial distribution have been quite uneven and geographically skewed, with some parts of the country leading and others lagging. For example, during the 1970s when I was a teenager growing up in the Los Angeles area, that city and the surrounding sprawl of Southern California constituted America’s whitest region, about the only large urban agglomeration whose racial character approximated that of the country as a whole—around 85 percent white—and my own San Fernando Valley area in particular exemplified the popular image of suburban picket fences and lighthearted “Leave It to Beaver” family comedies. Yet during the two decades that followed, Southern California underwent an enormous immigration-driven demographic transformation, creating a new Los Angeles which was almost 80 percent non-white and a surrounding region in which whites no longer held even a mere plurality.

This sweeping racial shift, involving the movement or displacement of over ten million people, might easily rank as the largest in the peacetime history of the world and is probably matched by just a handful of the greatest population changes brought about by war. The racial transformation in America’s national population may be without precedent in human history.

Republicans as the White Party

It is a commonplace that politics in America is heavily influenced by race, and these enormous demographic changes since 1965 have certainly not gone unnoticed within the political world. For decades, white voters have tended to lean Republican while non-whites have been strongly Democratic, so the swiftly falling ratio of the former to the latter has become a source of major concern, even alarm, within the top ranks of the GOP, which received a sharp wake-up call when gigantic California, traditionally one of the most reliably Republican states, suddenly became one of the most reliably Democratic.

During the mid-1990s there was a powerful strain of thought within conservative and Republican circles that the best means of coping with this looming political problem was to reduce or even halt the foreign immigration that was driving it. But after several years of bitter internal conflict, this anti-immigrationist faction lost out almost completely to the pro-immigrationist camp, which was backed by the powerful business lobby. As a result, the Republican Party mantra became one of embracing “diversity” rather than resisting it and focused on increasing the Republican share of the growing non-white vote. Former President George W. Bush, strategist Karl Rove, and Sen. John McCain have been the most prominent advocates of this perspective.

Rove invested huge resources in maximizing Bush’s Hispanic numbers in 1998 during his easy Texas gubernatorial reelection campaign and achieved considerable success, persuading some 40 percent or more of local Hispanics to vote the Republican ticket that year, a major shift of political loyalties. This later allowed him to tout his candidate’s excellent Hispanic rapport in national GOP circles, which was an important factor in gaining him the presidential nomination in 2000. Although Bush’s national Hispanic totals were much less impressive in the 2000 race, and the vast funds he invested in a quixotic attempt to carry California were totally wasted, Rove and his allies redoubled their efforts during the 2004 reelection campaign, and buoyed by the continuing patriotic aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, largely succeeded. Although the percentages have been much disputed, Bush seems to have carried somewhat over 40 percent of the Hispanic vote nationwide in 2004, although he was once again trounced in California.

• • •

Part of the Bush/Rove political strategy was to take a leading role in passing a sweeping immigration-reform measure, aimed at legalizing the status of many millions of (overwhelmingly Hispanic) illegal immigrants, easing the restrictions on future legal immigration, while also tightening border enforcement. Leaving aside policy matters, the political theory was simple: if the Republican Party changed the laws to benefit Hispanic and other immigrants, these groups and their children would be more likely to vote Republican, thereby helping to solve the GOP’s demographic dilemma. Rove endlessly pointed to 40 percent as the necessary GOP level of future Hispanic support—score above that number and political victory was likely, score much below it and defeat was nearly assured. Although this precise quantitative target was obviously intended for rhetorical effect, it does seem to represent the dominant strain in conservative thinking, namely the need to combine a strong white vote with a solid minority of Hispanics and Asians, thereby allowing the Republicans to survive and win races in an increasingly non-white America. (Meanwhile decades of fruitless efforts to attract a significant share of the black vote would be quietly abandoned.)

But does this political strategy actually make any sense? Or are there far more effective and more plausible paths to continued Republican political success? Although almost totally marginalized within Republican establishment ranks, the anti-immigrationist wing of the conservative movement has maintained a vigorous intellectual presence on the Internet. Over the years, its flagship organ, the VDare.com website run by Peter Brimelow, a former National Review senior editor, has been scathing in its attacks on the so-called Rove Strategy, instead proposing a contrasting approach christened the Sailer Strategy, after Steve Sailer, its primary architect and leading promoter (who has himself frequently written for The American Conservative). In essence, what Sailer proposes is the polar opposite of Rove’s approach, which he often ridicules as being based on a mixture of (probably dishonest) wishful thinking and sheer innumeracy.

Consider, for example, Rove’s oft-repeated mantra that a Republican presidential candidate needs to win something approaching 40 percent of the national Hispanic vote or have no chance of reaching the White House. During the last several election cycles, Hispanic voters represented between 5 and 8 percent of the national total, so the difference between a candidate winning an outstanding 50 percent of that vote and one winning a miserable 30 percent would amount to little more than just a single percentage point of the popular total, completely insignificant based on recent history. Furthermore, presidential races are determined by the electoral college map rather than popular-vote totals, and the overwhelming majority of Hispanics are concentrated either in solidly blue states such as California, New York, Illinois, and New Jersey, or solidly red ones such as Texas and Georgia, reducing their impact to almost nothing. Any Republican fearful of a loss in Texas or Democrat worried about carrying California would be facing a national defeat of epic proportions, in which Hispanic preferences would constitute a trivial component. Pursuing the Hispanic vote for its own sake seems a clear absurdity.

Even more importantly, Sailer argues that once we throw overboard the restrictive blinkers of modern “political correctness” on racial matters, certain aspects of the real world become obvious. For nearly the last half-century, the political core of the Republican Party has been the white vote, and especially the votes of whites who live in the most heavily non-white states, notably the arc of the old Confederacy. The political realignment of Southern whites foreshadowed by the support that Barry Goldwater attracted in 1964 based on his opposition to the Civil Rights Act and that constituted George Wallace’s white-backlash campaign of 1968 eventually became a central pillar of the dominant Reagan majority in the 1980s.

In many cases, this was even true outside the Deep South, as the blue-collar whites of Macomb County and other areas surrounding overwhelmingly black cities such as Detroit became the blue-collar Reagan Democrats who gave the GOP a near lock on the presidency. While the politics of racial polarization might be demonized in liberal intellectual circles, it served to elect vast numbers of Republicans to high and low office alike. George H.W. Bush’s “Willie Horton” ad and Jesse Helms’s “White Hands” ad have been endlessly vilified by the media, but they contributed to unexpected come-from-behind victories for the candidates willing to run them. And in politics, winning is the only metric of success.

Sailer suggests that a very similar approach would work equally well with regard to the hot-button issue of immigration and the rapidly growing Hispanic population, arguing that the votes of this group could be swamped by those of an angry white electorate energized along racial lines. He cites Pete Wilson’s unexpected California gubernatorial reelection victory in 1994 as a perfect example. Deeply unpopular due to a severe statewide recession and desperately behind in the polls, Wilson hitched his candidacy to a harsh media campaign vilifying illegal immigrants, and although his Hispanic support plummeted, his white support soared to an equal extent, giving him a landslide victory in a race the pundits had written off and sweeping in a full slate of victorious down-ticket Republicans. Sailer’s simple point is that individual white votes count just as much as Hispanic ones, and since there are vastly more of the former, attracting these with racially-charged campaign themes might prove very politically productive.

An additional fact noted by Sailer is that the racial demographics of a given region can be completely misleading from a political perspective. As mentioned earlier, Hispanics and other immigrants tend to be much younger than whites and much less likely to hold citizenship. Therefore, a state or region in which whites have become a numerical minority may still possess a large white supermajority among the electorate. Once again, today’s California provides a telling example, with Hispanics and whites now being about equal in numbers according to the Census, but with whites still regularly casting three times as many votes on Election Day.

The Sailer analysis is ruthlessly logical. Whites are still the overwhelming majority of voters, and will remain so for many decades to come, so raising your share of the white vote by just a couple of points has much more political impact than huge shifts in the non-white vote. As whites become a smaller and smaller portion of the local population in more and more regions, they will naturally become ripe for political polarization based on appeals to their interests as whites. And if Republicans focus their campaigning on racially charged issues such as immigration and affirmative action, they will promote this polarization, gradually transforming the two national political parties into crude proxies for direct racial interests, effectively becoming the “white party” and the “non-white party.” Since white voters are still close to 80 percent of the national electorate, the “white party”—the Republicans—will end up controlling almost all political power and could enact whatever policies they desired, on both racial and non-racial issues.

• • •

Many might find this political scenario quite distasteful or unnerving, but that does not necessarily render it implausible. In fact, over the last couple of decades, this exact process has unfolded in many states across the Deep South, with elected white Democrats becoming an increasingly endangered species. Each election year, blacks overwhelmingly vote for the “black party,” whites overwhelmingly vote for the “white party,” and since whites are usually two-thirds or so of the electorate, they almost invariably win at the polls. Although Republican consultants and pundits make enormous efforts to camouflage or ignore this underlying racial reality, it exists nonetheless.

By contrast, appeals for white support based on racial cohesion would be almost total nonstarters in 95 percent white Vermont or New Hampshire, or in many other states of the North in which the local demographics still approximate those of the country that overwhelmingly supported the Civil Rights legislation of the 1960s. But today’s national white percentages are much closer to those of 1960s Alabama and Mississippi, where whites fought that legislation tooth and nail on racial grounds. And as the nation’s overall demography continues its inexorable slide from that of Vermont to that of Mississippi, will white politics move in that same direction, especially if given a push?

Now I think a strong case can be made that such a process of deliberate racial polarization in American politics might have numerous adverse consequences for the future well-being of our country, sharply divided as it would become between hostile white and non-white political blocs of roughly equal size. But given the extremely utilitarian mentality of those who practice electoral politics for a living, the more important question we should explore is whether it would actually work, purely on the political level. Might this strategy of racial polarization be applicable across the country as a whole?

Non-Whites and Blacks

Consider an interesting datapoint. It is certainly true that the over the last century those states with the smallest white majorities have generally had names like Mississippi, South Carolina, and Alabama, and these have exhibited a very distinctive brand of white politics and race relations. But the least white state of all has actually projected a very different cultural image.

Whites were a minority in Hawaii at the time of statehood and have always been so, with the relative numbers of whites and Asians shifting somewhat based upon the various flows of migrants. Furthermore, the original white colonists and plantation elites historically had had a quite conflicted relationship both with the Native Hawaiian population whose leadership they supplanted and also with the large numbers of Japanese, Chinese, and other Asian workers originally imported as impoverished plantation laborers.

Yet although the local Republican Party has generally skewed toward the 25 percent of the population that is white, while the Democrats have been more popular among the majority Asians, the state’s reputation has overwhelmingly been one of easygoing race relations, a high degree of intermarriage, and a complete lack of vicious political conflict. Ideologically, Hawaii’s white minority seems to think and vote much more like the racially liberal residents of 95 percent white Vermont than as members of a racially polarized minority bloc, locked in endless political struggle with its non-white opponents.

Perhaps Hawaii is just a unique case, being a chain of small tropical islands located thousands of miles off the mainland and heavily dependent upon tourism for its economy. But there is an additional example. After Hawaii, the state with the next lowest white percentage throughout most of the 20th century was New Mexico, with the number of whites fluctuating at around half the total depending upon the ebbs and flows of the white and Hispanic populations, before eventually falling to 40 percent in 2010.

And although New Mexico hardly possesses Hawaii’s enormously positive social image—it is mostly rural with a small economy—it has also never developed the reputation of being a boiling racial cauldron, with whites and Hispanics locked in a bitter battle for power. Mention “New Mexico” and the popular images that spring to mind probably revolve around UFOs, vistas of great natural beauty, and government research laboratories, not longstanding racial conflict.

These examples lead to the suspicion that the history of bitter racial politics across most of the Deep South may represent less a conflict of white vs. non-white than one of white vs. black, and this seems quite plausible. After all, slavery and its legacy have for centuries constituted the deepest wound in American society, provoking a bloody Civil War which cost the lives of almost one third of all white Southern men of military age. The history of black/white racial relations is arguably the single most significant element in American political history, so we should hardly be surprised if it continues to heavily influence the politics of numerous states and cities, including those outside the South.

By contrast, although relations between whites and various other groups—Asians, Hispanics, and American Indians—have sometimes been hostile or even violent, these conflicts have never been nearly as long nor intense and are more like the often contentious relationships between various white ethnic groups. As our schoolbooks endlessly emphasize, black/white relations do indeed constitute a unique aspect of American history.

• • •

These alternate hypotheses about the underlying sources of white political behavior may be explored empirically by examining the electoral data across the 50 states. Like it or not, today’s Republican Party does indeed constitute the “white party,” drawing almost all of its national votes from whites, while the Democratic Party serves as the “mixed party,” with roughly comparable support from whites and non-whites. Therefore, white support for Republicans, particularly at the national level, may serve as a reasonable proxy for a state’s apparent degree of “white racial consciousness,” whether implicit or explicit.

Under the “Sailer Hypothesis,” white alignment with the Republicans should be heavily influenced by the white share of the population, with the residents of lily-white states exhibiting little racial consciousness, while those living in states in which whites have slender or non-existent majorities would tilt much more heavily Republican. A second possibility to consider might be called the “Hispanic Hypothesis,” in which the heavy influx of Hispanic immigrants, both legal and illegal, pushes whites toward the harder-line Republicans; since the vast majority of today’s Hispanics come from a relatively recent immigrant background, a state’s overall Hispanic population can be used as a good approximation for this independent variable. Finally, there is the “Black Hypothesis,” in which the long history of black/white racial conflict is assumed to be the primary factor, and the percentage of blacks in the local population is what generally influences white political behavior.

For the sake of simplicity and to minimize the confounding impact of local political issues and personalities, the easiest output variable to examine would be the percentage of the white vote that supported the Republican presidential ticket over the last 20 years. On a population-weighted basis, the correlation results for elections from 1992 through 2008 across the 50 states are as shown in the chart below.

The results seem conclusive. The correlations between the Hispanic percentage of each state and white voter preferences are approximately zero for all presidential elections, implying that the presence of large Hispanic populations appears to have virtually no impact upon white political alignment, either one way or the other.

By contrast, the evidence for apparent black/white racial conflict being the driving force that prompts whites to vote Republican seems very strong: the correlations between the size of the black population and the degree of white GOP support range from 0.43 to 0.70, with a mean of 0.55, being both quite substantial and very consistent over time.

The data regarding the “Sailer Hypothesis” is bit more interesting, with the correlations between a state’s overall non-white percentage and white Republican alignment being small but noticeable, ranging between 0.14 and 0.31, with a mean of 0.20.  However, we must remember that a considerable fraction of America’s non-whites are blacks, with the ratio declining from around half in 1992 to about one-third by 2008, and obviously the strong black correlations impact the non-white result. In fact, the Sailer Hypothesis curve closely tracks the weighted average of the Hispanic and Black Hypothesis curves, the difference being mostly due to America’s small but growing Asian population. Thus, any “Sailer Effect” in white voting patterns appears almost entirely due to the black portion of the non-white population and is therefore merely a statistical artifact.

• • •

In many respects, this conclusion merely constitutes a quantitative confirmation of the conventional political wisdom, which stretches back for many decades. For example, in the aftermath of the successful Reagan Revolution of the 1980s, prominent journalists Thomas and Mary Edsall published the widely praised Chain Reaction, which emphasized the underlying racial factors prompting America’s political realignment, and several similar books appeared around the same time, notably Peter Brown’s Minority Party. Numerous other authors had earlier made the same general point about the politics of the “white backlash” vote in the 1960s and 1970s, the era of urban unrest and forced busing.

In recent years, the Republican Party has grown quite embarrassed over these roots of its modern political rise and has therefore made considerable efforts to downplay such underlying racial factors relative to more innocuous issues such as support for low taxes or small government or patriotism or even traditional religious values, and this sustained effort to rewrite history partly accounts for much current amnesia. But the data speaks for itself.

There is another, more subtle reason why so many of America’s political elites and pundits tend to miss the clear signs of this obvious racial relationship, and it becomes apparent when we examine the scatterplot distribution of these election results for the most recent 2008 presidential vote, including the 50 states and also the District of Columbia. (Scatterplots for the previous presidential elections look very similar.) The results for the individual states mostly follow the sort of distribution we would expect for a strongly correlated result, but there is one huge exception: white voting patterns in D.C. constitute an enormously strong outlier. By a wide margin D.C. is simultaneously more heavily black than any state while also having whites who are the most liberal and Democratic in their voting behavior.

D.C.’s population is much smaller than that of nearly all states, so including it in our weighted correlation calculation would have only slightly shifted the results. But in the real world of today’s centralized political culture, the world of politicians and media pundits and political journalists, D.C. ranks as a colossus in mind share, playing a huge role in shaping ideological perceptions and therefore carrying a weight probably greater than that of California or Texas, or perhaps even both combined. And under such a mind-share weighting, that single city filled with a population consisting almost entirely of blacks and very liberal whites serves to substantially mask elite perceptions of the stark racial dynamics that influence political ideologies almost everywhere else in the country.

An Anti-Immigration Backlash

Let us consider the political implications of these striking results. Since the large-scale presence of non-black non-whites—primarily Hispanic and Asian immigrant groups—does not seem to produce much white political cohesion along racial lines, the continued growth of these populations can hardly represent a potential boon for the Republican Party. Meanwhile, harsh Republican rhetoric or policies that target these groups would naturally tend to drive them into the arms of the Democrats. Under such a scenario, the GOP loses millions of non-white votes without gaining any white votes in exchange, resulting in political disaster.

A perfect example of this danger may be found in the recent political history of California, whose huge size and heavily immigrant population render it a useful testbed for the nation as a whole. During the four decades from 1950 to 1990, California supported the Republican presidential ticket almost without fail, going Democratic only during Lyndon Johnson’s unprecedented 1964 landslide. The state was considered as solidly Republican as Wyoming or Idaho, and the huge number of electoral votes it carried combined with the enormous expense of contesting them established it as the anchor of the GOP presidential strategy, leading to the widespread notion of a Republican “lock” on the White House.

Although Hispanic and Asian numbers had been growing steadily for years, their support for Republicans had been growing as well, and by the early 1990s, a GOP candidate could regularly expect to receive around one-third or more of the Hispanic vote and half that of the Asian. For example, Pete Wilson’s narrow 1990 gubernatorial victory over Dianne Feinstein, which significantly relied upon his criticism of “racial quotas,” was achieved with 53 percent of the white vote, 47 percent of the Hispanic vote, and 58 percent of the Asian vote according to the prestigious California Field Poll used by the New York Times, though others placed his ethnic totals lower.

But all of this permanently changed following Wilson’s harsh 1994 reelection campaign, whose television ads relentlessly scapegoated Hispanic immigrants for the state’s terrible economic woes. Although his words were carefully chosen in lawyerly fashion to distinguish between legal and illegal immigrants, his message was perceived very differently, and his loudest grassroots activist supporters certainly made no such distinction. Moreover, the resounding California Republican landslide that resulted soon emboldened the newly established Republican majorities in the U.S. House and Senate to focus on passing anti-immigration legislation, which thus placed legal Asian immigrants in the same political crosshairs.

As a direct consequence, Republican support sharply dropped among Hispanics and Asians and has never really recovered. Moreover, the immigration battle frightened and energized many traditionally apolitical Hispanics into finally naturalizing and registering, and during the 15 years that followed, their share of the state vote more than doubled to 22 percent, severely compounding the blow to Republican prospects.

The consequence was that gigantic California—almost as populous as Texas and New York combined—suddenly switched from being the strong anchor of every Republican national campaign to being the equally strong anchor of every Democratic one. In the years that followed, the large GOP congressional delegation was decimated and the powerful state Republican Party, which had once propelled Nixon and Reagan to national leadership, was reduced to near irrelevance.

Consider the interesting case of Howard Ahmanson, long one of California’s wealthiest politically-active Evangelical Christians and during the early 1990s routinely described by the media as a central pillar of the Christian Right within the Republican Party. In a prescient 1993 letter to Commentary, he warned of the rising tide of anti-immigrant sentiment in conservative circles and expressed a concern that Republicans would “doom themselves” if they drove away these socially conservative voters, perhaps losing them for generations, just as previous Republicans had done with Italian and Irish immigrants a century earlier. The California Republicans completely ignored his warning, with the political consequences already noted.

In Ahmanson’s opinion, today’s California GOP has shrunk to the point where it now represents only the most dogmatically taxophobic elements of the state. Meanwhile, the Democrats have expanded so much that they usually incorporate both sides of almost every political divide: business and labor, whites and non-whites, the rich and the poor, liberals and conservatives. This inclusiveness certainly extends to the staunchest socially conservative voters, since it was the overwhelming support of California non-whites that defeated gay marriage at the ballot box in 2008. And these days Howard Ahmanson is a registered Democrat.

There is no logical contradiction between the powerful backlash of California whites against immigrants 20 years ago and the apparent lack of such political sentiments today. In the early 1990s, the state’s demographics had just undergone a period of very rapid change, and middle-class whites were naturally fearful and alarmed about the consequences of these changes and the possible behavior of so many millions of new immigrants from such different backgrounds, especially in the immediate aftermath of the deadly Rodney King riots. This left them easy targets for political demagoguery. But after a few years had gone by, most whites concluded that their new neighbors seemed like pretty reasonable people, not too different from themselves, and racial concerns dropped to the lower levels of most public opinion surveys, usually ranking below jobs, housing, healthcare, and sometimes even traffic.

Similarly, most Hispanic and Asian newcomers have developed perfectly amicable relations with their white counterparts, but still remain deeply suspicious of the Republican Party, whose leaders had spent several years defaming and attacking them. Such ethnic suspicions might occasionally be overcome by a particularly unusual Republican candidate, as we saw in the case of worldwide film superstar Arnold Schwarzenegger—himself a heavily-accented foreign immigrant—who managed to win a couple of landslide victories. But they proved enormous barriers to more typical Republican candidates, who began each statewide campaign with what amounted to an automatic ten or 15-point deficit at the polls and almost invariably lost as a result.

This can be seen in the details of the most recent California election cycle. As the only statewide Republican officeholder and a wealthy Silicon Valley entrepreneur, Insurance Commissioner Steve Poizner was assumed to have a lock on his party’s gubernatorial nomination and naturally attracted the support of all major segments of the GOP apparatus. But then former eBay CEO Meg Whitman, an utter political neophyte but with a billion-dollar fortune, decided to enter the race and immediately became the darling of the party’s mercenary establishment, given the bottomless funds she promised to spend on her campaign. Outmatched financially, Poizner was forced to refocus on right-wing primary voters, and as a highly opportunistic fellow, he decided to ride the national tidal wave of anti-immigration fears then sweeping across the country and make it the centerpiece of his campaign, eventually spending $25 million of his own money on the effort.

The result was that he lost the primary by 40 points. When you run as an immigration hard-liner, spend $25 million on your race, and lose by 40 points among the hard-core conservatives who dominate Republican primaries, you’re clearly selling the dog food that dogs just won’t eat. These days, anti-immigration candidacies in California possess about as much resonance as anti-papist candidacies in Massachusetts.

Afterwards, Whitman went on to spend an astonishing $180 million in her campaign, nearly all of it her own money, and in a year featuring an enormous national backlash against career politicians lost in a landslide to former Governor Jerry Brown, who had almost continuously been an elected official or a political candidate for the previous 45 years. Meanwhile, the best nationwide year for Republicans in two decades saw their California party lose every statewide race, mostly by wide margins. Such is the dismal political legacy that Pete Wilson bequeathed to his most unfortunate local successors.

• • •

Now consider the likely political future of a state such as Arizona, ground zero of the most recent national anti-immigrant backlash by nervous whites. A severe recession and rapidly changing demographics had alarmed Arizona voters, many of them elderly retirees from elsewhere, leaving them vulnerable to wild rumors of a huge immigrant crime wave, including beheadings and kidnappings, almost all of which was complete nonsense. As a result, harsh anti-immigrant measures were passed into law, and their mostly Republican supporters won sweeping victories among an electorate that is today roughly 80 percent white.

But buried near the bottom of a single one of the innumerable New York Times articles analyzing Arizona politics was the seemingly minor and irrelevant fact that almost half of all Arizona schoolchildren are now Hispanic. Meanwhile, according to Census data, over 80 percent of Arizonans aged 65 or older are white. A decade or more from now it seems likely that Arizona whites and Hispanics will enjoy perfectly good relations, and the former will have long since forgotten their current “immigrant scare.” But the latter will still remember it, and the once mighty Arizona Republican Party will be set on the road to oblivion.

Even in a rock-solid Deep South Republican state like Georgia, Hispanics have now grown into a remarkable 10 percent of the population, up from almost nothing in the early 1990s, and represent an even larger share of younger Georgians. So unless the local Republican Party can somehow greatly enhance its appeal to the 30 percent of Georgians who are black, the current wave of anti-immigrant legislation may prove highly problematical ten or 20 years down the road.

This pattern highlights a central dilemma faced by today’s Republican leadership. In states or regions experiencing heavy waves of non-white immigration, the party’s white conservative base tends to grow alarmed, and any particular spark—an economic downturn, a brutal crime widely publicized by the media—can lead to an explosion of racial hostility. At that point, thoughtful Republican candidates are faced with the choice of either following this populist appeal to immediate victory, often attracting the crossover support of large numbers of Democratic or independent voters in the process, or gritting their teeth and opposing it.

If they take the former approach, temporary electoral victories, no matter how sweeping, almost invariably become long-term disasters in political alignment. But if they take the latter stance, they sacrifice the sort of immediate opportunities that tend to figure very high in the minds of most politicians, and even risk losing primaries to harder-line rivals with shorter horizons or fewer scruples.

Since the Democratic Party is already so heavily influenced at the national level by non-white voters and pro-immigrant activists, local Democrats possess little leeway on this sort of issue, and any candidates who might consider adopting a populist anti-immigrant platform would quickly find themselves blacklisted by the party leadership, quite possibly becoming Republicans at the end of a bitter ideological divorce.

But when we consider the case of California and the numerous other states that now appear to be following along that same demographic trajectory, certainly including the Republican anchor state of Texas in which whites recently became a minority, today’s high levels of immigration seem to be forcing the Republicans into a very difficult strategic position, not necessarily over the next five or six years, but over the next ten or 20. Is there any way they can somehow escape this racial trap, perhaps by curtailing immigration? Moreover, can such a proposal be justified on anything other than political grounds?

Our Population Ponzi Scheme

This obviously leads into the endlessly contentious topic of immigration, and whether or not today’s high levels provide benefits that outweigh their problems. There are few subjects so likely to provoke angry emotions in political circles, as well as sweeping ideological justifications, personal vilifications, and factual claims that have no basis in reality. Furthermore, this is one issue in which individuals quite frequently feel compelled to take one position publicly while very clearly holding the opposite belief in private; and such dishonesty seems to occur in both directions of the debate.

Many of the leading factors driving populist opposition to immigration, such as perceptions of high crime rates or anti-white ethnic hostility, seem completely incorrect. As I demonstrated in a 2010 article, all available evidence indicates that most immigrant groups tend to have approximately the same crime rates as white Americans of a similar age, or perhaps even a bit lower. Similarly, there is overwhelming evidence that today’s immigrants want to learn English, gain productive employment, assimilate into our society, and generally become “good Americans” at least as much as did their European counterparts of a century ago.

The notion that masses of non-white immigrants, legal or not, will turn our cities into violent battlefields or support ethnic separatist movements which shatter national unity are total absurdities, and the people who believe such claims are fools. And as we have seen above from the accumulated voting data of the last couple of decades, after a brief transition period, whites and non-white immigrant groups seem to coexist perfectly well, or at least as well as did the various white ethnic groups on the East Coast 50 or 60 years ago.

However, the fact does remain that America’s current immigration levels are extremely high, not merely relative to the 40-year pause between 1925 and 1965, but even relative to the previous peak reached during the early years of the 20th century. Over the last decade, the flow of immigrants has often hit a million or more per year, a rate that would have seemed almost unimaginable during the immigration controversy of the early 1990s, when Peter Brimelow warned of America becoming an “Alien Nation” in his alarmist book of that title. The number of foreign-born Americans has doubled in the last 20 years, while almost a quarter of all American children today have at least one foreign-born parent, nearly matching the level reached during the absolute height of European immigration a century ago.

The result of all this has been a quite remarkable rate of national population growth. During the early 1970s, when environmental concerns, such as depletion of resources and overpopulation, became leading causes among the liberal intelligentsia, America’s population was a little over 200 million, and growth was rapidly diminishing, with birth rates falling to replacement levels following the end of the postwar Baby Boom. But soon after those activists declared victory and moved on to new and varied ideological causes, population growth—driven almost entirely by immigrants and their children—suddenly started up again, with numbers reaching unprecedented levels: 250 million in 1990, 275 million in 2000, and well over 300 million today. A couple of years ago, urban-development expert Joel Kotkin published The Next Hundred Million, a book in which he trumpeted the likely fact that the American population would reach 400 million within about 30 years. Does an eventual billion inhabitants of the 50 states now seem utterly impossible?

Such rapid and massive population growth is found nowhere else in the developed world and is rare even among the more successful developing countries. The European nations, Japan, and China are all approximately stable in their populations, and in most cases are projected to undergo some decline in the near future. Even crowded Mexico, long the leading source of anti-immigrationist dystopian nightmares, saw total fertility rates drop to replacement levels a few years ago, as increasing levels of affluence and education permeated the population.

Large and growing populations certainly do produce national benefits as well as burdens, and America’s wide-open interior spaces still provide a much lower overall population density than small and crowded European countries. But if our national population trends are so wildly discordant with those of almost all our international peers, perhaps we should at least question them.

• • •

There are obvious reasons for this curious lack of national debate. The solvency of our Social Security system is buttressed by such rapid population growth, which increases the number of current workers relative to retirees. The housing sector—which during the peak of the bubble became America’s largest industry—is heavily dependent upon population growth to boost demand. But support for immigration based on these arguments amounts to an endorsement of Ponzi schemes in which growth must continue indefinitely in order to maintain the same benefits. And as we have seen in the recent past, Ponzi schemes eventually collapse, usually leaving devastation in their wake.

Meanwhile, consider the strange continued silence of the once vocal environmentalist groups, for whom massive housing growth and endless suburban sprawl are hardly cherished dreams. I strongly suspect that the difference between their energetic criticism a generation or so ago and their quiescence today centers on the matter of race: back then, America’s population growth was driven almost entirely by the white birthrate, while today non-white immigration and the children of such immigrants are the overwhelming source. And these days in American society, very few individuals—least of all the sort of affluent liberals who focus on the environment—care to risk being branded with a “Scarlet R”.

As a prime example of this dynamic, consider the case of the Sierra Club, one of America’s oldest and largest environmental groups, which quite naturally had always made population growth one of its major concerns. During the mid-1990s, a wealthy California environmentalist, David Gelbaum, himself the grandson of Jewish immigrants from Europe and with a Mexican-American wife, grew outraged over the nasty racial tone of the political battle unleashed by Pete Wilson and Proposition 187 and privately pledged $100 million to the Sierra Club on the condition that it never turn anti-immigration. This requirement was accepted, permanently silencing that organization.

Even without such explicit inducements, we should hardly be surprised that liberal, cosmopolitan, upper middle class environmentalists would be extremely uncomfortable enlisting in a political cause typically spearheaded by the sort of loud right-wing populists whom they personally detest as “racist rabble.” Sometimes strange bedfellows do find it extremely difficult to share the same bed.

Meanwhile, many other powerful lobbies within our political system derive important real or perceived benefits from endless population growth. The massive inflow of often impoverished and desperate immigrants tends to weaken unions and drive down working-class wages, thereby increasing corporate profits, a slice of which is then rebated back to the campaign accounts of the elected officials who maintain such policies. Some of the more expansively-minded neoconservatives feel that if America must establish a hegemonic world empire, it necessarily requires a vast population to do so, especially given their expectation of an inevitable conflict with China. Particular proposals from some of these individuals carry strong echoes of the decaying Late Roman Empire, with Max Boot, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, having suggested that we should offer automatic American citizenship to any foreigner willing to enlist in the U.S. military.

But if we take a step back and ask ourselves to consider the current outcome of all these interlocked policies, we discover a very sorry situation. The massive immigration of the last couple of decades is certainly not the sole or even the leading cause, but it is an important contributing factor. Endless foreign wars, partly made possible by the availability of pliant immigrant cannon fodder, have ruined America’s worldwide reputation and its finances. A gigantic housing bubble, inflated by heavy immigration-driven population growth, has collapsed, wrecking the American economy and endangering our financial system. And the extremes of American wealth and poverty have reached levels never previously seen in our society.

This last point is perhaps the most significant, but also the least often articulated, given that both political parties are largely funded by the same financial interests.

The Politics of Rich and Poor

In recent decades, American society has undergone an almost unprecedented concentration of wealth, now reaching the point at which the top 1 percent possess as much net wealth as the bottom 90-95 percent. This same top 1 percent received over 80 percent of the total increase in American personal income between 1980 and 2005, and that trend has almost certainly accelerated since then. Late last year New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof sounded the alarm that America might soon reach the extremes of wealth and poverty found in the notoriously polarized societies of Argentina and the “banana republics” of Latin America, then needed to retract that claim when he discovered that we had already long since passed most of those countries in that regard. And in a widely discussed Vanity Fair article, Economics Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz characterized today’s America as being a country “Of the One Percent, By the One Percent, and For the One Percent.” This state of affairs is clearly not beneficial to the less wealthy 99 percent of our society, but he also pointed out that the obvious potential for social instability should deeply concern the more thoughtful members of the One Percent themselves.

Furthermore, much of this economic decline has been absolute rather than merely relative. Adjusted for inflation, median personal income has been stagnant for the past 40 years, and a substantial fraction of the population has seen a sharp drop in its standard of living, a situation almost without precedent in American history. Meanwhile, the costs of numerous budget items such as healthcare or higher education have risen very rapidly, thereby forcing more and more families into what Paul Krugman has characterized as a system of permanent “debt peonage” or what Warren Buffett has similarly described as a “sharecropper’s society.” As a result, nearly a quarter of American households have zero to negative net worth, and a single unexpected illness or economic setback can push them to the brink of destitution.

To some extent, this long stagnation in financial well-being has been masked by the material benefits derived from the exponentially growing power of our electronic technologies and also by the false sense of wealth temporarily provided by the housing bubble. But with the collapse of the latter, many Americans are finally discovering just how poor they really have become. And in many respects, this economic situation seems far worse in America than in most of the other wealthy countries we have long regarded as our economic peers, so it cannot simply be blamed upon problems of technological displacement or the rise of China or global free trade.

It is perhaps not entirely coincidental that this 40 year period of economic stagnation for most Americans coincides exactly with 40 years of rapidly rising immigration levels. After all, the concept that a huge influx of eager workers would tend to benefit Capital at the expense of Labor is hardly astonishing, nor does it require years of academic research into the intricacies of economic theory.

Consider, for example, the case of self-educated union activist Cesar Chavez, a liberal icon of the 1960s who today ranks as the top Latino figure in America’s progressive pantheon. During nearly his entire career, Chavez stood as a vigorous opponent of immigration, especially of the undocumented variety, repeatedly denouncing the failure of the government to enforce its immigration laws due to the pervasive influence of the business lobby and even occasionally organizing vigilante patrols at the Mexican border. Indeed, the Minutemen border activists of a few years back were merely following in Chavez’s footsteps and would have had every historical right to have named their organization the “Cesar Chavez Brigade.” I think a good case can be made that during his own era Chavez ranked as America’s foremost anti-immigration activist.

But today’s union leaders have grown almost completely silent on the obvious impact that large increases in the supply of labor have on the economic well-being of ordinary workers. A crucial explanation is that for reasons of citizenship and language, the overwhelming majority of immigrants are employed in the private sector, particularly the small-scale non-unionized private sector. Meanwhile, population growth tends to increase the need for teachers, police officers, firefighters, and other government employees, thereby benefiting the powerful public-sector unions that today completely dominate the labor movement.

• • •

This relates to another perfectly valid criticism raised by anti-immigration activists, namely that the net fiscal impact of many immigrants is substantially negative. The notion that large numbers of immigrants and their families subsist on welfare or that Mexican immigrant mothers often have five or ten children is sheer nonsense. Immigrants actually have very high labor force participation rates and relatively low rates of welfare dependency, while the vast majority of their families stop at two or three children, a number somewhat higher than that of today’s native-born whites but really no different from the typical American family during the hallowed 1950s. And since, as mentioned earlier, immigrant crime rates are about average, there is no large additional cost for police or prisons.

The fiscal difficulty lies not on the expenditure side but on the tax side. Most immigrants, especially illegal ones, work at relatively low paid jobs, and the various taxes they pay simply cannot cover their share of the (extremely inflated) costs of America’s governmental structure, notably schooling. Furthermore, for exactly this same reason of relative poverty, they receive a disproportionate share of those government programs aimed at benefiting the working poor, ranging from tax credits to food stamps to rental subsidies. Immigration critics have persuasively argued that the current system amounts to the classic case of economic special interests managing to privatize profits while socializing costs, wherein immigrant employers receive the full benefits of the labor done by their low-wage workforce while pushing many of the costs—including explicit income subsidies—onto the taxpayers. Obviously, all these same factors are equally true for non-immigrant Americans who fall into the category of working-poor, but the large continuing inflow of low-wage workers greatly exacerbates this basic fiscal problem.

Immigration and the Political Trap

But even if we conclude that our high immigration levels represent a serious national problem, is there any possible solution? The political reality is that both major parties are enormously dependent upon the business interests that greatly benefit from the current system and are also dominated by disparate ideologies—libertarian open-borders and multicultural open-borders—whose positions tend to coincide on this issue.

As an extreme example of the bizarre ideological views of our current political elites, consider a less-publicized element of the immigration reform plan that President George W. Bush trumpeted during his 2004 reelection campaign. This provision would have allowed any foreigner anywhere in the world to legally immigrate to America if he accepted a minimum-wage job that no American were willing to fill, an utterly insane proposal which would have effectively transformed America’s minimum wage into its maximum wage. Naturally his opponent, Sen. John Kerry, saw absolutely nothing wrong with this idea, though he did criticize various other aspects of Bush’s immigration plan as being somewhat mean-spirited.

Furthermore, while significant Democratic support for curtailing immigration appears almost unthinkable given the party’s internal dynamics, a committed Republican effort—unlikely though it might be—would seem doomed to failure due to the racial aspects of the issue. Republicans would immediately be subjected to withering Democratic attacks in the media—whether or not these were fair or sincere—and as a result would lose much of whatever remaining non-white political support they still retained, while the GOP plan would never have the slightest chance of gaining majority support in Congress, let alone a filibuster-proof majority. The Republicans would suffer massive political damage without any possibility of achieving legislative success, and knowing that, would never undertake the effort. So they don’t.

After all, even strictly enforcing existing immigration laws is almost impossible in our current political and media climate. Although the press has recently highlighted the hundreds of thousands of undocumented residents annually deported under the Obama administration—and this has sparked a sharp political backlash among his pro-immigrant supporters—such a number is negligible compared to the estimated total of 11 million or so. Only the most utterly egregious employers of those workers have ever paid serious penalties, and the dollars involved are usually trivial compared to the economic benefits of ignoring the law. In almost all cases, “employer sanctions” have amounted to just a (small) cost of doing business. When both worker and employer have a strong mutual interest in evading a law, enforcement becomes very difficult and cumbersome, just as we have seen in the case of our endlessly violated drug laws.

Even so, attacking the employment side of the equation remains the most effective approach. Virtually all immigrants come here for jobs, so eliminating government benefits would merely serve to further immiserate millions of families, who would remain in this country regardless. Having immigration agents conduct random sweeps through ethnic neighborhoods would engender enormous fear and anger and also deter immigrants from reporting crimes, while constituting a massive violation of traditional civil liberties. Even building a fence and doubling the border-patrol would probably have just a small impact across such an enormously long border, not least because an estimated one-half of all illegal immigrants enter the country legally and then overstay their visas. If the magnetic appeal of the American job market could somehow be reduced or eliminated, such ancillary measures might prove useful, but if the jobs remain, the immigrants will remain here as well.

Escaping the Low-Wage Society

So we are faced with several apparently insoluble and reinforcing dilemmas. Passing legislation to curtail immigration seems a political non-starter with both parties, and enforcing such legislation even if passed is equally unlikely. Yet as an almost inevitable consequence of the current system, the bulk of the American population—including the vast majority of immigrants and their children—falls deeper and deeper into economic misery, while government finances steadily deteriorate, leading our country to a looming calamity whose outcome appears both dire and quite difficult to predict. Over the last century, the political consequences of a largely impoverished middle class and a bankrupt government—whether in Latin America or in Central Europe—have often been very unfortunate.

By contrast, the sharp constriction in the labor supply resulting from steep reductions in additional immigration would dramatically boost worker wages, especially at the low end, with current immigrants themselves being among the greatest beneficiaries. An increase of a couple of dollars per hour or more could make huge improvements in the difficult existence of the working poor, perhaps allowing them to exit the debt treadmill and stand a better chance of eventually rising into a revitalized middle class. Admittedly, corporate profits might suffer a little and some businesses at the lowest end might disappear; but corporate profits are already doing quite nicely these days, and it makes no sense for developed countries to desperately compete with the impoverished Third World for jobs that are only viable under Third World salaries. Immigration restrictions that raised working-class wages by a couple of dollars an hour would also do wonders for the fiscal health of the Social Security system and government finances in general.

But perhaps the obvious escape from this seemingly inescapable political trap is as simple as merely reversing the direction of cause and effect. Consider the consequences of a very substantial rise in the national minimum wage, perhaps to $10 or more likely $12 per hour.

• • •

The automatic rejoinder to proposals for hiking the minimum wage is that “jobs will be lost.” But in today’s America a huge fraction of jobs at or near the minimum wage are held by immigrants, often illegal ones. Eliminating those jobs is a central goal of the plan, a feature not a bug.

Let us explore the likely implications of this simple proposal. The analysis that follows should be regarded as impressionistic and plausible rather than based on any sort of rigorous and detailed research. It is intended to raise possibilities rather than provide answers. Also, let us assume for the moment that these higher wage requirements would be very strictly enforced.

First, the vast majority of workers in America’s surviving manufacturing sector—whether in unionized Seattle or non-union South Carolina—already earn far more than the existing minimum wage, so their employers would hardly be affected, resulting in almost no impact on our international competitiveness. The same would be true for government employees, resulting in negligible cost to the taxpayer.

By contrast, the bulk of the low-wage jobs affected fall into the category of domestic non-tradeable service-sector jobs, which cannot be replaced by overseas workers. Many of these jobs would disappear, but a substantial fraction would remain viable at the higher wage level, with employers either raising prices or trimming profits or more likely a mixture of both. Perhaps consumers would pay 3 percent more for Wal-Mart goods or an extra dime for a McDonald’s hamburger, but most of these jobs would still exist and the price changes would be small compared to ongoing fluctuations due to commodity prices, international exchange rates, or Chinese production costs.

Meanwhile, many millions of low-wage workers would see an immediate 20 percent or 30 percent boost in their take-home pay, producing a large increase in general economic activity, not to mention personal well-being. We must bear in mind that an increase in the hourly minimum wage from the current federal level of $7.25 to (say) $12.00 would also have secondary, smaller ripple effects, boosting wages already above that level as well, perhaps even reaching workers earning as much as $15 per hour.

The likely impact upon immigrant workers, whether legal or illegal, would be quite varied. Those most recently arrived, especially illegal ones with weak language or job skills, would probably lose their jobs, especially since many of these individuals are already forced to work (illegally) for sub-minimum wages. However, workers who have been here for some years and acquired reasonably good language and job skills and who had demonstrated their reliability over time would probably be kept on, even if their employer needed to boost their pay by a dollar or two an hour.

Thus, the force of the policy would fall overwhelmingly on those immigrants who possessed the weakest ties to American society and still retained the strongest links to their country of origin. By contrast, those immigrants—legal or otherwise—who had lived here for some years and therefore had gradually become part of the community would mostly emerge unscathed, probably receiving a very welcome boost to their family income. Some anti-immigration activists might find this prospect extremely distasteful, but half- or two-thirds of a loaf is better than none.

Moreover, although this wage structure would tend to “grandfather” a considerable fraction of existing illegal immigrants, it would constitute a very formidable barrier to future ones. Paying $12 per hour might be reasonable for a reliable employee who had worked with you for several years, but would be much harder to justify for an impoverished new arrival speaking minimal English and with no track record. To a large extent, the undocumented job window in America would have permanently slammed shut.

In effect, a much higher minimum wage serves to remove the lowest rungs in the employment ladder, thus preventing newly arrived immigrants from gaining their initial foothold in the economy. As a natural consequence, these rungs would also disappear for the bottom-most American workers, such as youths seeking their first jobs or the least skilled in our society. But over the last few decades, these groups have already been largely displaced in the private-sector job market by immigrants, especially illegal ones. Whereas 40 years ago, teenagers and blacks tended to mow lawns and work as janitors, in most parts of the country these days, such jobs are now held by recent arrivals from south of the border. So the net loss of opportunity to Americans would not be large.

Furthermore, recently arrived illegal workers must very quickly find employment if they hope to cover their living expenses and remain here rather than being forced to return home instead. But first-time American job-seekers are already living with their families and anyway have no other home to draw them away, and consequently could spend months seeking an available job. Thus, a higher minimum wage would tend to disproportionately impact new immigrants rather than their American-born competitors.

• • •

The enforcement of these wage provisions would be quite easy compared with the complex web of current government requirements and restrictions. It is possible for business owners to claim they were “fooled” by obviously fraudulent legal documents or that they somehow neglected to run the confusing electronic background checks on their new temporary dishwasher. But it is very difficult for anyone to claim he “forgot” to pay his workers the legally mandated minimum wage. Furthermore, the former situation constitutes something of a “victimless crime” and usually arouses considerable sympathy among immigrant-rights advocates and within ethnic communities; but the latter would universally be seen as the case of a greedy boss who refused to pay his workers the money they were legally due and would attract no sympathy from the media, the police, juries, or anyone else.

Very stiff penalties, including mandatory prison terms, could assure near absolute compliance. Virtually no employer would be foolish enough to attempt to save a few hundred dollars a month in wages paid at the risk of a five-year prison sentence, especially since the workers he was cheating would immediately acquire enormous bargaining leverage over him by threatening to report his behavior to the police.

The proposed change would simply be in the rate of the minimum wage, rather than in the structure of the law, so certain relatively small modification and exceptions, such as including estimated tips for some restaurant employees, might be maintained, so long as these did not expand as a means of circumventing the statute.

Depending upon the state, the current American minimum wage ranges between $7.25 and $8.67 per hour. But is a much higher national minimum wage such as $12 per hour really unreasonable by historical or international standards? In 2011 dollars, the American hourly minimum wage was over $10 in 1968, during our peak of postwar prosperity and full employment, and perhaps that relationship was partly causal. Although exchange-rate fluctuations render exact comparisons difficult, the minimum wage in Ontario along our northern border is currently well over $10 per hour, while in France it now stands at nearly $13. Even more remarkably, Australia recently raised its minimum wage to over $16 per hour, and nonetheless has an unemployment rate of just 5 percent. With the collapse of America’s unsustainable housing-bubble economy of the 2000s, our unemployment rates seem no better and in many cases considerably worse than those of affluent Western countries that have refused to pursue our race-to-the-bottom low-wage economic strategy of recent decades.

• • •

But suppose this boost in the minimum wage succeeded at one of its primary goals and eliminated the jobs of many millions of America’s large undocumented population. Would these current workers and their families remain here anyway, perhaps turning to crime as they became financially desperate? After all, huge numbers of immigrants were employed in housing construction, and following the collapse of that industry their unemployment rates have soared, but most of them have stayed here anyway rather than going home again.

The central point to recognize is that most illegal immigrants, and a substantial fraction of legal ones, enter America with the original goal of short-term economic gain, intending to work for a few years, save as much money as possible, then go back home to their family and friends with a nice nest-egg. Frequently, these plans are unrealistic—saving money proves more difficult than expected—and local ties develop. But except for financial factors, even those individuals who have lived here a decade or longer often still dream of returning to their native countries, sometimes even after they have married, had American-born children, and put down considerable roots.

Among other factors, the cost-structure of American society is extremely high compared with that in most of the developing world, where dollars go much farther. This is the primary reason that substantial numbers of non-Hispanic American retirees have chosen to relocate to Mexico with their pensions, despite considerable barriers of language and culture.

Furthermore, as discussed earlier, the fiscal costs to the American government of low-wage immigrant families can be enormous. A couple working jobs at or near the present minimum wage pays negligible taxes, while if they have two school-age children, the grossly inflated expense structure of American public education may easily result in an annual taxpayer burden of $20,000 or more, even excluding the substantial costs associated with all other public services. And if one or both of these parents lose their jobs due to a soaring minimum wage, the fiscal burden grows still more severe.

The obvious solution, both humane and highly cost-effective, would be for the government to offer immigrants extremely generous financial relocation packages if they return home to their own countries. A tax-free cash payment perhaps as high as $5,000 or even $10,000 per adult plus a much smaller sum per minor child, together with free travel arrangements, would constitute an enormously attractive offer, probably being much more than they had managed to accumulate during many years of difficult low-wage labor. If the legal changes proposed herein had already caused their jobs to disappear, such a relocation offer would become irresistible. (Naturally, the full financial package would require hard evidence that they had already been living in America for a year or more, thereby preventing foreigners from crossing our borders simply to game the system.) Given the massive fiscal burdens inherent in the current situation, even such generous financial terms would probably pay for themselves almost immediately.

An important aspect of all these proposals is that they are largely self-enforcing. Workers would be perfectly aware of the simple minimum wage laws, and harsh penalties would deter employers from taking the risk of violating them. The disappearance of low-wage jobs would remove the primary lure for new illegal immigrants, and generous cash relocation packages would lead many existing ones to eagerly turn themselves in and seek deportation. Although the Border Patrol would continue to exist and immigration laws would remain on the books, after a short transition period these would become much less necessary, and a vast existing system of government bureaucracy, business red tape, and taxpayer expense could safely be reduced.

Even principled libertarians, fervently opposed to the very concept of a minimum wage, might find this system preferable to the status quo, which contains an enormously complex web of regulations and employment restrictions; the civil libertarian nightmares of identity cards, national databases, and workplace raids; and an existing minimum wage on top of all these other things.

The Political Balance Sheet

The political response to this package would obviously not be uniformly favorable, but would almost certainly be more so than for any typical immigration-restriction proposal.

Most of the larger corporations, especially those in the industrial sector, would be minimally affected by the wage changes, while benefiting from the (eventually) decreased burden of immigration-related reporting and paperwork requirements.

Many large retail establishments would be forced to pay higher wages, but since these requirements would be uniform, hitting all of them simultaneously, they would be able to raise prices in unison to cover much of the additional expense, a situation very different from one in which well-paid unionized companies are driven to the wall by their lower-paid non-unionized competitors. Furthermore, during the course of this severe recession, giant companies such as Wal-Mart have disclosed disturbing trends of declining sales, and this has widely been ascribed to the growing impoverishment of their lower-middle-class and working-poor customers. A dramatic rise in the wages of low-end groups would reverse this situation and probably boost the fortunes of Wal-Mart and its peers.

Large agricultural interests are heavily reliant upon illegal labor, but while they might be unhappy about raising their workers’ pay by a significant amount, they would find this situation vastly preferable to actual enforcement of today’s immigration laws, which would immediately put them out of business. Anyway, although agricultural labor is difficult and unpleasant, most field workers already earn well above current minimum-wage levels, averaging just over $10 per hour in 2009, so the required increase would be much less than what one might assume. And unlike the situation decades ago, only a small fraction of today’s illegal immigrants are employed in agriculture.

Many small textile manufacturers and other businesses that survive only by relying upon very low-paid immigrant labor, working in near-sweatshop conditions, would probably be driven out of business. But that is the intent of the proposal.

The reality is that most of the larger, more powerful business interests in America are much less heavily impacted by minimum wage laws than by all sorts of other regulatory and legal issues, not to mention healthcare and pension costs. A simple change in minimum-wage rates would provoke only a small fraction of the organized business opposition generated by many of the other sweeping national proposals of recent decades, notably healthcare reform. Small business interests, influential in Republican circles, would certainly oppose the measure, but they would largely stand alone.

• • •

A greater difficulty on the Republican side of the aisle would involve the entrenched ideological positions of many conservative elected officials and pundits, who over the years have come to vaguely regard minimum wage laws as being “bad,” both economically and even spiritually, having substituted dogma for thinking. As an example, conservative firebrand Rep. Michele Bachmann recently hinted that the solution to America’s current economic problems might involve substantially reducing our existing minimum-wage rates. Presumably, she believes our country would prosper by cutting its wages to Sub-Saharan African levels, then naturally importing millions of Sub-Saharan Africans happy to work at those rates.

But we should also recognize that these days a crucial component of the Republican electorate consists of working-class whites, often strongly religious ones, who tend to live in non-unionized low-wage states or who otherwise generally subsist, sometimes with considerable difficulty, on the lower rungs of the economic ladder. Proposing a large wage increase to a socially conservative evangelical Christian who works at Wal-Mart and currently struggles to pay her bills would be the sort of simple, clear message that might easily cut through an enormous amount of ideological clutter. And even if Rush Limbaugh, who earns tens of millions of dollars each year, denounced this proposal as “big-government liberalism,” for once his views might not find receptive ears. I suspect that a very substantial fraction of Michele Bachmann’s supporters fall into exactly this socioeconomic category.

The minimum wage represents one of those political issues whose vast appeal to ordinary voters is matched by little if any interest among establishment political elites. As an example, in 1996, following years of unsuccessful attempts to attract the support of California politicians, disgruntled union activists led by State Sen. Hilda Solis, now serving as President Obama’s secretary of labor, scraped together the funds to place a huge 35 percent minimum wage increase on the state ballot. Once Republican pollsters began testing the issue, they discovered voter support was so immensely broad and deep that the ballot initiative could not possibly be defeated, and they advised their business clients to avoid any attempt to do so, thus allowing the measure to pass in a landslide against almost no organized opposition. Afterward, the free-market naysayers who had predicted economic disaster were proven entirely wrong, and instead the state economy boomed.

Finally, we should remember that many of the most militant and ideologically fervent grassroots activists within conservative ranks are vehemently anti-immigration, often largely on racial grounds, and sometimes focus on that one issue to the exclusion of most others. For them, the very realistic prospect of dramatically cutting the numbers of America’s huge undocumented population, reducing future illegal immigration to a mere trickle, and even perhaps encouraging a substantial fraction of our legal immigrants to return home would be tremendously attractive, and they might make life very uncomfortable for any Republican politician who opposed this plan without providing a realistic alternative in its place.

The political calculus among Democrats would be much simpler. Any neoliberal Democratic officeholder who balked at a large rise in the minimum wage by citing the economic theories of Milton Friedman or the research reports of Goldman Sachs would be trampled into the dust by his enraged constituents, disappearing forever.

• • •

A little over a century ago, Henry Ford took the bold step of doubling the regular wages of his assembly-line workers to the then remarkable sum of $5 per day, thereby achieving international fame as well as enormous business success for his own company. According to most accounts, this event was a crucial factor in creating the prosperous middle class that eventually dominated America’s 20th-century history, and Lenin later hailed Ford as one of the world’s greatest revolutionary heroes, urged his followers to closely study Ford’s writings, and argued that so long as America possessed leaders of such wisdom, no Communist revolution would be necessary there.

These days, times have changed. But perhaps a similarly bold step, which similarly raises the income of America’s working class and similarly crosses many ideological lines, would help safeguard and maintain the national prosperity that men like Ford originally created.

Ron Unz is publisher of The American Conservative. He thanks Razib Khan for his assistance in gathering the state demographic and election data and running the resulting correlations.

Race, IQ, and Wealth

What the facts tell us about a taboo subject

The American Conservative • July 18, 2012 • 7,500 Words

At the end of April, Charles Kenny, a former World Bank economist specializing in international development, published a blistering attack in Foreign Policy entitled “Dumb and Dumber,” with the accusatory subtitle “Are development experts becoming racists?” Kenny charged that a growing number of development economists were turning towards genetic and other intrinsic human traits as a central explanation of national economic progress, often elevating these above the investment and regulatory issues that have long been the focus of international agencies.

Although Kenny suggested that many of his targets had been circumspect in how they raised these highly controversial ideas, he singled out IQ and the Wealth of Nations, published in 2001 by Richard Lynn and Tatu Vanhanen, as a particularly extreme and hateful example of this trend. These authors explicitly argue that IQ scores for different populations are largely fixed and hereditary, and that these—rather than economic or governmental structures—tend to determine the long-term wealth of a given country.

Kenny claimed that such IQ theories were not merely racist and deeply offensive but had also long been debunked by scientific experts—notably the prominent biologist Stephen Jay Gould in his 1980 book The Mismeasure of Man.

As Kenny soon discovered from the responses to his online article, he had seriously erred in quoting the authority of Gould, whose fraud on race and brain-size issues, presumably in service to his self-proclaimed Marxist beliefs, last year received further coverage in the New York Times. Science largely runs on the honor system, and once simple statements of fact—in Gould’s case, the physical volume of human skulls—are found to be false, we cannot trust more complex claims made by the particular scholar.

Despite Kenny’s obvious lack of familiarity with the technical questions he raised, these issues remain important ones to explore, given today’s globalized world. After all, it is generally acknowledged that some people are smarter than other people, and this almost syllogistically raises the possibility that some peoples may be smarter than other peoples.

Most nations prefer material wealth to poverty, and it seems plausible that smarter people might be better at generating the productivity needed to achieve this goal. We should hardly be surprised that this possible factor behind economic advancement has attracted the interest of the development experts criticized by Kenny, and just as he alleges, IQ and the Wealth of Nations ranks as perhaps the most extreme academic example of this analysis.

Although “intelligence” may be difficult to define precisely, most people have accepted that IQ scores seem to constitute a rough and measurable proxy for this trait, so Lynn and Vanhanen have collected a vast number of national IQ scores from the last 50 or 60 years and compared these to income levels and economic growth rates. Since experts have discovered that nominal IQ scores over the last century or so have tended to rise at a seemingly constant rate—the so-called “Flynn Effect”—the authors adjusted their raw scores accordingly. Having done so, they found a strong correlation of around 0.50–0.75 between the Flynn-adjusted IQ of a nation’s population and its real per capita GDP over the last few decades, seemingly indicating that smarter peoples tend to be wealthier and more successful.

From this statistical fact, Lynn and Vanhanen draw the conclusion that intelligence leads to economic success and—since they argue that intelligence itself is largely innate and genetic—that the relative development ranking of the long list of nations they analyze is unlikely to change much over time, nor will the economic standing of the various groups within ethnically mixed countries, including the United States.

Now this hypothesis might indeed be correct, but it is not necessarily warranted by the empirical data that Lynn and Vanhanen have gathered. After all, if high national IQ scores are correlated with economic success, perhaps the high IQs cause the success, but it seems just as possible that the success might be driving the high IQs, or that both might be due to some third factor. Correlation does not imply causality, let alone the particular direction of the causal arrow. A traditional liberal model positing that socio-economic factors strongly influence performance on academic ability tests would predict exactly the same distribution of international results found by Lynn and Vanhanen.

Fortunately, a careful examination of the wealth of empirical data they have gathered provides some important evidence on the relative plausibility of these conflicting hypotheses, allowing us to draw useful conclusions in this extremely taboo subject.

The Distribution of European Intelligence

Critics have often suggested, not without some plausibility, that when Western-designed IQ tests are applied to Third World peoples, the results may be distorted by hidden cultural bias. There is also the possible impact of malnutrition and other forms of extreme deprivation, or even practical difficulties in administering tests in desperately impoverished nations, as Kenny emphasized in his critique.

In order to minimize these extraneous factors, let us restrict our initial examination to the 60-odd IQ datapoints Lynn and Vanhanen obtained from European countries and their overseas offshoots over the last half-century. Obviously, some of these countries have at times been far poorer than others, but almost none have suffered the extreme poverty found in much of the Third World.

What we immediately notice is a long list of enormous variations in the tested IQs of genetically indistinguishable European peoples across temporal, geographical, and political lines, variations so large as to raise severe doubts about the strongly genetic-deterministic model of IQ favored by Lynn and Vanhanen and perhaps also quietly held by many others. (Unless otherwise indicated, all the IQ data that follow are drawn from their work and incorporate their Flynn adjustments.)

Consider, for example, the results from Germany obtained prior to its 1991 reunification. Lynn and Vanhanen present four separate IQ studies from the former West Germany, all quite sizable, which indicate mean IQs in the range 99–107, with the oldest 1970 sample providing the low end of that range. Meanwhile, a 1967 sample of East German children produced a score of just 90, while two later East German studies in 1978 and 1984 came in at 97–99, much closer to the West German numbers.

These results seem anomalous from the perspective of strong genetic determinism for IQ. To a very good approximation, East Germans and West Germans are genetically indistinguishable, and an IQ gap as wide as 17 points between the two groups seems inexplicable, while the recorded rise in East German scores of 7–9 points in just half a generation seems even more difficult to explain.

The dreary communist regime of East Germany was certainly far poorer than its western counterpart and its population may indeed have been “culturally deprived” in some sense, but East Germans hardly suffered from severe dietary deficiencies during the 1960s or late 1950s when the group of especially low-scoring children were born and raised. The huge apparent testing gap between the wealthy West and the dingy East raises serious questions about the strict genetic interpretation favored by Lynn and Vanhanen.

Next, consider Greece. Lynn and Vanhanen report two IQ sample results, a score of 88 in 1961 and a score of 95 in 1979. Obviously, a national rise of 7 full points in the Flynn-adjusted IQ of Greeks over just 18 years is an absurdity from the genetic perspective, especially since the earlier set represented children and the latter adults, so the two groups might even be the same individuals tested at different times. Both sample sizes are in the hundreds, not statistically insignificant, and while it is impossible to rule out other factors behind such a large discrepancy in a single country, it is interesting to note that Greek affluence had grown very rapidly during that same period, with the real per capita GDP rising by 170 percent.

Furthermore, although Greeks and Turks have a bitter history of ethnic and political conflict, modern studies have found them to be genetically almost indistinguishable, and a very large 1992 study of Turkish schoolchildren put their mean IQ at 90, lending plausibility to the low Greek figure. We also discover rather low IQ scores in all the reported samples of Greece’s impoverished Balkan neighbors in the Eastern Bloc taken before the collapse of Communism. Croatians scored 90 in 1952, two separate tests of Bulgarians in 1979–1982 put their IQs at 91–94, and Romanians scored 94 in 1972. While the low scores of the Croatian children might be partly explained by malnutrition and other physical hardships experienced during the difficult years of World War II, such an excuse seems less plausible for other Balkan populations tested decades after the war, all of which seem to score in the same range.

Two samples of Poles from 1979 and 1989 provided widely divergent mean IQs of 106 and 92, with the low Polish figure of 92 coming from a huge sample of over 4000 children tested with “Progressive Matrices,” supposedly one of the most culturally-independent methods. On the other hand, more economically advanced Communist countries in Central Europe often had considerably higher scores, with the Slovaks testing at 96 in 1983, the Czechs scoring 96–98 in 1979–1983, and the Hungarians reaching 99 in 1979.

All of these Southern or Eastern European IQ scores follow the per capita GDP of their countries, a correspondence that supports either the IQ-makes-wealth hypothesis of Lynn and Vanhanen, or the contrary wealth-makes-IQ hypothesis of traditional liberals.

During this same period, the far richer non-Communist nations of Europe—such as Austria, Britain, the Netherlands, Belgium, Norway, and West Germany—all tended to score at or somewhat above 100. The wide IQ gaps between these European peoples and the previous group seem unlikely to have a heavily innate basis, given the considerable genetic and phenotypic similarity across these populations. For example, the borders of Austria and Croatia are just a couple of dozen miles apart, both are Catholic countries that spent centuries as part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and it is quite difficult to distinguish Austrians from Croatians either by appearance or by genetic testing. Yet the gap between their reported IQ scores—12 points—is nearly as wide as that separating American blacks and whites.

It seems more plausible that most of the large and consistent IQ gaps between Western Europeans and their Balkan cousins are less a cause than a consequence of differences in development and affluence during the era in which these IQs were tested. For example, Austria had many times Croatia’s per capita GDP during the period in question. One of the few European nations to exhibit a sharp decline in tested IQ, Poland—whose score fell from 106 in 1979 to 92 in 1989—did so amid the economic turmoil of the 1980s, when its per capita GDP also substantially declined according to some measures, even while Western Europe was growing richer.

If these differences of perhaps 10 or even 15 IQ points between impoverished Balkan Europeans and wealthy Western ones reflected deeply hereditary rather than transitory environmental influences, they surely would have maintained themselves when these groups immigrated to the United States. But there is no evidence of this. As it happens, Americans of Greek and South Slav origins are considerably above most other American whites in both family income and educational level. Since the overwhelming majority of the latter trace their ancestry to Britain and other high IQ countries of Western Europe, this would seem a strange result if the Balkan peoples truly did suffer from an innate ability deficit approaching a full standard deviation.

Similar sharp differences occur in the case of Italian populations separated historically and geographically. Today, Italian-Americans are very close to the national white average in income and education, and the limited data we have seem to put their IQ close to this average as well. This would appear consistent with the IQ figures reported for Italy by Lynn and Vanhanen, which are based on large samples and come in at just above 100. However, there is a notoriously wide economic gap between northern Italy and the south, including Sicily. The overwhelming majority of Italian-Americans trace their ancestry to the latter, quite impoverished regions, and in 2010 Lynn reported new research indicating that the present-day IQ of Italians living in those areas was as low as 89, a figure that places them almost a full standard deviation below either their Northern Italian compatriots or their separated American cousins. Although Lynn attributed this large deficit in Southern Italian IQ to substantial North African or Near Eastern genetic admixture, poverty and cultural deprivation seem more likely explanations.

The Lynn/Vanhanen data on Jews also provide some suspicious IQ disparities. American Jews have among the highest tested IQs, with means being usually reported in the 110–115 range. Yet Lynn and Vanhanen report that Israeli Jews have strikingly low IQs by comparison. One large sample from 1989 put the figure at 90, while a far smaller sample from 1975 indicated an IQ of 97, with both results drawn from Israel’s large Jewish majority rather than its small Arab minority. The IQ gaps with American Jews are enormous, perhaps as large as 25 points, and difficult to explain by genetic factors, since a majority of Israel’s Jewish population in that period consisted of ethnic Askhenazi (European) Jews, just like those in America. The huge economic gulf between Israeli Jews, who then had less than half the average American per capita GDP, and American Jews, who were far above average in American income, would seem to be the most plausible explanation.

Similarly, a large 1990 test of South African whites placed their IQ at 94, considerably below that of the Dutch or English peoples from whom they derive, and again this may be connected to their lower level of national income and technological advancement.

Perhaps the strongest evidence supporting this cultural rather than genetic hypothesis comes from the northwestern corner of Europe, namely Celtic Ireland. When the early waves of Catholic Irish immigrants reached America near the middle of the 19th century, they were widely seen as particularly ignorant and uncouth and aroused much hostility from commentators of the era, some of whom suggested that they might be innately deficient in both character and intelligence. But they advanced economically at a reasonable pace, and within less than a century had become wealthier and better educated than the average white American, including those of “old stock” ancestry. The evidence today is that the tested IQ of the typical Irish-American—to the extent it can be distinguished—is somewhat above the national white American average of around 100 and also above that of most German-Americans, who arrived around the same time.

Meanwhile, Ireland itself remained largely rural and economically backward and during the 1970s and 1980s still possessed a real per capita GDP less than half that of the United States. Perhaps we should not be too surprised to discover that Lynn and Vanhanen list the Irish IQ at just 93 based on two samples taken during the 1970s, a figure far below that of their Irish-American cousins.

Even this rather low Irish IQ figure is quite misleading, since it was derived by averaging two separately reported Irish samples. The earlier of these, taken in 1972, involved nearly 3,500 Irish schoolchildren and is one of the largest European samples found anywhere in Lynn/Vanhanen, while the other, taken in 1979, involved just 75 Irish adults and is one of the smallest. The mean IQ of the large group was 87, while that of the tiny group was 98, and the Lynn/Vanhanen figure was obtained by combining these results through straight, unweighted averaging, which seems a doubtful approach. Indeed, a sample of 75 adults is so small it perhaps should simply be excluded on statistical grounds, given the high likelihood that it was drawn from a single location and is therefore unrepresentative of its nation as a whole.

So we are left with strong evidence that in the early 1970s, the Irish IQ averaged 87, the lowest figure anywhere in Europe and a full standard deviation below than that of Irish-Americans, a value which would seem to place a substantial fraction of Ireland’s population on the edge of clinical mental retardation.

Lynn seems to have accepted this conclusion. The current issue of the academic journal Personality and Individual Differences is organized as a tribute to Lynn and contains a lengthy interview in which he describes the turning points of his career, beginning with his appointment as a research professor in Dublin. His official responsibility was to investigate the social and economic problems of Ireland, and he soon concluded that the nation’s backwardness was largely due to the low IQ of its people, with the only obvious solution being a strong eugenics program, presumably including sterilization of a substantial fraction of the population. But given the dominant influence of conservative Catholicism in Ireland, he doubted the government would consider such suggestions, which would probably just get him “accused of being a Nazi,” so he “chickened out” and chose to suppress his findings. A few years later, he relocated to Protestant-run Ulster, where he felt his racial ideas might find a more receptive audience, and he eventually became interested in whether the poverty of other countries might be due to the same low IQ causal factor which he believed explained Ireland’s problems. This led him to the research that culminated in the publication of IQ and the Wealth of Nations.

But Lynn’s late-1960s views regarding the mostly genetic cause of low Irish IQ seem unwarranted. Ireland was then overwhelmingly rural and poor, with a low per capita GDP, while Irish Americans tended to be an urban population and a reasonably affluent one, and this sharp difference in external material conditions seems the most logical explanation for the wide disparity in IQ results. In further support of this environmental hypothesis, we should note that it has been estimated that nearly one-third of Australia’s population is wholly or substantially Irish in ancestry, with the balance mostly British, while the IQ results Lynn and Vanhanen report for Australia are all very close to the British average of 100.

The gathering of social science data, including national IQs, is fraught with difficulty, notably due to sampling problems, and two or three anomalous results might be explained away for those reasons. But the large number of examples cited above in which genetically indistinguishable European-ancestry populations show enormous variations in tested IQ seems to indicate a much broader difficulty. Not only are the results too numerous to be ascribed to chance error, but they follow a consistent pattern of their own, with European-ancestry groups living in affluent, well-developed countries almost invariably having IQ scores of around 100 or above, while their close kinsmen in much poorer regions have far lower scores. Indeed, in several of these cases, the countries and peoples are identical, being merely separated by a generation or less of local economic development.

To a small extent, Lynn and Vanhanen acknowledge the possible importance of non-genetic factors, and they devote a few pages to a discussion of the impact of health, nutrition, and education on IQ scores. But they never provide any clear estimate for the magnitude of these influences and claim that a number of twin or adoption studies have determined that IQ is 80 percent or more heritable. Their text seems to assume that genetics is the overwhelmingly dominant factor behind the national IQ disparities which they catalogue.

All IQ data was drawn from Lynn/Vanhanen. The per capita GDP figures are obtained from the World Bank and adjusted for Purchasing Power Parity (PPP 2005$) if available; otherwise being marked with an asterisk. Much of this economic data, especially for non-convertible East Bloc currencies before 1989, is somewhat uncertain and should be used only for rough comparative purposes.

Questioning the “Strong IQ Hypothesis”

The central thesis of Lynn and Vanhanen’s work might be called the “Strong IQ Hypothesis,” namely that IQ accurately reflects intelligence, that IQ is overwhelmingly determined by genetics, and that IQ is subject to little or no significant cultural or economic influence after we adjust for the universal Flynn Effect. Since the IQ disparities discussed above seem to provide a powerful challenge to this theory, their validity has sometimes been disputed on the grounds that the populations being compared might actually be more dissimilar than we realize due to the impact of selective migration.

For example, one might speculate that the smarter Irish immigrated to America, while their dimmer relatives remained at home, and the same was also true for the smarter Southern Italians, Greeks, or other Balkan Europeans. Similarly, perhaps the smarter European Jews crossed the oceans to New York Harbor in the years before World War I, while their dimmer relatives stayed behind and later moved to Israel after World War II.

These explanations seem quite unlikely. The intra-ethnic IQ gaps being discussed are absolutely enormous—often approaching a full standard deviation or more—and that would imply a similarly enormous gap between the portions of the population that stayed and those that emigrated, with no contemporaneous source seeming to provide any indication of this. Indeed, during the period when these immigrant flows were occurring, most American observers emphasized the remarkable backwardness of the new arrivals and often speculated that they were intrinsically defective and might constitute a permanent burden to society. If anything, it was sometimes suggested that they were less intelligent than their stay-at-home co-ethnics and had come to America because they were unable to compete at home, hence their description as the so-called “wretched refuse from a teeming shore.”

The limited ethnic IQ data we have from that period support this impression. In his 1978 book American Ethnic Groups, Thomas Sowell included a chapter that summarized the 1920s data on the average IQ scores of various Eastern and Southern European immigrant groups and showed that these were generally quite low, with Slovaks at 85.6, Greeks at 83, Poles at 85, Spaniards at 78, and Italians ranging between 78 and 85 in different studies. A separate analysis of the aptitude scores of World War I draftees published in 1923 came to similar conclusions. These published IQ studies by prominent academics led to widespread belief that the more recent European immigrant groups were much less intelligent than earlier ones and might drag down the national average, a belief that may have contributed to passage of the highly restrictive 1924 Immigration Act.

Even if we ignore all contemporaneous evidence and argue that 19th century European immigrants to America and elsewhere somehow constituted the IQ elite of their originating countries, the theory of selective migration still remains implausible. It has long been established on both theoretical and empirical grounds that IQ scores generally follow a mean-reversion pattern, in which the children of outlying individuals tend to regress toward the typical levels of their larger population or ethnic group. So even if we hypothesize that the Irish, South Italians, Jews, and Greeks who immigrated to America constituted the smartest small slice of their generation—rather than, as seems more likely, often the poorer and most miserable—roughly half their relative IQ advantage would have dissipated after a single generation. Thus, the apparent one standard deviation gap between American Irish and Ireland Irish a few decades ago would have required an initial gap of something closer to two standard deviations at the time the immigration occurred, a difference so large as to be totally implausible.

Furthermore, the most recent 2009 PISA international student academic tests sponsored by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development provide us with results that raise further doubts about the correctness of the Lynn/Vanhanen IQ scores from a wide range of European countries. For example, although Croatia and Austria are geographically quite close, Croatians had IQs 12 points lower when their country was desperately poor just after World War II; yet today their overall PISA scores are not enormously lower, and are actually higher in reading, even though Croatia’s average income is still lower by a factor of two. During the early 1970s, a huge national sample had placed the Ireland IQ at 87, the lowest in all of Europe, but today Ireland’s PISA scores are about average for the continent and roughly the same as those for France and Britain, while Irish per capita incomes have pulled a little ahead.

The subject of race and IQ is an extremely contentious one, and over the years there have sometimes been conflicting accusations that data presented by various academics and other experts were more or less fraudulent, fabricated for ideological reasons. This does appear to be true in the case of Stephen Jay Gould, one of the most widely quoted figures on the subject of IQ. Therefore, if the often anomalous IQ figures discussed above had been provided by any strong critic of IQ as an innate measure of intellectual ability, I would be extremely cautious in accepting them without exhaustive verification of the underlying sources.

But our situation is different. Lynn and Vanhanen rank among the most prominent academic advocates of a strongly genetic basis for IQ scores, and this indeed represents the summary conclusion that they draw from the vast amount of national IQ data they have collected and presented. They are unlikely to have skewed the data against their own ideological beliefs and theoretical hypothesis.

Yet an objective review of the Lynn/Vanhanen data almost completely discredits the Lynn/Vanhanen “Strong IQ Hypothesis.” If so many genetically-indistinguishable European populations—of roughly similar cultural and historical background and without severe nutritional difficulties—can display such huge variances in tested IQ across different decades and locations, we should be extremely cautious about assuming that other ethnic IQ differences are innate rather than environmental, especially since these may involve populations separated by far wider cultural or nutritional gaps.

We cannot rule out the possibility that different European peoples might have relatively small differences in innate intelligence or IQ—after all, these populations often differ in height and numerous other phenotypic traits. But this residual genetic element would explain merely a small fraction of the huge 10–15 point IQ disparities discussed above. Such a view might be characterized as the “Weak IQ Hypothesis”: huge IQ differences between large populations may be overwhelmingly due to cultural or socio-economic factors, but a residual component might indeed be genetic in origin.

We are now faced with a mystery arguably greater than that of IQ itself. Given the powerful ammunition that Lynn and Vanhanen have provided to those opposing their own “Strong IQ Hypothesis,” we must wonder why this has never attracted the attention of either of the warring camps in the endless, bitter IQ dispute, despite their alleged familiarity with the work of these two prominent scholars. In effect, I would suggest that the heralded 300-page work by Lynn and Vanhanen constituted a game-ending own-goal against their IQ-determinist side, but that neither of the competing ideological teams ever noticed.

Presumably, human psychology is the underlying explanation for this mysterious and even amusing silence. Given that Lynn and Vanhanen rank as titans of the racial-difference camp, perhaps their ideological opponents, who often come from less quantitative backgrounds, are reluctant even to open the pages of their books, fearful lest the vast quantity of data within prove that the racialist analysis is factually correct after all. Meanwhile, the pro-racialist elements may simply skim over the hundreds of pages of dry and detailed quantitative evidence and skip to the summary text, which claims that the data demonstrate IQ is genetically fixed and determines which nations will be rich and which will be poor.

Implications for the American Immigration Debate

This lack of attention to the actual data provided by Lynn and Vanhanen has seriously impaired many important public-policy discussions. The widespread belief in the innate mental inferiority of Southern and Eastern European immigrant groups may have played a significant role in the 1920s immigration debate, and it seems plausible that similar perspectives might be at work today. For example, sharp critics of our heavy recent immigration from Mexico sometimes claim—or at least hint—that the intellectual weakness of these millions of newcomers may constitute a disastrous long-term burden to American society. On anonymous Internet forums such voices are often more explicit and directly cite Lynn and Vanhanen in placing the Mexican IQ at just 87, far below the white American average, and a worrisome indicator given that as much as one-quarter of all Americans may be of Mexican ancestry by around the middle of this century.

The IQ figure of 87 that they quote from Lynn/Vanhanen is correct, though admittedly based on a single 1961 study of Mexican schoolchildren in the most impoverished southern part of that country. But such critics always fail to notice that a much larger and more recent study of Irish schoolchildren revealed precisely the same mean IQ of 87. So the most accurate representation of the facts presented in IQ and the Wealth of Nations is that Mexicans and Irish seem to have approximately the same intellectual ability, and since Irish have generally done well in American society, there seems no particular reason to assume that Mexicans will not.

But is this apparent equality of Mexican and Irish IQs several decades ago anything more than a statistical anomaly due to insufficiently thorough testing? Despite its recent economic problems, over the last couple of decades Ireland has become one of the best educated countries in Europe, with solid international PISA scores, and it seems almost certain that Irish IQs have rapidly converged toward the European mean. Indeed, two additional studies provided by Lynn and Vanhanen in their 2006 sequel, IQ and Global Inequality, seem to indicate that by 1993 the average Irish IQ had already risen to 92.

Meanwhile, tens of millions of Mexican-Americans have lived in the United States with its far higher standard of living for decades, and we must wonder whether they have demonstrated any similar rise in IQ. Lynn and Vanhanen provide some early 1970s studies for Mexican-American children living in Texas and California and the IQ scores were generally quite dismal, similar to those from Mexico itself. Surely, if Mexican-Americans had subsequently demonstrated a large rise in tested intelligence, the American media and ethnic-advocacy groups would have widely trumpeted such a fact.

Strangely enough, strong evidence of such an IQ rise does exist, but it has been ignored by our often oblivious national media. Among the most useful sources of detailed quantitative data in America is the General Social Survey (GSS), a huge sociological survey conducted every other year, in which tens of thousands of Americans have been subjected to a wide range of detailed questions and their responses made publicly available over the Internet. One regular item in the survey is the simple “Wordsum” vocabulary identification test, which, although quite crude, turns out to be heavily g-loaded, correlating 0.71 with the results of standard IQ tests. Such a correlation is at least as good as many other measures used to estimate population-wide intelligence, and probably superior to grades or graduation rates, while the vast GSS sample size provides a statistically valid means of discerning American trends and patterns in population segments too narrow for other sources.

Analyzing this GSS data set in a variety of different ways has become a favored activity of a blogger named Ron Guhname, who styles himself “The Inductivist” and every couple of days publishes a new finding on his website. In 2008, he decided to explore the Wordsum-implied IQ of American-born Mexican-Americans and discovered a remarkable result. These IQs were quite low, 84–85, in the 1970s and 1980s, a result consistent with the IQ samples reported by Lynn/Vanhanen for that era. But the Mexican-American IQ then jumped 7 points by the 1990s and an additional 3 points by the 2000s, a rise of 10 full points in just 20 years, while the Wordsum-implied IQ values for white Americans rose merely 2 points during that same period, presumably as an aspect of the regular Flynn Effect.

In actual values, the Mexican-American Wordsum-IQ increased from 84.4 in the 1980s to 95.1 in the 2000s, while the rise for American whites was from 99.2 to 101.3. In addition, the late 1990s IQ of U.S.-born Mexican-Americans has been separately estimated at 92.4 from the large  data set contained in the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY-97), a figure consistent with these Wordsum-IQ findings.

Thus, almost two-thirds of the IQ gap between American-born Mexican-Americans and whites disappeared in two decades, with these results being based on nationally-representative American samples of statistically significant size. Since Guhname is a right-wing blogger quite hostile to Hispanic immigration, it is to his credit that he published this result without hesitation, and to the embarrassment of America’s vast multicultural academic and media establishment that they had never independently discovered these important findings, nor indeed even noticed them once they appeared. In any event, it appears that Mexican-American IQs in America have been rising about as rapidly as Irish IQs seem to have risen in Europe.

But does this make any sense? During the 25 years between 1982 and 2007 the real per capita Irish GDP more than tripled, passing that of Britain, Germany, and France, while during this same period our national media have tended to emphasize the terrible economic difficulties endured by Mexican-Americans, rarely providing any indications of a major economic boom in that population. If Mexican-Americans—now numbering almost 35 million and well on their way to eventually surpassing Anglo-Saxons in number—had actually experienced rapid economic gains, surely our media would not have ignored such an important story?

I read several major newspapers closely each morning and am particularly interested in immigration-related news items, but on October 1, 2007, I was stunned to read a short New York Times opinion column by Douglas Besharov, a social scientist at the University of Maryland, which provided exactly such evidence. His U.S. Census-CPS numbers were based on Hispanics as a whole, but Mexicans and closely related Meso-American immigrant groups from Central America account for the vast majority of this population, so his results should mostly be applicable.

Besharov noted that in just the 12 years from 1994 to 2006, the poverty rate among Hispanics had dropped by fully one-third, plummeting from 30.7 percent to 20.6 percent, while the percentage of Hispanics holding skilled blue-collar jobs had more than doubled, rising from 11 percent to 25 percent. Meanwhile, median Hispanic real household income rose by 20 percent and individual real income by 30 percent. Education advancement was also significant, with the percentage of 18- to 24-year-old Hispanics without high-school diplomas or G.E.D.s falling from 44 percent to 34 percent, while college enrollment rose from 19 percent to 25 percent. All these latter numbers are still considerably below those of the comparable white population, but they do indicate remarkable economic and social advancement in just a dozen years.

Furthermore, they certainly understate the real rate of such progress, perhaps by a very substantial factor. The years 1994–2006 represented a period of peak immigration levels from Latin America—with most of this flow being illegal and low-skilled—a wave contributing nearly half the growth of the Hispanic population, which rose from 25 million to almost 45 million. Although the Census data do not allow us to disentangle the economic performance of these new arrivals from the previously established or American-born Hispanic segment, it is certain that the socio-economic advancement figures cited by Besharov would have been enormously better if not for the inclusion of so many additional millions of initially-impoverished newcomers, often with weak language skills and almost always concentrated near the bottom of the labor market. So Besharov’s extremely encouraging picture must underestimate the actual performance of American-born Hispanics.

The severe recession of the last few years has seen the average American family lose 40 percent of its net worth, and Hispanics have similarly lost a portion of their previous economic gains, but meanwhile their rapid educational advances have continued and even accelerated. An indicator of this sense of progress is revealed in an April survey by the Pew Hispanic Center, which found that 75 percent of Hispanics believe that they can get ahead if they work hard, a figure far above the 58 percent average for the general American public.

America’s socio-economic landscape has been reshaped dramatically over the last century or more due to technological and social changes, reducing some opportunities while increasing others, so direct historical comparisons can be misleading. Furthermore, detailed economic stratification data along ethnic lines from a hundred years ago is not easily available. But based on the raw numerical data we do possess, it seems likely that the tens of millions of Hispanics living in America in the early 1990s probably advanced more rapidly in economic and educational terms than had any of America’s large European immigrant groups of the past, such as the Irish, the Italians, the Jews, or the Slavs. Such real-world gains seem quite consistent with the very rapid rise in apparent IQ discussed above, which occurred during this same time period.

Given the existence of large and influential Hispanic-friendly institutions such as the Ford Foundation and the New York Times, it seems almost inexplicable that such dramatically positive developments received virtually no media attention. This silence has surely led much of the national electorate incorrectly to assume that little if any Hispanic progress was occurring, sometimes with unfortunate political consequences.

IQ Puzzles and a Super-Flynn Effect?

This strong empirical evidence of the apparent malleability of IQ scores raises interesting questions about the possible mechanism involved. For example, during the 1960s and 1970s there was a great deal of excitement in elite circles about the role of Head Start-type enrichment programs in dramatically raising the academic performance and the IQ scores of impoverished groups; but the overall evidence seems to be that these failed over the long run, with students regressing to their previous ability levels just a few years after leaving the program.

Similarly, much of the evidence accumulated by the leading advocates of the innateness of IQ, such as the Pioneer Fund, comes from twin adoption studies, which seem to show that individuals’ IQ and personality traits are far closer to those of their fraternal or (especially) identical twins raised apart than to unrelated foster siblings or parents, and this pattern of similarity grows steadily stronger over time. Not unreasonably, many psychometric experts have argued that these results prove that IQ is largely determined by genetic factors and cannot be changed via environmental influences within any normal range. Lynn and Vanhanen cite several of these studies to argue that IQ is at least 80 percent hereditary.

These individual results, usually based on relatively small statistical samples of adopted twins or siblings, seemingly demonstrate the extreme rigidity of IQ—the “Strong IQ Hypothesis”—while we have also seen the numerous examples above of large populations whose IQs have drastically shifted over relatively short periods of time. How can these contradictory findings be squared? I do not have the solution, but it would seem a very worthwhile subject for further research, on both theoretical and practical grounds.

This scientific puzzle probably has a close connection to the well-known Flynn Effect, first widely publicized by Lynn, which describes the consistent, regular rise in nominal IQs for populations almost everywhere in the world: Englishmen or Frenchmen today do far better on IQ tests than did their parents or grandparents, although we have no reason to believe they are much “smarter” in any meaningful sense. There has been considerable speculation that this general rise in IQ-test performance is based on the increasingly complex and technological environment surrounding us, whose intricacies constantly train all of us in the sort of mental abstractions found in most IQ tests, thereby gradually raising our test scores without necessarily raising our intelligence. In effect, life in modern urban societies has become a daily cram-course for IQ tests. Many pre-modern cultures similarly required individuals to undertake considerable feats of memory, so people back then might have excelled on memory-based tests compared to their counterparts today, who do not have the same benefits of daily practice.

If we consider the low scoring Balkan and Eastern European populations listed in the table above, most of them seem to live in countries which were far more rural and agricultural than their higher-scoring counterparts. This was certainly also true of Ireland 40 years ago, when its scores were quite low, and this situation would tend to apply as well to Mexican-Americans, who were a much more heavily rural population prior to the 1970s.

Some support for a significant rural/urban factor behind IQ scores may be seen in the curiously inverted pattern of apparent ethnic success between Europe and America. In the recent past the highest European IQ scores were generally found in northern countries such as Britain, Germany, and the Netherlands, while the lowest ones occurred in Ireland, Greece, Yugoslavia, and Southern Italy, and during the early 20th century this pattern was replicated among those same immigrant ethnic groups in America. Yet strangely enough, if we stratify the recent American GSS results by primary European ethnic origin, we find nearly the opposite result for Wordsum-IQ, years of education, and family income. Among the higher performing white American groups are the Irish, the Greeks, the Yugoslavs, and the Italians, while Americans of Dutch extraction are near the bottom for whites, as are oldstock Americans who no longer identify with any European country but are presumably British in main ancestry. Meanwhile, German-Americans are generally at or slightly below the white American average.

This pattern of apparently inverted white ethnic achievement in Europe and America becomes less mysterious when we discover it tracks quite well with the rural vs. urban divide. Two of the most heavily rural, least urbanized groups are the Dutch-Americans and Old Stock whites, which perform the worst, while the high-performing Italians, Greeks, and Yugoslavs are among the most heavily urbanized. German-Americans are slightly less urbanized than the average white and also tend to perform slightly below average. In fact, across all non-Hispanic American whites, the Wordsum-IQ gap between those who grew up on farms and those who grew up in cities or suburbs is nearly as large as the gap separating American blacks and whites, and even larger with regard to total years of education.

The origin of this inversion of ethnic hierarchies may be quite simple. When desperately poor immigrant groups such as the Irish, Italians, or Greeks arrived on our shores, they were unable to afford farmland, and therefore permanently remained in their East Coast cities of landing, while less-poor Germans might move to the Midwest and become farmers, following the agricultural choice made by many of the earliest frontier settlers derived from the British and the Dutch. So the more rural populations from Europe often became the more urban ones in America, leading to a gradual inversion of their relative IQ rankings.

If we combine this apparent rural/urban achievement pattern with the evidence of the Flynn Effect, we might speculate that scoring well on an IQ test tends to require a certain amount of “mental priming” or complex stimulation while growing up and that in the past such stimulation tended to be lacking in poor rural areas compared with more urban, affluent, or industrial ones. Obviously, working on a farm in a less developed country carries its own complexity, but it could be that the mental skills exercised are far less applicable to the strongly abstract and analytical thinking required on an IQ test.

This might help to explain the enormous variance in test scores recorded in individual European countries better than the chance possibility that large tested samples overwhelmingly consisted of especially bright or especially dim individuals. Based on this data, the hypothesized developmental impact of a lack of sufficient mental stimulation might be to reduce tested IQs by as much as 10–15 points. And once this socio-cultural environment substantially changes—as in the case of the Irish or Mexican-Americans—what might be called a “Super-Flynn Effect” can occur, involving a very rapid rise in nominal IQs. Obviously, all of this is quite speculative and warrants further investigation.

Sidebar

The East Asian Exception to Socio-Economic IQ Influences

Interestingly enough, these rapid rises in IQ due to changes in the general socio-economic environment appear completely absent when we examine the international or domestic IQ data for East Asian populations, for whom even tenfold differences in real per capita GDP seem to have little or no impact on IQ. Missing this unexpected contrast between the impact of socio-economic factors on Europeans and on East Asians may have been a major reason that Lynn and Vanhanen failed to notice the serious flaws in their “Strong IQ Hypothesis.”

None of these findings would have been possible without the great scholarly effort Richard Lynn and Tatu Vanhanen put into locating and properly presenting an enormous quantity of international IQ data in their books and research papers, as well as their courage in focusing attention on such highly controversial topics. Although I would argue that a close examination of the Lynn/Vanhanen data tend to convincingly refute their own “Strong IQ Hypothesis,” I would be the first to acknowledge my gratitude to the scholars whose efforts made my own analysis possible. Meanwhile, individuals such as Stephen Jay Gould, who commit outright academic fraud in support of their ideological positions, do enormous damage to the credibility of their own camp.

Ron Unz is publisher of The American Conservative and founder of Unz.org.

The East Asian Exception to Socio-Economic IQ Influences

The American Conservative • July 18, 2012 • 1,100 Words

In “Race, IQ, and Wealth,” I examined the pattern of IQ scores for various European peoples as presented by Richard Lynn and Tatu Vanhanen in IQ and the Wealth of Nations and noted the considerable evidence for a large socio-economic influence. In nearly all cases, impoverished, rural populations seemed to exhibit far lower IQ scores than affluent, urban ones, even when the populations compared are genetically indistinguishable. Furthermore, these lower IQs often rise rapidly once conditions improve, in what might be called a “Super-Flynn Effect.”

However, this strong relationship between wealth and nominal IQ seems to disappear when we examine East Asian populations. A few decades ago, China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea, and even Japan had extremely low per capita GDPs relative to those of America or Europe, yet almost all their tested IQs were around 100 or higher, comparable to those of the wealthiest and most advanced European-derived nations. In many cases, their incomes and standards of living were far below those of the impoverished nations of Southern and Eastern Europe, yet they showed no signs of the substantially depressed performance generally found in these latter countries, whose IQs were usually in the 88–94 range. This can be seen in the table below.

For consistency, all these results are drawn directly from Lynn/Vanhanen, and include their Flynn and other IQ adjustments up and down, several of which seemed rather large and arbitrary, with the GDP obtained from the World Bank, adjusted for Purchasing Power Parity (PPP 2005$) unless indicated by an asterisk. Much of this economic data is somewhat uncertain and should be used only for rough comparative purposes. A wide range of additional IQ results from these same countries are found in their 2006 sequel, but these lack testing-date information, making it impossible to compare with income levels or discern historical trends, and they anyway seem to fall into the same range.

This clear pattern of East Asian IQs remaining almost unaffected by depressed socio-economic conditions had also occurred when such ethnic populations lived as small minority groups in America. Whereas in the early decades of the 20th century schoolchildren whose families had immigrated from Southern and Eastern Europe tended to have very low tested IQs, often in the 80–85 range, most studies of that era showed that children from Chinese-American and Japanese-American immigrant backgrounds had IQs similar or even superior to the white mainstream population, despite their much lower socio-economic backgrounds.

One possible explanation of this striking result might be that these East Asian test results actually were artificially depressed due to relative deprivation and that once this condition was alleviated, Asian scores would rapidly rise by the same amounts as had those of various European-origin groups in different periods, perhaps 10–15 points. But this would imply that the fully-adjusted mean IQ scores of East Asians might approach the 120 range, and this seems unlikely, since affluent, well-educated present-day Asian nations such as Japan or South Korea show no evidence of mean IQs so high.

Indeed, the most obvious aspect of the East Asian IQs shown in the table below is that they bear almost no relationship to the wealth of the countries at the time the testing was performed. For example, Japan in 1951 was desperately poor, and its real per capita GDP rose tenfold during the 40 years that followed, but its IQ rose just a couple of points. Similar huge rises in income without significant rises in IQ occurred in South Korea, Taiwan, and other countries. The 2006 sequel by Lynn and Vanhanen provides numerous additional IQ reports from East Asian countries, but they all continue to fall into this same general range of scores. Furthermore, Asian-Americans living in the United States these days are generally affluent, but although they perform very well in school, their tested IQs do not have a mean anywhere near 120.

The most plausible inference from these decades of accumulated data is that the IQs of East Asian peoples tend to be more robust and insulated against the negative impact of cultural or economic deprivation than those of European groups or various others—a truly remarkable finding. This might be due to cultural factors of some type, or perhaps certain aspects of East Asian spoken or written languages. But a fascinating possibility is that this IQ robustness may have a substantially genetic component.

This would be somewhat similar to various physiological findings in recent years. For example, health studies in America have repeatedly shown that individuals of East Asian ancestry tend to have significantly longer life expectancy and lower rates of illness than most other American ethnic groups, and this effect seems independent of other environmental or dietary inputs and persists even after controlling for socio-economic factors. Over one hundred years ago, The Changing Chinese by A.E. Ross, one of America’s greatest early sociologists, provided copious anecdotal evidence indicating greater Chinese resistance to illness and injury and perhaps even an ability to survive on more meager food rations. Certainly these sorts of traits might be expected to have undergone strong selection in a country such as China, whose huge population had lived many centuries at the absolute Malthusian edge of starvation.

With regard to mental traits, decades of testing have established that the intelligence subcomponents of East Asians and Europeans are somewhat different in structure, with East Asians being relatively stronger in spatial ability and Europeans stronger in verbal ability. Since these differences are also found in East Asians raised and acculturated in America and other Western countries, they seem to have a large genetic component. Although this particular result was less well established at the time, the general notion that different groups might have differing relative strengths in particular abilities was the centerpiece of Howard Gardner’s famous “Theory of Multiple Intelligences,” publicized in his 1985 book Frames of Mind, which has received widespread attention in media and educational circles over the last couple of decades.

Although the precise genetic basis of the differing East Asian and European skews in mental ability has not been determined, some corresponding physical traits have already been localized in recent genetic studies, notably skin color. Both Northeast Asians and Northern Europeans tend to have relatively pale skin, presumably due to the evolutionary pressure they experienced to synthesize maximal amounts of Vitamin D under weak sunlight during the thousands of years they lived in northern latitudes. But in the last decade, we have discovered that the particular genetic mechanisms that they evolved to block melanin production and produce lighter skin are dissimilar, having developed via entirely different mutational pathways.

To the extent that East Asian IQs are indeed far less vulnerable to negative socio-economic factors than those of other racial groups, recognizing this fact might make it far easier for us to admit the important role that such environmental influences might play in determining the nominal IQs of other populations.

—Ron Unz

No Quotas, No Elite Public High School

How Los Angeles undercut its pathbreaking IHP project

The American Conservative • October 30, 2012 • 1,200 Words

In late September I attended a memorial service for William M. Fitz-Gibbon, a retired public school teacher who had passed away a few weeks earlier, just short of his 78th birthday.

Without doubt Bill Fitz-Gibbon—“Fitz” to everyone—was the individual who had the greatest academic influence on my life, and my feelings were shared by many others, with hundreds of his former students from the last 35 years attending the service, held at Walter Reed Junior High in the San Fernando Valley area of Los Angeles. But what made his achievement so remarkable is that his decades of teaching had almost entirely been spent—with only mixed success—trying to climb up the down escalator of American education.

Unlike most MIT science graduates with exceptional IQs, he was drawn to teaching, first at private schools in Switzerland and England and later in suburban Los Angeles. He decided the existing system was inadequate for the most able and saw the need for an academically elite public school similar to Stuyvesant and Bronx Science in New York. So in 1971, with the approval of his principal and working with two other teachers, he established his major legacy, the Individualized Honors Program (IHP) at Reed in North Hollywood, taking in some 30 seventh graders, mostly from the local area but with some drawn from across Los Angeles.

When these students moved up to the eighth grade, a new group of seventh graders was enrolled, and this was repeated again the following year, with IHP now containing three teachers and close to 100 seventh through ninth graders, representing the tiniest sliver of the half-million-plus Los Angeles Unified School District. And I had become part of that sliver, entering IHP as a seventh grader in 1973.

Within a few years the program had begun to achieve impressive results, with eighth and ninth graders passing Advanced Placement exams for college credit, the same sort of APs normally taken only by the top 11th and 12th graders at other leading schools. Reed’s IHP became the first and only junior high school in America where a sizable fraction of the students were doing college-level work. The obvious next step—part of the plan from the very beginning—was to extend the program to the upper grades, thereby creating a public school whose achievements would rival those of any in the world. But over three decades it never happened, and therein lies a tale.

Although LA schools had never enjoyed the reputation for academic excellence found in some East Coast cities, they had also never faced the same sort of bitter racial struggles. The suburban Valley was entirely middle class and well over 90 percent white in those days, and although the 1965 Watts Riots had been horrifying, they had taken place 30 miles away over the hills—events you saw on television rather than experienced in daily life.

But the ideological tide of the late 1960s had begun seeping into the public education system, gradually replacing the post-Sputnik push for rigorous academic quality with a focus on “experimentation,” with “New Math” and “Whole Language,” while the benchmark for success shifted from excellence to “equity” or “diversity.”

Meanwhile, a long political battle over proposed forced busing for racial integration—possibly involving daily round-trips of 50 miles or more—became the absolute centerpiece of educational politics and provoked a white exodus from the schools. Unlike on the East Coast, virtually all ordinary Angelenos had traditionally attended local public schools, but over a decade or so a substantial fraction nervously switched to newly established private academies. By the time the busing proposals finally died in court, the LAUSD had suffered a huge loss of its previous middle-class enrollment, and the school board had become ideologically polarized to an extreme degree.

This was the landscape in fall 1984 when I returned to California as a Stanford grad student in theoretical physics, after having spent years away on the East Coast and in England. With the IHP track record now long and impressive, I believed the time might be right to create the intended high school, and working with the IHP teachers and a couple of other IHP alumni, we began the project.

At first, things went extremely well. IHP’s academic results were amazing, but had never been noticed by the media, so sending out a few simple press releases quickly attracted outstanding coverage, including a front-page story in the Los Angeles Times and a full-page article in Time.

With such strong media coverage, we gradually recruited an impressive advisory board of supporters, including six Nobel Laureates, the president of Caltech, the president of the American Physical Society, a past chairman of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, and a former president of the Harvard Law Review. Leading local high-technology companies endorsed the effort, and prominent university professors expressed interest in teaching at the school part-time, including a Caltech Nobel Laureate.

By 1986, we had developed an outline of our proposed School for Advanced Studies and its full curriculum. Even more importantly, we had attracted the backing of the Los Angeles-based Weingart Foundation, which offered to provide $3.5 million in supplemental private funding to help establish the program.

All that remained was receiving authorization from the Los Angeles School Board, but that last hurdle proved insurmountable. For nearly two decades, the board had been bitterly split down the middle between right-wing and left-wing factions. Although the conservatives generally supported our effort, they hardly considered it a major priority, while some of the “progressives” hated it, viewing it as the worst sort of educational elitism.

In particular, they demanded that students be selected by strict racial proportions, which we believed would destroy the program. One of the front-page newspaper articles quoted board member Jackie Goldberg as saying, “If they don’t want quotas, they don’t want a public school.” With LAUSD refusing to allow the school, we explored various other options, but none of them materialized, and our efforts eventually faded away.

The Los Angeles School Board members went back to fighting over unionization issues and planning their future races for city council.

Bill Fitz-Gibbon spent another 20 years teaching at IHP, always hoping to extend the program to high school, but with no more luck than before.

And I became so disgusted at our failure that a college friend finally persuaded me to take a summer job writing software on Wall Street, a decision that unexpectedly marked my permanent defection from a planned academic career in theoretical physics.

The only long-term consequence of our years of effort was that ABC soon created a successful television sitcom called “Head of the Class,” which ran from 1986 to 1991 and featured ten ultra-bright students in a public school program called “IHP.” The show launched the career of Robin Givens, Mike Tyson’s future wife, while one of the other students was actually played by a Reed IHP graduate.

Naturally, the show itself was set in New York City, since everyone knows that a high-powered academic program like that could never exist in an educational backwater such as Los Angeles.

Ron Unz is publisher of the The American Conservative and founder of Unz.org.

The Myth of American Meritocracy

Are elite university admissions based on meritocracy and diversity as claimed?

The American Conservative • November 28, 2012 • 26,200 Words

Just before the Labor Day weekend, a front page New York Times story broke the news of the largest cheating scandal in Harvard University history, in which nearly half the students taking a Government course on the role of Congress had plagiarized or otherwise illegally collaborated on their final exam.[1] Each year, Harvard admits just 1600 freshmen while almost 125 Harvard students now face possible suspension over this single incident. A Harvard dean described the situation as “unprecedented.”

But should we really be so surprised at this behavior among the students at America's most prestigious academic institution? In the last generation or two, the funnel of opportunity in American society has drastically narrowed, with a greater and greater proportion of our financial, media, business, and political elites being drawn from a relatively small number of our leading universities, together with their professional schools. The rise of a Henry Ford, from farm boy mechanic to world business tycoon, seems virtually impossible today, as even America's most successful college dropouts such as Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg often turn out to be extremely well-connected former Harvard students. Indeed, the early success of Facebook was largely due to the powerful imprimatur it enjoyed from its exclusive availability first only at Harvard and later restricted to just the Ivy League.

During this period, we have witnessed a huge national decline in well-paid middle class jobs in the manufacturing sector and other sources of employment for those lacking college degrees, with median American wages having been stagnant or declining for the last forty years. Meanwhile, there has been an astonishing concentration of wealth at the top, with America's richest 1 percent now possessing nearly as much net wealth as the bottom 95 percent.[2] This situation, sometimes described as a “winner take all society,” leaves families desperate to maximize the chances that their children will reach the winners' circle, rather than risk failure and poverty or even merely a spot in the rapidly deteriorating middle class. And the best single means of becoming such an economic winner is to gain admission to a top university, which provides an easy ticket to the wealth of Wall Street or similar venues, whose leading firms increasingly restrict their hiring to graduates of the Ivy League or a tiny handful of other top colleges.[3] On the other side, finance remains the favored employment choice for Harvard, Yale or Princeton students after the diplomas are handed out.[4]

The Battle for Elite College Admissions

As a direct consequence, the war over college admissions has become astonishingly fierce, with many middle- or upper-middle class families investing quantities of time and money that would have seemed unimaginable a generation or more ago, leading to an all-against-all arms race that immiserates the student and exhausts the parents. The absurd parental efforts of an Amy Chua, as recounted in her 2010 bestseller Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, were simply a much more extreme version of widespread behavior among her peer-group, which is why her story resonated so deeply among our educated elites. Over the last thirty years, America's test-prep companies have grown from almost nothing into a $5 billion annual industry, allowing the affluent to provide an admissions edge to their less able children. Similarly, the enormous annual tuition of $35,000 charged by elite private schools such as Dalton or Exeter is less for a superior high school education than for the hope of a greatly increased chance to enter the Ivy League.[5] Many New York City parents even go to enormous efforts to enroll their children in the best possible pre-Kindergarten program, seeking early placement on the educational conveyer belt which eventually leads to Harvard.[6] Others cut corners in a more direct fashion, as revealed in the huge SAT cheating rings recently uncovered in affluent New York suburbs, in which students were paid thousands of dollars to take SAT exams for their wealthier but dimmer classmates.[7]

But given such massive social and economic value now concentrated in a Harvard or Yale degree, the tiny handful of elite admissions gatekeepers enjoy enormous, almost unprecedented power to shape the leadership of our society by allocating their supply of thick envelopes. Even billionaires, media barons, and U.S. Senators may weigh their words and actions more carefully as their children approach college age. And if such power is used to select our future elites in a corrupt manner, perhaps the inevitable result is the selection of corrupt elites, with terrible consequences for America. Thus, the huge Harvard cheating scandal, and perhaps also the endless series of financial, business, and political scandals which have rocked our country over the last decade or more, even while our national economy has stagnated.

Just a few years ago Pulitzer Prize-winning former Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Golden published The Price of Admission, a devastating account of the corrupt admissions practices at so many of our leading universities, in which every sort of non-academic or financial factor plays a role in privileging the privileged and thereby squeezing out those high-ability, hard-working students who lack any special hook. In one particularly egregious case, a wealthy New Jersey real estate developer, later sent to Federal prison on political corruption charges, paid Harvard $2.5 million to help ensure admission of his completely under-qualified son.[8] When we consider that Harvard's existing endowment was then at $15 billion and earning almost $7 million each day in investment earnings, we see that a culture of financial corruption has developed an absurd illogic of its own, in which senior Harvard administrators sell their university's honor for just a few hours worth of its regular annual income, the equivalent of a Harvard instructor raising a grade for a hundred dollars in cash.

An admissions system based on non-academic factors often amounting to institutionalized venality would seem strange or even unthinkable among the top universities of most other advanced nations in Europe or Asia, though such practices are widespread in much of the corrupt Third World. The notion of a wealthy family buying their son his entrance into the Grandes Ecoles of France or the top Japanese universities would be an absurdity, and the academic rectitude of Europe's Nordic or Germanic nations is even more severe, with those far more egalitarian societies anyway tending to deemphasize university rankings.

Or consider the case of China. There, legions of angry microbloggers endlessly denounce the official corruption and abuse which permeate so much of the economic system. But we almost never hear accusations of favoritism in university admissions, and this impression of strict meritocracy determined by the results of the national Gaokao college entrance examination has been confirmed to me by individuals familiar with that country. Since all the world's written exams may ultimately derive from China's old imperial examination system, which was kept remarkably clean for 1300 years, such practices are hardly surprising.[9] Attending a prestigious college is regarded by ordinary Chinese as their children's greatest hope of rapid upward mobility and is therefore often a focus of enormous family effort; China's ruling elites may rightly fear that a policy of admitting their own dim and lazy heirs to leading schools ahead of the higher-scoring children of the masses might ignite a widespread popular uprising. This perhaps explains why so many sons and daughters of top Chinese leaders attend college in the West: enrolling them at a third-rate Chinese university would be a tremendous humiliation, while our own corrupt admissions practices get them an easy spot at Harvard or Stanford, sitting side by side with the children of Bill Clinton, Al Gore, and George W. Bush.

Although the evidence of college admissions corruption presented in Golden's book is quite telling, the focus is almost entirely on current practices, and largely anecdotal rather than statistical. For a broader historical perspective, we should consider The Chosen by Berkeley sociologist Jerome Karabel, an exhaustive and award-winning 2005 narrative history of the last century of admissions policy at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton (I will henceforth sometimes abbreviate these “top three” most elite schools as “HYP”).

Karabel's massive documentation—over 700 pages and 3000 endnotes—establishes the remarkable fact that America's uniquely complex and subjective system of academic admissions actually arose as a means of covert ethnic tribal warfare. During the 1920s, the established Northeastern Anglo-Saxon elites who then dominated the Ivy League wished to sharply curtail the rapidly growing numbers of Jewish students, but their initial attempts to impose simple numerical quotas provoked enormous controversy and faculty opposition.[10] Therefore, the approach subsequently taken by Harvard President A. Lawrence Lowell and his peers was to transform the admissions process from a simple objective test of academic merit into a complex and holistic consideration of all aspects of each individual applicant; the resulting opacity permitted the admission or rejection of any given applicant, allowing the ethnicity of the student body to be shaped as desired. As a consequence, university leaders could honestly deny the existence of any racial or religious quotas, while still managing to reduce Jewish enrollment to a much lower level, and thereafter hold it almost constant during the decades which followed.[11] For example, the Jewish portion of Harvard's entering class dropped from nearly 30 percent in 1925 to 15 percent the following year and remained roughly static until the period of the Second World War.[12]

As Karabel repeatedly demonstrates, the major changes in admissions policy which later followed were usually determined by factors of raw political power and the balance of contending forces rather than any idealistic considerations. For example, in the aftermath of World War II, Jewish organizations and their allies mobilized their political and media resources to pressure the universities into increasing their ethnic enrollment by modifying the weight assigned to various academic and non-academic factors, raising the importance of the former over the latter. Then a decade or two later, this exact process was repeated in the opposite direction, as the early 1960s saw black activists and their liberal political allies pressure universities to bring their racial minority enrollments into closer alignment with America's national population by partially shifting away from their recently enshrined focus on purely academic considerations. Indeed, Karabel notes that the most sudden and extreme increase in minority enrollment took place at Yale in the years 1968–69, and was largely due to fears of race riots in heavily black New Haven, which surrounded the campus.[13]

Philosophical consistency appears notably absent in many of the prominent figures involved in these admissions battles, with both liberals and conservatives sometimes favoring academic merit and sometimes non-academic factors, whichever would produce the particular ethnic student mix they desired for personal or ideological reasons. Different political blocs waged long battles for control of particular universities, and sudden large shifts in admissions rates occurred as these groups gained or lost influence within the university apparatus: Yale replaced its admissions staff in 1965 and the following year Jewish numbers nearly doubled.[14]

At times, external judicial or political forces would be summoned to override university admissions policy, often succeeding in this aim. Karabel's own ideological leanings are hardly invisible, as he hails efforts by state legislatures to force Ivy League schools to lift their de facto Jewish quotas, but seems to regard later legislative attacks on “affirmative action” as unreasonable assaults on academic freedom.[15] The massively footnoted text of The Chosen might lead one to paraphrase Clausewitz and conclude that our elite college admissions policy often consists of ethnic warfare waged by other means, or even that it could be summarized as a simple Leninesque question of “Who, Whom?”

Although nearly all of Karabel's study is focused on the earlier history of admissions policy at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, with the developments of the last three decades being covered in just a few dozen pages, he finds complete continuity down to the present day, with the notorious opacity of the admissions process still allowing most private universities to admit whomever they want for whatever reasons they want, even if the reasons and the admissions decisions may eventually change over the years. Despite these plain facts, Harvard and the other top Ivy League schools today publicly deny any hint of discrimination along racial or ethnic lines, except insofar as they acknowledge providing an admissions boost to under-represented racial minorities, such as blacks or Hispanics. But given the enormous control these institutions exert on our larger society, we should test these claims against the evidence of the actual enrollment statistics.

Asian-Americans as the “New Jews”

The overwhelming focus of Karabel's book is on changes in Jewish undergraduate percentages at each university, and this is probably less due to his own ethnic heritage than because the data provides an extremely simple means of charting the ebb and flow of admissions policy: Jews were a high-performing group, whose numbers could only be restricted by major deviations from an objective meritocratic standard.

Obviously, anti-Jewish discrimination in admissions no longer exists at any of these institutions, but a roughly analogous situation may be found with a group whom Golden and others have sometimes labeled “The New Jews,” namely Asian-Americans. Since their strong academic performance is coupled with relatively little political power, they would be obvious candidates for discrimination in the harsh realpolitik of university admissions as documented by Karabel, and indeed he briefly raises the possibility of an anti-Asian admissions bias, before concluding that the elite universities are apparently correct in denying that it exists.[16]

There certainly does seem considerable anecdotal evidence that many Asians perceive their chances of elite admission as being drastically reduced by their racial origins.[17] For example, our national newspapers have revealed that students of part-Asian background have regularly attempted to conceal the non-white side of their ancestry when applying to Harvard and other elite universities out of concern it would greatly reduce their chances of admission.[18] Indeed, widespread perceptions of racial discrimination are almost certainly the primary factor behind the huge growth in the number of students refusing to reveal their racial background at top universities, with the percentage of Harvard students classified as “race unknown” having risen from almost nothing to a regular 5–15 percent of all undergraduates over the last twenty years, with similar levels reached at other elite schools.

Such fears that checking the “Asian” box on an admissions application may lead to rejection are hardly unreasonable, given that studies have documented a large gap between the average test scores of whites and Asians successfully admitted to elite universities. Princeton sociologist Thomas J. Espenshade and his colleagues have demonstrated that among undergraduates at highly selective schools such as the Ivy League, white students have mean scores 310 points higher on the 1600 SAT scale than their black classmates, but Asian students average 140 points above whites.[19] The former gap is an automatic consequence of officially acknowledged affirmative action policies, while the latter appears somewhat mysterious.

These broad statistical differences in the admission requirements for Asians are given a human face in Golden's discussions of this subject, in which he recounts numerous examples of Asian-American students who overcame dire family poverty, immigrant adversity, and other enormous personal hardships to achieve stellar academic performance and extracurricular triumphs, only to be rejected by all their top university choices. His chapter is actually entitled “The New Jews,” and he notes the considerable irony that a university such as Vanderbilt will announce a public goal of greatly increasing its Jewish enrollment and nearly triple those numbers in just four years, while showing very little interest in admitting high-performing Asian students.[20]

All these elite universities strongly deny the existence of any sort of racial discrimination against Asians in the admissions process, let alone an “Asian quota,” with senior administrators instead claiming that the potential of each student is individually evaluated via a holistic process far superior to any mechanical reliance on grades or test scores; but such public postures are identical to those taken by their academic predecessors in the 1920s and 1930s as documented by Karabel. Fortunately, we can investigate the plausibility of these claims by examining the decades of officially reported enrollment data available from the website of the National Center for Educational Statistics (NCES).

The ethnic composition of Harvard undergraduates certainly follows a highly intriguing pattern. Harvard had always had a significant Asian-American enrollment, generally running around 5 percent when I had attended in the early 1980s. But during the following decade, the size of America's Asian middle class grew rapidly, leading to a sharp rise in applications and admissions, with Asians exceeding 10 percent of undergraduates by the late 1980s and crossing the 20 percent threshold by 1993. However, from that year forward, the Asian numbers went into reverse, generally stagnating or declining during the two decades which followed, with the official 2011 figure being 17.2 percent.[21]

Even more surprising has been the sheer constancy of these percentages, with almost every year from 1995–2011 showing an Asian enrollment within a single point of the 16.5 percent average, despite huge fluctuations in the number of applications and the inevitable uncertainty surrounding which students will accept admission. By contrast, prior to 1993 Asian enrollment had often changed quite substantially from year to year. It is interesting to note that this exactly replicates the historical pattern observed by Karabel, in which Jewish enrollment rose very rapidly, leading to imposition of an informal quota system, after which the number of Jews fell substantially, and thereafter remained roughly constant for decades. On the face of it, ethnic enrollment levels which widely diverge from academic performance data or application rates and which remain remarkably static over time provide obvious circumstantial evidence for at least a de facto ethnic quota system.

In another strong historical parallel, all the other Ivy League universities seem to have gone through similar shifts in Asian enrollment at similar times and reached a similar plateau over the last couple of decades. As mentioned, the share of Asians at Harvard peaked at over 20 percent in 1993, then immediately declined and thereafter remained roughly constant at a level 3–5 points lower. Asians at Yale reached a 16.8 percent maximum in that same year, and soon dropped by about 3 points to a roughly constant level. The Columbia peak also came in 1993 and the Cornell peak in 1995, in both cases followed by the same substantial drop, and the same is true for most of their East Coast peers. During the mid- to late-1980s, there had been some public controversy in the media regarding allegations of anti-Asian discrimination in the Ivy League, and the Federal Government eventually even opened an investigation into the matter.[22] But once that investigation was closed in 1991, Asian enrollments across all those universities rapidly converged to the same level of approximately 16 percent, and remained roughly static thereafter (See chart below). In fact, the yearly fluctuations in Asian enrollments are often smaller than were the changes in Jewish numbers during the “quota era” of the past,[23] and are roughly the same relative size as the fluctuations in black enrollments, even though the latter are heavily influenced by the publicly declared “ethnic diversity goals” of those same institutions.

The largely constant Asian numbers at these elite colleges are particularly strange when we consider that the underlying population of Asians in America has been anything but static, instead growing at the fastest pace of any American racial group, having increased by almost 50 percent during the last decade, and more than doubling since 1993. Obviously, the relevant ratio would be to the 18–21 age cohort, but adjusting for this factor changes little: based on Census data, the college-age ratio of Asians to whites increased by 94 percent between 1994 and 2011, even while the ratio of Asians to whites at Harvard and Columbia fell over these same years.[24]

Put another way, the percentage of college-age Asian-Americans attending Harvard peaked around 1993, and has since dropped by over 50 percent, a decline somewhat larger than the fall in Jewish enrollment which followed the imposition of secret quotas in 1925.[25] And we have noted the parallel trends in the other Ivy League schools, which also replicates the historical pattern.

Trends of Asian enrollment at Caltech and the Ivy League universities, compared with growth of Asian college-age population; Asian age cohort population figures are based on Census CPS, and given the small sample size, are subject to considerable yearly statistical fluctuations. Source: Appendices B and C.

Furthermore, during this exact same period a large portion of the Asian-American population moved from first-generation immigrant poverty into the ranks of the middle class, greatly raising their educational aspirations for their children. Although elite universities generally refuse to release their applicant totals for different racial groups, some data occasionally becomes available. Princeton's records show that between 1980 and 1989, Asian-American applications increased by over 400 percent compared to just 8 percent for other groups, with an even more rapid increase for Brown during 1980-1987, while Harvard's Asian applicants increased over 250 percent between 1976 and 1985.[26] It seems likely that the statistics for other Ivy League schools would have followed a similar pattern and these trends would have at least partially continued over the decades which followed, just as the Asian presence has skyrocketed at selective public feeder schools such as Stuyvesant and Bronx Science in New York City and also at the top East Coast prep schools. Yet none of these huge changes in the underlying pool of Asian applicants seemed to have had noticeable impact on the number admitted to Harvard or most of the Ivy League.

Estimating Asian Merit

One obvious possible explanation for these trends might be a decline in average Asian scholastic performance, which would certainly be possible if more and more Asian students from the lower levels of the ability pool were pursuing an elite education.[27] The mean SAT scores for Asian students show no such large decline, but since we would expect elite universities to draw their students from near the absolute top of the performance curve, average scores by race are potentially less significant than the Asian fraction of America's highest performing students.

To the extent that the hundred thousand or so undergraduates at Ivy League schools and their approximate peers are selected by academic merit, they would mostly be drawn from the top one-half to one percent of their American age-cohort, and this is the appropriate pool to consider. It is perfectly possible that a particular ethnic population might have a relatively high mean SAT score, while still being somewhat less well represented in that top percent or so of measured ability; racial performance does not necessarily follow an exact “bell curve” distribution. For one thing, a Census category such as “Asian” is hardly homogenous or monolithic, with South Asians and East Asians such as Chinese and Koreans generally having much higher performance compared to other groups such as Filipinos, Vietnamese, or Cambodians, just as the various types of “Hispanics” such as Cubans, Mexicans, and Puerto Ricans differ widely in their socio-economic and academic profiles. Furthermore, the percentage of a given group taking the SAT may change over time, and the larger the percentage taking that test, the more that total will include weaker students, thereby depressing the average score.

Fortunately, allegations of anti-Asian admissions bias have become a topic of widespread and heated debate on the Internet, and disgruntled Asian-American activists have diligently located various types of data to support their accusations, with the recent ethnic distribution of National Merit Scholarship (NMS) semifinalists being among the most persuasive. Students receiving this official designation represent approximately the top one-half of one percent of a state's high school students as determined by their scores on the PSAT, twin brother to the SAT. Each year, the NMS Corporation distributes the names and schools of these semifinalists for each state, and dozens of these listings have been tracked down and linked on the Internet by determined activists, who have then sometimes estimated the ethnic distribution of the semifinalists by examining their family names.[28] Obviously, such a name analysis provides merely an approximate result, but the figures are striking enough to warrant the exercise. (All these NMS semifinalist estimates are discussed in Appendix E.)[29]

For example, California has a population comparable to that of the next two largest states combined, and its 2010 total of 2,003 NMS semifinalists included well over 1,100 East Asian or South Asian family names. California may be one of the most heavily Asian states, but even so Asians of high school age are still outnumbered by whites roughly 3-to-1, while there were far more high scoring Asians. Put another way, although Asians represented only about 11 percent of California high school students, they constituted almost 60 percent of the top scoring ones. California's list of NMS semifinalists from 2012 also followed a very similar ethnic pattern. Obviously, such an analysis based on last names is hardly precise, but it is probably correct to within a few percent, which is sufficient for our crude analytical purposes.

In addition, the number of test-takers is sufficiently large that an examination of especially distinctive last names allows us to pinpoint and roughly quantify the academic performance of different Asian groups. For example, the name “Nguyen” is uniquely Vietnamese and carried by about 1 in 3.6 of all Americans of that ethnicity, while “Kim” is just as uniquely Korean, with one in 5.5 Korean-Americans bearing that name.[30] By comparing the prevalence of these particular names on the California NMS semifinalist lists with the total size of the corresponding California ethnicities, we can estimate that California Vietnamese are significantly more likely than whites to score very highly on such tests, while Koreans seem to do eight times better than whites and California's Chinese even better still. (All these results rely upon the simplifying assumption that these different Asian groups are roughly proportional in their numbers of high school seniors.)

Interestingly enough, these Asian performance ratios are remarkably similar to those worked out by Nathaniel Weyl in his 1989 book The Geography of American Achievement, in which he estimated that Korean and Chinese names were over-represented by 1000 percent or more on the complete 1987 lists of national NMS semifinalists, while Vietnamese names were only somewhat more likely to appear than the white average.[31] This consistency is quite impressive when we consider that America's Asian population has tripled since the late 1980s, with major changes as well in socio-economic distribution and other characteristics.

The results for states other than California reflect this same huge abundance of high performing Asian students. In Texas, Asians are just 3.8 percent of the population but were over a quarter of the NMS semifinalists in 2010, while the 2.4 percent of Florida Asians provided between 10 percent and 16 percent of the top students in the six years from 2008 to 2013 for which I have been able to obtain the NMS lists. Even in New York, which contains one of our nation's most affluent and highly educated white populations and also remains by far the most heavily Jewish state, Asian over-representation was enormous: the Asian 7.3 percent of the population—many of them impoverished immigrant families—accounted for almost one-third of all top scoring New York students.

America's eight largest states contain nearly half our total population as well as over 60 percent of all Asian-Americans, and each has at least one NMS semifinalist list available for the years 2010–2012. Asians account for just 6 percent of the population in these states, but contribute almost one-third of all the names on these rosters of high performing students. Even this result may be a substantial underestimate, since over half these Asians are found in gigantic California, where extremely stiff academic competition has driven the qualifying NMS semifinalist threshold score to nearly the highest in the country; if students were selected based on a single nationwide standard, Asian numbers would surely be much higher. This pattern extends to the aggregate of the twenty-five states whose lists are available, with Asians constituting 5 percent of the total population but almost 28 percent of semifinalists. Extrapolating these state results to the national total, we would expect 25–30 percent of America's highest scoring high school seniors to be of Asian origin.[32] This figure is far above the current Asian enrollment at Harvard or the rest of the Ivy League.

Ironically enough, the methodology used to select these NMS semifinalists may considerably understate the actual number of very high-ability Asian students. According to testing experts, the three main subcomponents of intellectual ability are verbal, mathematical, and visuospatial, with the last of these representing the mental manipulation of objects. Yet the qualifying NMS scores are based on math, reading, and writing tests, with the last two both corresponding to verbal ability, and without any test of visuospatial skills. Even leaving aside the language difficulties which students from an immigrant background might face, East Asians tend to be weakest in the verbal category and strongest in the visuospatial, so NMS semifinalists are being selected by a process which excludes the strongest Asian component and doubles the weight of the weakest.[33]

This evidence of a massively disproportionate Asian presence among top-performing students only increases if we examine the winners of national academic competitions, especially those in mathematics and science, where judging is the most objective. Each year, America picks its five strongest students to represent our country in the International Math Olympiad, and during the three decades since 1980, some 34 percent of these team members have been Asian-American, with the corresponding figure for the International Computing Olympiad being 27 percent. The Intel Science Talent Search, begun in 1942 under the auspices of the Westinghouse Corporation, is America's most prestigious high school science competition, and since 1980 some 32 percent of the 1320 finalists have been of Asian ancestry (see Appendix F).

Given that Asians accounted for just 1.5 percent of the population in 1980 and often lived in relatively impoverished immigrant families, the longer-term historical trends are even more striking. Asians were less than 10 percent of U.S. Math Olympiad winners during the 1980s, but rose to a striking 58 percent of the total during the last thirteen years 2000–2012. For the Computing Olympiad, Asian winners averaged about 20 percent of the total during most of the 1990s and 2000s, but grew to 50 percent during 2009–2010 and a remarkable 75 percent during 2011–2012.

The statistical trend for the Science Talent Search finalists, numbering many thousands of top science students, has been the clearest: Asians constituted 22 percent of the total in the 1980s, 29 percent in the 1990s, 36 percent in the 2000s, and 64 percent in the 2010s. In particular science subjects, the Physics Olympiad winners follow a similar trajectory, with Asians accounting for 23 percent of the winners during the 1980s, 25 percent during the 1990s, 46 percent during the 2000s, and a remarkable 81 percent since 2010. The 2003–2012 Biology Olympiad winners were 68 percent Asian and Asians took an astonishing 90 percent of the top spots in the recent Chemistry Olympiads. Some 61 percent of the Siemens AP Awards from 2002–2011 went to Asians, including thirteen of the fourteen top national prizes.

Yet even while all these specific Asian-American academic achievement trends were rising at such an impressive pace, the relative enrollment of Asians at Harvard was plummeting, dropping by over half during the last twenty years, with a range of similar declines also occurring at Yale, Cornell, and most other Ivy League universities. Columbia, in the heart of heavily Asian New York City, showed the steepest decline of all.

There may even be a logical connection between these two contradictory trends. On the one hand, America over the last two decades has produced a rapidly increasing population of college-age Asians, whose families are increasingly affluent, well-educated, and eager to secure an elite education for their children. But on the other hand, it appears that these leading academic institutions have placed a rather strict upper limit on actual Asian enrollments, forcing these Asian students to compete more and more fiercely for a very restricted number of openings. This has sparked a massive Asian-American arms-race in academic performance at high schools throughout the country, as seen above in the skyrocketing math and science competition results. When a far greater volume of applicants is squeezed into a pipeline of fixed size, the pressure can grow enormously.

The implications of such massive pressure may be seen in a widely-discussed front page 2005 Wall Street Journal story entitled “The New White Flight.”[34] The article described the extreme academic intensity at several predominantly Asian high schools in Cupertino and other towns in Silicon Valley, and the resulting exodus of white students, who preferred to avoid such an exceptionally focused and competitive academic environment, which included such severe educational tension. But should the families of those Asian students be blamed if according to Espensade and his colleagues their children require far higher academic performance than their white classmates to have a similar chance of gaining admission to selective colleges?

Although the “Asian Tiger Mom” behavior described by author Amy Chua provoked widespread hostility and ridicule, consider the situation from her perspective. Being herself a Harvard graduate, she would like her daughters to follow in her own Ivy League footsteps, but is probably aware that the vast growth in Asian applicants with no corresponding increase in allocated Asian slots requires heroic efforts to shape the perfect application package. Since Chua's husband is not Asian, she could obviously encourage her children to improve their admissions chances by concealing their ethnic identity during the application process; but this would surely represent an enormous personal humiliation for a proud and highly successful Illinois-born American of Chinese ancestry.

The claim that most elite American universities employ a de facto Asian quota system is certainly an inflammatory charge in our society. Indeed, our media and cultural elites view any accusations of “racial discrimination” as being among the most horrific of all possible charges, sometimes even regarded as more serious than mass murder.[35] So before concluding that these accusations are probably true and considering possible social remedies, we should carefully reconsider their plausibility, given that they are largely based upon a mixture of circumstantial statistical evidence and the individual anecdotal cases presented by Golden and a small handful of other critical journalists. One obvious approach is to examine enrollment figures at those universities which for one reason or another may follow a different policy.

According to incoming student test scores and recent percentages of National Merit Scholars, four American universities stand at the absolute summit of average student quality—Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Caltech, the California Institute of Technology; and of these Caltech probably ranks first among equals.[36] Those three top Ivies continue to employ the same admissions system which Karabel describes as “opaque,” “flexible,” and allowing enormous “discretion,”[37] a system originally established to restrict the admission of high-performing Jews. But Caltech selects its students by strict academic standards, with Golden praising it for being America's shining example of a purely meritocratic university, almost untouched by the financial or political corruption so widespread in our other elite institutions. And since the beginning of the 1990s, Caltech's Asian-American enrollment has risen almost exactly in line with the growth of America's underlying Asian population, with Asians now constituting nearly 40 percent of each class (See chart on p. 18).

Obviously, the Caltech curriculum is narrowly focused on mathematics, science, and engineering, and since Asians tend to be especially strong in those subjects, the enrollment statistics might be somewhat distorted compared to a more academically balanced university. Therefore, we should also consider the enrollment figures for the highly-regarded University of California system, particularly its five most prestigious and selective campuses: Berkeley, UCLA, San Diego, Davis, and Irvine. The 1996 passage of Proposition 209 had outlawed the use of race or ethnicity in admissions decisions, and while administrative compliance has certainly not been absolute—Golden noted the evidence of some continued anti-Asian discrimination—the practices do seem to have moved in the general direction of race-blind meritocracy.[38] And the 2011 Asian-American enrollment at those five elite campuses ranged from 34 percent to 49 percent, with a weighted average of almost exactly 40 percent, identical to that of Caltech.[39]

In considering these statistics, we must take into account that California is one of our most heavily Asian states, containing over one-quarter of the total national population, but also that a substantial fraction of UC students are drawn from other parts of the country. The recent percentage of Asian NMS semifinalists in California has ranged between 55 percent and 60 percent, while for the rest of America the figure is probably closer to 20 percent, so an overall elite-campus UC Asian-American enrollment of around 40 percent seems reasonably close to what a fully meritocratic admissions system might be expected to produce.

By contrast, consider the anomalous admissions statistics for Columbia. New York City contains America's largest urban Asian population, and Asians are one-third or more of the entire state's top scoring high school students. Over the last couple of decades, the local Asian population has doubled in size and Asians now constitute over two-thirds of the students attending the most selective local high schools such as Stuyvesant and Bronx Science, perhaps triple the levels during the mid-1980s.[40] Yet whereas in 1993 Asians made up 22.7 percent of Columbia's undergraduates, the total had dropped to 15.6 percent by 2011. These figures seem extremely difficult to explain except as evidence of sharp racial bias.

Asian-Americans and Jews

A natural question to consider is the surprising lack of attention this issue seems to have attracted, despite such remarkably telling statistics and several articles over the years in major newspapers by Golden and other prominent journalists. One would think that a widespread practice of racial discrimination by America's most elite private universities—themselves leading bastions of “Political Correctness” and strident anti-racist ideology—would attract much more public scrutiny, especially given their long prior history of very similar exclusionary policies with regard to Jewish enrollment.[41] Without such scrutiny and the political mobilization it generates, the status quo seems unlikely to change.[42]

Indeed, Karabel convincingly demonstrates that the collapse of the long-standing Jewish quotas in the Ivy League during the decade following World War II only occurred as a result of massive media and political pressure, pressure surely facilitated by very heavy Jewish ownership of America's major media organs, including all three television networks, eight of nine major Hollywood studios, and many of the leading newspapers, including both the New York Times and the Washington Post. By contrast, Asian-Americans today neither own nor control even a single significant media outlet, and they constitute an almost invisible minority in films, television, radio, and print. For most Americans, what the media does not report simply does not exist, and there is virtually no major media coverage of what appear to be de facto Asian quotas at our top academic institutions.

But before we conclude that our elite media organs are engaging in an enormous “conspiracy of silence” regarding this egregious pattern of racial discrimination at our most prestigious universities, we should explore alternate explanations for these striking results. Perhaps we are considering the evidence from entirely the wrong perspective, and ignoring the most obvious—and relatively innocuous—explanation.

In recent decades, the notion of basing admissions on “colorblind” meritocratic standards such as standardized academic test scores has hardly been an uncontroversial position, with advocates for a fully “diversified” student body being far more prominent within the academic community. Indeed, one of the main attacks against California's 1996 Proposition 209 was that its requirement of race-neutrality in admissions would destroy the ethnic diversity of California's higher education system, and the measure was vigorously opposed by the vast majority of vocal university academics, both within that state and throughout the nation. Most leading progressives have long argued that the students selected by our elite institutions should at least roughly approximate the distribution of America's national population, requiring that special consideration be given to underrepresented or underprivileged groups of all types.

We must remember that at all the universities discussed above, Asian students are already enrolled in numbers far above their 5 percent share of the national population, and the Iron Law of Arithmetic is that percentages must always total to one hundred. So if additional slots were allocated to Asian applicants, these must necessarily come from some other group, perhaps blacks raised in the ghettos of Detroit or desperately poor Appalachian whites, who might be the first in their families to attend college. These days in America, most Asians are a heavily urbanized, highly affluent population,[43] overwhelmingly part of the middle- or upper-middle class, and boosting their Harvard numbers from three times their share of the population up to five or six might not be regarded as the best policy when other groups are far needier. To be sure, the broad racial category “Asian” hides enormous internal complexity—with Chinese, Koreans, and South Asians being far more successful than Filipinos, Vietnamese, or Cambodians—but that is just as true of the equally broad “white” or “Hispanic” labels, which also conceal much more than they reveal.

Furthermore, elite universities explicitly claim to consider a wide range of other admissions factors besides academic performance. Geographical diversity would certainly hurt Asian chances since nearly half their population lives in just the three states of California, New York, and Texas.[44] Top athletes gain a strong admissions edge, and few Asians are found in the upper ranks of basketball, football, baseball, and other leading sports, an occasional Jeremy Lin notwithstanding. Since most Asians come from a recent immigrant background, they would rarely receive the “legacy boost” going to students whose families have been attending the Ivy League for generations. And it is perfectly possible that ideological considerations of diversity and equity might make administrators reluctant to allow any particular group to become too heavily over-represented relative to its share of the general population. So perhaps highly-qualified Asians are not being rejected as Asians, but simply due to these pre-existing ideological and structural policies of our top universities, whether or not we happen to agree with them.[45] In fact, when an Asian student rejected by Harvard filed a complaint of racial discrimination with the U.S. Department of Education earlier this year, the Harvard Crimson denounced his charges as “ludicrous,” arguing that student diversity was a crucial educational goal and that affirmative action impacted Asians no more than any other applicant group.[46]

The best means of testing this hypothesis would be to compare Asian admissions with those of a somewhat similar control group. One obvious candidate would be the population of elite East Coast WASPs which once dominated the Ivy League. Members of this group should also be negatively impacted by admissions preferences directed towards applicants from rural or impoverished backgrounds, but there seems considerable anecdotal evidence that they are still heavily over-represented in the Ivy League relative to their academic performance or athletic prowess, strengthening the suspicion that Asian applicants are receiving unfair treatment. However, solid statistical data regarding this elite WASP subpopulation is almost non-existent, and anyway the boundaries of the category are quite imprecise and fluid across generations. For example, the two wealthy Winklevoss twins of Greenwich, Conn. and Harvard Facebook fame might appear to be perfect examples of this social class, but their grandfather actually had an eighth-grade education and came from a long line of impoverished coalminers in rural Pennsylvania.[47]

Fortunately, an alternate comparison population is readily available, namely that of American Jews,[48] a group which is both reasonably well-defined and one which possesses excellent statistical information, gathered by various Jewish organizations and academic scholars. In particular, Hillel, the nationwide Jewish student organization with chapters on most major university campuses, has for decades been providing extensive data on Jewish enrollment levels. Since Karabel's own historical analysis focuses so very heavily on Jewish admissions, his book also serves as a compendium of useful quantitative data drawn from these and similar sources.[49]

Once we begin separating out the Jewish portion of Ivy League enrollment, our picture of the overall demographics of the student bodies is completely transformed. Indeed, Karabel opens the final chapter of his book by performing exactly this calculation and noting the extreme irony that the WASP demographic group which had once so completely dominated America's elite universities and “virtually all the major institutions of American life” had by 2000 become “a small and beleaguered minority at Harvard,” being actually fewer in number than the Jews whose presence they had once sought to restrict.[50] Very similar results seem to apply all across the Ivy League, with the disproportion often being even greater than the particular example emphasized by Karabel.

In fact, Harvard reported that 45.0 percent of its undergraduates in 2011 were white Americans, but since Jews were 25 percent of the student body, the enrollment of non-Jewish whites might have been as low as 20 percent, though the true figure was probably somewhat higher.[51] The Jewish levels for Yale and Columbia were also around 25 percent, while white Gentiles were 22 percent at the former and just 15 percent at the latter. The remainder of the Ivy League followed this same general pattern.

This overrepresentation of Jews is really quite extraordinary, since the group currently constitutes just 2.1 percent of the general population and about 1.8 percent of college-age Americans.[52] Thus, although Asian-American high school graduates each year outnumber their Jewish classmates nearly three-to-one, American Jews are far more numerous at Harvard and throughout the Ivy League. Both groups are highly urbanized, generally affluent, and geographically concentrated within a few states, so the “diversity” factors considered above would hardly seem to apply; yet Jews seem to fare much better at the admissions office.

Even more remarkable are the historical trajectories. As noted earlier, America's Asian population has been growing rapidly over the last couple of decades, so the substantial decline in reported Ivy League Asian enrollment has actually constituted a huge drop relative to their fraction of the population. Meanwhile, the population of American Jews has been approximately constant in numbers, and aging along with the rest of the white population, leading to a sharp decline in the national proportion of college-age Jews, falling from 2.6 percent in 1972 and 2.2 percent in 1992 to just 1.8 percent in 2012. Nevertheless, total Jewish enrollment at elite universities has held constant or actually increased, indicating a large rise in relative Jewish admissions. In fact, if we aggregate the reported enrollment figures, we discover that 4 percent of all college-age American Jews are currently enrolled in the Ivy League, compared to just 1 percent of Asians and about 0.1 percent of whites of Christian background.[53]

One reasonable explanation for these remarkable statistics might be that although Asian-Americans are a high-performing academic group, American Jews may be far higher-performing, perhaps not unlikely for an ethnicity that gave the world Einstein, Freud, and so many other prominent intellectual figures. Thus, if we assume that our elite universities reserve a portion of their slots for “diversity” while allocating the remainder based on “academic merit,” Jews might be handily beating Asians (and everyone else) in the latter competition. Indeed, the average Jewish IQ has been widely reported in the range of 110–115, implying a huge abundance of individuals at the upper reaches of the distribution of intellect. So perhaps what had seemed like a clear pattern of anti-Asian discrimination is actually just the workings of academic meritocracy, at least when combined with a fixed allocation of “diversity admissions.”

The easiest means of exploring this hypothesis is to repeat much of our earlier examination of Asian academic performance, but now to include Jews as part of our analysis. Although Jewish names are not quite as absolutely distinctive as East or South Asian ones, they can be determined with reasonably good accuracy, so long as we are careful to note ambiguous cases and recognize that our estimates may easily be off by a small amount; furthermore, we can utilize especially distinctive names as a validation check. But strangely enough, when we perform this sort of analysis, it becomes somewhat difficult to locate major current evidence of the celebrated Jewish intellect and academic achievement discussed at such considerable length by Karabel and many other authors.

For example, consider California, second only to New York in the total number of its Jews, and with its Jewish percentage far above the national average. Over the last couple of years, blogger Steve Sailer and some of his commenters have examined the complete 2010 and 2012 NMS semifinalist lists of the 2000 or so top-scoring California high school seniors for ethnicity, and discovered that as few as 4–5 percent of the names seem to be Jewish, a figure not so dramatically different than the state's 3.3 percent Jewish population, and an estimate which I have personally confirmed.[54] Meanwhile, the state's 13 percent Asians account for over 57 percent of the top performing students. Thus, it appears that California Asians are perhaps three times as likely as Jews to do extremely well on academic tests, and this result remains unchanged if we adjust for the age distributions of the two populations.

One means of corroborating these surprising results is to consider the ratios of particularly distinctive ethnic names, and Sailer reported such exact findings made by one of his Jewish readers. For example, across the 2000-odd top scoring California students in 2010, there was just a single NMS semifinalist named Cohen, and also one each for Levy, Kaplan, and a last name beginning with “Gold.” Meanwhile, there were 49 Wangs and 36 Kims, plus a vast number of other highly distinctive Asian names. But according to Census data, the combined number of American Cohens and Levys together outnumber the Wangs almost two-to-one, and the same is true for the four most common names beginning with “Gold.” Put another way, California contains nearly one-fifth of all American Jews, hence almost 60,000 Cohens, Kaplans, Levys, Goldens, Goldsteins, Goldbergs, Goldmans, and Golds, and this population produced only 4 NMS semifinalists, a ratio almost identical to that produced by our general last name estimates. The 2012 California NMS semifinalist lists yield approximately the same ratios.

When we consider the apparent number of Jewish students across the NMS semifinalist lists of other major states, we get roughly similar results. New York has always been the center of the American Jewish community, and at 8.4 percent is half again as heavily Jewish as any other state, while probably containing a large fraction of America's Jewish financial and intellectual elite. Just as we might expect, the 2011 roster of New York NMS semifinalists is disproportionately filled with Jewish names, constituting about 21 percent of the total, a ratio twice as high as for any other state whose figures are available. But even here, New York's smaller and much less affluent Asian population is far better represented, providing around 34 percent of the top scoring students. Jews and Asians are today about equal in number within New York City but whereas a generation ago, elite local public schools such as Stuyvesant were very heavily Jewish, today Jews are outnumbered at least several times over by Asians.[55]

This same pattern of relative Asian and Jewish performance on aptitude exams generally appears in the other major states whose recent NMS semifinalist lists I have located and examined, though there is considerable individual variability, presumably due to the particular local characteristics of the Asian and Jewish populations. Across six years of Florida results, Asian students are more than twice as likely to be high scorers compared to their Jewish classmates, with the disparity being nearly as great in Pennsylvania. The relative advantage of Asians is a huge factor of 5.0 in Michigan and 4.1 in Ohio, while in Illinois Asians still do 150 percent as well as Jews. Among our largest states, only in Texas is the Asian performance as low as 120 percent, although Jews are the group that actually does much better in several smaller states, usually those in which the Jewish population is tiny.

As noted earlier, NMS semifinalist lists are available for a total of twenty-five states, including the eight largest, which together contain 75 percent of our national population, as well as 81 percent of American Jews and 80 percent of Asian-Americans, and across this total population Asians are almost twice as likely to be top scoring students as Jews. Extrapolating these results to the nation as a whole would produce a similar ratio, especially when we consider that Asian-rich California has among the toughest NMS semifinalist qualification thresholds. Meanwhile, the national number of Jewish semifinalists comes out at less than 6 percent of the total based on direct inspection of the individual names, with estimates based on either the particularly distinctive names considered by Sailer or the full set of such highly distinctive names used by Weyl yielding entirely consistent figures. Weyl had also found this same relative pattern of high Jewish academic performance being greatly exceeded by even higher Asian performance, with Koreans and Chinese being three or four times as likely as Jews to reach NMS semifinalist status in the late 1980s, though the overall Asian numbers were still quite small at the time.[56]

Earlier we had noted that the tests used to select NMS semifinalists actually tilted substantially against Asian students by double-weighting verbal skills and excluding visuospatial ability, but in the case of Jews this same testing-bias has exactly the opposite impact. Jewish ability tends to be exceptionally strong in its verbal component and mediocre at best in the visuospatial,[57] so the NMS semifinalist selection methodology would seem ideally designed to absolutely maximize the number of high-scoring Jews compared to other whites or (especially) East Asians. Thus, the number of high-ability Jews we are finding should be regarded as an extreme upper bound to a more neutrally-derived total.

But suppose these estimates are correct, and Asians overall are indeed twice as likely as Jews to rank among America's highest performing students. We must also consider that America's Asian population is far larger in size, representing roughly 5 percent of college-age students, compared to just 1.8 percent for Jews. Therefore, assuming an admissions system based on strictest objective meritocracy, we would expect our elite academic institutions to contain nearly five Asians for every Jew; but instead, the Jews are far more numerous, in some important cases by almost a factor of two. This raises obvious suspicions about the fairness of the Ivy League admissions process.

Once again, we can turn to the enrollment figures for strictly meritocratic Caltech as a test of our estimates. The campus is located in the Los Angeles area, home to one of America's largest and most successful Jewish communities, and Jews have traditionally been strongly drawn to the natural sciences. Indeed, at least three of Caltech's last six presidents have been of Jewish origin, and the same is true for two of its most renowned faculty members, theoretical physics Nobel Laureates Richard Feynman and Murray Gell-Mann. But Caltech's current undergraduates are just 5.5 percent Jewish, and the figure seems to have been around this level for some years; meanwhile, Asian enrollment is 39 percent, or seven times larger. It is intriguing that the school which admits students based on the strictest, most objective academic standards has by a very wide margin the lowest Jewish enrollment for any elite university.

Let us next turn to the five most selective campuses of the University of California system, whose admissions standards shifted substantially toward objective meritocracy following the 1996 passage of Prop. 209. The average Jewish enrollment is just over 8 percent, or roughly one-third that of the 25 percent found at Harvard and most of the Ivy League, whose admissions standards are supposedly far tougher. Meanwhile, some 40 percent of the students on these UC campuses are Asian, a figure almost five times as high. Once again, almost no elite university in the country has a Jewish enrollment as low as the average for these highly selective UC campuses.[58]

Another interesting example is MIT, whose students probably rank fifth in academic strength, just below the three HYP schools and Caltech, and whose admissions standards are far closer to a meritocratic ideal than is found in most elite schools, though perhaps not quite as pristine as those of its Caltech rival. Karabel notes that MIT has always had a far more meritocratic admissions system than nearby Harvard, tending to draw those students who were academic stars even if socially undistinguished. As an example, in the 1930s Feynman had been rejected by his top choice of Columbia possibly due to its Jewish quota, and instead enrolled at MIT.[59] But today, MIT's enrollment is just 9 percent Jewish, a figure lower than that anywhere in the Ivy League, while Asians are nearly three times as numerous, despite the school being located in one of the most heavily Jewish parts of the country.

The Strange Collapse of Jewish Academic Achievement

From my own perspective, I found these statistical results surprising, even shocking.

I had always been well aware of the very heavy Jewish presence at elite academic institutions. But the underwhelming percentage of Jewish students who today achieve high scores on academic aptitude tests was totally unexpected, and very different from the impressions I had formed during my own high school and college years a generation or so ago. An examination of other available statistics seems to support my recollections and provides evidence for a dramatic recent decline in the academic performance of American Jews

The U.S. Math Olympiad began in 1974, and all the names of the top scoring students are easily available on the Internet. During the 1970s, well over 40 percent of the total were Jewish, and during the 1980s and 1990s, the fraction averaged about one-third. However, during the thirteen years since 2000, just two names out of 78 or 2.5 percent appear to be Jewish. The Putnam Exam is the most difficult and prestigious mathematics competition for American college students, with five or six Putnam winners having been selected each year since 1938. Over 40 percent of the Putnam winners prior to 1950 were Jewish, and during every decade from the 1950s through the 1990s, between 22 percent and 31 percent of the winners seem to have come from that same ethnic background. But since 2000, the percentage has dropped to under 10 percent, without a single likely Jewish name in the last seven years.

This consistent picture of stark ethnic decline recurs when we examine the statistics for the Science Talent Search, which has been selecting 40 students as national finalists for America's most prestigious high school science award since 1942, thus providing a huge statistical dataset of over 2800 top science students. During every decade from the 1950s through the 1980s, Jewish students were consistently 22–23 percent of the recipients, with the percentage then declining to 17 percent in the 1990s, 15 percent in the 2000s, and just 7 percent since 2010. Indeed, of the thirty top ranked students over the last three years, only a single one seems likely to have been Jewish. Similarly, Jews were over one-quarter of the top students in the Physics Olympiad from 1986 to 1997, but have fallen to just 5 percent over the last decade, a result which must surely send Richard Feynman spinning in his grave.

Other science competitions provide generally consistent recent results, though without the long track record allowing useful historical comparisons. Over the last dozen years, just 8 percent of the top students in the Biology Olympiad have been Jewish, with none in the last three years. Between 1992 and 2012, only 11 percent of the winners of the Computing Olympiad had Jewish names, as did just 8 percent of the Siemens AP Award winners. And although I have only managed to locate the last two years of Chemistry Olympiad winners, these lists of 40 top students contained not a single probable Jewish name.

Further evidence is supplied by Weyl, who estimated that over 8 percent of the 1987 NMS semifinalists were Jewish,[60] a figure 35 percent higher than found in today's results. Moreover, in that period the math and verbal scores were weighted equally for qualification purposes, but after 1997 the verbal score was double-weighted,[61] which should have produced a large rise in the number of Jewish semifinalists, given the verbal-loading of Jewish ability. But instead, today's Jewish numbers are far below those of the late 1980s.

Taken in combination, these trends all provide powerful evidence that over the last decade or more there has been a dramatic collapse in Jewish academic achievement, at least at the high end.

Several possible explanations for this empirical result seem reasonably plausible. Although the innate potential of a group is unlikely to drop so suddenly, achievement is a function of both ability and effort, and today's overwhelmingly affluent Jewish students may be far less diligent in their work habits or driven in their studies than were their parents or grandparents, who lived much closer to the bracing challenges of the immigrant experience. In support of this hypothesis, roughly half of the Jewish Math Olympiad winners from the last two decades have had the sort of highly distinctive names which would tend to mark them as recent immigrants from the Soviet Union or elsewhere, and such names were also very common among the top Jewish science students of the same period, even though this group represents only about 10 percent of current American Jews. Indeed, it seems quite possible that this large sudden influx of very high performing immigrant Jews from the late 1980s onward served to partially mask the rapid concurrent decline of high academic achievement among native American Jews, which otherwise would have become much more clearly evident a decade or so earlier.

This pattern of third or fourth generation American students lacking the academic drive or intensity of their forefathers is hardly surprising, nor unique to Jews. Consider the case of Japanese-Americans, who mostly arrived in America during roughly the same era. America's Japanese have always been a high-performing group, with a strong academic tradition, and Japan's international PISA academic scores are today among the highest in the world. But when we examine the list of California's NMS semifinalists, less than 1 percent of the names are Japanese, roughly in line with their share of the California population.[62] Meanwhile, Chinese, Koreans, and South Asians are 6 percent of California but contribute 50 percent of the top scoring students, an eight-fold better result, with a major likely difference being that they are overwhelmingly of recent immigrant origin. In fact, although ongoing Japanese immigration has been trivial in size, a significant fraction of the top Japanese students have the unassimilated Japanese first names that would tend to indicate they are probably drawn from that tiny group.

In his 1966 book The Creative Elite in America, Weyl used last name analysis to document a similarly remarkable collapse in achievement among America's Puritan-descended population, which had once provided a hugely disproportionate fraction of our intellectual leadership, but for various reasons went into rapid decline from about 1900 onward. He also mentions the disappearance of the remarkable Scottish intellectual contribution to British life after about 1800. Although the evidence for both these historical parallels seems very strong, the causal factors are not entirely clear, though Weyl does provide some possible explanations.[63]

In some respects, perhaps it was the enormously outsize Jewish academic performance of the past which was highly anomalous, and the more recent partial convergence toward white European norms which is somewhat less surprising. Over the years, claims have been widely circulated that the mean Jewish IQ is a full standard deviation—15 points—above the white average of 100,[64] but this seems to have little basis in reality. Richard Lynn, one of the world's foremost IQ experts, has performed an exhaustive literature review and located some 32 IQ samples of American Jews, taken from 1920 to 2008. For the first 14 studies conducted during the years 1920–1937, the Jewish IQ came out very close to the white American mean, and it was only in later decades that the average figure rose to the approximate range of 107–111.[65]

In a previous article “Race, IQ & Wealth,” I had suggested that the IQs of ethnic groups appear to be far more malleable than many people would acknowledge, and may be particularly influenced by factors of urbanization, education, and affluence.[66] Given that Jews have always been America's most heavily urbanized population and became the most affluent during the decades in question, these factors may account for a substantial portion of their huge IQ rise during most of the twentieth century. But with modern electronic technology recently narrowing the gaps in social environment and educational opportunities between America's rural and urban worlds, we might expect a portion of this difference to gradually dissipate. American Jews are certainly a high-ability population, but the innate advantage they have over other high-ability white populations is probably far smaller than is widely believed.

This conclusion is supported by the General Social Survey (GSS), an online dataset of tens of thousands of American survey responses from the last forty years which includes the Wordsum vocabulary test, a very useful IQ proxy correlating at 0.71. Converted into the corresponding IQ scores, the Wordsum-IQ of Jews is indeed quite high at 109. But Americans of English, Welsh, Scottish, Swedish, and Catholic Irish ancestry also have fairly high mean IQs of 104 or above, and their combined populations outnumber Jews by almost 15-to-1, implying that they would totally dominate the upper reaches of the white American ability distribution, even if we excluded the remaining two-thirds of all American whites, many of whose IQs are also fairly high. Furthermore, all these groups are far less highly urbanized or affluent than Jews,[67] probably indicating that their scores are still artificially depressed to some extent. We should also remember that Jewish intellectual performance tends to be quite skewed, being exceptionally strong in the verbal subcomponent, much lower in math, and completely mediocre in visuospatial ability; thus, a completely verbal-oriented test such as Wordsum would actually tend to exaggerate Jewish IQ.

Stratifying the white American population along religious lines produces similar conclusions. An analysis of the data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth found that Americans raised in the Episcopal Church actually exceeded Jews in mean IQ, while several other religious categories came quite close, leading to the result that the overwhelming majority of America's high-ability white population had a non-Jewish background.[68]

Finally, in the case of Jews, these assimilation- or environment-related declines in relative academic performance may have been reinforced by powerful demographic trends. For the last generation or two, typical Jewish women from successful or even ordinary families have married very late and averaged little more than a single child, while the small fraction of Jewish women who are ultra-Orthodox often marry in their teens and then produce seven or eight children.[69] As a consequence, this extremely religious subpopulation has been doubling in size every twenty years, and now easily exceeds 10 percent of the total, including a far higher percentage of younger Jews. But ultra-Orthodox Jews have generally been academically mediocre, often with enormously high rates of poverty and government dependency.[70] Therefore, the combination of these two radically different trends of Jewish reproduction has acted to stabilize the total number of Jewish youngsters, while probably producing a sharp drop in their average academic achievement.

Meritocracy vs. Jews

Although the relative importance of these individual factors behind Jewish academic decline is unclear, the decline itself seems an unmistakable empirical fact, and the widespread unawareness of this fact has had important social consequences.

My casual mental image of today's top American students is based upon my memories of a generation or so ago, when Jewish students, sometimes including myself, regularly took home a quarter or more of the highest national honors on standardized tests or in prestigious academic competitions; thus, it seemed perfectly reasonable that Harvard and most of the other Ivy League schools might be 25 percent Jewish, based on meritocracy. But the objective evidence indicates that in present day America, only about 6 percent of our top students are Jewish, which now renders such very high Jewish enrollments at elite universities totally absurd and ridiculous. I strongly suspect that a similar time lag effect is responsible for the apparent confusion in many others who have considered the topic.

For example, throughout his very detailed book, Karabel always seems to automatically identify increasing Jewish enrollments with academic meritocracy, and Jewish declines with bias or discrimination, retaining this assumption even when his discussion moves into the 1990s and 2000s. He was born in 1950, graduated Harvard in 1972, and returned there to earn his Ph.D. in 1977, so this may indeed have been the reality during his formative years.[71] But he seems strikingly unaware that the world has changed since then, and that over the last decade or two, meritocracy and Jewish numbers have become opposing forces: the stricter the meritocratic standard, the fewer the Jews admitted.

Most of my preceding analysis has focused on the comparison of Asians with Jews, and I have pointed out that based on factors of objective academic performance and population size, we would expect Asians to outnumber Jews by perhaps five to one at our top national universities; instead, the total Jewish numbers across the Ivy League are actually 40 percent higher. This implies that Jewish enrollment is roughly 600 percent greater relative to Asians than should be expected under a strictly meritocratic admissions system.

Obviously, all these types of analysis may be applied just as easily to a comparison of Jews with non-Jewish whites, and the results turn out to be equally striking. The key factor is that although Jewish academic achievement has apparently plummeted in recent decades, non-Jewish whites seem to have remained relatively unchanged in their performance, which might be expected in such a large and diverse population. As a consequence, the relative proportions of top-performing students have undergone a dramatic shift.

We must bear in mind that the official U.S. Census category of “Non-Hispanic white” (which I will henceforth label “white”) is something of an ethnic hodgepodge, encompassing all the various white European ancestry groups, as well as a substantial admixture of North Africans, Middle Easterners, Iranians, Turks, Armenians, and Afghans. It amounts to everyone who is not black, Hispanic, Asian, or American Indian, and currently includes an estimated 63 percent of all Americans.

Determining the number of whites among NMS semifinalists or winners of various academic competitions is relatively easy. Both Asian and Hispanic names are quite distinctive, and their numbers can be estimated by the methods already discussed. Meanwhile, blacks are substantially outnumbered by Hispanics and they have much weaker academic performance, so they would produce far fewer very high scoring students. Therefore, we can approximate the number of whites by merely subtracting the number of Asian and Hispanic names as well as an estimated black total based on the latter figure, and then determine the number of white Gentiles by also subtracting the Jewish total.

Once we do this and compare the Jewish and non-Jewish white totals for various lists of top academic performers, we notice a striking pattern, with the historical ratios once ranging from near-equality to about one-in-four up until the recent collapse in Jewish performance. For example, among Math Olympiad winners, white Gentiles scarcely outnumbered Jews during the 1970s, and held only a three-to-two edge during the 1980s and 1990s, but since 2000 have become over fifteen times as numerous. Between 1938 and 1999, Putnam Exam winners had averaged about two white Gentiles for every Jew, with the ratios for each decade oscillating between 1.5 and 3.0, then rising to nearly 5-to-1 during 2001–2005, and without a single Jewish name on the winner list from 2006 onward.

The elite science competitions follow a broadly similar pattern. Non-Jewish whites had only outnumbered Jews 2-to-1 among the Physics Olympiad winners during 1986–1997, but the ratio rose to at least 7-to-1 during 2002–2012. Meanwhile, white Gentiles were more numerous by nearly 6-to-1 among 1992–2012 Computing Olympiad winners, 4-to-1 among the 2002–2011 Siemens AP Award winners, and over 3-to-1 among 2003–2012 Biology Olympiad champions. Across the sixty-odd years of America's Science Talent Search, Jews had regularly been named finalists at a relative rate fifteen- or even twenty-times that of their white Gentile classmates, but over the last decade or so, this has dropped by half.

The evidence of the recent NMS semifinalist lists seems the most conclusive of all, given the huge statistical sample sizes involved. As discussed earlier, these students constitute roughly the highest 0.5 percent in academic ability, the top 16,000 high school seniors who should be enrolling at the Ivy League and America's other most elite academic universities. In California, white Gentile names outnumber Jewish ones by over 8-to-1; in Texas, over 20-to-1; in Florida and Illinois, around 9-to-1. Even in New York, America's most heavily Jewish state, there are more than two high-ability white Gentile students for every Jewish one. Based on the overall distribution of America's population, it appears that approximately 65–70 percent of America's highest ability students are non-Jewish whites, well over ten times the Jewish total of under 6 percent.

Needless to say, these proportions are considerably different from what we actually find among the admitted students at Harvard and its elite peers, which today serve as a direct funnel to the commanding heights of American academics, law, business, and finance. Based on reported statistics, Jews approximately match or even outnumber non-Jewish whites at Harvard and most of the other Ivy League schools, which seems wildly disproportionate. Indeed, the official statistics indicate that non-Jewish whites at Harvard are America's most under-represented population group, enrolled at a much lower fraction of their national population than blacks or Hispanics, despite having far higher academic test scores.

When examining statistical evidence, the proper aggregation of data is critical. Consider the ratio of the recent 2007–2011 enrollment of Asian students at Harvard relative to their estimated share of America's recent NMS semifinalists, a reasonable proxy for the high-ability college-age population, and compare this result to the corresponding figure for whites. The Asian ratio is 63 percent, slightly above the white ratio of 61 percent, with both these figures being considerably below parity due to the substantial presence of under-represented racial minorities such as blacks and Hispanics, foreign students, and students of unreported race. Thus, there appears to be no evidence for racial bias against Asians, even excluding the race-neutral impact of athletic recruitment, legacy admissions, and geographical diversity.

However, if we separate out the Jewish students, their ratio turns out to be 435 percent, while the residual ratio for non-Jewish whites drops to just 28 percent, less than half of even the Asian figure. As a consequence, Asians appear under-represented relative to Jews by a factor of seven, while non-Jewish whites are by far the most under-represented group of all, despite any benefits they might receive from athletic, legacy, or geographical distribution factors. The rest of the Ivy League tends to follow a similar pattern, with the overall Jewish ratio being 381 percent, the Asian figure at 62 percent, and the ratio for non-Jewish whites a low 35 percent, all relative to their number of high-ability college-age students.

Just as striking as these wildly disproportionate current numbers have been the longer enrollment trends. In the three decades since I graduated Harvard, the presence of white Gentiles has dropped by as much as 70 percent, despite no remotely comparable decline in the relative size or academic performance of that population; meanwhile, the percentage of Jewish students has actually increased. This period certainly saw a very rapid rise in the number of Asian, Hispanic, and foreign students, as well as some increase in blacks. But it seems rather odd that all of these other gains would have come at the expense of whites of Christian background, and none at the expense of Jews.

Furthermore, the Harvard enrollment changes over the last decade have been even more unusual when we compare them to changes in the underlying demographics. Between 2000 and 2011, the relative percentage of college-age blacks enrolled at Harvard dropped by 18 percent, along with declines of 13 percent for Asians and 11 percent for Hispanics, while only whites increased, expanding their relative enrollment by 16 percent. However, this is merely an optical illusion: in fact, the figure for non-Jewish whites slightly declined, while the relative enrollment of Jews increased by over 35 percent, probably reaching the highest level in Harvard's entire history. Thus, the relative presence of Jews rose sharply while that of all other groups declined, and this occurred during exactly the period when the once-remarkable academic performance of Jewish high school students seemed to suddenly collapse.

Most of the other Ivy League schools appear to follow a fairly similar trajectory. Between 1980 and 2011, the official figures indicate that non-Jewish white enrollment dropped by 63 percent at Yale, 44 percent at Princeton, 52 percent at Dartmouth, 69 percent at Columbia, 62 percent at Cornell, 66 percent at Penn, and 64 percent at Brown. If we confine our attention to the last decade or so, the relative proportion of college-age non-Jewish whites enrolled at Yale has dropped 23 percent since 2000, with drops of 28 percent at Princeton, 18 percent at Dartmouth, 19 percent at Columbia and Penn, 24 percent at Cornell, and 23 percent at Brown. For most of these universities, non-white groups have followed a mixed pattern, mostly increasing but with some substantial drops. I have only located yearly Jewish enrollment percentages back to 2006, but during the six years since then, there is a uniform pattern of often substantial rises: increases of roughly 25 percent at Yale, 45 percent at Columbia, 10 percent at Cornell, 15 percent at Brown, and no declines anywhere.

Fourteen years ago I published a widely-discussed column in the Wall Street Journal highlighting some of the absurdities of our affirmative action system in higher education.[72] In particular, I pointed out that although Jews and Asians then totaled merely 5 percent of the American population, they occupied nearly 50 percent of the slots at Harvard and most of the other elite Ivies, while non-Jewish whites were left as the most under-represented student population, with relative numbers below those of blacks or Hispanics. Since then Jewish academic achievement has seemingly collapsed but relative Jewish enrollment in the Ivies has generally risen, while the exact opposite combination has occurred for both Asians and non-Jewish whites. I find this a strange and unexpected development.

It is important to recognize that all of these enrollment statistics are far less precise than we might ideally desire. As mentioned earlier, over the last couple of decades widespread perceptions of racial bias in admissions have led a significant number of students to refuse to reveal their race, which the official statistics classify as “race unknown.” This group almost certainly consists of Asians and whites, but it is impossible for us to determine the relative proportions, and without this information our above estimates can only be approximate.

Similarly, nearly all our figures on Jewish enrollment were ultimately drawn from the estimates of Hillel, the national Jewish campus organization, and these are obviously approximate. However, the Hillel data is the best we possess for recent decades, and is regularly used by the New York Times and other prominent media outlets, while also serving as the basis for much of Karabel's award-winning scholarship. Furthermore, so long as any latent bias in the data remained relatively constant, we could still correctly analyze changes over time.

For these sorts of reasons, any of the individual figures provided above should be treated with great caution, but the overall pattern of enrollments—statistics compiled over years and decades and across numerous different universities—seems likely to provide an accurate description of reality.

Elite Colleges Look Neither Like America Nor Like America's Highest-Ability Students

We are therefore faced with the clear conundrum that Jewish students seem to constitute roughly 6 percent of America's highest-ability high school graduates and non-Jewish whites around 65–70 percent, but these relative ratios differ by perhaps 1000 percent from the enrollments we actually find at Harvard and the other academic institutions which select America's future elites. Meanwhile, an ethnic distribution much closer to this apparent ability-ratio is found at Caltech, whose admissions are purely meritocratic, unlike the completely opaque, subjective, and discretionary Ivy League system so effectively described by Karabel, Golden, and others.

One obvious explanatory factor is that the Ivy League is located in the Northeast, a region of the country in which the Jewish fraction of the population is more than twice the national average. However, these schools also constitute America's leading national universities, so their geographical intake is quite broad, with Harvard drawing less than 40 percent of its American students from its own region, and the others similarly tending to have a nationally distributed enrollment. So this factor would probably explain only a small portion of the discrepancy. Furthermore, MIT utilizes a considerably more meritocratic and objective admissions system than Harvard, and although located just a few miles away has a ratio of Jewish to non-Jewish whites which differs by nearly a factor of four in favor of the latter compared to its crosstown rival.

By the late 1960s Jewish students had become a substantial fraction of most Ivy League schools and today some of their children may be benefiting from legacies. But until about twenty-five years ago, white Gentiles outnumbered their Jewish classmates perhaps as much as 3-to-1, so if anything we might expect the admissions impact of legacies to still favor the former group. Anyway, the research of Espenshade and his colleagues have shown that being a legacy provides an admissions advantage in the range of 19–26 percent,[73] while we are attempting to explain enrollment differences of roughly 1000 percent.

American Jews are certainly more affluent than most other groups, but all Ivy League universities admit their American students on a “need-blind” basis, so perceptions of ability to pay cannot be a factor, even if any evidence existed that Jewish applicants were actually wealthier than their non-Jewish counterparts. Many Jewish alumni are very generous to their alma maters, but so are non-Jews, and indeed nine of the ten largest university donations in history have come from non-Jewish individuals, nearly all in the last fifteen years;[74] thus, mercenary hopes of large future bequests would probably not be influencing these skewed admissions.

Perhaps Jews simply apply to these schools in far greater relative numbers, with successful, educationally-ambitious Jewish families being much more likely to encourage their bright children to aim at the Ivies than the parents of equally bright non-Jews. However, since these elite schools release no information regarding the ethnic or racial skew of their applications, we have no evidence for this hypothesis. And why would high-ability non-Jews be 600 percent or 800 percent more likely to apply to Caltech and MIT than to those other elite schools, which tend to have a far higher national profile?

Anyway, the numbers alone render this explanation implausible. Each year, the Ivy League colleges enroll almost 10,000 American whites and Asians, of whom over 3000 are Jewish. Meanwhile, each year the NMS Corporation selects and publicly names America's highest-ability 16,000 graduating seniors; of these, fewer than 1000 are Jewish, while almost 15,000 are non-Jewish whites and Asians. Even if every single one of these high-ability Jewish students applied to and enrolled at the Ivy League—with none going to any of America's other 3000 colleges—Ivy League admissions officers are obviously still dipping rather deep into the lower reaches of the Jewish ability-pool, instead of easily drawing from some 15,000 other publicly identified candidates of far greater ability but different ethnicity. Why would these universities not simply send out inexpensive mailings to these 15,000 top students, encouraging them to apply, especially since their geographical, ethnic, and cultural backgrounds might help to considerably “diversify” undergraduate enrollments, while greatly raising the average student test scores by which these universities supposedly live or die in the competitive college-rankings.

The situation becomes even stranger when we focus on Harvard, which this year accepted fewer than 6 percent of over 34,000 applicants and whose offers of admission are seldom refused. Each Harvard class includes roughly 400 Jews and 800 Asians and non-Jewish whites; this total represents over 40 percent of America's highest-ability Jewish students, but merely 5 percent of their equally high-ability non-Jewish peers. It is quite possible that a larger percentage of these top Jewish students apply and decide to attend than similar members from these other groups, but it seems wildly implausible that such causes could account for roughly an eight-fold difference in apparent admissions outcome. Harvard's stated “holistic” admissions policy explicitly takes into account numerous personal characteristics other than straight academic ability, including sports and musical talent. But it seems very unlikely that any remotely neutral application of these principles could produce admissions results whose ethnic skew differs so widely from the underlying meritocratic ratios.

One datapoint strengthening this suspicion of admissions bias has been the plunge in the number of Harvard's entering National Merit Scholars, a particularly select ability group, which dropped by almost 40 percent between 2002 and 2011, falling from 396 to 248. This exact period saw a collapse in Jewish academic achievement combined with a sharp rise in Jewish Harvard admissions, which together might easily help to explain Harvard's strange decline in this important measure of highest student quality.

Harvard could obviously fill its entire class with high-scoring valedictorians or National Merit Scholars but chooses not to do so. In 2003, Harvard rejected well over half of all applicants with perfect SAT scores, up from rejecting a quarter a few years earlier, and in 2010 Princeton acknowledged it also admitted only about half.[75] According to Harvard's dean of admissions, “With the SAT, small differences of 50 or 100 points or more have no significant effect on admissions decisions.”[76] In fact, a former Senior Admissions Officer at Harvard has claimed that by the mid-2000s as few as 5 percent of the students at highly selective universities such as his own were admitted purely based on academic merit.[77]

It is important to note that these current rejection rates of top scoring applicants are vastly higher than during the 1950s or 1960s, when Harvard admitted six of every seven such students and Princeton adopted a 1959 policy in which no high scoring applicant could be refused admission without a detailed review by a faculty committee.[78] An obvious indication of Karabel's obtuseness is that he describes and condemns the anti-meritocratic policies of the past without apparently noticing that they have actually become far worse today. An admissions framework in which academic merit is not the prime consideration may be directly related to the mystery of why Harvard's ethnic skew differs in such extreme fashion from that of America's brightest graduating seniors. In fact, Harvard's apparent preference for academically weak Jewish applicants seems to be reflected in their performance once they arrive on campus.[79]

Having considered and largely eliminated these several possible explanatory factors, we can only speculate as to the true causes of such seemingly anomalous enrollment statistics at our Ivy League universities. However, we cannot completely exclude the possible explanation that these other top students are simply not wanted at such elite institutions, perhaps because their entrance in large numbers might drastically transform the current ethnic and cultural mix. After all, Karabel devoted hundreds of pages of his text to documenting exactly this pattern of Ivy League admissions behavior during the 1920s and 1930s, so why should we be surprised if it continues today, at least at an unconscious level, but simply with the polarities reversed?

It would be unreasonable to ignore the salient fact that this massive apparent bias in favor of far less-qualified Jewish applicants coincides with an equally massive ethnic skew at the topmost administrative ranks of the universities in question, a situation which once again exactly parallels Karabel's account from the 1920s. Indeed, Karabel points out that by 1993 Harvard, Yale, and Princeton all had presidents of Jewish ancestry,[80] and the same is true for the current presidents of Yale, Penn, Cornell, and possibly Columbia, as well as Princeton's president throughout during the 1990s and Yale's new incoming president, while all three of Harvard's most recent presidents have either had Jewish origins or a Jewish spouse.[81]

At most universities, a provost is the second-ranking official, being responsible for day-to-day academic operations. Although Princeton's current president is not Jewish, all seven of the most recent Princeton provosts stretching back to 1977 have had such ancestry, with several of the other Ivies not being far behind.[82] A similar degree of massive overrepresentation is found throughout the other top administrative ranks of the rest of the Ivy League, and across American leading educational institutions in general, and these are the institutions which select our future national elites.

I have not the slightest reason to doubt that the overwhelming majority of these individuals are honest and sincere, and attempt to do their best for their institutions and their students. But as our liberal intellectual elites regularly emphasize, unconscious biases or shared assumptions can become a huge but unnoticed problem when decision-making occurs within a very narrow circle, whose extreme “non-diversity” may lead to lack of introspection, and what else can be said when for the last two decades almost all of the leaders of our most elite universities have been drawn from an ethnic community constituting just 2 percent of America's population?

As a perfect example of such a situation, consider an amusing incident from the mid-1980s, when Asian groups first noticed a sharp decline in Asian admissions rates to Harvard and accused the university of having begun a quiet effort to restrict Asian numbers, criticism which was vigorously resisted by senior Harvard officials. During this period, Henry Rosovsky, Harvard's Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (and later Acting President), referred to Asian American students as “no doubt the most over-represented group in the university.”[83] At that point, Harvard's Asian students were enrolled at 300 percent of parity, while those of Rosovsky's own ethnicity were probably at 900 percent or more of parity.[84]

Unconscious biases may become especially serious when combined with an admissions system based on the extreme flexibility and subjectivity that exists at these colleges. As mentioned, three of Caltech's last six presidents have been of Jewish origins, but the objective admissions system has produced no sign of ethnic favoritism, and largely meritocratic MIT also seems unaffected by having had two Jewish presidents of the last five.[85] But when machinery already exists for admitting or rejecting whomever a university wishes, on any grounds whatsoever, that machinery may be unconsciously steered in a particular direction by the shared group biases of the individuals controlling it.

The Disturbing Reality of the Elite College Admission System

Perhaps the most detailed statistical research into the actual admissions practices of American universities has been conducted by Princeton sociology professor Thomas J. Espenshade and his colleagues, whose results were summarized in his 2009 book No Longer Separate, Not Yet Equal, co-authored with Alexandria Walton Radford. Their findings provide an empirical look at the individual factors that dramatically raise or lower the likelihood of acceptance into the leading American universities which select the next generation of our national elites.

The research certainly supports the widespread perception that non-academic factors play a major role in the process, including athletic ability and “legacy” status. But as we saw earlier, even more significant are racial factors, with black ancestry being worth the equivalent of 310 points, Hispanics gaining 130 points, and Asian students being penalized by 140 points, all relative to white applicants on the 1600 point Math and Reading SAT scale.[86]

Universities always emphasize the importance of non-academic (and subjective) “leadership traits” as a central reason why they do not rely upon grades and academic test scores to select at least their white students, arguing that evidence of such personal initiative and leadership should often outweigh somewhat lower academic performance in predicting future success and value to our society. And on the face of it, these claims may seem plausible.

But the difficulty comes from the fact that such subjective factors must necessarily be assessed subjectively, by the particular individuals sitting in the Yale or Columbia admissions offices, and their cultural or ideological background may heavily taint their decision-making. One of Espenshade's most striking findings was that excelling in certain types of completely mainstream high school activities actually reduced a student's admission chances by 60–65 percent, apparently because teenagers with such interests were regarded with considerable disfavor by the sort of people employed in admissions; these were ROTC, 4-H Clubs, Future Farmers of America, and various similar organizations.[87] Consider that these reported activities were totally mainstream, innocuous, and non-ideological, yet might easily get an applicant rejected, presumably for being cultural markers. When we recognize the overwhelmingly liberal orientation of nearly all our elite universities and the large communities of academics and administrators they employ, we can easily imagine what might become of any applicants who proudly proclaimed their successful leadership roles in an activity associated with conservative Christianity or rightwing politics as their extracurricular claim to fame.

Our imagination is given substance by The Gatekeepers, a fascinating and very disturbing inside look at the admissions system of Wesleyan, an elite liberal arts college in Middleton, Conn. The author was Jacques Steinberg, a veteran National Education Correspondent at the New York Times, and now its editor focusing on college admissions issues. Although Wesleyan definitely ranks a notch or so below the Ivies in selectivity, Steinberg strongly suggests that the admissions decision-making process is very similar, and while his 2002 book described the selection of the Fall 2000 entering class, his afterword to the 2012 edition states that the overall process has remained largely unchanged down to the present day. Whether or not Steinberg himself recognizes it, the most striking fact—which would surely shock students almost anywhere else in the Developed World—is the enormous focus on ideology and ethnic background compared to academic achievement or evidence of intellectual ability, as well as the powerful role of “connections” and clout.

Consider the case of Tiffany Wang, a Chinese immigrant student raised in the Silicon Valley area, where her father worked as an engineer. Although English was not her first language, her SAT scores were over 100 points above the Wesleyan average, and she ranked as a National Merit Scholarship semifinalist, putting her in the top 0.5 percent of high school students (not the top 2 percent as Steinberg mistakenly claims). Nevertheless, the admissions officer rated her just so-so in academics, and seemed far more positively impressed by her ethnic activism in the local school's Asian-American club. Ultimately, he stamped her with a “Reject,” but later admitted to Steinberg that she might have been admitted if he had been aware of the enormous time and effort she had spent campaigning against the death penalty, a political cause near and dear to his own heart. Somehow I suspect that a student who boasted of leadership in pro-death penalty activism among his extracurriculars might have fared rather worse in this process. And presumably for similar reasons, Tiffany was also rejected by all her other prestigious college choices, including Yale, Penn, Duke, and Wellesley, an outcome which greatly surprised and disappointed her immigrant father.[88]

There was also the case of half-Brazilian Julianna Bentes, with slight black ancestry, who came from a middle-class family and attended on a partial scholarship one of America's most elite prep schools, whose annual tuition now tops $30,000; her SAT scores were somewhat higher than Tiffany's, and she was an excellent dancer. The combination of her academic ability, dancing talent, and “multiracial” background ranked her as one of America's top college recruitment prospects, gaining her admission and generous financial packages from Harvard, Yale, Stanford and every other elite university to which she applied, including the University of Chicago's most prestigious academic scholarship award and a personal opportunity to meet Chelsea Clinton while visiting Stanford, which she did, before ultimately selecting Yale.[89]

Finally, there was the case of Becca Jannol, a girl from a very affluent Jewish family near Beverly Hills, who attended the same elite prep school as Julianna, but with her parents paying the full annual tuition. Despite her every possible advantage, including test-prep courses and retaking the exam, her SAT scores were some 240 points lower on the 1600 point scale, placing her toward the bottom of the Wesleyan range, while her application essay focused on the philosophical challenges she encountered when she was suspended for illegal drug use. But she was a great favorite of her prep school counselor, who was an old college friend of the Wesleyan admissions officer, and using his discretion, he stamped her “Admit.” Her dismal academic record then caused this initial decision to be overturned by a unanimous vote of the other members of the full admissions committee, but he refused to give up, and moved heaven and earth to gain her a spot, even offering to rescind the admissions of one or more already selected applicants to create a place for her. Eventually he got her shifted from the Reject category to wait-list status, after which he secretly moved her folder to the very top of the large waiting list pile.[90]

In the end “connections” triumphed, and she received admission to Wesleyan, although she turned it down in favor of an offer from more prestigious Cornell, which she had obtained through similar means. But at Cornell, she found herself “miserable,” hating the classes and saying she “didn't see the usefulness of [her] being there.” However, her poor academic ability proved no hindrance, since the same administrator who had arranged her admission also wrangled her a quick entrance into a special “honors program” he personally ran, containing just 40 of the 3500 students in her year. This exempted her from all academic graduation requirements, apparently including classes or tests, thereby allowing her to spend her four college years mostly traveling around the world while working on a so-called “special project.” After graduation, she eventually took a job at her father's successful law firm, thereby realizing her obvious potential as a member of America's ruling Ivy League elite, or in her own words, as being one of “the best of the best.”[91]

Steinberg's description of the remaining handful of Wesleyan applicants seems to fall into a very similar pattern, indicating that our elite admissions process operates under the principle of “Ideology and Diversity tempered by Corruption.” Certainly the majority of the decisions made seem to demonstrate that although the Maoist doctrine of favoring “Red over Expert” was abandoned decades ago in China, it is still alive and well in America's elite university admissions process, though sometimes mitigated by factors of wealth and influence.[92] The overwhelmingly liberal orientation of the elite university community, the apparent willingness of many liberals to actively discriminate against non-liberals, and the fact that American Jews remain perhaps the most liberal ethnic community may together help explain a significant portion of our skewed enrollment statistics.[93]

We should also note that although admissions officers are poorly paid, earning less than public school teachers,[94] they nevertheless control a very valuable resource. According to Steinberg's account, when individual officers are particularly forceful in their advocacy for an obviously under-qualified applicant, their colleagues regularly ask them, perhaps jokingly, “how much are they paying you to get that student admitted?”[95] Indeed, Golden states that admissions officers at top universities are constantly being offered explicit bribes, sometimes even including promises of houses or cruises.[96] And although Steinberg's presentation of Wesleyan's admissions practices was glowingly favorable, it may have been more than pure coincidence that the particular admissions officer who was the focus of his reporting decided to seek employment elsewhere just before the book was scheduled to appear in print.[97]

Steinberg's narrative is engagingly written and he makes no effort to conceal his own ideological orientation, but some of his major lapses are troubling. For example, he accepts without question the notion that Asian-American applicants receive a racial “diversity” boost in elite admissions, though it has been obvious for decades that the exact opposite is true. And in his introduction, he describes the disturbingly exclusionary world of the past, explaining that until the late 1950s Jews “need not have bothered trying” to enroll at Harvard or the other Ivies.[98] Yet in fact, Jews were heavily, often massively over-represented in the Ivy League throughout the entire Twentieth Century, and by 1952 constituted 25 percent of Harvard undergraduates, a rate some 700 percent higher than their share of the general population.[99]

Steinberg is an award-winning journalist who has spent most of the last 15 years covering education for the New York Times, and surely ranks near the very top of his profession; his book was widely reviewed and almost universally praised. For such huge factual errors to pass unnoticed is a very disturbing indication of the knowledge and assumptions of the individuals who shape our public perceptions on the realities of higher education in our society.

In fact, it seems likely that some of these obvious admissions biases we have noticed may be related to the poor human quality and weak academic credentials of many of the university employees making these momentous decisions. As mentioned above, the job of admissions officer is poorly paid, requires no professional training, and offers few opportunities for career advancement; thus, it is often filled by individuals with haphazard employment records. As one of the “Little Ivies,” Wesleyan is among America's most prestigious liberal arts colleges, and Steinberg's description of the career paths of its handful of admissions officers is eye-opening: the interim Director of Admissions had most recently screened food-stamp recipients and run a psychiatric half-way house; another had worked as an animal control officer and managed a camera store; a third unsuccessfully sought a job as a United Airlines flight attendant; others were recent college graduates, whose main college interests had been sports or ethnic studies.[100] The vast majority seem to possess minimal academic expertise and few intellectual interests, raising serious questions about their ability to reasonably evaluate their higher-quality applicants.

As additional evidence, we can consider What It Really Takes to Get into the Ivy League, a 2003 advice book written by Chuck Hughes, who spent five years as a Senior Admissions Officer at Harvard, after having himself graduated from that university. Although he strongly emphasizes his own college participation in varsity sports, he never says a word about any personal academic interests, and near the end of his book on elite college admissions, he appears to describe Duke, Northwestern, and Rice as being members of the Ivy League.[101]

A more explicit statement of this exact problem is found in A for Admission, a very candid 1997 description of the admissions process at elite private universities written by Michele A. Hernandez, who had spent four years as Dartmouth's Assistant Director of Admissions. Near the beginning of her book, Hernandez explains that over half of Ivy League admissions officers are individuals who had not attended such academically challenging universities, nor probably had the intellectual capability to do so, and were sometimes confused about the relative ranking of SAT scores and other basic academic credentials. She also cautions students to avoid any subtlety in their essays, lest their words be misunderstood by their readers in the admissions office, whose degrees are more likely to have been in education than in any serious academic discipline.[102]

It seems quite possible that poorly-paid liberal arts or ethnic-studies majors, probably with few quantitative skills and a vaguely “progressive” ideological focus, could implement highly unfair admissions decisions without even realizing their actions. According to Steinberg, admissions officers seem to assume that an important part of their duty is maximizing non-white enrollment, and this is especially true if they themselves are non-white, while there is no indication that they are actually aware of America's overall population distribution.[103]

The last point is not a trivial one, since although our country is only about 13 percent black, according to a 2001 Gallup survey most people thought the figure was 33 percent, with the average non-white putting it at 40 percent.[104] This was roughly confirmed by the GSS respondents in 2000, who also believed that nearly 18 percent of Americans were Jewish, a figure more than eight times too large.[105] A very recent 2012 survey found that Americans believe Protestants outnumber Jews in this country by only 2.5 to 1, when the actual ratio is ten times greater.[106]

Such shocking demographic ignorance is hardly confined solely to the uneducated. For example, soon after Karabel's book appeared, a prominent Massachusetts law school dean with a major interest in ethnic discrimination issues devoted two hours of his televised public affairs program to a detailed discussion of the topic with the author, but at the end let slip that he believed California's population was 50 percent Asian, an utter absurdity.[107] So perhaps many college administrators may have little idea about which ethnic groups are already enrolled above parity and which are below, instead taking their marching orders from an amorphous academic narrative which valorizes “racial diversity.”

Meanwhile, any hint of “anti-Semitism” in admissions is regarded as an absolutely mortal sin, and any significant reduction in Jewish enrollment may often be denounced as such by the hair-trigger media. For example, in 1999 Princeton discovered that its Jewish enrollment had declined to just 500 percent of parity, down from more than 700 percent in the mid-1980s, and far below the comparable figures for Harvard or Yale. This quickly resulted in four front-page stories in the Daily Princetonian, a major article in the New York Observer, and extensive national coverage in both the New York Times and the Chronicle of Higher Education.[108] These articles included denunciations of Princeton's long historical legacy of anti-Semitism and quickly led to official apologies, followed by an immediate 30 percent rebound in Jewish numbers. During these same years, non-Jewish white enrollment across the entire Ivy League had dropped by roughly 50 percent, reducing those numbers to far below parity, but this was met with media silence or even occasional congratulations on the further “multicultural” progress of America's elite education system.

I suspect that the combined effect of these separate pressures, rather than any planned or intentional bias, is the primary cause of the striking enrollment statistics that we have examined above. In effect, somewhat dim and over-worked admissions officers, generally possessing weak quantitative skills, have been tasked by their academic superiors and media monitors with the twin ideological goals of enrolling Jews and enrolling non-whites, with any major failures risking harsh charges of either “anti-Semitism” or “racism.” But by inescapable logic maximizing the number of Jews and non-whites implies minimizing the number of non-Jewish whites.

Problems with Pure Diversity and Pure Meritocracy

In recent decades, elite college admissions policy has frequently become an ideological battlefield between liberals and conservatives, but I would argue that both these warring camps have been missing the actual reality of the situation.

Conservatives have denounced “affirmative action” policies which emphasize race over academic merit, and thereby lead to the enrollment of lesser qualified blacks and Hispanics over their more qualified white and Asian competitors; they argue that our elite institutions should be color-blind and race-neutral. Meanwhile, liberals have countered that the student body of these institutions should “look like America,” at least approximately, and that ethnic and racial diversity intrinsically provide important educational benefits, at least if all admitted students are reasonably qualified and able to do the work.

My own position has always been strongly in the former camp, supporting meritocracy over diversity in elite admissions. But based on the detailed evidence I have discussed above, it appears that both these ideological values have gradually been overwhelmed and replaced by the influence of corruption and ethnic favoritism, thereby selecting future American elites which are not meritocratic nor diverse, neither being drawn from our most able students nor reasonably reflecting the general American population.

The overwhelming evidence is that the system currently employed by most of our leading universities admits applicants whose ability may be unremarkable but who are beneficiaries of underhanded manipulation and favoritism. Nations which put their future national leadership in the hands of such individuals are likely to encounter enormous economic and social problems, exactly the sort of problems which our own country seems to have increasingly experienced over the last couple of decades. And unless the absurdly skewed enrollments of our elite academic institutions are corrected, the composition of these feeder institutions will ensure that such national problems only continue to grow worse as time passes. We should therefore consider various means of correcting the severe flaws in our academic admissions system, which functions as the primary intake valve of our future national elites.

One obvious approach would be to wave a magic wand and make the existing system “work better” by replacing many thousands of college admissions officers by individuals more competent and less venal, guardians of the common good who would properly balance objective academic merit against other intrinsic student qualities, while avoiding any lapse into rank favoritism. But this same simple solution could always be proposed for any other obviously failing system, including Soviet-style Communism.

A more fundamental change might be to directly adopt the implicit logic of America's “academic diversity” movement—whose leadership has been overwhelmingly Jewish[109]—and require our elite universities to bring their student bodies into rough conformity with the overall college-age population, ethnicity by ethnicity, in which case the Jewish presence at Harvard and the rest of the Ivy League would drop to between 1.5 and 2 percent.[110]

However, even leaving aside the rights and wrongs of such a proposal, it would be extremely difficult to implement in practice. The pattern of American ethnic origins is complex and interwoven, with high intermarriage rates, leading to categories being fluid and ambiguous. Furthermore, such an approach would foster clear absurdities, with wealthy Anglo-Saxons from Greenwich, Conn. being propelled into Yale because they fill the “quota” created on the backs of the impoverished Anglo-Saxons of Appalachia or Mississippi.

An opposite approach would be to rely on strictest objective meritocracy, with elite universities automatically selecting their students in academic rank-order, based on high school grades and performance on standardized exams such as the SAT. This approach would be similar to that used in many other developed countries around the world, but would produce severe social problems of its own.

Consider the notorious examples of the single-minded academic focus and testing-frenzy which are already sometimes found at many predominantly Asian immigrant high schools, involving endless cram-courses and massive psychological pressure. This seems very similar to the stories of extreme educational effort found in countries such as Japan, South Korea, and China, where educational success is an overriding social value and elite admissions are fully determined by rank-order academic performance. At present, these severe educational pressures on American teenagers have been largely confined to a portion of our small Asian-American population and perhaps some of their non-Asian schoolmates, but if Harvard and its peers all selected their students based on such criteria, a huge fraction of American students would be forced to adopt similar work-habits or lose any hope of gaining admission. Do we really want to produce an entire nation of “Asian Tiger Moms” of all ethnicities and backgrounds, probably with horrible consequences for the future mental health, personal creativity, and even long-term academic performance of the next generation?

Also, we would expect such a system to heavily favor those students enrolled at our finest secondary schools, whose families could afford the best private tutors and cram-courses, and with parents willing to push them to expend the last ounce of their personal effort in endless, constant studying. These crucial factors, along with innate ability, are hardly distributed evenly among America's highly diverse population of over 300 million, whether along geographical, socio-economic, or ethnic lines, and the result would probably be an extremely unbalanced enrollment within the ranks of our top universities, perhaps one even more unbalanced than that of today. Although American cultural elites may currently pay too much lip service to “diversity” as a value, there is also such a thing as too little educational diversity. Do we really want a system in which all of America's top 100 universities selected their students much like Caltech does today, and therefore had a similar academic environment?

We should also consider that under such a selection system, any interest or involvement not directly contributing to the academic transcript—including activities associated with artistic talent, sports ability, or extra-curricular leadership—would disappear from our top universities, since students who devoted any significant time to those pursuits would tend to lose out to those who did not. Even those highest-ability students who gained admission would tend to forego the benefits of encountering classmates with a somewhat more balanced mix of interests and abilities, a group closer to the American mainstream, and might therefore develop a very one-sided and unrealistic view of our national population. And if every student admitted to Harvard believed, not without some justification, that he had been objectively determined to be among the smartest and hardest working 0.05 percent of all Americans his age, that might not be the best psychological starting point for a teenager just entering his adult life and future career.

These same problems would also manifest themselves in an admissions system based on strict meritocracy as adjusted by socio-economic status, which Richard Kahlenberg prominently advocated in his 1996 book The Remedy, and various other writings. Although this approach has always seemed reasonably attractive to me and the results would certainly provide more socio-economical balance than straight meritocracy, other “diversity” enhancements might be minimal. We should remember that a significant fraction of our Asian immigrant population combines very low socio-economic status with extremely strong academic performance and educational focus, so it seems likely that this small group would capture a hugely disproportionate share of all admissions spots influenced by these modifying factors, which may or may not be fully realized by advocates of this approach.

An Inner Ring and an Outer Ring

But if selecting our future elites by purest “diversity” wouldn't work, and using purest “meritocracy” would seem an equally bad idea, what would be the right approach to take as a replacement for today's complex mixture of diversity, meritocracy, favoritism, and corruption?

Perhaps an important starting point would be to recognize that in any normal distribution curve, numbers widen greatly and differences become far less significant below the very top. Today's academic supporters of “affirmative action” frequently claim that beneath the strongest tier of academic applicants to Yale or Stanford, the differences between particular students become relatively small, only slightly indicative of how they will perform at the college if they are enrolled;[111] and this claim is not entirely false. A large fraction of all the students applying have demonstrated that they have the ability and commitment to adequately perform the college work in question, and although they are unlikely to graduate in the top 5 percent of Princeton's class, the same is also true of the vast majority of their classmates. The average student at Harvard is going to be an average Harvard student, and perhaps it would be better if a large majority of the admitted students would not find this prospect a horrifying disappointment after their previously stellar career of having always been the biggest student fish in their smallish academic ponds.

The notion of top universities only selecting a slice of their students based on purest academic merit certainly seems to be the standard today, and was so in the past as well. Karabel recounts how during the 1950s and 1960s, Harvard reserved about 10 percent of its spots for “top brains,” while selecting the remainder based on a mixture of different factors.[112] In Choosing Elites, Robert Klitgaard indicates that roughly this same approach continued into the 1980s, with only a fraction of admitted students being classified and admitted as “first-class scholars.”[113] As already mentioned, according to Hughes, who served five years as a Harvard Senior Admissions Officer at Harvard, by the mid-2000s only 5 percent or less of Harvard undergraduates were selected purely on academic merit, with extracurricular activities and a wide variety of unspecified other criteria being used to choose among the other 80–85 percent of applicants who could actually handle the academic work; and this same pattern is found at most other highly selective universities.[114] Given a widening funnel of ability, it is absurd to base admissions decisions on just a small difference of twenty or thirty points on the SAT, which merely encourages students to spend thousands of hours cramming in order to gain those extra crucial twenty or thirty points over their competitors.

But if our elite colleges were to select only a portion of their students based on purest academic merit, how should they pick the remainder, merely by flipping a coin? Actually, that might not be such a terrible idea, at least compared with the current system, in which these decisions are often seemingly based on massive biases and sometimes even outright corruption. After all, if we are seeking a student body which is at least somewhat diverse and reasonably representative of the American population, random selection is hardly the least effective means of ensuring that outcome. And the result would be true diversity, rather than the dishonest and ridiculous pseudo-diversity of our existing system.

The notion of using random selection to overcome the risk of unfair bias has been used for centuries, including in our own country, and is regularly found in matters of the greatest civic importance, especially those involving life and death. Our jury system relies on the random selection of a handful of ordinary citizens to determine the guilt or innocence of even the most eminent and powerful individuals, as well as to render corporate verdicts with penalties reaching into the billions. The millions of Americans ordered to fight and perhaps die in our major wars were generally called into the military by the process of a random draft lottery. And today, the enormous growth of games of chance and financial lotteries, often government-run, have become an unfortunate but very popular aspect of our entire economic system. Compared to these situations, requiring an excellent but hardly spectacular student to take his chances on winning a spot at Harvard or Yale hardly seems unreasonable.

In The Big Test, journalist Nicholas Lemann traces the history of meritocratic admissions policy, and the philosophical conflicts which liberals faced once that policy first came into direct conflict with the racial diversity they also favored, beginning when the DeFunis “reverse discrimination” case reached the U.S. Supreme Court in 1974. At that point, one of the high court's strongest liberal voices was Justice William O. Douglas, and he repeatedly considered the possible use of random lotteries as the fairest means of allocating college admissions slots below the top tier of most highly qualified applicants.[115]

Let us explore the likely social implications of such an admissions policy, focusing solely on Harvard and following a very simple model, in which (say) 300 slots or around 20 percent of each entering class are allocated based on pure academic merit (the “Inner Ring”), with the remaining 1300 slots being randomly selected from the 30,000 or so American applicants considered able to reasonably perform at the school's required academic level and thereby benefit from a Harvard education (the “Outer Ring”).

First, we must recognize that the 300 applicants admitted by straight merit would be an exceptionally select group, representing just the top 2 percent of America's 16,000 NMS semifinalists. Also, almost any American students in this group or even reasonably close would be very well aware of that fact, and more importantly, nearly all other students would realize they were far too distant to have any chance of reaching that level, no matter how hard they studied or how many hours they crammed, thus freeing them from any terrible academic pressure. Under today's system, the opaque and haphazard nature of the admissions process persuades tens of thousands of students they might have a realistic shot at Harvard if only they would study a bit harder or participate in one more resume-stuffing extracurricular,[116] but that would no longer be the case, and they would be able to relax a bit more during their high school years, just so long as they did well enough to qualify and try their luck as one of the “Outer Ring” of applicants.

The 300 Inner Ring students would certainly be quite different in all sorts of ways from the average high school student, even aside from their greater academic ability and drive; they might not be “diverse” in any sense of the word, whether geographically, ethnically, or socio-economically. But the remaining 1300 Outer Ring students would represent a random cross-section of the tens of thousands of students who applied for admission and had reasonably good academic ability, and since they would constitute 80 percent of the enrollment, Harvard would almost certainly become far more diverse and representative of America's total population in almost all ways than is the case today, when 30 percent of its students come from private schools, often the most elite and expensive ones.[117]

Furthermore, the vast majority of Harvard graduates—and everyone who later dealt with them—would know perfectly well that they had merely been “lucky” in gaining their admission, thereby tempering the sort of arrogance found among too many of today's elite college graduates. And our vast and growing parasitic infrastructure of expensive cram-schools, private tutors, special academies, and college application consultants would quickly be reduced to what was merited by their real academic value, which may actually be close to nil. A general armistice would have been declared in America's endlessly growing elite admissions arms-race.

Under such a system, Harvard might no longer boast of having America's top Lacrosse player or a Carnegie Hall violinist or a Senatorial scion. But the class would be filled with the sort of reasonably talented and reasonably serious athletes, musicians, and activists drawn as a cross-section from the tens of thousands of qualified applicants, thereby providing a far more normal and healthier range of students.

The terrible family pressure which students, especially immigrant students, often today endure in the college admissions process would be greatly reduced. Even the most ambitious parents would usually recognize that their sons and daughters are unlikely to ever outrank 99.99 percent of their fellow students academically, so their only hope of reaching a school like Harvard would be the same as that of everyone else, via the admissions lottery. And losing in a random drawing can hardly be a source of major shame to any family.

One of the most harmful aspects of recent American society has been the growth of a winner-take-all mentality, in which finishing even just slightly below the top rung at any stage of the career ladder seems to amount to economic and sometimes personal failure. An aspect of this is that our most elite businesses tend to only recruit from the top universities, assuming that these possess a near-monopoly on the brightest and most talented students, even though it actually appears that favoritism and corruption these days are huge factors in admission. But if it were explicitly known that the vast majority of Harvard students had merely been winners in the application lottery, top businesses would begin to cast a much wider net in their employment outreach, and while the average Harvard student would probably be academically stronger than the average graduate of a state college, the gap would no longer be seen as so enormous, with individuals being judged more on their own merits and actual achievements. A Harvard student who graduated magna cum laude would surely have many doors open before him, but not one who graduated in the bottom half of his class.

This same approach of an Inner Ring and an Outer Ring of admissions could similarly be applied to most of America's other selective colleges, perhaps with some variations in the relative sizes of the two groups. It is possible that some universities such as Caltech, which today selects its 200 entering freshmen by purely meritocratic academic rank-order, might prefer to retain that system, in which case the Inner Ring would constitute the entire enrollment. Other universities, which glorify the extremes of total diversity, might choose to select almost all their students by random lot. But for most, the sort of split enrollment I have outlined might work reasonably well.

Since colleges would still be positioned in a hierarchy of national excellence and prestige, those students whose academic record just missed placing them within the Inner Ring of a Harvard or a Yale would almost certainly gain automatic admission to a Columbia, Cornell, or Duke, and the same sort of cascading effect would be found down through all subsequent layers of selectivity. Thus, although America's top couple of thousand students each year would not all be found among the 4000 entering Harvard, Yale, or Princeton, they would at least gain admission to some Ivy or its equivalent, in contrast to the shocking examples of admissions injustice recounted by Golden.

Since essays, personal statements, lists of extracurricular achievements and so many other uniquely complex and time-consuming elements of the American admissions process would no longer exist, students could easily apply to long lists of possible colleges, ranking them in order of personal preference. Meanwhile, the colleges themselves could dispense with nearly their entire admissions staff, since the only remaining part of the admissions process would be determining the academic ranking of the tiny fraction of top applicants, which could be performed quickly and easily. Harvard currently receives almost 35,000 applications, which must each be individually read and evaluated in a massive undertaking, but applying a crude automatic filter of grades and test scores would easily winnow these down to the 1,000 plausible candidates for those 300 Inner Ring slots, allowing a careful evaluation of those highest-performing students on pure academic grounds.

Eliminating at a stroke the enormous expense and complexity of our baroque admissions process might actually raise the quality of the students attending elite colleges by drawing more applicants into the system, especially if, as I suggest elsewhere, tuition at our top private colleges were drastically reduced or even eliminated (See “Paying Tuition to a Giant Hedge Fund”).

The late James Q. Wilson certainly ranked as one of America's most highly-regarded social scientists of the second half of the twentieth century, and when he was awarded the Gold Medal of the National Institute of Social Sciences in 2011, his remarks provided some fascinating details of his own educational background. Although an outstanding high school student in Southern California, no one in his family had ever previously attended college nor had he himself given it any thought, instead starting work in his father's auto repair shop after graduation in order to learn the trade of a car mechanic. However, one of his teachers arranged his admission to a small college on a full scholarship, which launched him on his stellar academic career.[118]

It seems likely that the vast paperwork and expense of today's admissions system, with its endless forms, intrusive questionnaires, fee-waiver-applications, and general bureaucracy intimidates many bright students, especially those from impoverished or immigrant backgrounds, and deters them from even considering an application to our elite colleges, especially since they perhaps wrongly assume that they would stand no chance of success. But filling out a few very simple forms and having their test scores and grades scores automatically forwarded to a list of possible universities would give them at least the same chance in the lottery as any other applicant whose academic skills were adequate.

Following the 1991 collapse and disintegration of the Soviet Union, some observers noted with unease that the United States was left as about the only remaining large and fully-functional multi-ethnic society, and the subsequent collapse and disintegration of ethnically diverse Yugoslavia merely strengthened these concerns. China is sometimes portrayed by the ignorant American media as having large and restive minority populations, but it is 92 percent Han Chinese, and if we exclude a few outlying or thinly populated provinces—the equivalents of Alaska, Hawaii, and New Mexico—closer to 95 percent Han, with all its top leadership drawn from that same background and therefore possessing a natural alignment of interests. Without doubt, America's great success despite its multiplicity of ethnic nationalities is almost unique in modern human history. But such success should not be taken for granted.

Many of the Jewish writers who focus on the history of elite university admissions, including Karabel, Steinberg, and Lemann, have critiqued and rebuked the America of the first half of the Twentieth Century for having been governed by a narrow WASP ascendency, which overwhelmingly dominated and controlled the commanding heights of business, finance, education, and politics; and some of their criticisms are not unreasonable. But we should bear in mind that this dominant group of White Anglo-Saxon Protestants—largely descended from among the earliest American settlers and which had gradually absorbed and assimilated substantial elements of Celtic, Dutch, German, and French background—was generally aligned in culture, religion, ideology, and ancestry with perhaps 60 percent of America's total population at the time, and therefore hardly represented an alien presence.[119] By contrast, a similarly overwhelming domination by a tiny segment of America's current population, one which is completely misaligned in all these respects, seems far less inherently stable, especially when the institutional roots of such domination have continually increased despite the collapse of the supposedly meritocratic justification. This does not seem like a recipe for a healthy and successful society, nor one which will even long survive in anything like its current form.

Power corrupts and an extreme concentration of power even more so, especially when that concentration of power is endlessly praised and glorified by the major media and the prominent intellectuals which together constitute such an important element of that power. But as time goes by and more and more Americans notice that they are poorer and more indebted than they have ever been before, the blandishments of such propaganda machinery will eventually lose effectiveness, much as did the similar propaganda organs of the decaying Soviet state. Kahlenberg quotes Pat Moynihan as noting that the stagnant American earnings between 1970 and 1985 represented “the longest stretch of ‘flat' income in the history of the European settlement of North America.”[120] The only difference today is that this period of economic stagnation has now extended nearly three times as long, and has also been combined with numerous social, moral, and foreign policy disasters.

Over the last few decades America's ruling elites have been produced largely as a consequence of the particular selection methods adopted by our top national universities in the late 1960s. Leaving aside the question of whether these methods have been fair or have instead been based on corruption and ethnic favoritism, the elites they have produced have clearly done a very poor job of leading our country, and we must change the methods used to select them. Conservative William F. Buckley, Jr. once famously quipped that he would rather entrust the government of the United States to the first 400 names listed in the Boston telephone directory than to the faculty of Harvard. So perhaps an important step in solving our national problems would be to apply a similar method to selecting the vast majority of Harvard's students.

Ron Unz is publisher of The American Conservative.

Quantitative Sources and Methods Appendices

- Quantitative Sources and Methods Appendices

Primary Bibliography

The Shape of the River(1998) William G. Bowen and Derek Bok

Equity and Excellence in American Higher Education (2005) William G. Bowen, Martin A. Kurzweil, and Eugene M. Tobin

Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother (2011) Amy Chua

No Longer Separate, Not Yet Equal (2009) Thomas J. Espenshade and Alexandria Walton Radford

The Price of Admission (2006) Daniel Golden

Twilight of the Elites (2012) Christopher Hayes

A Is For Admission (1997) Michele A. Hernandez

Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street (2009)

Karen Ho

Asian Americans in Higher Education and at Work (1988) Jayjia Hsia

What It Really Takes to Get into the Ivy League (2003) Chuck Hughes

The Chosen (2005) Jerome Karabel

Choosing Elites (1985) Robert Klitgaard

The Big Test (1999) Nicholas Lemann

The Chosen People: A Study of Jewish Intelligence and Achievement (2011) Richard Lynn

How to Be a High School Superstar (2010) Cal Newport

Joining the Club: A History of Jews and Yale (1985) Dan A. Oren

How They Got Into Harvard (2005) The Harvard Crimson

The Gatekeepers (2002/2012) Jacques Steinberg

The Half-Opened Door (1979/2010) Marcia Graham Synnott

The Retreat from Race (1992/1998) Dana Y. Takagi

The Abilities and Achievements of Orientals in North America (1982) Philip E. Vernon

The Creative Elite in America (1966) Nathaniel Weyl

The Geography of American Achievement (1989) Nathaniel Weyl

References

[1] “Harvard Says 125 Students May Have Cheated on a Final Exam,” Richard Perez-Pena and Jess Bidgood, The New York Times, August 30, 2012: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/31/education/harvard-says-125-students-may-have-cheated-on-exam.html

[2] By 2010, the top 1% of Americans possessed 35.4% of the national net wealth, while the bottom 95% held 36.9%. See Edward N. Wolff, “The Asset Price Meltdown and the Wealth of the Middle Class,” New York University, August 26, 2012: http://appam.confex.com/appam/2012/webprogram/Paper2134.html .

[3]See Ho (2009) pp. 11, 13, 40-69 passim, 256 for an extensive discussion of the college background and recruitment choices made by Wall Street firms in recent years. According to her “ethnography” of Wall Street, major financial firms recruit very heavily from Harvard and Princeton, somewhat less at the remaining Ivy League schools and a few others such as Stanford and MIT, and rarely anywhere else, partly because they believe admission to elite universities provide evidence of “smartness,” which Wall Street values above all else (p. 38).

The claim that attendance at an Ivy League or other elite university provides a substantial advantage over similarly talented individuals has been disputed by the recent research of Stacy Dale and Alan B. Krueger, but their findings are based on students who graduated college almost two decades ago, and probably do not capture the dramatic recent changes in the American economy and Wall Street practices since that time. See David Leonhardt, “Revisiting the Value of Elite Colleges,” The New York Times, February 21, 2011: http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/02/21/revisiting-the-value-of-elite-colleges/ .

[4] Ezra Klein, “Wall Street Steps In When Ivy League Fails,” Washington Post, February 16, 2012: http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/wall-street-steps-in-when-ivy-league-fails/2012/02/16/gIQAX2weIR_story.html

[5] Austin Bramwell, “Top of the Class,” The American Conservative, March 13, 2012: http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/top-of-the-class/

[6] As an example of these extreme efforts, see “NYC's Kindergarten Wars,” The New York Post/PageSix Magazine, October 5, 2008: http://www.nypost.com/pagesixmag/issues/20081005/NYCs+Kindergarten+Wars

[7] Jenny Anderson and Peter Applebome, “Exam Cheating on Long Island Hardly a Secret,” The New York Times, December 1, 2011: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/02/education/on-long-island-sat-cheating-was-hardly-a-secret.html

[8] Golden (2006) pp. 44-48.

[9] Ssu-yu Teng, “Chinese Influence on the Western Examination System,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, Sept. 1943, pp. 267-312.

[10] Karabel (2005) pp. 89-109.

[11] Oren (1985) p. 62.

[12] Karabel (2005) p. 126.

[13] Karabel (2005) pp. 387-391.

[14] Karabel (2005) p. 364

[15] Karabel (2005) pp. 93, 194-195, 486-499.

[16] Karabel (2005) pp. 524-525.

[17] Admittedly, surveys show that the vast majority of Asian-Americans do not believe their racial background hurts their chances of college admission, but such factors would obviously apply primarily only at the elite, highly selective universities, which only a small fraction of Asians seek to attend. See “The Rise of Asian Americans,” Pew Research Center, June 19, 2012: http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2012/06/19/the-rise-of-asian-americans/ .

[18] Jesse Washington, “Some Asians' College Strategy: Don't Check ‘Asian,'” The Associated Press, December 3, 1011:

http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/education/story/2011-12-03/asian-students-college-applications/51620236/1 . See also Jon Marcus, “Competitive Disadvantage,” The Boston Globe, April 17, 2011: http://www.boston.com/news/education/higher/articles/2011/04/17/high_achieving_asian

_americans_are_being_shut_out_of_top_schools/ and Scott Jaschik, “Is It Bias? Is It Legal?,” Inside Higher Ed, February 3, 2012: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2012/02/03/federal-probe-raises-new-questions-discrimination-against-asian-american-applicants .

[19] Espanshade (2009) p. 92-93.

[20] Golden (2006) p. 200.

[21] The elite university enrollment statistics for Asians and other racial and ethnic groups derived from the NCES data are provided in Appendix C. All the Asian figures provided by the NCES exclude “mixed race” individuals, who were previously included in the “Race Unknown” category but since 2009 have been provided separately.

[22] Hsia (1988) pp. 93-148, Takagi (1992/1998).

[23] For example, see Oren (1985) pp. 320-322 and Synnott (1979/2010) pp. 112,195.

[24] A portion of this decline in relative Asian enrollment may be apparent rather than real. As noted earlier, some Asian applicants, especially those of mixed parentage and without an identifying Asian name, may attempt to conceal their non-white ancestry in hopes of enhancing their likelihood of admission. But such a situation can hardly be used to justify Ivy League policy, and since the numbers are unknown, we must generally confine our analysis to the officially reported statistics.

[25] It should be noted that some former Ivy League admissions officers strongly deny such charges of anti-Asian bias. For example, Chuck Hughes, who spent five years as a Harvard Senior Admissions Officer, claims in his 2003 book that Asian American applicants—just like blacks, Hispanics, American Indians, and other non-whites—actually receive a beneficial “tip” in evaluating their application packages. It should also be noted that Hughes strongly emphasizes his own enthusiastic participation in varsity sports as a Harvard undergraduate, while avoiding mention of any academic interests. See Hughes (2003) pp. 86, 145.

[26] Hsia (1988) pp. 98-99; Karabel (2005) p. 500.

[27] Indeed, Dean L. Fred Jewett of Harvard suggested in 1985 that among Asians “family pressure makes more marginal students apply” but provided no evidence for this claim, which seems contradicted by the objective evidence. See Hsia (1988) p. 97.

[28] College Confidential, September 16, 2011:

http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/13210307-post724.html .

[29] One apparent difficulty in such Asian surname analysis might be the case of mixed-race individuals with Asian names, but this difficulty is quite insignificant. First, mixed-race Asians are only about 15% of the total Asian population, and are excluded from our Asian statistics for college enrollments. Meanwhile, until quite recently, the overwhelming majority of marriages between Asians and non-Asians involved an Asian wife, hence the last names of any children would tend not to be Asian and would be excluded from our list analysis. Thus, both our college enrollment figures and our academic performance estimates tend to exclude part-Asians and should be fully consistent.

[30] The 2000 Census lists 310,125 Nguyens, or about 1 in 3.6 of the total Vietnamese population of 1,122,528. Meanwhile, there were 194,067 Kims, representing 1 in 5.5 of the 1,076,872 Koreans.

[31] Weyl (1987) pp. 26-27.

[32] Stephan and Abigail Thernstrom, America in Black and White (1997) pp. 398-400 provides some racial statistics on the past distribution of top SAT scores which would strongly support this conclusion. In 1981, Asians were just 2% of the college-age population but accounted for over 4% of students with Verbal scores of 700 or above and 11% of those with Math scores of 750 or above. By 1995, college-age Asians were still just 3% of the total, but produced over 14% of those high Verbal scores and a remarkable 28% of the high Math scores. Since Asian-Americans have now increased to roughly 5% of students of college age and have also become much more affluent, we would expect such figures to be far higher today.

[33] Although the primary measure of human “fluid intelligence”—so-called “g”—is measured consistently across different groups, for reasons not entirely clear the three principal subcomponents of Verbal, Mathematical, and Visuospatial abilities sometimes vary substantially across racial or ethnic lines. For example, East Asians tend to be especially strong in Visuospatial ability but much less so in Verbal ability, Jews are extremely strong in Verbal but mediocre in Visuospatial skills, while most white Europeans tend to be intermediate in both these different categories. See Vernon (1982) pp. 20-21, 160-163, 178-180, 272-277.

[34] Suein Hwang, “The New White Flight,” The Wall Street Journal, November 19, 2005: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB113236377590902105-search.html .

[35] At his 1992 Milwaukee trial, Jeffrey Dahmer freely admitted torturing, killing, and cannibalizing 17 young men, but vigorously denied he had selected his mostly black victims out of any racial bias. In a more typical case, after black Connecticut truck driver Omar Thornton massacred five of his white co-workers, the media focused considerable attention on whether they had been innocent victims or “racists” as Thornton had alleged.

[36] In recent years, the Reading and Writing SAT scores for entering freshmen at all four universities have been almost identical, while the Math SAT scores at Caltech have been significantly higher, as have been the percentages of National Merit Scholars. See the NCES website: http://nces.ed.gov/collegenavigator/ and Steve Hsu, “Elite Universities and Human Capital Mongering,” October 10, 2010: http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2010/10/elite-universities-and-human-capital.html .

[37] Indeed, the 1988 official register of Harvard, intended for prospective applicants, actually described the Harvard admissions process as “complex, subjective, and sometimes difficult to comprehend.” See Takagi (1992/1998) p. 63.

[38] As Asian applications to the University of California system grew rapidly during the 1980s, there were major efforts to replace a simple and objective meritocratic admissions system with a “holistic” and opaque system, closer to that of the Ivies, which had the initial effect of sharply reducing Asian admissions. See Hsia (1988) pp. 106-119, Takagi (1992/1998). However, political resistance by Asian groups in California and especially the subsequent passage of Proposition 209 eventually overcame these policies.

[39] Earlier this month, a lengthy New York Times article on Asian admissions issues written by the newspaper's former Education Editor argued that the use of objective admissions standards had caused the Berkeley and UCLA campuses to become more than half Asian, and suggested that this had led to adverse social and educational consequences. However, this claim contains serious factual errors, given that the 2011 Asian undergraduate enrollments were just 37% and 34% respectively, and had never come close to half at any point in history. See Ethan Bronner, “Asian-Americans in the Argument,” The New York Times, November 4, 2012: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/04/education/edlife/affirmative-action-a-complicated-issue-for-asian-americans.html .

[40] Asians are currently 72% of the students at Stuyvesant and 63% at Bronx Science, while the latter school was just 20% Asian in 1986. See Kyle Spencer, “For Asians, School Tests Are Vital Steppingstones,” The New York Times, October 28, 2012: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/27/education/a-grueling-admissions-test-highlights-a-racial-divide.html and Deborah Anderluh, “High School for Gifted Kids May Open in L.A.,” The Los Angeles Herald-Examiner, September 28, 1986:

.

[41] In the mid-1980s, charges that anti-Asian discrimination in the UC system were similar to the old “Jewish quotas” of the Ivy League quickly provoked television network coverage. See Takagi (1992/1998) pp. 50-51.

[42] Media coverage played a huge role in influencing the growth and outcome of the battle over the admissions of Asians to the UC system. See Takagi (1992/1998) pp.49-51, 74-77, 100-103.

[43] Asian-Americans had 2010 median annual household income of $66,000, about 22% higher than the white figure and were almost 60% more likely to have graduated from college, in each case ranking the highest of any racial group. See “The Rise of Asian Americans,” Pew Research Center, June 19, 2012: http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2012/06/19/the-rise-of-asian-americans/ .

[44] In defending Harvard against 1980s accusations of anti-Asian discrimination in admissions, Dean Fred Jewett made exactly this point regarding the impact of Asian geographical concentration. See Takagi (1992/1998) p. 69.

[45] These were exactly the arguments made by a relatively recent Harvard graduate who had served as Editor-in-Chief of the Harvard Independent and also reported on admissions practices. See Matthew Yglesias, “Harvard and Princeton Clearly Discriminate Against Asian Applicants; the Question Is Whether It's Illegal,” Slate.com, February 14, 2012: http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2012/02/14/harvard_and_princeton_clearly_

discriminate_against_asian_appliants_the_question_is_whether_it_s_illegal.html.

[46] Daniel Golden, “Harvard Targeted in U.S. Asian-American Discrimination Probe, Bloomberg News, February 2, 2012: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-02-02/harvard-targeted-in-u-s-asian-american-discrimination-probe.html ; Daniel E. Slotnik, “Do Asian-Americans Face Bias in Admissions at Elite Colleges?,” The New York Times, February 8, 2012: http://thechoice.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/08/do-asian-americans-face-bias-in-admissions-at-elite-colleges/ ; Editorial, “A Ludicrous Lawsuit,” The Harvard Crimson, February 8, 2012: http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2012/2/8/lawsuit-admissions-fair/ .

[47] Dana Vachon, “The Code of the Winklevii,” Vanity Fair, December 2011: http://www.vanityfair.com/business/features/2011/12/winklevosses-201112 .

[48] For decades, comparing and contrasting Asian-Americans with Jews has been a commonplace in public policy analysis, given that both groups are small but high-performing minorities in American society. See, for example, “The Triumph of Asian-Americans” and “Asians and Jews,” David A. Bell, The New Republic, July 15-22, 1985 and Michael Barone, The New Americans (2001) pp. 193-274. Indeed, one-third of Barone's book consists of the section entitled “Jews and Asians.” Most recently, the entire front page of the Wall Street Journal Weekly Review section was devoted to exactly this topic; see Lee Siegel, “Rise of the Tiger Nation,” Wall Street Journal, October 27-28, 2012: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204076204578076613986930932.html .

[49] Jewish enrollment estimates for elite universities are summarized in Appendix D.

[50] Karabel (2005) p. 536.

[51] Since the overwhelming majority of Harvard's foreign students are drawn from non-white countries or countries with negligible Jewish populations, it is likely that nearly all the Jewish students reported by Hillel are American. However, 6.2% of Harvard undergraduates refused to report their race in 2011, and many of these, possibly a majority, may actually be white. This “Race Unknown” category has typically ranged between 5% and 15% of Harvard undergraduates over the last couple of decades, with roughly similar numbers at most other Ivy League schools.

[52] For all these Jewish demographic estimates, see Appendix B.

[53] The combined undergraduate enrollment of the eight Ivy League universities includes roughly 12,000 Jews, 9,000 Asians, and 13,000 non-Jewish whites, as well as 5,000 students whose racial background is unknown. The population of college-age Americans consists of roughly 10 million whites, including 300,000 Jews, and 800,000 Asians.

[54] Steve Sailer, “National Merit Semifinalists by School and Name,” September 18, 2010: http://isteve.blogspot.com/2010/09/national-merit-semifinalists-by-school.html ; “The Far East Rises in the West,” Takimag.com, February 29, 2012: http://takimag.com/article/the_far_east_rises_in_the_west_steve_sailer/print ; “More Views on California Surnames of Semifinalists,” February 29, 2012: http://isteve.blogspot.com/2012/02/more-views-on-california-sunrnames-of.html . Obviously such a Jewish surname analysis would miss the children of intermarried families in which the husband was non-Jewish, hence only count half the half-Jews. However, any such errors introduced are probably small relative to the broader uncertainty in defining and estimating total Jewish numbers, the ambiguity in identifying Jewish names, and the likely estimation errors in the Jewish college enrollment statistics.

[55] Fernanda Santos, “To Be Black at Stuyvesant High,” The New York Times, February 25, 2012: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/26/education/black-at-stuyvesant-high-one-girls-experience.html . In 2012, Asians were 72.5% of Stuyvesant students, with all whites at just 24%, of whom an unspecified fraction were Jewish. Charles Murray has noted that in 1954, Jewish children comprised 24/28 or 85% of the highest-scoring students in NYC on a citywide IQ test, although at that point Jews were probably a little less than 30% of the city's total white population, so a similar degree of over-representation at the local elite academic schools seems plausible. See Charles Murray, “Jewish Genius,” Commentary, April 2007.

[56] Weyl (1989) p. 26-27.

[57] Vernon (1982) 160-162, 178-179, 273; Richard Lynn, “The Intelligence of American Jews,” Personality and Individual Differences, January 2004; Margaret E. Backman, “Patterns of Mental Abilities: Ethnic, Socioeconomic, and Sex Differences,” American Educational Research Journal, Winter 1972.

[58] Evidence that these low Jewish enrollments are due to meritocratic admissions factors rather than merely lack of possible applicants may be seen if we compare different UC campuses. Berkeley and UCLA are the most selective, and at those Jewish enrollment averages about 9.5% or about one-quarter the Asian total; meanwhile, Santa Cruz and Santa Barbara are much less selective, and the Jewish percentages are nearly twice as high and also close to the local Asian figures. Jewish enrollments are also very substantial at the lower-tier California State University system, with numbers being much higher both at CS Northridge than nearby UCLA and at San Diego State compared to UCSD. Large numbers of Jewish students also attend the schools in the lowest-tier community college system as well, such as Pierce College in the San Fernando Valley. If these Jewish students had had higher academic performance, most would almost certainly have selected the much more prestigious University of California campuses.

[59] Kimball A. Milton and Jagdish Mehra, Climbing the Mountain: The Scientific Biography of Julian Schwinger, 2003, p. 218.

[60] Weyl (1989) p. 26-27 estimates Jews as having a “performance coefficient” of 339 on the 1987 NMS semifinalist list. Since Jews were then approximately 2.4% of the American population, they would have been roughly 8.1% of the 1987 NMS semifinalists.

[61] David W. Murray, “The War Against Testing,” Commentary, September 1998.

[62] California contains a large fraction of America's mainland Japanese-Americans, who represent approximately 1.1% of the state's population, while roughly 0.8% of the state's NMS semifinalists have Japanese surnames. However, the older mean age of this group implies that it probably represents a relatively reduced fraction of the high school population.

[63] Weyl (1966) pp. 53-54, 83-84.

[64] Most recently, Judge Richard Posner, one of America's most highly regarded jurists, made such a claim that Jews have a mean IQ of 115 on his blog, together with an even more absurd claim that the same was also true for Asian-Americans. See “Rating Teachers,” The Becker-Posner Blog, September 23, 2012, http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/2012/09/rating-teachersposner.html .

[65] Lynn (2011) pp. 274-278.

[66] Ron Unz, “Race, IQ, and Wealth,” The American Conservative, August 2012: http://www.unz.com/article/race-iq-and-wealth/ .

[67] For example, the GSS indicates that just 3% of Jews live in rural areas, a tenth of the overall white rate, while Jews are over twice as likely to live in major cities or suburbs than the general white population.

[68] Helmuth Nyborg, “The Intelligence-Religiosity Nexus: A Representative Study of White Adolescent Americans,”

Intelligence (2009) pp. 81-93.

[69] See Appendix A.

[70] Sam Roberts, “A Village With the Numbers, Not the Image, of the Poorest Place,” The New York Times, April 20, 2011:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/21/nyregion/kiryas-joel-a-village-with-the-numbers-not-the-image-of-the-poorest-place.html .

[71] See Appendix G.

[72] Ron Unz, “Some Minorities Are More Minor Than Others,” The Wall Street Journal, November 16, 1998: http://www.unz.com/article/some-minorities-are-more-minor-than-others/ .

[73] Espenshade (2009) p. 113.

[74] See http://www.onlinecolleges.net/2012/02/21/the-10-most-generous-college-donations-of-all-time/ .

[75] Hughes (2003) p. 31. In 2003, roughly 450 students with perfect SAT scores of 1600 applied to Harvard, and fewer than 200 were accepted. For the 2000 rates, see Steinberg (2002) p. 220, and for the case of Princeton, see Kim Clark, “Do Elite Private Colleges Discriminate Against Asian Students?,” US News & World Report, October 7, 2009: http://www.usnews.com/education/articles/2009/10/07/do-elite-private-colleges-discriminate-against-asian-students .

[76] William R. Fitzsimmons, “Guidance Office: Answers From Harvard's Dean, Part 2,” The New York Times, September 11, 2009: http://thechoice.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/09/11/harvarddean-part2/

[77] Hughes (2003) 49, 57-58.

[78] Karabel (2005) pp. 292, 311.

[79] Privacy considerations prevent the public release of information on honors degrees awarded to graduates, but the top 10% of each Harvard class is inducted into Phi Beta Kappa, the national honors society, and the university's PBK rosters of the last fifty years are available on the Internet: http://isites.harvard.edu/icb/icb.do?keyword=k19082&pageid=icb.page189954 . Thirty or forty years ago, Jewish names were very common on the PBK lists, but more recently they have dropped to fairly low levels. It appears that Harvard's non-Jewish whites are now perhaps five times as likely as their Jewish classmates to achieve such high academic performance, with Asian students doing nearly as well. See Appendix G.

In recent years, Jewish conservatives have often been in the forefront of accusations that ethnic favoritism leads elite academic institutions to unfairly admit large numbers of blacks and Hispanics, who subsequently underperform once on campus. But perhaps such critics should consider looking into a mirror.

[80] Karabel (2005) p. 667n95.

[81] Harvard's most recent presidents have been Neil Rudenstine (1991-2001), Larry Summers (2001-2006), and Drew Faust (2007-present); the first two were of Jewish ancestry, while the last has been married to Charles E. Rosenberg since 1980. Richard Levin has served as president of Yale since 1993, as did Harold Shapiro at Princeton (1988-2001), while the current presidents of Penn and Cornell are Amy Gutmann (2004-present), and David Skorton (2006-present) respectively, all of Jewish origins, as is Yale's newly named incoming president Peter Salovey. In addition, former NYC Mayor Ed Koch identified Columbia President Lee Bollinger (2002-present) as being of Jewish ancestry in an angry column regarding Iran, but I have been unable to independently verify that claim. See Ed Koch, “Columbia Prez Should Have Stood Up for America, Too,” Jewish World Review, September 26, 2007.

[82] Princeton's last seven provosts have been Neil Rudenstine (1977-1987), Paul Benacerraf (1988-1991), Hugo Sonnenschein (1991-1993), Stephen Goldfeld (1993-1995), Jeremiah Ostriker (1995-2001), Amy Guttmann (2001-2004), and Christopher Eisgruber (2004-present), and all were of Jewish ancestry. Four of Harvard's last five provosts have had similar ethnicity, as well as three of three at Brown and two of five at Yale, including in each case the current officeholder.

[83] Fox Butterfield, “Harvard's ‘Core' Dean Glances Back,” The New York Times, June 2, 1984.

[84] See Appendix D. It is also curious that the weighty 1998 defense of preferential ethnic admissions policies at elite institutions written by former Harvard President Derek Bok and former Princeton President William G. Bowen contains no mention whatsoever of the widespread claims of anti-Asian discrimination at their own institutions, and does not even include a single reference to “Jews” in their very detailed index. See Bowen (1998).

[85] Three of Caltech's most recent six presidents have been Harold Brown (1969-1977), Marvin Goldberger (1978-1987), and David Baltimore (1997-2006), all of Jewish ancestry. Two of MIT's most recent five presidents have been Jerome Wiesner (1971–1980) and Leo Reif (2012–present), who have the same ethnic background.

[86] Espenshade (2009) pp. 92-93.

[87] Espenshade (2009) p. 126.

[88] Steinberg (2002/2012) pp. 124-136, 219-220.

[89] Steinberg (2002/2012) pp. 27-38, 204-210, 243-252.

[90] Steinberg (2002/2012) pp. 38-47, 173-195, 256-257.

[91] Steinberg (2002/2012) pp. 258-261, 281-282, 298-299.

[92] For example, Harvard President Derek Bok once denigrated the compensatory rational for affirmative action, instead praising “diversity” as “the hallmark” and the “core” of a university experience. As a positive instance of such “diversity,” he cited the benefits of enrolling a friend of his who had served as a captain of the women's track team, and came from a background wealthy enough that she celebrated her birthday with a trip to Italy. See Kahlenberg (1996) p. 29.

[93] See Howard Kurtz, “College Faculties A Most Liberal Lot, Study Finds,” The Washington Post, March 29, 2005: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A8427-2005Mar28.html ; Emily Esfahani Smith, “Survey Shocker: Liberal profs admit they'd discriminate against conservatives in hiring, advancement,” The Washington Times, August 1, 2012: http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2012/aug/1/liberal-majority-on-campus-yes-were-biased/ ; Eric Alterman, “Think Again: Jews Are Still Liberal,” The Center for American Progress, April 19, 2012: http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/media/news/2012/04/19/11420/think-again-jews-are-still-liberal/ .

[94] Steinberg (2002/2012) p. 9.

[95] Steinberg (2002/2012) pp. 181-182.

[96] Golden (2006) p. 60.

[97] Steinberg (2002/2012) pp. 282-284.

[98] Steinberg (2002/2012) pp. xiii, 130-131.

[99] See Appendix D.

[100] Steinberg (2002/2012) pp. 59-63, 265-266.

[101] Hughes (2003) p. 86, 202.

[102] Hernandez (1997) pp. 1-5. She suggests that the Harvard is the only Ivy League university in which a majority of the Admissions Officers tend to have an Ivy League background.

[103] Steinberg (2002) p. 131, 177-178.

[104] Joseph Carroll, “Public Overestimates U.S. Black and Hispanic Populations,” Gallup News Service, June 4, 2001.

http://www.gallup.com/poll/4435/public-overestimates-us-black-hispanic-populations.aspx

[105] Razib Khan, “How Many Minorities Are There in the USA?,” Discover Magazine/GNXP Blog, January 7, 2012: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2012/01/how-many-minorities-are-there-in-the-usa/ .

[106] Grey Matter Research Consulting, September 13, 2012

[107] Dean Lawrence R. Velvel of the Masschusetts School of Law interviewing Prof. Jerome Karabel on “Books of Our Time,” a public affairs show. The remarks described appear in the last nine minutes of the second hour segment. Hour One: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8911761293819497494 ; Hour Two: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-4805892219974282 .

[108] “Sharp Drop in Jewish Enrollment at Princeton U. Stirs Concern,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, May 7, 1999; Ben Gose, “Princeton Tries to Explain a Drop in Jewish Enrollment,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, May 14, 1999; Caroline C. Pam, “Enrollment of Jews at Princeton Drops by 40% in 15 Years,” The New York Observer, May 31, 1999; Karen W. Arenson, “Princeton Puzzle: Where Have Jewish Students Gone?,” The New York Times, June 2, 1999. It should be noted that Princeton's president at the time was Harold Shapiro, of Jewish ancestry, and just a few years earlier, the university had opened a $4.5 million Center for Jewish Life. See Synnott (1979/2010) p. xxvi-xxvii.

[109] See William Lind, “The Origins of Political Correctness,” February 5, 2000, Accuracy in Academia: http://www.academia.org/the-origins-of-political-correctness/ . Nearly all the figures mentioned were of Jewish origins.

[110] As discussed earlier, the recent accusations of Harvard racial discrimination from a rejected Asian applicant were denounced as “ludicrous” and “surreal” by the student editors of the Harvard Crimson, who emphasized the tremendous importance of affirmative action policies in maintaining student ethnic “diversity” at elite colleges and pointed out that Asians were anyway already over-represented by 200% relative to their portion of the American population. It so happens that the two top names on the Crimson masthead both came from an ethnic group over-represented at Harvard by nearly 1300%.

[111] For example, Bowen (1998) p. 37-39 attempts to compare the academic strength of black students admitted under affirmative action policies with the bottom decile of admitted white students, as a proxy for those whites rejected under affirmative action, and notes that the gap is smaller than often believed. The authors, former presidents of Harvard and Princeton, also emphasize that the crucial factor is to ensure that all admitted are above a high academic threshold and able to reasonably perform the work in question (p. 23). One obvious problem with this analysis is that if elite universities admit many under-qualified white students based on favoritism or corruption, these would constitute the bottom decile in question, and the comparison made would merely highlight this fact.

[112] Karabel (2005) p. 292.

[113] Klitgaard (1985) pp. 23-30.

[114] Hughes (2003) pp. 15, 49, 56. Also, in 1990 Harvard officials told federal investigators that 80-90% of applicants could probably do the academic work and 50-60% could do superb work. See Takagi (1992/1998) p. 194.

[115] Lemann (1999) pp. 206-207.

[116] Examples of the extreme effort students take in building their resumes for elite college admissions purposes are discussed throughout Newport (2010) and Harvard Crimson Editors (2005).

[117] See for example Austin Bramwell, “Top of the Class,” The American Conservative, March 13, 2012: http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/top-of-the-class/ .

[118] Quoted in Heather Higgins, “Remembering James Q. Wilson,” US News and World Report, March 5, 2012: http://www.usnews.com/opinion/articles/2012/03/05/remembering-james-q-wilson .

[119] The quota provisions of the 1924 Immigration Act were based on the national origins of the existing American population and therefore required a detailed analysis of existing ethnicities, and the totals for 1920 are presented in Madison Grant, Conquest of a Continent (1933) pp. 278-280. Around that time, well over one-third of all Americans were of British ancestry, 80 percent were Protestant, and 85% of whites had origins in Northwestern Europe.

[120] Quoted in Kahlenberg (1996) p. 115.

Statistics Indicate an Ivy League Asian Quota

The New York Times • December 19, 2012 • 700 Words

Just as their predecessors of the 1920s always denied the existence of “Jewish quotas,” top officials at Harvard, Yale, Princeton and the other Ivy League schools today strongly deny the existence of “Asian quotas.”  But there exists powerful statistical evidence to the contrary.

Each year, American universities provide their racial enrollment data to the National Center for Education Statistics, which makes this information available online.  After the Justice Department closed an investigation in the early 1990s into charges that Harvard University discriminated against Asian-American applicants, Harvard’s reported enrollment of Asian-Americans began gradually declining, falling from 20.6 percent in 1993 to about 16.5 percent over most of the last decade.

This decline might seem small.  But these same years brought a huge increase in America’s college-age Asian population, which roughly doubled between 1992 and 2011, while non-Hispanic white numbers remained almost unchanged.  Thus, according to official statistics, the percentage of Asian-Americans enrolled at Harvard fell by more than 50 percent over the last two decades, while the percentage of whites changed little.  This decline in relative Asian-American enrollment was actually larger than the impact of Harvard’s 1925 Jewish quota, which reduced Jewish freshmen from 27.6 percent to 15 percent.

The percentages of college-age Asian-Americans enrolled at most of the other Ivy League schools also fell during this same period, and over the last few years Asian enrollments across these different universities have converged to a very similar level and remained static over time.  This raises suspicions of a joint Ivy League policy to restrict Asian-American numbers to a particular percentage.

Meanwhile, the California Institute of Technology follows a highly selective but strictly race-neutral admissions policy, and its enrollment of Asian-Americans has grown almost exactly in line with the growth of the Asian-American population.

The last 20 years have brought a huge rise in the number of Asians winning top academic awards in our high schools or being named National Merit Scholarship semifinalists.  It seems quite suspicious that none of trends have been reflected in their increased enrollment at Harvard and other top Ivy League universities.

Some individuals have suggested that Asian-Americans no longer apply to the Ivy League in large numbers and this explains their reduced presence.  The prestigious University of California system routinely releases the racial totals for its college applicants, which allows the public to examine admission rates by race.  During the 1980s,  Ivy League colleges sometimes did so as well, but more recently have begun keeping these figures secret.  If Harvard and the other Ivy League schools simply released their racial application totals for the last 20 years, we might easily resolve the disturbing suspicion that they have quietly implemented a system of “Asian-American quotas.”

Since the Ivy League universities currently release their yearly racial totals both for admissions and for enrollments, I cannot see what plausible excuse they might have against also releasing their racial application totals.  This would allow us to examine the trends of racial admission rates for the last couple of decades, and decide whether or not these seemed suspicious.

Between 1980 and 1987 the Brown University admissions rate for Asian-American applicants dropped by over 40% compared with that for all other racial groups.  This discovery provoked considerable media scrutiny during the 1980s and eventually contributed to a federal investigation into anti-Asian discrimination at elite colleges. Perhaps as a consequence, the Ivy League has steadfastly refused to release any subsequent admissions rate figures, raising obvious suspicions that they might have something to hide.

Last week, Charles Murray of the conservative American Enterprise Institute, one of America’s most prominent social scientists, argued that the statistical data seems to demonstrate a clear pattern of racial discrimination against Asian-American applicants to Ivy League universities.  Now this New York Times forum has raised exactly the same question, including similar charges by former Delaware Lt. Governor S.B. Woo, who served as Founding President of 80-20, one of America’s leading Asian-American advocacy organizations.

American academics and journalists all across the political spectrum should begin asking Harvard and the other Ivy League universities to release the racial application totals which might substantiate their claims that they have not adopted “Asian-American quotas.”

Racial Quotas, Harvard, and the Legacy of Bakke

Have three decades of Supreme Court support for affirmative action been based on fraud?

National Review • February 18, 2013 • 800 Words

For almost 35 years, college-admissions decisions in America have been governed by the continuing legacy of University of California v. Bakke, in which a fragmented U.S. Supreme Court struck down the use of racial quotas but affirmed the legitimacy of considering race as one factor among several. The justices are now revisiting these crucial national issues in the pending Fisher v. University of Texas decision.

According to many observers, a crucial factor in the original 1978 ruling may have been the amicus brief filed by Harvard University. America’s oldest and most prestigious academic institution emphasized that its “holistic” admissions process allowed for the creation of a racially diversified student body while avoiding any “quota system.” In fact, Justice Lewis Powell’s majority opinion cited Harvard’s approach as exemplary, suggesting it demonstrated that well-intentioned and determined university administrators could achieve ethnic diversity without using quotas.

In the decades that followed, Harvard and its Ivy League allies redoubled their public advocacy of racial diversity via holistic admissions. When California’s Proposition 209 propelled the affirmative-action debate back onto the national stage during the 1990s, Derek Bok and William Bowen, former presidents of Harvard and Princeton respectively, published The Shape of the River, a weighty and influential volume that made the case for achieving academic racial diversity using the non-quota Ivy League methods already endorsed by the high court. Over the years, advocacy of “a holistic admissions system” as practiced by Harvard has become a favored mantra among diversity advocates in higher education.

But what if all these claims were simply fraudulent?

I recently published a lengthy article analyzing the admissions policies of America’s Ivy League universities; one of my main points was that these policies coincide with a very suspicious pattern of Asian-American enrollments.

Over the last 20 years, America’s population of college-age Asian-Americans has roughly doubled; but during this same period, the number admitted to Harvard and most other Ivy League schools has held steady or even declined, despite significant improvement in Asian academic performance. Furthermore, the Asian percentages at all Ivy League schools have recently converged to a very narrow range and remained static over time, which seems quite suspicious.

Meanwhile, the Californian Institute of Technology (Caltech) follows a highly selective but strictly race-neutral admissions policy, and its enrollment of Asian Americans has grown almost exactly in line with the growth of the Asian-American population.

The stark difference between these two admissions policies is evident in this graph of comparative enrollment:

Top officials at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton today strenuously deny the existence of Asian-American quotas, but their predecessors had similarly denied the existence of Jewish quotas in the 1920s, now universally acknowledged to have existed. In fact, the large growth in the Asian-American population means that the fraction attending Harvard has fallen by more than 50 percent since the early 1990s, a decline considerably greater than the decline Jews experienced after the implementation of secret quotas in 1925.

Based on these officially reported enrollment statistics, the evidence of Ivy League racial quotas seems overwhelming to many outside observers. The liberal New York Times recently ran a forum on the topic, and a large majority of its commenters were scathing in their criticism of the Harvard public-relations officer who defended his university’s position.

S.B. Woo, founding president of 80-20, a national Asian-American advocacy organization that strongly supported President Obama’s reelection, participated in the New York Times forum, entitling his contribution “Discrimination Is Obvious.” He argued that “the credibility of elite colleges suffers” when they deny the clear evidence that they “set a quota for Asian students,” and he claimed that “America’s core value of equal opportunity is being trampled.” Liberal and left-wing pundits from publications such as The Atlantic and The Washington Monthly have similarly ridiculed Harvard’s blatant dishonesty in the matter.

Suppose we accept the overwhelming statistical evidence that the admissions offices of Harvard and other Ivy League schools have been quietly following an illegal Asian-American quota system for at least the last couple of decades. During this same period, presidents of these institutions have publicly touted their “non-quota” approach to racial admissions problems, while their top lawyers have filed important amicus briefs making similar legal claims, most recently in the 2012 Fisher case. But if none of these individuals ever noticed that illegal quota activity was occurring under their very noses, how can their opinions carry much weight before either the public or the high court?

If the “Harvard Holistic Model” has actually amounted to racial quotas in disguise, then a central pillar of the modern legal foundation of affirmative action in college admissions going back to Bakke may have been based on fraud. Perhaps the justices of the Supreme Court should take these facts into consideration as they formulate their current ruling in the Fisher case.

Ron Unz is publisher of The American Conservative .

How Social Darwinism Made Modern China

A thousand years of meritocracy shaped the Middle Kingdom.

The American Conservative • March 11, 2013 • 8,300 Words

During the three decades following Deng Xiaoping’s 1978 reforms, China achieved the fastest sustained rate of economic growth in human history, with the resulting 40-fold rise in the size of China’s economy leaving it poised to surpass America’s as the largest in the world. A billion ordinary Han Chinese have lifted themselves economically from oxen and bicycles to the verge of automobiles within a single generation.

China’s academic performance has been just as stunning. The 2009 Program for International Student Assessment(PISA) tests placed gigantic Shanghai—a megalopolis of 15 million—at the absolute top of world student achievement.[1] PISA results from the rest of the country have been nearly as impressive, with the average scores of hundreds of millions of provincial Chinese—mostly from rural families with annual incomes below $2,000—matching or exceeding those of Europe’s most advanced and successful countries, such as Germany, France, and Switzerland, and ranking well above America’s results.[2]

These successes follow closely on the heels of a previous generation of similar economic and technological gains for several much smaller Chinese-ancestry countries in that same part of the world, such as Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore, and the great academic and socioeconomic success of small Chinese-descended minority populations in predominantly white nations, including America, Canada, and Australia. The children of the Yellow Emperor seem destined to play an enormous role in Mankind’s future.

Although these developments might have shocked Westerners of the mid-20th Century—when China was best known for its terrible poverty and Maoist revolutionary fanaticism—they would have seemed far less unexpected to our leading thinkers of 100 years ago, many of whom prophesied that the Middle Kingdom would eventually regain its ranking among the foremost nations of the world. This was certainly the expectation of E.A. Ross, one of America’s greatest early sociologists, whose book The Changing Chinese looked past the destitution, misery, and corruption of the China of his day to a future modernized China perhaps on a technological par with America and the leading European nations. Ross’s views were widely echoed by public intellectuals such as Lothrop Stoddard, who foresaw China’s probable awakening from centuries of inward-looking slumber as a looming challenge to the worldwide hegemony long enjoyed by the various European-descended nations.

The likely roots of such widespread Chinese success have received little detailed exploration in today’s major Western media, which tends to shy away from considering the particular characteristics of ethnic groups or nationalities, as opposed to their institutional systems and forms of government. Yet although the latter obviously play a crucial role—Maoist China was far less economically successful than Dengist China—it is useful to note that the examples of Chinese success cited above range across a wide diversity of socioeconomic/political systems.

For decades, Hong Kong enjoyed one of the most free-market, nearly anarcho-libertarian economic systems; during that same period, Singapore was governed by the tight hand of Lee Kuan Yew and his socialistic People’s Action Party, which built a one-party state with a large degree of government guidance and control. Yet both these populations were overwhelmingly Chinese, and both experienced almost equally rapid economic development, moving in 50 years from total postwar destitution and teeming refugee slums to ranking among the wealthiest places on earth. And Taiwan, whose much larger Chinese-ancestry population pursued an intermediate development model, enjoyed similar economic success.

Despite a long legacy of racial discrimination and mistreatment, small Chinese communities in America also prospered and advanced, even as their numbers grew rapidly following passage of the 1965 Immigration Act. In recent years a remarkable fraction of America’s top students—whether judged by the objective winners’ circle of the Mathematics Olympiad and Intel Science competition or by the somewhat more subjective rates of admission to Ivy League colleges—have been of Chinese ancestry. The results are particularly striking when cast in quantitative terms: although just 1 percent of American high-school graduates each year have ethnic Chinese origins, surname analysis indicates that they currently include nearly 15 percent of the highest-achieving students, a performance ratio more than four times better than that of American Jews, the top-scoring white ancestry group.[3]

Chinese people seem to be doing extremely well all over the world, across a wide range of economic and cultural landscapes.

Almost none of these global developments were predicted by America’s leading intellectuals of the 1960s or 1970s, and many of their successors have had just as much difficulty recognizing the dramatic sweep of events through which they are living. A perfect example of this strange myopia may be found in the writings of leading development economists Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson, whose brief discussions of China’s rapid rise to world economic dominance seem to portray the phenomenon as a temporary illusion almost certain soon to collapse because the institutional approach followed differs from the ultra-free-market neoliberalism that they recommend.[4] The large role that the government plays in guiding Chinese economic decisions dooms it to failure, despite all evidence to the contrary, while America’s heavily financialized economy must be successful, regardless of our high unemployment and low growth. According to Acemoglu and Robinson, nearly all international success or failure is determined by governmental institutions, and since China possesses the wrong ones, failure is certain, though there seems no sign of it.

Perhaps such academics will be proven correct, and China’s economic miracle will collapse into the debacle they predict. But if this does not occur, and the international trend lines of the past 35 years continue for another five or ten, we should consider turning for explanations to those long-forgotten thinkers who actually foretold these world developments that we are now experiencing, individuals such as Ross and Stoddard. The widespread devastation produced by the Japanese invasion, World War II, and the Chinese Civil War, followed by the economic calamity of Maoism, did delay the predicted rise of China by a generation or two, but except for such unforeseen events, their analysis of Chinese potential seems remarkably prescient. For example, Stoddard approvingly quotes the late Victorian predictions of Professor Charles E. Pearson:

Does any one doubt that the day is at hand when China will have cheap fuel from her coal-mines, cheap transport by railways and steamers, and will have founded technical schools to develop her industries? Whenever that day comes, she may wrest the control of the world’s markets, especially throughout Asia, from England and Germany.[5]

A People Shaped by Their Difficult Environment

Western intellectual life a century ago was quite different from that of today, with contrary doctrines and taboos, and the spirit of that age certainly held sway over its leading figures. Racialism—the notion that different peoples tend to have different innate traits, as largely fashioned by their particular histories—was dominant then, so much so that the notion was almost universally held and applied, sometimes in rather crude fashion, to both European and non-European populations.

With regard to the Chinese, the widespread view was that many of their prominent characteristics had been shaped by thousands of years of history in a generally stable and organized society possessing central political administration, a situation almost unique among the peoples of the world. In effect, despite temporary periods of political fragmentation, East Asia’s own Roman Empire had never fallen, and a thousand-year interregnum of barbarism, economic collapse, and technological backwardness had been avoided.

On the less fortunate side, the enormous population growth of recent centuries had gradually caught up with and overtaken China’s exceptionally efficient agricultural system, reducing the lives of most Chinese to the brink of Malthusian starvation; and these pressures and constraints were believed to be reflected in the Chinese people. For example, Stoddard wrote:

Winnowed by ages of grim elimination in a land populated to the uttermost limits of subsistence, the Chinese race is selected as no other for survival under the fiercest conditions of economic stress. At home the average Chinese lives his whole life literally within a hand’s breadth of starvation. Accordingly, when removed to the easier environment of other lands, the Chinaman brings with him a working capacity which simply appalls his competitors.[6]

Stoddard backed these riveting phrases with a wide selection of detailed and descriptive quotations from prominent observers, both Western and Chinese. Although Ross was more cautiously empirical in his observations and less literary in his style, his analysis was quite similar, with his book on the Chinese containing over 40 pages describing the grim and gripping details of daily survival, provided under the evocative chapter-heading “The Struggle for Existence in China.”[7]

During the second half of the 20th century, ideological considerations largely eliminated from American public discourse the notion that many centuries of particular circumstances might leave an indelible imprint upon a people. But with the turn of the new millennium, such analyses have once again begun appearing in respectable intellectual quarters.

The most notable example of this would surely be A Farewell to Alms, Gregory Clark’s fascinating 2007 analysis of the deep origins of Britain’s industrial revolution, which was widely reviewed and praised throughout elite circles, with New York Times economics columnist Tyler Cowen hailing it as possibly “the next blockbuster in economics” and Berkeley economist Brad DeLong characterizing it as “brilliant.”

Although Clark’s work focused on many different factors, the one that attracted the greatest attention was his demographic analysis of British history based upon a close examination of individual testaments. Clark discovered evidence that for centuries the wealthier British had left significantly more surviving children than their poorer compatriots, thus leading their descendents to constitute an ever larger share of each generation. Presumably, this was because they could afford to marry at a younger age, and their superior nutritional and living arrangements reduced mortality rates for themselves and their families. Indeed, the near-Malthusian poverty of much ordinary English life during this era meant that the impoverished lower classes often failed even to reproduce themselves over time, gradually being replaced by the downwardly mobile children of their financial betters. Since personal economic achievement was probably in part due to traits such as diligence, prudence, and productivity, Clark argued that these characteristics steadily became more widespread in the British population, laying the human basis for later national economic success.

Leaving aside whether or not the historical evidence actually supports Clark’s hypothesis—economist Robert C. Allen has published a strong and fairly persuasive refutation[8]—the theoretical framework he advances seems a perfectly plausible one. Although the stylistic aspects and quantitative approaches certainly differ, much of Clark’s analysis for England seems to have clear parallels in how Stoddard, Ross, and others of their era characterized China. So perhaps it would be useful to explore whether a Clarkian analysis might be applicable to the people of the Middle Kingdom.

Interestingly enough, Clark himself devotes a few pages to considering this question and concludes that in contrast to the British case, wealthier Chinese were no more fecund than the poorer, eliminating the possibility of any similar generational trend.[9] But Clark is not a China specialist, and his brief analysis relies on the birth records of the descendants of the ruling imperial dynasty, a group totally unrepresentative of the broader population. In fact, a more careful examination of the Chinese source material reveals persuasive evidence for a substantial skew in family size, directly related to economic success, with the pattern being perhaps even stronger and more universally apparent than was the case for Britain or any other country.

Moreover, certain unique aspects of traditional Chinese society may have maintained and amplified this long-term effect, in a manner unlike that found in most other societies in Europe or elsewhere. China indeed may constitute the largest and longest-lasting instance of an extreme “Social Darwinist” society anywhere in human history, perhaps with important implications for the shaping of the modern Chinese people.[10]

The Social Economy of Traditional China

Chinese society is notable for its stability and longevity. From the gradual establishment of the bureaucratic imperial state based on mandarinate rule during the Sui (589–618) and T’ang (618–907) dynasties down to the Communist Revolution of 1948, a single set of social and economic relations appears to have maintained its grip on the country, evolving only slightly while dynastic successions and military conquests periodically transformed the governmental superstructure.

A central feature of this system was the replacement of the local rule of aristocratic elements by a class of official meritocrats, empowered by the central government and selected by competitive examination. In essence, China eliminated the role of hereditary feudal lords and the social structure they represented over 1,000 years before European countries did the same, substituting a system of legal equality for virtually the entire population beneath the reigning emperor and his family.

The social importance of competitive examinations was enormous, playing the same role in determining membership in the ruling elite that the aristocratic bloodlines of Europe’s nobility did until modern times, and this system embedded itself just as deeply in the popular culture. The great noble houses of France or Germany might trace their lineages back to ancestors elevated under Charlemagne or Barbarossa, with their heirs afterward rising and falling in standing and estates, while in China the proud family traditions would boast generations of top-scoring test-takers, along with the important government positions that they had received as a result. Whereas in Europe there existed fanciful stories of a heroic commoner youth doing some great deed for the king and consequently being elevated to a knighthood or higher, such tales were confined to fiction down to the French Revolution. But in China, even the greatest lineages of academic performers almost invariably had roots in the ordinary peasantry.

Not only was China the first national state to utilize competitive written examinations for selection purposes, but it is quite possible that almost all other instances everywhere in the world ultimately derive from the Chinese example. It has long been established that the Chinese system served as the model for the meritocratic civil services that transformed the efficiency of Britain and other European states during the 18th and 19th centuries. But persuasive historical arguments have also been advanced that the same is even true for university entrance tests and honors examinations, with Cambridge’s famed Math Tripos being the earliest example.[11] Modern written tests may actually be as Chinese as chopsticks.

With Chinese civilization having spent most of the past 1,500 years allocating its positions of national power and influence by examination, there has sometimes been speculation that test-taking ability has become embedded in the Chinese people at the biological as well as cultural level. Yet although there might be an element of truth to this, it hardly seems likely to be significant. During the eras in question, China’s total population numbered far into the tens of millions, growing in unsteady fashion from perhaps 60 million before AD 900 to well over 400 million by 1850. But the number of Chinese passing the highest imperial exam and attaining the exalted rank of chin-shih during most of the past six centuries was often less than 100 per year, down from a high of over 200 under the Sung dynasty (960-1279), and even if we include the lesser rank of chu-jen, the national total of such degree-holders was probably just in the low tens of thousands,[12] a tiny fraction of 1 percent of the overall population—totally dwarfed by the numbers of Chinese making their living as artisans or merchants, let alone the overwhelming mass of the rural peasantry. The cultural impact of rule by a test-selected elite was enormous, but the direct genetic impact would have been negligible.

This same difficulty of relative proportions frustrates any attempt to apply in China an evolutionary model similar to the one that Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending have persuasively suggested for the evolution of high intelligence among the Ashkenazi Jews of Europe.[13] The latter group constituted a small, reproductively isolated population overwhelmingly concentrated in the sorts of business and financial activity that would have strongly favored more intelligent individuals, and one with insignificant gene-flow from the external population not undergoing such selective pressure. By contrast, there is no evidence that successful Chinese merchants or scholars were unwilling to take brides from the general population, and any reasonable rate of such intermarriage each generation would have totally swamped the selective impact of mercantile or scholarly success. If we are hoping to find any rough parallel to the process that Clark hypothesizes for Britain, we must concentrate our attention on the life circumstances of China’s broad rural peasantry—well over 90 percent of the population during all these centuries—just as the aforementioned 19th-century observers generally had done.

Absence of Caste and Fluidity of Class

In fact, although Western observers tended to focus on China’s horrific poverty above all else, traditional Chinese society actually possessed certain unusual or even unique characteristics that may help account for the shaping of the Chinese people. Perhaps the most important of these was the near total absence of social caste and the extreme fluidity of economic class.

Feudalism had ended in China a thousand years before the French Revolution, and nearly all Chinese stood equal before the law.[14] The “gentry”—those who had passed an official examination and received an academic degree—possessed certain privileges and the “mean people”—prostitutes, entertainers, slaves, and various other degraded social elements—suffered under legal discrimination. But both these strata were minute in size, with each usually amounting to less than 1 percent of the general population, while “the common people”—everyone else, including the peasantry—enjoyed complete legal equality.

However, such legal equality was totally divorced from economic equality, and extreme gradations of wealth and poverty were found in every corner of society, down to the smallest and most homogenous village. During most of the 20th century, the traditional Marxian class analysis of Chinese rural life divided the population according to graduated wealth and degree of “exploitative” income: landlords, who obtained most or all of their income from rent or hired labor; rich, middle, and poor peasants, grouped according to decreasing wealth and rental income and increasing tendency to hire out their own labor; and agricultural laborers, who owned negligible land and obtained nearly all their income from hiring themselves out to others.

In hard times, these variations in wealth might easily mean the difference between life and death, but everyone acknowledged that such distinctions were purely economic and subject to change: a landlord who lost his land would become a poor peasant; a poor peasant who came into wealth would be the equal of any landlord. During its political struggle, the Chinese Communist Party claimed that landlords and rich peasants constituted about 10 percent of the population and possessed 70–80 percent of the land, while poor peasants and hired laborers made up the overwhelming majority of the population and owned just 10–15 percent of the land. Neutral observers found these claims somewhat exaggerated for propagandistic purposes, but not all that far from the harsh reality.[15]

Complete legal equality and extreme economic inequality together fostered one of the most unrestrained free-market systems known to history, not only in China’s cities but much more importantly in its vast countryside, which contained nearly the entire population. Land, the primary form of wealth, was freely bought, sold, traded, rented out, sub-leased, or mortgaged as loan collateral. Money-lending and food-lending were widely practiced, especially during times of famine, with usurious rates of interest being the norm, often in excess of 10 percent per month compounded. In extreme cases, children or even wives might be sold for cash and food. Unless aided by relatives, peasants without land or money routinely starved to death. Meanwhile, the agricultural activity of more prosperous peasants was highly commercialized and entrepreneurial, with complex business arrangements often the norm.[16]

For centuries, a central fact of daily life in rural China had been the tremendous human density, as the Middle Kingdom’s population expanded from 65 million to 430 million during the five centuries before 1850,[17] eventually forcing nearly all land to be cultivated to maximum efficiency. Although Chinese society was almost entirely rural and agricultural, Shandong province in 1750 had well over twice the population density of the Netherlands, the most urbanized and densely populated part of Europe, while during the early years of the Industrial Revolution, England’s population density was only one-fifth that of Jiangsu province.[18]

Chinese agricultural methods had always been exceptionally efficient, but by the 19th century, the continuing growth of the Chinese population had finally caught and surpassed the absolute Malthusian carrying-capacity of the farming system under its existing technical and economic structure.[19] Population growth was largely held in check by mortality (including high infant mortality), decreased fertility due to malnutrition, disease, and periodic regional famines that killed an average of 5 percent of the population.[20] Even the Chinese language came to incorporate the centrality of food, with the traditional words of greeting being “Have you eaten?” and the common phrase denoting a wedding, funeral, or other important social occasion being “to eat good things.”[21]

The cultural and ideological constraints of Chinese society posed major obstacles to mitigating this never-ending human calamity. Although impoverished Europeans of this era, male and female alike, often married late or not at all, early marriage and family were central pillars of Chinese life, with the sage Mencius stating that to have no children was the worst of unfilial acts; indeed, marriage and anticipated children were the mark of adulthood. Furthermore, only male heirs could continue the family name and ensure that oneself and one’s ancestors would be paid the proper ritual respect, and multiple sons were required to protect against the vagaries of fate. On a more practical level, married daughters became part of their husband’s household, and only sons could ensure provision for one’s old age.

Nearly all peasant societies sanctify filial loyalty, marriage, family, and children, while elevating sons above daughters, but in traditional China these tendencies seem to have been especially strong, representing a central goal and focus of all daily life beyond bare survival. Given the terrible poverty, cruel choices were often made, and female infanticide, including through neglect, was the primary means of birth control among the poor, leading to a typical shortfall of 10–15 percent among women of marriageable age. Reproductive competition for those remaining women was therefore fierce, with virtually every woman marrying, generally by her late teens. The inevitable result was a large and steady natural increase in the total population, except when constrained by various forms of increased mortality.

Remarkable Upward Mobility But Relentless Downward Mobility

The vast majority of Chinese might be impoverished peasants, but for those with ability and luck, the possibilities of upward mobility were quite remarkable in what was an essentially classless society. The richer strata of each village possessed the wealth to give their most able children a classical education in hopes of preparing them for the series of official examinations. If the son of a rich peasant or petty landlord were sufficiently diligent and intellectually able, he might pass such an examination and obtain an official degree, opening enormous opportunities for political power and wealth.

For the Ming (1368–1644) and Ch’ing (1644–1911) dynasties, statistics exist on the social origins of the chin-shih class, the highest official rank, and these demonstrate a rate of upward mobility unmatched by almost any Western society, whether modern or premodern. Over 30 percent of such elite degree-holders came from commoner families that for three previous generations had produced no one of high official rank, and in the data from earlier centuries, this fraction of “new men” reached a high of 84 percent. Such numbers far exceed the equivalent figures for Cambridge University during all the centuries since its foundation, and would probably seem remarkable at America’s elite Ivy League colleges today or in the past. Meanwhile, downward social mobility was also common among even the highest families. As a summary statistic, across the six centuries of these two dynasties less than 6 percent of China’s ruling elites came from the ruling elites of the previous generation.[22]

The founding philosophical principle of the modern Western world has been the “Equality of Man,” while that of Confucianist China was the polar opposite belief in the inherent inequality of men. Yet in reality, the latter often seemed to fulfill better the ideological goals of the former. Frontier America might have had its mythos of presidents born in log-cabins, but for many centuries a substantial fraction of the Middle Kingdom’s ruling mandarins did indeed come from rural rice-paddies, a state of affairs that would have seemed almost unimaginable in any European country until the Age of Revolution, and even long afterward.

Such potential for elevation into the ruling Chinese elite was remarkable, but a far more important factor in the society was the open possibility of local economic advancement for the sufficiently enterprising and diligent rural peasant. Ironically enough, a perfect description of such upward mobility was provided by Communist revolutionary leader Mao Zedong, who recounted how his father had risen from being a landless poor peasant to rich peasant status:

My father was a poor peasant and while still young was obliged to join the army because of heavy debts. He was a soldier for many years. Later on he returned to the village where I was born, and by saving carefully and gathering together a little money through small trading and other enterprise he managed to buy back his land.

As middle peasants then my family owned fifteen mou [about 2.5 acres] of land. On this they could raise sixty tan of rice a year. The five members of the family consumed a total of thirty-five tan—that is, about seven each—which left an annual surplus of twenty-five tan. Using this surplus, my father accumulated a little capital and in time purchased seven more mou, which gave the family the status of ‘rich’ peasants. We could then raise eighty-four tan of rice a year.

When I was ten years of age and the family owned only fifteen mou of land, the five members of the family consisted of my father, mother, grandfather, younger brother, and myself. After we had acquired the additional seven mou, my grandfather died, but there came another younger brother. However, we still had a surplus of forty-nine tan of rice each year, and on this my father prospered.

At the time my father was a middle peasant he began to deal in grain transport and selling, by which he made a little money. After he became a ‘rich’ peasant, he devoted most of his time to that business. He hired a full-time farm laborer, and put his children to work on the farm, as well as his wife. I began to work at farming tasks when I was six years old. My father had no shop for his business. He simply purchased grain from the poor farmers and then transported it to the city merchants, where he got a higher price. In the winter, when the rice was being ground, he hired an extra laborer to work on the farm, so that at that time there were seven mouths to feed. My family ate frugally, but had enough always.[23]

Mao’s account gives no indication that he regarded his family’s rise as extraordinary in any way; his father had obviously done well, but there were probably many other families in Mao’s village that had similarly improved their lot during the course of a single generation. Such opportunities for rapid social mobility would have been almost impossible in any of the feudal or class-ridden societies of the same period, in Europe or most other parts of the world.

However, the flip-side of possible peasant upward mobility was the far greater likelihood of downward mobility, which was enormous and probably represented the single most significant factor shaping the modern Chinese people. Each generation, a few who were lucky or able might rise, but a vast multitude always fell, and those families near the bottom simply disappeared from the world. Traditional rural China was a society faced with the reality of an enormous and inexorable downward mobility: for centuries, nearly all Chinese ended their lives much poorer than had their parents.

The strong case for such downward mobility was demonstrated a quarter century ago by historian Edwin E. Moise,[24] whose crucial article on the subject has received far less attention than it deserves, perhaps because the intellectual climate of the late 1970s prevented readers from drawing the obvious evolutionary implications.

In many respects, Moise’s demographic analysis of China eerily anticipated that of Clark for England, as he pointed out that only the wealthier families of a Chinese village could afford the costs associated with obtaining wives for their sons, with female infanticide and other factors regularly ensuring up to a 15 percent shortfall in the number of available women. Thus, the poorest village strata usually failed to reproduce at all, while poverty and malnourishment also tended to lower fertility and raise infant mortality as one moved downward along the economic gradient. At the same time, the wealthiest villagers sometimes could afford multiple wives or concubines and regularly produced much larger numbers of surviving offspring. Each generation, the poorest disappeared, the less affluent failed to replenish their numbers, and all those lower rungs on the economic ladder were filled by the downwardly mobile children of the fecund wealthy.

This fundamental reality of Chinese rural existence was certainly obvious to the peasants themselves and to outside observers, and there exists an enormous quantity of anecdotal evidence describing the situation, whether gathered by Moise or found elsewhere, as illustrated by a few examples:

‘How could any man in our village claim that his family had been poor for three generations? If a man is poor, then his son can’t afford to marry; and if his son can’t marry, there can’t be a third generation.’[25]

… Because of the marked shortage of women, there was always a great number of men without wives at all. This included the overwhelming majority of long-term hired laborers… The poorest families died out, being unable to arrange marriages for their sons. The future generations of poor were the descendants of bankrupted middle and rich peasants and landlords.[26]

… Further down the economic scale there were many families with unmarried sons who had already passed the customary marriage age, thus limiting the size of the family. Wong Mi was a case in point. He was already twenty-three, with both of his parents in their mid-sixties; but since the family was able to rent only an acre of poor land and could not finance his marriage, he lived with the old parents, and the family consisted of three members. Wong Chun, a landless peasant in his forties, had been in the same position when he lived with his aged parents ten years before, and now, both parents having died, he lived alone. There were ten or fifteen families in the village with single unmarried sons.[27]

… As previously mentioned, there were about twenty families in Nanching that had no land at all and constituted the bottom group in the village’s pyramid of land ownership. A few of these families were tenant farmers, but the majority, since they could not finance even the buying of tools, fertilizer, and seeds, worked as “long-term” agricultural laborers on an annual basis. As such, they normally were paid about 1,000 catties of unhusked rice per year and board and room if they owned no home. This income might equal or even exceed what they might have wrested from a small rented farm, but it was not enough to support a family of average size without supplementary employment undertaken by other members of the family. For this reason, many of them never married, and the largest number of bachelors was to be found among landless peasants. Wong Tu-en, a landless peasant working for a rich peasant for nearly ten years, was still a “bare stick” (unmarried man) in his fifties; and there were others in the village like him. They were objects of ridicule and pity in the eyes of the villagers, whose life [sic] centered upon the family.[28]

Furthermore, the forces of downward mobility in rural Chinese society were greatly accentuated by fenjia, the traditional system of inheritance, which required equal division of property among all sons, in sharp contrast to the practice of primogeniture commonly found in European countries.

If most or all of a father’s property went to the eldest son, then the long-term survival of a reasonably affluent peasant family was assured unless the primary heir were a complete wastrel or encountered unusually bad fortune. But in China, cultural pressures forced a wealthy man to do his best to maximize the number of his surviving sons, and within the richer strata of a village it was not uncommon for a man to leave two, three, or even more male heirs, compelling each to begin his economic independence with merely a fraction of his father’s wealth. Unless they succeeded in substantially augmenting their inheritance, the sons of a particularly fecund rich landlord might be middle peasants—and his grandchildren, starving poor peasants.[29] Families whose elevated status derived from a single fortuitous circumstance or a transient trait not deeply rooted in their behavioral characteristics therefore enjoyed only fleeting economic success, and poverty eventually culled their descendents from the village.

The members of a successful family could maintain their economic position over time only if in each generation large amounts of additional wealth were extracted from their land and their neighbors through high intelligence, sharp business sense, hard work, and great diligence. The penalty for major business miscalculations or lack of sufficient effort was either personal or reproductive extinction. As American observer William Hinton graphically described:

Security, relative comfort, influence, position, and leisure [were] maintained amidst a sea of the most dismal and frightening poverty and hunger—a poverty and hunger which at all times threatened to engulf any family which relaxed its vigilance, took pity on its poor neighbors, failed to extract the last copper of rent and interest, or ceased for an instant the incessant accumulation of grain and money. Those who did not go up went down, and those who went down often went to their deaths or at least to the dissolution and dispersal of their families.[30]

However, under favorable circumstances, a family successful in business might expand its numbers from generation to generation until it gradually squeezed out all its less competitive neighbors, with its progeny eventually constituting nearly the entire population of a village. For example, a century after a couple of poor Yang brothers arrived in a region as farm laborers, their descendents had formed a clan of 80–90 families in one village and the entire population of a neighboring one.[31] In a Guangdong village, a merchant family named Huang arrived and bought land, growing in numbers and land ownership over the centuries until their descendants replaced most of the other families, which became poor and ultimately disappeared, while the Huangs eventually constituted 74 percent of the total local population, including a complete mix of the rich, middle, and poor.[32]

The Implications for the Chinese People and for American Ideology

In many respects, the Chinese society portrayed by our historical and sociological sources seems an almost perfect example of the sort of local environment that would be expected to produce a deep imprint upon the characteristics of its inhabitants. Even prior to the start of this harsh development process, China had spent thousands of years as one of the world’s most advanced economic and technological civilizations. The socioeconomic system established from the end of the sixth century A.D. onward then remained largely stable and unchanged for well over a millennium, with the sort of orderly and law-based society that benefited those who followed its rules and ruthlessly weeded out the troublemaker. During many of those centuries, the burden of overpopulation placed enormous economic pressure on each family to survive, while a powerful cultural tradition emphasized the production of surviving offspring, especially sons, as the greatest goal in life, even if that result might lead to the impoverishment of the next generation. Agricultural efficiency was remarkably high but required great effort and diligence, while the complexities of economic decision-making—how to manage land, crop selection, and investment decisions—were far greater than those faced by the simple peasant serf found in most other parts of the world, with the rewards for success and the penalties for failure being extreme. The sheer size and cultural unity of the Chinese population would have facilitated the rapid appearance and spread of useful innovations, including those at the purely biological level.[33]

It is important to recognize that although good business ability was critical for the long-term success of a line of Chinese peasants, the overall shaping constraints differed considerably from those that might have affected a mercantile caste such as the Ashkenazi Jews of Eastern Europe or the Parsis of India. These latter groups occupied highly specialized economic niches in which a keen head for figures or a ruthless business sense might have been all that was required for personal success and prosperity. But in the world of rural Chinese villages, even the wealthier elements usually spent the majority of the lives in backbreaking labor, working alongside their families and their hired men in the fields and rice paddies. Successful peasants might benefit from a good intellect, but they also required the propensity for hard manual toil, determination, diligence, and even such purely physical traits as resistance to injury and efficiency in food digestion. Given such multiple selective pressures and constraints, we would expect the shift in the prevalence of any single one of these traits to be far slower than if it alone determined success, and the many centuries of steady Chinese selection across the world’s largest population would have been required to produce any substantial result.[34]

The impact of such strong selective forces obviously manifests at multiple levels, with cultural software being far more flexible and responsive than any gradual shifts in innate tendencies, and distinguishing between evidence of these two mechanisms is hardly a trivial task. But it seems quite unlikely that the second, deeper sort of biological human change would not have occurred during a thousand years or more of these relentlessly shaping pressures, and simply to ignore or dismiss such an important possibility is unreasonable. Yet that seems to have been the dominant strain of Western intellectual belief for the last two or three generations.

Sometimes the best means of recognizing one’s ideological blinders is to consider seriously the ideas and perspectives of alien minds that lack them, and in the case of Western society these happen to include most of our greatest intellectual figures from 80 or 90 years ago, now suddenly restored to availability by the magic of the Internet. Admittedly, in some respects these individuals were naïve in their thinking or treated various ideas in crude fashion, but in many more cases their analyses were remarkably acute and scientifically insightful, often functioning as an invaluable corrective to the assumed truths of the present. And in certain matters, notably predicting the economic trajectory of the world’s largest country, they seem to have anticipated developments that almost none of their successors of the past 50 years ever imagined. This should certainly give us pause.

Consider also the ironic case of Bruce Lahn, a brilliant Chinese-born genetics researcher at the University of Chicago. In an interview a few years ago, he casually mentioned his speculation that the socially conformist tendencies of most Chinese people might be due to the fact that for the past 2,000 years the Chinese government had regularly eliminated its more rebellious subjects, a suggestion that would surely be regarded as totally obvious and innocuous everywhere in the world except in the West of the past half century or so. Not long before that interview, Lahn had achieved great scientific acclaim for his breakthrough discoveries on the possible genetic origins of human civilization, but this research eventually provoked such heated controversy that he was dissuaded from continuing it.[35]

Yet although Chinese researchers living in America willingly conform to American ideological restrictions, this is not the case with Chinese researchers in China itself, and it is hardly surprising that BGI—the Beijing Genomics Institute—has become the recognized world leader in cutting-edge human genetics research. This is despite the billions spent by its American counterparts, which must operate within a much more circumscribed framework of acceptable ideas.

During the Cold War, the enormous governmental investments of the Soviet regime in many fields produced nothing, since they were based on a model of reality that was both unquestionable and also false. The growing divergence between that ideological model and the real world eventually doomed the USSR, whose vast and permanent bulk blew away in a sudden gust of wind two decades ago. American leaders should take care that they do not stubbornly adhere to scientifically false doctrines that will lead our own country to risk a similar fate.

Ron Unz is publisher of The American Conservative.

Primary Bibliography

Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson (2012) Why Nations Fail

Robert C. Allen, “A Review of Gregory Clark’s A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World,” Journal of Economic Literature (2008) pp. 946-973

John Lossing Buck (1964) Land Utilization in China

Tommy Bengtsson, Cameron Campbell, and James Z. Lee (2004) Life Under Pressure: Mortality and Living Standards in Europe and Asia, 1700-1900

T’ung-Tsu Ch’u (1965) Law and Society in Traditional China

Gregory Clark (2007) A Farewell to Alms

Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending (2009) The 10,000 Year Explosion

Isabel and David Crook (1959) Revolution in a Chinese Village: Ten Mile Inn

Mark Elvin (1973) The Pattern of the Chinese Past

John King Fairbank (1948/1979) The United States and China

Susan B. Hanley (1997) Everyday Things in Premodern Japan

William Hinton (1966) Fanshen

Ping-Ti Ho, “Aspects of Social Mobility in China, 1368-1911,” Comparative Studies in Society and History (Jun. 1959) pp. 330-359

Ping-Ti Ho (1971) The Ladder of Success in Imperial China

Philip C.C. Huang, Lynda Schaeffer Bell, and Kathy Lemons Walker (1978) Chinese Communists and Rural Society, 1927-1934

Philip C.C. Huang (1985) The Peasant Economy and Social Change in North China

Philip C.C. Huang (1990) The Peasant Family and Rural Development in the Yangzi Delta, 1350-1988

Charles O. Hucker (1975) China’s Imperial Past

James Z. Lee and Wang Feng (1999) One Quarter of Humanity

Dwight H. Perkins (1969) Agricultural Development in China, 1368-1968

James Z. Lee and Cameron Campbell (1997) Fate and Fortune in Rural China

Ts’ui-jung Liu, James Z. Lee, David Sven Reher, Osamu Saito, and Wang Feng (2001) Asian Population History

David S. Landes (1998) The Wealth and Poverty of Nations

Edwin E. Moise, “Downward Mobility in Pre-Revolutionary China,” Modern China (Jan. 1977) pp. 3-31

Kenneth Pomeranz (2000) The Great Divergence

Heiner Rindermann, Michael A. Woodley, and James Stratford, “Haplogroups as evolutionary markers of cognitive ability,” Intelligence 40 (2012) pp. 362-375.

Edward A. Ross (1911) The Changing Chinese

David C. Schak, “Poverty,” Encyclopedia of Modern China (2009)

Franz Schurmann and Orville Schell (1967) Imperial China

Franz Schurmann and Orville Schell (1967) Republican China

Arthur Henderson Smith (1899) Village Life in China

Thomas C. Smith (1959) The Agrarian Origins of Modern Japan

Edgar Snow (1938/1968) Red Star Over China

Clark W. Sorensen, “Land Tenure and Class Relations in Colonial Korea,” Journal of Korean Studies (1990) pp. 35-54.

Lothrop Stoddard (1921) The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy

Ssu-yu Teng, “Chinese Influence on the Western Examination System,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies (Sep. 1943) pp. 267-312.

Noriko O. Tsuya, Wang Feng, George Alter, and James Z. Lee (2010) Prudence and Pressure: Reproduction and Human Agency in Europe and Asia, 1700-1900

Martin C. Yang (1945) A Chinese Village: Taitou, Shantung Province

C.K. Yang (1959a) A Chinese Village in Early Communist Transition

C.K. Yang (1959b) The Chinese Family in the Communist Revolution

Notes

[1] Sam Dillon, “Top Test Scores From Shanghai Stun Educators,” The New York Times, December 7, 2010, A1: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/07/education/07education.html .

[2] Sean Coughlan, “China: The world’s cleverest country?,” BBC News, May 8, 2012: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-17585201 . In the BBC interview, Andreas Schleicher, director of the OECD’s PISA tests, emphasized that not only had Shanghai’s results topped the world, but that the unpublished results from China’s major provinces, including from rural and disadvantaged areas, showed “remarkable performance.” Later, blogger Anatoly Karlin discovered that a dozen of those provincial results had been released on the Chinese internet, and discussed them at length. See Anatoly Karlin, “Analysis of China’s PISA 2009 Results,” August 13, 2012: http://akarlin.com/2012/08/13/analysis-of-chinas-pisa-2009-results/ and Ron Unz, “Race/IQ: Irish IQ & Chinese IQ,” The American Conservative, August 14, 2012: http://www.ronunz.org/2012/08/14/unz-on-raceiq-irish-iq-chinese-iq/ .

[3] Ron Unz, “The Myth of American Meritocracy,” The American Conservative, December 2012, pp. 14-51, Appendix E: http://www.unz.com/runz/meritocracy-appendices/#5 .

[4] Acemoglu (2012) pp. 436-443.

[5] Stoddard (1921) p. 244.

[6] Stoddard (1921) p. 28.

[7] Ross (1911) pp. 70-111.

[8] Allen (2008).

[9] Clark (2007) pp. 266-271.

[10] Most of the ideas in the remainder of this article were originally presented in an unpublished 1983 paper produced for E.O. Wilson at Harvard University. In 2010 I made that crude version available on the Internet, where it drew some attention and was eventually cited in an academic review article by Rindermann (2012) as being among the earliest examples of a theory for the evolution of high intelligence in a particular group. I have therefore decided to update and publish it here in a less eccentric form. My special thanks to anthropologist Peter Frost for encouraging me to retrieve the original paper from my undergraduate files and to theoretical physicist Steve Hsu for drawing attention to it on his blogsite. See http://www.ronunz.org/1980/04/01/social-darwinism-and-rural-china/ and http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2011/02/sociobiological-implications-of.html .

[11] Teng (1943).

[12] Hucker (1975) pp. 318-320. The lowest certification category of sheng-yuan possessed few direct privileges aside from exemption from forced state labor, but even if we include their total numbers, the total would still probably be just in the hundreds of thousands. See Ho (1959) pp. 340-343.

The total number of Imperial officials—degree holders who most directly benefited from their superior academic performance—was still just fewer than 20,000 when the population had reached 400 million. See Fairbank (1948/1979) p. 38.

[13] Cochran (2009) pp. 187-224.

[14] Elvin (1973) pp. 235-267 adduces considerable evidence that a manorial system of land-tenure, sometimes including serf-like conditions, actually survived into the early Ch’ing era, at least in large portions of China. But his suggestion that this constituted the dominant form of Chinese land-holding until that period seems to be a minority view among modern scholars.

[15] Yang (1959a) pp. 41, 45-46; Hinton (1966) p. 27.

[16] See Elvin (1973) pp. 129, 167, 177. See also Huang (1985) and Huang (1990) for a detailed discussion of the “managerial farmer” mode of production, an important aspect of the rural life in many Chinese regions.

[17] Ho (1971) p. 219. Furthermore, growth rates in many particular regions far exceeded the national average, with for example the population of Hebei increasing perhaps 1,100% from 1393 to 1790. See Huang (1985) pp. 321-325.

[18] Pomeranz (2000) p. 33; Clark (2007) p. 141. Smith (1899) pp. 18-19 also estimated that in his own day large portions of the Chinese agricultural countryside had a population density four times that of Belgium, the most densely populated country in Europe.

[19] The question of why Europe escaped its own Malthusian trap via an Industrial Revolution while China did not is an intriguing and important one, and a persuasive hypothesis is provided in Pomeranz (2000).

[20] Moise (1977) p. 5.

[21] Hinton (1966) p. 25; Smith (1899) p. 196.

[22] Ho (1959) pp. 342-348.

[23] Interviewed in Snow (1938/68) pp. 130-131.

[24] Moise (1977).

[25] Crook (1959) p. 133.

[26] Crook (1959) p. 11.

[27] Yang (1959a) p. 18.

[28] Yang (1959a) p. 51.

[29] William Hinton noted firsthand this inherent difficulty with the Communist “feudal tails campaign,” aimed at the heirs of wealthy landlords and other exploiters: “So great was the tendency of Chinese society toward dissipation of wealth through the practice of equal inheritance that very few persons could claim with confidence that their families were free from the taint of past exploitation.” See Hinton (1966) p. 203.

[30] Hinton (1966) p. 38.

[31] Yang (1945) p. 13.

[32] Moise (1977) p. 20. In fact, Yang (1945) p. 12 explicitly characterizes village history as being “the ecological succession of clans,” as more successful families multiplied in size and gradually “crowded out” their less successful competitors, which eventually disappeared.

[33] Under the Accelerationist evolutionary model, the rate at which beneficial mutations arise is proportional to the size of the population, and during most of its history China functioned as a single population pool, containing a quarter or more of all mankind. See Cochran (2009) pp. 65-76.

[34] Perhaps the strongest evidence against this causal model for the origins of current Chinese achievement comes from the difficulty of extending it to the other highly successful peoples of East Asia. Both the Japanese and the Koreans have done remarkably well in their economic and technological advancement, and also as small immigrant racial minorities in America and elsewhere. However, there is no evidence that rural life in either country had any of the major features possibly so significant for Chinese history, such as a total lack of feudal caste structure, an exceptionally commercialized system of agricultural production and land tenure, and the massive universal downward mobility due to equal division of property among male heirs. Indeed, Japanese society in particular had always been dominated by a rigidly aristocratic military caste, totally different from the exam-based meritocratic elite governing China. So to the extent that the modern behavior and performance of Japanese and Koreans closely resembles that of Han Chinese, we must look to other cultural, economic, or genetic factors in explaining this similarity rather than the legacy of the socio-economic system discussed in this article, such as the “cold winters” hypothesis of Richard Lynn and others. See Rindermann (2012) p. 363.

[35] “Scientist’s Study of Brain Genes Sparks a Backlash,” Antonio Regaldo, The Wall Street Journal, June 16, 2006, A1: http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB115040765329081636-T5DQ4jvnwqOdVvsP_XSVG_lvgik_20060628.html

Race/IQ: The Jason Richwine Affair

Amid the fury over the ex-Heritage staffer's work the question to ask is: was he right?

The American Conservative • May 13, 2013 • 2,400 Words

Amid loud cries of “Witch! Witch! Burn the Witch!” an enraged throng of ideological activists and media pundits late last week besieged the fortress-like DC headquarters of the conservative Heritage Foundation, demanding the person of one Jason Richwine, Ph.D., employed there as a senior policy analyst. The High Lords of Heritage, deeply concerned about any possible threat to their million-dollar salaries, quickly submitted, though they waited until late Friday, the dead-zone period of national news coverage, before announcing that young Dr. Richwine had been expelled into the Outer Darkness.

Only a week earlier, Richwine had reached a pinnacle of his career, listed as co-author of a widely trumpeted Heritage research study demonstrating that Congressional passage of proposed immigration reform legislation would cost American taxpayers some six trillion dollars…or perhaps the figure was six quadrillion dollars.

But then some enterprising journalist discovered the dreadful evidence of Richwine’s horrific heresy, namely that his 2009 doctoral dissertation at the Harvard Kennedy School had focused on the very low IQs of those racial groups providing most of our current immigrants, with his conclusion being that such inflows must be halted lest American society be dumbified into disaster. Taken together Race and IQ constitute an exceptionally volatile mix in modern American society, and ignited by a six trillion dollar spark, the resulting explosion blew Richwine out of his comfortable DC employment.

Now it seems to me that Heritage’s reaction was a bit difficult to justify. After all, the title of Richwine’s dissertation had been “IQ and Immigration Policy” perhaps providing some slight hint that his topic had something to do with IQ and immigration policy. So the inescapable conclusion is that Heritage was perfectly willing to employ someone with Richwine’s racial views but only so long as the media and the public remained unaware. Last week the media found out, hence exit young Richwine.

However, the behavior of Richwine’s mob of media-tormenters seems just as reprehensible. Glancing over a few of the multitude of denunciatory columns I see little sign of any serious attempt to rebut rather than merely vilify poor Richwine. His attackers seem horrified that anyone might dare believe such heretical notions, rather than whether those beliefs are correct or incorrect. This absurd situation has certainly been noted by Richwine’s own legion of determined defenders, with blogger Steve Sailer citing this case as a perfect example of the recent American tendency to “speak power to truth.”

But in the famous words of Talleyrand, the approach followed by Richwine’s critics “was worse than a crime, it was a blunder.” When a Harvard Ph.D. makes extremely controversial claims about race and intelligence and the main response is to lynch the messenger rather than dispassionately refute the message, the natural conclusion of reasonable onlookers is that Richwine may have been “politically incorrect” but he was factually correct. For example, David Weigel’s lengthy discussion in Slate seems to imply this perspective, and how can anyone blame him? If race and IQ constitute the sort of intellectual pornography never to be candidly discussed in respectable company then the primary sources of information and opinion become small brown-paper-wrapper websites, whose opinions on such ideologically-charged topics may or may not be wholly reliable.

I suspect that Weigel is merely one of many prominent journalists and media pundits who draw important portions of their world view from furtively exploring the nether regions of the Internet. After all, our reigning academic orthodoxy has insisted for decades that “race does not exist,” a scientific claim roughly equivalent to declaring that “gravity does not exist.” Hence, many younger journalists have come to doubt this palpable absurdity, and may often seek transgressive truths by reading the perspectives of various racialist bloggers, who unfortunately are often just as ignorant and mistaken as their orthodox opponents. The Washington Post and Slate.com are sister publications and there was the amusing spectacle of bloggers David Weigel and Jennifer Rubin taking diametrically opposite positions on the Richwine controversy, although neither apparently has the scientific or quantitative background necessary to evaluate the actual issues under dispute.

Having thus sketched the political atmospherics of the Richwine Affair, including the bad and self-damaging behavior of so many participants on all sides of the controversy, I should also discuss the substantive issues, namely whether Richwine’s views are right or wrong, and also my impression of the general quality of his scholarship in advocating them. My own background is in the hard sciences, and I prefer determining reality based on evidence and quantitative data rather than from ideological first principles. Personally, I’m less interested in whether Richwine’s views are “incorrect” than whether or not they are correct.

My first substantial encounter with Richwine came in early 2010 when I published a major article arguing that Hispanic crime rates in America were roughly similar to those of whites of the same age, a claim that naturally ignited a firestorm of hostility from various rightwingers. Although most of the attacks were merely vituperative, Richwine had recently undertaken major research on exactly that same topic and had come to polar opposite conclusions, so he soon became my strongest analytical opponent, resulting in a long series of very productive exchanges. Although he confined his critique to just one of the three or four major pillars of my case, he initially made some effective points. But after several rounds of debate and the discovery of additional evidence from California, I think most impartial observers concluded that my analysis was almost entirely correct. I urge all interested parties to read my original article and the series of lengthy exchanges with Richwine and others, and then formulate their own conclusions.

Richwine’s behavior during this lengthy debate was exemplary and the exchanges proved very useful in extending my own analysis.  And later that year we were both invited to reprise our arguments in a public debate at a major anti-immigrationist conference, where I met him for the first time.

As I mentioned earlier, an unfortunate consequence of Richwine’s intellectual martyrdom may be the widespread assumption among uninformed journalists that his various theories were probably correct, and indeed Weigel states that Richwine “demolished” my own analysis of Hispanic crime. But that is Weigel’s own error and I tend to doubt that he either read my article or the subsequent exchanges with Richwine before making such an erroneous claim. Perhaps the current controversy surrounding these racial issues may prompt the major media to more carefully compare my own arguments with those of my opponents, carefully weigh the evidence, and then bring the important conclusions to much wider public attention.

With regard to Richwine’s IQ arguments, last year I published a major 7,500 word article on exactly the same topic of Race/IQ, arguing that there was overwhelming evidence that the IQs of various ethnic groups were far more malleable and environmentally influenced than is widely believed by many of those interested in the topic. Once again, this article provoked a vast outpouring of angry commentary from various rightwing bloggers and pundits, probably the most uniformly hostile reaction I’ve ever received to anything I’d written. I responded to my multitude of critics in a long series of columns, totaling perhaps another 15,000 words. By the time the debate wound down, I think the accumulated evidence in favor of my position was absolutely decisive, and several of my strongest early opponents privately told me so, though I’m sure many of my angriest critics will never admit that.

Unfortunately, the mainstream media timorously avoided this explosive subject and almost entirely ignored the many tens of thousands of words produced during the long debate. Once again, perhaps the current Richwine controversy will provide the media a second opportunity to objectively review the topic and bring the important facts to a wider audience.

Richwine himself had not participated in last year’s heated Race/IQ debate and at the time I was only vaguely aware of some of his previous work on that topic. But the question of Mexican-American IQ was an important focus of my own analysis and taken together with some additional evidence that came out during the course of the debate, I would argue that the conclusions Richwine formed in his doctoral dissertation are almost certainly incorrect.

Obviously, it would be absurd for me to attempt to summarize nearly 25,000 words of my arguments in just a few sentences, and I urge all interested parties to read my material and decide for themselves whether my arguments are persuasive. But after quickly reviewing major sections of Richwine’s controversial doctoral dissertation, I would like to make a few important points.

First, he argues that the large IQ deficit of impoverished Hispanic immigrants is likely to inflict a long-term social disaster upon American society. However, it is well known that nearly all previous immigrant groups—southern and eastern Europeans—who came here in poverty similarly scored very low on IQ tests in the decades after their arrival, with results that were sometimes far below those of today’s Mexican immigrants. Yet after a generation or two their tested intelligence had almost invariably converged close to the American mean. Evidence of the past does not necessarily predict the future, but such a strong historical pattern should leave us cautious about assuming it will not continue.

In fact, Richwine specifically discusses the famous study by Carl Brigham, who concluded on the basis of the tests taken by WWI recruits that southern and eastern Europeans were drastically inferior in innate mental ability to America’s mostly northwestern European population and argued that their continuing immigration would produce a national disaster. Richwine rather cavalierly dismisses this historical analysis as having been based on poor testing methods and probably motivated by a belief in “bizarre…racial categories.” But Brigham was a highly regarded psychometrician and his careful research was widely accepted by nearly all the leading experts of that time. Having carefully read his book, I cannot find any serious fault with his methods nor any indications of unscientific bias on his part. Brigham may have been mistaken in his conclusions, but they seem to have been based on the best evidence and theory of his day.

Furthermore, Richwine chooses to ignore a vast amount of additional evidence from that same period, much of which was collected in Clifford Kirkpatrick’s important 1926 academic monograph “Intelligence and Migration.” Kirkpatrick provides page after page of separate studies demonstrating that during the 1920s the tested IQs of American schoolchildren of Greek, Slavic, Italian, and Portuguese ancestry were usually in the 75-85 range, and that Jewish schoolchildren sometimes performed just as poorly. These results are hardly obscure since they have been cited for decades by Thomas Sowell, and I think it is a serious scholarly lapse for Richwine to have essentially ignored them. Perhaps he simply believes that all IQ experts of a century ago were frauds and their empirical work should be dismissed, but if so, he should explicitly make that argument. Otherwise, we must accept that southern and eastern European immigrant groups had very low IQs a century ago and have average ones today, which is an extremely important finding. In fact, I have demonstrated that there is overwhelming evidence that various other group IQs have risen rapidly over time, and I also provided some strong indications that this exact process is already occurring among today’s Hispanic immigrants.

On another matter, Richwine must be aware that Arthur Jensen and Hans Eysenck rank as two of the greatest figures in twentieth century psychometrics. Yet decades ago both these scholars reviewed the structural evidence of Mexican-American IQs, and reached conclusions almost identical to my own, namely that the acknowledged gaps to white intelligence scores were largely perhaps almost entirely due to environmental factors and would steadily disappear as the population became more affluent and acculturated. Scientists should not argue from authority and Jensen and Eysenck might certainly have been mistaken, but it seems unreasonable for Richwine to never mention their contrary analysis.

Richwine’s doctoral work was performed at Harvard’s Kennedy School for Public Policy, which is separate from the main graduate school containing academic disciplines such as evolutionary biology, psychology, and sociology. The typical Kennedy School graduate receives a Masters Degree in Public Administration, and is often a mid-career government official, seeking to burnish his academic credentials. The three faculty members who evaluated Richwine’s dissertation—George Borjas, Richard Zeckhauser, and Christopher Jencks—are noted social scientists, but with the possible exception of Jencks, who was apparently a late addition, none seems to have a strong background in IQ issues; otherwise, they surely would have brought the facts I have cited above to Richwine’s attention and required him to properly address them. And once the media mob began baying for blood, Richwine’s advisors immediately backpedaled on any familiarity with IQ issues and quickly disassociated themselves from the dissertation they themselves had approved.

Again, the fault is less Richwine’s or that of his advisors than the totally taboo nature of the topic in question. Even given the best of intentions and effort it is difficult to undertake solid research in a subject that few are willing to discuss in public and one in which there exists such widespread misinformation.

Several months ago a prominent liberal academic with whom I’ve become a bit friendly was horrified by my article speculating on the Social Darwinist roots of Chinese success, pointing out that my analysis so sharply deviated from the established description of reality promoted by Stephen Jay Gould. He also mentioned that several of his friends wondered why I seemed so “obsessed” with race.  I would argue that racial issues are an interesting and important subject, especially in a country as racially diverse as our own, but another factor behind my focus has been what I see as a dangerous vacuum of calm and reasonably informed discussion.  After all, if I don’t write about Hispanic crime, I shudder to think who else will.

Perhaps our major media might use the opportunity of this current controversy to begin covering racial subjects in a manner more substantive and thoughtful than just quoting endless exchange of smears and slurs. If so, then the intellectual martyrdom of Dr. Jason Richwine may have served a useful purpose.

Race and Crime in America

The unspoken statistical reality of urban crime over the last quarter century.

The Unz Review • July 20, 2013 • 7,300 Words

The noted science fiction writer Philip K. Dick once declared that “Reality is what continues to exist whether you believe in it or not.”  Such an observation should be kept in mind when we consider some of the touchier aspects of American society.

Recall the notorious case of Daniel Patrick Moynihan, whose 1965 report on the terrible deterioration in the condition of the black American family aroused such a firestorm of denunciation and outrage in liberal circles that the topic was rendered totally radioactive for the better part of a generation.  Eventually the continuing deterioration reached such massive proportions that the subject was taken up again by prominent liberals in the 1980s, who then declared Moynihan a prophetic voice, unjustly condemned.

This contentious history of racially-charged social analysis was certainly in the back of my mind when I began my quantitative research into Hispanic crime rates in late 2009.  One traditional difficulty in producing such estimates had been the problematical nature of the data.  Although the FBI Uniform Crime Reports readily show the annual totals of black and Asian criminal perpetrators, Hispanics are generally grouped together with whites and no separate figures are provided, thereby allowing all sorts of extreme speculation by those so inclined.

In order to distinguish reality from vivid imagination, a major section of my analysis focused on the data from America’s larger cities, exploring the correlations between their FBI-reported crime rates and their Census-reported ethnic proportions.  If urban crime rates had little relation to the relative size of the local Hispanic population, this would indicate that Hispanics did not have unusually high rates of criminality.  Furthermore, densely populated urban centers have almost always had far more crime than rural areas or suburbs, so restricting the analysis to cities would reduce the impact of that extraneous variable, which might otherwise artificially inflate the national crime statistics for a heavily urbanized population group such as Hispanics.

My expectations proved entirely correct, and the correlations between Hispanic percentages and local crime rates were usually quite close to the same figures for whites, strongly supporting my hypothesis that the two groups had fairly similar rates of urban criminality despite their huge differences in socio-economic status.  But that same simple calculation yielded a remarkably strong correlation between black numbers and crime, fully confirming the implications of the FBI racial data on perpetrators.

This presented me with an obvious quandary. The topic of my article was “Hispanic crime” and my research findings were original and potentially an important addition to the public policy debate.  Yet the black crime figures in my charts and graphs were so striking that I realized they might easily overshadow my other results, becoming the focus of an explosive debate that would inevitably deflect attention away from my central conclusion.  Therefore, I chose to excise the black results, perhaps improperly elevating political prudence over intellectual candor.

I further justified this decision by noting that black crime in America had been an important topic of public discussion for at least the last half-century.  I reasoned that my findings must surely have been quietly known for decades to most social scientists in the relevant fields, and hence would add little to existing knowledge.  However, since that time a few private discussions have led me to seriously question that assumption, as has the emotion-laden but vacuous media firestorm surrounding the George Zimmerman trial.  I have therefore now decided to publish an expanded and unexpurgated version of my analysis, which I believe may have important explanatory value as well as some interesting policy implications.

The Pattern of Urban Crime in America

My central methodology is simple.  I obtained the crime rates and ethnic percentages of America’s larger cities from official government data sources and calculated the population-weighted cross-correlations.  In order to minimize the impact of statistical outliers, I applied this same approach to hundreds of different datasets: each of the years 1985 through 2011; homicide rates, robbery rates, and violent crime overall; all large cities of 250,000 and above and also restricted only to major cities of at least 500,000.  I obtained these urban crime correlations with respect to the percentages of local whites, blacks, and Hispanics, but excluded Asians since their numbers were quite insignificant until recently (here and throughout this article, “white” shall refer to non-Hispanic whites).

I also attempted to estimate these same results for the overall immigrant population.  The overwhelming majority of immigrants since 1965 have been Hispanic or Asian while conversely the overwhelming majority of those two population groups have a relatively recent immigrant family background.  So the combined population of Hispanics and Asians constitutes a good proxy for the immigrant community, and allows us to determine the immigrant relationship to crime rates.

Presented graphically, these various urban crime correlations are as follows:

These charts demonstrate that over the last twenty-five years the weighted correlations for each of the crime categories against the percentages of whites, Hispanics, and “immigrants” (i.e. Hispanics-plus-Asians) have fluctuated in the general range of -0.20 to -0.60.  Interestingly enough, for most of the last decade the presence of Hispanics and immigrants has become noticeably less associated with crime than the presence of whites, although that latter category obviously exhibits large regional heterogeneity.  Meanwhile, in the case of blacks, the weighted crime correlations have steadily risen from 0.60 to around 0.80 or above, almost always now falling within between 0.75 and 0.85.

These particular calculations do rely upon several minor methodological choices.  For example, I have used the 2000 Census population thresholds for selecting the sixty-odd large cities in my dataset, while I could have chosen some other year instead.  The substantial annual fluctuations in the urban ethnic percentages provided by the Census-ACS estimates led me to instead use the interpolated Census figures for all years.  The annual urban population totals used by the FBI sometimes differ slightly from the Census numbers, and I used the former for population-weighting purposes.  However, all my results were quite robust with respect to these particular decisions, and modifying them would produce results largely indistinguishable from those presented above.

On a more difficult matter, there is always the possibility of local bias in FBI crime statistics, with the data for some cities possibly being more reliable or comprehensive than for others.  But the reporting rate for homicides is widely accepted as close to 100 percent, and the close correspondence between the results for this “gold standard” crime category and those for the robbery and violent crime rates tends to confirm the validity of the latter.  In any event, we would expect the highest-crime areas to be those most likely to suffer from under-reporting problems, so we would expect our figures to somewhat underestimate the true size of the correlations.

It is important to recognize that within the world of academic sociology discovering an important correlation in the range of 0.80 or above is quite remarkable, almost extraordinary.  And even these correlations between black population prevalence and urban crime rates may actually tend to significantly understate the reality.  All these correlations were performed on a city-wide aggregate basis.  The New York City numbers include both the Upper East Side and Brownsville, Los Angeles both Bel Air and Watts, Chicago the Gold Coast and Englewood, with each city’s totals averaging those of both the wealthiest and the most dangerous districts.  This crude methodology tends to obscure the local pattern of crime, which usually varies tremendously between different areas, often roughly corresponding to the lines of racial segregation.  It is hardly a secret that impoverished black areas do have far higher crime rates than affluent white ones.

If instead we relied upon smaller geographical units such as neighborhoods, our results would be much more precise, but ethnicity data is provided by zip code while crime data is reported by precinct, so a major research undertaking would be required to match these dissimilar aggregational units for calculation purposes.  However, the apparent geographical pattern of crime in these cities and most others might lead us to suspect that our national racial correlations would become substantially greater under such a more accurate approach, perhaps often reaching or even exceeding the 0.90 level.  The inescapable conclusion is that local urban crime rates in America seem to be almost entirely explained by the local racial distribution.

But could such a strikingly simple sociological truth possibly be correct?  After all, academic scholars have long advanced a wide variety of different socio-economic explanations for crime, and these have often been heavily promoted by pundits and the media.  Commonly cited factors have been urban density, especially in the case of high-rise housing projects, and local poverty.  There is also the relative number of police officers to consider.  We should certainly compare the possible influence of these factors with the ethnic ones examined above.

Since the geographical borders of a city are generally fixed, average population densities are easy to calculate and in recent years their apparent impact upon crime rates has been negligible, whether for homicide, robbery, or violent crime in general.  For the last dozen years, the density/crime correlations have always ranged between 0.20 and -0.20 and were usually close to zero.  Perhaps many of us have an intuitive mental image of densely populated East Coast cities being natural hotbeds of crime.  But this appears incorrect: crime rates and urban density seem to have little connection.

What about the sizes of the various urban police departments?  Although precise comparisons are sometimes difficult, the Bureau of Justice Statistics periodically publishes official reports on the subject, and the latest 2007 study lists the numerical totals of America’s fifty largest urban police forces, allowing us to calculate the weighted correlations between these per capita policing levels and the corresponding crime rates of the years 2007-2011.  We discover that there actually exists a moderately strong positive correlation, generally falling in the range 0.30-0.60: the more police, the more crime.  Although this might seem counterintuitive, the explanation becomes obvious once we reverse the direction of causation.  Higher crime rates usually persuade local authorities to hire additional police officers.

Finally, although urban crime rates do track local economic conditions, the relationship is far from tight.  For the years 2006-2011, the Census-ACS provides estimates of the Mean Income, Median Income, and Poverty Rates for each urban center, and we can easily perform the same calculations we did in the racial case.  The correlations between the Mean Income and Median Income levels and the various crime categories generally fall in the range of -0.40 to -0.60, being moderately rather than strongly negative.  Even the correlation between Poverty Rate and crime—supported by the obvious truism that most street criminals are poor—is hardly enormous, falling between 0.50 and 0.70, and usually well below our racial figures.

The relative strength of these different correlations may be seen by a chart superimposing the economic and ethnic results for the last dozen years of robbery rate correlations for our major cities.  Although the hard economic times since 2008 have considerably increased the influence of the poverty correlate, that factor is still considerably less significant than the racial one.

Indeed, the race/crime correlation so substantially exceeds the poverty/crime relationship that much of the latter may simply be a statistical artifact due to most urban blacks being poor.  Consider that both blacks and Hispanics currently have similar national poverty rates in the one-third range, more than double the white figure, and each constitutes well over 20% of our urban population.  However, major cities with substantial poverty but few blacks usually tend to have far lower levels of crime.  For example, El Paso and Atlanta are comparable in size and have similar poverty rates, but the latter has eight times the robbery rate and over ten times the homicide rate.  Within California, Oakland approximately matches Santa Ana in size and poverty, but has several times the rate of crime.  Thus, it seems plausible that removing the black population from our calculation might actually reduce the residual poverty/crime correlation for non-blacks to a moderate or even a low figure.

To some extent, this surprising possibility is merely a statistical syllogism.  Whenever the correlation to a single factor approaches unity, no other non-equivalent item may have a large, independent impact.  And failing to recognize the existence of such a single, overwhelming factor might lead us to misidentify numerous other spurious influences, whose apparent causal importance actually derives from their own correlations with the primary item.  For many years, the black connection to local crime has been so strong as to almost eliminate the possible role of any other variable.

We must obviously be cautious in interpreting the meaning of these statistical findings since correlation does not necessarily imply causation.  Over the last few years the crime correlation for Hispanic or Hispanic-plus-Asian numbers has been substantially more negative than the same figure for whites, but this does not necessarily prove that whites are much more likely to commit urban crime, though it would tend to rule out the contrary possibility that Hispanics or immigrants have far higher rates of criminality.

However, if we examine the official FBI arrest statistics, we find that these seem to support the most straightforward interpretation of our racial crime correlations.  For example, blacks in America were over six times as likely to be arrested for homicide in 2011 as non-blacks and over eight times as likely to be arrested for robbery; the factors for previous years were usually in a similar range.  The accuracy of this racial pattern of arrests is generally confirmed by the corresponding racial pattern of victim-identification statements, also aggregated by the FBI.  Indeed, several years ago the liberal Sentencing Project organization estimated that some one-third of all American black men are already convicted criminals by their 20s, and the fraction would surely be far higher for those living in urban areas.

A sense of the real world impact of these grim statistics may be found in the stratified 2011 Census-ACS data for major American cities.  The three urban centers with the largest black populations are New York City, Chicago, and Philadelphia, and together they contain over one-third more adult black women than black men.  The corresponding national shortfall of black males runs well into the millions, partly accounting for the notorious “marriage gap” problems faced by women of their background.  Those millions of missing black men are generally dead or in prison.

Over the last few years, the official publications of the Bureau of Justice Statistics have made it increasingly difficult to determine the racial totals of inmates in state prisons and local jails but the figures from the mid-2000s probably still provide a reasonable estimate, and I had used these in my 2010 article.  Since crime is overwhelmingly committed by young males, for comparative purposes we should normalize all these incarceration totals against the base population of adult males in their prime-crime years, and the results are summarized in my previously published chart, reprinted here.

Since the mid-1990s, the issue of street crime has mostly dropped off the front pages of our national newspapers and disappeared from the public debate.  Meanwhile, black Americans have gained much greater visibility in the upper reaches of our national elites, while Barack Obama has been elected and reelected as our first black president.  This might seem to indicate that traditional racial cleavages in our society have become less substantial.  Furthermore, with such enormous numbers of young black men now in prison, we might naturally expect that the racial character of American urban crime rates has sharply declined over the last couple of decades.  However, the quantitative evidence demonstrates the exact opposite situation, as may be seen by examining the combined twenty-five year trajectories of our various racial crime correlations, which have steadily grown more extreme.  The images shown on our film screens or television sets may portray one America, but the actual data reveals a very different country.

Once we accept the reality of these stark racial facts, we must naturally wonder about the causes, and also why the historical trends seem to have been moving in exactly the wrong direction over most of the last quarter-century. Certainly many theoretical explanations have been advanced, both from the Left and the Right, and whole library shelves have been filled with books on the subject since the urban violence of the 1960s. A short article is no place for me to summarize such a vast literature on a contentious topic, especially when I can provide no original insights of my own. But good theoretical analysis requires a solid factual grounding, and my main purpose here is to establish those facts, which others may then choose to interpret howsoever they wish.  Absent such information, any national dialogue becomes an exercise in empty ideological posturing.

The Racial Subtext of American Electoral Politics

Racial issues have traditionally been among the most highly charged in American public life, and the nexus of crime and race has been exceptionally contentious for many decades.  Under these circumstances respectable scholars tend to be cautious in discussing or merely investigating this topic, and the mainstream media is usually even more gun-shy.  The striking racial findings presented above require only trivial statistical calculations and may be glimpsed in any casual inspection of the crime rankings of our major cities.  But I remain uncertain to what extent they are already recognized by our experts in social policy.

For example, when I presented my correlation results to one very prominent conservative social scientist, he found them shocking and remarkable, and said he had never imagined that the statistical relationship between race and crime was so extremely strong.  But when I showed the same data to an equally prominent liberal academic, he took the information in stride and said he assumed that almost all experts were already quietly aware of the general facts.  The reactions of other knowledgeable individuals fell all along this spectrum ranging from surprise to familiarity.  Knowledge so explosive that it is usually unspoken and unreported may easily remain unknown even to many of our foremost intellectuals.

But whether or not most of our ruling elites explicitly recognize the stark racial character of American crime, the reality still exists, and we should consider exploring whether these unpublicized facts may have had broader influences in our society, possibly in seemingly unrelated areas.  After all, urban crime has frequently been a leading issue in American public life, during some periods ranking as one of the most important.  Certain matters may not be easily discussed in polite company these days, but if even just a portion of the citizenry is intuitively aware of the situation, their attitudes might have broader ripple effects throughout the entire population.  Is there any substantial evidence for this?

Consider the electoral behavior of American whites, and especially their inclination to support either Democratic or Republican candidates.  Because of gerrymandering, most individual congressional districts are overwhelmingly aligned with one party or another, and general elections are a mere formality; this is often also true of statewide races for senator or governor.  However, in presidential elections both parties almost always field viable national candidates with a reasonable chance of winning, so these provide the best means of gauging white political alignment.  And for these campaigns, the racial lines are clearly established, with the modern Republicans being the “white party,” drawing over 90% of their support from that demographic group, while over 90% of blacks regularly vote the Democratic ticket, which also usually attracts the overwhelming majority of other non-white voters.

As I pointed out in a 2011 article, there has been a striking statewide pattern to white voting behavior over the last couple of decades.  Many conservative activists and media pundits have spent years attacking immigrants, illegal or otherwise, and have regularly denounced the cultural threat posed by the growing population of non-English-speakers or non-white foreigners.  Nevertheless, the empirical fact is that presence or absence of large numbers of Hispanics or Asians in a given state seems to have virtually no impact upon white voting patterns.  Meanwhile, there exists a strong relationship between the size of a state’s black population and the likelihood that local whites will favor the Republicans.  The weighted-average correlations between the racial compositions of the fifty states and the degree to which their white voters favor Republican presidential candidates is summarized in the following chart.

GOP leaders are always fearful of being denounced as “racist” by the major media, and often seek to camouflage the underlying source of their electoral support by adopting the most extreme forms of tokenism, promoting black party leaders and spokesmen while heavily recruiting black candidates and focusing almost entirely upon non-racial issues.  Conservative activists often rhetorically identify themselves as heirs to the “party of Lincoln” and may even accuse their Democratic opponents of seeking to keep blacks in Welfare State bondage.  But the actual data tells a very different story about the likely sources of Republican support.

The strength of this pattern may be seen at its extremes.  Mississippi is the state with the highest black percentage and across all six elections its white population was the most likely to vote Republican, with the figures recently running at nearly the 90% level.  Louisiana, Georgia, and South Carolina are generally clustered together as the next blackest in population, and in most elections their white populations were the next most likely to support the Republican ticket, although being sometimes exceeded by the whites of Alabama, the fifth or sixth blackest state during those decades.

By contrast, consider the three states with the largest non-white percentages: Hawaii, California, and New Mexico.  The whites of the first two have actually been far less likely to vote Republican than whites nationwide, while those in New Mexico fall close to the national average.  This tends to confirm the national statistical results that the widespread presence of non-whites, even in overwhelming numbers, seems to have little impact upon white voting behavior.

While I would not argue that black crime is the sole determining factor behind the racial polarization in white voting behavior, I do suspect it is one of the largest contributors.  Empirically, the presence of blacks causes whites to vote the “law-and-order” Republican ticket, while the presence of Hispanics or Asians seems to have negligible political impact.

Nevertheless, we should remain cautious in interpreting these results.  For example, although these national correlations are certainly substantial, they are almost entirely due to the weighting of the Southern states, in which blacks are almost 20% of the total population and racial tensions have traditionally been the strongest.  In non-Southern states, the correlations are nil, perhaps partly because blacks are found in far smaller numbers, being less than 9% of the total.

The Hidden Motive for Heavy Immigration?

Consider also the highly contentious issue of immigration.  Obviously, much of the underlying conflict is purely economic in character, with workers aware that restricting the supply of available labor will protect their bargaining power over wages, while businesses seek to maximize their profits by expanding the pool of potential employees, whether low-skilled or high-tech.

But all involved participants quickly discover that despite endless protestations to the contrary there is also a clear racial subtext, usually accounting for the emotionality of the debate.  For the last half-century, the overwhelming majority of immigrants, especially illegal ones, have been non-white, and the resulting racial fears have been a central motivating force driving many of the most zealous restrictionists, who fear being swamped by a tidal wave of “the Other.”  However, I believe that racial considerations, whether fully conscious or not, might also be found on the other side of the issue, helping to explain why our national leadership today so uniformly endorses very heavy foreign immigration.

America’s ruling financial, media, and political elites are largely concentrated in three major urban centers—New York City, Los Angeles, and Washington, D.C.—and all three have contained large black populations, including a violent underclass.  During the early 1990s, many observers feared New York City was headed for urban collapse due to its enormously high crime rates, Los Angeles experienced the massive and deadly Rodney King Riots, and Washington often vied for the title of American homicide capital.  In each city, the violence and crime were overwhelmingly committed by black males, and although white elites were rarely the victims, their fears were quite palpable.

One obvious reaction to these concerns was strong political support for a massive national crackdown on crime, and the prison incarceration of black men increased by almost 500% during the two decades after 1980.  But even after such enormous rates of imprisonment, official FBI statistics indicate that blacks today are still over 600% as likely to commit homicide than non-blacks and their robbery rate is over 700% larger; these disparities seem just as high with respect to Hispanic or Asian immigrants as they are for whites.  Thus, replacing a city’s blacks with immigrants would tend to lower local crime rates by as much as 90%, and during the 1990s American elites may have become increasingly aware of this important fact, together with the obvious implications for their quality of urban life and housing values.

According to Census data, between 1990 and 2010 the number of Hispanics and Asians increased by one-third in Los Angeles, by nearly 50% in New York City, and by over 70% in Washington, D.C.  The inevitable result was to squeeze out much of the local black population, which declined, often substantially, in each location.  And all three cities experienced enormous drops in local crime, with homicide rates falling by 73%, 79%, and 72% respectively, perhaps partly as a result of these underlying demographic changes.  Meanwhile, the white population increasingly shifted toward the affluent, who were best able to afford the sharp rise in housing prices.  It is an undeniable fact that American elites, conservative and liberal alike, are today almost universally in favor of very high levels of immigration, and their possible recognition of the direct demographic impact upon their own urban circumstances may be an important but unspoken factor in shaping their views.

As an anecdotal example, consider the case of Matthew Yglesias, a prominent young liberal blogger living in Washington, DC.  A couple of years ago he recounted on his blogsite how he was suddenly attacked from behind and seriously beaten by two young men while walking home one evening from a dinner party.  At first he was quite cagey about identifying his attackers, but he eventually admitted they were blacks, possibly engaged in the growing racial practice of urban “polar bear hunting” so widely publicized by the Drudge Report and other rightwing websites.

Few matters are more likely to trouble the minds of our Harvard-educated intellectual elite than fear of suffering random violent assaults while they walk the streets of their own city.  Yet no respectable progressive would possibly focus on the racial character of such an attack, let alone advocate the removal of local blacks as a precautionary measure.  Instead Yglesias suggested that housing-density issues might have been responsible and that better urban planning would reduce crime.

But consider that support for very high levels of foreign immigration is an impeccably liberal cause, and such policies inevitably displace and remove huge numbers of urban blacks; it is easy to imagine that Yglesias quietly redoubled his pro-immigration zeal in the wake of the incident.  Multiply this personal example a thousand-fold, and perhaps an important strand of the tremendous pro-immigration ideological framework of American elites becomes apparent.  The more conspiratorially-minded racialists, bitterly hostile to immigration, sometimes speculate that there is a diabolical plot by our ruling power structure to “race-replace” America’s traditional white population.  Perhaps a hidden motive along these lines does indeed help explain some support for heavy immigration, but I suspect that the race being targeted for replacement is not the white one.

Such factors may also play a role outside the major urban centers discussed above and even where least suspected.  Among all American businessmen, Silicon Valley executives are probably strongest in their pro-immigration advocacy, as indicated by the major political advertising campaign recently launched by top technology CEOs, organized together as “FWD.us.”  Obviously, their own cosmopolitan background and desire for an unlimited supply of inexpensive, high-quality engineers is their primary motive.  However, widespread sentiments in favor of lesser-educated immigrant groups such as undocumented Latin Americans also seem quite strong, and we find Steve Jobs’ wealthy widow Laurene Powell Jobs focusing her efforts almost exclusively on that particular aspect of the legislation, with her sentiments hardly being discordant with those of her wealthy peer group.  Could hidden racial factors be part of the explanation?  That might seem quite unlikely since Silicon Valley’s black population has been very low for decades, running in the 3 or 4 percent range.

However, a closer examination reveals a very different situation.  The small city of Palo Alto is one of the most desirable local residential areas, home to the late Steve Jobs, as well as the current CEOs of Apple, Google, Facebook, Yahoo, and a host of other companies; by some estimates, it may contain the world’s highest per capita concentration of billionaires. On three sides, Palo Alto abuts communities of a similar character: Mountain View, containing Google; the Stanford University campus; and Menlo Park, the center of America’s venture capital industry.  But on the fourth side, mostly separated by Highway 101, lies East Palo Alto, which for decades was a dangerous ghetto, overwhelmingly black.

I moved back to Palo Alto from New York City in 1992, and that year East Palo Alto recorded America’s highest per capita murder rate; although relatively few of the homicides, robberies, and rapes spilled across the border, enough did to leave many people uneasy.  Gated communities and even street fences are quite uncommon in the region, and for years anyone who wished could go to the home of Steve Jobs and walk around his yard or even peer into his windows.  Meanwhile, the sort of harsh racial profiling widely practiced in some large cities was completely abhorrent to the socially liberal citizenry.  One may easily imagine a scenario in which escalating street crime from the ghetto next door might have produced a collapse in high housing prices and sparked a massive flight of the wealthy.

One reason this did not occur was the vast influx of impoverished immigrants from south of the border that swept into the less affluent communities of the region during those same years and rapidly transformed the local demographics.  Between 1980 and 2010 the combined Hispanic population of Santa Clara and San Mateo counties nearly tripled.  A city offering cheap housing such as East Palo Alto saw far greater relative increases, reversing its demographics during that period from 60% black and 14% Hispanic to 16% black and 65% Hispanic.  Over the last twenty years, the homicide rate in that small city dropped by 85%, with similar huge declines in other crime categories as well, thereby transforming a miserable ghetto into a pleasant working-class community, now featuring new office complexes, luxury hotels, and large regional shopping centers.  Multi-billionaire Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife recently purchased a large $9 million home just a few hundred feet from the East Palo Alto border, a decision that would have been unthinkable during the early 1990s.  Technology executives are highly quantitative individuals, skilled in pattern recognition, and I find it difficult to believe that they have all remained completely oblivious to these local racial factors.

However the powerful role of immigration in transforming the crime rates of important urban centers probably had a much smaller impact on the national totals.  The combined black populations of New York City, Washington, and Los Angeles may have dropped by half a million over the last two decades, but the individuals pushed out did not disappear from the world; they merely moved to Atlanta or Baltimore or Riverside.  But from the personal perspective of America’s ruling elite, they did indeed disappear.

For over thirty years, local black activists in Washington, D.C. have accused the ruling white power structure of promoting “The Plan,” a deliberate strategy of removing most of the black population from our national capital and replacing them with whites; and this “conspiracy theory” has been endlessly ridiculed as absurdly paranoid nonsense by our elite Washington media.  Meanwhile, during this same thirty year period, Washington’s black population dropped from over 70% to less than half and will probably fall below the white total within the next few years.

Indeed, the strong support of our political elites for Section 8 housing vouchers may be less connected with any alleged social benefits these provide than with their important role in moving large numbers of impoverished urban residents away from the near vicinity of wealthy neighborhoods out into the remote suburbs of the middle class.  Several years ago the Atlantic published a major article by Hanna Rosin on the rapid changes in the geographical pattern of crime induced by these demographic shifts, and the piece provoked much discussion even though the author avoided unduly emphasizing the troubling racial aspects.  Elite selfishness is hardly surprising and a policy of exporting those populations with a strong link to crime into other localities seems a natural strategy, especially if this can be accomplished under the altruistic guise of socially-uplifting anti-poverty programs.

Finally, it is important to emphasize that this clear political interplay between heavy levels of immigration and black urban displacement is a relatively recent development and certainly was not anticipated by the original promoters of the 1965 Immigration Act.  Indeed, although restrictionists routinely denounce that legislation for having flooded America with Hispanic immigrants, the facts are precisely the opposite.  While the 1924 Immigration Act had drastically curtailed immigration from Europe (and Asia), the entire Western Hemisphere was totally exempted, and the U.S. retained its previous “open borders” policy for Mexico and the rest of Latin America until strict quotas were finally introduced as part of the 1965 law.  Although these 1965 changes were expected to enable renewed European immigration, no one anticipated the vast inflow of Hispanic and Asian immigrants in the decades that followed, nor the resulting impact upon the racial composition of our major cities.  But today these continuing urban demographic changes may have now become a significant motive in the minds of the elites advocating increased immigration under the legislation being considered by Congress.

During the 1960s black author James Baldwin coined the widely-quoted phrase “Urban renewal means Negro removal.” I suspect that a somewhat similar semi-intentional national policy is today transforming America’s leading urban centers, although it remains almost entirely unreported by our mainstream media.

On rare occasions, the mask slips and the underlying mental workings of our national elites are momentarily revealed. Consider New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, one of our most vocal pro-immigration voices on the national stage and a man whose vast wealth and influence often allow him to be far more candid on controversial topics than most other public figures. In May 2011 Bloomberg was interviewed on Meet the Press, and explained that if he had full authority, he could easily fix the seemingly insoluble problems of a city like Detroit at no cost to the taxpayer. He proposed opening wide the floodgates to unlimited foreign immigration on the condition that all the additional immigrants moved to Detroit and lived there for a decade or so, thereby transforming the city. I suspect this provides an important insight into how he and his friends discuss certain racial issues in private.

The Remarkable New York City Exception

Powerful quantitative evidence for social determinism may be dispiriting, and when the main determinant seems to be race, many Americans will choose to throw up their hands and ignore the statistical facts, simply hoping that these might somehow be proven incorrect.  That is certainly their privilege, but for those individuals who prefer to grit their teeth and mine the data for contrary indications, there do exist a few interesting nuggets.

Weighted average correlations are a very useful summary statistic, but they neither tell the whole story nor do they preclude the existence of outlying cases, which might provide some insights on ameliorating the grim situation we have described.  And it so happens that among our many dozens of major urban centers one of the most extreme race/crime outliers is neither small nor obscure: New York City.  Our largest metropolis often has crime rates that deviate sharply from the usual urban pattern observed almost everywhere else.

Recall our earlier mention of the surprising absence of any correlation between urban population density and crime rates.  Those summary statistics were correct, but they also hid some important variations and the null overall result was almost entirely due to the extremely high density and low crime rates in America’s largest city, combined with its huge population-weighting.  If we excluded New York City from our calculations, the remainder of America’s major urban centers would demonstrate some moderately strong and fairly stable correlations between density and crime over the last dozen years; for example, density has generally had a positive correlation of around 0.35 with robbery rates.

Similar anomalies appear in the racial crime calculations that have been the central focus of our analysis.  Based on its racial composition, we would expect New York City’s homicide rate to be some 70% higher than it actually is, with robbery and violent crime also being far more widespread.  Cities like San Jose and San Diego may have homicide and violent crime rates only half that of New York City, but given the stark differences in their underlying demographics, it is New York City’s Finest who deserves praise for their remarkable effectiveness in crime prevention.  Evaluating the apparent success or failure of urban law enforcement policies without candidly considering a city’s demographic challenges may lead to incorrect policy judgments.

Little of New York City’s success in crime prevention seems due to the relative size of its police force, which is roughly similar to those of Chicago, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Boston on a per capita basis, and far below that of Washington, D.C., all cities whose crime rates reflect their demographics.  So it appears that New York City’s crime-fighting methods rather than merely the number of its officers has been the crucial factor.

Ideas have consequences, as do attempts to avoid them.  For most of the last twenty years, the policing methods implemented under mayors Rudolph Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg won enormous national praise as they so dramatically cut New York crime rates: murders dropped by over three-quarters.  But during the last few years, some of these same policies have begun receiving widespread criticism among those pundits who may have forgotten just how bad things were two decades ago.

Our simple statistical analysis obviously does not allow us to disentangle the relative importance of the different factors behind New York City’s success.  Since the early 1990s, the city implemented a “community policing” model as well as pioneering the rapid use of local crime data to pinpoint dangerous hotspots and allocate resources more accurately.  But other elements of the package have included strict, even harsh policing methods, such as the widespread use of “stop-and-frisk” to reduce gun violence.   Denouncing these techniques as unconstitutional or racially discriminatory may be perfectly justified, but those who do so must consider the trade-offs involved, including the very real possibility of a 70% rise in homicides if local policing effectiveness declined to levels found in the rest of the country.

Let us compare the demographic and crime trends of New York City and Washington, twin abodes of our East Coast urban elite.  Between 1985 and 2011, Washington’s homicide rate dropped by 26%, robbery fell 27%, and violent crime in general was cut by 30%; but the city’s black population also dropped by 27% during this same period.  Meanwhile, New York City’s corresponding declines in crime were far greater, 67%, 78%, and 67% respectively, but were accompanied by only a small 7% decline in black numbers.  For all these serious crime rates to decline at nearly ten times the rate of their primary racial determinant is absolutely remarkable, a combination that left the city an exceptional outlier among America’s major urban centers.

Put another way, if America’s other cities with large black populations had somehow managed to achieve the same surprisingly low crime rates as New York City then most of the  high racial crime correlations that have been the central findings of this article would disappear.  Conversely, if New York City were excluded from our current national statistics, many of the existing racial crime correlations would exceed 0.90.  These are objective facts and well-intentioned analysts who sharply criticize New York City policing methods should recognize that they may face some unpalatable choices.

Perhaps further research would establish that the widely-lauded elements of local police practice are the ones primarily responsible for such results, and the more controversial methods may safely be eliminated without negative consequences.  But for whatever combination of reasons, the overall results achieved by New York City have been quite remarkable and caution should be exercised before drastic changes are made in such a successful model.

Obviously New York City is not the sole positive outlier on these crime statistics, though it is by far the most significant, both because of its size and the magnitude of its deviation from the predicted results. If we examine the 2011 homicide rates for our set of sixty-six large cities, seventeen of these were at least 30% below the projected trendline, with four cities—Charlotte, Raleigh, St. Paul, and Virginia Beach—achieving even better results than New York City. But many of these successful cities have numerically small black populations, and the total for all seventeen combined is not much larger that of New York City alone. One intriguing fact is that although fewer than one-third of the all our large cities lie in the South, these Southern cities account for over two-thirds of those particularly successful examples, and a roughly similar pattern applies both for other crime rates and for other recent years. The exact mix of cultural, socio-economic, or demographic factors responsible for such notable Southern success in achieving relatively low urban crime rates is unclear, but might warrant further investigation.

Over the last decade or two, liberal intellectuals have regularly denounced their conservative opponents for allowing ideological considerations to trump objective facts, sometimes styling themselves the “Reality-Based Community” as an ironic riposte to the foolish criticism of a top Bush Administration official.  Many of these liberal accusations have considerable merit.  But individuals who claim to accept reality undercut their credibility if they pick and choose which portions of reality they acknowledge and which portions they carefully ignore.  Our academic and media elites should not avoid factual evidence that they dislike.

Consider that over one-quarter of all the urban black males in America have vanished from our society, a loss-ratio approaching that experienced by Europeans during the Black Death of the Middle Ages.  Yet these astonishing statistics have largely remained unreported by our major media and hence unrecognized by the general American public.  Should the medieval scribes of the Fourteenth Century have ignored the annihilating impact of the bubonic plague all around them and merely confined their writings to more pleasant news?

It is said that very young children sometimes believe they can hide themselves by covering their eyes, and that seems to be the general approach taken by our major media to the unpleasantly grim racial crime statistics analyzed in this article.  But the reality continues to exist whether or not we ignore it.

California Republicans Vote to Restore “Bilingual Education”

The Unz Review • May 7, 2014 • 1,400 Words

After almost seventeen years history may be about to repeat itself in California politics, though perhaps with a strong element of farce. Late last week, the Senate Education Committee voted 8-to-0 to place a measure on the November 2016 ballot repealing Prop. 227 and restoring “bilingual education” in California public schools. The long-dormant Language Wars may be returning to American politics, and based on the early indicators, the G.O.P. may have totally abandoned any support for English in the schools, with not a single Republican casting a No vote on the proposal.

Although many might be surprised by this political alignment, I am not. When I launched my “English for the Children” initiative effort in 1997 to replace California’s failed system of Spanish-almost-only “bilingual education” with intensive English immersion, I sought to avoid the political partisanship that could easily taint a project touching upon delicate ethnic issues. As matters turned out, I got my wish, and our campaign was among the most bipartisan in state history, being opposed by nearly every prominent Democrat and also nearly every prominent Republican.

Requiring that English be taught in public schools was opposed by the Chairman of the state Republican Party and the Chairman of the State Democratic Party, as well as all four party leaders in the State Senate and Assembly. President Bill Clinton came out to California to campaign against us. All four candidates for governor, Democrat and Republican alike, denounced the measure and together starred in a powerful television spot urging a No vote, ranked by many as the best advertisement of that election cycle. We were opposed by every California union, every political slate, and almost every newspaper editorial board, and were outspent on advertising by a ratio of 25-to-1. But despite this daunting array of influential opponents, our initiative still passed with one of the largest political landslides of any contested measure in state history, winning over 61 percent of the vote.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PqTQFSh3uxE

As is traditional with California initiatives, our critics hoped to win in the courtroom what they had lost at the ballot box and bilingual advocates immediately sued to block the law. However, in the weeks that followed, four separate federal judges ruled in favor of Prop. 227 and the law that had passed in the June vote began to be implemented statewide as the new school year began in September. All of California’s thousand-odd school districts were required to teach young immigrant children in English as soon as they started school, though some bitterly resisted and dragged their feet.

The consequences were quite remarkable. Although nearly every state newspaper had editorially opposed the change in educational policy, once their journalists began visiting the schools to report the results of such a sweeping educational transformation, the many dozens of major media stories produced were uniformly glowing, with teachers, parents, and children all very happy with the change, and everyone surprised how quickly and easily the students were learning English in the classroom.

The following year, academic test scores for a million-plus immigrant students in California rose substantially, confounding naysayers and putting the story back on the front pages of the major state newspapers. And in 2000, immigrant test scores continued their rise, leading to a front-page story in the Sunday New York Times and major coverage in the rest of the national media. The founding president of the California Association of Bilingual Educators publicly declared that he had been wrong for thirty years and bilingual education didn’t work while English immersion did work, becoming a born-again convert to “English” and appearing on CBS News and the PBS Newshour to make his case.

During the first four years following the passage of Prop. 227, the academic performance of over a million immigrant schoolchildren taught in English roughly doubled, while those school districts that stubbornly retained their bilingual education programs showed no improvement whatsoever. English-learners in English immersion classes academically outperformed their counterparts in holdover bilingual education programs in every subject, every grade level, and every year, racking up performance advantage of 80-to-0.

The political trends showed a similar trajectory, with Arizona voters passing an almost identical ballot measure by an even wider 26 point margin in November 2000 and the electorate of Massachusetts, arguably America’s most liberal state, favoring “English” by a colossal 32 point landslide in 2002, incidentally putting supporter Mitt Romney in the governorship as a political side-effect. Then in 2003, Nativo Lopez, one of California’s most diehard remaining backers of bilingual education, was recalled from office in Santa Ana by Latino parents outraged over his opposition to “English,” losing by a 40 point margin in America’s most heavily Latino immigrant major city.

With that last landslide vote over a decade ago in America’s most heavily Latino immigrant city, resistance to “English” completely crumbled and bilingual education largely disappeared from schools in California and much of the rest of the country while even the term itself almost completely vanished from public discourse or media coverage.

For decades since the 1960s, denunciations of bilingual education had been a staple of conservative campaign rhetoric—the so-called “language wars”—but with the provocative educational policy having disappeared, the rhetoric eventually followed and fewer and fewer elected officials or political activists even remembered that the program had once existed. A couple of years ago, Peter Brimelow, editor of the leading anti-immigration webzine VDare.com, included a rare denunciation of bilingual education in one of his columns, but felt compelled to explain the meaning of the term, which may have become unfamiliar to his younger anti-immigrationist readers.

Meanwhile, virtually all immigrant children in California quickly and easily learned English as soon as they entered school, and no one thought the process difficult or remarkable. Whereas for decades bilingual education theorists had claimed that it took seven to ten years for a young child to learn English—a totally insane claim that was ubiquitous in our schools of education—everyone now recognized that just a few months was usually time enough, with the new goal being for Latino children to learn English in pre-school and therefore become fully English-proficient before they even entered kindergarten.

And inevitably, the Prop. 227 educational revolution has produced a generation of mostly bilingual young adults. After all, a large fraction of California Latinos are raised in Spanish-speaking households, and learn that language as children. Meanwhile, they now learn to read and write and speak mainstream English as soon as they enter school, while often continuing to speak Spanish at home with their parents and other family members. Thus, millions of younger Californians have ended up with complete fluency in both languages, effortlessly switching between the two, as I have personally often noticed in Palo Alto, a town in which perhaps half the ordinary daily workers are Hispanic in origin.

One reason this educational revolution has attracted so little ongoing attention is that it merely served to align instructional curriculum with overwhelming popular sentiment. Even a decade or more ago, while the policy was still under sharp political dispute, numerous state and national surveys had indicated that nearly 80% of all Americans supported having all public school instruction conducted in English, with these massive supermajorities cutting across all ideological, political, ethnic, and geographical lines, and support among immigrant Hispanics being especially strong.  Indeed, I am not aware of any contentious policy issue whose backing was so totally uniform and overwhelming.

But politics abhors a vacuum and although almost everyone else has forgotten the topic of bilingual education over the last dozen years, the small number of bilingual zealots have remained just as committed as ever to their failed dogma. I doubt that there ever numbered more than just a few hundred hardcore bilingual activist supporters among California’s population of over thirty million, but their years of unopposed private lobbying and spurious academic research have now borne fruit. California politicians are hardly deep thinkers and term limits ensured that few of them had been prominent in public life during the late 1990s. Hence the 8-to-0 committee vote to reestablish bilingual education in California.

In reviewing the last twenty years of domestic policy battles in America, the replacement of bilingual education with English immersion in our public schools may rank as just about the only clear success for policies traditionally advocated by conservatives and Republicans—at least no other obvious example comes to mind. Meanwhile, the disastrous political choices made by California Republicans during the 1990s have placed what was once the most powerful Republican state party in America on the very edge of irrelevance and a descent into minor-party status.

For California Republicans to back the restoration of failed bilingual education programs would probably mark the final nail in their coffin, and rightfully so.

English and Meritocracy: The Gullibility of Our Political and Media Elites

The Unz Review • May 15, 2014 • 1,800 Words

Last week I noted in a column that the California Republicans in the Education Committee of the State Senate had joined an 8-to-0 vote to repeal Proposition 227 and restore Spanish-almost-only “bilingual education” in our schools.

The academic performance of over a million immigrant student had doubled in the four years following the implementation of intensive English immersion programs, so presumably the goal of the Republicans (and their Democratic co-conspirators) is now to un-double that performance and restore the system as it was in the past.

Just a few years ago, the educational successes of Prop. 227 were still so keenly recalled that even the erstwhile champions of bilingual programs heatedly denied any intent to restore the disastrous system. But politicians have exceptionally short memories, and with all the bilingual activists and bilingual researchers having spent some time lobbying them in Sacramento about the wondrous benefits of teaching young immigrant children everything in Spanish in order to help them learn English, their empty heads have been spun around and their votes have reversed.

Various other individuals share my amusement about this ridiculous situation. Harvard Professor Steven Pinker, one of America’s foremost psycho-linguists reminded his 126,000 twitter followers about the “Bizarre chapter in educ politics: So-called bilingual education (= keep Eng away fm kids when they can best learn it)” and Francis Fukuyama, another very prominent intellectual, tweeted out my column to his own 29,000 followers, as did Debra Saunders of the SF Chronicle and numerous others.

In general, the reaction all across the Internet to the Republican reversal on bilingual education was scathing, and others shared my view that it might constitute the last nail in the coffin for the dying California GOP that had once dominated the state during the eras of Reagan and Nixon.

Still, it would only be fair to note that the Republican position did receive strong support in certain ideological quarters. Richard Spencer, one of America’s leading White Nationalists, strongly endorsed the restoration of bilingual education and opposed requiring Hispanic children to learn English. Many of the commenters on Jared Taylor’s similarly-hued website took the same position, with one of them very clearly summarizing their perspective:

Good! Anything that disadvantages hispanics vs poor whites is in our racial interest.

Bilingual education often turns into defacto segregation, where whites get to be in normal classes with fewer hispanics. This could be the best thing for white kids trapped in California public schools. The hispanic kids won’t end up learning enough English to escape their educational barrio.

When the hispanics graduate with their worthless bilingual degrees, they won’t be able to speak English well enough to compete with the white kids for jobs. They’ll end up mopping floors and mowing lawns for the rest of their lives.

I’m done “doing the right thing” if it means helping non-whites at the expense of whites. If Jose and Guadalupe want their dumb kids to speak mexican dialect spanish as their only language, I hope the little bambinos enjoy their jobs scrubbing toilets for minimum wage.

Frankly, I regard the current effort to return a million California schoolchildren to Spanish language classrooms more as an amusing bit of idiocy than as any serious threat to the educational revolution of the late 1990s. We must remember that California schools have now been teaching immigrant children English for the better part of a full generation, and nearly all of them have become perfectly fluent and literate in that language, which they obviously want their children also to learn.

Most Latinos are working-class or working-poor and being busy with their own lives, don’t pay a great deal of regular attention to what the politicians in Sacramento are saying or doing. But if they discover that the local schools have suddenly stopped teaching their children English and shifted them into Spanish language classes instead, that bizarre educational change will produce a tidal wave of popular anger and outrage, threatening the gullible politicians responsible with annihilation.

As an approximate analogy, just a few months ago every Asian Democrat in the California Legislature voted to repeal Prop. 209 and reestablish racial preferences in state university admissions. But once ordinary Asians got wind of this development, which would almost certainly would have led to the reestablishment of Asian Quotas in California colleges, the popular outcry was so enormous that all the Asian Democrats immediately reversed their positions and their legislative leaders quickly killed the suddenly divisive measure, which had previously enjoyed near-unanimous Democratic backing.

As an even better parallel, consider the instructive political fate of Nativo Lopez of Santa Ana. His powerful political machine had rendered him a feared local figure to both Democrats and Republicans alike, whom he regularly insulted and attacked with total impunity, even running profanity-laced radio spots against California’s reigning Democratic governor without suffering any retaliation. But after he proclaimed himself a diehard supporter of bilingual education and refused to implement the English language programs required by Prop. 227, he provoked a grassroots uprising by angry Latino parents and was recalled from office, losing by a forty point margin in America’s most heavily Latino immigrant city.

Even over a dozen years ago, long before the educational facts were so fully established, “English in the Schools” enjoyed nearly 80% support among Democrats and Republicans,  and those numbers and intensity were identical for Latinos. Meanwhile, American popular discontent with the endless failures of our political elites, both Democratic and Republican, is at an all-time high. California Republicans are already on the verge of slipping into minor party status and the reestablishment of bilingual education in our schools might place the Democrats on the same trajectory. Perhaps a non-partisan “English Party” would arise to replace both of them in power.

But if the ignorance and gullibility of most American political leaders are universally acknowledged and the subject of endless ridicule by our media elites, perhaps the latter should occasionally look into a mirror.

Anyone can find a ridiculous article by a lowly and unknown junior reporter and tear it to shreds, so let me instead point to a particularly egregious recent example at the opposite end of the spectrum.

The New York Times stands as America’s newspaper of record and among Timesmen few can match the credentials of David Leonhardt, winner of a Pulitzer Prize and numerous other journalistic awards, spending years as Washington Bureau Chief and recently promoted to Managing Editor of a new high-profile venture applying analytical methods to public policy issues.

For his maiden analytical effort, Leonhardt filled the front page of the Sunday Week in Review with a 1,500 word piece discussing the reason that admission to the Ivies and other elite universities has become so much more difficult for American teenagers over the last couple of decades.

His surprising explanation was the enormous increase in the presence of foreign students since 1994, whose growing numbers have left American applicants to compete over a far smaller remaining pie. Thus, the globalization of top American universities is the true culprit behind so many of those thin envelopes received by disappointed students over the last few months.

Given my own prior research and writings on university admissions issues, Leonhardt’s claims seemed extremely doubtful to me, and their credibility was not enhanced by his total lack of specific numbers on international college admissions. In fact, it took me just a couple of minutes to confirm that his argument was entirely incorrect.

The website of the National Center for Educational Statistics provides thirty years worth of data on the enrollment of international students for America’s 5,000 individual colleges, but unfortunately only the most recent figures are presented in convenient form. Therefore, last year I added a research utility to my own website that immediately provides the 1980-2011 enrollment statistics for any university. A few moments using this tool revealed that between 1994 and 2011 the percentage of domestic undergraduates had merely declined from 93.5% to 89.3% at Harvard and from 95.6% to 89.8% at Yale, with roughly similar changes at most other elite universities. Obviously, a decline of only about 5% in the number of available slots for American students would have had little impact on their chance of admission.

Given that Leonhardt’s only quoted source was Harvard’s longtime dean of admissions, who emphasized the tremendous benefits international students provide to their American classmates, I strongly suspect that particular administrator and his counterparts had provided the original impetus for the article, and their motives may have been largely self-serving. Each Spring, many wealthy and influential families are disappointed at the rejection letters received by their children and deflecting their unhappiness is a crucial goal for top colleges. The sorts of families who apply to the Ivies are exactly those that most tend to favor globalization and meritocracy and if they could be persuaded that the competition of brilliant foreigners was the cause of their children’s distress, they would be much less likely to protest.

My own analysis of today’s admissions policies at the Ivies and other elite universities is very different and was presented in my 30,000 word Meritocracy article and the 30,000 words of columns that followed. Perhaps Leonhardt should read my analysis and examine the extensive data I provided.

As it happens, America’s Educational Writers Association is holding its annual convention next week at Vanderbilt University and I have been invited to speak on a panel dealing with Asian admissions issues, a major theme of my own research. Over the last year or two, I have published quite a number of pieces highlighting the strong statistical evidence for an Asian Quota among Ivy League universities, with my research even sparking a 2012 New York Times forum on the topic.

I have also repeatedly pointed out that the easiest means of addressing these very serious charges of racial discrimination would be for Ivies to release the historical statistics on the ethnic distribution of their applicants, information which they have no legitimate reason for keeping secret. My strong suspicion is that the admission rates for Asian-American applicants have plummeted relative to all other groups over the last twenty years, a drop certainly unmatched by any decline in Asian academic performance, and that this glaring discrepancy explains the unwillingness of our elite universities to provide that data.

The trends may have been so dramatic that if made public they would reach the front pages of the leading newspapers in America—and many in Asia as well—and generate a political firestorm, with the enterprising reporter who somehow obtained the data perhaps winning himself a Pulitzer Prize along the way. In fact, I can think of a particular American journalist ideally situated to achieve this result, with exactly the right mixture of stature, credibility, and university connections to quietly secure the restricted information and then break the story to an admiring public. His name? David Leonhardt of The New York Times.

Does Race Exist? Do Hills Exist?

The Unz Review • May 22, 2014 • 2,300 Words

Although my own academic background is in theoretical physics, I’m the first to admit that field seems in the doldrums these days compared with human evolutionary biology.

The greatest physics discoveries of the last couple of years—the Higgs Boson and strong evidence for Cosmological Inflation—merely confirm the well-established beliefs that physicists have had since before I entered grad school. It’s nice that such experimental evidence means that individuals such as Peter Higgs, Alan Guth, and Andrei Linde, whose names have been prominent in the standard textbooks for decades, have received or will surely soon receive their long-deserved Nobel Prizes, but little new has been learned. Or so is the impression of a lapsed theoretician who left that field over twenty-five years ago and who mostly follows it through the pages of the major newspapers.

Meanwhile, human evolutionary biology has been on a tear, partly due to the full deciphering of the human genome over the last couple of decades and our increasing technical ability to effectively read archaic DNA from thousands or even tens of thousands of years in the past. In recent years we have seen shocking discoveries that most humans possess small but probably significant Neanderthal ancestry and that important genetic changes have regularly swept through our genome. On the theoretical side, it was long assumed that human genes had changed little since Cave Man days, but we now understand that in some respects human evolution may have actually accelerated during the last ten thousand years as our rapidly growing population provided a much larger source of potentially favorable mutations, while agriculture and civilization were simultaneously applying strong selective pressures.

Although my other projects have prevented me from following these developments except through newspapers, blogs, and books, such evolutionary issues have long fascinated me. During the early 1980s I even participated in the field, studying under Harvard’s E.O. Wilson and felt that if physics had not been an option, evolutionary biology would have been my next choice. I remember telling all my skeptical friends in 1979 that Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene was probably one of the most important books of the decade, and I stand by that opinion today.

Yet although our understanding of the origins of modern humans and their biologically-influenced behavior has grown by leaps and bounds over the last couple of decades, these world-changing developments seem to have received extremely scanty coverage in the mainstream press, meaning that many of them have probably not penetrated into the public consciousness of those who are not academic specialists. The assumptions and world-views of most American intellectuals and journalists often seem stuck in the 1980s, clinging to ideas that are almost completely outmoded and incorrect, much like Soviet biology into the 1960s was still crippled by the Stalinist legacy of Trofim K. Lysenko, who had argued for the inheritance of acquired characteristics and purged all those biologists who disagreed.

America’s own Lysenko is surely the late Harvard paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould, whose platform in the prestige media and widely assigned books have massively influenced entire generations of college students and thinkers. Unfortunately, just like his Soviet counterpart, Gould promoted ideologically motivated misrepresentations of reality, sometimes backed by outright scientific fraud, and people who read his books are regularly absorbing falsehoods.

In a further parallel to the Soviet case, Gould and his Marxist circle of friends and allies, including Richard Lewontin, Steven Rose, and several others, regularly sought to purge or otherwise silence their most honest and courageous colleagues. During the 1970s, Harvard’s Wilson became their particular target for daring to publish his landmark book Sociobiology: The New Synthesis, and their wild ideological charges led radical student demonstrators to demand the university fire one of its brightest tenured stars and even to physically assault the mild-mannered Wilson at a meeting of the American Academy of Sciences. Although Gould seems to have been a rather mediocre scientist, some of his radical allies such as Lewontin were first-class researchers, but also ideologues who allowed their politics to dictate their science.

While I was a graduate student at Cambridge University during the mid-1980s, these events occasionally came up in casual discussions across the dining tables. On one such occasion, a former grad student of Lewontin’s said that during the height of the sociobiology controversy he had asked his mentor why he was leveling such ridiculous accusations against a colleague, with the reply being that those accusations were admittedly scientific nonsense, but they served the political interests of Marxism, which was far more important. Meanwhile, given Gould’s strength in words but his weakness in thinking, I find it reasonably likely that he simply believed many of the absurdities he was spouting.

As the years and the decades have gone by, I’ve always assumed that Gouldism was about to lose its grip on American intellectual life, but that assumption has always proven wrong. The totally absurd notion that genetics plays a relatively small role in influencing most human behaviors represents a zombified doctrines, absorbing endless seemingly fatal scientific wounds at the hands of prominent scholars but remaining almost unkillable, more like a religious dogma than a scientific doctrine.

For example, in 2002 Harvard’s Steven Pinker, one of America’s most prominent evolutionary psychologists, published The Blank Slate, an outstanding critique of this incorrect reigning dogma, which specifically included a lengthy debunking of Gould, Lewontin, and their circle. Not only was the book a huge seller and glowingly discussed throughout the MSM, but I was stunned to read an equally favorable review in The Nation, pole-star of America’s political Left. I naturally assumed that the full collapse of Gouldism was underway, an impression enhanced once the august New York Times later published an article describing an important instance of Gould’s scientific fraud.

But a year or two ago, when I heard smart intellectuals still citing Gould, I asked a prominent academic how that would possibly be the case. He explained that whereas in the 1990s, probably 99% of intellectuals believed in Gould, the massive revelations of recent years had merely reduced that support to 95%, leaving Gouldism almost as entrenched as ever. Whereas worldwide support for Stalinism substantially collapsed following Khrushchev’s 1956 “Secret Speech” Gouldian nonsense seems to have largely avoided that fate.

But perhaps that is now about to change.

One of the oddities of American intellectual life is that although a full-fledged scientific revolution in human genetics and evolution has been taking place for the last couple of decades, very little of this has been reported in the mainstream media, perhaps because the findings so totally contradict the numerous falsehoods that so many senior editors presumably imbibed during the introductory anthropology courses they took to satisfy their science distributional requirement as undergraduates.

Indeed, when I consider the major news stories on evolutionary breakthroughs I have read in our MSM over the last dozen years, the overwhelming majority seem to have been written by a single individual, Nicholas Wade of The New York Times, who recently retired after twenty years as a editor and reporter at our national newspaper of record, following previous decades of work at top scientific publications such as Nature and Science.

When I asked around a little, my impression was confirmed. Our nation of over 300 million may be in the forefront of evolutionary discovery, but Wade has long been almost the only reporter seriously covering these fascinating developments in the mainstream print media. Meanwhile, the weekly New York Times Science Section seems to be moving in the direction of People Magazine, with so much of the coverage seemingly focused on phone apps, dieting, and phone apps to assist with dieting.  For example, fully half of the Letters page in this morning’s print edition was devoted to a heated debate on the “Science of Overeating.”

But while his former colleagues often focus on the transient and the trivial, Wade has spent the last couple of years producing an outstanding book to bring awareness of the revolutionary discoveries of modern genetic research to a broader American audience. Generations of Soviets had been taught the inheritance of acquired characteristics in their universities, and I assume they must have been shocked to discover it was all an ideologically motivated hoax. I suspect that many complacent American intellectuals may have a similar reaction to Wade’s book, which focuses on the highly touchy subject of the genetic nature of our distinct human races and the implications for society and history, bearing the descriptive title A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race, and Human History. I’d certainly rank Wade’s book as the most important popular presentation of these ideas at least since Pinker’s Blank Slate. In the interests of full disclosure, I should say that I was also very pleased to see him substantially cite my own major articles from the last couple of years on race, IQ, and wealth and the Social Darwinist roots of modern China.

All too many socially-conditioned Americans have absorbed the Lewontin-Gould mantra that “Race Does Not Exist” which from a scientific perspective is roughly similar to claiming that “Teeth Do Not Exist” or perhaps “Hills Do Not Exist,” with the latter being an especially good parallel. It is perfectly correct that the notion of “hill” is ill-defined and vague—what precise height distinguishes a pile of dirt from a hill and a hill from a mountain?—but nevertheless denying the reality or usefulness of such a concept would be an absurdity. Similarly, the notion of distinct human races—genetic clusters across a wide variety of scales and degrees of fuzziness—is an obviously useful and correct organizing principle, and one which was probably accepted without question by everyone in the history of the world except for deluded Americans of the last fifty years.

Anyway, let us suppose that the Gouldians rising up to denounce the heretic, such as anthropologist Agustin Fuentes, are given their way and the common term “race” is purged from our scientific vocabulary as being meaningless. Well, large-scale genetic population clusters obviously continue to exist in the real world and are an important element in ongoing research, both medical and evolutionary.  So it would make sense to conveniently replace an overly cumbersome multisyllabic phrase with a short single-syllabic word now suddenly gone unused, namely “race.”

Indeed, I would suggest that one of the sources of present-day confusion is that the very term “race” has undergone an unfortunate metamorphosis over the course of the 20th century. Today, when people speak of “races” they are almost invariably referring to the continental-scale mega-races such as Asians, Africans, and Europeans. These “races” certainly exist and are highly meaningful and distinct in genetic terms, with blogger Steve Sailer slyly noting that the cover of Prof. Luca Cavalli-Sforza definitive tome on human genetic diversity displays a colored worldwide map looking much like what Sen. Strom Thurmond in his dotage might have drawn on a napkin with crayons.

But I would argue that restricting the term race to merely that small handful of huge groupings is extremely wasteful and we are far better off also applying the term to its traditional meaning, typically aimed at much smaller population groups. One hundred years ago, every educated individual casually used phrases such as “the Anglo-Saxon race,” “the Hungarian race,” and “the Chinese race,” and this is exactly the usage to which we should restore.  To be sure, these particular genetic population clusters are naturally grouped into higher-level clusters as well—with Russians, Ukrainians, and Poles all being branches of the larger Slav race, itself a component of the European mega-race, but the word can remain flexible in scale without producing any serious confusion. All these groups are exactly the sort of natural statistical clusters that regularly appear during genetic population analysis, and we might as well use the traditional popular term for them rather than inventing an entirely new one.

As for the full contents of Wade’s book, several reviews have already noted a few small glitches here and there and I myself certainly took issue with some of his arguments.  For example, I think he is much too accepting of Gregory Clark’s influential 2007 book arguing that the Industrial Revolution occurred in Britain because the British had undergone nearly a thousand years of uniquely strong selection for economic success, a thesis I find extremely doubtful.  I also think Wade should have given far more attention to the seminal Cochran-Harpending theory that the rapid growth of human population after the development of agriculture has produced an equally rapid acceleration in mutation-driven evolution during the last ten thousand years, and Wade’s omission surely explains why the notoriously arrogant and irascible Gregory Cochran published such an unfriendly review on his own blogsite.  Certainly everyone should explore all sides of the ongoing debate and a small racialist website has conveniently gathered together annotated links to the dozens of reviews across the web, favorable, unfavorable, and mixed.  But reading the book itself is essential for anyone interested in the current state of human evolutionary science.

I’d originally intended to publish my own perspective several weeks ago and was delayed by other pressing matters.  But I have been very pleased to see that Wade’s book is beginning to receive the major attention it so greatly deserves.   American intellectuals must begin shedding a half-century of lies and dishonesty based on the dismally unscientific dogma of Stephen Jay Gould and instead start to discover what modern evolutionary biologists and genetic researchers have all known for years or even decades.   A Troublesome Inheritance by Nicholas Wade of the New York Times may represent a huge step forward in achieving this important goal.

Asian Quotas in the Ivy League? "We See Nothing! Nothing!"

The Unz Review • May 27, 2014 • 1,500 Words

Last week I was invited to speak at the annual conference of the Education Writers Association, with the topic of my panel being the perspective of Asian-Americans on Affirmative Action policies in college admissions.  Despite having the only white face among the four presenters, I believe my analysis made a useful contribution.

A couple of months ago, the issue had unexpectedly moved to the fore of the national debate. Democrats in the California State Legislature had unanimously backed SCA-5, a proposed 2014 ballot measure intended to repeal Prop. 209 and thereby restore Affirmative Action, banned in 1996. Since the 1990s, California had effectively become a one-party Democratic state, and many expected the voters would roll back that controversial legacy of the Pete Wilson Era. Every Asian in the Legislature is a Democrat and every Asian had supported the repeal without hesitation.

But once word of the proposal filtered out into the general Asian-American community, massive opposition spontaneously erupted, and within three weeks nearly 120,000 Asians had signed an electronic petition denouncing the proposal. Their intense hostility centered on the restoration of racially-conscious admissions policies for the prestigious state university system, reflecting their widespread belief that this would eventually result in the establishment of “Asian Quotas,” denying Asian students an equal chance for admission to public universities.

When over a hundred thousand individuals unexpectedly join a grassroots protest, politicians pay attention and within a few days every Asian legislator had reversed course and declared opposition to the measure. California Asians are a core Democratic constituency, usually backing that party’s candidates in the 75% range, and the stunned Democratic leadership quickly tabled the suddenly divisive proposal, which threatened to split their electoral base.

During the weeks that have followed, liberal advocates of Affirmative Action policies argued that Asian-American fears of a looming Asian Quota were totally mistaken, the product of dishonest conservative propaganda and misleading coverage in the ethnic media.  Indeed, these were exactly the arguments advanced by two of my fellow panelists, OiYan Poon of Loyola University and Robert Teranishi of UCLA. But although my presentation did not focus on the particulars of the recent California controversy, I think I demonstrated the underlying roots of the concern that had so galvanized the Asian community.

In late 2012 I had published The Myth of American Meritocracy, a lengthy critique of the admissions policies of America’s elite academic institutions. One of my central points was the overwhelming statistical evidence for the existence of “Asian Quotas” at Harvard, Yale, and the other elite Ivy League schools.

Over the last twenty years, America’s population of college-age Asians has roughly doubled and Asian academic achievement has reached new heights, but there has been no increase whatsoever in Asian enrollment in those elite universities and indeed substantial declines at Harvard and several other Ivies. Meanwhile, other top colleges such as Caltech that admit students based on a strictly meritocratic and objective standard have seen Asian numbers increase fully in line with the growth of the Asian population. These results were summarized in one of my graphs, soon afterward republished in a contentious New York Times symposium inspired by my findings.

(The public ethnic and gender enrollment history for Harvard and every other American university is now conveniently available on our website).

Ivy League schools admit their students by a totally opaque and subjective process, only somewhat related to academic performance or other objective factors, and leading American journalists such as Pulitzer-Prize winner Daniel Golden have documented the powerful evidence that this system is laced with favoritism and even outright corruption. In recent years, Asian enrollments at all the Ivies have converged to a very narrow range and remained relatively constant from year to year, a remarkably suspicious result that seems strongly suggestive of an implicit Asian Quota. Indeed, the statistical evidence for a present-day Asian Quota is arguably stronger than that for the notorious Jewish Quota of the Ivies during the 1920s and 1930s, the existence of which was widely denied at the time by university administrators but is now universally accepted.

During the late 1980s and early 1990s, there had been widespread accusations of a similar policy of anti-Asian bias in admissions at the University of California system, but the passage of Prop. 209 outlawed the use of racial factors in admissions, and recent statistics indicate that Asian students are now admitted to leading UC campuses closely in line with their academic performance and without any numerical ceiling on their numbers. Asian parents in California can see with their own two eyes obvious evidence of an Asian Quota at most of America’s top national universities leading to their deep concern that a similar policy might eventually return to the University of California campuses.

Furthermore, Asian elected officials, Asian activists, and most Asian-American advocacy groups have kept silent on the likely existence of Asian Quotas at elite universities, thereby squandering any credibility they might have had during the contentious California debate. My own long article ran over eighteen months ago and despite its original publication in a magazine with a tiny circulation, quickly accumulated over 200,000 pageviews while the analysis was soon widely discussed in the New York Times and numerous other prominent publications.  Indeed, Times columnist David Brooks ranked the piece as perhaps the best American magazine article of the year.  But not a single Asian officeholder or traditional advocacy group took any notice or made any effort to hold the Ivies accountable on a matter of greatest concern to their own community.

In my writings, I have repeatedly noted that although the Ivies freely release their ethnic admissions and ethnic enrollment statistics, they refuse to release their ethnic application totals, data which is freely provided by the University of California and other universities. I strongly suspect that the reason for such reticence is that admission rates for Asians have plummeted relative to all other groups during the last twenty years, a necessary consequence of a determined effort to sharply restrict Asian numbers even while the Asian population has doubled. Asian elected officials or prominent activists could easily apply enormous pressure on the Ivies to release this simple data, but not a single one has chosen to do so.

Such timidity is far from surprising.  Most prominent Asian activists are either affiliated with universities or have close ties with individuals who are.  Regularly denouncing the perceived misdeeds of “white supremacists,” rightwingers, or even merely Republicans is an easy position to take given that those groups possess negligible influence within the academic community.  But Harvard University and its peers dominate higher education like a colossus, and leveling criticism against such targets is hardly conducive to academic career advancement.  Thus Asians found in ethnic studies departments readily seek out the most obscure and insignificant examples of anti-Asian discrimination in throughout the wider world but remain totally silent about the massively visible biases in the most prestigious portions of their own academy.

To date, the stonewalling of the Ivies on this issue has largely succeeded and the entire topic has disappeared from the mainstream media and public discussion, although ordinary Asians remain just as unhappy as ever about the obvious racial discrimination their children face in applying to most elite universities.  Unless either the media or prominent political figures begin putting pressure on Harvard and its fellow elite universities to reveal their ethnic admissions rates, I see no likelihood that this situation will change. And ordinary Asian families will become more and more doubtful that their interests are being represented either in government or in the media. Hence the backlash over SCA-5.

Meanwhile, most other elected officials seem to pay as little attention to the details of college admissions matters as do their Asian counterparts. For example, Sen. Ed Hernandez, the SCA-5 sponsor, had claimed that his effort to reestablish Affirmative Action in California university admissions was necessary to stem the ongoing erosion of Hispanic enrollment at those institutions. But just a few weeks later, all of California’s leading newspapers carried headlines declaring that Hispanic enrollment had reached an all-time high in the UC system, surpassing white numbers for the first time. Somehow I suspect that Sen. Hernandez would have a very difficult time gaining admission to an elite California university either with or without Affirmative Action.

[Clarification: In this column I pointed out that most Asian-American advocacy groups, including all the “traditional” ones, have kept entirely silent on the issue of Asian Quotas in higher education.  Although this is correct, I should have emphasized that some newer such groups have actually been very vigorous on this issue, including efforts to force the Ivies to release their applicant data and recently helping to organize the grassroots resistance to SCA-5 in California, with the most prominent of these being the 80-20 Initiative and one of its founding members, Dr. S.B. Woo, former Lt. Gov. of Delaware.  Indeed, Dr. Haibo Huang, another leading 80-20 activist, had persuaded EWA to invite me to the panel and gave his presentation just before mine.  Another relatively new Asian-American organization quite active on the issue of Affirmative Action is The Asian American Legal Foundation.  My criticism was entirely directed toward the older and more traditional Asian advocacy organizations]

Meritocracy: Will Harvard Become Free and Fair?

The Unz Review • January 19, 2016 • 1,100 Words

As many of you already know, I recently launched the “Free Harvard/Fair Harvard” campaign, aimed at electing a slate of five candidates to the Harvard Board of Overseers on a platform of (1) increasing the transparency of today’s opaque and abuse-ridden admissions process and (2) immediately eliminating undergraduate tuition as being unnecessary given the huge size of the endowment.

Although scarcely a single individual in America was aware of our plans until five or six weeks ago, our momentum has been enormous, and the New York Times ran a (somewhat suspiciously-minded) front-page story about our reformist campaign on Friday, which quickly sparked additional stories in the London Telegraph, the Harvard Crimson, New York Magazine, Time Magazine, and several other publications, along with considerable international coverage in Spanish, Turkish, and Chinese media outlets.

Harvard is the world’s wealthiest and most prestigious university, and if it were suddenly to abolish tuition under the pressure of a referendum vote of its 320,000 alumni, the resulting earthquake in the global academic community would have aftershocks far and wide. Indeed, some of Harvard’s most eminent scholars have already dropped me supportive notes, questioning the absurd rise of tuition at their own institution and at other universities over the past few decades, and very much hoping that our campaign might succeed in reversing this trend.

Certainly, Harvard hardly needs the money. Embedded below is a striking chart, showing the relative size of Harvard’s sources of income in recent years, with the annual investment earnings from its mammoth endowment regularly averaging some twenty-five times larger than the net tuition revenue from its college students. As I stated in my late 2012 article “Paying Tuition to a Giant Hedge Fund” Harvard has quietly become one of the world’s largest hedge-funds, with its aggressively managed $38 billion portfolio shielded from all taxation because of the small educational institution it continues to run as a charity off to one side.

Adding to the attention of our bold campaign has been the strange-bedfellows ideological alliance of our slate of five candidates for Harvard Overseer. Both I and Lee Cheng, co-founder of the Asian-American Legal Foundation, are generally characterized as conservatives. Stuart Taylor, Jr., who has spent decades as a prominent journalist and legal commentator, is usually considered a political moderate, although the Brookings Institution with which he has long been affiliated perhaps leans a bit more liberal. Stephen Hsu, Professor of Theoretical Physics and Vice President for Research and Graduate Studies at Michigan State, is very much a moderate academic liberal, whose blogsite has for years proudly featured photos of his meetings with President Obama. And Ralph Nader, headlining our slate, is surely one of the most renowned political progressives of the last half century.

It is also far from coincidental that two of the five members of our slate are Asian-Americans. Several years ago I published strong statistical evidence for the existence of an “Asian Quota” at Harvard and the other Ivy League universities, prompting The New York Times to run a symposium on the topic, which attracted enormous attention and commentary.

Naturally, Harvard and its peers ignored these complaints, and just a few months ago The Economist ran a lengthy survey on the issue of Asian Quotas, updating my results and showing that nothing had changed. Add to this the massive pattern of corrupt and abusive admissions practices at elite colleges—documented by Pulitzer Prize winner Daniel Golden in his book The Price of Admission—and it is obvious that only the disinfecting sunlight of admissions transparency would restore our own alma mater and its peers to the academic integrity that is absolutely necessary for their continued existence. And only the external pressure of a successful campaign for seats on the Harvard Board of Overseers could achieve this result.

Indeed, the notorious sluggishness of the Harvard Administration in responding to any external stimuli was the immediate spur for this campaign. Last year the New York Times had solicited a piece from me on my suggestions for improving higher education, and I merely reiterated my argument that elite colleges should immediately abolish tuition. Response at the time was overwhelmingly positive from all ideological quarters, but mighty Harvard paid not the slightest notice to my words, leading me to consider what possible means might exist to impose necessary reforms upon such an enormously wealthy and rather solipsistic institution, now rapidly approaching its 400th anniversary. This Overseer campaign was the ultimate result.

And if we succeed with this effort, the reverberations will echo far and wide, given that so many of Harvard’s near-peers possess balance sheets and institutional proclivities that are nearly indistinguishable. Anyone who looks at a chart of the sources of income for Yale, Princeton, and Stanford would notice an uncanny resemblance to that of their Cambridge sibling. So if Harvard falls to the “Free Tuition Movement,” many other academic dominoes will surely soon topple as well.

Will our campaign succeed? Maybe, maybe not. Based on all indications so far, I have little doubt that if our names do appear on the annual Overseer ballot and our position statements are mailed out to the 320,000 Harvard alumni, we will win a resounding victory throughout the Harvard community, and soon thereafter mighty Harvard will agree to forego 4% of its annual investment income and henceforth become tuition-free, while also starting to shift its admissions process from abusive total opacity to some degree of reasonable transparency. But the more difficult question is whether we will even be able to reach that ballot.

We now have little more than ten remaining days to obtain the valid signatures of 201 Harvard alumni, holders of either undergraduate or graduate degrees, and although those numbers are small, our time is very short. Furthermore, the traditions of such an august institution, set forth in the antique English of its mid-17th Century charter, require that all such signatures be provided in physical form and only written upon the elegant petitions printed by the University itself.

Thus, anyone holding a Harvard degree who is interested in signing our petitions and perhaps changing the world should email us at petitions@FreeHarvard.org, and include your mailing address to obtain a petition for signing. If you can commit to quickly gathering an additional signature or two and also include your phone number, we will fedex you a petition. The more Harvard alumni signatures all of you can quickly gather, the more likely Harvard will soon become both free and fair.

Bilingual Education Programs Fail Our Students

The San Diego Union-Tribune • August 5, 2016 • 800 Words

Twenty years ago, California public schools were forcing thousands of Latino children into Spanish-almost-only classes against the wishes of their parents.

In 1996, The Los Angeles Times told the story of a group of Latino immigrant parents who began a public protest against their local elementary school for refusing to teach their children English, boycotting classes and marching outside with picket signs.

That protest inspired our “English for the Children” initiative campaign, which began the following year. Our Proposition 227 required California public schools to teach children English from their first day of classes, placing children who didn't know English into an intensive sheltered English immersion program to teach them the language as quickly as possible, then moving them into the regular classes with all the other children.

Our honorary chairman was the late Jaime Escalante of “Stand and Deliver” fame, one of America's most famous teachers, and we attracted enormous public support. Even though almost all the politicians, Democrat and Republican alike, refused to support our initiative, we still won a landslide victory, getting over 61 percent of the vote.

The educational results were tremendous. Most California newspapers had opposed our ballot measure, but once it passed they immediately began reporting how well the new system worked and how quickly and easily hundreds of thousands of Latino children were learning English.

Within four years, the academic test scores of over 1 million immigrant schoolchildren had increased by 30 percent, 50 percent or even 100 percent. Proposition 227 was so successful that its educational results were reported on the front page of The New York Times, with major coverage by CBS News and many other national media outlets.

The founding president of the California Association of Bilingual Educators publicly admitted that he'd been mistaken for 30 years and that intensive English immersion was the best educational policy for immigrant children. He became a leading national advocate of English in the schools.

Because nearly all the Latino children in California schools are now immediately taught English, they're doing much better academically and gaining admission to top colleges. Despite the end of affirmative action in California, there's been a huge increase in the number of Latinos attending the prestigious University of California system.

So-called “Dual-Language Programs” — in which up to 90 percent of the instruction is in Spanish — were never completely outlawed by Proposition 227. However, parents who wanted to place their children in such non-English classes had to sign an annual waiver, and since the overwhelming majority of Latino parents wanted their children taught English, that's exactly what has happened.

Because all these educational changes were so successful, almost everyone in California began supporting them, and the entire issue has been dead and forgotten for the last dozen years.

However, a small group of die-hard bilingual education activists never gave up. They recently hoodwinked some of the politicians in Sacramento into placing Proposition 58 on the ballot, hoping to repeal Proposition 227 and allow the re-establishment of Spanish-almost-only classes throughout California.

The supporters of Proposition 58 have publicly admitted that one of their biggest objections to the current system is that it has been difficult to persuade immigrant parents to sign waivers placing their children in non-English classes. Therefore, Proposition 58 eliminates that requirement and allows children to be placed in non-English classes without the written consent of their parents, just as had been the case 20 years ago.

The overwhelming majority of California voters, immigrant and native-born alike, believe children should be taught English in school. Therefore, the supporters of Proposition 58 are being dishonest and trying to trick the voters. They sought to give their ballot measure the very deceptive official title “English Language Education” even though it actually repeals the requirement that children be taught English in California public schools. Their proposed title of their proposition is the exact opposite of what it actually does.

And the worst part of Proposition 58 is hidden away in Section 8, which repeals all restrictions on the California Legislature to make future changes. This would allow the Legislature to reestablish mandatory Spanish-almost-only instruction in all our public schools by a simple majority vote, once again forcing all Latino children into those classes against their parents' wishes.

Proposition 227 — “English for the Children” — has worked very well in California and has greatly improved the education of millions of immigrant schoolchildren since 1998. The voters should keep this successful system and not be tricked into re-establishing the failed education programs of the past.

Unz, a Silicon Valley software developer, was chairman of the 1998 “English for the Children” campaign to pass Proposition 227.

Bilingualism vs. "Bilingual Education"

The Unz Review • September 12, 2016 • 2,600 Words

When I’m driving, my car radio is invariably tuned to KOIT, the leading “easy listening” station in the San Francisco Bay area. My tastes are humdrum and unsophisticated, so the songs merely provide some pleasant background music, occasionally punctuated by commercial ads, mostly annoying but occasionally amusing.

One of the better ones began running only recently, an AT&T spot touting its new family plan with unlimited data on multiple lines. The spot opens with a brother and sister discussing all the wonderful things they’re able to do with so much monthly data, including talking, texting, using social media, and playing games. Except for the smartphone technology being discussed and the traces of “Valley Speak” style and intonation, the two teenagers almost sound like they might have been plucked straight from a Leave It to Beaver episode set in the idealized suburbia of the hallowed 1950s.

But about half-way through, unexpected references began catching my attention. The boy mentions that the unlimited data plan also allows his mom to share comments on her favorite novelas and his dad to share pictures of his favorite soccer players. Hmm, I suddenly thought. And then a bit later, the boy teases his sister and she responds “Mama! Carlos me esta molestando“—“Mom! Carlos is bothering me”—causing the irritated mother to reply with a bit of scolding Spanish. I suddenly realized that the blond or freckled Southern California teenagers I’d been imagining in my mind’s eye were probably somewhat duskier in hue.

Every year AT&T ranks as one of America’s top advertisers, with an annual media budget in the billions, and the focus group research that goes into its marketing campaigns must surely render even the best-funded presidential effort amateurish and unscripted by comparison. So if AT&T believes that an appropriate phone-plan pitch to California’s millions of Latino families should involve teenagers speaking perfect accent-free English then switching to flawless Spanish, while their parents prefer the latter, that’s very likely correct.

Although the commercial did catch me a bit by surprise, it merely reinforced something I’ve occasionally noticed among the numerous Latino workers I regularly encounter in my daily life in the Palo Alto area. Certainly a large majority of the older ones have the weak or heavily-accented English that marks them as immigrants, perhaps even relatively recent arrivals. However, among young adults, say those in their twenties or so, it’s not uncommon to encounter speech patterns that would be absolutely indistinguishable from those of Mayflower descendants raised in lily-white suburbs—but which then seamlessly switch to perfect Spanish as soon as the need might arise.

I’m not sure exact numbers exist, but it wouldn’t surprise me if California today contains one of the largest concentrations of totally bilingual members of the younger generation found anywhere in the world. And ironically enough, an important factor behind that widespread rise of California bilingualism was probably our successful Prop. 227 campaign over eighteen years ago, which replaced so-called “bilingual education” in California’s public schools with intensive sheltered English immersion.

The reason for this apparent paradox is that “bilingual education” was largely a misnomer, and in practice the system invariably amounted to Spanish-almost-only instruction.

Most Latino immigrant children grow up with Spanish being the language of their home. Their families usually watch Spanish TV, listen to Spanish radio, and most of the people in their neighborhood speak Spanish in their daily lives. So if these young children, knowing Spanish as their sole language, eagerly enter kindergarten or the first grade only to encounter classrooms in which nearly all the instruction is once again in Spanish, is it really so surprising that they might remain monolingual Spanish-speakers for a considerable number of years?

Our larger society is overwhelmingly English-oriented, and with the most popular movies and television shows being in English, all of those children did eventually learn our predominant national language, even if the pre-Prop. 227 schools hadn’t gradually introduced considerable English by the fifth or sixth grade. But for many students, losing those earliest five or six years of English-language instruction saddled them with a greatly reduced English vocabulary and a strong, permanent accent. They certainly learned English, but sometimes spent the rest of their lives having trouble reading, writing, or even speaking it properly.

Latino immigrant families in California tend to be working-class or working-poor, and if their children leave the local public schools being less than proficient in English, they are obviously doubly-disadvantaged, and would have a very difficult time getting a good job or pursuing higher education. But achieving the total fluency and literacy produced by immediate English immersion opened many doors, and in 2014—nearly two decades after Prop. 209 outlawed Affirmative Action in California higher education—newspaper headlines announced that the number of Latinos had surpassed the number of whites admitted to the prestigious University of California system.

The whole notion that schools should teach English to children who already know Spanish hardly constituted a revolutionary pedagogical notion. After all, schools usually concentrate on teaching children what they don’t already know rather what they do, but with regard to language, this only became the case after the June 1998 passage of Prop. 227 and its full implementation in September of that year. A million or more immigrant schoolchildren were suddenly exposed to six or seven hours a day of English in their classrooms, quickly absorbing that new language “like little sponges,” while still often spending the remainder of their childhood in an almost entirely Spanish-speaking neighborhood environment. Given such a truly “bilingual” upbringing, it’s hardly surprising that over the last decade or two so many of them have become fully bilingual young adults.

Almost twenty years ago, during the early stages of the Prop. 227 campaign I published a long op-ed in The Los Angeles Times similarly entitled “Bilingualism vs. Bilingual Education” and I think the facts have completely born out my analysis and predictions at that time:

Bilingualism vs. Bilingual Education

Ron Unz, The Los Angeles Times, October 19, 1997

Offhand, the current situation might seem a reasonably satisfactory state of affairs, especially since Prop. 227 never actually outlawed bilingual education. Immigrant parents desiring a non-English education for their children could still obtain that option by signing an annual written waiver, but since the vast majority preferred English, those other programs largely vanished.

The only group never reconciled to the disappearance of bilingual education was the small, but zealous clique of bilingual ed activists, many of them being the same individuals who had opposed our initiative back in 1998, still just as rigidly committed to their doctrinaire beliefs but now 18 years older. The entire topic has been dead and forgotten by nearly everyone else for so many years that these activists recently took advantages of that public vacuum—and the total political amnesia produced by term-limits turnover—to successfully lobby the empty-headed California Legislature on the wonders of this innovative new educational technique called “bilingual education,” now hindered by the old-fashioned restrictions of Prop. 227. As a result, this November’s ballot contains Prop. 58, which largely repeals the provisions of Prop. 227 and reestablishes the old basis for Spanish-almost-only “bilingual” programs.

Amusingly enough, Sen. Ricardo Lara, sponsor of Prop. 58, let slip some telling remarks at the press conference announcing his plan to repeal “English for the Children.” He explained that one of the biggest problems with the current system is that immigrant parents are usually quite reluctant to sign the written waivers placing their children in bilingual programs, especially when they are informed that they can choose English classes instead. Hence the need to remove the waiver requirement, allowing those children to receive the supposed benefits of Spanish-almost-only “bilingual” programs, whether their parents really want it or not. An official in the California State Department of Education provided the same explanation to an educational journalist.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/WwVKVk7jTFQ

Indeed, I suspect these statements hint at one of the main groups quietly pushing for the change. Over the years, Spanish-almost-only “dual immersion” programs have become increasingly popular among California’s affluent, well-educated Anglo families, but the structure of those programs also requires participation of large numbers of Spanish-speaking children, and perhaps the supply of voluntary ones has gradually been exhausted. Therefore, eliminating the waiver requirement will allow school districts to ensure that those very politically-engaged upper-middle-class Anglo families are provided a sufficient number of working-class Latino immigrant children to act as unpaid Spanish-language classroom tutors for their own sons and daughters. Even during the original Prop. 227 campaign I regularly encountered vehement protests by numerous dual-immersion Anglo parents, but I’m not sure that I ever came across a single Latino immigrant family opposed to our “English” campaign.

This November’s ballot is an especially full one, overflowing with seventeen initiatives, many of them being the sort of tax and regulatory measures that attract enormous advertising budgets. Estimates are that a total of some $450 million will be spent on the various competing Yes and No campaigns, with the radio and television stations already saturated with their ads. Given that bilingual education no longer exists and many Californians have almost forgotten that it ever did, it’s not clear how much attention our particular issue will attract.

Furthermore, the bilingual ed activists rather deceptively entitled their measure the “English Language Education” initiative, even though it actually repeals the requirement for English language education. Given the enormous popularity of teaching English in the schools, such attractive packaging may sway a considerable number of voters, easily befuddled by such a long and complex ballot. So it’s difficult to predict the outcome.

But regardless of any possible changes in the law, English has now become so deeply rooted in California’s public schools that I find it very difficult to believe that any widespread change would occur. For most of a full generation, Latino children have gone to school and easily learned English in just a few months, and if the schools stop following that sensible policy, parents will surely become quite disgruntled and quickly make their feelings known to the chagrined politicians who created such an unnecessary problem.

Let us consider an example, not entirely dissimilar. Many Italians live in New Jersey, and I doubt that most of them pay close attention to all the nonsense proposed by the foolish politicians in Trenton. But if one school year they discovered that their local public schools no longer taught in English, but that the language of instruction had switched to Italian, I doubt they would be happy about this or that such a silly policy would long continue.

A "Grand Bargain" on Immigration Reform?

An alliance of pro-immigrant Democrats and anti-immigration Republicans could finally fix our broken system

The Unz Review • October 3, 2016 • 4,700 Words

From everything I’ve heard Swedes seem like very pleasant people, rather agreeable to have around, while my personal experience with Mexicans leads me to a similar conclusion. But suppose so many millions of Swedes poured across the borders into our southern neighbor that within just a few decades Mexico City had become majority Swedish, while much of the rest of that country were following a somewhat similar trajectory. Under such circumstances, severe political problems would surely arise, perhaps even endangering social stability.

I think this one short paragraph provides a better clue to the unexpected political rise of Donald Trump than would a hundred footnoted academic articles.

In the year 1915 America was over 85% white, and a half-century later in 1965, that same 85% ratio still nearly applied. But partly due to the passage of the Immigration Reform Act of that year, America’s demographics changed very rapidly over the following five decades. By 2015 there had been a 700% increase in the total number of Hispanics and Asians and the black population was nearly 100% larger, while the number of (non-Hispanic) whites had grown less than 25%, with much of even that small increase due to the huge influx of Middle Easterners, North Africans, and other non-European Caucasians officially classified by our U.S. Census as “white.” As a consequence of these sharply divergent demographic trends, American whites have fallen to little more than 60% of the total, and are now projected to become a minority within just another generation or two, already reduced to representing barely half of all children under the age of 10.

Demographic changes so enormous and rapid on a continental scale are probably unprecedented in all human history, and our political establishment was remarkably blind for having failed to anticipate the possible popular reaction. Over the last twelve months, Donald Trump, a socially liberal New Yorker, has utilized the immigration issue to seize the GOP presidential nomination against the vehement opposition of nearly the entire Republican establishment, conservative and moderate alike, and at times his campaign has enjoyed a lead in the national polls, placing him within possible reach of the White House. Instead of wondering how a candidate came to take advantage of that particular issue, perhaps we should instead ask ourselves why it hadn’t happened sooner.

The answer is that for various pragmatic and ideological reasons the ruling elites of both our major parties have largely either ignored or publicly welcomed the demographic changes transforming the nation they jointly control. Continuous heavy immigration has long been seen as an unabashed positive both by open borders libertarians of the economically-focused Right and also by open borders multiculturalists of the socially-focused Left, and these ideological positions permeate the community of policy experts, staffers, donors, and media pundits who constitute our political ecosphere.

Earlier this year, Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, an elderly individual with unabashed socialistic views, was interviewed by Vox‘s Ezra Klein, and explained that “of course” heavy foreign immigration—let alone “open borders”—represented the economic dream of extreme free market libertarians such as the Koch brothers, since that policy would obviously drive down the wages of workers and greatly advantage Capital at the expense of Labor. These notions scandalized his neoliberal interlocutor, and the following day another Vox colleague joined in the attack, harshly denouncing the candidate’s views as “ugly” and “wrongheaded,” while instead pointing to the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal as the proper font of progressive economic doctrine. Faced with such sharp attacks by young and influential Democratic pundits less than half his age, Sanders soon retreated from his simple statement of fact, and henceforth avoided raising the immigration issue during the remainder of his campaign.

Only a brash, self-funded billionaire contemptuous of establishment wisdom would challenge this bipartisan immigration consensus among our political elites, and only a prominent celebrity could launch his campaign with sufficient visibility to achieve a media breakthrough. This seemed an unlikely combination of traits to find in one individual, but the unlikely occurred, and our national politics has been upended.

There had already been strong previous indications of this smoldering political volcano among voters, though these signs were repeatedly ignored or discounted by the DC Republican appartachiks who spent their time attending each others’ receptions and fundraisers. During the 2014 election cycle, immigration was a key issue behind the stunning defeat of Republican House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, who lost to an unknown primary challenger whom he outspent 40-to-1, constituting one of the greatest upsets in Congressional history. Prior to that, anti-immigration Tea Party insurgents had ended the long careers of incumbent Republican senators Bob Bennett of Utah in 2010 and Richard Lugar of Indiana in 2012.

Compounding the psychological pressure driving the politics of immigration has been the role of the mainstream media in fostering a sense of beleaguerment and marginalization within America’s shrinking white majority. Because of the huge rise in the Hispanic and Asian populations over the last fifty years, the relative percentage of blacks had increased only slightly, going from 11% to 12%, but nonetheless black media visibility had massively expanded, whether in sports, entertainment, news reports, or even advertising. Therefore, as far back as the 1990s, Gallup polls indicated that the average American believed that our national population was already one-third black, and therefore already minority-white given the estimates of Hispanics and other non-white subgroups.

Meanwhile, the less than even-handed attitude of our national elites towards ethnic activism has hardly helped ameliorate the political situation. A strident Black Nationalist such as Malcolm X was widely condemned during his own lifetime as an extremist advocate of violence, yet he has now been honored with a U.S. postage stamp, while today a lifelong racial activist such as Al Sharpton has his own MSNBC cable television show and received 80-odd invitations to the White House over the last few years. Such treatment seems very different from what their white-activist counterparts, either past or present, might expect to receive. Trump publicly denounced the Mexican-American federal judge hearing his legal case as being ethnically biased against him, citing the latter’s membership in a La Raza Lawyers Association. The organization in question seems rather innocuous and Trump’s accusation weak, but one wonders whether a Caucasian affiliated with a similar white-advocacy group containing “the Race” in its title would have ever even been nominated to the bench, let alone successfully confirmed.

In late July, Avik Roy, a Republican intellectual of South Asian ancestry, declared with anguish that he had completely misunderstood the true nature of the political party he had long and diligently served. He and his Beltway friends—the wonks and ideologues of Conservativism, Inc.—had spent years earnestly debating health care reform, targeted tax cuts, and free trade promotion, assuming that such policies and principles were similarly inspiring the voters who elected their Republican candidates to office. And then Trump, with harsh, racially-charged rhetoric, diametrically opposing policy views, and a negligible advertising budget crushed all those prominent national leaders at the ballot box. According to Roy, he and all his conservative friends and patrons had been living “in a kind of bubble,” believing that their voters cared about their “philosophical, economic conservatism,” but they were entirely mistaken: “In reality, the gravitational center of the Republican Party is white nationalism.” Indeed, over the last few months, some analysts have suggested that mainstream conservative leaders have been unmasked as generals commanding a ghost army, representing an ideological movement that never really existed.

For nearly twenty years, I have been arguing that a shrinking white majority, endlessly poked and prodded by diversitarian cultural provocations and fearful of falling into oppressed minority status, might erupt into a nationalistic movement organized along white racial lines, perhaps seizing the Republican Party as its vehicle. I take no great pleasure that my concerns are being echoed much more widely today.

Pro-Immigrant Democrats and Anti-Immigration Republicans

So much for the diagnosis. Donald Trump is obviously a highly flawed candidate who may or may not win the presidency in five weeks time; but even if he ultimately falls short, recognition of the previously unsuspected power of the popular forces he has unleashed will have permanently altered the American political landscape. Allowing sharp racial polarization to dominate the politics of a nation that is already almost 40% non-white seems a very dangerous situation. Immigration ranks as the hottest of the newly emergent issues that have propelled Trump to the nomination. Does there exist any room for a mutually agreeable compromise?

The possibility might appear remote given that the two sides apparently have such diametrically opposed interests. A Trumpized Republican Party seems overwhelmingly hostile to immigration, while its Democratic counterpart draws much of its political strength from immigrants, who, together with their friends, relatives, and ideological allies, constitute a large portion of its electoral base.

Since the early 2000s the primary goal of pro-immigrant advocates has been allowing the 11 million or more undocumented immigrants to “come out of the shadows” by legalizing their status, and most of the Republican Party establishment has supported several attempts over the last dozen years to achieve exactly this result via Congressional legislation. Yet despite the backing of broad coalitions representing enormous financial resources and business lobbying power, all these efforts have failed, breaking upon the rocks of a scrappy alliance of far smaller and less wealthy grassroots anti-immigration groups. And now this opposing anti-immigration coalition has demonstrated its powerful appeal at the national level and seized control of the Republican Party. If a pro-immigrant Democratic Party has repeatedly failed to pass legislation backed by pro-immigration Republican leaders, can there be any possible hope of success after that Republican Party has become so stridently anti-immigration?

Strangely enough, the answer is yes, and the outlines of a potentially viable deal may even be visible. The crucial insight is recognizing that “pro-immigrant” policies are not necessarily the same as “pro-immigration” policies, and indeed may be exactly the opposite.

This is more than merely a play upon words. Most of the powerful, immigrant-focused groups within the Democratic coalition are primarily concerned with the well-being of existing immigrants, whether legal or illegal, and have only a secondary interest in future levels of immigration. Meanwhile, the overriding goal of the leading forces in the anti-immigration camp is to drastically reduce current immigration levels, and while they would dearly like to dislodge those immigrants already here, most quietly recognize that achieving that goal may not be politically practical.

Indeed, the commonality of interests between these two seemingly opposed ideological camps may actually be far greater than is usually recognized. The fundamental law of supply and demand dictates that the more individuals who occupy a particular market niche, the weaker becomes their economic bargaining power and the lower their incomes. Thus, existing dentists or taxi drivers have a strong vested interest in supporting restrictive licensing barriers preventing others from entering their profession and competing against them. Exactly the same is true of existing immigrants, who frequently face new immigrants as their most direct economic competitors, and hence may often become strong opponents of further immigration.

This has certainly been a common pattern in the past. For example, Samuel Gompers, founding president of the American Federation of Labor (AFL), was himself a European immigrant but also became a leading champion of the restrictive immigration laws of the 1920s, which drastically reduced the flow of additional European immigrants and thereby protected his union members against impoverishment. Much more recently, the same was true with labor leader Cesar Chavez, today enshrined as the foremost Hispanic icon in the progressive pantheon. It is a little known fact that for decades Chavez was one of America’s leading opponents of immigration, especially of the undocumented variety, endlessly denouncing the government’s laxity in enforcing immigration laws and even going so far as to organize numerous vigilante patrols along the Mexican border, not dissimilar from those of the controversial Minutemen activists of the 2000s.

But if immigrants themselves have such strong economic reasons to oppose continuing heavy immigration, why in modern America have they almost invariably become leading political opponents of the anti-immigration groups advocating exactly those same policies? The obvious explanation has been the extreme heavy-handedness of many on the anti-immigration side, who have often resorted to crude ethnic attacks or unwarranted vilification in making their case.

A perfect example of this self-defeating behavior came from Trump’s own campaign after the immigration issue caught fire following a July 2015 fatal shooting in San Francisco. A young white woman died at the hands of a undocumented Mexican felon, recently released from jail rather than deported due to lax “Sanctuary City” policies, and the resulting media firestorm was enormous. Later investigation revealed that the shooting itself was clearly accidental, and the annual number of ordinary whites murdered by illegal immigrants seems almost microscopically small, but Trump’s crude denunciations of Mexican immigrants as “rapists and killers” naturally provoked outrage within the Hispanic community.

A subtle factor driving the counter-productive tactics of many anti-immigration groups may be their severe misperception of the nature of the conflict. There is a common tendency in politics to commit the error of ideological projection, thereby assuming, often implicitly, that the motivations of one’s opponents are the mirror-image of one’s own. So the politically-fearful white racial-activists who largely dominate the anti-immigration movement naturally believe that Hispanic immigrants are similarly motivated, and that the goal of their leaders is to swamp the country with more people of their own background, thereby allowing them to seize political power along ethnic lines. However, there seems little evidence for this, with most Hispanics being rather conflicted about future immigration, though they generally do support humane treatment for those immigrants who are already here and might circle the political wagons if they perceive that their community is under unfair racial attack. Thus, many anti-immigration leaders probably consider themselves locked into a zero-sum ethnic political struggle that does not necessarily exist.

Meanwhile, Hispanic leaders and other immigrant advocates probably exhibit a similar misunderstanding about the true priorities of their opponents in the anti-immigration camp. For tactical political reasons, the latter almost invariably focus their rhetorical fire upon the undocumented, partly because the phrase “illegal immigrant” seems to conjure up the image of a dangerous foreign criminal, while terms like “legal immigrant” or “refugee” have much more positive psychological connotations. But this subterfuge masks the true goals and concerns of that movement. Whether motivated by fears of white racial displacement, destructive economic competition for native workers, or even merely the harms of unchecked population growth, nearly all anti-immigration groups are actually just as concerned about legal immigration as the undocumented type. For them, total numbers are the central issue—indeed, the largest such organization styles itself “NumbersUSA”—and since legal entrants always represent the bulk of the overall flow, legal immigration is their true primary target.

In actuality, the leading opponents of the anti-immigration camp may be found within the mainstream business community, much of which considers a heavy, continuing flow of immigrants, legal or otherwise, as an important source of low-cost labor that also exerts powerful downward pressure upon the wages of all other working-class employees. But although such pro-business elements have traditionally dominated the politics of the Republican Party, these are exactly the interest groups that have frequently been routed politically by anti-immigration grassroots rightwingers in Republican primaries and have now suffered the same fate at the presidential level, as the Trump campaign crushed their favored candidates. So given their current weakness, they would probably be unable to block a political package supported by a strange-bedfellows alliance of pro-immigrant Democrats and anti-immigration Republicans.

One of the factors potentially driving such an unlikely historic coalition would be the simple fact that each of these groups is extremely dissatisfied with the status quo and desperate for change, but neither separately has any realistic chance of achieving its goals in the foreseeable future. Only some sort of unexpected “grand bargain” crossing ideological lines might break the current political deadlock.

For almost twenty years, immigrant advocates have been pressing for measures to lighten the burden of illegality that weighs upon so many millions of families in their community, and all these efforts have invariably failed. Passing any sort of “amnesty” proposal would require control of the House together with a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate, and the likelihood of this happening in the foreseeable future is not high.

Meanwhile, annual immigration rates, legal and illegal combined, have easily exceeded a million a year for most of the last generation, and all but the most unrealistic anti-immigration leaders must recognize that there exists little political hope of ever enacting Congressional legislation to reduce these numbers under existing political alignments. Instead, they have merely been fighting—and winning—a long series of defensive battles against “amnesty” and further expanded open borders proposals.

Thus, these two powerful ideological coalitions have fought each other to a complete stalemate, and each also views the current situation as totally unacceptable. But if they were to join forces, both might achieve their fondest goals while sacrificing relatively little in return.

Outlines of a Possible “Grand Bargain”

What might be the principal components of a legislative package able to bridge such a seemingly wide ideological chasm between pro-immigrant Democrats and anti-immigration Republicans?

- Enacting Large, Permanent Cuts to Legal Immigration

One central element would be large, permanent cuts in the rate of legal immigration. As mentioned, the bulk of these new arrivals tend to be eager workers, who exert severe downward wage pressure on their working-class competitors, with previous immigrants probably suffering the most economic damage. American business interests may benefit in the short run by keeping their labor costs as low as possible, but our working population suffers, and the resulting low-wage society reduces the consumer spending that drives our economy.

Furthermore, such elevated levels of immigration over the last few decades have led to an American population growth rate that is exceptionally high for a developed country. An exponentially growing population drives up housing prices and other asset values, greatly increasing the wealth of the One Percent but further injuring the economic prospects of ordinary Americans and worsening our economic inequality. I think it is hardly coincidental that the last forty years of high immigration rates have exactly coincided with forty years of economic stagnation for most ordinary Americans, together with an unprecedented concentration of wealth at the top.

Permanently reducing the rate of legal immigration, perhaps by a factor of 50% or more, would solve many of these problems, with the exact allocation of the remaining slots being subject to negotiation.

- Raising the Minimum Wage

Obviously, large cuts in legal immigration would be meaningless unless the legislative package also contained credible means of drastically reducing future illegal immigration, a promise often made but never kept. However, a crucial difference is that the prospective political coalition being assembled would exclude most of the traditionally pro-immigration, pro-business wing of the Republican Party, thereby allowing a much different approach to the issue, which might also greatly broaden the potential popular appeal.

For example, I have long argued that the best and most effective means of reducing illegal immigration is a large increase in the minimum wage.

The vast majority of illegal immigrants come to America for jobs, and our pundits are correct in saying “they take the jobs that Americans won’t.” But the reason that Americans won’t take those jobs is often that the wages are just too low. Only recently-arrived illegal immigrants are desperate enough to take many of those terrible, low-paying jobs.

A large hike in the federal minimum wage—perhaps to $12 per hour—would eliminate this problem. Americans and established immigrants would flock to such positions once the wages were more reasonable, while the relatively small number of jobs that disappear would be those that require exploitation of an ultra-low-wage workforce, jobs that should have no place in a developed economy.

Enforcing minimum wage laws is far easier than enforcing immigration laws, and penalties could be strengthened for cases of serious “wage theft.” Once the magnetic lure of low-wage job openings had vanished, other immigration enforcement measures would immediately become much more effective, and future inflows could be reduced to minimal levels. In effect, a high and strictly enforced minimum wage functions as an invisible economic wall, probably much more effective at deterring border-crossers than anything built of concrete and steel.

Meanwhile, a much higher minimum wage would also automatically reduce many of means-tested social welfare benefits currently going to low wage workers. American businesses would be forced to pay their own employees rather than shift so much of the cost to ordinary American taxpayers.

Over the last few years, raising the federal minimum wage has become a central policy goal of most Democrats, but has invariably been blocked in Congress by conservative Republicans. However, once that proposal is reframed as an immigration control measure and embedded within a much broader package focused on that issue, many of the more rightwing Republicans would probably come on board, propelled by their stridently anti-immigration base. Meanwhile, incorporating a large minimum wage hike would guarantee the enthusiasm of those Democrats less concerned with immigration issues.

- Dealing Humanely with Illegal Immigrants

A much higher minimum wage combined with strengthened immigration enforcement measures should be able to reduce future illegal immigration to minimal levels, while large, permanent cuts in legal immigration should eliminate the population pressure driving America toward becoming a low-wage society and reducing the quality-of-life for American workers.

But any agreement on these necessary longer-term policies would also have to deal humanely with millions of existing undocumented residents, who had arrived during an era when the government did not seriously enforce its immigration laws.

Any politically viable proposal would need to offer permanent residency and perhaps eventual citizenship to individuals who have already lived in the United States for many years, had no criminal record, and possessed strong ties to the local community, such as American-born family members.

Meanwhile, a large hike in the minimum wage and stronger employment enforcement laws would eliminate the jobs of many of lower-skilled immigrant workers too recently arrived to qualify for a change in status. Such existing illegal residents should be offered free transportation back to their home countries, together with a generous one-time cash settlement, perhaps as high as $5,000 or even $10,000 per adult, encouraging them to come forward and accept permanent deportation, an investment that would be very cost-effective for the American taxpayer. (Naturally such payments would require a written commitment not to return, enforced by serious criminal penalties.) With their jobs having disappeared, it seems likely that most of the more recently arrived immigrants would find such a financial offer very attractive, completely obviating the need for any harsh federal “deportation force.”

- Reforming the Abusive H-1B Immigration Visa System

One of the strongest constituencies currently backing higher levels of immigration is Silicon Valley, primarily due to the acute shortage of H-1B visas for specially skilled foreigners, now capped at 85,000 per year.

However, as a series of articles in the New York Times has demonstrated, this shortage is entirely artificial. Outsourcing companies have been gaming the H-1B system and capturing the bulk of the visas, then using these to import large numbers of low-wage immigrants as replacements for experienced, higher-paid American tech workers. Thus, the poorly-designed current visa system severely undercuts middle class wages while also harming the international competitiveness of America’s best technology firms by unreasonably restricting their own supply of elite foreign hires.

An effective means of addressing this situation would be to reform the H-1B system by having the government auction off the visas, thereby ensuring that they go to those companies for which they provide the greatest economic value. Such a bidding process would also end the ongoing job loss and downward wage pressure experienced by regular workers in the industry.

Incorporating such H-1B visa changes into the proposed immigration reform package might have an excellent chance of bringing major elements of the powerful technology industry into the political coalition supporting the legislation. Meanwhile, since the overall number of such visas would remain unchanged, anti-immigration groups are unlikely to protest this change, while tech worker organizations might become enthusiastic at the prospects of finally ending of the continual downward wage-pressure they have long been experiencing at the hands of low-end outsourcing companies.

Decades of angry and fruitless struggle over immigration issues have surely persuaded most cynical observers that any significant change—let alone a major breakthrough—is almost impossible, and the hardened political trench-lines are unlikely to be broken for the foreseeable future. Lobbyists still promise eventual victory, thereby collecting their regular paychecks from donors, while activists continue organizing their protests, but few others believe that anything will ever actually happen.

However, an unexpected strategic realignment, joining America’s leading pro-immigrant and anti-immigration forces, would completely transform this deadlocked political landscape, cutting across the defensive lines in diagonal fashion and creating possibilities where none had previously existed. Such an unlikely alliance would also surely attract the sort of intense media coverage able to focus enormous national attention on the issue, thereby pressuring our elected officials to produce actual legislation.

Furthermore, this sort of a trans-ideological alliance might also help soften the exceptional bitterness that currently pervades the immigration debate, as the various zealous partisans discovered to their amazement that their longtime adversaries were not necessarily so hostile to their own primary objectives. Given America’s enormous ideological and ethnic diversity, healing these existing national wounds would be a very welcome development.

Many political analysts might reject this sort of scenario as a pipe-dream, believing that no political conflict so contentious and longstanding—especially one possessing such strong ethnic overtones—could possibly be resolved in so simple and relatively amicable a fashion. Yet ironically enough, something very similar happened less than twenty years ago on another such issue, itself also closely tied to immigration.

For decades, one of America’s most bitter educational struggles, heavily laced with ethnically divisive rhetoric, had centered on the issue of so-called “bilingual education,” namely whether young immigrant children should be taught for years in their own native language or instead should be immersed in English from their first day of school. Opponents of these programs, ranging from mainstream conservatives to anti-immigrant activists, regularly denounced them as motivated by Latino separatism, perhaps even laying the groundwork for an eventual secessionist movement along the lines of the French population of Quebec. Meanwhile, outraged Latino politicians and liberal activists energetically defended that system, regularly accusing its critics of racist or nativist sentiments. The harsh rhetoric and angry partisans on both sides poisoned the public dialogue and the likelihood of any resolution seemed minimal.

However, in the late 1990s, I and several others launched a major project to shift the debate from the ideological to the practical and pedagogical, focusing on the simple question of whether or not the programs actually worked, and catalyzing our efforts around a series of successful ballot initiatives. Prompted by this campaign, the national media began exploring these entirely different issues, and soon discovered that English language immersion was much more successful, as well as also being far more popular among actual immigrant Latino families themselves. As a consequence, native-language instruction programs gradually faded from the national curriculum, and indeed the very term “bilingual education” has largely disappeared from the media lexicon over the last dozen years. A decades-long political conflict, bitter and ethnically-charged, evaporated so completely that a younger generation may scarcely be aware that it ever even existed.

We can only hope that our ongoing “Immigration Wars” might similarly be resolved and almost totally forgotten within such a short period of time. Another twenty years of total political deadlock on the issue might be disastrous.

Racial Discrimination at Harvard

The Unz Review • October 22, 2018 • 10,300 Words

This last week trial began in Boston federal court for the current lawsuit in which a collection of Asian-American organizations are charging Harvard University with racial discrimination in its college admissions policies. The New York Times, our national newspaper of record, has been providing almost daily coverage to developments in the case, with the stories sometimes reaching the front page.

Last Sunday, just before the legal proceedings began, the Times ran a major article explaining the general background of the controversy, and I was very pleased to see that my own past research was cited as an important factor sparking the lawsuit, with the reporter even including a direct link to my 26,000 word 2012 cover-story “The Myth of American Meritocracy,” which had provided strong quantitative evidence of anti-Asian racial quotas. Economic historian Niall Ferguson, long one of Harvard’s most prominent professors but recently decamped to Stanford, similarly noted the role of my research in his column for the London Sunday Times.

Two decades ago, I had published a widely-discussed op-ed in The Wall Street Journal on somewhat similar issues of racial discrimination in elite admissions. But my more recent article was far longer and more comprehensive, and certainly drew more attention than anything else I have ever published, before or after. Soon after it appeared in The American Conservative, its hundreds of thousands of pageviews broke all records for that publication and it attracted considerable notice in the media. Times columnist David Brooks soon ranked it as perhaps the best American magazine article of the year, a verdict seconded by a top editor at The Economist, and the Times itself quickly organized a symposium on the topic of Asian Quotas, in which I eagerly participated. Forbes, The Atlantic, The Washington Monthly, Business Insider, and other publications all discussed my striking results.

Conservative circles took considerable interest, with Charles Murray highlighting my findings, and National Review later publishing an article in which I explained the important implications of my findings for the legal validity of the 1978 Bakke decision by the U.S. Supreme Court.

There was also a considerable reaction from the academic community itself. I quickly received speaking invitations from the Yale Political Union, Yale Law, and the University of Chicago Law School, while Prof. Ferguson discussed my distressing analysis in a lengthy Newsweek/Daily Beast entitled “The End of the American Dream.”

Moreover, I had also published an associated critique suggesting that over the years my beloved Harvard alma mater had transformed itself into one of the world’s largest hedge-funds with a vestigial school attached for tax-exempt purposes. This also generated enormous discussion in media circles, with liberal journalist Chris Hayes Tweeting it out and generously saying he was “very jealous” he hadn’t written the piece himself, while many of his colleagues promoted the piece with similarly favorable remarks, while the university quickly provided a weak public response to these serious financial charges.

Meanwhile, unbeknownst to myself or other outside observers, Harvard itself launched an internal investigation of the anti-Asian bias that I had alleged. Apparently, the university’s own initial results generally confirmed my accusations, indicating that if students were admitted solely based upon objective academic merit, far more Asians would receive thick envelopes. But Harvard’s top administrators buried the study and did nothing, with these important facts only coming out years later during the discovery process of the current Asian Quotas lawsuit.

Only the first part of my very long article dealt with the question of anti-Asian racial discrimination in elite college admissions, but it attracted vastly more attention than any other element.

For many years, there had been a widespread belief within the Asian-American community that such discriminatory practices existed, a sentiment backed by considerable anecdotal evidence. But the university administrations had always flatly denied those claims, and the media had shown little interest in investigating them. However, my powerful new quantitative evidence was very difficult to ignore.

Among other things, I focused upon the publicly available statewide lists of National Merit Semifinalists (NMS), a group that constituted the highest-performing one-half percent of American high school seniors. By a fortunate coincidence, this fraction of the American student body was reasonably close in size to the total enrollment of students at the Ivy League schools together with similarly elite schools such as Stanford, Caltech, and MIT. The NMS dataset had previously been almost entirely ignored by researchers, but I found it a treasure-trove of useful empirical information.

Since Asian last names are extremely distinctive, I was able to estimate that Asians nationally constituted roughly 25-30% of this top academic group, a figure considerably larger than their enrollment at Harvard and other elite schools. This conclusion was supported by the even greater Asian dominance in more highly selective academic competitions such as the Math Olympiad and the Intel Science Talent Search, though the far smaller numbers involved reduced the statistical validity of that analysis.

But my most dramatic finding relied upon an even simpler analysis of public data, which had previously remained unnoticed. As I wrote in my New York Times column:

Just as their predecessors of the 1920s always denied the existence of “Jewish quotas,” top officials at Harvard, Yale, Princeton and the other Ivy League schools today strongly deny the existence of “Asian quotas.” But there exists powerful statistical evidence to the contrary.

Each year, American universities provide their racial enrollment data to the National Center for Education Statistics, which makes this information available online. After the Justice Department closed an investigation in the early 1990s into charges that Harvard University discriminated against Asian-American applicants, Harvard's reported enrollment of Asian-Americans began gradually declining, falling from 20.6 percent in 1993 to about 16.5 percent over most of the last decade.

This decline might seem small. But these same years brought a huge increase in America's college-age Asian population, which roughly doubled between 1992 and 2011, while non-Hispanic white numbers remained almost unchanged. Thus, according to official statistics, the percentage of Asian-Americans enrolled at Harvard fell by more than 50 percent over the last two decades, while the percentage of whites changed little. This decline in relative Asian-American enrollment was actually larger than the impact of Harvard's 1925 Jewish quota, which reduced Jewish freshmen from 27.6 percent to 15 percent.

The percentages of college-age Asian-Americans enrolled at most of the other Ivy League schools also fell during this same period, and over the last few years Asian enrollments across these different universities have converged to a very similar level and remained static over time. This raises suspicions of a joint Ivy League policy to restrict Asian-American numbers to a particular percentage.

This statistical finding was illustrated in a simple graph, demonstrating that over the last two decades enrollment of Asian-Americans had gradually converged across the entire Ivy League, while sharply diverging from the rapidly increasing Asian-American population, with only strictly meritocratic Caltech continuing to track the latter.

It would be difficult to imagine more obvious visual evidence of an Asian Quota implemented across the Ivy League, and this chart was very widely circulated among Asian-American organizations and activists, who launched their lawsuit the following year. If they do succeed in winning their current case in federal court, the history books may eventually record that the wealthiest and most powerful university in the world was brought low by a single striking graph.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-60CY8mgg80

For decades Affirmative Action based upon race has been an extremely contentious topic in American politics, sharply dividing across ideological lines, and it was hardly surprising that my new analysis of that issue produced a wave of coverage. But buried deeper within that same article were even more explosive findings, apparently far too sensitive to even become a subject of significant media scrutiny.

Not without reason, most journalists regard matters touching upon Jewish sensitivities as the lethal “third rail” of their profession, and the bulk of my piece had presented some unexpected new insights in this area. These attracted the widespread private fascination of numerous prominent scholars and members of the media, but almost none of these individuals was willing to publicly disclose the results that had drawn their rapt attention.

As a consequence, these findings have remained largely unnoticed except among those who have actually taken the time to read far into my extremely long piece, while never penetrating into the awareness of the broader public. For example, Prof. Jordan Peterson, a leading celebrity-intellectual with a large YouTube following, recently demonstrated that he was totally ignorant of these important facts. Therefore, I am now taking this opportunity to summarize and excerpt those elements of my Meritocracy analysis that attracted the greatest private interest but received the least public attention.

A few years earlier, Jerome Karabel, an eminent Berkeley sociologist, had published The Chosen, his magisterial history of Jewish enrollment in the Ivy League, which won numerous scholarly accolades. His research conclusively demonstrated the existence of the once-denied Jewish Quotas of the past, employed by the reigning WASP elites to maintain control of those institutions against their upstart ethnic competitors. As I wrote:

Karabel's massive documentation—over 700 pages and 3000 endnotes—establishes the remarkable fact that America's uniquely complex and subjective system of academic admissions actually arose as a means of covert ethnic tribal warfare…

As Karabel repeatedly demonstrates, the major changes in admissions policy which later followed were usually determined by factors of raw political power and the balance of contending forces rather than any idealistic considerations. For example, in the aftermath of World War II, Jewish organizations and their allies mobilized their political and media resources to pressure the universities into increasing their ethnic enrollment by modifying the weight assigned to various academic and non-academic factors, raising the importance of the former over the latter. Then a decade or two later, this exact process was repeated in the opposite direction, as the early 1960s saw black activists and their liberal political allies pressure universities to bring their racial minority enrollments into closer alignment with America's national population by partially shifting away from their recently enshrined focus on purely academic considerations. Indeed, Karabel notes that the most sudden and extreme increase in minority enrollment took place at Yale in the years 1968–69, and was largely due to fears of race riots in heavily black New Haven, which surrounded the campus.

Philosophical consistency appears notably absent in many of the prominent figures involved in these admissions battles, with both liberals and conservatives sometimes favoring academic merit and sometimes non-academic factors, whichever would produce the particular ethnic student mix they desired for personal or ideological reasons. Different political blocs waged long battles for control of particular universities, and sudden large shifts in admissions rates occurred as these groups gained or lost influence within the university apparatus: Yale replaced its admissions staff in 1965 and the following year Jewish numbers nearly doubled.

Branches of Hillel, the Jewish student organization, exist across most college campuses, and for decades they have provided estimates of the percentages of the local Jewish enrollment, with Karabel and other scholars relying upon these to chart the ebbs and flows of Jewish numbers. I discussed how Karabel used this data to celebrate the final meritocratic victory of Jewish college applicants over their former WASP oppressors.

Indeed, Karabel opens the final chapter of his book by…noting the extreme irony that the WASP demographic group which had once so completely dominated America's elite universities and “virtually all the major institutions of American life” had by 2000 become “a small and beleaguered minority at Harvard,” being actually fewer in number than the Jews whose presence they had once sought to restrict. Very similar results seem to apply all across the Ivy League, with the disproportion often being even greater than the particular example emphasized by Karabel.

Karabel showed that the collapse of WASP resistance to the admission of high-performing Jewish students soon drastically reshaped the ethnic composition of these institutions, with his triumphalist narrative suggesting that this transformation raised academic standards and lifted the quality of the student body to new heights. And for decades, I had entirely accepted this simple morality tale, which was implicitly or explicitly presented in nearly all the accounts, liberal and conservative alike, that I had read regarding the history of our leading East Coast universities.

But as I began to quantitatively explore this issue, utilizing the same techniques and data sets I had applied to determining the existence of severe discrimination against Asian applicants, I uncovered evidence of an entirely contrary nature. I soon came to realize that many of my beliefs were merely ideological fairy tales, sometimes little more accurate than the Soviet claims of Russian peasants eagerly joining their collective farms.

Although Jewish names are not nearly as distinctive as Asian ones, they may usually be determined with reasonable accuracy, and applying Weyl analysis to a subset of the most absolutely characteristic ones—such as Goldstein, Silverberg, Cohen, and Kaplan—allows us to statistically validate the results so obtained.

As I thus analyzed the many dozens of statewide NMS lists, I soon discovered that Jews were far less heavily represented among America’s highest-performing students than I had expected, probably constituting no more than 6% of the national NMS total. The lists of the winners of the top scholastic competitions I had previously examined for Asians produced reasonably similar results.

Hispanic names are quite distinct and blacks are fewer in number and somewhat less successful academically, so the NMS totals for those two groups are also not difficult to determine. Once we subtract the totals of Asians, Jews, Hispanics, and blacks, what remains is the NMS total of non-Hispanic white Gentiles. And the results were extremely eye-opening:

The evidence of the recent NMS semifinalist lists seems the most conclusive of all, given the huge statistical sample sizes involved. As discussed earlier, these students constitute roughly the highest 0.5 percent in academic ability, the top 16,000 high school seniors who should be enrolling at the Ivy League and America's other most elite academic universities. In California, white Gentile names outnumber Jewish ones by over 8-to-1; in Texas, over 20-to-1; in Florida and Illinois, around 9-to-1. Even in New York, America's most heavily Jewish state, there are more than two high-ability white Gentile students for every Jewish one. Based on the overall distribution of America's population, it appears that approximately 65–70 percent of America's highest ability students are non-Jewish whites, well over ten times the Jewish total of under 6 percent.

Needless to say, these proportions are considerably different from what we actually find among the admitted students at Harvard and its elite peers, which today serve as a direct funnel to the commanding heights of American academics, law, business, and finance. Based on reported statistics, Jews approximately match or even outnumber non-Jewish whites at Harvard and most of the other Ivy League schools, which seems wildly disproportionate. Indeed, the official statistics indicate that non-Jewish whites at Harvard are America's most under-represented population group, enrolled at a much lower fraction of their national population than blacks or Hispanics, despite having far higher academic test scores.

When examining statistical evidence, the proper aggregation of data is critical. Consider the ratio of the recent 2007–2011 enrollment of Asian students at Harvard relative to their estimated share of America's recent NMS semifinalists, a reasonable proxy for the high-ability college-age population, and compare this result to the corresponding figure for whites. The Asian ratio is 63 percent, slightly above the white ratio of 61 percent, with both these figures being considerably below parity due to the substantial presence of under-represented racial minorities such as blacks and Hispanics, foreign students, and students of unreported race. Thus, there appears to be no evidence for racial bias against Asians, even excluding the race-neutral impact of athletic recruitment, legacy admissions, and geographical diversity.

However, if we separate out the Jewish students, their ratio turns out to be 435 percent, while the residual ratio for non-Jewish whites drops to just 28 percent, less than half of even the Asian figure. As a consequence, Asians appear under-represented relative to Jews by a factor of seven, while non-Jewish whites are by far the most under-represented group of all, despite any benefits they might receive from athletic, legacy, or geographical distribution factors. The rest of the Ivy League tends to follow a similar pattern, with the overall Jewish ratio being 381 percent, the Asian figure at 62 percent, and the ratio for non-Jewish whites a low 35 percent, all relative to their number of high-ability college-age students.

Just as striking as these wildly disproportionate current numbers have been the longer enrollment trends. In the three decades since I graduated Harvard, the presence of white Gentiles has dropped by as much as 70 percent, despite no remotely comparable decline in the relative size or academic performance of that population; meanwhile, the percentage of Jewish students has actually increased. This period certainly saw a very rapid rise in the number of Asian, Hispanic, and foreign students, as well as some increase in blacks. But it seems rather odd that all of these other gains would have come at the expense of whites of Christian background, and none at the expense of Jews.

Several graphs from my article effectively illustrated these remarkable findings.

Based on these figures, Jewish students were roughly 1,000% more likely to be enrolled at Harvard and the rest of the Ivy League than white Gentiles of similar ability. This was an absolutely astonishing result given that under-representation in the range of 20% or 30% is often treated by courts as powerful prima facie evidence of racial discrimination.

Furthermore, I noted the possibility that this discrepancy might be related to the overwhelming Jewish dominance of the top administration of those institutions:

It would be unreasonable to ignore the salient fact that this massive apparent bias in favor of far less-qualified Jewish applicants coincides with an equally massive ethnic skew at the topmost administrative ranks of the universities in question, a situation which once again exactly parallels Karabel's account from the 1920s. Indeed, Karabel points out that by 1993 Harvard, Yale, and Princeton all had presidents of Jewish ancestry, and the same is true for the current presidents of Yale, Penn, Cornell, and possibly Columbia, as well as Princeton's president throughout during the 1990s and Yale's new incoming president, while all three of Harvard's most recent presidents have either had Jewish origins or a Jewish spouse.

At most universities, a provost is the second-ranking official, being responsible for day-to-day academic operations. Although Princeton's current president is not Jewish, all seven of the most recent Princeton provosts stretching back to 1977 have had such ancestry, with several of the other Ivies not being far behind. A similar degree of massive overrepresentation is found throughout the other top administrative ranks of the rest of the Ivy League, and across American leading educational institutions in general, and these are the institutions which select our future national elites.

Since the publication of my 2012 article, Harvard and Princeton have both selected new presidents, each of them Jewish, while Yale’s Jewish president has remained in office.

The exact mechanism by which this seemingly enormous bias in favor of Jewish applicants to our most elite colleges manifests itself is not entirely clear, and I very doubt that it takes the crude form of top administrators directing admissions officers to enroll under-qualified Jewish applicants. Instead, I strongly suggested that a leading factor was the “negative pressure” of America’s overwhelmingly Jewish media and Jewish activist groups, which might respond harshly to any significant decline in Jewish numbers:

Meanwhile, any hint of “anti-Semitism” in admissions is regarded as an absolutely mortal sin, and any significant reduction in Jewish enrollment may often be denounced as such by the hair-trigger media. For example, in 1999 Princeton discovered that its Jewish enrollment had declined to just 500 percent of parity, down from more than 700 percent in the mid-1980s, and far below the comparable figures for Harvard or Yale. This quickly resulted in four front-page stories in the Daily Princetonian, a major article in the New York Observer, and extensive national coverage in both the New York Times and the Chronicle of Higher Education. These articles included denunciations of Princeton's long historical legacy of anti-Semitism and quickly led to official apologies, followed by an immediate 30 percent rebound in Jewish numbers. During these same years, non-Jewish white enrollment across the entire Ivy League had dropped by roughly 50 percent, reducing those numbers to far below parity, but this was met with media silence or even occasional congratulations on the further “multicultural” progress of America's elite education system.

I suspect that the combined effect of these separate pressures, rather than any planned or intentional bias, is the primary cause of the striking enrollment statistics that we have examined above. In effect, somewhat dim and over-worked admissions officers, generally possessing weak quantitative skills, have been tasked by their academic superiors and media monitors with the twin ideological goals of enrolling Jews and enrolling non-whites, with any major failures risking harsh charges of either “anti-Semitism” or “racism.” But by inescapable logic maximizing the number of Jews and non-whites implies minimizing the number of non-Jewish whites.

I further noted that this 1999 firestorm of media controversy attacking Princeton for its alleged “anti-Semitism” took place at a time when university’s president and provost were both Jewish, and the campus had recently opened a $4.5 million Center for Jewish Life.

In 2002, Jacques Steinberg, a longtime National Educational Correspondent for the New York Times, published The Gatekeepers, a widely praised best-seller that provided an “inside look” at the college admissions process based on the year he had spent embedded with those officials at Wesleyan, and the 2012 edition of his book stated that few aspects of the process had changed during the previous decade. I was deeply distressed by his description of the background of the admissions officers:

In fact, it seems likely that some of these obvious admissions biases we have noticed may be related to the poor human quality and weak academic credentials of many of the university employees making these momentous decisions. As mentioned above, the job of admissions officer is poorly paid, requires no professional training, and offers few opportunities for career advancement; thus, it is often filled by individuals with haphazard employment records. As one of the “Little Ivies,” Wesleyan is among America's most prestigious liberal arts colleges, and Steinberg's description of the career paths of its handful of admissions officers is eye-opening: the interim Director of Admissions had most recently screened food-stamp recipients and run a psychiatric half-way house; another had worked as an animal control officer and managed a camera store; a third unsuccessfully sought a job as a United Airlines flight attendant; others were recent college graduates, whose main college interests had been sports or ethnic studies. The vast majority seem to possess minimal academic expertise and few intellectual interests, raising serious questions about their ability to reasonably evaluate their higher-quality applicants.

Books by former members of the Harvard and Dartmouth admissions strongly supported the same conclusions.

As additional evidence, we can consider What It Really Takes to Get into the Ivy League, a 2003 advice book written by Chuck Hughes, who spent five years as a Senior Admissions Officer at Harvard, after having himself graduated from that university. Although he strongly emphasizes his own college participation in varsity sports, he never says a word about any personal academic interests, and near the end of his book on elite college admissions, he appears to describe Duke, Northwestern, and Rice as being members of the Ivy League.

A more explicit statement of this exact problem is found in A for Admission, a very candid 1997 description of the admissions process at elite private universities written by Michele A. Hernandez, who had spent four years as Dartmouth's Assistant Director of Admissions. Near the beginning of her book, Hernandez explains that over half of Ivy League admissions officers are individuals who had not attended such academically challenging universities, nor probably had the intellectual capability to do so, and were sometimes confused about the relative ranking of SAT scores and other basic academic credentials. She also cautions students to avoid any subtlety in their essays, lest their words be misunderstood by their readers in the admissions office, whose degrees are more likely to have been in education than in any serious academic discipline.

Given this unfortunate situation, we should not be overly surprised by the egregious aspects of the particular admissions stories that Steinberg recounts.

Consider the case of Tiffany Wang, a Chinese immigrant student raised in the Silicon Valley area, where her father worked as an engineer. Although English was not her first language, her SAT scores were over 100 points above the Wesleyan average, and she ranked as a National Merit Scholarship semifinalist, putting her in the top 0.5 percent of high school students (not the top 2 percent as Steinberg mistakenly claims). Nevertheless, the admissions officer rated her just so-so in academics, and seemed far more positively impressed by her ethnic activism in the local school's Asian-American club. Ultimately, he stamped her with a “Reject,” but later admitted to Steinberg that she might have been admitted if he had been aware of the enormous time and effort she had spent campaigning against the death penalty, a political cause near and dear to his own heart. Somehow I suspect that a student who boasted of leadership in pro-death penalty activism among his extracurriculars might have fared rather worse in this process. And presumably for similar reasons, Tiffany was also rejected by all her other prestigious college choices, including Yale, Penn, Duke, and Wellesley, an outcome which greatly surprised and disappointed her immigrant father.

There was also the case of half-Brazilian Julianna Bentes, with slight black ancestry, who came from a middle-class family and attended on a partial scholarship one of America's most elite prep schools, whose annual tuition now tops $30,000; her SAT scores were somewhat higher than Tiffany's, and she was an excellent dancer. The combination of her academic ability, dancing talent, and “multiracial” background ranked her as one of America's top college recruitment prospects, gaining her admission and generous financial packages from Harvard, Yale, Stanford and every other elite university to which she applied, including the University of Chicago's most prestigious academic scholarship award and a personal opportunity to meet Chelsea Clinton while visiting Stanford, which she did, before ultimately selecting Yale.

Finally, there was the case of Becca Jannol, a girl from a very affluent Jewish family near Beverly Hills, who attended the same elite prep school as Julianna, but with her parents paying the full annual tuition. Despite her every possible advantage, including test-prep courses and retaking the exam, her SAT scores were some 240 points lower on the 1600 point scale, placing her toward the bottom of the Wesleyan range, while her application essay focused on the philosophical challenges she encountered when she was suspended for illegal drug use. But she was a great favorite of her prep school counselor, who was an old college friend of the Wesleyan admissions officer, and using his discretion, he stamped her “Admit.” Her dismal academic record then caused this initial decision to be overturned by a unanimous vote of the other members of the full admissions committee, but he refused to give up, and moved heaven and earth to gain her a spot, even offering to rescind the admissions of one or more already selected applicants to create a place for her. Eventually he got her shifted from the Reject category to wait-list status, after which he secretly moved her folder to the very top of the large waiting list pile.

In the end “connections” triumphed, and she received admission to Wesleyan, although she turned it down in favor of an offer from more prestigious Cornell, which she had obtained through similar means. But at Cornell, she found herself “miserable,” hating the classes and saying she “didn't see the usefulness of [her] being there.” However, her poor academic ability proved no hindrance, since the same administrator who had arranged her admission also wrangled her a quick entrance into a special “honors program” he personally ran, containing just 40 of the 3500 students in her year. This exempted her from all academic graduation requirements, apparently including classes or tests, thereby allowing her to spend her four college years mostly traveling around the world while working on a so-called “special project.” After graduation, she eventually took a job at her father's successful law firm, thereby realizing her obvious potential as a member of America's ruling Ivy League elite, or in her own words, as being one of “the best of the best.”

Jannol’s account also contains a particularly intriguing element. Personal essays have become a crucial component of application packages to elite colleges, and these are considered especially effective if they provide strong evidence of hardships and victimhood. Given her extremely wealthy and privileged background, Jannol had originally considered focusing on her status as the granddaughter of a Holocaust survivor, but ultimately decided against it because so many of her peers would be following exactly that same stratagem, explaining to Steinberg that “Everyone’s going to write about their Holocaust grandma.”

Over the last few decades, our news and entertainment industries have elevated Jewish suffering during World War II into the most horrific and monumental tragedy of the modern era, and it not impossible that a substantial fraction of the unfair Jewish advantage in elite admissions may derive from something as simple as the ability of the children of elite Jewish families to wrap themselves in the ultimate victimhood of Holocaust survivor status.

I had been stunned by my evidence of the unreasonable over-representation of Jewish students at our most elite academic institutions, and most of the prominent scholars and journalists who read my analysis seemed to have a similar reaction. Further analysis suggested some of the crucial reasons for this widespread myopia, which I explicated in a section entitled “The Strange Collapse of Jewish Academic Achievement.”

From my own perspective, I found these statistical results surprising, even shocking.

I had always been well aware of the very heavy Jewish presence at elite academic institutions. But the underwhelming percentage of Jewish students who today achieve high scores on academic aptitude tests was totally unexpected, and very different from the impressions I had formed during my own high school and college years a generation or so ago. An examination of other available statistics seems to support my recollections and provides evidence for a dramatic recent decline in the academic performance of American Jews

The U.S. Math Olympiad began in 1974, and all the names of the top scoring students are easily available on the Internet. During the 1970s, well over 40 percent of the total were Jewish, and during the 1980s and 1990s, the fraction averaged about one-third. However, during the thirteen years since 2000, just two names out of 78 or 2.5 percent appear to be Jewish. The Putnam Exam is the most difficult and prestigious mathematics competition for American college students, with five or six Putnam winners having been selected each year since 1938. Over 40 percent of the Putnam winners prior to 1950 were Jewish, and during every decade from the 1950s through the 1990s, between 22 percent and 31 percent of the winners seem to have come from that same ethnic background. But since 2000, the percentage has dropped to under 10 percent, without a single likely Jewish name in the last seven years.

This consistent picture of stark ethnic decline recurs when we examine the statistics for the Science Talent Search, which has been selecting 40 students as national finalists for America's most prestigious high school science award since 1942, thus providing a huge statistical dataset of over 2800 top science students. During every decade from the 1950s through the 1980s, Jewish students were consistently 22–23 percent of the recipients, with the percentage then declining to 17 percent in the 1990s, 15 percent in the 2000s, and just 7 percent since 2010. Indeed, of the thirty top ranked students over the last three years, only a single one seems likely to have been Jewish. Similarly, Jews were over one-quarter of the top students in the Physics Olympiad from 1986 to 1997, but have fallen to just 5 percent over the last decade, a result which must surely send Richard Feynman spinning in his grave.

• • •

Taken in combination, these trends all provide powerful evidence that over the last decade or more there has been a dramatic collapse in Jewish academic achievement, at least at the high end.

Several possible explanations for this empirical result seem reasonably plausible. Although the innate potential of a group is unlikely to drop so suddenly, achievement is a function of both ability and effort, and today's overwhelmingly affluent Jewish students may be far less diligent in their work habits or driven in their studies than were their parents or grandparents, who lived much closer to the bracing challenges of the immigrant experience. In support of this hypothesis, roughly half of the Jewish Math Olympiad winners from the last two decades have had the sort of highly distinctive names which would tend to mark them as recent immigrants from the Soviet Union or elsewhere, and such names were also very common among the top Jewish science students of the same period, even though this group represents only about 10 percent of current American Jews. Indeed, it seems quite possible that this large sudden influx of very high performing immigrant Jews from the late 1980s onward served to partially mask the rapid concurrent decline of high academic achievement among native American Jews, which otherwise would have become much more clearly evident a decade or so earlier.

This pattern of third or fourth generation American students lacking the academic drive or intensity of their forefathers is hardly surprising, nor unique to Jews. Consider the case of Japanese-Americans, who mostly arrived in America during roughly the same era. America's Japanese have always been a high-performing group, with a strong academic tradition, and Japan's international PISA academic scores are today among the highest in the world. But when we examine the list of California's NMS semifinalists, less than 1 percent of the names are Japanese, roughly in line with their share of the California population. Meanwhile, Chinese, Koreans, and South Asians are 6 percent of California but contribute 50 percent of the top scoring students, an eight-fold better result, with a major likely difference being that they are overwhelmingly of recent immigrant origin. In fact, although ongoing Japanese immigration has been trivial in size, a significant fraction of the top Japanese students have the unassimilated Japanese first names that would tend to indicate they are probably drawn from that tiny group.

In his 1966 book The Creative Elite in America, Weyl used last name analysis to document a similarly remarkable collapse in achievement among America's Puritan-descended population, which had once provided a hugely disproportionate fraction of our intellectual leadership, but for various reasons went into rapid decline from about 1900 onward. He also mentions the disappearance of the remarkable Scottish intellectual contribution to British life after about 1800. Although the evidence for both these historical parallels seems very strong, the causal factors are not entirely clear, though Weyl does provide some possible explanations.

In some respects, perhaps it was the enormously outsize Jewish academic performance of the past which was highly anomalous, and the more recent partial convergence toward white European norms which is somewhat less surprising. Over the years, claims have been widely circulated that the mean Jewish IQ is a full standard deviation—15 points—above the white average of 100, but this seems to have little basis in reality. Richard Lynn, one of the world's foremost IQ experts, has performed an exhaustive literature review and located some 32 IQ samples of American Jews, taken from 1920 to 2008. For the first 14 studies conducted during the years 1920–1937, the Jewish IQ came out very close to the white American mean, and it was only in later decades that the average figure rose to the approximate range of 107–111.

In a previous article “Race, IQ & Wealth,” I had suggested that the IQs of ethnic groups appear to be far more malleable than many people would acknowledge, and may be particularly influenced by factors of urbanization, education, and affluence. Given that Jews have always been America's most heavily urbanized population and became the most affluent during the decades in question, these factors may account for a substantial portion of their huge IQ rise during most of the twentieth century. But with modern electronic technology recently narrowing the gaps in social environment and educational opportunities between America's rural and urban worlds, we might expect a portion of this difference to gradually dissipate. American Jews are certainly a high-ability population, but the innate advantage they have over other high-ability white populations is probably far smaller than is widely believed.

This conclusion is supported by the General Social Survey (GSS), an online dataset of tens of thousands of American survey responses from the last forty years which includes the Wordsum vocabulary test, a very useful IQ proxy correlating at 0.71. Converted into the corresponding IQ scores, the Wordsum-IQ of Jews is indeed quite high at 109. But Americans of English, Welsh, Scottish, Swedish, and Catholic Irish ancestry also have fairly high mean IQs of 104 or above, and their combined populations outnumber Jews by almost 15-to-1, implying that they would totally dominate the upper reaches of the white American ability distribution, even if we excluded the remaining two-thirds of all American whites, many of whose IQs are also fairly high. Furthermore, all these groups are far less highly urbanized or affluent than Jews, probably indicating that their scores are still artificially depressed to some extent. We should also remember that Jewish intellectual performance tends to be quite skewed, being exceptionally strong in the verbal subcomponent, much lower in math, and completely mediocre in visuospatial ability; thus, a completely verbal-oriented test such as Wordsum would actually tend to exaggerate Jewish IQ.

Stratifying the white American population along religious lines produces similar conclusions. An analysis of the data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth found that Americans raised in the Episcopal Church actually exceeded Jews in mean IQ, while several other religious categories came quite close, leading to the result that the overwhelming majority of America's high-ability white population had a non-Jewish background.

Finally, in the case of Jews, these assimilation- or environment-related declines in relative academic performance may have been reinforced by powerful demographic trends. For the last generation or two, typical Jewish women from successful or even ordinary families have married very late and averaged little more than a single child, while the small fraction of Jewish women who are ultra-Orthodox often marry in their teens and then produce seven or eight children. As a consequence, this extremely religious subpopulation has been doubling in size every twenty years, and now easily exceeds 10 percent of the total, including a far higher percentage of younger Jews. But ultra-Orthodox Jews have generally been academically mediocre, often with enormously high rates of poverty and government dependency. Therefore, the combination of these two radically different trends of Jewish reproduction has acted to stabilize the total number of Jewish youngsters, while probably producing a sharp drop in their average academic achievement.

Although the relative importance of these individual factors behind Jewish academic decline is unclear, the decline itself seems an unmistakable empirical fact, and the widespread unawareness of this fact has had important social consequences.

My casual mental image of today's top American students is based upon my memories of a generation or so ago, when Jewish students, sometimes including myself, regularly took home a quarter or more of the highest national honors on standardized tests or in prestigious academic competitions; thus, it seemed perfectly reasonable that Harvard and most of the other Ivy League schools might be 25 percent Jewish, based on meritocracy. But the objective evidence indicates that in present day America, only about 6 percent of our top students are Jewish, which now renders such very high Jewish enrollments at elite universities totally absurd and ridiculous. I strongly suspect that a similar time lag effect is responsible for the apparent confusion in many others who have considered the topic.

For example, throughout his very detailed book, Karabel always seems to automatically identify increasing Jewish enrollments with academic meritocracy, and Jewish declines with bias or discrimination, retaining this assumption even when his discussion moves into the 1990s and 2000s. He was born in 1950, graduated Harvard in 1972, and returned there to earn his Ph.D. in 1977, so this may indeed have been the reality during his formative years. But he seems strikingly unaware that the world has changed since then, and that over the last decade or two, meritocracy and Jewish numbers have become opposing forces: the stricter the meritocratic standard, the fewer the Jews admitted.

Evidence of the remarkable collapse of Jewish academic achievement is easily seen in a series of charts:

Important results with major policy implications will only have significant impact if they are widely distributed, and in this regard I faced formidable obstacles.

My article was running in The American Conservative, a small circulation political opinion magazine of which I was the publisher, and so my findings needed to break through into far larger and more mainstream outlets in order to reach a sizable audience. But in the past TAC had often been fiercely denounced by Jewish activists and organizations, mostly on foreign policy issues, and elements of my piece were far more inflammatory than had been any of that other material. While harsh attacks might help promote my information within particular ideological circles, they would surely dissuade mainstream publications from taking notice, and would also sufficiently stigmatize my research that no respectable individual would be willing to cite it in the future.

My first decision was to place my Asian Quota section near the front of my very long text. Aside from the intrinsic importance, this would also provide interested readers with a relatively safe “hook” that they could use to describe and promote my analysis, while allowing them to safely avoid mention of the “third rail” material that constituted the bulk of my text; and this was exactly what eventually occurred. But such a strategy would obviously fail unless I could also somehow induce hair-trigger activist groups to maintain silence about my article rather than crudely demonizing it. Therefore, I decided to launch what I considered a decapitating first strike against those central organs of Jewish activism but to do so in a rather oblique manner.

Jerome Karabel certainly ranked as the world’s foremost authority on Jewish admissions to the Ivy League, and his celebrated opus had been the central text I had used, although my ultimate conclusions were radically different than his own. It seemed likely to me that once Jewish organizations became aware of the controversial elements of my article, he would be among the first individuals they contacted, both to seek his assessment of my analysis and perhaps also receive suggestions for an effective rebuttal.

Therefore, I obtained Karabel’s contact information and sent him an advance copy of my completed article weeks before it was generally released, explaining that I thought he would find it rather interesting although some of my conclusions were quite different than his own. My expectation was that once he carefully read my detailed analysis, he would conclude that the case I made was far too strong to be effectively refuted, and he would pass along that verdict to the activist organizations when they eventually contacted him, thus leading them adopt a response of “strategic silence” in order to avoid drawing attention to my claims. For whatever reason, that was exactly how they reacted, and no prominent Jewish activist or group ever issued a public response to my extremely controversial findings despite the considerable attention these ultimately attracted.

Not only did this complete absence of organized attacks provide a green light for the very favorable mainstream coverage I soon began receiving, but it even opened the door to quite friendly treatment from numerous members of the organized Jewish community itself, as they discovered and read my article without any prior negative preconceptions. Most of these discussions focused directly upon the evidence of the sharp recent decline in Jewish academic ability and the resulting Jewish over-representation at elite universities, with a professor of Talmud Studies at Yeshiva University publishing a thousand-word column entitled “Endangered Jewish Genius” and NYU’s Berman Jewish Policy Center featuring my article on its website. Even the Israeli press took notice, with a columnist for Israel Hayom, Sheldon Adelson’s top-circulation newpaper, devoting a 1500 word column to my analysis, focusing especially upon my claims of Jewish over-representation.

But although prominent Jewish activists maintained their strict blockade against any discussion of my findings, the Jewish community has never lacked for extreme zealots, and some of these did eventually launch ferocious attacks on my work. However, these were fringe figures, so they were very slow off the mark in their responses and lacked significant credibility or media support. Therefore, their complaints had little impact, especially because they were largely self-refuting.

My fiercest academic critic was a certain cancer researcher named Janet Mertz, a fanatic feminist whose previous public efforts had been focused on vilifying and refuting former Harvard president Larry Summers for his mild but impolitic suggestion that perhaps men might be a bit better at math than women, a position she regarded as utter anathema. To that end, she had published a 10,000 word peer-reviewed analysis of decades worth of International Math Olympiad participants, which convincingly demonstrated that across almost every time period and country, roughly 95% of the best mathematicians had been male and only 5% female. But she rather bizarrely claimed that this conclusively proved that males and females had exactly equal mathematical aptitude, and then persuaded Science Daily and other gullible media outlets to publish headlined news stories touting her powerful debunking of male chauvinist mythology.

Mertz was equally zealous in her Jewish identitarianism, and she had invested enormous effort in exhaustively determining the exact fractional Jewish ancestry of all of America’s recent Math Olympians. As a consequence, she fiercely denounced as mere “guesswork” my own estimates of Jewish numbers, based as they were upon a much more casual inspection of surnames, supplemented by Weyl analysis. I think my response was quite effective.

As it happens, she and her co-authors had exhaustively researched the ethnicity of the 1988-2007 American Math Olympians in their aforementioned 2008 article, and through a combination of extensive biographical research and confidential personal interviews had determined the exact number of full-Jews and part-Jews among those 120 individuals, publishing the results in their Table 7 mentioned above, together with the broader racial categories.

Given that I had produced my own ethnic estimates for those same students based on perhaps five minutes of cursory surname analysis, while Mertz and her associates seemingly devoted five weeks of research to the same task, I readily acknowledge that her results are certain to be vastly more accurate than my own. Indeed, if we regard the Mertz figures as the “gold standard,” then comparing them with my own numbers provides a useful means of assessing the overall quality of my direct inspection technique, a technique that constituted a central pillar of my entire study. This allows us to decide whether my approach was indeed just the worthless “guesswork” that she alleges.

Her peer-reviewed journal article determined that the 120 American Math Olympians from 1988-2007 consisted of exactly 42 Asians, 26 Jews, and 52 non-Jewish whites. My crude surname estimate had been 44 Asians, 23 Jews, and 53 non-Jewish whites. Individual readers must decide for themselves whether these estimation errors seem so enormous as to totally invalidate my overall conclusions, but personally I would be quite satisfied if they remained in this range across the tens of thousands of surnames I had inspected throughout the rest of my paper.

Obviously, such estimation techniques may be completely incorrect for tiny handfuls of names, and should only be relied upon across substantial lists. For example, in one sentence of my 30,000 word article I stated that just 2 of the 78 names of Olympiad winners since 2000 seemed likely to be Jewish, and Mertz has repeatedly attacked me for this claim, now pointing out that I had missed the Hebrew name of winner “Oaz Nir.” She is correct, and since Nir was a double winner in 2000 and 2001, this single surname error on my part accounts for virtually the entire discrepancy between my own 1988-2007 Olympiad results and those produced by the exhaustive research undertaken by Mertz and her three academic co-authors.

The only reason that I or anyone else even became aware of Mertz’s harsh critique of my analysis was the heavy promotion she received by Andrew Gelman, a professor of Statistics at Columbia University and a prominent blogger, who thereby apparently hoped to undercut my findings without directly involving himself and thereby risking his own reputation. But once I informed him of some of her previous scholarly claims regarding gender issues, he seemed to abandon the project.

A close Mertz ally was a much younger woman named Nurit Baytch, whom I actually encountered in person. As I was giving my lecture at the University of Chicago Law School, I couldn’t help but notice a rather short young woman sitting in the front row, glaring at me with a glassy-eyed stare. I am hardly a clothes-horse, but she was dressed very strangely, and when she afterward came up to “confront me,” her mannerisms and style of speaking were quite odd as well. All in all, her appearance much reminded me of the photos of female Weather Underground terrorists of the late 1960s, most of whom had also come from a Jewish background.

Eventually, Ms. Baytch wrote a massive document purportedly refuting my Meritocracy analysis, and since it was never published anywhere, she posted it on the Internet as a GoogleDocs file, which countless Jewish activists have subsequently cited as a conclusive debunking of my claims. But all her tens of thousands of words of complex verbiage cannot get around the simple fact that only about 6% of America’s high-performing NMS students are Jewish and the remaining 94% are Gentile.

Her other line of criticism was to denounce my use of the Hillel numbers for Jewish enrollment, which she claimed were completely fraudulent, though without any evidence buttressing her claim. Although for decades, these Hillel figures had been accepted without reservation by all our leading media outlets and academic researchers, I had actually treated them with some caution, perhaps being the first analyst to do so.

Similarly, nearly all our figures on Jewish enrollment were ultimately drawn from the estimates of Hillel, the national Jewish campus organization, and these are obviously approximate. However, the Hillel data is the best we possess for recent decades, and is regularly used by the New York Times and other prominent media outlets, while also serving as the basis for much of Karabel's award-winning scholarship. Furthermore, so long as any latent bias in the data remained relatively constant, we could still correctly analyze changes over time.

Completely discarding as unreliable the tens of thousands of annual Jewish enrollment estimates compiled by Hillel over the last half-century would completely eliminate almost everything we know about the historical size and trajectory of the Jewish presence at thousands of American colleges, destroying the sociological studies of many scholars. But fortunately, it seems quite unlikely that the figures are as completely nonsensical as Baytch casually claims.

These Hillel estimates have been very widely circulated within the Jewish community for decades and republished in Jewish magazines, being primarily intended to help guide strongly-identified Jewish families in selecting a college campus with a Jewish enrollment in the range they considered necessary. For most families, the cost of a college education is one of the largest investments they will ever make, and if for decades, tens or hundreds of thousands of committed Jewish families had picked their colleges based on the Hillel numbers only to discover that those figures had no connection to reality, surely there would have been a huge and angry backlash. But there is no record of any such complaints.

For many years, Harvard Hillel had regularly claimed that half or more of all the white undergraduates on the campus came from a Jewish background, and if this figure were wildly inaccurate, surely someone at Harvard Hillel would have eventually noticed that error and corrected it, with the same being true for Yale, Columbia, Penn, and numerous other colleges. Obviously, the criteria used to classify a student as Jewish are somewhat elastic, and we can easily suppose that the estimate generally includes part-Jews who in any way identified with that community, and may have been been somewhat exaggerated due to ethnic boosterism. But it seems highly unlikely that the figures would be utterly and demonstrably false.

These arguments based on general plausibility are strongly supported by quantitative evidence, and ironically enough, it is Baytch herself who provided it. Around the time she produced her lengthy and unpublished document, Harvard Hillel was claiming a Jewish undergraduate enrollment of 25%, and near the beginning of her text, she claimed that figure was obviously false by citing a Harvard Crimson survey indicating that only 9.5% of the Class of 2017 were Jewish. However, she failed to notice that the survey referred to being religiously Jewish, which is entirely different than being Jewish in the broader ethnic or ancestral sense, especially since Jews are among the most secular population in American society and a full 42% of the Harvard students described their religious beliefs as atheist, agnostic, or “other.” Indeed, a worldwide survey finds that only 38% of (ethnic) Jews follow the Jewish religion. So if the Crimson survey were correct and Harvard Jews were typical in their religiosity, this would imply that 9.5% / 0.38 = 25%(!!!) of Harvard freshman were ethnically Jewish, exactly the figure claimed by Harvard Hillel. Fanatic ideologues such as Baytch sometimes have a tendency to score game-ending own-goals without even realizing what they have done.

In general, classifying an individual as Jewish has a rather protean nature, with somewhat overlapping definitions based on religion, ethnicity, and full or partial ancestry, allowing it to be drastically expanded or contracted for various reasons. I suspect that Baytch’s confusion on this matter was entirely sincere, related to the obsessive tendencies she exhibited in real life. But others may employ these shifting definitions based upon more pragmatic considerations.

It is well known that for many decades the American Communist Party and especially its top leadership was overwhelmingly Jewish, even at a time when Jews were just 3% of the national population. But Jewish community leaders were not pleased with this situation, and they sometimes flatly denied the reality, insisting that there were actually no Jewish Communists whatsoever—how could there be, when Communists were hostile to all religious belief?

Similarly, my findings that Jews were apparently enrolled at Harvard and other elite colleges at a rate some 1,000% greater than white Gentiles of similar academic performance must surely have set off alarm bells within the leadership of Jewish activist organizations, who wondered how best to manage or conceal this potentially dangerous information. With a high-profile Asian discrimination lawsuit wending its way through the courts and my own unsuccessful 2016 attempt to run a slate of candidates for the Board of Harvard Overseers, the likelihood of growing public scrutiny surely loomed very large.

Baytch’s apparent confusion between having Jewish ancestry and practicing the Jewish religion would have been well-known in these circles, and offered an obvious solution. If Jewish numbers were suddenly narrowed to only include those students who claimed to follow Jewish religious practices, the flagrant over-representation of Jews on elite campuses would be greatly reduced. Meanwhile, large numbers of lesser-qualified applicants of Jewish ancestry but no religious belief could continue to gain unfair admission by writing essays about their “Holocaust grandmas” with America’s 98% Gentile population being none the wiser.

For whatever reason, Hillel seems to have recently adopted this practice, drastically reducing its published estimates of the Jewish enrollment at Harvard and other elite colleges, thus eliminating a glaring example of ethnic bias by a simple act of redefinition. For example, the Hillel website now claims that merely 11% of Harvard undergraduates are Jewish, a huge reduction from the previous 25% figure, and a total suspiciously close to the Crimson survey of a few years ago which counted Jews only based upon their religious beliefs. The Hillel figures for Yale, Princeton, and most other elite colleges have experienced equally sudden and huge declines.

One very strong clue regarding this new definition of Jewish enrollment comes from Caltech, an elite science and engineering school which is quite unlikely to attract Jews professing religious faith. According to the Hillel website, the Jewish enrollment is 0%, claiming that there absolutely no Jews on campus. Despite this, the website also describes the vibrant Jewish life at Caltech, with Caltech Jews involved in all sorts of local activities and projects. This absurd paradox is obviously due to the distinction between individuals who are Jewish by religion and those who are Jewish by ancestry.

As the 1999 media firestorm engulfing Princeton demonstrated, in the past even slight and gentle declines of Jewish enrollment over a fifteen year period would provoke massive controversy and angry denunciations from Jewish organizations. The absolute lack of any organized response to the recent sudden disappearance of nearly 60% of Harvard’s Jews certainly suggests that little more than a mere change in definition had occurred.

Many years ago as a young and naive undergraduate, I would regularly spend my dinners discussing all sorts of political and policy issues with my fellow classmates in our Harvard dining hall.

Affirmative Action was a regular topic of our conversations, and I would occasionally note how odd America was in that regard. No other example came to mind in which an ethnic group had established a legalized system of racial discrimination against its own members, while similar sorts of systems aimed at excluding or disadvantaging rival ethnic groups were all too common in world history.

As the decades went by, I gradually noticed that the huge and continuing increase in the enrollment of non-white and foreign students at our most elite universities had caused a complete collapse in the enrollment of white American Gentiles, but oddly enough, no similar reduction in Jewish numbers. It was well-known that Jewish activists had been the primary force behind the establishment of Affirmative Action and related policies in college admissions, and I began to wonder about their true motivation, whether conscious or unconscious.

Had the goal been the stated one, of providing educational opportunities to previously excluded groups? Or had that merely been the excuse used to advance a policy that eliminated the majority of white Gentiles, their primary ethnic competitors? With the Jewish population numbering merely 2%, there was an obvious limit as to how many elite college slots they themselves could possibly fill, but if enough other groups were also brought in, then Gentile numbers could easily be reduced to low levels, despite the fact that they constituted the bulk of the national population.

Asians represented an interesting test-case. As their numbers rapidly grew, white Gentiles were consequently pushed out, and this process was celebrated across the academic community. But by the late 1980s, Asian numbers had increased to such an extent that they inevitably began to impinge upon elite Jewish enrollment as well and future increases would surely worsen the situation. And at that point, the process suddenly halted, with Asian numbers being sharply reduced and thereafter permanently capped. The implications of this situation were already in the back of my mind when I published my 1998 Wall Street Journal column describing some of these striking racial facts.

The current high-profile trial in Boston is widely portrayed by the media as a conflict between Asian-American groups, whose educational interests suffer under the current subjective and opaque admissions system, and black and Hispanic groups, whose numbers might be sharply reduced under some proposed changes. Whites are largely portrayed as bystanders, with Harvard indicating that their numbers would scarcely shift even under drastic changes in admissions policy. But the term “white” encompasses both Jews and Gentiles, and thus may conceal more than it reveals.

The implications of my 2012 Meritocracy analysis are certainly well-known to all of the prominent participants and observers in the ongoing legal battle, but the fearsome power of the ADL and its media allies ensures that certain important aspects of the current situation are never subjected to widespread public discussion. Asian advocates rightly denounce the unfairness of the current elite academic admissions system, but remain absolutely mute about which American group actually controls the institutions involved.

Throughout the enormous media controversy surrounding the Harvard trial in Boston, all sides are doing their utmost to avoid noticing the 2% elephant in the room. And that fact provides the best proof of the tremendous size and power of that elephant in today’s American society.

Racial Politics in America and in California

The Unz Review • November 12, 2018 • 7,400 Words

I wasn’t closely following the midterm elections campaign, but the results seemed to be about as expected for Donald Trump and the Republicans. With some races still undecided, the Democrats will apparently pick up close to 35 House seats, giving them solid control, and also a half-dozen governorships, while losing at least a couple of Senate seats. These overall Democratic gains seem roughly what might be expected for the first midterm after a Republican presidential victory, but nothing at all like the “blue wave” that had seemed possible a few months earlier, before the bitter public battle over the Kavanaugh Supreme Court nomination greatly re-energized the Republican base.

Perhaps the loss of the House may actually prove to be a mixed blessing for Trump. Democrats will achieve control of all the investigative committees and their accusations and subpoenas will make Trump’s life even more miserable than it was before, while surely removing any chance that significant elements of Trump’s remaining agenda will ever be enacted. However, although Trump had reached the presidency by advocating a radical populist-nationalist agenda, he has hardly governed in those terms. For his first two years in office, he sunk nearly all his political capital into enacting huge tax cuts for the rich, wholesale Wall Street deregulation, large increases in military spending, and an extremely pro-Israel foreign policy—exactly the sort of policies near-and-dear to the establishment conservative candidates whom he had crushed in the Republican primaries. Meanwhile, his jilted grassroots supporters have had to settle for some radical rhetoric and a regular barrage of outrageous Tweets rather than anything more substantive. With Republicans in full control of Congress, finding excuses for this widespread betrayal was quite difficult, but now that the Democrats have taken the House, Trump’s apologists can more easily shift the blame over to them.

Meanwhile, a considerably stronger Republican Senate will certainly ease the way for Trump’s future court nominees, especially if another Supreme Court vacancy occurs, and there will be little chance of any difficult Kavanaugh battles. However, here once again, Trump’s supposed radicalism has merely been rhetorical. Kavanaugh and nearly all of his other nominees have been very mainstream Republican choices, carefully vetted by the Federalist Society and other conservative establishment groups, and they would probably have been near the top of the list if Jeb Bush or Marco Rubio were sitting in the Oval Office.

Both Trump’s supporters and his opponents claim that his presidency represents a drastic break from Republican business-as-usual, and surely that was the hope of many of the Americans who voted for him in 2016, but the actual reality often seems rather different.

Although the net election results were not particularly bad for the Republicans, the implications of several state races seem extremely worrisome. The highest profile senate race was in Texas, and Trump may have narrowly dodged a bullet. Among our largest states, Texas ranks as by far the most solidly Republican, and therefore it serves as the central lynchpin of each Republican presidential campaign. The GOP has won every major statewide race for more than twenty years, but despite such seemingly huge advantages, incumbent Sen. Ted Cruz faced a very difficult reelection race against a young border-area Congressman named Beto O’Rourke, who drew enormous enthusiasm and an ocean of local and national funding.

I was actually in Texas just a couple of days before the vote, speaking at a Ron Paul-related conference in the Houston area, and although most of the libertarian-leaning attendees thought that Cruz would probably win, they all agreed with the national media that it would probably be close. Cruz’s final victory margin of less than three points confirmed this verdict.

But if things had gone differently, and O’Rourke had squeaked out a narrow win, our national politics would have been immediately transformed. Any Republican able to win California has a near-lock on the White House, and the same is true for any Democrat able to carry Texas, especially if the latter is a young and attractive Kennedyesque liberal, fluent in Spanish and probably very popular with the large Latino populations of other crucial states such as Florida, Arizona, Nevada, and Colorado. I strongly suspect that a freshman Sen. O’Rourke (R-Texas) would have been offered the 2020 Democratic nomination almost by acclamation, and barring unexpected personal or national developments, would have been a strong favorite in that race against Trump or any other Republican. Rep. O’Rourke raised an astonishing $70 million in nationwide donations, and surely many of his contributors were dreaming of similar possibilities. A swing of just a point and a half, and in twenty-four months he probably would have been our next president. But it was not to be.

Still, the very close nature of the race does not bode well for long-term Republican control over what has certainly become one of their must-win states. O’Rourke may have been an especially attractive candidate and Cruz has often been described as unlikable, but a small margin of victory drawn entirely from the older and whiter portion of the Texas electorate reinforces the growing GOP fear that changing demographics are inevitably shifting Texas toward the Democrats.

These negative indications were even stronger in the high-profile gubernatorial races in Florida and Georgia, each narrowly won by a right-wing white Republican who faced a left-wing black Democrat. In the past a matche along such racial and ideological lines in Southern states would have been expected to produce a blowout GOP victory, but this year the margin was less than two points in Georgia and less than one in Florida. These surprisingly strong showings by the two black Democrats came despite the considerable personal baggage each had carried, with the Florida candidate under possible investigation in a local corruption scandal and the one in Georgia owing over $50,000 in unpaid federal income taxes. Normally, these would have been exactly the sort of factors that provided racially-suspicious whites convenient “psychological deniability,” allowing them to vote in overwhelming numbers for the white candidate with a clear conscience.

Although Florida was traditionally a swing state, Georgia had been solidly Republican for many years, at least on the federal level, supporting the Republican presidential candidate in six of the last seven elections, with only fellow Southerner Bill Clinton carrying it by a whisker in 1992. Both Georgia senators had been Republican since 2005, as had been most of the Congressional delegation for over two decades, along with every current statewide officeholder. In the note too distant past, Georgia had elected some prominent Democrats, but these had always been white moderates of the Southern variety. In a society whose politics was still substantially divided along racial lines, electing a vocal left-liberal black as governor might have seemed almost unthinkable, but it came within a couple of points of happening.

The apparent Democratic victory in a close Arizona Senate race represents another severe warning sign to the Republicans. With the sole exception of 1996, that state had backed the Republican presidential ticket without fail in every national election since 1960 and both senators had been Republicans since 1995, with the Congressional delegation generally skewing in that same direction for the last half century. Yet a Democrat now seems to have won an open Senate seat, something that had last happened in 1976.

The obvious factors driving the political realignments in both Georgia and Arizona were the long-term demographic trends, especially the rapid growth of the local Hispanic population. When combined with harsh anti-immigrant rhetoric by Republicans at both the national and the local levels, the result may eventually prove lethal to GOP prospects in both those states. And indeed I had predicted exactly these developments back in 2011:

Now consider the likely political future of a state such as Arizona, ground zero of the most recent national anti-immigrant backlash by nervous whites. A severe recession and rapidly changing demographics had alarmed Arizona voters, many of them elderly retirees from elsewhere, leaving them vulnerable to wild rumors of a huge immigrant crime wave, including beheadings and kidnappings, almost all of which was complete nonsense. As a result, harsh anti-immigrant measures were passed into law, and their mostly Republican supporters won sweeping victories among an electorate that is today roughly 80 percent white.

But buried near the bottom of a single one of the innumerable New York Times articles analyzing Arizona politics was the seemingly minor and irrelevant fact that almost half of all Arizona schoolchildren are now Hispanic. Meanwhile, according to Census data, over 80 percent of Arizonans aged 65 or older are white. A decade or more from now it seems likely that Arizona whites and Hispanics will enjoy perfectly good relations, and the former will have long since forgotten their current “immigrant scare.” But the latter will still remember it, and the once mighty Arizona Republican Party will be set on the road to oblivion.

Even in a rock-solid Deep South Republican state like Georgia, Hispanics have now grown into a remarkable 10 percent of the population, up from almost nothing in the early 1990s, and represent an even larger share of younger Georgians. So unless the local Republican Party can somehow greatly enhance its appeal to the 30 percent of Georgians who are black, the current wave of anti-immigrant legislation may prove highly problematical ten or 20 years down the road.

This pattern of immigration-driven demographic shifts producing a sharp but temporary backlash among conservative voters, later followed by the political collapse of the local Republican Party is hardly new to me. I first suggested this strong possibility for my own native state of California over twenty-five years ago, and I have subsequently published numerous articles and columns outlining the political dynamics both before, during, and after these political situations have occurred.

Although many of my pieces were published in leading conservative outlets such as the Wall Street Journal, and often were widely discussed and even endorsed in elite Republican circles, the immediate political pressures in the opposite direction have invariably been too strong. As a direct consequence, the once mighty California Republican Party has steadily declined into irrelevancy, most recently dropping below 25% of the electorate. For many years now, all statewide offices have been held by Democrats, who also now hold a super-majority in the State Legislature, while there is a reasonable chance that after all the races are decided, the size of the GOP Congressional delegation will have fallen to single digits.

I think my entire analysis of these political dynamics whether in California or nationally has held up very well, and I would scarcely change a single word I had previously written. Therefore, I see no reason to repeat myself at great length. Instead, I urge those so interested to read a couple of my past articles that cover the subject in considerable detail, and then decide for themselves whether in hindsight my analysis seems to have been correct.

- California and the End of White America

The unprecedented racial transformation of California and its political consequences

Ron Unz • Commentary Magazine, October 1999 • 8,600 Words

- Immigration, Republicans, and the End of White America

The sources of America's immigration problems—and a possible solution

Ron Unz • The American Conservative, September 2011 • 12,200 Words

Obviously, racial politics in America currently revolves around the positions taken by the Trump Administration. For foreign policy reasons, I had strongly favored Trump both in the primary and in the general election, but I hardly regarded him as a thoughtful vessel for the positions he claimed to espouse. To put it bluntly, he struck me much like a highly-opinionated construction worker, angrily spouting off on politics in his local neighborhood bar, being right on some matters and wrong on others, but with none of his views based upon any deep understanding of the issues. I suspect that even many of Trump’s strongest supporters have gradually come around to a similar appraisal of their idol.

This is nowhere better illustrated than in the issue of immigration, which surely won Trump the Republican nomination and played a major role in his unexpected general election victory. From the very beginning, his entirely wrong-headed approach to this highly contentious topic seems almost perfectly calculated to be both ineffective and severely damaging to his supposed goals.

A strong case can be made that American immigration levels have been far too high for many years and should be sharply reduced, and such a change would also greatly slow the ongoing demographic transformation that has so agitated large portions of the white American majority. But in this regard, Trump’s overwhelming focus on illegal immigration makes absolutely no sense at all. If we exclude a relatively small portion of the most highly-skilled legal immigrants, the remainder are probably not all that different in their characteristics from their undocumented counterparts, and indeed individuals may often shift back and forth between these two categories over time, as illegals gain green cards or legals remain here after their temporary visas expire. The ubiquitous rhetorical focus on illegal immigrants seems mostly due to a mixture of “political correctness” and political demagoguery, supplemented by sheer ignorance.

According to most estimates, the size of America’s undocumented population has been almost entirely stagnant since the Housing Meltdown wrecked employment in the construction industry, while net legal immigration has still regularly been running at a million or more a year. Therefore, it seems likely that nearly all net immigration over the last decade or so has been of the legal variety.

These simple facts apparently escape some of the loudest voices on the subject. For example, a year or so ago I happened to listen to the podcast of a leading Alt-Right personality, a prominent Trump supporter who claimed he made illegal immigration his central political focus. When asked why he generally ignored legal immigration, he answered that the numbers in that category were just too low to much matter. With such inspired leadership, the collapse of the Alt-Right movement hardly surprised me.

The signature issue of Trump’s populist campaign was to a build a wall across our Mexican border aimed at blocking the flow of illegal immigrants, and many of Trump’s supporters have become bitter at his total failure to achieve even a shred of that promise. But as I’ve frequently pointed out, the whole idea makes absolutely no sense at all. Suppose that Trump had built his wall, standing 700 feet tall and fronted by land-mines and self-firing machine-guns. If (say) 95% of our immigrants come across the border legally, how would such a wall have had any real impact on that flow? Policies based upon a total ignorance of the facts are unlikely to be successful.

Trump launched his longshot presidential bid with a denunciation of the “rapists and killers” swarming across our border with Mexico, and not long afterward his campaign caught fire when the national media went into a feeding frenzy about the fatal shooting of a young white woman named Kathryn Steinle by a much-deported Mexican national living in San Francisco. Safeguarding America from the rampaging hordes of illegals has been a central theme of the Trump Administration and its supporters, so much so that he even closed the recent midterm Congressional campaign with a highly controversial television spot featuring an illegal immigrant convicted of killing two sheriffs’ deputies in 2014.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0pdxPLCAAFE

However, this widespread notion of immigrant criminality is almost entirely false. All available evidence indicates that immigrants, legal or illegal, Hispanic or otherwise, have crime rates not all that much different from native-born white Americans of the same age and gender, and often somewhat lower. I demonstrated this important result almost a decade ago, and all the subsequent information has confirmed this finding. This reality is hardly difficult to notice in our daily lives. When I first moved to Palo Alto a quarter century ago, neighboring East Palo Alto had the highest per capita murder rate in America, but after a vast wave of immigrant Hispanics transformed its demographics, the homicide rate fell by some 97%.

- The Myth of Hispanic Crime

Ron Unz • The American Conservative, January 26, 2010 • 5,500 Words

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-60CY8mgg80

Many of the regular commenters on my webzine are zealous anti-immigrant activists, and whenever the national media focuses on the arrest of an illegal immigrant for a violent offence, they cite the case as confirming the dangers of immigrant criminality, with the Iowa rape and murder of Mollie Tibbetts a few months ago being the most recent example. However, this sort of anecdotal reasoning is entirely innumerate.

Most experts believe that there are roughly 11 million illegal immigrants in America, with some activists often claiming that the figure is far higher; meanwhile, there are over 15,000 annual homicides. Despite these huge numbers, I suspect that the number of ordinary middle-class whites killed by illegals is almost infinitesimal, probably no more than 10 per year if we exclude wives stabbing husbands and rival drug-dealers shooting each other. Energetic right-wing websites such as Breitbart and the Daily Stormer eagerly scan the news media in hopes of locating any stories of immigrant killings, and I’ve challenged those commenters to mine the archives of those publications in order to disprove my totals, but none of them have ever succeeded in doing so. Indeed, I suspect that killings of whites by illegal immigrants often generate national headlines partly because they are so exceptionally rare, and that the average white American is about as likely to be killed by lightning as murdered by an illegal. For a candidate to win the presidency based on a platform of lightning-abatement is hardly the mark of a serious country.

Ironically enough, even the details of San Francisco killing that so greatly boosted Trump’s fledgling campaign turned out to be very different than was widely imagined. Although most of Trump’s followers probably had the impression that the homicide had been committed by a hardened Latino criminal, perhaps a gang-banger driven by anti-white hatred, the facts that eventually came out at the trial were something else entirely. The culprit had been a disoriented homeless man, here illegally, who had apparently found a gun while picking through the trash. When he casually waved it around in a foolish and reckless manner, it suddenly discharged, with the bullet striking the pavement a dozen feet from where he sat, then ricocheting to fatally wound the unfortunate victim standing a hundred feet distant. Based on these unlikely circumstances, the tragedy seems much closer to being a lighting-strike than a typical street-killing.

Trump’s final pre-election remarks, claiming that he possessed the legal right to issue an Executive Order abolishing our traditional birthright citizenship provisions seemed especially ridiculous, though wildly popular within his right-wing base. Automatic U.S. citizenship for all children born here, regardless of the legal status of their parents, has been settled constitutional law for well over a century, and nearly all legal experts have held that it was guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment, as later confirmed by a 19th century Supreme Court ruling. In the last decade or two, a tiny handful of lawyers have claimed this policy could actually be overturned by Congressional legislation rather than Constitutional Amendment, but prior to Trump, no one had claimed the President had the ability to strip millions of Americans of their citizenship merely by Executive Tweet.

To my eye, the legal case for the Fourteenth Amendment birthright provision seems extremely strong and those who dispute it are doing so on very dubious grounds, clearly motivated by ideological factors. But given my lack of legal training, I would raise a different point. From the late 19th century onward, many, many millions of children have been born to illegal immigrants in this country, and all of them were always considered automatic U.S. citizens, without a single person having ever disputed that matter until quite recently. It’s not that the courts ruled that the children were citizens—it’s that across a century or so, no one had even questioned the matter enough to try to bring it before a judge, nor had any politician or opinion columnist ever raised a doubt. So opponents of birthright citizenship are clearly proposing a rather astonishing legal innovation, one which certainly would have surprised several past generations of Americans.

Now admittedly, such innovations have become somewhat more common in recent American jurisprudence. For example, as far as I know, no one in the entire history of the world had ever raised the notion of Gay Marriage until just a couple of decades ago, yet we recently discovered that our Founding Fathers had fortuitously guaranteed a right to Gay Marriage in the U.S. Constitution, where it lay undetected for more than two centuries until the time was ripe. Thus, Constitutional principles are obviously far more malleable than they might once have seemed.

Still, the practicalities of Trump’s sudden legal revolution seem quite considerable. For example, over the last century legal immigration from South of the border has been fairly low while the number of Hispanic citizens has increased by well over 40 million. Thus, it seems likely that tens of millions of these Latinos ultimately derive their citizenship from those disputed birthright provisions, and presumably some millions of white and Asian citizens would also fall into that same category. Since the legal territory is so completely uncharted, perhaps Trump believes his authority in this matter is retroactive, and for a president to strip perhaps 30 million Americans of their current citizenship with a single Tweet would certainly demonstrate the awesome power of Twitter.

In many ways, the failings of the Trump Administration illustrate the difficulties of that a superpower faces when it is run by a bar-stool political philosopher guided by his personal echo-chamber.

Twenty or more years ago I would have been extremely concerned about all these racially-charged political controversies involving immigration, and throughout the 1990s such issues were my central focus. But these days, I view these loud national media battles with detachment or irritation rather than anything more serious. The main reason is the recent trajectory of California, and not merely because it is my home state.

Whites had historically been minorities in a couple of small American states such as Hawaii and New Mexico, but for most of the twentieth century gigantic California had ranked as our whitest large state. Then, within a single generation it underwent one of the greatest demographic shifts in all human history, rapidly becoming one of the least white. During the 1990s California whites suddenly discovered that they had become a shrinking minority of their own state’s population, but they still remained a large super-majority of the California electorate. The resulting mismatch between population and political power was a major factor in the extremely bitter Immigration Wars of that period, about which I have written at considerable length.

Although immigration issues elsewhere were only slightly visible at that time, they totally dominated California issues, with potentially disastrous consequences. Under the wrong circumstances, our politics could have devolved into an escalating cycle of bitter hostility between two large blocs, with roughly half our population consisting of native-born whites and the other half of non-whites from a recent immigrant background. Due to factors of citizenship and age, the former would have held the overwhelming majority of political power and might have been tempted to use those considerable levers to block the rise of the latter, otherwise almost inevitable due to its demographic momentum.

Back then, California represented even a greater portion of our national population than it does today, being comparable to the combined total of Texas and New York, the next two largest states, and as home to Hollywood and Silicon Valley, it was the long-recognized pace-setter for the country. If such a sunny and hopeful state had suddenly become embroiled in an endless cycle of bitter racial political conflict between whites and immigrants much like the traditional black-white divides of the Deep South, that could easily have easily set the pattern nationwide.

Some especially unfortunate social policies potentially magnified this risk. Historically, the leading source of national ethnic division has usually been along the lines of language, and California seemed especially vulnerable in this regard. Almost everywhere in the world, immigrant children are taught the national language of their new country, and this had always been the case in our own schools as well. But for totally bizarre and inexplicable reasons, America had gradually abandoned this sensible policy for Hispanic immigrants. California was the national center of the newly created system of Spanish-almost-only instruction, misnamed “bilingual education,” with up to 70% of Latino children spending at least some of their school years in those classes, and as a result often failing to properly master English literacy. If our country’s largest and most important state had become sharply divided along lines of ethnicity and language, a national disaster with separatist overtones might have become a realistic possibility, especially as the pattern of immigrant relations in other states began following the dominant California model.

Fortunately, despite the very serious risks this national calamity was narrowly averted, partly through the hard work of many individuals, partly through luck, and partly through the sheer political incompetence of the California Republican Party, which Gov. Pete Wilson had opportunistically positioned as the standard-bearer of the anti-immigrant cause. Although demagoguery often produces strong short-term advantages, the California Republicans instead quickly fell into a sharp decline that has continued almost unabated to the present day, with California soon becoming a one-party Democratic state.

California’s transformed political landscape may be illustrated by a single example. In late 1994, I was a top featured speaker at a 70,000 person anti-Prop. 187 rally held in Los Angeles, the largest pro-immigrant protest in American history. The event had been organized by a local immigrant rights activist named Juan Jose Guttierez and his young Latino assistant then just a couple of years out of college, while apparently receiving very little support from any of the state’s rather timorous Hispanic elected officials.

A few years later, that young assistant, Kevin de Leon, went into politics himself. Gradually rising through the ranks, he most recently served as President of the State Senate and this November received over 45% of the vote in his unsuccessful challenge to 85-year-old incumbent Sen. Dianne Feinstein, who had held public office almost longer than her challenger had been alive. As I’ve sometimes joked with journalists over the years, De Leon seems to have done much better politically over the last 25 years than either Gov. Wilson or the California Republican Party.

Partly because the California Republicans failed so quickly in their political attempt to capitalize upon anti-immigration sentiment, almost no lasting damage was done to relations between whites and non-white immigrants, which soon returned to the quite amicable state the two groups had previously enjoyed. Indeed, within a decade anti-immigrant sentiments had faded to insignificant levels even within the overwhelmingly white and conservative Republican rump party, let alone the heavily non-white Democrats. A few years ago, I discussed this fortunate political outcome at great length.

One important factor assisting this rapid ethnic reconciliation was my own successful 1998 campaign to dismantle the failed “bilingual education” system by ballot initiative. My measure required that all young children be taught English in the public schools, and it passed in a huge landslide despite being publicly opposed by nearly every established political element in the state and massively outspent on advertising. Although for obvious reasons, almost all immigrant families had always wanted their children taught English, many deeply suspicious whites had long remained unaware of this, instead fearing that Hispanics preferred Spanish-language schools. But once the huge media coverage surrounding the initiative drove home the true facts, many sources of tension between immigrants and the native-born faded away. I think the ultimate outcome for California society is best illustrated by an amusing AT&T radio advertisement that ran across the state a couple of years ago.

https://www.unz.com/CONTENTS/AUDIO/misc/ATT-Ad-KOIT.mp3

Since California had always been the center of America’s bilingual education movement, the elimination of those programs set them on the road to oblivion elsewhere as well, especially once the New York Times, the New Republic, and the rest of the mainstream media documented the tremendous success of such educational reforms and the strong support they attracted within the immigrant community.

For decades, those disastrous bilingual programs had greatly impacted the education of many millions of Hispanic students, looming very large on the national political stage, but their collapse and disappearance was so rapid and complete that I suspect few younger Americans today are even aware that they had ever existed. I’m also unsure whether the younger generation of immigrant Californians are more than vaguely aware of the ferocious political battles over immigration that had roiled the state throughout the 1990s.

Since such a substantial fraction of America’s Hispanic and immigrant populations reside in California, their excellent current relations with their fellow white and native-born Americans serves as a very positive model for the rest of the country. Trump had made immigration concerns a central theme of his 2016 campaign, but that issue fell totally flat in America’s most heavily immigrant state, with white Californians supporting Trump at a rate 20-25 points lower than whites in the rest of the country. Indeed, if the entire white national electorate had voted like its Golden State counterpart, Trump would have lost all fifty states, mostly by huge landslides, suffering by far the greatest electoral disaster in American history. All the Trump-hating pundits would have spent Election Night laughing and saying “I told you so!”

These California sentiments hardly seem unique. Texas is our second largest state and has been following a demographic trajectory similar to that of California, with whites having fallen into minority status, soon to be passed by a rapidly growing Hispanic population. But although Texas is as strongly conservative as California is liberal, whites and Hispanics seem to get along just as well, and the enthusiastic support of the latter for O’Rourke against his Spanish-surnamed opponent hardly suggests any deep ethnic chauvinism. Florida, New York, and Illinois also contain very large concentrations of Hispanics and immigrants, who once again apparently enjoy quite good relations with their white neighbors. With such a large fraction of our immigrant population living in states displaying negligible levels of nativist rancor, the likelihood that today’s immigration controversy at the national level will produce any long-lasting negative consequences seems very low to me.

Most observers would agree that for many years America’s highest-ranking political figure of fervent anti-immigration sentiments has been Jeff Sessions of Alabama, first as a senator and more recently as Trump’s Attorney-General. But few seem to have noted the oddity that Sessions has lived his entire life in a state containing just a sliver of immigrants or Hispanics, strongly suggesting that his entire knowledge of that complex subject comes from secondary sources, perhaps those having a sharp ideological bias. Would we really tend to trust the expertise of a political leader from lily-white Vermont when it came to sorting out the difficult black-white relations of a Deep South state such as Mississippi?

A few months ago someone pointed me to a lengthy piece in the Sunday New York Times by Richard Kahlenberg, a moderate liberal who has spent the last twenty years at the Century Foundation. Kahlenberg argued that bridging our country’s enormously deep ethnic and ideological divide desperately required a Robert Kennedy-type figure, who had demonstrated a remarkable unifying ability a half-century ago before his presidential campaign was tragically cut short by an assassin’s bullet. But although I liked the piece, I pointed out that California’s political situation was quite different, having absolutely no political divide that required any bridging. Our state’s politics had become extremely bland and boring, and I cited a good article describing the heated race for state Attorney General, in which the angry charges and counter-charges were so dull and perfunctory that one’s eyes would glaze over.

In the last couple of years, American society has been experiencing a long series of bizarre Chinese Cultural Revolution-style protests against long-honored figures of our past, now denounced as “racist symbols,” with buildings renamed and leftist mobs attacking public statues. Although monuments associated with the Confederacy have been the primary targets, these attacks have often extended outside the South and even former presidents such as Woodrow Wilson, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and William McKinley have sometimes become targets, along with the author of the Star-Spangled Banner and the founder of modern gynecology. As an extreme example, the losing black gubernatorial candidate in Georgia had called for the ISIS-like destruction of the gigantic Stone Mountain Memorial, a national monument featured on a 1970 U.S. postage stamp.

Ultra-liberal California has hardly been free of such copy-cat protests, with a handful of obscure memorials to Robert E. Lee or other Confederate figures targeted and removed, along with a statue or two honoring Christopher Columbus. In Palo Alto, a zealously-PC Swedish immigrant launched a successful campaign to rename two of Palo Alto’s middle schools because they honored top academic figures of a century ago known to have advocated eugenics, even though exactly similar charges could be leveled against most other prominent American intellectuals of that same era.

But although California was seized from Mexico during a controversial 19th century war, there have been absolutely no reports of any protests aimed at the various statues and monuments honoring the leaders associated with that military action or the state’s subsequent American leadership. Ironically enough, several high-profile controversies have instead targeted symbols of California’s Mexican past, especially Father Junipero Serra, the recently-sainted founder of Spanish California. Denounced by leftists for his alleged cruelty to the Indians, Serra has had his name removed from various Stanford University buildings. Meanwhile, California’s numerous and prominent Hispanic elected officials would surely ridicule and condemn any such similar attacks against the state’s past Anglo-Saxon heritage.

In recent years, despondent white activists have sometimes bemoaned that America’s racial transformation has become irreversible and that our once overwhelmingly white country is inevitably headed for a Brazilian future, with the enormous crime, corruption, and political disorder that such a society entails. But I am very skeptical of these claims. Over the last half-century, California’s white European population has fallen from almost 85% of the total down to little more than 30%, far below that of Brazil, yet none of those terrible social ills seem anywhere to be found. Our ultra-liberal state legislature recently banned plastic straws for environmental reasons, but such nonsense seems more typical of Burlington, VT than the bloody favela politics of the Sao Paolo ghettos.

One widespread problem is that most of us draw our knowledge of the outside world from the media, and the picture of reality imparted by the conservative commentators of FoxNews is usually just as distorted and unrealistic as that of their liberal mainstream media counterparts. Back in January, the legislature established California as a “sanctuary state,” enacting various laws to shield illegal immigrants from threat of federal deportation. President Trump immediately denounced this policy in the strongest possible terms, warning that the horrifying levels of resulting immigrant crime would surely bring the state to its knees. But when a Hannity correspondent interviewed local Californians about that supposedly very controversial new policy, she was chagrined to discover that nearly all of them casually supported it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DmP0FDbGy8o

More recently, the Sacramento Bee ran a rather amusing political cartoon that seems to correctly describe the divergence between actual life in California and how matters are portrayed on FoxNews.

Obviously, those ideologically committed to a different perspective will treat my claims with extreme skepticism. But they should carefully consider some supporting evidence.

Consider that blogger Steve Sailer is a California native who moved back to live in his hometown of Los Angeles around twenty years ago. While he was growing up, that city was among the whitest in America, but for the last couple of decades the population has been half Hispanic, with white Europeans probably constituting no more than 20% of the total. Racially- or ideologically-charged topics are his primary focus, especially those connected with politics. But although his posts regularly deal with all sorts of national controversies, in recent years he has only very rarely written anything about Los Angeles politics or California issues in general. Indeed, someone reading his blog over the last decade would have remained almost entirely unaware of the many hard-fought state and city election campaigns that had spent so many hundreds of millions dollars on advertising that blankets the airwaves all around his own home. The obvious reason for his remarkable silence is that nearly all those political candidates and campaigns were so bland and boring that there was almost never anything interesting to say about them. These days, Los Angeles is just not a very “exciting” city to live in or write about. By contrast, Brazil is an extremely “exciting” country, and if he were living there, his blog would surely be overwhelmed with local stories.

Oddly enough, both Los Angeles and California had experienced far more such negative “excitement” decades ago, when both were still overwhelmingly white. Although Southern California had widely been considered a true American paradise in the 1950s and early 1960s, several tumultuous decades soon followed, encompassing the Watts Riots, the two hundred or so racial Zebra killings in San Francisco and statewide, the Manson murders, the Black Panthers, the Symbionese Liberation Army, the extremely high urban crime rates from the 1980s onward, the LA Riots, and the bitter racial turmoil of the 1990s. Throughout most of the second half of the twentieth century, our state was notorious for its bizarre and often dangerous politics, with the 1978 killing of a San Francisco-area Congressman in the huge Jonestown Massacre followed just a week later by the assassination of the mayor of that same city at the hands of a conservative former supervisor. Yet as whites became a much smaller share of the population, all this turmoil and controversy seemed to fade away, a trend exactly contrary to what fearful white activists might have normally predicted.

Admittedly, many of the examples mentioned above, such as the deadly urban riots and the Zebra killings, were directly associated with the state’s black population. But California had always had by far the smallest black population of any large state, and that fraction has dropped by less than a percentage point in the last fifty years. So black demographic changes cannot be responsible. However, today 60% of the state population is neither black nor white, and perhaps this majority has had a salutary buffering effect on the local version of America’s eternal black-white racial conflict.

California still has very serious long-term problems far beyond the deadly wildfires currently ravaging portions of the state, but few of these seem related to bitter racial or ideological conflicts. Probably the leading concern is the extremely high cost of housing, and once these huge living expenses are properly considered, the state’s resulting poverty rate is among the worst in the country. The post-Cold War era of the early 1990s saw the disappearance of Southern California’s huge aerospace industry, which had traditionally been the largest source of well-paying middle class jobs, and although the current Tech Boom—or perhaps Tech Bubble—has created enormous wealth, nearly all of that has been concentrated within a sliver of the population, giving California one of America’s most unequal income distributions. Some of these poverty problems are being gradually alleviated by the 2015 enactment of a huge rise in the statewide Minimum Wage, which will reach $15 per hour by 2023, a political movement that I’m proud to have substantially fostered, but that impact is a gradual one.

It seems undeniable that most of these major California problems are closely connected to the doubling of the state’s population since the late 1960s, and nearly all of that huge increase was due to very heavy foreign immigration. Such rapid population growth naturally benefits Capital at the expense of Labor, so the resulting changes have both raised housing costs and lowered worker wages. There has also been a sharp reduction in the quality of life as more and more residents have been pushed out into the less desirable portions of the state, such as the smoggy Inland Empire of Riverside and San Bernardino counties, which often require horrific traffic commutes to Los Angeles area jobs. Even the recent spate of wildfires may not be entirely unconnected since suburban growth puts more areas at risk and state water problems have been exacerbated by increased consumption. But most of these same problems would have occurred if the many millions of newcomers had been white rather than Hispanic or Asian.

The affluent and extremely pleasant California lifestyle of the post-war era was widely recognized across America, and that magnetic lure produced the early stages of the state’s very rapid population growth. But more recently, the ill effects of congested traffic, terrible housing options, and stiff job competition at the lower end had greatly reduced state’s attractions. Growth has sharply fallen, though this is partly because continuing inflows of immigrants have been partially matched by a simultaneous outflow of existing residents.

Obviously, at some point a combination of severe overcrowding, unaffordable housing, and general worker impoverishment will sufficiently reduce the attractions of our society that the continuing inflow of immigrants will fall to merely a trickle. But this hardly seems the most desirable solution to our problems, whether in California or in other states moving along the same trajectory. Meanwhile, our deadlocked Congress has failed to enact any significant immigration legislation in 28 years, and the extremely rancorous relations between the Trump White House and newly Democratic House hardly suggest that anything will soon change. As a consequence, both Trump and Obama have been forced to issue Executive Orders of an extremely dubious legal nature, whether granting temporary protected status to illegal immigrant “Dreamers” or now promising to automatically reject all refugee claims along our Southern border. The gap between pro- and anti-immigration forces seems absolutely unbridgeable and likely to continue indefinitely, even though both sides remain extremely dissatisfied with the status quo.

However, as I argued a couple of years ago, the widespread belief that our immigration problems are insoluble is based on a very serious misunderstanding of the contending elements involved. Both the media and the political participants regard the conflict as being waged between two sides, but that is mistaken. There are actually three political factions: pro-immigrant Democrats, pro-immigration Republicans, and anti-immigration Republicans. All the unsuccessful Congressional efforts of the last couple of decades involved an alliance of the first two groups failing to overcome the opposition of the third, and with Trump having enormously increased the power of that last faction, there is no prospect for any change in that situation.

But careful consideration will reveal that the major goals of the first and third groups—pro-immigrant Democrats and anti-immigration Republicans—are actually not directly in conflict, and if they formed a political alliance, they could easily formulate legislation acceptable to both that might stand have an excellent chance of passing both houses of Congress and being signed into law by the President. Although I published my analysis of this solution several weeks before Trump’s upset 2016 victory, I think that it is just as correct and relevant today, and perhaps even more so given that November election results have produced a divided Congress, closing the door on other options.

- A “Grand Bargain” on Immigration Reform?

An alliance of pro-immigrant Democrats and anti-immigration Republicans could finally fix our broken system

Ron Unz • October 3, 2016 • 4,700 Words

An Open Letter to the "Alt-Right" and Others

The Unz Review • December 24, 2018 • 2,000 Words

Given the current federal government shut-down over funding of a border-wall and the continuing increase in Internet censorship and “deplatforming,” I’ve decided I might as well publish a lengthy note I’d privately circulated last year to a considerable number of individuals, many of whom were then prominently associated with the “Alt-Right” movement.

A few people had suggested at the time that I release it, but I felt I was much too preoccupied with my software work to involve myself in any resulting discussion. The heated reaction to my recent discussion of racial politics in California does indicate that these issues still deserve a wider audience.

Very little has happened in the last fifteen months that would cause me to reconsider any of my views.

A Confidential Note to Various “Alt-Right” People and Others

Dated: August 21, 2017

I’ve been very dismayed by the recent “political purge” being conducted by some of the largest Internet companies, in which numerous controversial websites of the “Alt Right” have suddenly been “disappeared,” and in which all sorts of basic Internet services such as PayPal have been terminated to many of the others on grounds of political ideology. Some of these sites might eventually come back, but I’d assume that others are gone forever.

This is a very disheartening development, and has enormous negative implications for freedom of thought on the Internet. I’m very busy with my own software work, but have already run or republished a number of highly critical articles of this purge on my website, and will certainly continue to do so in the future. I’ve also run numerous articles suggesting that the current excuse for this purge, namely the recent violence at Charlottesville, is being heavily slanted and misreported in the MSM.

There’s also a chance that some of the projects I’m currently working on might somewhat help somewhat mitigate this situation, though none of you should much count upon that for the immediate future.

However, that being said, I’d like to provide some very candid observations regarding what I think were some of the factors over the years that put all of you in this terrible predicament. Whether or not you decide to accept my conclusions is your own choice, but the sentiments I’m expressing are entirely sincere.

First, I’m sure that all of you realize that there are very powerful interests that are extremely hostile to your positions, and which are always looking for some means of shutting you down, one way or another. These groups possess enormous wealth, media power, and political connections and none of you have any of those things. Under such circumstances, I think that the “risky behavior” in which some of you have chosen to indulge has contributed to your situation.

I’d also like to emphasize that many of your opponents, whether in the commanding heights of power or in the form of “antifa”-associated radical activists, engage in all sorts of questionable and dishonest behavior as well, saying all sorts of things that are extreme or just aren’t true. But since their side almost entirely controls the distribution of information in the MSM and elsewhere, they can get away with these things while you yourselves cannot. That’s certainly not fair, but as the old saying goes “Life is Unfair.”

Now although I’m a software developer and live in the heart of Silicon Valley in Palo Alto, I’m really not part of the mainstream “tech community” and only very slightly know a few of the prominent figures in it. But I think I have a reasonably good sense of what’s going on and why they’re taking the absolutely unprecedented step of purging many of you from the Internet.

My strong impression is that most of the leading Silicon Valley people are generally pretty nice and reasonable, but are very politically unsophisticated. They’re totally focused on technology and business issues, and with a few exceptions here and there, don’t really pay any deep attention to politics or ideological matters, sub-contracting out those things to the same “mainstream” opinion-forming elites who provide that role for almost everyone else in our society. Just think of the leading Silicon Valley people as your pleasant, college-educated next door neighbors, who sporadically catch the regular news on TV, glance at the newspaper headlines, and regard that as the reality of the world.

As an example, when “everyone says” that Russia hacked our presidential election, well, then, I suppose that Russia must have hacked our presidential election. And pretty much the same applies to matters of race, ethnicity, and social policy.

Now most sensible people somewhat weigh the reality presented in the MSM against what they actually experience in their day-to-day lives, and if there’s a sharp divergence between the two, they may gradually become suspicious of the MSM, and begin turning to alternate sources of information, even including the sort of ideological views presented on your own websites. That’s obviously why your own readership has risen quite a lot over the last few years, and why Donald Trump stunned America’s elites by winning the presidency despite 99% opposition in the MSM. Maybe all the TV programs told working class whites in the Midwest or the South that things under Obama were great and Trump was horrible, but when they looked around themselves, they saw something totally different, so they decided the MSM was just lying and voted Trump.

But the problem that all of you face is that when people in Silicon Valley look around themselves, what they see reasonably matches the claims of the MSM, while if they ever visit Breitbart, let alone any of your own Alt-Right websites, you mostly come across like a bunch of total lunatics. Therefore, when the MSM recently claimed that you were all a bunch of violent, murderous madmen, they stampeded the Silicon Valley people into deciding to help shut all of you down as a public service to America.

Let’s take a few salient issues. Over the last year or two, I’d guess that 70% of the most visible and heated rhetoric coming from Donald Trump has involved ferocious attacks on Muslims, Mexicans, and immigrants in general, and certainly that’s also been a major theme of his backers both in the Alt-Right and the Alt-Lite.

Now obviously, almost every mainstream/prominent figure in American politics and media, Democrat and Republican, has denounced these attacks in the strongest possible terms as “racist,” “bigoted,” etc. But that had no impact upon Trump’s support in e.g. West Virginia, since the people there watched FoxNews shows about Muslims conquering America and imposing Sharia law, and had become very fearful. The fact that ordinary West Virginians have almost no real life contact with Mexicans, Muslims, or immigrants left them open to such nonsense.

But Silicon Valley is a different story. One-third of the local population consists of Hispanic immigrants, mostly Mexican and a large fraction from an illegal immigrant background. There are huge numbers of other immigrants in the technology industry, and a noticeable slice of them are Muslims. Nearly all of these groups seem like perfectly fine people, very few are criminals, and virtually none are terrorists. Trump and Ann Coulter and others may talk about swarming hordes of “Mexican rapists,” but they just don’t seem to exist in real life. Rightwingers may claim that immigrant crime has been forcing affluent whites to barricade themselves inside gated communities, but Silicon Valley has no gated communities. For twenty years, Steve Jobs lived in an ordinary house sitting on an ordinary street, one which wouldn’t have seemed too out of place in the white-bread San Fernando Valley of the 1950s, and the same is true for many of the other top Silicon Valley execs.

Alt-Right people are always talking about the horrific future consequences of white Europeans becoming a minority, but they already became a minority decades ago in Silicon Valley, and these days are probably down to around 30% or so. Yet everything is perfectly fine here. Well, not perfectly fine since everyone is always complaining about traffic being terrible and housing prices ridiculously high, but these aren’t exactly the central concerns raised by the Alt-Right.

California overall is almost 40% Hispanic these days, heading towards an outright majority, and the top two leaders in the State Legislature are Hispanic, as are many of the other members. But although tearing down “racist” Civil War monuments has become the burning issue in the South and along the East Coast, there hasn’t been the slightest talk of doing anything to the various monuments or towns honoring various figures from the Mexican-American War or the annexation of California. Frankly, the whole notion would seem so ridiculous it would just be laughed out of court.

Admittedly, some of the renaming nonsense did recently spread to ultra-liberal Palo Alto. Some ultra-PC immigrant from Sweden was horrified to discover that two of the local middle schools, Terman and Jordan, were named after pro-eugenicist academics from the Stanford of a century ago, and despite opposition he stampeded the Palo Alto school board into voting to rename those schools, but although it’s ridiculous, it’s not exactly the same thing as what’s been happening with mobs attacking those those statues in New Orleans and elsewhere.

So the problem is that when people notice that many of the things your organizations are saying are absolutely 100% contrary to what they actually see in their ordinary lives, they quickly conclude that you’re just as crazy as your critics in the MSM always say you are, and they immediately dismiss all of your other claims and ideas. Perhaps that’s not entirely fair, but it’s what happens.

Meanwhile, certain other “alt-right”-type issues have very little daily resonance in Silicon Valley. For example, black behavior here is just as problematical as it is elsewhere, and blacks are responsible for a remarkably high fraction of all the serious local crime. But since there are very few blacks, it’s relatively easy for local “good-thinking” people to pretend not to notice the problem. Overall, California has by far the lowest black percentage of any large state, and for Silicon Valley, the figure is something like 3%, of which a relatively high fraction are middle-class engineers and such, while overall crime rates are too low for it to be much of an issue. Anyway, my impression was that Trump and his people were far too PC to ever talk much about black crime, instead focusing their concerns on the deadly threat of pro-Iranian terrorists and Islamic Shariah Law and all that sort of nonsense.

The bottom line is that some of the things the Alt-Right has been saying for years are generally true while other things are generally false. Your misfortune is that it is the falsehoods which have the most day-to-day presence in the lives of the Silicon Valley community, thus leading to their total dismissal of your entire message, and perhaps the blacklisting of most of your websites and organizations, thereby setting a very dangerous precedent for the future of the First Amendment in America.

At this stage, I’m really not sure that any of you can do anything, and anyway maybe the newly Neoconized Trump administration will get us all into some crazy nuclear war with Russia or China or both, rendering this whole website situation completely moot. But I thought I might as well provide you my honest appraisal of how you got into these difficulties.

Like I said, I’m very busy with my software work, so perhaps I shouldn’t have taken the time to send this note, but the overall Internet trends are so unfortunate, I decided to put together a few quick words on the matter.

Ron Unz

August 21, 2017

Immigration, Building a Wall, and Hispanic Crime

The Unz Review • January 14, 2019 • 5,800 Words

Back in November I published a long column discussing the results of the 2018 midterm elections and then a couple of weeks ago I also released a private letter I’d distributed to prominent figures in the Alt-Right movement back in 2017, suggesting some of the ways that their public positions had severely damaged their credibility and injured their nascent political movement.

Immigration and the closely-related issue of Hispanic crime were important elements of both my pieces, so perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised that I provoked such an enormous outpouring of (mostly hostile) responses, now totaling well over 3,000 comments and nearly 500,000(!) words. The bitter immigration dispute between President Donald Trump and the new Democratic Congress has already produced the longest federal government shut-down in American history, so this controversial subject has certainly reached the absolute center of the American political stage.

Unfortunately, I believe that there are few other topics in which such severe misinformation, often of an emotionally charged nature, has so totally contaminated the political debate, sometimes on both sides of the controversy. Given this situation, I’ve decided to provide a general summary of what I see as some of the crucial facts together with my analysis.

The dismal state of factual misinformation widespread within the anti-immigration community is best illustrated by a single striking example. Among such individuals, no piece of American legislation is as fiercely condemned as the 1965 Hart-Celler Immigration Act, routinely denounced as the law that destroyed our country by opening the floodgates to the influx of countless millions of non-white Third Worlders, thereby dooming America to eventual white-minority status. These critics often single out Ted Kennedy as the particular villain behind this policy, even though he had only just reached the Senate a couple of years earlier, and as a very junior member played only a relatively minor role in enacting this statute.

This supposed impact of the 1965 Act certainly possesses superficial plausibility. The measure was widely advertised as a loosening of our strict immigration quotas of the 1920s and non-white immigration did enormously increase in the decades that followed. Largely as a consequence of the latter, America’s white population declined from 84% to just 62% between 1965 and 2015, with our rapidly-growing Latino population now reaching 18% of the total. Today more than half of young American children are non-white, and within a couple of decades whites will have become a minority of our entire population, a situation that would have been absolutely unimaginable back in 1965. Indeed, the careful demographers of the Pew Research Center have determined that the overwhelming majority of these racial changes have been due to post-1965 immigration, without which America would still be 75% white today. Since 1965 our non-white population has grown by 86 million, but 60 million of that increase has been due to immigration, overwhelmingly from Latin America and the Caribbean.

Given these undeniable statistics, I would guess that 99% of anti-immigration activists currently believe that the 1965 Immigration Act was responsible for opening our borders and thereby destroying white-majority America. Ann Coulter’s best-selling screed Adios America! is filled with ferocious attacks against the 1965 Act and Sen. Ted Kennedy on exactly these grounds.

Unfortunately, all these individuals have the facts exactly backwards and upside-down. The 1965 Act didn’t OPEN America’s borders, instead it largely CLOSED America’s borders.

The history is very simple. Prior to the 1920s, America allowed unlimited immigration from Europe and Latin America. Then the 1924 Immigration Act sharply restricted European immigration, but retained an “open borders” policy toward Latin America and the rest of the Western Hemisphere, largely because Southwestern business interests desired an unrestricted supply of Mexican labor. This only changed with the 1965 Act, which for the first time imposed strict quotas upon immigration from Latin America and the Caribbean even as it loosened restrictions upon European and Asian immigration. Prior to 1965, any Latin American who paid a small fee at the border, generally in the range of $18, could legally immigrate to America with almost no waiting period. Immigration had remained low merely because Mexico and most of Latin America had traditionally been under-populated.

The huge rise in Latin American immigration after 1965 was due to the enormous population growth in that region and came in spite of the 1965 Act rather because of it.

If Congress had never passed the 1965 Act, illegal immigration would never have become an issue because legal immigration from Latin America would have remained entirely unlimited. I suspect that the influx of legal Hispanics might have reached 5 million per year by the 1990s, and perhaps the entire impoverished population of Haiti would have relocated to our shores. Immigration over the last fifty years has increased our non-white population by some 60 million, but without the sharp restrictions of the 1965 Act, the figure would surely have been 120 million or perhaps even 180 million. Such a scenario can hardly be viewed with favor by racially-focused immigration-restrictionists.

This gigantic factual error at the core of the anti-immigration movement was almost certainly unintentional. Presumably, some early activist 25 or 30 years ago was careless and made an honest mistake regarding the legal details of the 1965 Act, a mistake that soon got into widespread circulation. Since that time, many thousands of other immigration-activists have quoted and requoted that initial blunder across the Internet, until almost everyone in this insular ideological community has come to believe it.

Anyone can make a mistake, but the fact that this misinformation has remained so widespread for so many years suggests the rather unreliable quality of most anti-immigration sources across the Internet.

Indeed, for the last dozen years or so, I’ve periodically brought this serious error to the attention of various anti-immigration websites. They’ve checked the facts, said Oops!, and immediately discontinued their incessant attacks against the 1965 Act and Teddy Kennedy. But they obviously couldn’t take down the hundreds of pieces they had already published on the subject, nor could they publicly admit their longstanding error without looking ridiculous, so almost none of their readers or peers become aware of the correction, and the denunciations of the 1965 Act in their community continue almost unabated. Sometimes after a few years, these websites even return to attacking the 1965 Act themselves, as less well-informed contributors join or the peer-pressure simply becomes too strong.

When we recognize that almost all of today’s anti-immigration activists have spent decades looking at our central immigration legislation of the last half-century upside-down, we should not be surprised to discover that other erroneous beliefs are also widespread in that community, and some of these have far greater practical political significance. The enormous support for “building a wall” to stop illegal immigration is perhaps the best example.

First, if we exclude a relatively small portion of the most highly-skilled legal immigrants, the remainder are probably not all that different in their characteristics from their undocumented counterparts, and indeed individuals may often shift back and forth between these two categories over time, as illegals gain green cards or legals remain here after their temporary visas expire. The ubiquitous rhetorical focus on illegal immigrants seems mostly due to a mixture of “political correctness” and political demagoguery, supplemented by sheer ignorance.

According to most estimates, the size of America's undocumented population has been almost entirely stagnant since the 2008 Housing Meltdown wrecked employment in the construction industry, while net legal immigration has still regularly been running at a million or more a year. Therefore, it seems likely that nearly all net immigration over the last decade or so has been of the legal variety.

Now there are numerous plausible reasons to argue that immigration levels are far too high and should be substantially reduced, but if nearly all the flow is legal, the near-exclusive focus on the sliver of illegals makes absolutely no sense.

The signature issue of Trump’s populist campaign was building a wall across our border to block illegal immigration, and America has now endured our longest federal government shut-down over funding this proposal. But as I’ve repeatedly pointed out, even if we built such a wall 700 feet tall and fronted with self-firing machine-guns, I fail to see how it would have any impact whatsoever on legal immigration, which is probably over 95% of the total. Government policies based upon sheer ignorance and stupidity are hardly likely to be successful.

When I’ve periodically raised some of these points in the past, agitated rightwingers have sometimes angrily denounced me, though without offering any logical counter-argument. But under the circumstances, perhaps I should provide an additional source that may possess greater credibility in such ideological circles.

Despite having been totally “deplatformed” from all normal Internet services, the neo-Nazi Daily Stormer still apparently gets more traffic than all the other Alt-Right websites in the world combined, and its editor, Andrew Anglin, is an ardent Trump supporter. Nevertheless, he recently ran a lead editorial in which he ridiculed the whole “Build the Wall” nonsense, and correctly suggested that all the talk about it was largely due to the totally brainwashed stupidity of most anti-immigration rightwingers:

We currently have a million people coming in every year through the various “legal” methods who do not leave and are often given citizenship…People are stupid in general, and most simply do not understand that the real threat to America is legal immigration…

The wall is largely a symbolic gesture in the larger scheme of things, and speaks to the absolutely brainwashed nature of the mass of conservatives who believe that legal immigration is “okay.”

I remember before Trump having these conversations in Columbus, Ohio, and hearing people say “it's the illegals that's the problem” and replying “well what about all these Somalians?” People would look confused for a minute and then say “aren't they illegal?”

Hearing them talk about “I just want it to be legal” is infuriating, as they do not have any clear explanation as to why they believe this, and the fact that there is virtually no difference between the two allows liberals to exploit their inability to explain a difference and make them look stupid.

Major political struggles are often decided by a battle of “competing incompetence” and if our anti-immigration movement is handicapped by being woefully ignorant and innumerate, it possesses the distinct advantage that many of its leading opponents—whose ideas permeate our ruling elites—are downright insane.

This unfortunate fact was brought home to me a few years ago when I was invited to participate in a televised Intelligence Squared immigration debate held in New York City. For two decades my writings and political activity had established me as one of the foremost pro-immigrant voices in public policy circles, but the contours of the elite ideological landscape had so radically shifted that I was actually enlisted to take the anti-immigration side of the question, joined by the co-founder of the eminently pro-immigrant Migration Policy Institute.

The proposition under debate was that “Anyone Should be Able to Take a Job Anywhere,” namely that America and the rest of the world should adopt the extreme libertarian doctrine of eliminating all restrictions on the free movement of workers.

When I was first approached about participating, I thought the whole proposal so ridiculous that the organizers would have a very difficult time locating anyone to take the other side, but I was entirely mistaken. Not only had they easily located prominent advocates, but the introductory remarks of the chairman of the forum suggested that he was surprised that anyone could seriously oppose such an “Open Borders” proposal. Indeed, the initial polling of the New York City audience showed a wide margin in favor.

However, ninety minutes later the situation had entirely changed. Once I and my equally pro-immigrant debate partner had pointed out the obvious lunacy in opening our borders to the unlimited influx of foreign workers, the proposition was soundly defeated, with the swing in votes being the largest of any ever seen in the history of that longstanding public debate series.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EwRVNVT6xLY

- Open Borders, American Elites, and the Minimum Wage

Views change about massive immigration once both sides of the issue are heard

Ron Unz • November 11, 2013 • 1,700 Words

The inescapable conclusion is that the elite New Yorkers in that audience had lived their entire lives scrupulously insulated from any plausible arguments critical of high immigration levels. Indeed, in a previous article I had noted that our presidential candidates sometimes seemed likewise hermetically sealed in a bubble of immigration insanity:

As an extreme example of the bizarre ideological views of our current political elites, consider a less-publicized element of the immigration reform plan that President George W. Bush trumpeted during his 2004 reelection campaign. This provision would have allowed any foreigner anywhere in the world to legally immigrate to America if he accepted a minimum-wage job that no American were willing to fill, an utterly insane proposal which would have effectively transformed America's minimum wage into its maximum wage. Naturally his opponent, Sen. John Kerry, saw absolutely nothing wrong with this idea, though he did criticize various other aspects of Bush's immigration plan as being somewhat mean-spirited.

Under such circumstances one would naturally think that critics of current immigration policy would have a very easy time winning the policy debate. But this is obviously not the case as we have seen from the November election results and most public opinion polls and the reasons may be suggested in the following brief political allegory I’ve sometimes presented.

I assume that there are government regulations limiting the number of passengers on a commercial bus. But suppose the bus companies all got together and after doing some market research, decided they could make more money if they packed their passengers in like sardines.

So they hired some thinktankers and consultants to start an “Open Doors” movement, denouncing the horrifying unfairness of closing bus doors to passengers who wanted to get on. Indeed, they viciously attacked their opponents as being “anti-people” since they were trying to prevent more people from getting on buses.

Naturally, their opponents fought back. But suppose the loudest activists claimed that if you put too many people on a bus, they'd all turn into werewolves and a massive wave of brutal killings would result.

The entire bus policy debate would be diverted into the question of whether werewolves actually existed and whether crowded buses might induce widespread lycanthropy. Under such a scenario, I think the “Open Doors” side would probably win, especially if they had so much more money for buying media ads and bribing politicians.

A national policy debate over whether immigration levels are much too high is long overdue. Instead, Donald Trump together with his political advisers and activist allies have sparked a heated battle over claims that hordes of Mexican “rapists and killers” are illegally swarming across our border and we must build a wall to stop them. As a direct consequence, the supposedly horrific threat of immigrant and especially Hispanic crime has become a staple theme of rightwing pundits over the last couple of years. The awesome stupidity of this political strategy is a remarkable thing to behold.

Just as in the case of their topsy-turvy misunderstanding of the 1965 Immigration Act, I tend to believe that most of these factual errors by rightwing activists are rooted in simple incompetence rather than deliberate dishonesty. The climate of “political correctness” enforced upon our journalists and academic scholars on racially-charged issues such as crime tends to suppress any candid discussion of the facts, and in such a climate of silence, wild rumors and misunderstood statistics can easily propagate among ideological groups that have grown highly suspicious of the mainstream media narrative.

Partly in hopes of rectifying this sort of confusion, back in 2010 I had published a careful analysis of Hispanic crime rates, and although none of my methodology seemed especially remarkable, my findings provoked quite a lot of attention both from anti-immigration advocates and a number of mainstream journalists. Indeed, an indication of the near-total vacuum of serious discussion on this important topic is that even after nearly a decade, my article still generally ranks at or near the top of the many tens of millions of search results whenever anyone googles “Hispanic crime” or “Latino crime.”

- The Myth of Hispanic Crime

Talk TV sensationalists and axe-grinding ideologues have fallen for a myth of immigrant lawlessness

Ron Unz • The American Conservative, January 26, 2010 • 5,500 Words

A few weeks ago I recapitulated some of these findings along with various others while speaking at a Ron Paul-related conference in the Houston area.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SVG1UtaFvRo

Two of the most important points I made in my crime analysis were very simple ones.

First, regardless of all other factors, criminal activity has always been concentrated among relatively youthful males, and the age-distributions of Hispanics and (non-Hispanic) whites are quite different. Hispanics have a median age in their late 20s, putting them near the peak of their highest-crime years, while the median age of whites is in the mid-40s, meaning that a large majority are past the likely age for committing serious crimes. Therefore, all measures of criminal activity, such as incarceration rates, should be adjusted to the size of the high-crime-age male cohort. This allows us to properly estimate the relative crime rates of Hispanics and whites of the same age.

It is also very important to recognize that federal incarceration statistics severely distort ethnic estimates of American criminality. Nearly all ordinary crimes such as robbery, rape, murder, assault, arson, and theft are prosecuted in state courts and those convicted are sent to state prisons or local jails, with these containing 90% of criminal offenders. Meanwhile, half of all federal arrests are for immigration violations, and non-resident foreigners caught smuggling drugs at the border also receive federal sentences. Rep. Steve King of Iowa has long been a zealous critic of illegal immigrants and their supposedly high crime rates, and apparently under his prodding, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) issued a 2011 report providing the incarceration rates of non-citizens, whether legal or illegal. While roughly 4-6% of state inmates were illegal immigrants, the non-citizens held in federal prisons were a remarkable 27% of the total, with 90% of these being charged with immigration or drug violations and also roughly 90% being Hispanic.

In estimating the rates of ordinary “street crime” among different groups, we would obviously want to exclude illegal nannies arrested for illegal nannying and non-resident Mexicans caught smuggling drugs at the border, so my 2010 analysis excluded federal prisons while adjusting these ethnic incarceration rates by the size of the high-crime-age male population. Based on this methodology, I derived the following results:

Although ordinary police reports sometimes conflate ethnicity with race, and report Hispanics as white, this is certainly not the case with large state prison systems, given the severe problems they face with racially-based gang violence, so these figures should be regarded as highly reliable. Obviously, the white and Hispanic incarceration rates are actually quite close, while the black figures are an extreme outlier.

Many of my findings were also confirmed from other sources. For example, I later discovered that PPIC, California’s leading think-tank, had published a detailed 2006 analysis of ethnic incarceration rates in California, and contained age-adjusted incarceration statistics very similar to my own California estimates, an important result since California by itself contains a substantial fraction of America’s entire Hispanic population; a 2018 PPIC follow-up study provided roughly similar results. The national rise of the Black Lives Matter movement prompted California’s very liberal State Legislature to require the state Attorney General to publish exact statistics on racial/ethnic arrest rates for all crime categories throughout the state, and the most recent 2015 report showed that the racial distribution of violent crime arrests also followed a very similar pattern. I believe that all available evidence over the last decade has fully supported the conclusions in my 2010 Hispanic Crime article.

Then in 2013, I also published a longer and more comprehensive analysis of urban crime rates in America, one that provided a very candid analysis of the racial patterns these followed, and suggested the powerful, subterranean roles these realities had probably played in quietly shaping numerous seemingly unrelated political decisions, notably including immigration policy.

- Race and Crime in America

The unspoken statistical reality of urban crime over the last quarter century

Ron Unz • July 20, 2013 • 7,200 Words

One of my most striking results was that over the last twenty-five years, there had been an exceptionally strong and growing relationship across all our major cities between the fraction of its black population and the rates of both violent crime and homicide.

In discussing these findings, I went on to note:

It is important to recognize that within the world of academic sociology discovering an important correlation in the range of 0.80 or above is quite remarkable, almost extraordinary. And even these correlations between black population prevalence and urban crime rates may actually tend to significantly understate the reality. All these correlations were performed on a city-wide aggregate basis. The New York City numbers include both the Upper East Side and Brownsville, Los Angeles both Bel Air and Watts, Chicago the Gold Coast and Englewood, with each city's totals averaging those of both the wealthiest and the most dangerous districts. This crude methodology tends to obscure the local pattern of crime, which usually varies tremendously between different areas, often roughly corresponding to the lines of racial segregation. It is hardly a secret that impoverished black areas do have far higher crime rates than affluent white ones.

If instead we relied upon smaller geographical units such as neighborhoods, our results would be much more precise, but ethnicity data is provided by zip code while crime data is reported by precinct, so a major research undertaking would be required to match these dissimilar aggregational units for calculation purposes. However, the apparent geographical pattern of crime in these cities and most others might lead us to suspect that our national racial correlations would become substantially greater under such a more accurate approach, perhaps often reaching or even exceeding the 0.90 level. The inescapable conclusion is that local urban crime rates in America seem to be almost entirely explained by the local racial distribution.

Several of America’s most eminent social scientists were greatly impressed by these statistical results.

These national urban crime correlations clearly indicate that the size of the local Hispanic or immigrant population has little if any impact upon crime rates, and when I cited them, various racially-agitated rightwingers denounced me in the strongest possible terms, suggesting that I was using statistical tricks to hide the obvious reality of high Hispanic crime. In particular, they claimed that my emphasis on weighted-correlations of urban crime rates over the last quarter-century was motivated by my dishonesty, and I had deliberately failed to provide the results of multivariate regressions, which surely would have told a very different story.

Eventually, these harsh insults and accusations became so irritating that I dug up my old data and ran a dozen multivariate regressions. These naturally revealed that the P-Values for the differences between the impact of whites and Hispanics on local crime rates were statistically insignificant, just as I knew they would be.

Several other commenters attempted to rebut my analysis by citing selected portions of the 2016 research report The Color of Crime, published by Jared Taylor, one of America’s leading White Nationalists. This led me to carefully examine that study, which is conveniently available both in HTML and PDF formats. The author was Edward Rubinstein, an experienced economist, and although I might take some issue with the emphasis or presentation of some of the material, the basic data seemed quite solid and the analysis carefully prepared. Indeed, it brought to my attention several sources of useful official statistics of which I had previously been unaware. But in general, I found the contents of the report fully consistent with the findings in my own 2010 and 2013 articles.

The source of confusion for many readers had been the detailed racial crime statistics presented for New York City and Chicago, which seemed to show Hispanic crime rates far higher than what I had presented. But this merely reflected the considerable heterogeneity of the Hispanic population. Nationally, the overwhelming majority of Hispanics are Meso-American, with only a small minority being Caribbean. But this latter group had traditionally constituted the bulk of the Hispanic population in New York City and the rest of the Northeast, as well as to some extent in Chicago, and (non-Cuban) Caribbean Hispanics have generally had far higher crime rates. I had discussed this important issue and its implications at considerable length in my Hispanic Crime article:

Furthermore, contrary to official bureaucratic categories, Hispanics are hardly a monolithic ethnic group and actually exhibit large variations in their cultural traditions based on country of origin. The very low Hispanic imprisonment rate in Florida may reflect the considerable economic and social success of the Cuban community centered there. Another set of obvious outliers are the states of the Northeast, primarily the New York/New England region, in which relative Hispanic imprisonment rates generally run two to three times higher than the national Hispanic average, as shown in Chart 2. These exceptionally high Hispanic incarceration rates probably reflect the considerable social and economic difficulties long experienced by the large Puerto Rican and Dominican communities that have settled in that region.

]

The high incarceration rate for these Caribbean Hispanics may partially explain general perceptions of Hispanic crime rates. A large proportion of America's intellectual, media, and political elite lives in the Northeast, in cities like New York and Boston, and if the Hispanics traditionally living in those areas have unusually high rates of criminal activity, there would be a natural if mistaken tendency to assume that this same pattern also applied to Hispanic groups throughout the country.

But outside the Northeast, the vast majority of Hispanics are Meso-American, being either from Mexico or Central America. Chart 3 summarizes the very different relative imprisonment rates for these groups by focusing on the most heavily Hispanic states outside the Northeast.

Moreover, if we consider weighted-average age-adjusted Hispanic imprisonment ratios excluding those outlying cases of the Northeastern states, we discover that the remaining figure moves into close parity with white incarceration rates. (See Chart 4.) Since Hispanics are still considerably poorer than whites, this is a striking result. Also, crime rates are always higher in densely populated urban areas than in suburbs or rural communities, and since Hispanics are three times as likely as whites to live in cities, their relatively low imprisonment rates become even more surprising.

When I provided some of these simple quantitative findngs in my recent columns or their comment-threads, I naturally provoked a vast wave of angry denials, with vociferous claims that my statistics were somehow “cooked” and that Hispanics obviously had the high crime rates so widely believed in certain ideological circles. Some of these agitated individuals seemed to respond as if a central pillar of their world-view were crumbling before their very eyes.

Given this extreme reluctance to accept any of the broader statistical evidence I had offered, I added a handful of simple questions for such hostile skeptics to ponder:

- The two most heavily Hispanic cities in America are El Paso and Santa Ana, each about 80% Hispanic. They have fairly low crime and homicide rates. The same is true for most of the other heavily or substantially Hispanic cities around the country. If Hispanics had unusually high crime rates that you believe, how would this be possible?

- A half-century ago, Los Angeles was over 70% white and only 10% Hispanic, and today it’s 50% Hispanic and perhaps 25% white. Yet the crime and homicide rates are roughly similar. How is this possible in your mind?

- A huge wave of immigrant Hispanics moved into East Palo Alto, the neighboring town to where I live, and as a consequence it has become overwhelmingly Hispanic. Meanwhile, the homicide rate has declined by over 95% and today both crime and homicide rates are fairly low. What’s your explanation.

- I’ve calculated 25 years of weighted cross-correlations across all the major cities in America, and they tend to show that the presence of whites and Hispanics has approximately similar impacts upon urban crime rates. What’s your theory about why the numbers came out the way they did?

I believe there is absolutely overwhelming evidence that most Hispanic groups have crime rates approximately the same as those of whites of the same age, and I have obviously been irritated by the stubborn refusal of so many anti-immigration activists to accept this obvious reality. But I do believe that in most cases this position is based upon ignorance and innumeracy rather than deliberately dishonest intent. Furthermore, I feel that a great deal of the blame must be be placed upon the shoulders of our mainstream media and academic elites.

As noted above, exactly the same statistical evidence that suggests that whites and Hispanics have roughly similar crime rates also demonstrates the exceptionally high rate of black criminality, and this latter fact has surely dissuaded most journalists and scholars from publicly discussing racial crime in quantitative detail. The resulting vacuum of solid information has naturally been filled by rumor, anecdotes, and speculation, often severely skewed by ideological leanings.

Furthermore, there seems considerable evidence that over the years even many mainstream journalists have inadvertently fallen into believing the same erroneous facts as the rightwing activists they publicly denounce. This unfortunate situation was brought to my attention a few years ago during the notorious Jason Richwine Affair.

In 2013 Dr. Richwine, a prominent Heritage Foundation policy analyst, had reached the pinnacle of his career when the conservative media began widely trumpeting his research study suggesting that America’s large Hispanic immigrant population was enormously increasing our crime rates and would cost taxpayers many trillions of dollars in future welfare benefits and other government spending.

But then his critics discovered that his 2009 Harvard doctoral dissertation had focused on the supposedly very low IQs of the racial groups constituting most of our current immigrant inflow, and he argued that this doomed our country to inevitable genetic decline. An enormous national media firestorm immediately erupted and Richwine was quickly purged from all respectable conservative institutions. At the time, I discussed the controversy and its implications in a lengthy column:

- Race/IQ: The Jason Richwine Affair

Amid the fury over the ex-Heritage staffer’s work the question to ask is: was he right?

Ron Unz • The American Conservative, May 13, 2013 • 2,400 Words

My disturbing realization was that although mainstream journalists were virtually unanimous in their harsh condemnations of the embattled Heritage researcher and their support for his ouster, it was readily apparent that some of them—perhaps even most of them—actually believed that Richwine was factually correct although certainly “politically incorrect.” After all, with any candid discussion of racial topics so totally taboo in our society, where would they acquire contrary information? Indeed, one of them went so far as to claim that Richwine had easily debunked my Hispanic Crime analysis, a statement I found rather amusing. As I explained at length, I was quite unimpressed with the quality of Richwine’s research, but apparently his journalistic foes found it so terrifyingly persuasive that they felt the need to transform him into an “un-person” in order to protect the public from his dangerous ideas. In effect, it appeared that many of them probably believed that Richwine needed to be destroyed not because he was wrong but because he was right.

With the racial analysis of social behavior so widely taboo and strictly policed these days by Twitter lynch-mobs, it is hardly surprising that journalists would often fall into error, and these errors would feed upon themselves. But sometimes the political consequences of such disingenuous behavior may still be quite serious.

A perfect example occurred just last week while I was engaged in a heated debate over Hispanic crime rates with the outraged commenters to my most recent article. The San Francisco Chronicle, California’s most influential newspaper, ran a major story bearing the provocative headline “Latinos account for nearly half of 172 people killed by police in California in 2017.”

Now to the liberal editors of that newspaper and activists of a similar ideological hue, such a factual statement might carry implications of brutal police violence being directed against oppressed non-whites, but I suspect that to the average American—let alone the average rightwinger—the clear implication would be that California Latinos are a particularly dangerous and violent population, constantly confronting the police and regularly being killed as a consequence. Indeed, I was a little surprised that neither Donald Trump nor Ann Coulter had tweeted that article out to their millions of enthusiastic followers.

However, the story carries different implications once we recognize that Latinos account for nearly half of police killings in a state in which Latinos also account for nearly half the total population. I quickly used the actual statistics buried in the text of the article to produce a simple chart displaying the ratio of police shootings and killings in California compared to the fraction of the total population, which tells a very different tale:

Obviously, the rate of Asian police shootings is extremely low, while the figures for whites and Latinos are really not so very far apart, and probably become very similar once we adjust for the much larger fraction of Latinos who are youthful males, the cohort most likely to engage in police confrontations. Meanwhile, the chart display an enormous outlying group which went unmentioned in the Chronicle headline and was therefore missed by busy individuals who depend upon quick glances at a major newspaper for their knowledge of the world.

The unfortunate truth is that in many situations “politically correct” mainstream media journalists and racially-focused anti-immigration activists may share a strong commonality of interests, and the dishonest practices of the former tend to reinforce the confused beliefs of the latter, with negative consequences for our society.

The Political Bankruptcy of American White Nationalism

The Unz Review • July 27, 2020 • 3,400 Words

The last few weeks have seen the greatest wave of American urban unrest in two generations. Massive protests, riots, and looting have swept across dozens of our major cities, accompanied by an enormous amount of political vandalism, often targeting monuments to our country’s former presidents and other historical figures.

Most importantly, powerful elements of our political, corporate, and media elite have now declared their support for various policy goals of the newly-elevated Black Lives Matter movement, even sometimes agreeing that local police departments should be “defunded” and that our most celebrated national heroes such as Washington and Jefferson should be removed from their places of honor in our nation’s capital, proposals that would have been dismissed as utter lunacy just a couple of months ago. Many observers, not least in China, have noted the striking similarities this turmoil bears to aspects of Mao’s Cultural Revolution of the late 1960s. We seem rapidly heading towards some unknown but probably unfortunate destination.

This enormous national upheaval has centered on race, probably leading many individuals to reassess their racial understanding of the world. But some of these shifts may have been in less expected directions.

I recently received a short email from someone in his thirties with whom I’d been a little friendly over the last dozen years. He had spent most of that period solidly located within the racialist/HBD right-wing, regularly writing for its publications and even working with some of its leading figures during part of that period. This background lent particular weight to his conclusions.

He entitled his note “You were a prophet” and then declared:

I was a fool to believe that immigration mattered, that there was anything in American politics and culture other than the sadomasochistic relationship between white liberals and blacks.

He also provided some harsh appraisals of prominent anti-immigration right-wingers:

It’s amazing just how wrong people like Ann Coulter, Pat Buchanan, and Steve Sailer have been on all these issues…Their mistakes are partly racialism, but more a degenerate nationalism, that ends up sympathizing more with criminals than honest people who contribute to society and mind their own business.

Although my correspondent did not refer to any particular articles of mine, there was really no need. Over the last quarter century, I have published hundreds of thousands of words on the contentious subjects of immigration and race, and my most recent writings take positions not much different from those that I had presented in the early 1990s.

Over the last few years and especially since the election of President Donald Trump, immigration has returned to the center stage of American politics, becoming the primary focus of most right-wing activists and pundits.

I regarded this approach as extremely misguided and counter-productive. Three years ago in the aftermath of the Charlottesville debacle, I circulated a private letter to a couple of dozen prominent figures in the reigning Alt-Right movement, then publicly released it the following year, along with two lengthy columns devoted to similar topics. These three pieces together provoked an enormous outpouring of responses, amounting to nearly 4,000 comments and 600,000 words, with some supportive but the overwhelming majority quite hostile. Those so interested may wish to revisit those discussions and decide for themselves whether or not my analysis has proven correct.

- An Open Letter to the “Alt-Right” and Others • August 21, 2017 • 2,000 Words • 2,034 Comments

- Racial Politics in America and in California • November 12, 2018 • 7,400 Words • 1,040 Comments

- Immigration, Building a Wall, and Hispanic Crime • January 14, 2019 • 5,800 Words • 882 Comments

From the time I first became involved in immigration issues three decades ago, it soon became apparent that the overwhelming majority of the strong opposition was racially-driven. John Tanton was the original founder of the modern movement and he had his roots in environmentalism and population control, while Roy Beck, a more recent leading figure, seemed most concerned with the impact of a heavy inflow of foreign workers upon native employment. But such individuals were the clear exceptions. I would say that something like 90% of the energetic core membership of the anti-immigration groups were soft-core or perhaps crypto-White Nationalists, with the movement representing a safe and somewhat “politically correct” haven for once-common ideological views that had gradually become too controversial to directly advocate.

During all of this time, a dystopian nightmare scenario dominated the fears of these individuals, involving the collapse of our stable middle-class society under a massive influx of non-white foreigners, a population impossible to assimilate and deeply hostile to our culture. Crime and social disorder would skyrocket and the cherished symbols of our national heritage would come under fierce attack. Once California and the rest of the Southwest became heavily Hispanic, a secessionist movement would naturally become a powerful political force, possibly seeking to reunite with Mexico

This sort of apocalyptic vision was indicated by the title of one of the earliest works in the genre, The Path to National Suicide, published in 1990 by the late Lawrence Auster. Over the years, several bestsellers have been produced along roughly similar lines, including Peter Brimelow’s Alien Nation in 1995, Pat Buchanan’s Death of the West in 2001, and most recently Ann Coulter’s Adios America! in 2015. Even figures of the highest academic repute have sometimes voiced similar fears, with Harvard’s Samuel P. Huntington, one of America’s most eminent political scientists, publishing The Clash of Civilizations in 1996 and Who Are We? in 2004.

And whether we take our information from the pages of the New York Times articles or from informal smartphone videos, exactly these long-dreaded scenes of violent disorder and cultural upheaval have now appeared throughout much of our country. But the circumstances have been quite different than any of these writers had predicted.

Over the last few decades, America’s urban centers have been become overwhelmingly non-white and heavily immigrant, with residents of European ancestry these days reduced to less than 35% of the total. But within this national average, some cities are still largely white, and these have demonstrated an intriguing pattern.

Two of the American cities that have experienced the longest and most sustained urban chaos and anti-government disorder over the last couple of months have been Portland, Oregon and Seattle, Washington, and these are two of our cities that have remained the most overwhelmingly white, each in the range of 65-70%. The flashpoint of America’s racial convulsion was Minneapolis, and its city government has now voted to “defund” the local police department while nearly a quarter of its officers have already announced their plans to quit. Minneapolis is another major demographic outlier, still being 60% white.

Meanwhile, whites had already become a minority decades ago in my own state of California, and this shift has been especially strong in the larger cities, with white Europeans probably down to little more than 20% in Los Angeles and San Jose, while remaining perhaps 35% in San Diego and San Francisco. During my younger years, LA had been America’s most overwhelmingly white large city, and over the last half century it had also developed a reputation for especially deadly racial rioting, becoming notorious for the Watts Riots of 1965 and the Rodney King Riots of 1992. But the disorders this time were very mild by comparison, and almost entirely limited to Westside looting by the local black population, now reduced to less than 10% of the total. Unrest in other California cities has been even more minimal in recent weeks, nothing at all like what has wracked so many other American urban centers.

I noticed this same pattern even closer to home when I compared Palo Alto, quite affluent and over 90% white and Asian, with neighboring East Palo Alto, heavily immigrant and working-class, over 90% non-white with few Asians.

For decades my hometown has been extremely liberal but politically rather placid, and this remained the case in June and July, with activism mostly confined to a large (and overwhelmingly white) Black Lives Matter protest march, accompanied by a little minor vandalism. More recently, BLM activists painted a huge visual affirmation of their creed on the street in front of City Hall, and arranged to partially exclude traffic from that block to prevent cars from damaging their design. Most controversially, a portion of their mural honored a militant from the Black Liberation Army, who had murdered a police officer in 1970, afterward breaking out of prison and escaping to Cuba. Local police officers have expressed considerable irritation at seeing this tribute to a convicted cop-killer so close to their own headquarters.

This sort of minor ideological ferment hardly matches the endless rounds of protest and violence in Portland or Seattle, but still exceeded anything taking place in neighboring East Palo Alto, which as far as I can tell has been entirely quiet after a couple of protest marches by local blacks in early June.

The reality of our day-to-day lives inevitably wears away at our ideological frameworks. The long-committed racialist who emailed me had mentioned that he had been living for the last few years in a city that was overwhelmingly non-white and heavily immigrant, and his personal experiences had already caused him to reassess many of his beliefs and assumptions. So when his area remained absolutely calm and peaceful while overwhelmingly white cities like Minneapolis, Portland, and Seattle burned, he merely reached the terminus of a political road that he had already been traveling.

I suspect that many others in his camp have quietly come to similar conclusions although for various reasons they may be reluctant to publicly acknowledge those facts. Over the last two decades, blogger Steve Sailer has become a hero and an inspiration to America’s burgeoning Internet racialist community for his willingness to address many of the issues so fiercely suppressed in the regular conservative media let alone its mainstream liberal counterpart. Immigration has long been his signature issue, together with the concomitant demographic and social changes, and he has remained one of the highest-profile writers published at VDare, the leading hard-core anti-immigration webzine. A substantial fraction of his regular commenters clearly seem situated in the White Nationalist camp.

Yet over the years I’ve sometimes pointed to an interesting fact that has seemingly escaped the attention of so many of his enthusiastically racialist fans. Like me, he grew up in a Los Angeles that was then the whitest large city in America, with our own San Fernando Valley being perhaps 85% white in those days. He continues to live there, although the white population has declined to less than 25%, now ranking LA as one of our least white large cities. But although so much of his enormously prolific blogging focuses on race, social issues, and crime, as well as the foibles of “political correctness,” for years less and less of his material has been drawn from his own city. I strongly suspect this is because the local LA politics has become so bland and boring that there just hasn’t been much interesting to say.

As we might expect, his traffic and comments surged enormously once the national turmoil began at the beginning of June, but the overwhelming majority of his posts still dealt with the events on the East Coast or the Midwest since the unrest in his own region had been so relatively minor by comparison. All around the country, the visual evidence seemed to suggest that the violent antifa rioters were mostly white while the looters were overwhelmingly black. But America’s huge immigrant population was rather conspicuous by its absence, with some of his commenters even remarking on that point.

Across California as a whole, there were some considerable ironies. For decades fearful nativists ranging from Huntington to Brimelow had suggested that as Hispanics became local majorities, their emboldened leaders might seek to cleanse the state of its public symbols of the 19th century Anglo conquest. However, as I noted in a recent column, events in my state and other parts of the once-Mexican Southwest have actually taken a very different turn.

The original roots of our country were Anglo-Saxon and this heritage remained dominant during its first century or more, but other strands in our national tapestry are suffering similar vilification. Christopher Columbus discovered the New World for Spain, but he has became a hated and despised figure across our country, so perhaps in the near future his only surviving North American monument will be the huge statue honoring him in the heart of Mexico City. Father Junipero Serra founded Hispanic California and a few years ago was canonized as the first and only Latin American saint, but his statues have been toppled and his name already removed from Stanford University buildings. At the time we acquired the sparsely-populated American Southwest, the bulk of our new Hispanic population was concentrated in New Mexico, but the founding father of that region has now had his monument attacked and vandalized. Cervantes, author of Don Quixote, is considered the greatest writer in the Spanish language, and his statue was also vandalized.

Marx famously suggested that all great historical events occur twice, first as tragedy and later as farce. My own appraisal of the heated immigration battles of the last few years has been along similar lines.

Earlier in the 1990s immigration had become an enormously important political struggle, with the battle centered in my own state of California. During that period I was extremely concerned about the threat this conflict posed to the stability of our country, as I later recounted in a long 1999 cover-story published in Commentary. However, when the issue returned to the national political stage under Trump, I viewed the situation with detachment or irritation rather than as any sort of serious danger.

The reasons were simple. The overwhelming majority of American immigrants are concentrated in a handful of large states including California, Texas, New York, Florida, and Illinois, and by all indications they get along quite well with their white and native-born neighbors, as I had demonstrated in a long 2011 article. Therefore, I thought it very unlikely that such equanimity would be seriously disrupted by the harsh rhetoric of Trump and his national allies, even if that were magnified by the power of the media and the Internet. And this indeed has turned out to be the case.

For obvious reasons, non-white immigration has always been an issue of paramount importance to the white racialist community. Such individuals therefore constitute the bulk of fervent anti-immigration activists, though many of them might fiercely deny the nature of those sentiments, perhaps even to themselves. But these political zealots may mistakenly convince themselves that the general public shares their particular ideological focus. Instead, I see very little evidence that the immigration issue is of overriding importance to “normies,” except in particular situations when it directly affects their lives in a negative way.

As an example, white voters in heavily immigrant California had supported Trump in 2016 by 20-25 points less than whites in the rest of the country, with the striking disconnect between his anti-immigrant rhetoric and their own personal experiences probably being a major factor. By sharp contrast, immigration was an especially powerful issue for Trump in a state like West Virginia, which has almost no Hispanics or immigrants of any kind, and whose voters therefore drew their entire understanding of the issue from FoxNews and Breitbart rather than from real life. But political issues that are substantially a creation of media propaganda inherently have less staying power than those with organic roots. I analyzed the political dynamics at considerable length back in 2011, and I believe that all my predictions have been borne out:

- Immigration, Republicans, and the End of White America • September 2011 • 12,200 Words

So this is the dilemma faced by Alt-Right leaders and similar “nationalist” right-wingers, including many of the individuals around Trump. They have spent the last few years concentrating on a largely synthetic issue that has very little connection to the actual reality that most ordinary Americans see in their day-to-day lives. And as a result, they may have destroyed themselves politically.

Consider an analogy. Suppose that the Alt-Right and similar groups had spent this period focusing on Catholics as the greatest threat to American society, publishing numerous books on the subject and launching websites devoted to the “Great Catholic Menace” while FoxNews brainwashed its ignorant viewers into an anti-Catholic frenzy. Perhaps Trump might have been elected partly running on that platform, but with his victory primarily due to the enormous dissatisfaction so many voters felt at the general state of their country, including their distrust and hatred of the mainstream media and our arrogant and corrupt political elites, with the latter fully exemplified by Hillary Clinton.

Even if elements of such a Trump Administration attempted to implement their anti-Catholic proposals, I doubt there would be much risk of sparking a religious civil war endangering our country. Most ordinary Catholics get along pretty well with non-Catholics, and a little political ranting at the national level would hardly be enough to change that.

However, many Catholics would surely become angry at having been unfairly vilified and attacked and they would naturally gravitate toward Trump’s political opponents. If Silicon Valley were a heavily Catholic industry, many of its executives would regard the noisier anti-Catholic zealots as dangerous lunatics and perhaps begin thinking about kicking them off the Internet, a proposal that bitter enemies of the Alt-Right such as the ADL would do everything to foster behind the scenes.

So as a result, the Trump coalition would have greatly multiplied its political enemies for no good or logical reason. And when some unrelated incident suddenly sparked a national wave of rioting and vandalism by leftists and blacks, many Catholics who might have otherwise have sided with a Trump crackdown, would instead choose to remain neutral, or simply distrust Trump too much to even consider his arguments.

Having spent years on the inside of the white racialist movement, my correspondent provided some additional observations, suggesting that a political strategy so heavily focused on immigration had made it very difficult for the Trump Administration to respond effectively to the violent Black Lives Matter unrest:

I thought about what you said about the anti-immigration movement being crypto-white nationalism. That is completely true, or at least it was until Trump got elected. I have noticed though that the WNs who argue for immigration restriction ended up convincing a bunch of opportunists and dumb people who are not WNs to start seeing immigration as a major issue. They seem to really believe in the stupid race-blind nationalism that VDare was pushing disingenuously.

Look at this from one of the main editors of TAC, who seriously argues that Trump should hold a rally in Baltimore and strong arm corporations into creating jobs there.

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/the-rally-that-could-have-been/

People who push this kind of stupidity tend also to be “China hawks,” trying to create a national identity based on freeing Hong Kong and war on Mexican gardeners. Unlike WNs though, they’re not tapping into anything real within the population, and I don’t predict they’ll ever see much electoral success.

I think the triumph of this low-IQ nationalism is why public opinion shifted so rapidly in the direction of support for BLM. Trump and those around him were called bigots for their immigration views, so they overcompensated by being extremely pro-black. Reports were that Jared did “criminal justice reform” in hopes of winning them over. When BLM popped up, they didn’t have any response since they had put so much stock in “Blexit.” There here was thus no elite opposition to BLM, and public opinion therefore went along.

This analysis appears quite plausible to me. The senior leadership of the Trump Administration seems heavily skewed towards ideologues and total incompetents, with its haphazard and incoherent public health policies having already led to the Covid-19 deaths of 150,000 Americans, a body-count that will probably double or triple by the end of the year.

A similarly ineffective response to early Black Lives Matter protests allowed these to develop enormous social momentum, and spread nationwide. Future historians will surely marvel at how the death of a convicted violent felon—quite possibly due to a drug-overdose—in ultra-liberal Minneapolis soon led to removal of so many of our most celebrated American presidents from their traditional places of honor and cast down statues of Christopher Columbus all across our country, perhaps eventually even culminating in the destruction of fabled Mount Rushmore.

Will California Restore Affirmative Action?

Probably Not

The Unz Review • September 18, 2020 • 1,400 Words

As everyone knows, over the last couple of decades California has become a one-party Democratic state. Democrats hold a better than three-fourths hyper-majority in the State Assembly and their control is nearly as overwhelming in the State Senate. California has our nation’s largest Congressional delegation, but of its 53 members only seven are Republican.

Not only is every statewide officeholder a Democrat, but no Republican has won such a race in almost 15 years, with many of the recent contests not even featuring a Republican on the November ballot. The once-proud Republican Party of Reagan and Nixon has been reduced to almost total irrelevance.

This same pattern has held in national elections, with Donald Trump losing the 2016 California vote by a remarkable 30 points and the most recent polling data suggesting a similar outcome this November.

Except for tiny Hawaii, California is now America’s most heavily non-white state, with our white European population reduced to little more than 30% of the total. But such demographic factors explain only part of those lop-sided 2016 election results since white Californians supported Trump at a rate 20-25 points lower than whites in the rest of the country. If America’s entire white national electorate had voted like its Golden State counterpart, Trump would have lost all fifty states, mostly by huge landslides, and suffered by far the greatest electoral disaster in American history. All the Trump-hating pundits would have spent Election Night laughing and saying “I told you so!”

Although liberal domination of California state politics is not quite as absolute as Democratic control, the state is certainly very liberal, with our elected officials supporting all sorts of causes and policies that would be anathema in much of the rest of the country.

Given these political realities and expecting a heavy November turnout, state Democratic leaders believed they had the perfect opportunity this year to undo one of the last hated legacies of Republican Gov. Pete Wilson, the Prop. 209 ban on governmental Affirmative Action, passed into law by a relatively narrow 55% to 45% margin in 1996. Democrats felt quite confident that a full generation of demographic and ideological shifts had totally transformed the electorate, allowing them to win a resounding victory for “racial diversity” at the ballot box.

The plan to restore Affirmative Action became an unstoppable political juggernaut, with the Assembly voting 60-14 and the Senate 30-10 to place Prop. 16 on the November ballot, repealing Prop. 209. The project enjoyed the strong support of popular Gov. Gavin Newsom and nearly all other prominent political leaders, as well as the unanimous backing of the UC Board of Regents and the heads of all three public higher education systems. Leading sports teams such as the San Francisco Giants and the Golden State Warriors added their endorsements.

California’s Attorney-General is a liberal Democrat, and his office provided what seemed like a slam-dunk official title description for the ballot measure: “Allows Diversity as a Factor in Public Employment, Education, and Contracting Decisions.” In this day and age, what California voter could possibly oppose “Diversity”?

So much for theory. PPIC, California’s leading public policy thinktank, just released the first major poll on the November vote, and our morning newspapers revealed that the attempt to restore Affirmative Action will probably lose, perhaps even by a huge landslide.

The traditional rule in California politics is that support for a ballot measure steadily declines as Election Day approaches, with undecideds overwhelmingly breaking No. Therefore, at this stage a successful measure should probably have a lead of at least 10 points. For example, experts believe that Prop. 15—a split-roll tax initiative—appears to be in trouble given its weak 51% support.

Meanwhile, only 31% of voters are currently backing Prop. 16, aimed at restoring Affirmative Action. Anything might still happen, but those are dismal numbers just a couple of weeks before ballots are mailed out.

The demographic distribution of support also tells an interesting story. Whites are probably one-third or less of California residents, but for reasons of age and naturalization, they still constitute a slight majority of likely voters, and only 26% of whites support Prop. 16. It appears that most white California Democrats refuse to support Affirmative Action.

Latinos are California’s largest group, currently representing 40% of the total population and perhaps eventually rising to an outright majority according to some projections. Only 41% of Latinos seem to support Affirmative Action.

Asians have been the group most strongly opposed to the restoration of Affirmative Action, fearing that racial discrimination would exclude their children from Berkeley, UCLA, and other top UC campuses, and a few years ago their vocal opposition had blocked a previous attempt to repeal Prop. 209. PPIC polls normally break out their Asian numbers, but in this instance Asians and blacks were lumped together, registering a combined 40% support for Prop. 16. Perhaps PPIC feared that revealing Asians (and blacks) as extreme outliers on this divisive issue would produce bitter feelings. Since Asian respondents outnumbered blacks by more than 2-to-1 and probably showed very little support for Prop. 16, it seems likely that black support for Affirmative Action was overwhelming, probably in the 60-70% range.

The low level of Hispanic support for Affirmative Action may surprise many rightwingers, but it makes perfect sense. The overwhelming majority of Hispanics work in the private sector, often in small businesses where most or all of the other employees are also Hispanic. If you and most of your coworkers are Hispanic, Affirmative Action is simply meaningless.

Prop. 209 had required color-blind university admissions since 1996, but Hispanic students have nonetheless still done rather well over the last couple of decades, actually overtaking whites in University of California admissions a few years ago, though still heavily outnumbered by Asians at Berkeley and UCLA. Hispanic families seem quite satisfied with this situation, and have provided no grassroots support for restoring Affirmative Action in university admissions.

With the exception of a tiny sliver of “professional Hispanics” who have made an entire career out of their ethnicity, Affirmative Action has never historically been much of a Hispanic issue. Indeed, I once noted the strong support Pete Wilson had received in his first 1990 campaign for governor.

Although Hispanic and Asian numbers had been growing steadily for years, their support for Republicans had been growing as well, and by the early 1990s, a GOP candidate could regularly expect to receive around one-third or more of the Hispanic vote and half that of the Asian. For example, Pete Wilson's narrow 1990 gubernatorial victory over Dianne Feinstein, which significantly relied upon his criticism of “racial quotas,” was achieved with 53 percent of the white vote, 47 percent of the Hispanic vote, and 58 percent of the Asian vote according to the prestigious California Field Poll used by the New York Times, though others placed his ethnic totals lower.

By contrast, the issue has always been heavily associated with blacks, who represent just 6% of California’s population but nonetheless still seem to receive a greatly disproportionate share of the high-profile “diversity” slots, including the vast financial rewards of plum positions in Hollywood and Silicon Valley.

Political analysts seemed quite surprised by the PPIC poll results, including the low Latino support for Affirmative Action. But they should have remembered the blue-collar Reagan Democrats of the 1980s, who turned against their traditional political party over similar issues. Perhaps over the last generation, more and more Latinos have come to associate “diversity” with stories of friends or relatives sometimes unfairly losing promotions to blacks whom they regarded as less competent.

For obvious reasons, these sorts of “politically-incorrect” private sentiments may not be readily apparent to our political elites, Latino or otherwise. Such individuals spend their time ensconced in the State Capital, working with liberal lobbyists, donors, and political operatives, who provide an entirely different view of the world. And as a result, certain polling numbers may continue to mystify them.

Back in the mid-1990s I remember having lunch with Pat Buchanan in DC. At one point, I mentioned that America’s rapidly-growing Hispanic population had an obvious and natural political leader, based upon such strong affinities in political ideology, cultural traits, personal background, and religion. But fate took a different turn, and Buchanan missed playing his historic role.

White Racialism in America, Then and Now

The Unz Review • October 5, 2020 • 24,900 Words

One morning a couple of years ago I received an urgent email from a moderately prominent libertarian figure strongly focused on antiwar issues.  He warned me that our publication had been branded a “White Supremacist website” by the Washington Post, and urged me to immediately respond, perhaps by demanding a formal retraction or even taking legal action lest we be destroyed by that totally unfair accusation.

When I looked into the matter, my own perspective was rather different.  Apparently Max Boot, one of the more agitated Jewish Neocons, had written a column fiercely denouncing some recent criticism of pro-Israel policies that Philip Giraldi had published in our webzine, and the “White Supremacist” slur was merely his crude means of demonizing the author’s views for those of his readers who might be less than wholeheartedly enthusiastic about Benjamin Netanyahu and his policies.

After pointing this out to my correspondent, I also noted that a good 10% or more of our writers were probably “White Nationalists,” and perhaps a few of them might even arguably be labeled “White Supremacists.”  So although Boot’s description of our website was certainly wrong, it was probably less wrong than the vast majority of his other writing, which was typically focused on American military policy and the Middle East.

Our webzine is quite unusual in its willingness to feature a smattering of writers who provide a White Nationalist perspective.  Such individuals are almost totally excluded from other online publications, except for those marginalized websites devoted to their ideas, which often tend to focus on such topics and related issues to the near exclusion of anything else.  However, I believe that maintaining this sort of ideological quarantine or “ghettoization” greatly diminishes the ability to understand many important aspects of our world.

Substituting ideological slurs and demonization for rational evaluation and rebuttal has long become a commonplace in heated American policy debates, recently growing more severe in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement and the associated “cancel-culture” driven by inflamed social media.  Locating a couple of controversial sentences and then using these to dismiss an enormous body of detailed analysis may sometimes serve as an effective debating technique among timorous journalists, but its intellectual legitimacy seems rather doubtful.  And this is especially true with regard to the charged subject of white racialism, which seems to provoke a near-religious antipathy among so many of the politically correct elites of our society, despite their avowedly secular protestations.

Even the choice of preferred accusatory phrases suggests a certain amount of bad faith.  My impression is that a couple of years ago members of the pro-white ideological camp were usually denounced as “White Nationalists” but more recently that term has been superseded by “White Supremacists.”  I suspect that part of the reason for this verbal shift was the obvious hypocrisy of their disparate treatment.  As I noted a few years ago:

A strident Black Nationalist such as Malcolm X was widely condemned during his own lifetime as an extremist advocate of violence, yet he has now been honored with a U.S. postage stamp, while today a lifelong racial activist such as Al Sharpton has his own MSNBC cable television show and received 80-odd invitations to the White House over the last few years. Such treatment seems very different from what their white-activist counterparts, either past or present, might expect to receive.

Following the unexpected victory of Donald Trump and the resulting sudden media prominence of the racialist Alt-Right, a national journalist who had become a leading chronicler of that movement visited me for lunch in Palo Alto, and we spent a couple of hours discussing what I considered some of the tremendous ironies of America’s existing ideological landscape.  Among other things, I pointed out that the overwhelming majority of the world’s leading academics and intellectuals from one hundred years ago—whether left, right, or center—held many views that would surely have gotten them branded as “White Nationalists” in today’s severely constricted ideological climate.

But whereas today’s WNs are an extremely vilified and marginalized group, with their ranks therefore necessarily skewed towards eccentrics and misfits, the situation was entirely different back then.  Their counterparts of the past included many of the foremost academic scholars and public intellectuals of that era, who openly discussed their views in leading opinion journals rather than by pseudonymous postings in dark corners of the Internet.   Partly for this reason, such individuals tended to approach the same issues with far greater sophistication.

Until the early 2000s, nearly all these names would have been almost unknown to me, either rating a sentence or two in my introductory history textbooks, or else being entirely omitted.  But I spent most of that decade building a content-archiving system that provided convenient access to over a million articles from more than 200 of our leading periodicals since the mid-nineteenth century, and was stunned by the severe distortions and enormous lacunae in my knowledge which this revealed.  As I wrote a couple of years ago on related matters:

I sometimes imagined myself a little like an earnest young Soviet researcher of the 1970s who began digging into the musty files of long-forgotten Kremlin archives and made some stunning discoveries. Trotsky was apparently not the notorious Nazi spy and traitor portrayed in all the textbooks, but instead had been the right-hand man of the sainted Lenin himself during the glorious days of the great Bolshevik Revolution, and for some years afterward had remained in the topmost ranks of the Party elite. And who were these other figures—Zinoviev, Kamenev, Bukharin, Rykov—who also spent those early years at the very top of the Communist hierarchy? In history courses, they had barely rated a few mentions, as minor Capitalist agents who were quickly unmasked and paid for their treachery with their lives. How could the great Lenin, father of the Revolution, have been such an idiot to have surrounded himself almost exclusively with traitors and spies?

As I gradually discovered, large portions of America’s entire intellectual past had been hidden or altered beyond recognition, and racial beliefs constituted a major portion of this transformation.

The ongoing “cancel-culture” of today’s elite-backed Black Lives Matter movement represents merely the latest iteration of this long process.  The names of many of our most famous presidents and honored national leaders have recently been stripped from buildings and public monuments, and a committee organized by the Mayor of DC recently called for the possible removal of the Jefferson Memorial and the Washington Monument.  If this current social revolution continues, we are only a step or two away from a society in which any favorable public mention for Thomas Jefferson or George Washington might be regarded as an immediate firing-offense by many major corporations, and grounds for banning by social media.  Although such a development seems unlikely, it would merely represent an extreme version of the ideological purge that has already reshaped our academic and journalistic world over the last century.

The Sociology of E.A. Ross

In my conversation with that national journalist, one of the major examples I cited was that of E.A. Ross, a leading intellectual figure of the early decades of the twentieth century but now largely forgotten except when portrayed as a racist cartoon villain by ignorant present-day academics.  Last year, I noted such crude treatment by Holocaust historian Joseph W. Bendersky in his book documenting and condemning the views of America’s Anglo-Saxon elites from a century ago:

Although I would not question the accuracy of Bendersky's exhaustive archival research, he seems considerably less sure-footed regarding American intellectual history and sometimes allows his personal sentiments to lead him into severe error. For example, his first chapter devotes a couple of pages to E.A. Ross, citing some of his unflattering descriptions of Jews and Jewish behavior, and suggesting he was a fanatic anti-Semite, who dreaded “the coming catastrophe of an America overrun by racially inferior people.”

But Ross was actually one of our greatest early sociologists, and his 26 page discussion of Jewish immigrants published in 1913 was scrupulously fair-minded and even-handed, describing both positive and negative characteristics, following similar chapters on Irish, German, Scandinavian, Italian, and Slavic newcomers. And although Bendersky routinely denounces his own ideological villains as “Social Darwinists,” the source he actually cites regarding Ross correctly identified the scholar as one of America's leading critics of Social Darwinism. Indeed, Ross's stature in left-wing circles was so great that he was selected as a member of the Dewey Commission, organized to independently adjudicate the angry conflicting accusations of Stalinists and Trotskyites. And in 1936, a Jewish leftist fulsomely praised Ross's long and distinguished scholarly career in the pages of The New Masses, the weekly periodical of the American Communist Party, only regretting that Ross had never been willing to embrace Marxism.

- The Old World in the New

The Significance of Past and Present Immigration to the American People

E.A. Ross • 1914 • 59,000 Words

Ross was quite plain-spoken in his views, and his long career was bracketed by his leading national role in major free speech issues.  As a young academic, he had been fired by Stanford University for his political beliefs, a celebrated incident that led to the creation of the American Association of University Professors, while he ended his life serving for a decade as national chairman of the ACLU.

In 1915 Ross published South of Panama, describing the backwardness and misery he had encountered in so many of the societies of Latin America during his half year of travels and investigation across that region.  Although the bulk of the text was descriptive and empirical, at one point he pondered the underlying nature of those problems, wondering whether the causes were primarily cultural, due to the widespread poverty and lack of education, or instead a result of the innate inferiority of the local population, emphasizing that the answer to this crucial question would have an enormous impact upon the continent’s future developmental trajectory.

After even-handedly mentioning some of the limited evidence supporting each of these two conflicting theories, he ultimately leaned towards the environmental side, criticizing heredity as “a cheap offhand explanation” of human characteristics that actually often change over time.  Today such a discussion would be utterly unimaginable within the confines of our respectable academic or media worlds, and for opposite reasons would also be extremely rare among committed racialists.

- South of Panama

E.A. Ross • 1917 • 71,000 Words

Although Ross was uncertain about the natural abilities of South America’s mostly Mestizo population, a six month research trip to China a few years earlier had left him no doubt abut the potential of the Chinese, despite their immense existing poverty.  As he recounted in his book:

To forty-three men who, as educators, missionaries and diplomats, have had good opportunity to learn the “feel” of the Chinese mind, I put the question, “Do you find the intellectual capacity of the yellow race equal to that of the white race?” All but five answered “Yes,” and one sinologue of varied experience as missionary, university president and legation adviser left me gasping with the statement, “Most of us who have spent twenty-five years or more out here come to feel that the yellow race is the normal human type, while the white race is a ‘sport.’”

Given these conclusions, he felt quite confident of China’s future success as I explained a few years ago:

[China’s global rise] would have seemed far less unexpected to our leading thinkers of 100 years ago, many of whom prophesied that the Middle Kingdom would eventually regain its ranking among the foremost nations of the world. This was certainly the expectation of E.A. Ross, one of America's greatest early sociologists, whose book The Changing Chinese looked past the destitution, misery, and corruption of the China of his day to a future modernized China perhaps on a technological par with America and the leading European nations. Ross's views were widely echoed by public intellectuals such as Lothrop Stoddard, who foresaw China's probable awakening from centuries of inward-looking slumber as a looming challenge to the worldwide hegemony long enjoyed by the various European-descended nations.

- The Changing Chinese

The Conflict of Oriental and Western Cultures in China

E.A. Ross • 1911 • 61,000 Words

Ross published more than two dozen books and numerous articles, and I have no doubt that these could easily be mined for a multitude of sentences or paragraphs that would today ignite a firestorm of controversy on Twitter or among the talking-heads of Cable TV, with a lynch-mob branding him a “White Supremacist” fit for deplatforming.  But that merely demonstrates the severe flaws in our current climate of harsh ideological censorship.

Lothrop Stoddard and The Rising Tide of Color

Lothro Stoddard

A much stronger case could be made against his close contemporary Lothrop Stoddard, also mentioned above.  Indeed, I doubt that Stoddard himself would have disputed any attempt to label him as a “White Supremacist.”  After all, his most famous and influential work bore the full title “The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy,” and that 1921 bestseller focused upon the emerging challenges that peoples of white European origin faced in maintaining their global control in the aftermath of the terribly destructive First World War.

But although that term would probably apply to Stoddard, the marginalizing implications it carries in today’s society would be extremely misleading since his beliefs were so widely shared by much of America’s political and intellectual elite.  He himself came from a prestigious New England family, and after earning his doctorate in history at Harvard, his series of very successful books quickly established him as one of our country’s most influential writers and public intellectuals, winning him regular invitations to lecture at our nation’s military academy and with his articles regularly gracing the pages of our most prestigious national publications.

The serious concerns he raised about the economic challenge America and Europe might soon face from a rising China were grounded in solid realism.  For example, he approvingly quoted the late Victorian predictions of Prof. Charles E. Pearson:

Does any one doubt that the day is at hand when China will have cheap fuel from her coal-mines, cheap transport by railways and steamers, and will have founded technical schools to develop her industries? Whenever that day comes, she may wrest the control of the world's markets, especially throughout Asia, from England and Germany.

Many of Stoddard’s books focused upon sharp racialist issues, and these might seem extremely jarring to a modern readership.  But other works fell outside that area, and they effectively demonstrated the remarkable quality and objectivity of one of America’s leading geopolitical thinkers of that era.

For example, just prior to our own 1917 entry into the First World War, he had published Present-Day Europe, providing a detailed description of the political and social situation in all of the contending European states, including their historical roots. I happened to read the book about a decade ago, and found it the best summary treatment of that subject I had ever encountered.

- Present-Day Europe

Its National States of Mind

Lothrop Stoddard • 1917 • 74,000 Words

World  War I and its immediate aftermath saw the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, the abolition of the Islamic Caliphate by Ataturk’s secular regime, and the widespread rise of left-wing militant atheism inspired by the Bolshevik Revolution.  As a natural consequence, nearly all Western thinkers dismissed the power of Islam as a spent force and a fading relic of the past, while Stoddard was almost alone in presciently suggesting its possible worldwide revival in The New World of Islam, published in 1922.

- The New World of Islam

Lothrop Stoddard • 1922 • 95,000 Words

But Stoddard’s best-known work certainly remains The Rising Tide of Color, published 100 years ago, which launched his influential career.  About a decade ago, I finally got around to reading it, and was greatly surprised that a book so heavily demonized in every description I had encountered actually came across as so level-headed and innocuous.  Although most of the leading political figures of that time proclaimed permanent white rule of the world, Stoddard strongly argued that this situation was temporary, soon to evaporate under the pressure of rising non-white nationalism, economic development, and population growth.  These rising tides of the peoples of Asia and the Middle East made their eventual independence almost inevitable, and the European powers should therefore voluntarily relinquish their vast colonial empires rather than earn future bitterness by stubbornly seeking to retain them.  A “White Supremacist” might certainly advance such arguments, but only one of far greater sophistication than is today implied by that popular media slur.

I recently reread Stoddard’s volume and was even more impressed the second time through.  In many respects, his sweeping panorama of the future geopolitical landscape brings to mind The Clash of Civilizations, published in 1997 by renowned Harvard political scientist Samuel P. Huntington, which then became a huge national bestseller and cultural-touchstone in the wake of the 9/11 attacks of 2001.  Yet although Huntington’s text is just two decades old and Stoddard’s has reached its first century, I think it is the former that actually now seems much more dated and less applicable to the current alignment of the world and the challenges faced by white European populations.

- The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy

Lothrop Stoddard • 1920 • 78,000 Words

By the mid-1930s, Stoddard’s star was fading, with his racialist framework under growing pressure both in the sciences and by the influential leftist and anti-racist elements brought into power during the New Deal Era.  His last book appeared the year before our entrance into the Second World War and probably sealed his intellectual fate.  As I wrote last year:

During late 1939, a leading American news syndicate sent Stoddard to spend a few months in wartime Germany and provide his perspective, with his numerous dispatches appearing in The New York Times and other top newspapers. Upon his return, he published a 1940 book summarizing all his information, seemingly just as even-handed as his earlier 1917 volume. His coverage probably constitutes one of the most objective and comprehensive American accounts of the mundane domestic nature of National Socialist Germany, and thus may seem rather shocking to modern readers steeped in eighty years of increasingly unrealistic Hollywood propaganda.

- Into the Darkness

An Uncensored Report from Inside the Third Reich At War

Lothrop Stoddard • 1940 • 79,000 Words

As I’ve previously discussed, during World War II and in its immediate aftermath, America experienced its own Great Purge of our academic and journalistic elites—left, right, and center—with many of our most prominent figures permanently disappearing from public visibility, and Stoddard was among those who fell.  For two decades he had been among America’s leading public intellectuals, but when he died in 1950, no obituary appeared in the pages of the New York Times.

The Anthropology of Madison Grant Dethroned by the Boasian Revolution

Madison Grant

Stoddard’s own writings had focused primarily upon history and politics, but his world-view had been shaped by the ideas of his mentor Madison Grant, a hugely influential figure in racial theories, eugenics, and natural conservation efforts.

Although a lawyer by training, Grant never practiced in the field, and instead gained fame with the 1916 publication of his book The Passing of the Great Race, which argued for the division of European populations into three primary races of Nordics, Alpines, and Mediterraneans, with the first of these playing the overarching role in world history and the creation of dynamic civilizations.  Late twentieth century critics such as Harvard’s Stephen Jay Gould denounced the book as America’s most influential work of “scientific racism,” and noted that Adolf Hitler had written Grant a fan-letter in which he described it as his “Bible.”

Early American anthropology was heavily dominated by Anglo-Saxon racialists, and Grant’s views were widespread within that field.  Drawing upon a Darwinian world-view, these scientists heavily focused upon physical and psychological racial differences, certainly including those within the white population, and they were often aligned with political movements aimed at sharply curtailing continued large-scale immigration, especially from Southern and Eastern Europe.  They also tended to be either right-wing or apolitical in their views.

The opposing ideological camp in the early field of anthropology was overwhelmingly the creation of a German-Jewish immigrant named Franz Boas, who held strongly left-leaning political views.  Becoming a professor of anthropology at Columbia University in 1899, he began strongly challenging existing notions of race and racial differences, and focused much more on cultural rather than biological explanations for the behavior of different human societies.

In those pre-DNA days, the classification of different racial groups relied heavily upon physical measurements, with the shape of the skull being a key means of separating European populations into the purported Nordic, Alpine, and Mediterranean races.  Boas’s greatest early claim to fame was his landmark 1911 study demonstrating that European groups who immigrated to America rapidly changed the shapes of their skulls, apparently due to shifts in diet or other environmental factors, thereby seeming to transform themselves into a different racial group, an astonishing discovery that shocked most of his scientific colleagues.

When I first read that account, I found myself extremely skeptical of such a result, since we know that skull-shape is overwhelmingly determined by genetic factors rather than by diet or sunshine.  And indeed, it does appears that Boas’s conclusions were entirely false, and apparently even fraudulent, though perhaps unintentionally so, being a product of his ideological zeal in debunking existing racial dogma.  Over the years, quite a number of ultra-high-profile frauds in the field of anthropology have come to light, almost all of them falling upon a particular side of the ideological isle.  Perhaps the most famous recent example was that of Boas disciple Margaret Mead and her bestseller on the sexual customs of Samoa.

From his Columbia University base, Boas began minting large numbers of anthropology Ph.D.’s, and his former students soon began founding new departments throughout the country, gradually shifting the entire field towards their much less hereditarian perspective on human behavior. By the late 1920s they had gained the upper hand over their academic rivals in this hidden institutional conflict, and a Darwinian framework for understanding human behavior had largely been expelled from the academic social sciences.  Even the basic notion of biological race—once almost universally accepted—had become much less of a subject of discussion, with fewer and fewer academics focusing upon the differences between human groups, let alone among European whites.

The victory of Boasian anthropology became overwhelming around the time of the Second World War, and for decades thereafter any notion of applying Darwinism to the understanding of human activity was confined to the margins of academia.  This situation only began to change in the mid-1970s with the rise of sociobiology, and the large-scale mappings of the human genome around the end of the century finally began restoring race to its proper place near the center of anthropology.  Many of Boas’s intellectual heirs ferociously resisted this revival of a Darwinist and hereditarian framework, sometimes with improper means.  The serious scientific fraud at the center of Stephen Jay Gould’s influential book The Mismeasure of Man is a notorious example of this.

The fascinating story of this hidden decades-long struggle over the control of anthropology and its relationship to Darwinism is very effectively told in Carl Degler’s 1991 book In Search of Human Nature, which carries the descriptive subtitle “The Decline and Revival of Darwinism in American Social Thought.”

As a Pulitzer Prize-winning former president of the American Historical Association, Degler certainly had stellar academic credentials for the task.  For decades, he had been a strong champion of feminist and anti-racialist causes, firmly embracing the “culturalist” model of human history, and as he explained both in his Preface and in a subsequent interview, he had begun his investigation assuming that the Boasian victory had come about primarily on the basis of objective scientific facts.  But his years of archival research had eventually led him to conclude that the motives had mostly been ideological, and that the bulk of the evidence had always actually remained to the contrary.

The Times gave his important book the lead position in its Sunday Book Review, with the very favorable discussion running nearly 3,000 words, including an appended interview in which the scholar recognized that his longtime colleagues would issue “a sigh of regret that Carl Degler, who has been working all this time writing against racism and sexism, has been converted to the other side.”  Notwithstanding his shift into the sociobiological camp, when he died a quarter-century later, the Times obituary honored him with the headline “Carl N. Degler, Scholarly Champion of the Oppressed in America, Dies at 93.”

Carleton Putnam and the Battle Over School Desegration

A few years after Stoddard’s unnoticed 1950 death, racial issues moved to the forefront of American society.  The 1954 Supreme Court decision Brown vs. Board of Education unanimously overturned more than a half-century of legal precedent by striking down state laws for public school segregation.  Reaction to Brown was fierce throughout the South, but although President Eisenhower seems to have had misgivings about the decision, he dispatched the troops of the 101st Airborne to forcibly integrate Little Rock high school.

The massive resistance of the South to these new racial policies continued, and periodically reached the national media.  According to his later account, Carleton Putnam happened to read a 1958 column in Life Magazine by a Southern journalist defending segregation, and he was soon drawn into the ongoing political battle.

Like Stoddard, Putnam had deep New England Puritan ancestry, but after graduating from Princeton and earning his law degree at Columbia, he had chosen to pursue a business career.  In the mid-1930s he had become a pioneer in commercial aviation and started his own small airline, which following various expansions and mergers eventually became Delta, the nation’s largest carrier, with Putnam serving as chairman for 15 years.  While still in his early 50s, he had retired from active business involvement and begun work on an intended four volume biography of Theodore Roosevelt, a distant relative, with the first volume appearing in 1958 to widespread critical praise.  But that project was soon abandoned as he gradually began devoting all his efforts to the campaign to maintain racial segregation, first by writing a series of public letters and newspaper columns, and later by launching a public speaking tour, writing books and organizing legal efforts to overturn Brown.

Putnam had paid little attention to political or scientific developments during the two decades he had been absorbed in the business world, but was stunned when he discovered the ideological changes that had swept through the academy during that period, which eventually laid the intellectual basis for the legal and political decisions that overturned legal segregation.  From his perspective, the major biological differences between blacks and whites had long been recognized, with the substantial African inferiority in mind and temperament fully acknowledged by most scientists. But in less than a single generation, the theories of Franz Boas and his coterie of academic disciples had captured anthropology and related sciences, proclaiming the doctrine of racial equality and marginalizing those who maintained the old beliefs.  Eventually, this new scientific consensus was given the strength of law by the Supreme Court.

In Putnam’s opinion, the great danger of desegregation was that it might eventually lead to racial miscegenation, and the admixture of African ancestry into America’s white population would severely degrade the citizenry, leading to a large and permanent decline in mental ability and social behavior.  To a considerable extent, he believed that biology was destiny, and the mixture of black with white would destroy our nation’s future.

During the 1950s, the battles over racial integration were almost entirely confined to the South, which contained the overwhelming majority of our black population, and as a New England Yankee and prominent business executive Putnam’s energetic involvement in the cause drew considerable attention.  In 1961 he collected together his writings on the subject, much of which were based upon his extensive correspondence with various critics, and published Race and Reason, a short book setting forth his views which became a major bestseller, having 150,000 copies in print.  Several of the world’s leading scientific experts who supported his position contributed a Foreword to his book, which also received the strong endorsement of several high-ranking Southern senators, who distributed copies to their followers and local newspaper editors.

- Race and Reason

A Yankee View

Carleton Putnam • 1961 • 46,000 Words

As a prominent voice in the national campaign to maintain segregation, Putnam argued that the leading figures in his political movement were pursuing an ineffectual strategy, staking their claim on the constitutional doctrine of “states’ rights” while they avoided raising the scientific reality of the large biological differences between blacks and whites, which he believed should have been their main issue.  He claimed that these individuals all privately acknowledged those racial facts, but as members of the Southern elite they had been closely associated for generations with the families of their black household domestics and other retainers, and considered it impossible to publicly discuss the biological differences that they so readily acknowledged in private.  Thus, for cultural reasons they were foregoing their strongest political weapon, and Putnam believed his own work was necessary to remedy that lack.  He also claimed that numerous prominent scientists privately endorsed his scientific views about race but were too fearful of academic or financial retaliation to acknowledge those facts in public.

According to Putnam, the unchallenged sociological and psychological evidence that had helped sway the Supreme Court to overturn segregation was largely fraudulent, and his project culminated in an important 1963 challenge to Brown, in which he and his legal team successfully introduced the contrary testimony of several scientific experts.  But although they won at trial, that verdict was subsequently overturned at the appellate level, and the high court refused to hear an appeal.

In 1967 he published his sequel Race and Reality, which received a glowing endorsement from physics Nobel Laureate William Shockley who had recently become notorious for voicing similar views.  Around the same time or a few years later, leading psychometric scholars such as Arthur Jensen of Berkeley, Hans Eysenck of University College London, and Richard J. Herrnstein of Harvard had focused upon the large and seemingly innate racial gaps in IQ, with intellectually-elite publications such as the Harvard Educational Review and The Atlantic presenting their long articles on the subject.  But the political tide in American society was never reversed, and Putnam eventually abandoned his efforts.

Despite his controversial and strongly racialist public writings, when Putnam died in 1998 at the age of 96, he received a rather long and favorable obituary in the Times, certainly emphasizing his segregationist efforts and even mentioning that his books had inspired a young David Duke to become a leader of the Ku Klux Klan, but written in a surprisingly detached and even friendly tone, suggesting that Putnam had managed to retain lifelong credibility among our East Coast elites.

Wickliffe Draper, the Pioneer Fund, and Mankind Quarterly

Much of the hidden backstory of Putnam’s pro-segregation effort was later revealed in a 2002 book by William H. Tucker of Rutgers. The Funding of Scientific Racism recounted the origins and activities of the Pioneer Fund, for many decades the leading financial backer of numerous American racialist projects.  Prof. Tucker had his origins in the academic New Left of the late 1960s and was intensely hostile to the ideological positions of his subjects, but his three years of archival research and numerous personal interviews provide a wealth of information that otherwise would have remained hidden.

Although the Pioneer Fund only became an occasional subject of media scrutiny during the 1990s, its origins actually stretched back to the early decades of the 20th century and a millionaire named Wickliffe Draper, who funded and established the organization.  Like Stoddard, Grant, and Putnam, Draper himself was of New England Puritan stock, the group that had provided a hugely disproportionate share of America’s intellectual elites from the founding of our nation up through the beginning of the twentieth century.  He had graduated Harvard in 1913, been wounded in combat during the First World War, and eventually gained the rank of colonel in the post-war reserves.  Inheriting a substantial textile industry fortune, he never pursued a career, but instead devoted most of his life to such gentleman pursuits as big game hunting and travel.

Although obviously distasteful to Tucker, Draper’s strong racialist views seemed quite reflective of the leading American figures of his youth such as Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, and in his early adulthood, the books of Grant and Stoddard were on everyone’s lips.  Indeed, Roosevelt had praised Grant’s theories, and Draper was one of Grant’s social acquaintances, regarding him as a personal role-model according to Tucker.

By modern standards, America’s ruling elites of that era embraced extremely racist notions, and Draper’s views fit very comfortably within that milieu.  One of his earliest projects had been to promote the repatriation of America’s blacks back to Africa, but such ideas were hardly uncommon at the time, and indeed during the 1920s one of America’s most prominent black public figures was the nationalistic leader Marcus Garvey, who proposed to do exactly that.

Draper was hardly any sort of intellectual, but his importance lay in his willingness to heavily finance those racialists who were, and his choice of like-minded successors who continued to support such causes for decades after his death in 1972, which allowed his influence to span nearly a century, from the era of Warren Harding to that of Barack Obama.  The non-profit Pioneer Fund, which he established in 1937, was the primary vehicle for his donations, but Tucker’s research indicates that substantial additional sums were also disbursed directly from Draper’s personal assets.  In particular, it appears that much or even most of the funding for Putnam’s press campaigns, book distributions, and legal efforts may have been quietly provided by Draper, who viewed Putnam as a trusted ally and advisor.

Among American foundations, the Pioneer Fund scarcely ranked as a minnow, being dwarfed a hundred times over by Ford, Carnegie, Rockefeller, and other philanthropic endowments which were enthusiastically supportive of the rising anti-racist tide in American society and thought.  But although massively outspent by its ideological opponents, Pioneer’s dollars played a crucial role in subsidizing and keeping alive the racialist doctrines that had once entirely dominated American society but which had begun receding from the late 1920s onward, before becoming completely marginalized among our national elites by the 1950s and 1960s.

For example, the science of eugenics had been launched in the late 19th century by polymath Francis Galton, a first cousin of Charles Darwin, and for decades was almost universally accepted by educated individuals of all ideological backgrounds, with the strongest support usually coming from progressives and only the fervently religious being the main holdouts.  But under continuous pressure mostly by Jews and Marxists, the doctrine began a long and permanent retreat during the late 1920s and 1930s.  Around the same time, Franz Boas and his energetic group of academic disciples, most of them Jewish, had gained control of American anthropology, largely displacing the Anglo-Saxon academics who had originally created the discipline, and overturning the racialist theories once promoted by Grant and Stoddard.

As regular academic periodicals grew unwelcoming to articles that continued to adhere to what eventually became known as “scientific racism,” the Pioneer Fund in 1960 financed the creation of Mankind Quarterly, a new peer-reviewed journal intended to fill that gap.  When I digitized the archives of that publication around 2003, its name meant nothing to me, nor did those of its editorial board members and leading contributors.  But I eventually discovered that many of these latter individuals were actually leading international scholars with distinguished academic records, whose refusal to join ideological trends had locked them out of mainstream periodicals and eventually purged their names from our media and intellectual history despite their prestigious academic credentials.

For example, Henry Garrett had been the longtime chairman of Columbia University’s Psychology Department, president of the American Psychological Association, a member of the AAAS and the National Research Council, and editor of leading academic texts.  R. Ruggles Gates was a prominent British geneticist and a Fellow of the Royal Society. Robert Gayre, A. James Gregor, Robert Kuttner, R. Travis Osborne, and numerous other regular contributors also had strong scientific or scholarly credentials.  Although Tucker is quite hostile to these individuals and their ideology, his book is helpful in providing this important background.  The 1960-2004 archives of the publication are now conveniently available for reading on this website:

- Mankind Quarterly

128 Issues, July 1960 to July 2004

Nathaniel Weyl as a Proto-Neoconservative

Nearly all of the prominent American racialists so far discussed came from an Old Stock Anglo-Saxon backgrounds, reflecting the elites that had totally dominated our society up until the 1930s, and their lifelong political tendencies were generally either mainstream or right-wing.  But the most frequent outside contributor to Mankind Quarterly during the 1960s and 1970s was Nathaniel Weyl, who had different roots.

His father Walter was from a German-Jewish immigrant family and had been a leading progressive intellectual, co-founding The New Republic in 1914.  After getting his degree from Columbia University in 1931 and doing graduate work at the London School of Economics, the younger Weyl soon veered far to the left, spending the 1930s as a committed Communist Party member while working in government and operating on the fringes of a Soviet spy network.  He and his wife both broke with the Party  in 1939, disgusted by the Hitler-Stalin Pact, and by the late 1940s he had become a strong conservative and a zealous anti-Communist, regularly denouncing Red espionage in various publications, eventually including National Review.  So in some respects his ideological path anticipated that of the later neoconservatives who followed the same trajectory a generation or more later.

Racial and ethnic topics soon became one of Weyl’s main areas of interest, and in 1960 he published The Negro in American Civilization, an exhaustive and unflinching account of the role of blacks in our nation’s history.  Running well over 150,000 words, the coverage stretched from their African roots down to his present day, focused primarily upon history and politics but also including extensive discussion of biological, anthropological, and sociological issues.  Willmoore Kendall, a prominent Yale political scientist, was William F. Buckley Jr.’s mentor, and he gave the volume a glowing treatment in National Review, saying it filled the longstanding need for “a compendious and objective survey of the facts about the American Negro” but warned that “the evidence Weyl has assembled is vastly more discouraging…than most of us have permitted ourselves to fear in our most pessimistic moments.”  While praising Weyl’s bravery and candor, Kendall predicted that “He will pay dearly for it.”

Indeed, Kendall’s warning seems to have been borne out and almost all of Weyl’s subsequent writings were confined to conservative or racialist publications, as were the reviews of his many later books.  And Kendell’s ringing endorsement may even have had serious personal consequences, since the following year he was forced out of his tenured Yale professorship after 14 years of teaching at that academic institution.  In 1971, Weyl and a co-author published American Statesmen on Slavery and the Negro, which seems largely a supplement and sequel to the previous book.  Both of Weyl’s hefty volumes were parallel to Putnam’s short books, though providing far greater breadth and depth.

Although Weyl lacked a doctorate, he was a highly innovative thinker, so his apparent blacklisting by mainstream academics and publications had unfortunate intellectual consequences.  For example, in 1966 he published The Creative Elite in America, introducing a powerful sampling technique for determining the relative performance of different ethnic groups based upon their subset of especially distinctive last names, a tool which I had christened “Weyl Analysis” and heavily used in my long article “The Myth of American Meritocracy”  analyzing elite college admissions.

Among his various quantitative findings, Weyl demonstrated the long intellectual dominance of Americans of Puritan stock, and their noticeable decline by about 1900.  A half-century after Weyl’s sociological breakthrough, economist Gregory Clark relied upon exactly the same methodology in widely-praised best-seller The Son Also Rises, but confined any mention of Weyl to a single brief footnote, which denounced him as a “racist” and expressed surprise that such a powerful sociological technique had been so little used.

Weyl’s passing at age 94 was noted in a brief 2005 Times obituary, which focused entirely on his anti-Communism and peripheral involvement in the Hiss case and was reasonably favorable.  Since all of Weyl’s decades of research in “scientific racialism” had been blacklisted by the media, later generations of journalists may have remained totally unaware of it.

Academic Anthropologists and the Reality of Race

Although neither Putnam nor Weyl had held academic positions, these racialist writers and others drew quite heavily upon the works of those who did, most of whom were fully mainstream scholars.  Very few of these individuals fell into the ideological camp of white racialism, and indeed the majority seem to have been either typical liberals or else entirely apolitical, merely being researchers who followed the scientific data wherever it happened to lead.

Objective scientific reality does exist, but unless we have the time and expertise to investigate the research studies ourselves, our perception of that reality relies upon the filter of the media, and that portrayal may be severely distorted.  There is the notorious historical example of Stalin’s elevation of Trofim K. Lysenko and his anti-hereditarian theories to official dogma while condemning to the gulag those scientists who continued to believe in genetics, a policy that crippled Soviet biology for decades.

Back in 2017 I was interviewed for an hour or two over the phone by a New York Times journalist focused on the racially-related political topics that had suddenly begun dominating the national headlines.  She seemed very skeptical that race was a scientifically valid concept, and quite surprised when I told her that saying “race does not exist” was roughly equivalent to asserting that “gravity does not exist.”  I pointed out that her longtime colleague Nicholas Wade, an award-winning science journalist, had published an entire book a couple of years earlier on the science of race, and that just a few weeks before our conversation her own newspaper had devoted the entire front section of its prestigious Week in Review section to a lengthy exposition of the undeniable scientific reality of race by Professor of Genetics David Reich of Harvard University and the Broad Institute.  But despite these points, she still seemed quite unconvinced, presumably reflecting the uniformly contrary opinions of her own journalistic peer-group.  A few months ago, James Bennet, the highly-regarded Opinion Editor of the Times, was suddenly purged for insufficient “wokeness,” so I suspect that henceforth her beliefs will no longer be disturbed by any such discordant scientific information from her own newspaper.

Although our country has not yet reached the Soviet condition of imprisoning researchers whose scientific findings are misaligned with the reigning ideology, for decades harsh informal sanctions have been visited upon those academics who come to unwelcome conclusions, especially if they are perceived as lending aid and comfort to racialist forces and their political projects.  In some cases, controversial findings have unleashed a torrent of media vilification, with the scholars being attacked as “fascists” or “neo-Nazis,” despite all evidence to the contrary, and even subjected to personal threats and demands that they be censored.  Occasionally, such harsh and unfair denunciations have actually moved the victims into the racialist camp, thereby becoming self-fulfilling prophecies, but more typically the scholars have quietly continued their research activities until the media spotlight eventually shifted elsewhere.  Meanwhile, rival academics presenting contrary positions have often been heavily promoted by the media as fully authoritative sources, despite sometimes possessing far weaker scholarly credentials.

An early post-war example of this process came in the case of Prof. Carleton Coon, one of the world’s foremost physical anthropologists, who spent two decades at Harvard and later served as president of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists.  Coon’s specialty was race, and he authored several of the standard academic texts in that subject.  His research also attracted some controversy when he proposed the hypothesis that the different races of mankind actually predated the emergence of homo sapiens, having previously appeared in the geographically-separated populations of our homo erectus predecessors, which then independently crossed the line into full sapiency at different points in time.

Both Coon’s fully mainstream work and his more speculative theories were heavily cited by Putnam and others in their political writings on segregation, and according to Tucker’s research, Coon was quietly sympathetic to their efforts.  During his presidential term, a rump session of his professional association voted to condemn Putnam’s book, and when Coon discovered that virtually none of those hostile members had actually read it, he threatened to resign in protest.

Throughout this era, Coon’s leading scientific opponent was a British social anthropologist and follower of Franz Boas, who had originally been born Israel Ehrenberg but then chose to conceal his Jewish origins by taking the remarkably pompous and aristocratic name of “Montague Francis Ashley-Montagu.”   After relocating to America, he eventually shortened his new name to “Ashley Montagu” while also affecting an extremely upper-class British accent despite his very working-class roots.

Although Montagu seems to have had few scholarly achievements, had made fraudulent claims about his educational credentials, and was dismissed after a few years from his only serious academic position, he spent decades as an extremely successful scientific popularizer, gaining enormous public influence through the media and political support he received.

He was best known for his strong opposition to the concept of race, which he characterized as “Man’s most dangerous myth” in a massively best-selling book of that title after having authored UNESCO’s famous 1951 declaration on that subject, which he quite possibly plagiarized.  Although the actual fine print of his biological claims was generally more nuanced, his headline writings successfully promoted the widespread notion that race was a dangerous pseudo-scientific illusion.

A very interesting history of the anthropological conflicts of that era may be found in Pat Shipman’s 1994 book The Evolution of Racism.  Prior to her turn to anthropology, Shipman had begun her academic career in Religion, and she seems a very zealous anti-racist, but as a diligent and candid researcher, her accounts of Coon, Montagu, and several of the other important figures may have revealed a different image than what she had originally anticipated.

For example, Montagu’s early attempts to expunge the scientific notion of race came under withering criticism by leading scholars in the field, and he defended himself by denouncing his anthropological adversaries as “racists” who opposed him because of his Jewish heritage.  In an on-the-record interview decades later, he explained those past conflicts by declaring that “all non-Jews are anti-Semitic,” a statement so remarkable that Shipman used it as the title of one of her chapters.

One of Montagu’s later books, The Natural Superiority of Women, also became hugely influential within the burgeoning feminist movement.  Montagu remained a very prominent and mediagenic celebrity-scientist for decades, finally dying in 1999 at the age of 94.

While Montagu’s misleading claims received vast media promotion and he became a major television celebrity-intellectual, far more substantial scholarly works on the same subject received scarcely any public attention, or were even actively boycotted.  For example, in 1974 John R. Baker, an eminent Oxford don, published Race, a magisterial 300,000 word volume presenting the entire intellectual history and scientific information on that subject, ranging from physical anthropology to psychometrics.  In the opinion of Sir Peter Medawar, one of the Britain’s leading men of science, no other book “tries to encompass everything relevant to the idea of race with such thoroughness, seriousness, and honesty.”  But according to later accounts, intense political pressure forced Oxford University Press to suppress the book by minimizing its distribution and visibility outside the narrow confines of academia. As a consequence, the public impact of this major work of scholarship was restricted to the white racialist community, where it was strongly endorsed by Mankind Quarterly.

I have only casually leafed through the very lengthy works of Coon and Baker, but these massively-documented tomes seem to contain exactly the sort of careful and dispassionate material that represents the epitome of serious science, so different from the ideologically-motivated verbiage of popular, media-promoted charlatans such as Montagu.

More recently, the current state of our scientific knowledge was helpfully summarized in Race: The Reality of Human Differences published in 2004 by eminent Berkeley anthropologist Vincent Sarich and journalist Frank Miele, which won glowing praise from Colombia anthropologist Ralph Holloway and several other mainstream academics.  The book describes the intellectual history of the scientific issues, providing coverage of the  various political controversies and Coon’s important work, and since it only runs a couple of hundred pages and is written in an easy style, would serve as an excellent introduction to this controversial topic.

IQ Researchers and Racial Differences

Putnam’s second book had appeared in 1967, recounting the failure of his attempts to overturn the Brown decision, and thereby reestablish the legal basis for school segregation.  By then, popular resistance in the South had largely crumbled, resulting in massive white flight from the local public schools.  Meanwhile, Northern cities such as Boston were being roiled by similar controversies over integration, and the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act had considerably broadened the political battlefield for racial issues.  Although elite liberal opinion had predicted that such reform legislation would greatly reduce American racial conflict, the country had instead witnessed the worst wave of urban unrest since at least the Civil War, with deadly black riots in Detroit, Watts, and numerous other cities.

An important basis for the Brown decision had been the argument that desegregation would substantially reduce the wide educational achievement gap between black and white students, which was also a central goal of many of Lyndon Johnson’s new Great Society programs, such as Head Start.  But in February 1969, the prestigious Harvard Educational Review gave over its entire issue to a massive 123 page article by Prof. Arthur Jensen of Berkeley, a leading psychometrician, bearing the provocative title “How Much Can We Boost IQ and Scholastic Achievement?”  Jensen argued that there was overwhelming scientific evidence that IQ scores and other measures of scholastic ability were determined by nature rather than nurture and that the wide black-white performance gap was mostly biological in origin.  Jensen’s scientific claims provoked a national firestorm of controversy, subjecting Jensen to massive vilification, including physical assaults and very serious threats against the lives of himself and his family.

Despite these ferocious attacks, Jensen never wavered in his scientific positions during the decades that followed, and in 1998 he published his magnum opus The g Factor: The Science of Mental Ability, reiterating his findings.  By 2005, he was widely regarded as the Grand Old Man of psychometrics, and he published an article summarizing the previous thirty years of research on racial differences in intelligence, with his co-author being Prof. J. Philippe Rushton, an evolutionary theorist who held explicitly White Nationalist beliefs.

Jensen seems to have been largely apolitical, and although his original article had ignited the controversy, he hardly desired the resulting media spotlight, which soon shifted away, allowing him to spend the next four decades in his scholarly research prior to his death in 2012 at age 89.  Instead, a much more eager lightning-rod appeared in the person of physicist William Shockley, who years earlier had won a Nobel Prize for inventing the transistor.  Shockley seemed to relish public attention, which he soon attracted by wholeheartedly endorsing Jensen’s views and then spending years promoting them in the media and various public forums, along with other racially-charged policy proposals such as government-paid sterilization for low-IQ individuals and similar eugenic measures.  The physicist soon became a household name, attracting massive public vilification up until his death in 1989 and even long afterward.

Shockley was a Palo Alto native, and in 1956 after inventing the transistor he had founded Shockley Semiconductor in neighboring Mountain View to commercialize his invention, choosing to relocate back from the East Coast in order to be closer to his aged and ailing mother.  His difficult personality and poor management skills eventually produced an exodus of his early employees, who went on to spawn many of the most important technology companies in the region, arguably making Shockley the father of the modern Silicon Valley, which otherwise might never have come into existence.  But although he is probably the most important Palo Altan in history, his controversial racialist views have prevented any appropriate recognition.  For years I have driven past his simple clapboard home on Waverley Ave., which is unmarked by any plaque or historic designation, and his name has never graced any building, monument, or award.

Lacking any such public honors and with his name now largely forgotten, Shockley presented no target for the recent Black Lives Matter protest movement to attack, and he was simply ignored.  By contrast, a similar campaign a few years ago forced our local school district to rename Terman Middle School, which had honored famed Stanford Electrical Engineering Prof. Frederick Terman.  In the 1930s, Terman had encouraged his students William Hewlett and David Packard to found their eponymous company, which also played a huge role in creating America’s powerful technology industry.  Terman’s name was scraped from the school because he shared it with that of his father, Stanford Psychology Prof. Lewis Terman, who had pioneered American IQ testing a century ago, now considered a toxic figure despite almost no focus on race.

Jensen had done his own doctoral work at University College London under Hans Eysenck, a renowned professor of psychology and expert in psychometrics.  A couple of years after the appearance of Jensen’s controversial article on the heredity basis of IQ, Eysenck published Race, Intelligence, and Education, a short book taking much the same position.  Once again, a massive wave of controversy and media vilification erupted, with Eysenck being physically attacked and having his life threatened.  Although he never retracted his views, henceforth he focused almost entirely on other topics, and by the time of his death in 1997 was a figure of enormous eminence in the field of psychology, ranking first in the world in the number of his peer-reviewed academic citations.  Despite such scholarly achievements, he had never been made a member of the British Psychological Society, apparently because of the controversial nature of his writings on race and IQ three decades earlier.

The same year that Eysenck had released his controversial book, the parallel views of a much younger Harvard psychology professor named Richard Herrnstein attracted similar attention in our own country.  Founded in 1857, The Atlantic had for more than a century been one of America’s most prestigious national magazines, and Herrnstein’s 20,000 word article on IQ was one of the longest ever published in that magazine, providing a comprehensive account of the origins and accuracy of IQ tests as a measure of human intelligence, along with the enormous implications for the future of our society.  Herrnstein strongly endorsed the arguments of Jensen and others that IQ was overwhelmingly determined by innate factors, but tread rather carefully on the related evidence of a large difference in intelligence between racial groups.

Given its venue, Herrnstein’s massive article reached a large national audience, including many of America’s intellectual elites, and soon provoked the usual wave of attacks and hostile criticism, though his caution on racial issues probably insulated him from the level of vitriol that Jensen and Eysenck had encountered.  Rather than being expelled from respectable media circles, Herrnstein went on to publish additional major articles on related IQ issues over the next couple of decades in The Public Interest, National Review, Commentary, and even socialistic Dissent.

In 1982, The Atlantic carried another one of his long articles describing the overwhelming consensus of academic researchers on IQ issues and the severe distortions of the scientific facts regularly promoted by leading mainstream media organs such as The New York Times and CBS News.  So although the positions of Herrnstein and his allies were largely excluded from outlets with the largest national audiences, they continually reached smaller but more intellectually elite circles. In 1985 he co-authored Crime and Human Nature with eminent political scientist James Q. Wilson, an influential and well-received text arguing for a strong innate component to criminal behavior, including discussion of the very wide differences in crime rates between racial and ethnic groups.

The Bell Curve Wars and Other IQ Controversies

Herrnstein died of lung cancer at the age of 64 in September 1994, having devoted the final years of his life to a project that directly addressed the large racial differences in intelligence which most of his previous writings had usually sidestepped.  Teaming up with prominent social scientist Charles Murray, he produced The Bell Curve, a massive volume that weighed in at 845 pages and over 400,000 words.

The book was released just weeks after his death and immediately became a national sensation, probably attracting more controversy and media coverage than anything published in decades.  Almost three generations had passed since a major American press had published a book heavily arguing for the mostly innate nature of human intelligence and the wide racial differences in such traits, and although the latter issue constituted only small portion of the text, those incendiary claims attracted nearly all the attention.

At that time, The New Republic was America’s most influential liberal opinion magazine, and both owner Martin Peretz and editor Andrew Sullivan together gave their strong support to the launch of The Bell Curve, allocating much of an issue to a 10,000 word cover-story entitled “Race, Genes, and IQ: An Apologia,” which largely consisted of extended extracts from the book.  But that decision sparked a huge revolt by most of the magazine’s outraged staff and regular contributors, who demanded space for rebuttal, so that the same issue also carried some 19 separate attacks on the book and its theories, many of them extremely harsh, with epithets such as “neo-Nazi” tossed around.   According to Sullivan, the incident marked a turning point in his relationships with his TNR colleagues, which never recovered, and he eventually left the magazine.

From the distance of a quarter century, I had mostly forgotten the overwhelming media coverage at the time, but spending a couple of days reading fifty or sixty of the contemporaneous reviews, many of them quite lengthy, refreshed my memory, and also underscored the tremendously disparate reactions by usual ideological soulmates.

For example, just within the pages of the New York Times, the Sunday Book Review allocated The Bell Curve and two other books on similar racial issues an almost unprecedented three pages of discussion, with Malcolm Browne, the paper’s Pulitzer Prize-winning science journalist taking 4,200 words to portray the works in a substantially favorable light, emphasizing the need to confront long-suppressed taboos.  But a week later the same newspaper ran a very long editorial denouncing “The Bell Curve Agenda” in the harshest possible terms, and an 8,300 word cover-story in the Sunday Magazine had vilified Murray as “The Most Dangerous Conservative in America.”

National Review, the leading conservative magazine, had already run a long and favorable review, but soon devoted most of an entire issue to a remarkable symposium by 14 separate contributors, many of them prominent journalists or academics, who provided a very wide range of both positive and negative perspectives.  Although TNR was then my favorite magazine and I didn’t hold NR in high regard, the flood of attacks in the former seemed absolutely hysterical, while I thought that the latter had provided the best and most balanced discussion.

The coincidental timing of larger political events probably helped explain this enormous media coverage.  Just a couple of weeks after the book’s release, Newt Gingrich and the Republicans had unexpectedly swept to power in Congressional elections, ending nearly a half-century of unbroken Democratic control by seizing majorities in both the House and the Senate, an event just as traumatic to the liberals of that day as Donald Trump’s upset victory was to prove in 2016.  Racial controversies had been a significant contributing factor to the Republican landslide, and appalled liberals now saw their familiar political and ideological world crumbling about them, with the frightening possibility that the “white racism” of the buried past would suddenly regain control of American society.

The result was an exceptionally bitter wave of liberal media attacks on the book, which was demonized to an unprecedented extent.  As mentioned, much of the early media discussion of The Bell Curve and its ideas had been favorable or at least respectful, but an enormous public campaign of vilification was now unleashed, with many timorous Republicans and conservatives soon wilting under the attacks and abandoning any support.  A couple of years earlier, I had been invited to a private meeting in DC at which Murray had confidentially circulated portions of his work-in-progress and the neoconservative organizers strategized with him about the best approach for successfully launching the book; but now I heard word that Bill Kristol was seeking conservatives to sign a public statement condemning the “racist” tract.

The book continued to sell very well, but the tide of elite public opinion soon turned sharply against it, and Herrnstein’s death just a month before publication was surely a contributing factor.  Until just a few years earlier, Murray had been totally unaware of these scientific issues involving race and IQ, and indeed had regularly dismissed the possible role of racial differences as a factor in black social problems in his previous writings denouncing the welfare state.  By contrast, Herrnstein had spent more than two decades researching the topic as a leading Harvard professor, and was also partially immunized against attacks because of his strong liberal credentials.  Thus, the disappearance of the senior liberal co-author removed a crucial defender of the contents, leaving the conservative Murray much more vulnerable and exposed, and forcing him to publicly defend psychometric issues that were outside his primary area of expertise.  I remember thinking at the time that when faced with sharp technical questioning by hostile journalists some of his media responses were not as effective as they might have been.

America’s leading psychometricians, whose professional expertise on race and IQ had long been ignored or mischaracterized in the public arena, quickly mobilized in support, using the media firestorm as an opportunity to get their longstanding opinions into print.  In December, the Wall Street Journal gave over most of a full editorial page to a public declaration that The Bell Curve represented the scholarly consensus of the “mainstream science on intelligence,” a statement organized by Prof. Linda Gottfredson and signed by 52 academic experts, including such eminent scholars as Eysenck and Jensen.

Despite these counter-attacks, the intellectual tide continued to turn against the work, and within less than a year, the ideological status quo had reasserted itself, with the remaining defenders finding themselves severely beleaguered in the mainstream media.  When the firestorm had originally erupted, famed paleolibertarian Murray Rothbard had been gleeful that the long-suppressed truths about racial matters had finally broken through, suggesting that powerful political elements had apparently decided to reverse their decades of scientific suppression.  But at the ten year anniversary, longtime writers on race and IQ such as Steve Sailer and Chris Brand delivered lengthy and despairing verdicts, concluding that the ideas in the book had been successfully suppressed, and any favorable mention of it in respectable circles would render someone an immediate outcast.  Sailer even suggested that the “Bell Curve Wars” represented a crucial turning point for both the neoconservative and neoliberal intellectual movements, which soon abandoned any lingering candor on racially-charged issues.  Indeed, other frequent writers on racial matters such as John Derbyshire and Peter Brimelow have sometimes described the period 1995-2005 as a brief “interrglacial” during which controversial racial topics could sometimes be discussed in the mainstream media, but that the subsequent clamp-down had been even more severe than anything before.

Many journalists and academics became extremely fearful of broaching the subject of race and IQ, with even the most eminent figures sometimes suffering severe consequences when they did so.  For half a century, James Watson had reigned as one of the world’s greatest scientific figures, having shared a Nobel Prize for discovering DNA in 1953 and then spending decades leading Cold Spring Harbor laboratory, which he built up into a major center of scientific research.  But in 2007 while on a book-tour at the age of 79, he raised questions about the average intelligence of black Africans and was immediately subjected to a firestorm of public criticism and media vituperation, soon being stripped of many of his honors, and later endured a second wave of vilification when similar remarks came to light in a 2018 documentary.  This was a shocking fate for a scientist in his 90s who had spent his entire career at the peak of world renown and achievement.

At the time of the initial Watson firestorm, Slate was our leading online publication, generally neoliberal and well-respected, and William Saletan, one of its senior editors, began publishing a lengthy five-part series entitled “Liberal Creationism,” in which he explained the solid scientific basis of Watson’s casual remarks.  But Saletan immediately encountered such a ferocious wave of denunciations that he soon apologized for having used “disreputable sources” amid widespread doubts that he would be able to keep his job.

Richard Lynn and IQ and the Wealth of Nations

Although Saletan managed to survive, other media figures naturally became very discrete on the subject of race and IQ, either mouthing platitudes or avoiding the topic entirely lest they be mobbed and their careers destroyed.  Scientists themselves also recognized that if a figure of Watson’s towering stature could be so easily destroyed, they needed to watch their words very carefully if they wished to retain their positions.  Meanwhile, IQ researchers and racialist elements followed the topic more eagerly than ever, but remained on the ideological margins, with few of their books or articles gaining any wider exposure.  And this severe bifurcation between the two camps—one enormously large but silent and fearful and the other small and fiercely committed to IQ doctrine—had serious negative consequences.

In 2002, Richard Lynn and a co-author had published IQ and the Wealth of Nations, which was entirely ignored by mainstream media but became a sensation in IQ and racialist circles.  Some of its striking findings began to circulate widely on the Internet, together with those presented in several follow-up volumes, such as The Global Bell Curve.

For decades, Lynn had been a leading figure in international IQ research, with many of his important results cited in the Herrnstein/Murray book, and his new work proposed a sweeping global hypothesis.  Based upon his collection of hundreds of international IQ samples, he demonstrated a strong correlation between national IQs and per capita incomes, claiming this proved that a nation’s IQ was a central factor in determining its economic success, with obvious implications for government policies on foreign aid and immigration.  In addition, the extremely low IQs in so many African countries, often running 30 points or more below the white American average, obviously explained Africa’s dismal economic failures.

Despite his lack of any mainstream coverage, Lynn soon became a near cult-figure within the racialist community and the statistics in his book an object of veneration.  Moreover, such explosive information may have been widely discussed in private conversations, gradually leaking into establishment circles, and perhaps even ultimately playing a role in prompting Watson’s controversial public statements.  I suspect that numerous mainstream academics or journalists even regarded the international IQ data as a sort of intellectual pornography, becoming the “forbidden knowledge” that often attracts keen interest.

At the time, I was totally immersed in my own software work, but about a decade later I finally looked into Lynn’s material, and came to radically different conclusions.  Focusing primarily upon the dozens of white European IQ samples he had presented, I noticed an extremely striking variance in those results over fairly short periods of time and between genetically-indistinguishable groups, raising strong doubts about Lynn’s strict hereditarian explanation.

Just as Lynn claimed, national wealth was closely linked to IQ, but his own evidence actually suggested that the causal arrow pointed in the direction opposite to his hypothesis, with IQs seeming to rise very rapidly as national wealth increased.  For example, Lynn showed that East Germans had IQs as much as 17 points lower than their West German neighbors, while in the early 1970s Ireland Irish were some 13 points below their Irish-American cousins, but both these huge gaps quickly closed as the poorer societies became less poor.  A large number of such extreme anomalies seemed to refute the “Strong IQ Hypothesis” long embraced by Lynn, most of his fellow IQ researchers, and their numerous racialist admirers.

I presented this analysis in my major 2012 article “Race, IQ, and Wealth” which provoked widespread discussion, and in a series of follow-up columns I expanded on these ideas and replied to Lynn’s attempted rebuttal. I think my conclusions were eventually accepted by most of the less-dogmatic elements within both the IQ and racialist communities:

- Race, IQ, and Wealth

What the facts tell us about a taboo subject

Ron Unz • The American Conservative • July 18, 2012 • 7,500 Words

Since my own findings were rather humdrum and so obviously implied by Lynn’s own data, I suggested the larger surprise was that they had not been previously noticed during the years of bitter battles over IQ:

We are now faced with a mystery arguably greater than that of IQ itself. Given the powerful ammunition that Lynn and Vanhanen have provided to those opposing their own “Strong IQ Hypothesis,” we must wonder why this has never attracted the attention of either of the warring camps in the endless, bitter IQ dispute, despite their alleged familiarity with the work of these two prominent scholars. In effect, I would suggest that the heralded 300-page work by Lynn and Vanhanen constituted a game-ending own-goal against their IQ-determinist side, but that neither of the competing ideological teams ever noticed.

This seemed a perfect example of why efforts to suppress public discussion of a contentious topic may ultimately be self-defeating, preventing the warring camps from objectively analyzing the underlying evidence and coming to realistic conclusions.

Philippe Rushton, r/K Theory, and Accelerated Evolution

I had always been interested in racial issues, and the enormous 1994 media frenzy surrounding The Bell Curve naturally led me to purchase a copy, but I found it rather uninteresting and ran out of steam less than a hundred pages into the massive 845 page volume.  After all, Herrnstein had been writing pretty much the same thing for more than two decades, starting with his very famous 1971 Atlantic article, and although he’d now compiled a great deal of additional supporting evidence, his arguments had already convinced me over many years earlier.

By contrast, another book that coincidentally came out almost at the same time fell into a very different category.  Although it received merely a sliver of the media coverage given to the Herrnstein/Murray book, I found Race, Evolution, and Behavior by Canadian academic J. Philippe Rushton absolutely fascinating and considered it a seminal advance in human evolutionary theory.

After summarizing the known scientific facts about the main races of mankind and their different characteristics, Rushton then analyzed this data within the context of r/K theory, a framework of biological adaptation originally developed by sociobiology pioneer E.O. Wilson, which analyzed organisms as being optimized for particular environmental conditions.  Under circumstances of resource-abundance, r-selected species emphasize rapid reproduction, while if resources are scarce and competition the crucial factor, K-selected species focus on high parental-investment.

All humans are situated at the far K-end of the spectrum, but some races more so than others.  Restricting his attention to the three classical continental-scale mega-races of Africans, Europeans, and East Asians, Rushton analyzed their characteristics under this theoretical framework.  Across some sixty different physical and behavioral traits, Africans were invariably at one end of the continuum and Asians at the other, with Europeans in the middle but much closer to Asians.  And in each case, these biological characteristics followed the same r/K pattern.  A vast wealth of empirical data supported the conclusion that each race had evolved a distinct package of environmentally-influenced features.

I remember casually discussing the two contrasting books with a politically-moderate academic friend of mine at the time, and we both agreed that while the ideas in the much-hyped Bell Curve were neither particularly new nor provocative, Rushton’s research was absolutely fascinating and probably worth a Nobel Prize.   I also joked that it might take at least thirty years for such controversial material to become sufficiently accepted for him to claim that honor.  Since those prizes are not awarded posthumously, when Rushton died of cancer in 2012 at the relatively young age of 68, I mentioned to one of Harvard’s most prominent scholars that my prediction could no longer be tested.

Despite the shocking aspects of Rushton’s racial analysis, whose controversial conclusions vastly exceeded the rather bland and well-established claims advanced by Herrnstein and Murray, his book initially received fair and even rather favorable treatment, with the two works frequently paired together in reviews.  The extremely long discussion in the New York Times Sunday Book Review covered both of them, and while it noted Rushton’s “incendiary thesis,” his ideas were still treated in a fully-respectful fashion.

Nonetheless, for most modern readers, Rushton’s rather straightforward discussion of racial differences in brain size, genital organs, and rates of physical maturation might trigger an almost allergic reaction, seeming to represent the most horrifying aspects of the endlessly-vilified “scientific racism” from in the early decades of the 20th century.  I was hardly surprised to notice that Rushton’s Wikipedia entry tenuously attempted to link him to the Nazi Party in its second paragraph, and many journalists had pursued a very similar line of attack in 1994.  Indeed, since his own book had made significant use of Rushton’s research, Murray felt compelled to add an Afterword that defended Rushton as a “serious scholar,” but many of the harshest attacks on The Bell Curve still greatly exploited that Rushton association.

Rushton’s landmark book is no longer in print and only available on Amazon at excessive prices, but fortunately PDF copies may be found on the Internet, as well as those of abridged edition, which condenses his 350 page volume into what amounts to a long article.

For years, Rushton’s research and writings had attracted furious hostility, with organized leftists unsuccessfully attempting to have his Canadian university fire him from his tenured professorship, and prominent politicians even suggesting that he should be investigated and prosecuted for violations of Canada’s expansive hate-crimes laws.  Endlessly persecuted or ignored by the political mainstream while hailed for his brilliance by the racialist community, Rushton’s own ideological views may have gradually shifted as a consequence.  Near the very beginning of his 1995 book, he had argued that use of his scientific research by ethnic nationalists was “problematic,” but by 2002 he had assumed the presidency of the Pioneer Fund and a few years later had become a featured speaker at right-wing racialist conferences, at which point I had come to consider him as an outright White Nationalist.

This last characterization actually had important consequences for my own activities.  I had done quite a lot of writing on racial and ethnic issues during the 1990s, then became absorbed in my software work and published almost nothing during the first decade of the 2000s.  However, I actively participated in a lively email discussion group organized by Steve Sailer which focused on racial issues.  A very common topic of discussion was immigrants and immigration, with my own generally favorable views usually rendering me a tiny minority of one.  A frequent sub-topic was crime, and my claims that Hispanics had approximately the same crime rates as whites of the same age attracted endless attacks and ridicule from the overwhelming majority of the other list-members.  The dispute went on for so many years that I eventually no longer bothered to argue the case, but every now and then just made some satirical jibe on the matter.

As it happens, Rushton was a very occasional participant in the group, and in late 2009 one of my jokes caught his eye.  Being a bit on the humorless side, he failed to comprehend that my remarks were actually tongue-in-cheek, and after three or four explanatory exchanges, I was finally forced to state my position as explicitly as possible: “Hispanics have approximately the same crime rates as whites of the same age.” He found my claim totally astonishing, saying that it contradicted absolutely everything he had ever learned about the subject and even threatened to overturn his entire ideological world-view, which he had so painstakingly built up over his previous thirty years of scientific investigation into human racial differences. Therefore, he said, I couldn't possibly be correct.

I then regarded Rushton as probably being the world's leading White Nationalist academic scholar, and he was basically saying that he would eat his own hat if my contradictory racial analysis proved correct. Such an intellectual challenge was just too tempting to resist, so I took a brief hiatus from my ongoing software project to work out the crime numbers, which naturally turned out to be exactly as I had expected, then published my work as “The Myth of Hispanic Crime” in January 2010, an article which provoked quite a lot of discussion on various websites.  I believe my findings had a substantial impact in reshaping the public debate, and my article spent most of the next decade generally ranked #2 by Google among some 160 million search results for “Hispanic Crime” and “Latino Crime” until all the pages of our website were entirely deranked by the Internet giant a few months ago, though it still holds that impressive position both on DuckDuckGo and Bing.

- https://www.google.com/search?q=latino+crime

- https://www.bing.com/search?q=latino+crime

- https://duckduckgo.com/?q=latino+crime

- The Myth of Hispanic Crime

Talk TV sensationalists and axe-grinding ideologues have fallen for a myth of immigrant lawlessness

Ron Unz • The American Conservative • January 26, 2010 • 5,500 Words

My satisfaction with that article prompted me to return to research and writing, and over the next couple of years, I published more than I ever done had in the past.

Whether or not Rushton’s ill-treatment had pushed him into the white racialist camp, he gave little indication of deeply regretting that alignment, which only came after some twenty years of increasingly harsh vilification and harassment, both at his university and by the media.  A much more unfortunate public demonization, though on a far lesser scale, occurred in the case of Henry Harpending, an eminent anthropologist with whom I’d become a little friendly during the early 2000s.

As his Wikipedia article indicates, he had spent nearly his entire career as an absolutely mainstream academic figure.  After earning his Ph.D. at Harvard in 1972, he did important original work both in population genetics and anthropological fieldwork in Africa, and published over 120 articles in respected scientific journals.  He eventually won election to the prestigious National Academy of Sciences, and spent his last twenty years as a full professor at the University of Utah.

Around 2007 he began a series of collaborations with physicist Gregory Cochran and together they published a number of important, high-profile papers.  These included a theory that the introgression of Neanderthal genes may have spurred the development of early Homo Sapiens, the presentation of genetic evidence for the evolution of increased Ashkenazi Jewish intelligence, and most importantly the hypothesis that human evolution had been rapidly accelerating during the last 10,000 years, being driven by the increased appearance of favorable mutations due to far larger populations.  All these papers appeared in well-regarded academic journals, with a couple of them being sufficiently important that they received favorable coverage in the science pages of the New York Times. In 2007 he and Cochran co-authored The 10,000 Year Explosion, published by Basic Books, which presented these various evolutionary ideas, as well as the suggestion that the evolution of lactose-tolerance might have been an important factor behind the early Indo-European expansion.  The numerous reviews in academic journals were generally quite favorable.

However, the suggestion that human evolution had rapidly accelerated during the last few thousand years carried possible racial implications that did not pass unnoticed among white racialists, and the work became quite popular in such circles.  Moreover, the two authors launched West Hunter, a joint blogsite focused on racial and evolutionary issues, and although Harpending seemed only minimally involved, many of the numerous commenters expressed sharply racialist sentiments on a wide variety of matters.  Despite seemingly being apolitical, during 2009 and 2011 he accepted speaking engagement at small right-wing gatherings on the East Coast, perhaps thereby coming to the attention of SPLC investigators.

In 2014 Nicholas Wade, a longtime science reporter and editor at the New York Times, published an important book on race and evolution that quickly drew an organized campaign of vilification, including a public letter signed by 134 prominent geneticists, whose absurd charges conclusively proved that not a single one had read the book they were attacking.  One of Wade’s chapters covered the theory of the evolution of increased Ashkenazi intelligence that Harpending had co-authored, probably placing a large target on the latter’s back.

So the following year, the SPLC’s HateWatch newsletter outrageously denounced the mild-mannered academic as a “White Nationalist.”   This accusation was based upon a ridiculous grab-basket of charges, several of which merely amounted to describing his scientific research findings or mere guilt by association.  Other than that, they noted he had occasionally made public statements roughly along the lines of the theories promoted by Herrnstein and Murray and had once called for the mass-deportation of illegal immigrants. For his writings on controversial Jewish issues, Kevin MacDonald has long become an arch-fiend to SPLC researchers, and they demonstrated their total incompetence by claiming Harpending’s theories were based upon those of MacDonald although they have no connection whatsoever and the latter’s name never even appeared in the index nor the bibliography of his book.

Quiet academics who become the object of vicious accusations by influential national organizations have little recourse, and suddenly being labeled a “White Nationalist” and “racist” must have been a very painful experience, possibly contributing to his death from a couple of strokes early the following year at age 72.  Despite his twenty years as an esteemed Utah professor, no obituary appeared in his local newspaper, while his university website currently contains a page disassociating itself from one of its former academic stars.

The motive behind such SPLC calumny may have been partly to provide a severe warning to other scientific researchers, much like the destruction of James Watson’s towering reputation.  But think a larger factor was the desire to sufficiently anathemize the scholar that in the future no one would dare to cite his research in the public media, and that result seems to have been achieved.  In 2019 a rather chauvinistic Jewish columnist at the  New York Times casually referred to some of the findings that had been favorably discussed in his own newspaper a dozen years earlier, then desperately back-pedaled and removed the reference after someone discovered he had been relying upon a “racist” researcher.

Jewish Issues and Revilo P. Oliver

This extreme sensitivity towards any scientific research touching upon Jews or Jewish characteristics may actually represent a major hidden subtext behind the heavy suppression of racial research over the last century, perhaps even being a more important factor than the obvious focus on black/white issues.

As discussed above, Prof. Tucker’s exhaustive investigation of the Pioneer Fund revealed that throughout most of the twentieth century the organization had been at the center of a network of racialist researchers, providing at least some funding support for many of the scholars discussed above, including Jensen, Eysenck, Rushton, and Lynn, whose focus on topics of race and IQ was heavily disfavored by the vastly larger flow of funding from governmental or mainstream philanthropic sources.  But Tucker discovered strong indications that many of the key Pioneer figures had also held strong views on Jewish issues, though they were careful not to publicly disclose them.

In his first chapter, he explained that Pioneer had its ideological roots in the 1920s, when now-controversial notions of white racialism and eugenics were ubiquitous in elite American circles, especially prevalent in our officer corps and Military Intelligence, who were members of Col. Draper’s own social milieu.  Heavily drawing upon the ground-breaking research of Holocaust historian Joseph W. Bendersky, Tucker noted that these same groups were also deeply—if quietly—hostile to growing Jewish influence in American society, which they viewed as a direct threat to continued Anglo-Saxon dominance.  For four decades one of the top figures at Pioneer was Secretary John B. Trevor, Jr., the son of the former high-ranking Military Intelligence officer who had played a central role in the passage of the 1924 Immigration Act, whose underlying motive had actually been to eliminate any future influx of Eastern European Jews.

I summarized some of Bendersky’s important findings in a previous article:

In these military circles, there was an overwhelming belief that powerful Jewish elements had financed and led Russia's Bolshevik Revolution, and were organizing similar Communist movements elsewhere aimed at destroying all existing Gentile elites and imposing Jewish supremacy throughout America and the rest of the Western world…Although intelligence officers gradually came to doubt that the Protocols of the Elders of Zion was an authentic document, most believed that the notorious work provided a reasonably accurate description of the strategic plans of the Jewish leadership for subverting America and the rest of the world and establishing Jewish rule.

Although Bendersky's claims are certainly extraordinary ones, he provides an enormous wealth of compelling evidence to support them, quoting or summarizing thousands of declassified Intelligence files, and further supporting his case by drawing from the personal correspondence of many of the officers involved. He conclusively demonstrates that during the very same years that Henry Ford was publishing his controversial series The International Jew, similar ideas, but with a much sharper edge, were ubiquitous within our own Intelligence community. Indeed, whereas Ford mostly focused upon Jewish dishonesty, malfeasance, and corruption, our Military Intelligence professionals viewed organized Jewry as a deadly threat to American society and Western civilization in general. Hence the title of Bendersky's book.

By the late 1930s and especially after World War II, such sentiments were only rarely voiced in public, but archival research confirms that they still remained a powerful factor in private thoughts and correspondence, including within Pioneer’s inner circle.

Although unconnected with Pioneer, one influential post-war racialist who placed Jewish issues at the center of his concerns was University of Illinois Classics Prof. Revilo P. Oliver.  Having held an important wartime role in military code-breaking, during the 1950s Oliver became a leading figure at both National Review and the John Birch Society, two of the leading right-wing organizations of that era, and according to his 1981 memoirs, both had originally been established with the primary goal of combating Jewish influence.  As I wrote last year:

One of his friends, a right-wing Yale professor named Willmoore Kendall, argued that a crucial factor in the Jewish domination of American public life was their control over influential opinion journals such as The Nation and The New Republic, and that launching a competing publication might be the most effective remedy. For this purpose, he had recruited a prize student of his named William F. Buckley, Jr., who could draw upon the financial resources of his wealthy father, long known in certain circles for his discreet sponsorship of various anti-Jewish publications and “his drastic private opinion about the aliens' perversion of our national life.”

By 1958 Oliver had established himself as one of National Review‘s leading contributors, and he was contacted by a wealthy Massachusetts businessman named Robert Welch, who had been an early investor in the magazine but was greatly disappointed by its political ineffectiveness, so the two men corresponded and gradually became quite friendly. Welch said he was concerned that the publication focused largely on frivolity and pseudo-literary endeavors, while it increasingly minimized or ignored the conspiratorial role of the Jewish aliens who had gained such a degree of control over the country…

Late that same year, Welch described his plans for regaining control of the country by the creation of a semi-secret national organization of patriotic individuals, primarily drawn from the upper middle classes and prosperous businessmen, which eventually became known as the John Birch Society. With its structure and strategy inspired by the Communist Party, it was to be tightly organized into individual local cells, whose members would then establish a network of front organizations for particular political projects, all seemingly unconnected but actually under their dominant influence. Secret directives would be passed along to each local chapter by the word of mouth via coordinators dispatched from Welch's central headquarters, a system also modeled after the strict hierarchical discipline of Communist movements.

…Minimal emphasis was to be placed upon Jewish matters, partly to avoid drawing media fire and partly in hopes that a growing schism between Zionist and non-Zionist Jews might weaken their powerful adversary, or if the former gained the upper hand, perhaps help ensure the removal of all Jews to the Middle East.

Although Oliver had entered both anti-Jewish projects with high hopes, these soon dissipated, and within a few years he came to believe that each had been rendered ineffective, apparently subverted by the need for Jewish funding.  He ultimately concluded that his huge investments of time and effort had been entirely wasted, and eventually broke with both organizations, mostly abandoning political activity although he continued to occasionally write for Far Right publications, and retained a great deal of prestige in those circles up until his 1994 death at the age of 86.

Wilmot Robertson, The Dispossessed Majority, and Instauration

Oliver’s stridently anti-Jewish views rendered him unacceptable in regular conservative circles, let alone within the political mainstream, but Tucker’s archival research suggests that these same sentiments were far less uncommon among prominent racialists of the 1950s and 1960s than their public utterances might indicate.

As a longtime senior figure in the corporate world with an Ivy League education, Putnam was a member of America’s elite Establishment, and his national crusade to maintain racial segregation in the public schools and prevent intermarriage was wholeheartedly endorsed by many leading Southerners of the era, including governors and influential U.S. senators.  But private correspondence reveals that Putnam’s true political views actually extended far beyond that particular issue, which was widely endorsed by so many leading conservatives of his day.

Around 1970, he brought to Draper’s attention a lengthy manuscript by a pseudonymous author calling himself “Wilmot Robertson,” strongly endorsing the work and urging financial support.  Other leading figures in the Pioneer Fund circle were equally enthusiastic, and with their backing The Dispossessed Majority was published in 1972, not long after Draper’s death, while Putnam’s correspondence revealed that he then distributed copies to “very influential figures…near…to the controls of our society.”

Running some 200,000 words, Robertson’s opus soon became the ur-text of modern American White Nationalism, reestablishing the ideological basis for a movement once anchored in the writings of men such as Lothrop Stoddard but which had largely disappeared in the aftermath of World War II.

From its earliest days, America had been run by its Anglo-Saxon core along with the assimilated descendents of closely-related Northern European immigrant groups, who together constituted both the bulk of the population and a large majority of its ruling elites.  But Robertson argued that during the previous generation or two, a quiet revolution had steadily shifted political and social control into the hands of America’s tiny Jewish minority, thereby transforming the country’s huge white Gentile population into “the dispossessed majority” of his title, even as the heavily Jewish media ensured that very few members of that group had recognized this ongoing transformation.

Putnam’s own books and other writings had been quite cagey on such touchy subjects, occasionally alluding to the elite “minority groups” that were his primary political opponents but almost never even mentioning the word “Jew.”  However, his enthusiastic support for Robertson’s work suggests that he was actually in full agreement on those underlying issues, which came as a very pleasant surprise to his longtime allies in the Pioneer circle.

After encountering scattered references to the Robertson book here and there on the Internet, I finally purchased and read it about a decade ago, finding the work considerably better than I had expected.  But having now learned of Putnam’s personal involvement in its origins, I decided to take another look, and also noticed the cover-blurbs from prominent scholars.  Prof. Coon described it as “A work of vast scope and scholarship” while Prof. Oliver praised it as “Politically the most important book published in this country since 1939—perhaps since 1917.”  Prompted by strong endorsements, I decided to reread it, and see how it held up the second time round.

Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, the central fault line in American society had almost invariably been that separating black from white, with few scholars exploring any residual conflicts between different white ethnic groups.  Large scale European immigration had been halted in 1924, and it was widely believed that decades of action by America’s powerful melting-pot had mostly eliminated the sharp differences between the various flavors of whites, a perception strongly encouraged by the media of that era.  In fact, I suspect that one reason Beyond the Melting Pot by Nathan Glazer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan had attracted so much attention and became such a sociological classic in 1963 was that it focused on a subject otherwise so little-discussed and one that went against the prevailing ideas of the period.

By contrast, The Dispossessed Majority marked an ideological return to the early decades of the twentieth century, when intra-white conflict along ethnic lines had been the central issue.  Indeed, Robertson reverted to the old-fashioned separation of Europeans into the Nordic, Alpine, and Mediterranean sub-races, a usage long since fallen into disrepute and popular disuse.  Although blacks, Asians, and other non-white groups were given some attention, his primary focus was on differences between American whites.

In particular, the author sharply distinguished between “assimiliable” and “non-assimiliable” white minorities.  By his reckoning, America’s so-called “Majority” population—the Old Stock Anglo-Saxons and other fully assimilated Northern European ethnic groups—constituted just under 60% of our total population.  An additional 12% fell into the category of “assimilable white minorities,” including the Irish, Poles, and French Canadians.  But another 8% of the population consisted of white ethnicities he considered sufficiently alien as to be classified as “non-assimilable,” including Jews, Southern Italians, and Greeks, which was quite an intellectually scandalous position to take in the early 1970s.

And although Jews only represented a small fraction of those latter groups, Robertson put them at the absolute center of his analysis.  Throughout his long work, he used the term “minority” on a multitude of occasions, almost once per page, and I would guess that 90% of those references were to Jews, so much so that the word almost served as a euphemism.  Considering another metric, he devoted a long section of his book to describing and discussing the country’s major ethnic groups, ranging from the Irish and the Slavs to the blacks and other non-whites.  But the chapter on Jews occupied nearly half the entire space: two pages on Mexicans and other Hispanics, two pages on Asians, but fifty pages on Jews.  Although it might seem strange to current readers, his heavily racialist text generally paid very little attention to America’s Hispanics or Asians since both those groups were then such a small fraction of the national population.

Just as Putnam and others claimed, the book contained an enormous quantity of careful research material which Robertson had spent ten years compiling, all presented in a polished, lucid style, with professional editing.  But as might be expected, a work focused on such extremely controversial material encountered severe difficulties with sales and distribution.  The author later explained that nearly all conservative publications had rejected his ads and bookstores refused to stock any copies, while almost all writers who were sent review copies ignored its existence.  Yet even so, within two years some 16,000 copies had been sold or otherwise distributed, a very solid achievement under such difficult circumstances, and total sales eventually exceeded 150,000 copies, quite remarkable under the circumstances.

A book first published in 1972 is now nearly a half-century old, and must be evaluated in that light, so its numerous references to the threat of Communism and the Soviet Union are obviously quite dated.  But taken as a whole, I think the text holds up very well, probably remaining more relevant to the domestic problems of our own present-day American society than all but a sliver of the works published around the same time.  Indeed, although I had found it quite interesting a decade ago, the events of the last few years—and especially the last few months—seem to have enormously increased its contemporary relevance.  Robertson—whose real name was Humphrey Ireland—died in 2005 at the age of 90, but I think he would have found our current domestic problems an almost straight-line extrapolation of those that he had first laid out several decades ago.

Most remarkably, I think an updated version of his central ethnographic framework might be a useful means of analyzing the fault-lines in today’s American society.  Although Robertson might not necessarily have agreed, I believe that the last two generations have succeeded in fully merging virtually all of America’s white Gentile ethnic groups—whether “assimilable” or “non-assimilable”—into what he had defined as the Majority population, with few if any sharp distinctions remaining.  So by that standard, today’s Majority is almost exactly the same fraction of our national population as the somewhat different Majority that he had defined fifty years ago.

And I would argue that an even more profound change has been that the bulk of America’s non-whites—most Hispanic and Asian groups—have now clearly shifted into Robertson’s category of “assimilable minorities,” or perhaps in many cases have already even become fully-assimilated members of our Majority population.  Such major revisions obviously do violence to the ideological beliefs of an author who was born more than a century ago, but I think they much better reflect the realities of today’s American society than do his sharp distinctions between Europeans of Nordic and Alpine racial ancestry.

Perhaps to some extent my sociological analysis is a selfish one.  Throughout world history differences of language have been among the sharpest barriers separating ethnic groups, so I believe that my own success two decades ago in dismantling the widespread system of Spanish-almost-only “bilingual education” in California and elsewhere throughout the country has probably played a large role in achieving this reclassification of America’s large and rapidly growing Hispanic population, now already 17% of the national total.

And oddly enough, under this revised ethnic framework a case can be made that the vast demographic changes of the last fifty years have ultimately resulted in an America whose Majority and assimilable minorities together now constitute a much larger fraction of our national population than they did when Robertson’s book first appeared. Whether or not others accept my modification of his ideas or regard them as grotesque mutilations, his masterwork is easily available online as a PDF, and also part of this website’s HTML Books section:

- The Dispossessed Majority

Wilmot Robertson • 1972 • 203,000 Words

A few years after publishing his book, Robertson launched Instauration, a monthly racialist magazine that appeared without fail for the next quarter century from 1975-2000.  Although widely read in racialist circles, perhaps the only time it ever gained a bit of public attention was when National Review Senior Editor Joseph Sobran favorably mentioned it in one of his 1986 columns, thereby provoking a firestorm of criticism, and laying the groundwork for his later purge from that publication and the destruction of his career.

I managed to obtain a complete set of Instauration around the same time I bought Robertson’s book, and then casually read through most of the issues.  While the material was probably unique at the time it appeared, the growth of the Internet has spawned a multitude of websites now offering similar ideological fare, so I found the articles of only slight historical interest.  With all the back issues now online as PDFs, people can judge for themselves.

One major element that did draw my attention was a long continuing series entitled “The Game and the Candle” that ran across more than two dozen issues, and which I found quite fascinating.  It was described as “a dramatized rendering of the secret history of the United States (1912-1960)” and many of the historical allusions only became intelligible to me when I finally reread it again near the end of last year.  Although most of the surprising conspiratorial claims presented are far from solidly established, I suspect that much of the “alternate reality” that they describe is at least as close to the truth as the very conventional historical narrative of the twentieth century found in all our standard history textbooks.  For ease of reading, I have extracted all the 29 installments, which amount to perhaps 100,000 words, and merged them together into a single long PDF.

- The Game and the Candle

A dramatized rendering of the secret history of the United States (1912-1960)

Wilmot Robertson • 1972-1974 • 100,000 Words

Jared Taylor, Peter Brimelow, and Kevin MacDonald

Around 1990, racial controversies began returning to the center-stage of American public life.  Our nation’s leading economic, political, and media elements overwhelmingly reside in New York City, Washington DC, and Los Angeles, and in all these urban centers very serious levels of black crime became a daily source of concern, with fears only growing worse after the LA Riots of 1992, the worst outbreak of racial violence in a generation.  Meanwhile, a continuing flood of foreign immigration, the highest in three generations, was also rapidly altering the demographics and darkening the complexion of California and other large states, with whites gradually being reduced to a minority of the population and often a small minority of public school students.

Robertson’s tiny racialist publication seems to have mostly been a one-man operation, and as someone born in 1915, he was already in his mid-70s by the beginning of this period of heightened racial tension, probably in no position to take full advantage of the opportunity.  The potential audience and reach of his writings had always been severely restricted by the media boycotts he endured, but the appearance of the Internet would soon begin reducing such distributional barriers, providing a tremendous opening for those willing and able to take full advantage of the new technology.  Over the next quarter-century, there was a huge growth of racialist publications, websites, and forums, which followed a wide variety of different styles and areas of main interest.

The unexpected 2016 election victory of Donald Trump was later to place these ideas under an unprecedented national spotlight.  Although the term “Alt-Right” had originally been coined a few years earlier by political activist Richard Spencer and his paleoconservative mentor Prof. Paul Gottfried, the fundamental ideas of that movement had been developed over the previous decades by these various racialist outlets, whose existence had been almost entirely ignored by the mainstream media.

Three of the most prominent figures in this Internet-based ideological movement were each roughly a generation younger than Robertson, and by taking full advantage of the Internet, they eventually created ongoing publications that have become among the most important outlets for racialist content.  Although Jared Taylor, Peter Brimelow, and Kevin MacDonald share overlapping interests and have regularly collaborated together or spoken at the same events, each seems to primarily focus on a particular portion of the political landscape that Robertson’s publication had originally encompassed.

Jared Taylor launched his American Renaissance newsletter in late 1990, initially under a slightly different form of his name and in 1992 he published Paved with Good Intentions, a powerful compendium of the apparent failures of America’s efforts at racial integration, with a heavy focus upon black crime and other social dysfunction.  At that time, his more controversial ideological views were not yet generally known, so the book was released by a fully mainstream press, then widely and favorably reviewed in regular conservative media outlets, even receiving respectful treatment by a leading liberal academic in the pages of the prestigious New York Review of Books.  An anniversary edition of Taylor’s book is available in convenient HTML form on this website, allowing those so interested to read it and decide for themselves:

- Paved with Good Intentions

The Failure of Race Relations in Contemporary America

Jared Taylor • 1992 • 150,000 Words

According to his Wikipedia entry, Taylor had been born in Japan to missionary parents in 1951 and spent his first 16 years living in that country, afterward graduating from Yale and earning a postgraduate degree in Paris, with some years spent traveling in West Africa.  He later worked in the financial services and publishing industries, and wrote a well-received book on Japan in 1983, obviously possessing the sort of mainstream and elite credentials which many might find surprising in a controversial political movement long pushed into the fringes.  His memories of spending his early years in a racially-homogenous, peaceful, and orderly East Asian society surely stood in sharp contrast with the increasingly fragmented and crime-ridden America he saw about him during the late 1980s and early 1990s, and this must have been an important factor in his political evolution.

Taylor’s three decades of public activity have probably established him as America’s most prominent White Nationalist, while the print version of his American Renaissance publication shifted to an entirely online presence about a decade ago.  Although many of its items have dealt with transient day-to-day events, his archives provide a cornucopia of serious racialist content, including lengthy book reviews that would be found almost nowhere else, as has already been demonstrated in this article.  The quality of the content is often quite high, and under a different ideological regime one could easily imagine many of these pieces appearing in America’s leading general interest magazines rather than being confined to the margins of the Internet.  Although his publication covers racialist matters in general, over the years the primary focus has probably remained the subject of his original book, namely the problematic aspects of blacks in American society.

When Taylor’s 1990 book was very favorably discussed in the pages of National Review, the writer was journalist Peter Brimelow, a senior editor at Forbes.  Brimelow was then regarded as a very mainstream if conservative-leaning financial journalist, who had spent part of the late 1970s serving as a Republican Senate staffer, and had long and close ties with prominent conservative intellectuals and authors, especially those grouped around the Manhattan Institute, with its intermingled neoconservative and libertarian elements.  Born and educated in Britain, he had come to Stanford in the early 1970s for his MBA, then spent a number of years working as a journalist in Canada, before permanently settling in the New York City area.

Six months before writing that review, Brimelow had himself created quite a stir by publishing a National Review cover-story entitled “Time to Rethink Immigration?,” one of the longest and most influential articles ever to appear in that magazine.  The right-wing nativism of the 1920s had dissipated soon after the heavy flow of foreigners from Europe had been legally reduced to a trickle, and in recent decades conservatives had generally been quite friendly towards immigrants and immigration, with the ringing phrases of Ronald Reagan providing a perfect example of that tendency.

The 1965 Immigration Act had reopened the possibility of large-scale immigration from Europe and Asia, while the very rapid population growth in Latin America had produced a similar effect from that region, and these gradually began having a large national impact.  By the late 1980s major demographic changes were taking place across American society, but most conservative leaders still continued to ignore the issue.  Indeed, when Pat Buchanan published Right from the Beginning in 1990, his resoundingly conservative call-to-arms actually included favorable mention of America’s large population of hard-working illegal immigrants.  But much of the Republican Party’s white conservative base had meanwhile begun to seethe on the issue, producing the dry tinder for a potential political explosion, and Brimelow’s powerful 13,000 word article helped provide the spark.

Two years later, incumbent Gov. Pete Wilson of California turned an uphill reelection drive into a landslide victory by riding the coattails of Prop. 187, his state’s anti-illegal immigration ballot measure, which passed by an even wider margin.  On that same Election Day, the Republicans led by Newt Gingrich won an unexpected national victory, gaining control of both the House and the Senate for the first time in sixty years.  An unforeseen consequence of these Congressional victories was that longstanding critics of immigration suddenly held the chairmanships of both relevant committees, and they pledged to pass legislation sharply reducing the flow of incoming foreigners.

Brimelow had expanded his very long NR article into Alien Nation, a book published by Random House, and with exceptionally fortuitous timing, it was released in early 1995, selling very well as a consequence. While he kept his day job at Forbes, he had also been named a senior editor at NR, and over the next few years became an influential figure at America’s conservative media flagship organ.  Although long out of print, his 1995 book is conveniently available in HTML format on this website:

- Alien Nation

Common Sense About America’s Immigration Disaster

Peter Brimelow • 1995 • 95,000 Words

Throughout the rest of the 1990s, racial issues remained at the forefront of the American political debate.  California in particular became the epicenter of such controversies, with battles over the state’s Propositions 187, 209, and 227—dealing with illegal immigration, affirmative action, and bilingual education respectively—inspiring national debates over those same topics. I myself was very heavily involved in all these conflicts, and later recounted the history and broader analysis in a long 1999 Commentary cover-article and an even longer American Conservative sequel a dozen years later.  I think both these articles have held up very well, and I would strongly recommend them to those interested in the topics:

- California and the End of White America

The unprecedented racial transformation of California and its political consequences

Ron Unz • Commentary • October 1999 • 8,600 Words

- Immigration, Republicans, and the End of White America

The sources of America's immigration problems—and a possible solution

Ron Unz • The American Conservative • September 19, 2011 • 12,300 Words

Although Brimelow and his anti-immigration allies had gained the upper hand in the early battles within the conservative movement and the Republican Party, by the late 1990s their pro-immigration opponents backed by the powerful business lobby had won a complete victory and purged most of their erstwhile foes.  Denied any significant media outlet for views still so widely held among ordinary grassroots conservatives, he and a small group of allies launched the VDare website near the end of 1999, and the publication soon emerged as the leading venue for hard-core anti-immigration views, often presented with a sharp racialist tinge.  Although immigration has always remained its overwhelming focus, coverage soon extended  to other controversial topics of a similar hue which were also generally excluded from the conservative mainstream, including black criminality, racial differences, Jewish influence, and IQ studies.  Much of this material would have hardly seemed out of place in the National Review of the 1990s, but had now been exiled to the web.

Jared Taylor and Peter Brimelow had become racialist partisans and publishers via the unsurprising route of journalism, but a third leading figure, Kevin MacDonald, instead had a purely academic background.

Born in 1944, MacDonald had earned his Ph.D. in biobehavioral sciences in 1981 and after a post-doctoral fellowship in psychology became a faculty member in the California State University system a few years later, soon beginning to focus on evolutionary psychology.  The debate over group evolutionary strategies has traditionally been a highly contentious topic in the field, and according to his own account, MacDonald became interested in exploring the issue within the human context.  Jews have been recognized as a distinct human group for thousands of years and there exist copious historical records of their activities and behavior, so they seemed an ideal subject for a case study.

After years of diligent research, MacDonald published A People That Shall Dwell Alone in 1994, having the subtitle “Judaism as a Group Evolutionary Strategy.”  Released by a standard academic press, the work received generally favorable reviews in academic journals and otherwise attracted no notice whatsoever.  In 1998, he followed this with Separation and Its Discontents subtitled “Toward an Evolutionary Theory of Anti-Semitism,” attracting fewer reviews and once again no other attention.  His final volume The Culture of Critique appeared later that same year, and was far more political and contemporaneous in its focus, as indicated by the subtitle “An Evolutionary Analysis of Jewish Involvement in Twentieth-Century Intellectual and Political Movements.”

According to MacDonald, he had been shocked when his research revealed the overwhelming role of organized Jewish groups in transforming America’s political and intellectual life during the course of the twentieth century, most notably with regard to our immigration policy, an important history that had remained concealed from him and nearly all other Americans.  Although released by the same academic press, this last work was almost entirely ignored by the scholarly journals that had reviewed the previous two volumes of his trilogy.

Despite the highly controversial nature of MacDonald’s historical findings, I suspect that most of his subsequent notoriety and his entrance into political activism was due to his participation in David Irving’s high-profile libel lawsuit.  Irving, one of Britain’s most successful historians, had been under heavy attack for many years by Jewish groups outraged over the contents of his best-selling World War II histories, and by the time of his London trial in 2000, he was a beleaguered figure, soon to be financially ruined by the heavy judgment against him.  Irving’s looming fate naturally intimidated most of his potential scholarly supporters, and MacDonald was the only witness willing to testify on his behalf, providing an account of the past activities of organized Jewish groups.  Such involvement naturally brought the California academic to the attention of the right-wing groups who had rallied on Irving’s behalf, but more importantly led MacDonald to be targeted by Irving’s numerous Jewish foes, who immediately began orchestrating harsh media attacks against him.

Campaigns of public vilification are sometimes counter-productive, and I suspect that the vast majority of individuals who first discovered MacDonald’s work did so from reading pieces like “Evolutionary Psychology’s Anti-Semite” by Judith Shulevitz in Slate, then America’s premier opinion webzine, with its close competitor Salon publishing a similar hit-piece.  That was certainly true in my own case, and my curiosity at those denunciations led me to order the books of his trilogy, which I soon began to read, finding them very judicious in their approach and scholarly in their tone.  But the religious and historical contents proved so tremendously dull that after reading the first volume and starting the second, I put the books aside and moved on to other things.

A few years ago, I finally returned to those works, finding the first two volumes much more interesting now than I had before, and the third volume even more so.  All these works had originally been published by a highly-reputable academic press, but in 2018 the ADL finally succeeded in pressuring Amazon into taking the unprecedented step of purging them from its book store, which holds a near-total monopoly on online book sales in the Western world.  However, all three books are conveniently available in HTML form on this website, so those so interested can read them and decide for themselves:

- A People That Shall Dwell Alone

Judaism as a Group Evolutionary Strategy

Kevin MacDonald • 1994 • 168,000 Words

- Separation and Its Discontents

Toward an Evolutionary Theory of Anti-Semitism

Kevin MacDonald • 1998 • 168,000 Words

- The Culture of Critique

An Evolutionary Analysis of Jewish Involvement in Twentieth-Century Intellectual and Political Movements

Kevin MacDonald • 1998 • 247,000 Words

For the last couple of decades, immigration has been an especially hot-button issue among right-wing activists, with the 1965 Immigration Act regularly portrayed as a horrific political betrayal that doomed American society.  MacDonald’s research demonstrated that organized Jewish groups had been a central force behind passage of that legislation, a goal they had tirelessly pursued for over 40 years.  As a consequence, MacDonald was soon lionized as a political hero in those circles, and the very scholarly tone of his books greatly enhanced his credibility.  Meanwhile, the harsh vilification campaign by his Jewish critics severely damaged his personal standing at his Long Beach campus, producing many painful moments and further driving him toward his new collection of right-wing admirers.

Within a few years, MacDonald had become a leading figure in the racialist camp, awarded the Jack London prize by The Occidental Quarterly in 2004, and soon afterward becoming editor of the associated Occidental Observer webzine. Over the last dozen or more years, that latter outlet has published a great deal of high-quality content, releasing articles that are often heavily footnoted and may run several thousand words in length, far more scholarly and academic in tone than what is found in nearly any other racialist publication.  The webzine has also served to launch a number of promising new writers, several of whom hold Ph.D.s and have impressive research skills.  Although the heaviest focus tends to be on Jewish-related issues, articles on other topics such as immigration, crime, and evolutionary biology also regularly appear.

Compared with other prominent right-wing racialists, MacDonald’s policy proposals have generally been rather vague and mild, I think mostly confined to criticism of affirmative action and calls for large reductions in immigration.  His legion of fierce critics have surely mined every word he has ever written or spoken, and if anything more serious had been discovered, the material would certainly have been used to blacken his name.  Yet despite the absence of any substantive proposals that fall to the right of FoxNews, his exceptionally hostile Wikipedia entry—as long as those of Taylor and Brimelow combined—contains 16 separate uses of “Nazi” or “neo-Nazi,” including the explicit statement that “He is active in the American neo-Nazi movement,” an entirely unsubstantiated accusation that I view with great skepticism.  By contrast, Taylor’s Wikipedia article reports that he has been trying to “de-Nazify” the racialist right, while Brimelow’s entry contains no reference to Nazism.  This further demonstrates that focusing upon Jewish misbehavior seems to escalate personal vilification to extraordinary levels, and brings to mind the famous quote frequently misattributed to Voltaire: “To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize.”

George Lincoln Rockwell, William Pierce, and David Duke

With the partial exception of Putnam, all the white racialists thus far discussed were academics, writers, and other intellectuals, or at least confined most of their activities to such pathways.   But they sought major changes in American society, and effecting such changes must necessarily involve the organizing and activism aimed at achieving a measure of political power.  Such activities require quite different talents and personalities, and therefore attract different individuals.  Three of the leading white racialist political organizers had successive careers that stretched from the early post-war years down to the present day.

Although now largely forgotten, George Lincoln Rockwell became a somewhat prominent public figure in the 1960s, notorious as the founder of the American Nazi Party, and successfully operating as something of a political performance-artist, regularly employing a wide range of stunts and media events in order to attract considerable press coverage.  Indeed, the name of his right-wing racialist organization along with its Hitler-era flags and uniforms had obviously been chosen for exactly that reason, serving as an irresistible lure for the media attention that serves as the life’s-blood of any small and under-funded political organization, which would usually prefer to be vilified rather than merely ignored.

Rockwell himself had been a reasonably successful commercial artist and entrepreneur, serving as a naval commander during World War II, and afterward being drawn toward right-wing politics.  At first, his political views were fairly mainstream, and he supported the possible presidential candidacy of Gen. Douglas MacArthur and later worked for William F. Buckley, Jr. at National Review.  But he gradually moved farther and farther to the right, eventually coming to regard organized Jewry as the especially nefarious source of America’s deepest problems.  He founded his Nazi Party in 1959 and ran it with mixed success for the next eight years despite numerous bitter internal feuds and splits, eventually  being assassinated by a disgruntled former member in 1967.  He told his personal story and political evolution in two self-published books, his autobiographical This Time the World in 1961 and the posthumously-released White Power in 1966, which were unfortunately both purged by Amazon a couple of years ago, but can still be easily found online.  In 1999, a comprehensive Rockwell biography by William H. Schmaltz was published by an academic specialty press, which helpfully fills in many of the gaps and omissions.

Although usually relegated to just a sentence or two in our history books and treated like a villainous clown, at times Rockwell had moved in important circles, and may have even helped influence some national events.  In his autobiographical account, he describes his political education under a certain DeWest Hooker, a successful entertainment executive whom he regarded as a personal hero and mentor.  Hooker was fiercely anti-Jewish and years later became a close friend of journalist Michael Collins Piper, who recounted a fascinating tale from the 1960 Presidential race in his book Final Judgment.

Jewish groups still had deep animosity for Joseph Kennedy over his strong opposition to American involvement in World War II, and the family patriarch feared that this lingering hostility would damage his son’s chances of reaching the White House.  So he asked Hooker to have his friend Rockwell organize public Nazi Party demonstrations endorsing Nixon and attacking JFK, thereby solidifying Jewish support for the latter.  These protests actually attracted quite a bit of media coverage, and probably helped the younger Kennedy win 80% of the Jewish vote, along with heavy campaign donations and friendly media support, perhaps tipping the balance in such a very close national election.

In an even stranger possible twist, Hooker years later reportedly explained that the original impetus for the creation of Rockwell’s American Nazi Party had actually come from the Jewish ADL, which believed that widespread media coverage of such an organization would greatly enhance their fund-raising efforts.  So they allegedly approached Hooker and explained their proposal, offering to pay all the costs of publishing the Nazi literature and other materials, and he persuaded his protege to implement the idea.  I think a story so bizarre is less likely to have been invented.

After Rockwell’s demise, his small organization disintegrated, but within a few years the pieces were reconstituted in a somewhat different fashion by Dr. William Pierce, a former physics professor at the University of Oregon who had abandoned academia in 1965 to devote himself to racial activism, soon joining Rockwell’s organization.

Over the next three decades, Pierce probably ranked as one of America’s leading figures on the Far Right fringe, with his National Alliance eventually including some 1,500 dues-paying members and 15 full-time staffers, and his weekly short-wave radio broadcasts potentially reached a much larger national audience.  Along the way, he published The Turner Diaries, a fictionalized account of a right-wing revolution against an oppressive American government, which became a gigantic underground bestseller, having some 400,000 copies in print despite being boycotted by all regular bookstores and lacking any mainstream advertising.  In 1994 there were widespread media reports that the Oklahoma City Bombing had been inspired by Pierce’s novel, which provided him a short burst of national media attention and as well as the benefits of a semi-mainstream publisher.  Pierce died of cancer in 2002, after which his organization also soon disintegrated.

By far the most comprehensive discussion of Pierce and his efforts is The Fame of a Dead Man’s Deeds, published the year before his death by Prof. Robert S. Griffin of the University of Vermont.  Pierce’s background and ideas are presented in an objective but somewhat sympathetic manner, and the book also contains a great deal of additional material on other individuals and issues from that segment of the ideological spectrum, including a long chapter on Rockwell and another on Revilo Oliver.  The entire text of Griffin’s volume is conveniently readable here in HTML format:

- The Fame of a Dead Man’s Deeds

An Up-Close Portrait of White Nationalist William Pierce

Robert S. Griffin • 2001 • 185,000 Words

While Rockwell’s numerous media stunts had gained him a certain measure of public attention during the first half of the 1960s, Pierce and his far larger and better disciplined organization remained almost entirely unknown throughout their three decades of activity.  But during that same period, a much younger activist began following Rockwell’s play-book and gained media attention by his bold tactics, eventually becoming a nationally-recognized racialist-celebrity and political figure, first as the leader of a faction of the Ku Klux Klan and afterward as a surprisingly successful candidate for high public office.  These days, the names of George Lincoln Rockwell or William Pierce would surely draw blank stares, but David Duke probably still rings a bell.  As an objective measure of prominence, his Wikipedia article is much longer than those of Rockwell and Pierce combined, and carries an ADL endorsement ranking him as “perhaps America’s most well-known racist and anti-Semite.”

Duke’s high-water mark came almost three decades ago when for a couple of years he flashed like a meteor across the American political landscape.  Drawing upon deep populist anger over welfare, crime, affirmative action, and other racially-charged issues, in 1990 he challenged the incumbent Democratic senator in his home state of Louisiana.  Despite being massively outspent and facing an exceptionally hostile media, with both parties absolutely united against him, he stunned the country by getting over 43% of the total vote, including a landslide majority of his state’s whites.  The following year, he launched a challenge to the incumbent Republican governor along similar lines, defeating him in the open primary and then once again winning a large majority of whites even while losing the run-off to a former Democratic governor, who was the recipient of a tidal wave of funding, media, and endorsements, including the active support of nearly every prominent national Republican.

Following my own successful “English” campaign in California, I had published a long 1999 cover story in Commentary discussing my state’s racially-charged political conflicts of the preceding decade, and it had attracted a good deal of favorable interest, leading me to consider writing a book that expanded my analysis to the national level.  As part of my background preparation, I began reading thirty or forty books on racial issues, of which one of the longest was Duke’s My Awakening, which had been released the previous year.

I had expected it to be an ideological screed that I would casually skim and then abandon, but Duke’s book was actually something entirely different.  Two decades have almost completely blurred the details, but I remember reading the entire text and being very impressed with the quality of both the style and content.  Indeed, the book was so far superior to what I had expected from someone only known to me as a fringe political-activist with no serious academic credentials that I began to wonder, perhaps a bit unfairly, about the identity of the true author.

Not long afterward I shelved my potential writing plans in favor of my content-archiving project, which steadily grew in scope and ultimately absorbed most of my time and effect for the next decade.  But just a few days ago, I decided to take another look at Duke’s book for the first time in twenty years.  Although I merely intended to glance at a few pages, I found the material so interesting that I reread the entire text, which ran 700 pages with more than 1000 footnotes, being far longer than I had remembered.

My first surprise was the exceptionally favorable Foreword provided by Glayde Whitney, a seemingly respectable Florida professor of behavioral genetics, who described himself as a lifelong Hubert Humphrey Democrat.  Whitney said that although he had never met Duke, he had independently come to most of the same conclusions over the years.  Therefore, he fully endorsed the former Klansman’s controversial views on racial and genetic issues and hoped that Duke’s high public profile would finally succeed in bringing these important ideas to the attention of a much wider national audience.  The former president of the Behavior Genetics Association even described Duke as “a Moses-like prophet,” and suggested that his book might play the same role that Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations had achieved with regard to the theory of capitalism.

As I read through the long text, Prof. Whitney’s characterization began to seem less and less outlandish.  Although obviously pitched to a popular audience, the first major section described the important scientific facts about race, IQ, and evolutionary psychology drawn from the works of  many of the academic scholars discussed above, and the material presented seemed almost entirely correct.

But what impressed me even more this time round were the other elements of the book concerning history and politics that I had probably disregarded back in 2000.  The next section ran over 250 pages and dealt with a variety of controversial Jewish issues.  Back in 2000, these had probably raised some questions in my mind, but soon faded.  However, over the last two decades, I had done a great deal of reading and investigation in the history of the twentieth century, and I now realized that many of my controversial findings had first been encountered—and then soon dismissed and forgotten—in the pages of Duke’s book.  For example, he included a 40 page chapter strongly disputing the reality of the Jewish Holocaust, which he argued was merely a propaganda-hoax, very likely the first time I had ever encountered that shocking claim in any serious writing, and I must have reacted with extreme skepticism.  But a few years ago I finally investigated the topic at length and came to very similar conclusions.

- American Pravda: Holocaust Denial

Ron Unz •  August 27, 2018 • 17,600 Words

At the time, I had also never heard of the Nazi-Zionist partnership of the 1930s or the many strange aspects of Talmudic Judaism or the persecution of historian David Irving, and all of these accounts were so discordant with my mainstream understanding that they had never lodged in my memory when I read about them back in 2000.  But over the last couple of years I discussed them at length in my American Pravda series, along with my reinterpretation of the Second World War.  If prejudice means pre-judging ideas, then twenty years ago I was certainly quite prejudiced when I read and disregarded the historical claims of a former Klansman with only an undergraduate history degree from Louisiana State University, but in hindsight, he seems to have been entirely correct on so many of these important historical matters long before I had even become aware of them.

If we carefully separate Duke’s ideological beliefs from his factual claims, my considered opinion is that 80-90% of the latter are correct, and ironically enough his largest errors come in positions that he closely shares with most other American conservatives and right-wingers.

One of the more remarkable items in Duke’s account, impossible to verify but quite possibly true, was his long and friendly acquaintance with Prof. William Shockley, to whom he dedicated his book.  Shockley’s own political notoriety had preceded Duke’s entrance onto the public stage, and given their strong agreement on issues of race and IQ and mutual demonization by the media, they supposedly had a number of phone conversations from the early 1970s until shortly before Shockley’s death in 1989.  By then, Duke was already preparing his remarkable 1990 U.S. Senate run and according to his account, Shockley said that if he were thirty years younger and healthier, he would be campaigning on Duke’s behalf. Consider such a historical tableau: the physicist who had won a Nobel Prize for inventing the transistor and then created Silicon Valley campaigning in Louisiana on behalf of the former Grand Dragon of the KKK.

Along with many other important works, Duke’s book was purged from Amazon a couple of years ago, but can still be easily found online.

Erectus Walks Amongst Us

Most present-day Americans, whether young or old, have lived their entire lives undergoing a form of psychological conditioning that causes them to suffer a sort of allergic reaction at ideas that fall into certain particular categories.  Some of the most notable triggers include topics involving race, ethnicity, and sex, and encountering such forbidden material may be a painful experience, with the discomfort only gradually subsiding after repeated exposures.  One of the most terrifying subjects for a man is the nature of mankind.

Many of the dozens of books already discussed in this long article fall into those disturbing categories, and in some cases their contents caused me considerable unease when I first encountered them ten or fifteen or twenty years ago, whether or not I ultimately concluded that much of their analysis was mistaken.  But whenever I turn my thoughts to the most controversial book I have ever read, a single obvious candidate comes to mind, a self-published work of anthropology.

I can’t recall the exact  circumstances of how it first came to my attention, perhaps when I was browsing the comments of some fringe website or blogger in 2008.  I went ahead and clicked a button on Amazon, receiving it a few days later while my credit card was debited $18.00.  The work has long since gone out of print, and the cheapest hard copies now sell for $900.

The author was an individual entirely unknown to me, apparently a longtime libertarian activist and something of a polymath, holding undergraduate and graduate degrees in mathematics, physics, chemistry, economics, and law.  He claimed to have spent four full years writing the book after several previous years of lengthy Internet discussions in which he and one or more collaborators had gradually worked out most of the basic ideas and done much of the research.  Such claims seem plausible since the finalized text runs some 200,000 words and is supplemented with a vast multitude of illustrations, charts, and tables, along with more than 1200 detailed footnotes, most of them substantive and many quite long.  The bibliography contains over 1,000 entries.

The writing itself was quite serviceable if hardly elegant, and the work seems to fit rather comfortably within the evolutionary framework provided by Coon’s racial theories from the 1960s and Rushton’s r/K analysis from the 1990s, though I hadn’t yet encountered the former at the time.

I have no serious expertise in anthropology, but the early chapters that covered genetics and evolution seemed quite correct in their detailed description of those scientific foundations, and the arguments advanced in the later ones were plausibly presented, if often revolutionary in their implications.  But far more than Coon or Rushton, Richard D. Fuerle intended to turn the evolutionary history of Homo sapiens entirely on its head.

When faced with a sweeping theoretical framework of claims in a subject far beyond my personal expertise, I naturally turn to reviews and commentary, which will give me a useful starting point whether they are supportive or critical.  But with the sole exception of a quite favorable and comprehensive review (PDF Version) by Jared Taylor that ran nearly 6,000 words, none existed.  Not a single one of the many racialist bloggers saw fit to touch this material, thus depriving me of the extended comment-thread debates that would normally have assisted my understanding.

Faced with this dilemma, I decided to contact an eminent scholar I knew who had great expertise in exactly this subject, and gingerly asked whether he had heard of the work.  As it happens, he had recently received a copy but had not bothered to look at it, and upon hearing from me decided to do so.  A couple of days later, he dropped me a note saying he had already read more than half of the book, and was so extremely impressed at the vast quantity of very important information it contained that he planned to keep it close on his own shelf to use as a standard reference source.  Then a day or two later, he told me that after finishing the book, he had been absolutely horrified by the theories advanced by the author.  So I avoided raising that topic in the future.

I recently reread my old copy of Erectus Walks Amongst Us and the sheer volume of its material and sweep of its ideas impressed me just as much now as it had a dozen years ago.  My expertise in anthropology has hardly much improved over the years, so my brief discussion of the contents should not be taken very seriously, and may merely demonstrate my own deep ignorance of the subject.  Flying blind is always a risky endeavor.

The human evolutionary framework proposed by Fuerle seems to generally follow that of Coon, providing various arguments that contrary to modern orthodoxy, the different races of man actually predate the appearance of Homo sapiens itself, having evolved in the geographically-separated populations of our Homo erectus predecessors.  As an example of the evidence presented, he notes that the early erectoids dwelling in Asia had shovel-shaped incisors, as do modern Asians, which seems unlikely to have been purely coincidental.

But Fuerle’s central thesis is that our reigning Out of Africa framework—the notion that Homo sapiens first evolved in Africa then spread throughout the world—should be replaced by an Out of Eurasia model, and some of his points do seem like reasonable ones.

He argues that the package of African physical traits seems to be heat-adapted, while those of Asians are cold-adapted with the Caucasian race remaining more generalized, then suggests on theoretical grounds that a heat-adapted human population would be less likely to easily evolve into cold-adapted and generalized varieties, let alone do so in as little as the 60,000 years now believed.  Also, Africa’s relatively stable environment would be much less likely to provide the severe environmental challenges necessary for giving rise to a new species, especially one with far greater intelligence than its erectoid predecessors.

Under the current theory of African origins, Homo sapiens migrated out of Africa into Eurasia during the very time that the latter continent was gripped by a severe ice age that produced very difficult living conditions compared with their less impacted African homeland, which seems implausible.  Moreover, Neanderthal man had already occupied Europe and parts of Asia for hundreds of thousands of years, surely being well adapted to local conditions and also having a larger brain than Homo sapiens, so it seems unlikely that small numbers of African-adapted human interlopers could have easily displaced them.

Meanwhile, Fuerle’s contrary model of human evolution argues that sapiency was first achieved somewhere in the Eurasian continent, far larger than Africa and also providing much more stressful selective pressure.  And during the ice age that wrapped the globe 60,000 years ago, small bands of early Homo sapiens were driven into Africa’s more hospitable climate rather than away from it.

Not long after Fuerle’s book appeared, anthropology was rocked by the discovery that non-African DNA contained small Neanderthal elements, demonstrating that the two different species had interbred at least to some slight extent during the tens of thousands of years they overlapped in Europe and parts of Asia.  Indeed, Cochran and Harpending had even suggested that such Neanderthal introgression might have involved genes crucial for the success of Homo sapiens, perhaps providing traits well-adapted to local environmental conditions, and therefore been subject to strongly positive selective pressure.  Not long afterward, small traces of other pre-human hominoid DNA were found in some of the present-day populations of South-East Asia, the residue of a species called the Denisovans.

All of these discoveries of residual DNA have demonstrated that species are not nearly as rigidly separated from one another as our elementary biology textbooks had usually maintained.  Indeed, numerous animal species can readily mate and produce fertile offspring although they do not usually do so under natural conditions.  Fuerle repeatedly stressed exactly this point in his book, long before these waves of DNA research had firmly established the case with regard to human beings.  For example, Homo neanderthalensis had always been classified as separate from our own species, but some might now argue that it was simply a different race of Homo sapiens and should instead be called Homo sapiens neanderthalensis.

When we consider the larger populations of the Sub-Saharan African continent, those living in the Horn of Africa seem to be partial outliers, both by genes and by physical attributes, being a partial mix of the peoples on either side, African Negroes and  Middle-Eastern Caucasians, in some respects actually being closer to the latter except with regard to skin color.  Similar hybridization is quite common in the world, notably in Central Asia, where Caucasians and Asians have intermingled for thousands of years.  So our hybridization with Neanderthals is merely an extreme example of this.

Science inevitably advances, and over the last couple of decades the analysis of human DNA has substantially revised our family tree of world populations, providing quantitative results that are far more solid and exact than the crude analyses produced by past generations of physical anthropologists.  If we exclude the small local populations of Australian Aborigines, African Pygmies, and a few other minor groups, humanity has traditionally been divided into three mega-races, the Caucasoids, Mongoloids, and Negroids, and that remains true today.  But genetic analysis has now revealed that the first two groups cluster together much more closely, with the last is a considerable outlier.  So to a good first approximation, mankind is genetically divided into Eurasians and Africans, and Fuerle makes the provocative argument that if Africans were not a living race and were instead only known from their bones and DNA, they probably would have been classified as a separate species from Eurasians.

And in a telling passage quoted in Taylor’s lengthy review, Fuerle emphasizes that the phenotypical differences between Eurasians and Africans seem follow a consistent pattern:

[V]irtually all of the racial differences between Africans and Eurasians are in traits that are primitive; there are few, if any, African traits that are more modern than Eurasian traits. The evidence comes from a large variety of very different traits: hard tissue, soft tissue, physiology, behavior, intelligence, accomplishments, and genes. And most importantly, all of the evidence is consistent. It is not the case that genes are saying blacks are modern and bones are saying they are primitive. All of the evidence is saying the same thing…

This noticeable pattern of African traits is readily explained by Fuerle’s model of human origins.  If Homo sapiens first evolved in Eurasia and small bands of this new species then entered Africa perhaps 60,000 years ago, they might naturally have hybridized with the local hominids of that continent, just like other early members of their species had done with Neanderthals or Denisovans.  But since the pre-existing local populations were so much larger, a much greater portion of today’s genetic ancestry might have come from those other sources.

Earlier this year, an analysis of the African genome revealed that up to 19% of the DNA appears to have its origins in “ghost populations” of the archaic pre-human hominids who had once flourished on that continent.  Although these scientific results have not received the media attention they might warrant, they seem to represent a striking experimental confirmation of the remarkable predictions that Fuerle had advanced in a book published a dozen years earlier.  Our standard history textbooks explain that a century ago the 1919 solar eclipse expedition by Eddington provided experimental confirmation for the predictions of General Relativity, elevating Einstein to international fame and indirectly leading to his 1921 Nobel Prize.  I’ve sometimes wondered whether these recent DNA findings should be considered in a similar light.

Fuerle died in 2014 at the age of 73, thereby failing to see this apparent confirmation of his hypothesis, and I suspect he ended his life quite disappointed at the near-total lack of recognition his self-published 2008 book had achieved, especially given the many years of effort he had invested in producing it.   Aside from that one long review in the American Renaissance newsletter, his work received no substantial discussion anywhere else, and seemingly fell into oblivion.

In his preface, he had described the book as the main contribution to future generations of his waning years, and he authorized anyone to freely publish or copy without royalties, also promising to shortly make it available in HTML form on a website, which he did a few months later.  He later released a PDF version, with the all-important footnotes being linked back to that website.  Over the years I was a very occasional visitor, but when I checked a few years ago, I discovered that the URL had lapsed some time after his death, and the website was no longer available.  As a consequence, the PDF versions still in circulation lack access to the footnotes, severely crippling the value of the text.

Fortunately, the pages of the website were backed up on Archive.org, and I was able to copy them to a location on our own website, including all the associated images.  I also produced a modified version of the PDF in which the footnotes are once again active, now point to this available copy.

Those so interested may now read the work and decide for themselves how severely my own ignorance of anthropology has impaired my evaluation of his book.

- Erectus Walks Amongst Us

The evolution of modern humans

Richard D. Fuerle • 2008 • 200,000 Words

Preface

Acknowledgments

Introduction

SECTION I • WHAT EVERY PALEOANTHROPOLOGIST SHOULD KNOW

Chapter 1 • A Story of the Origin of Humans

Chapter 2 • Early Humans

Chapter 3 • DNA

Chapter 4 • Evolution

Chapter 5 • Selectors

Chapter 6 • Neoteny

Chapter 7 • Genetic Distance

Chapter 8 • Evolutionary Psychology

SECTION II • TRAITS OF LIVING POPULATIONS

Chapter 9 • Hard Tissue

Chapter 10 • Soft Tissue

Chapter 11 • Reproductive Strategy

Chapter 12 • Behavior

Chapter 13 • Genes

Chapter 14 • Intelligence

Chapter 15 • Civilizations and Achievements

Chapter 16 • Primitive Traits

SECTION III • THE OUT-OF-AFRICA THEORY

Chapter 17 • Fossil Skulls

Chapter 18 • Modern Behavior

Chapter 19 • MtDNA

Chapter 20 • Population Differences in MtDNA

Chapter 21 • Nuclear DNA

Chapter 22 • Replacement

SECTION IV • THE OUT-OF-EURASIA THEORY

Chapter 23 • The Bipedal Apes

Chapter 24 • The Origin of the Eurasians

Chapter 25 • The Neanderthals

Chapter 26 • The Origin of Africans

Chapter 27 • The Origin of Asian Aborigines

SECTION V • POLICY

Chapter 28 • Homo Africanus

Chapter 29 • Miscegenation

Chapter 30 • Hybrid Vigor

Chapter 31 • Segregation

Chapter 32 • Eugenics

Chapter 33 • Re-Classifying the Left

Chapter 34 • Egalitarianism

Chapter 35 • Individualism

Chapter 36 • Morality

Chapter 37 • Which Way Western Man?

Appendix (DNA)

Glossary

Recommended Reading

Reference

Trade Disaster Deferred

The Sacramento Bee • July 9, 1995 • 900 Words

HAVING PULLED America back from the brink of a disastrous trade war with the Japanese, the Clinton administration deserves at least faint praise for its last-minute lack of commitment to principle.

All along, Clinton’s trade negotiators had demanded that the Japanese government pledge its private companies and individual consumers to specific “numerical goals and timetables” for the increased purchase of American goods, and all along, Tokyo had rightly resisted such “international affirmative action.” Hours before America’s deadline, the Clintonites folded, accepting the fig leaf of vague and unspecific promises to do more. In this case, no principle was far better than a bad principle.

Just last year, Clinton rightfully invested enormous political capital in enacting major bipartisan free-trade agreements culminating in GATT, a measure vital to the world economy. Now, just months after GATT’s ratification, his administration threatened to impose unilateral trade sanctions against Japan, a blatant violation of the treaty. Nearly every major nation—including many which have experienced severe trade friction with Japan—stood against America on this point. If the U.S. can appoint itself judge, jury and executioner in its trade disputes and violate newly signed treaties at will, then American contracts are not worth the paper they are printed on, and our system of international trade will falter and collapse, endangering much of our prosperity.

Clinton’s assumption that the Japanese government would agree to numerical quotas in consumer purchasing was implausible from the beginning. Imagine how Americans would react to a French demand that our government commit its citizens to drinking a specific number of bottles of French wine each year. Even the old state-run economies of Eastern Europe would have had difficulty enforcing such an agreement. Furthermore, Japan currently stands at the brink of financial collapse, with its banks holding between $400 and $1 trillion of bad loans on their books. Faced with such a disaster, no Japanese government could allow itself to be seen as meekly bowing to unreasonable foreign economic demands and remain in office.

CLINTON’S MOTIVES were readily apparent. Free trade is good economics, but often bad politics, and threatening trade sanctions marks the beginning of his reelection campaign as surely as his recent purchase of television advertising time. The remaining big industrial trade unions represent one of the few surviving constituencies of the Democratic Party, although on this issue, the leading Republican presidential contenders were no better, uniformly praising Clinton’s trade toughness with an eye toward winning the protectionist primary voters of Ohio and Michigan.

Our own state’s fragile economic recovery would certainly have become the first casualty of any trade war, and not merely because of the hundreds of thousands of Californians employed by Japanese corporations or our $13 billion in exports to Japan. Despite the recent hard times brought about by cutbacks in defense spending, our state heavily dominates the world’s most successful growth industries such as computer hardware and software, telecommunications, biotechnology, and entertainment.

But the products which these industries produce are largely information-based, conditioning their marketing success upon international agreements on copyrights, trademarks and licenses, such as were incorporated into the recent GATT agreements. If the U.S. can blithely violate sections of GATT in order to protect a declining automobile industry, other nations will soon do the same to protect national industries with a far brighter economic future.

And there lies the great tragedy of current American trade policy. America today is absolutely dominant in nearly all the leading industries and technologies of tomorrow, but our own national self-doubt keeps us from admitting the fact of our economic victory. Our world dominance in crucial growth sectors is arguably far greater now than it was even during the peak of American optimism in 1965, when the fragmentation of world markets meant that viable foreign competitors always existed in the leading-edge industries of that era.

Today, America stands alone. Despite receiving billions of dollars in misdirected government subsidies, Japanese computer manufacturers are facing annihilation in their home market at the hands of aggressive American imports. Bill Gates of Microsoft is a figure of legend to Japanese school children, perhaps a greater hero in Kyoto than in Kansas. And East to West and North to South, popular culture everywhere—for good or for ill—is shaped by images produced in Hollywood, by Americans for Americans.

IN 1990, before vote-mongering blurred his common sense, a staunch Reaganite Republican wrote: “Among the great American achievements of the 20th century is free Asia, democratic and capitalist, which arose out of the ashes of World War II and KoreaŠTo squander that in an absurd ‘trade war’ because we cannot compete with Korean cars or Japanese computer chips would be an act of almost terminal stupidity for the West.”

Pat Buchanan was right then, and he is wrong today, as are all the other politicians, Democrat or Republican, who refused to stand firm against the economic idiocy of the Clinton administration. The universal assumption that one side or the other will always eventually back down and avert catastrophe mirrors the confident brinksmanship of Europe’s leaders in 1914, just before the war that nearly destroyed European civilization. Played over time, a game of economic Russian roulette has but one certain outcome, and it is always fatal.

Taking Stock

The Los Angeles Times • August 25, 2002 • 900 Words

PALO ALTO—Regulators looking at how stock options are accounted for have seen cause for concern. I see opportunity.

It’s true that when actual expenses don’t appear on an operating statement it can make for some rude surprises–as at Enron and elsewhere. But faced with the worrisome risk of our economy falling into a double-dip recession, perhaps we should look at the potential for even more creative exploitation of off-the-books transactions. All we have to do is follow the odd logic of numerous corporate CEOs and Wall Street strategizers to its obvious conclusion. They have vigorously defended the practice of not counting stock options as expenses, arguing that since no actual dollars leave the corporate treasury, no actual expense has been incurred. Under this analysis, profits per share might fall but total profits would not.

So why not apply this same argument to the issuance not just of options–which give someone the right to purchase stock at a guaranteed price–but also to the issuance of stock itself. Issuing new stock also involves no direct outlay of corporate cash. So shouldn’t it too be excluded as an operating expense? Imagine the possibilities.

First, since stock has a clear market value, workers and executives could easily be persuaded to take their entire compensation in that form, some of which they could then sell to pay their ordinary living expenses. This business innovation would allow corporations to eliminate all salary costs from an accounting perspective, since no actual cash is spent. Corporate profits could soar, enormously boosting our economy.

Even better, similar financial engineering would allow corporations to barter their shares or options for rent, raw materials, advertising, capital equipment and everything else they require, thereby completely eliminating all these burdensome drags on profit margins. Since not a single actual dollar would change hands, corporations could reasonably reduce their total accounting expenses to zero, allowing profits to equal revenues. Such an elimination of all business expenses in our society would lead to an unprecedented economic boom, far surpassing that achieved at the height of the late-1990s bubble.

Ultimately, if the issuance of stock were not considered an accounting expense, companies could abandon the difficult task of producing and selling actual goods or services, and instead could switch their business activity to merely issuing and selling stock and options directly into the marketplace. This would generate enormous revenue at no cost whatsoever, with the only necessary raw materials being blank stock certificates, which would be purchased with–what else?–stock certificates.

Although such financial techniques might seem risky, they have already been partially exploited by some of America’s largest and most prestigious corporations, particularly in the innovative Silicon Valley.

Take the case of mighty Intel: Its official 2001 profits would have been reduced by over 80% without this effective use of options accounting technology. In an even bolder use of the concept, hugely profitable Cisco Systems would have actually lost vast sums of money throughout most of the last decade had it fully accounted for the stock options it issued. Financial analysts have suggested that Cisco’s reported 1998 profit of $1.35 billion would have become a loss of $4.9 billion had it not employed this remarkable technique. Effective use of options allowed Cisco to report the massive and endlessly rising profits that led its market value to peak just north of $500 billion, briefly establishing it as the most valuable company in the world in 2000.

It’s true that Cisco has since encountered a few rough patches, with more than $400 billion of that market value having disappeared. But if Cisco CEO John Chambers remains steadfast in his commitment to options technology–becoming a national leader on the issue and a prominent speaker at President Bush’s recent economic forum in Waco–then why should the rest of us shy away?

Chambers has demonstrated his patriotic commitment to his principles by personally raising or directly contributing millions of dollars to the Republican Party over the last several years, an exertion made easier by the $239 million he earned by selling much of his Cisco stock during its better days.

His persuasiveness has led the Bush administration to adopt his views on this important accounting issue. Meanwhile, Chambers’ high-tech allies have been equally persuasive with America’s top Democratic leaders, perhaps for many of the same underlying reasons.

Indeed, the effective business use of stock options by Intel and Cisco are examples so universally typical of other, similar companies that one could make a plausible case that in recent years the key technology powering the financial success of Silicon Valley companies has gradually shifted from the microchip and the fiber-optic strand to reliance on options finance–which actually seems very closely related to that Holy Grail of mechanical engineers, the perpetual motion machine.

Given this fact, perhaps we should encourage these same innovators to apply their innovations to more mundane practical needs. Exactly the same theoretical logic that permits companies to avoid counting their stock options as expenses could easily be used to produce mechanical devices that would allow us to run our cars without fuel and our lights without electricity. An eager world awaits.

Ron Unz, a political activist and Silicon Valley, software developer, is the founder and chairman of Wall Street, Analytics, a financial services software company.

China's Rise, America's Fall

Which superpower is more threatened by its “extractive elites”?

The American Conservative • April 17, 2012 • 6,700 Words

The rise of China surely ranks among the most important world developments of the last 100 years. With America still trapped in its fifth year of economic hardship, and the Chinese economy poised to surpass our own before the end of this decade, China looms very large on the horizon. We are living in the early years of what journalists once dubbed “The Pacific Century,” yet there are worrisome signs it may instead become known as “The Chinese Century.”

But does the Chinese giant have feet of clay? In a recently published book, Why Nations Fail, economists Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson characterize China's ruling elites as “extractive”—parasitic and corrupt—and predict that Chinese economic growth will soon falter and decline, while America's “inclusive” governing institutions have taken us from strength to strength. They argue that a country governed as a one-party state, without the free media or checks and balances of our own democratic system, cannot long prosper in the modern world. The glowing tributes this book has received from a vast array of America's most prominent public intellectuals, including six Nobel laureates in economics, testifies to the widespread popularity of this optimistic message.

Yet do the facts about China and America really warrant this conclusion?

China Shakes the World

By the late 1970s, three decades of Communist central planning had managed to increase China's production at a respectable rate, but with tremendous fits and starts, and often at a terrible cost: 35 million or more Chinese had starved to death during the disastrous 1959–1961 famine caused by Mao's forced industrialization policy of the Great Leap Forward.

China's population had also grown very rapidly during this period, so the typical standard of living had improved only slightly, perhaps 2 percent per year between 1958 and 1978, and this from an extremely low base. Adjusted for purchasing power, most Chinese in 1980 had an income 60–70 percent below that of the citizens in other major Third World countries such as Indonesia, Nigeria, Pakistan, and Kenya, none of which were considered great economic success stories. In those days, even Haitians were far wealthier than Chinese.

All this began to change very rapidly once Deng Xiaoping initiated his free-market reforms in 1978, first throughout the countryside and eventually in the smaller industrial enterprises of the coastal provinces. By 1985, The Economist ran a cover story praising China's 700,000,000 peasants for having doubled their agricultural production in just seven years, an achievement almost unprecedented in world history. Meanwhile, China's newly adopted one-child policy, despite its considerable unpopularity, had sharply reduced population growth rates in a country possessing relatively little arable land.

A combination of slowing population growth and rapidly accelerating economic output has obvious implications for national prosperity. During the three decades to 2010, China achieved perhaps the most rapid sustained rate of economic development in the history of the human species, with its real economy growing almost 40-fold between 1978 and 2010. In 1978, America's economy was 15 times larger, but according to most international estimates, China is now set to surpass America's total economic output within just another few years.

Furthermore, the vast majority of China's newly created economic wealth has flowed to ordinary Chinese workers, who have moved from oxen and bicycles to the verge of automobiles in just a single generation. While median American incomes have been stagnant for almost forty years, those in China have nearly doubled every decade, with the real wages of workers outside the farm-sector rising about 150 percent over the last ten years alone. The Chinese of 1980 were desperately poor compared to Pakistanis, Nigerians, or Kenyans; but today, they are several times wealthier, representing more than a tenfold shift in relative income.

A World Bank report recently highlighted the huge drop in global poverty rates from 1980 to 2008, but critics noted that over 100 percent of that decline came from China alone: the number of Chinese living in dire poverty fell by a remarkable 662 million, while the impoverished population in the rest of the world actually rose by 13 million. And although India is often paired with China in the Western media, a large fraction of Indians have actually grown poorer over time. The bottom half of India's still rapidly growing population has seen its daily caloric intake steadily decline for the last 30 years, with half of all children under five now being malnourished.

China's economic progress is especially impressive when matched against historical parallels. Between 1870 and 1900, America enjoyed unprecedented industrial expansion, such that even Karl Marx and his followers began to doubt that a Communist revolution would be necessary or even possible in a country whose people were achieving such widely shared prosperity through capitalistic expansion. During those 30 years America's real per capita income grew by 100 percent. But over the last 30 years, real per capita income in China has grown by more than 1,300 percent.

Over the last decade alone, China quadrupled its industrial output, which is now comparable to that of the U.S. In the crucial sector of automobiles, China raised its production ninefold, from 2 million cars in 2000 to 18 million in 2010, a figure now greater than the combined totals for America and Japan. China accounted for fully 85 percent of the total world increase in auto manufacturing during that decade.

It is true that many of China's highest-tech exports are more apparent than real. Nearly all Apple's iPhones and iPads come from China, but this is largely due to the use of cheap Chinese labor for final assembly, with just 4 percent of the value added in those world-leading items being Chinese. This distorts Chinese trade statistics, leading to unnecessary friction. However, some high-tech China exports are indeed fully Chinese, notably those of Huawei, which now ranks alongside Sweden's Ericsson as one of the world's two leading telecommunications manufacturers, while once powerful North American competitors such Lucent-Alcatel and Nortel have fallen into steep decline or even bankruptcy. And although America originally pioneered the Human Genome Project, the Beijing Genomics Institute (BGI) today probably stands as the world leader in that enormously important emerging scientific field.

China's recent rise should hardly surprise us. For most of the last 3,000 years, China together with the Mediterranean world and its adjoining European peninsula have constituted the two greatest world centers of technological and economic progress. During the 13th century, Marco Polo traveled from his native Venice to the Chinese Empire and described the latter as vastly wealthier and more advanced than any European country. As late as the 18th century, many leading European philosophers such as Voltaire often looked to Chinese society as an intellectual exemplar, while both the British and the Prussians used the Chinese mandarinate as their model for establishing a meritocratic civil service based on competitive examinations.

Even a century ago, near the nadir of China's later weakness and decay, some of America's foremost public intellectuals, such as Edward A. Ross and Lothrop Stoddard, boldly predicted the forthcoming restoration of the Chinese nation to global influence, the former with equanimity and the latter with serious concern. Indeed, Stoddard argued that only three major inventions effectively separated the world of classical antiquity from that of 18th-century Europe—gunpowder, the mariner's compass, and the printing press. All three seem to have first appeared in China, though for various social, political, and ideological reasons, none were properly implemented.

Does China's rise necessarily imply America's decline? Not at all: human economic progress is not a zero-sum game. Under the right circumstances, the rapid development of one large country should tend to improve living standards for the rest of the world.

This is most obvious for those nations whose economic strengths directly complement those of a growing China. Massive industrial expansion clearly requires a similar increase in raw-material consumption, and China is now the world's largest producer and user of electricity, concrete, steel, and many other basic materials, with its iron-ore imports surging by a factor of ten between 2000 and 2011. This has driven huge increases in the costs of most commodities; for example, copper's world price rose more than eightfold during the last decade. As a direct consequence, these years have generally been very good ones for the economies of countries that heavily rely upon the export of natural resources—Australia, Russia, Brazil, Saudi Arabia, and parts of Africa.

Meanwhile, as China's growth gradually doubles total world industrial production, the resulting “China price” reduces the cost of manufactured goods, making them much more easily affordable to everyone, and thereby greatly increases the global standard of living. While this process may negatively impact those particular industries and countries directly competing with China, it provides enormous opportunities as well, not merely to the aforementioned raw-material suppliers but also to countries like Germany, whose advanced equipment and machine tools have found a huge Chinese market, thereby helping to reduce German unemployment to the lowest level in 20 years.

And as ordinary Chinese grow wealthier, they provide a larger market as well for the goods and services of leading Western companies, ranging from fast-food chains to consumer products to luxury goods. Chinese workers not only assemble Apple's iPhones and iPads, but are also very eager to purchase them, and China has now become that company's second largest market, with nearly all of the extravagant profit margins flowing back to its American owners and employees. In 2011 General Motors sold more cars in China than in the U.S., and that rapidly growing market became a crucial factor in the survival of an iconic American corporation. China has become the third largest market in the world for McDonald's, and the main driver of global profits for the American parent company of Pizza Hut, Taco Bell, and KFC.

Social Costs of a Rapid Rise

Transforming a country in little more than a single generation from a land of nearly a billion peasants to one of nearly a billion city-dwellers is no easy task, and such a breakneck pace of industrial and economic development inevitably leads to substantial social costs. Chinese urban pollution is among the worst in the world, and traffic is rapidly heading toward that same point. China now contains the second largest number of billionaires after America, together with more than a million dollar-millionaires, and although many of these individuals came by their fortunes honestly, many others did not. Official corruption is a leading source of popular resentment against the various levels of Chinese government, ranging from local village councils to the highest officials in Beijing.

But we must maintain a proper sense of proportion. As someone who grew up in Los Angeles when it still had the most notorious smog in America, I recognize that such trends can be reversed with time and money, and indeed the Chinese government has expressed intense interest in the emerging technology of non-polluting electric cars. Rapidly growing national wealth can be deployed to solve many problems.

Similarly, plutocrats who grow rich through friends in high places or even outright corruption are easier to tolerate when a rising tide is rapidly lifting all boats. Ordinary Chinese workers have increased their real income by well over 1,000 percent in recent decades, while the corresponding figure for most American workers has been close to zero. If typical American wages were doubling every decade, there would be far less anger in our own society directed against the “One Percent.” Indeed, under the standard GINI index used to measure wealth inequality, China's score is not particularly high, being roughly the same as that of the United States, though certainly indicating greater inequality than most of the social democracies of Western Europe.

Many American pundits and politicians still focus their attention on the tragic Tiananmen Square incident of 1989, during which hundreds of determined Chinese protesters were massacred by government troops. But although that event loomed very large at the time, in hindsight it generated merely a blip in the upward trajectory of China's development and today seems virtually forgotten among ordinary Chinese, whose real incomes have increased several-fold in the quarter century since then.

Much of the Tiananmen protest had been driven by popular outrage at government corruption, and certainly there have been additional major scandals in recent years, often heavily splashed across the pages of America's leading newspapers. But a closer examination paints a more nuanced picture, especially when contrasted with America's own situation.

For example, over the last few years one of the most ambitious Chinese projects has been a plan to create the world's largest and most advanced network of high-speed rail transport, an effort that absorbed a remarkable $200 billion of government investment. The result was the construction of over 6,000 miles of track, a total probably now greater than that of all the world's other nations combined. Unfortunately, this project also involved considerable corruption, as was widely reported in the world media, which estimated that hundreds of millions of dollars had been misappropriated through bribery and graft. This scandal eventually led to the arrest or removal of numerous government officials, notably including China's powerful Railways Minister.

Obviously such serious corruption would seem horrifying in a country with the pristine standards of a Sweden or a Norway. But based on the published accounts, it appears that the funds diverted amounted to perhaps as little as 0.2 percent of the total, with the remaining 99.8 percent generally spent as intended. So serious corruption notwithstanding, the project succeeded and China does indeed now possess the world's largest and most advanced network of high-speed rail, constructed almost entirely in the last five or six years.

Meanwhile, America has no high-speed rail whatsoever, despite decades of debate and vast amounts of time and money spent on lobbying, hearings, political campaigns, planning efforts, and environmental-impact reports. China's high-speed rail system may be far from perfect, but it actually exists, while America's does not. Annual Chinese ridership now totals over 25 million trips per year, and although an occasional disaster—such as the 2011 crash in Weizhou, which killed 40 passengers—is tragic, it is hardly unexpected. After all, America's aging low-speed trains are not exempt from similar calamities, as we saw in the 2008 Chatsworth crash that killed 25 in California.

For many years Western journalists regularly reported that the dismantling of China's old Maoist system of government-guaranteed healthcare had led to serious social stresses, forcing ordinary workers to save an unreasonable fraction of their salaries to pay for medical treatment if they or their families became ill. But over the last couple of years, the government has taken major steps to reduce this problem by establishing a national healthcare insurance system whose coverage now extends to 95 percent or so of the total population, a far better ratio than is found in wealthy America and at a tiny fraction of the cost. Once again, competent leaders with access to growing national wealth can effectively solve these sorts of major social problems.

Although Chinese cities have negligible crime and are almost entirely free of the horrible slums found in many rapidly urbanizing Third World countries, housing for ordinary workers is often quite inadequate. But national concerns over rising unemployment due to the global recession gave the government a perfect opportunity late last year to announce a bold plan to construct over 35 million modern new government apartments, which would then be provided to ordinary workers on a subsidized basis.

All of this follows the pattern of Lee Kwan Yew's mixed-development model, combining state socialism and free enterprise, which raised Singapore's people from the desperate, abject poverty of 1945 to a standard of living now considerably higher than that of most Europeans or Americans, including a per capita GDP almost $12,000 above that of the United States. Obviously, implementing such a program for the world's largest population and on a continental scale is far more challenging than doing so in a tiny city-state with a population of a few million and inherited British colonial institutions, but so far China has done very well in confounding its skeptics.

America's Economic Decline

These facts do not provide much evidence for the thesis in Why Nations Fail that China's leaders constitute a self-serving and venal “extractive” elite. Unfortunately, such indications seem far more apparent when we direct our gaze inward, toward the recent economic and social trajectory of our own country

Against the backdrop of remarkable Chinese progress, America mostly presents a very gloomy picture. Certainly America's top engineers and entrepreneurs have created many of the world's most important technologies, sometimes becoming enormously wealthy in the process. But these economic successes are not typical nor have their benefits been widely distributed. Over the last 40 years, a large majority of American workers have seen their real incomes stagnate or decline.

Meanwhile, the rapid concentration of American wealth continues apace: the richest 1 percent of America's population now holds as much net wealth as the bottom 90–95 percent, and these trends may even be accelerating. A recent study revealed that during our supposed recovery of the last couple of years, 93 percent of the total increase in national income went to the top 1 percent, with an astonishing 37 percent being captured by just the wealthiest 0.01 percent of the population, 15,000 households in a nation of well over 300 million people.

Evidence for the long-term decline in our economic circumstances is most apparent when we consider the situation of younger Americans. The national media endlessly trumpets the tiny number of youthful Facebook millionaires, but the prospects for most of their contemporaries are actually quite grim. According to research from the Pew Center, barely half of 18- to 24-year-old Americans are currently employed, the lowest level since 1948, a time long before most women had joined the labor force. Nearly one-fifth of young men age 25–34 are still living with their parents, while the wealth of all households headed by those younger than 35 is 68 percent lower today than it was in 1984.

The total outstanding amount of non-dischargeable student-loan debt has crossed the trillion-dollar mark, now surpassing the combined total of credit-card and auto-loan debt—and with a quarter of all student-loan payers now delinquent, there are worrisome indicators that much of it will remain a permanent burden, reducing many millions to long-term debt peonage. A huge swath of America's younger generation seems completely impoverished, and likely to remain so.

International trade statistics, meanwhile, demonstrate that although Apple and Google are doing quite well, our overall economy is not. For many years now our largest goods export has been government IOUs, whose dollar value has sometimes been greater than that of the next ten categories combined. At some point, perhaps sooner than we think, the rest of the world will lose its appetite for this non-functional product, and our currency will collapse, together with our standard of living. Similar Cassandra-like warnings were issued for years about the housing bubble or the profligacy of the Greek government, and were proven false year after year until one day they suddenly became true.

Ironically enough, there is actually one major category in which American expansion still easily tops that of China, both today and for the indefinite future: population growth. The rate of America's demographic increase passed that of China over 20 years ago and has been greater every year since, sometimes by as much as a factor of two. According to standard projections, China's population in 2050 will be almost exactly what it was in 2000, with the country having achieved the population stability typical of advanced, prosperous societies. But during that same half-century, the number of America's inhabitants will have grown by almost 50 percent, a rate totally unprecedented in the developed world and actually greater than that found in numerous Third World countries such as Colombia, Algeria, Thailand, Mexico, or Indonesia. A combination of very rapid population growth and doubtful prospects for equally rapid economic growth does not bode well for the likely quality of the 2050 American Dream.

China rises while America falls, but are there major causal connections between these two concurrent trends now reshaping the future of our world? Not that I can see. American politicians and pundits are naturally fearful of taking on the fierce special interest groups that dominate their political universe, so they often seek an external scapegoat to explicate the misery of their constituents, sometimes choosing to focus on China. But this is merely political theater for the ignorant and the gullible.

Various studies have suggested that China's currency may be substantially undervalued, but even if the frequent demands of Paul Krugman and others were met and the yuan rapidly appreciated another 15 or 20 percent, few industrial jobs would return to American shores, while working-class Americans might pay much more for their basic necessities. And if China opened wide its borders to more American movies or financial services, the multimillionaires of Hollywood and Wall Street might grow even richer, but ordinary Americans would see little benefit. It is always easier for a nation to point an accusing finger at foreigners rather than honestly admit that almost all its terrible problems are essentially self-inflicted.

Decay of Constitutional Democracy

The central theme of Why Nations Fail is that political institutions and the behavior of ruling elites largely determine the economic success or failure of countries. If most Americans have experienced virtually no economic gains for decades, perhaps we should cast our gaze at these factors in our own society.

Our elites boast about the greatness of our constitutional democracy, the wondrous human rights we enjoy, the freedom and rule of law that have long made America a light unto the nations of the world and a spiritual draw for oppressed peoples everywhere, including China itself. But are these claims actually correct? They often stack up very strangely when they appear in the opinion pages of our major newspapers, coming just after the news reporting, whose facts tell a very different story.

Just last year, the Obama administration initiated a massive months-long bombing campaign against the duly recognized government of Libya on “humanitarian” grounds, then argued with a straight face that a military effort comprising hundreds of bombing sorties and over a billion dollars in combat costs did not actually constitute “warfare,” and hence was completely exempt from the established provisions of the Congressional War Powers Act. A few months later, Congress overwhelmingly passed and President Obama signed the National Defense Authorization Act, granting the president power to permanently imprison without trial or charges any American whom he classifies as a national-security threat based on his own judgment and secret evidence. When we consider that American society has experienced virtually no domestic terrorism during the past decade, we must wonder how long our remaining constitutional liberties would survive if we were facing frequent real-life attacks by an actual terrorist underground, such as had been the case for many years with the IRA in Britain, ETA in Spain, or the Red Brigades in Italy.

Most recently, President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder have claimed the inherent right of an American president to summarily execute anyone anywhere in the world, American citizen or not, whom White House advisors have privately decided was a “bad person.” While it is certainly true that major world governments have occasionally assassinated their political enemies abroad, I have never before heard these dark deeds publicly proclaimed as legitimate and aboveboard. Certainly if the governments of Russia or China, let alone Iran, declared their inherent right to kill anyone anywhere in the world whom they didn't like, our media pundits would immediately blast these statements as proof of their total criminal insanity.

These are very strange notions of the “rule of law” for the administration of a president who had once served as top editor of the Harvard Law Review and who was routinely flattered in his political campaigns by being described as a “constitutional scholar.”

Many of these negative ideological trends have been absorbed and accepted by the popular culture and much of the American public. Over the last decade one of the highest-rated shows on American television was “24”, created by Joel Surnow and chronicling Kiefer Sutherland as a patriotic but ruthless Secret Service agent, with each episode constituting a single hour of his desperate efforts to thwart terrorist plots and safeguard our national security. Numerous episodes featured our hero torturing suspected evildoers in order to extract the information necessary to save innocent lives, with the entire series representing a popular weekly glorification of graphic government torture on behalf of the greater good.

Now soft-headed protestations to the contrary, most governments around the world have at least occasionally practiced torture, especially when combating popular insurgencies, and some of the more brutal regimes, including Stalinist Russia and Nazi Germany, even professionalized the process. But such dark deeds done in secret were always vigorously denied in public, and the popular films and other media of Stalin's Soviet Union invariably featured pure-hearted workers and peasants bravely doing their honorable and patriotic duty for the Motherland, rather than the terrible torments being daily inflicted in the cellars of the Lubyanka prison. Throughout all of modern history, I am not aware of a single even semi-civilized country that publicly celebrated the activities of its professional government torturers in the popular media. Certainly such sentiments would have been totally abhorrent and unthinkable in the “conservative Hollywood” of the Cold War 1950s.

And since we live in a entertainment-dominated society, sentiments affirmed on the screen often have direct real-world consequences. At one point, senior American military and counter-terrorism officials felt the need to travel to Hollywood and urge its screenwriters to stop glorifying American torture, since their shows were encouraging U.S. soldiers to torture Muslim captives even when their commanding officers repeatedly ordered them not to do so.

Given these facts, we should hardly be surprised that international surveys over the past decade have regularly ranked America as the world's most hated major nation, a remarkable achievement given the dominant global role of American media and entertainment and also the enormous international sympathy that initially flowed to our country following the 9/11 attacks.

An Emerging One-Party State

So far at least, these extra-constitutional and often brutal methods have not been directed toward controlling America's own political system; we remain a democracy rather than a dictatorship. But does our current system actually possess the central feature of a true democracy, namely a high degree of popular influence over major government policies? Here the evidence seems more ambiguous.

Consider the pattern of the last decade. With two ruinous wars and a financial collapse to his record, George W. Bush was widely regarded as one of the most disastrous presidents in American history, and at times his public approval numbers sank to the lowest levels ever measured. The sweeping victory of his successor, Barack Obama, represented more a repudiation of Bush and his policies than anything else, and leading political activists, left and right alike, characterized Obama as Bush's absolute antithesis, both in background and in ideology. This sentiment was certainly shared abroad, with Obama being selected for the Nobel Peace Prize just months after entering office, based on the widespread assumption that he was certain to reverse most of the policies of his detested predecessor and restore America to sanity.

Yet almost none of these reversals took place. Instead, the continuity of administration policy has been so complete and so obvious that many critics now routinely speak of the Bush/Obama administration.

The harsh violations of constitutional principles and civil liberties which Bush pioneered following the 9/11 attacks have only further intensified under Obama, the heralded Harvard constitutional scholar and ardent civil libertarian, and this has occurred without the excuse of any major new terrorist attacks. During his Democratic primary campaign, Obama promised that he would move to end Bush's futile Iraq War immediately upon taking office, but instead large American forces remained in place for years until heavy pressure from the Iraqi government finally forced their removal; meanwhile, America's occupation army in Afghanistan actually tripled in size. The government bailout of the hated financial manipulators of Wall Street, begun under Bush, continued apace under Obama, with no serious attempts at either government prosecution or drastic reform. Americans are still mostly suffering through the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, but Wall Street profits and multimillion-dollar bonuses soon returned to record levels.

In particular, the continuity of top officials has been remarkable. As Bush's second defense secretary, Robert Gates had been responsible for the ongoing management of America's foreign wars and military occupations since 2006; Obama kept him on, and he continued to play the same role in the new administration. Similarly, Timothy Geithner had been one of Bush's most senior financial appointments, playing a crucial role in the widely unpopular financial bailout of Wall Street; Obama promoted him to Treasury secretary and authorized continuation of those same policies. Ben Bernanke had been appointed chairman of the Federal Reserve by Bush and was reappointed by Obama. Bush wars and bailouts became Obama wars and bailouts. The American public voted for an anti-Bush, but got Bush's third term instead.

During the Cold War, Soviet propagandists routinely characterized our democracy as a sham, with the American public merely selecting which of the two intertwined branches of their single political party should alternate in office, while the actual underlying policies remained essentially unchanged, being decided and implemented by the same corrupt ruling class. This accusation may have been mostly false at the time it was made but seems disturbingly accurate today.

When times are hard and government policies are widely unpopular, but voters are only offered a choice between the rival slick marketing campaigns of Coke and Pepsi, cynicism can reach extreme proportions. Over the last year, surveys have shown that the public non-approval of Congress—representing Washington's political establishment—has ranged as high as 90–95 percent, which is completely unprecedented.

But if our government policies are so broadly unpopular, why are we unable to change them through the sacred power of the vote? The answer is that America's system of government has increasingly morphed from being a representative democracy to becoming something closer to a mixture of plutocracy and mediacracy, with elections almost entirely determined by money and media, not necessarily in that order. Political leaders are made or broken depending on whether they receive the cash and visibility needed to win office.

National campaigns increasingly seem sordid reality shows for second-rate political celebrities, while our country continues along its path toward multiple looming calamities. Candidates who depart from the script or deviate from the elite D.C. consensus regarding wars or bailouts—notably a principled ideologue such as Ron Paul—are routinely stigmatized in the media as dangerous extremists or even entirely airbrushed out of campaign news coverage, as has been humorously highlighted by comedian Jon Stewart.

We know from the collapsed communist states of Eastern Europe that control over the media may determine public perceptions of reality, but it does not change the underlying reality itself, and reality usually has the last laugh. Economics Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz and his colleagues have conservatively estimated the total long-term cost of our disastrous Iraq War at $3 trillion, representing over one-fifth of our entire accumulated national debt, or almost $30,000 per American household. And even now the direct ongoing costs of our Afghanistan War still run $120 billion per year, many times the size of Afghanistan's total GDP. Meanwhile, during these same years the international price of oil has risen from $25 to $125 per barrel—partly as a consequence of these past military disruptions and growing fears of future ones—thereby imposing gigantic economic costs upon our society.

And we suffer other costs as well. A recent New York Times story described the morale-building visit of Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta to our forces in Afghanistan and noted that all American troops had been required to surrender their weapons before attending his speech and none were allowed to remain armed in his vicinity. Such a command decision seems almost unprecedented in American history and does not reflect well upon the perceived state of our military morale.

Future historians may eventually regard these two failed wars, fought for entirely irrational reasons, as the proximate cause of America's financial and political collapse, representing the historical bookend to our World War II victory, which originally established American global dominance.

Our Extractive Elites

When parasitic elites govern a society along “extractive” lines, a central feature is the massive upward flow of extracted wealth, regardless of any contrary laws or regulations. Certainly America has experienced an enormous growth of officially tolerated corruption as our political system has increasingly consolidated into a one-party state controlled by a unified media-plutocracy.

Consider the late 2011 collapse of MF Global, a midsize but highly reputable brokerage firm. Although this debacle was far smaller than the Lehman bankruptcy or the Enron fraud, it effectively illustrates the incestuous activities of America's overlapping elites. Just a year earlier, Jon Corzine had been installed as CEO, following his terms as Democratic governor and U.S. senator from New Jersey and his previous career as CEO of Goldman Sachs. Perhaps no other American had such a combination of stellar political and financial credentials on his resume. Soon after taking the reins, Corzine decided to boost his company's profits by betting its entire capital and more against the possibility that any European countries might default on their national debts. When he lost that bet, his multi-billion-dollar firm tumbled into bankruptcy.

At this point, the story moves from a commonplace tale of Wall Street arrogance and greed into something out of the Twilight Zone, or perhaps Monty Python. The major newspapers began reporting that customer funds, eventually said to total $1.6 billion, had mysteriously disappeared during the collapse, and no one could determine what had become of them, a very strange claim in our age of massively computerized financial records. Weeks and eventually months passed, tens of millions of dollars were spent on armies of investigators and forensic accountants, but all those customer funds stayed “missing,” while the elite media covered this bizarre situation in the most gingerly possible fashion. As an example, a front page Wall Street Journal story on February 23, 2012 suggested that after so many months, there seemed little likelihood that the disappeared customer funds might ever reappear, but also emphasized that absolutely no one was being accused of any wrongdoing. Presumably the journalists were suggesting that the $1.6 billion dollars of customer money had simply walked out the door on its own two feet.

Stories like this give the lie to the endless boasts of our politicians and business pundits that America's financial system is the most transparent and least corrupt in today's world. Certainly America is not unique in the existence of long-term corporate fraud, as was recently shown in the fall of Japan's Olympus Corporation following the discovery of more than a billion dollars in long-hidden investment losses. But when we consider the largest corporate collapses of the last decade that were substantially due to fraud, nearly all the names are American: WorldCom, Enron, Tyco, Global Crossing, and Adelphia. And this list leaves out all the American financial institutions destroyed by the financial meltdown—such as Lehman, Bear Stearns, Merrill Lynch, Washington Mutual, and Wachovia—and the many trillions of dollars in American homeowner equity and top-rated MBS securities which evaporated during that process. Meanwhile, the largest and longest Ponzi Scheme in world history, that of Bernie Madoff, had survived for decades under the very nose of the SEC, despite a long series of detailed warnings and complaints. The second largest such fraud, that of Allen R. Stanford, also bears the label “Made in the USA.”

Some of the sources of Chinese success and American decay are not entirely mysterious. As it happens, the typical professional background of a member of China's political elite is engineering; they were taught to build things. Meanwhile, a remarkable fraction of America's political leadership class attended law school, where they were trained to argue effectively and to manipulate. Thus, we should not be greatly surprised that while China's leaders tend to build, America's leaders seem to prefer endless manipulation, whether of words, money, or people.

How corrupt is the American society fashioned by our current ruling elites? That question is perhaps more ambiguous than it might seem. According to the standard world rankings produced by Transparency International, the United States is a reasonably clean country, with corruption being considerably higher than in the nations of Northern Europe or elsewhere in the Anglosphere, but much lower than in most of the rest of the world, including China.

But I suspect that this one-dimensional metric fails to capture some of the central anomalies of America's current social dilemma. Unlike the situation in many Third World countries, American teachers and tax inspectors very rarely solicit bribes, and there is little overlap in personnel between our local police and the criminals whom they pursue. Most ordinary Americans are generally honest. So by these basic measures of day-to-day corruption, America is quite clean, not too different from Germany or Japan.

By contrast, local village authorities in China have a notorious tendency to seize public land and sell it to real estate developers for huge personal profits. This sort of daily misbehavior has produced an annual Chinese total of up to 90,000 so-called “mass incidents”—public strikes, protests, or riots—usually directed against corrupt local officials or businessmen.

However, although American micro-corruption is rare, we seem to suffer from appalling levels of macro-corruption, situations in which our various ruling elites squander or misappropriate tens or even hundreds of billions of dollars of our national wealth, sometimes doing so just barely on one side of technical legality and sometimes on the other.

Sweden is among the cleanest societies in Europe, while Sicily is perhaps the most corrupt. But suppose a large clan of ruthless Sicilian Mafiosi moved to Sweden and somehow managed to gain control of its government. On a day-to-day basis, little would change, with Swedish traffic policemen and building inspectors performing their duties with the same sort of incorruptible efficiency as before, and I suspect that Sweden's Transparency International rankings would scarcely decline. But meanwhile, a large fraction of Sweden's accumulated national wealth might gradually be stolen and transferred to secret Cayman Islands bank accounts, or invested in Latin American drug cartels, and eventually the entire plundered economy would collapse.

Ordinary Americans who work hard and seek to earn an honest living for themselves and their families appear to be suffering the ill effects of exactly this same sort of elite-driven economic pillage. The roots of our national decline will be found at the very top of our society, among the One Percent, or more likely the 0.1 percent.

Thus, the ideas presented in Why Nations Fail seem both true and false. The claim that harmful political institutions and corrupt elites can inflict huge economic damage upon a society seems absolutely correct. But while the authors turn a harsh eye toward elite misbehavior across time and space—from ancient Rome to Czarist Russia to rising China—their vision seems to turn rosy-tinted when they consider present-day America, the society in which they themselves live and whose ruling elites lavishly fund the academic institutions with which they are affiliated. Given the American realities of the last dozen years, it is quite remarkable that the scholars who wrote a book entitled Why Nations Fail never glanced outside their own office windows.

A similar dangerous reticence may afflict most of our media, which appears much more eager to focus on self-inflicted disasters in foreign countries than on those here at home. Presented below is a companion case-study, “Chinese Melamine and American Vioxx: A Comparison,” in which I point out that while the American media a few years ago joined its Chinese counterparts in devoting enormous coverage to the deaths of a few Chinese children from tainted infant formula, it paid relatively little attention to a somewhat similar domestic public-health disaster that killed many tens or even hundreds of thousands of Americans.

A society's media and academic organs constitute the sensory apparatus and central nervous system of its body politic, and if the information these provide is seriously misleading, looming dangers may fester and grow. A media and academy that are highly corrupt or dishonest constitute a deadly national peril. And although the political leadership of undemocratic China might dearly wish to hide all its major mistakes, its crude propaganda machinery often fails at this self-destructive task. But America's own societal information system is vastly more skilled and experienced in shaping reality to meet the needs of business and government leaders, and this very success does tremendous damage to our country.

Perhaps Americans really do prefer that their broadcasters provide Happy News and that their political campaigns constitute amusing reality shows. Certainly the cheering coliseum crowds of the Roman Empire favored their bread and circuses over the difficult and dangerous tasks that their ancestors had undertaken during Rome's rise to world greatness. And so long as we can continue to trade bits of printed paper carrying presidential portraits for flat-screen TVs from Chinese factories, perhaps all is well and no one need be too concerned about the apparent course of our national trajectory, least of all our political leadership class.

But if so, then we must admit that Richard Lynn, a prominent British scholar, has been correct in predicting for a decade or longer that the global dominance of the European-derived peoples is rapidly drawing to its end and within the foreseeable future the torch of human progress and world leadership will inevitably pass into Chinese hands.

Ron Unz is publisher of The American Conservative and founder of Unz.org.

Raising American Wages...by Raising American Wages

A simple remedy for income stagnation

The New America Foundation • November 15, 2012 • 3,900 Words

With Americans still trapped in the fifth year of our Great Recession, and median personal income having been essentially stagnant for forty years, perhaps we should finally admit that decades of economic policies have largely failed.

The last two years of our supposed recovery have seen American growth rates averaging well under 2 percent.[1] Although our media often pays greater attention to the recent gains in stock market and asset prices, such paltry growth means that many of the millions of jobs lost in 2008 and 2009 will never be regained, and the broadest measures of American unemployment and underemployment will remain stuck in the vicinity of 15%.[2] Meanwhile, an astonishing 93% of the total increase in income during the recovery period has been captured by the top one percent of earners, who now hold almost as much net wealth as the bottom 95 percent of our society.[3] This polarized situation does not bode well for our future, and unless broader social trends in jobs and incomes soon improve, dark days surely lie ahead.

• • •

If we seek to create jobs and raise incomes for ordinary Americans, we should consider what sorts of jobs and incomes these might be. Since economists and policy analysts tend to have advanced degrees and many leading journalists these days are Ivy League alumni, their employment perceptions may often diverge from reality. So let us review the official government data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), as discussed by Prof. Jack Metzgar of Chicago’s Center for Working-Class Studies and brought to my attention in an excellent column by the late Alexander Cockburn.[4] Metzgar writes:

The BLS’s three largest occupational categories by themselves accounted for more than one-third of the workforce in 2010 (49 million jobs), and they will make an outsized contribution to the new jobs projected for 2020. They are:

Office and administrative support occupations (median wage of $30,710)

Sales and related occupations ($24,370)

Food preparation and serving occupations ($18,770)

Other occupations projected to provide the largest number of new jobs in the next decade include child care workers ($19,300), personal care aides ($19,640), home health aides ($20,560), janitors and cleaners ($22,210), teacher assistants ($23,220), non-construction laborers ($23,460), security guards ($23,920), and construction laborers ($29,280).

Although our bipartisan elites regularly suggest higher education as the best elixir for what ails our economy and its workers, few of these job categories seem logical careers for individuals who have devoted four years of their life to the study of History, Psychology, or Business Education, often at considerable expense. Nor would we expect the increased production of such degrees, presumably at lower-tier or for-profit colleges, to have much positive impact on the wages or working conditions of janitors or security guards.

Consider that only 20% of current jobs require even a bachelors’ degree.[5] More than 30% of Americans over the age of 25 have graduated college, so this implies that one-third or more of today’s college graduates are over-educated for their current employment, perhaps conforming to the stereotype of the college psychology major working at Starbucks or McDonalds.

Furthermore, this employment situation will change only gradually over the next decade, according to BLS projections. Millions of jobs in our “knowledge economy” do currently require a post-graduate degree, and the numbers are growing rapidly; but even by 2020, these will constitute less than 5% of the total, while around 70% of all jobs will still require merely a high school diploma.[6]

Education may be valuable for other reasons, but it does not seem to hold the answer to our jobs and incomes problem.

If additional education is a dead end, other partisan nostrums appear equally doubtful. Large cuts in government taxation or regulation are unlikely to benefit the average sales clerk or waitress. And the favored progressive proposal of a huge new government stimulus package has absolutely no chance of getting through Congress; but even if it did, few of the funds would flow to the low-paid private sector service workers catalogued above, and any broader social gains would rely upon a secondary boost in economic activity produced by putting extra government dollars into private pockets.

So how might we possibly raise the wages of American workers who fill this huge roster of underpaid and lesser-skilled positions, holding jobs which are almost entirely concentrated in the private service sector?

• • •

Perhaps the most effective means of raising their wages is simply to raise their wages.

Consider the impact of a large increase in the federal minimum wage, perhaps to $10 or more likely $12 per hour.

The generally low-end jobs catalogued above are entirely in the non-tradable service sector; they could not be outsourced to even lower-paid foreigners in Bangalore or Manila. Perhaps there might be some incentive for further automation, but the nature of the jobs in question – focused on personal interactions requiring human skills – are exactly those least open to mechanical replacement. Just consider the difficulty and expense of automating the job of a home health care aide, child care worker, or bartender.

With direct replacement via outsourcing or automation unlikely, employers responding to a higher minimum wage would be faced with the choice of either increasing the wages of their lowest paid workers by perhaps a couple of dollars per hour, or eliminating their jobs. There would likely be some job loss,[7] but given the simultaneous rise in labor costs among all competitors and the localized market for these services, the logical business response would be to raise prices by a few percent to help cover increased costs while also trimming current profit margins. Perhaps consumers would pay 3 percent more for Wal-Mart goods or an extra dime for a McDonald’s hamburger, but most of the jobs would still exist and the price changes would be small compared to typical fluctuations due to commodity and energy prices, international exchange rates, or Chinese production costs.

The resulting one-time inflationary spike would slightly raise living expenses for everyone in our society, but the immediate 20% or 30% boost in the take-home pay of many millions of America’s lowest income workers would make it easy for them to absorb these small costs, while the impact upon the middle or upper classes would be totally negligible. An increase in the hourly minimum wage from the current federal level of $7.25 to (say) $12.00 might also have secondary, smaller ripple effects, boosting wages currently above that level as well.

A minimum wage in this range is hardly absurd or extreme. In 2012 dollars, the American minimum wage was over $10 in 1968 during our peak of postwar prosperity and full employment.[8] The average minimum wage in Canadian provinces is currently well over $10 per hour, the national figure for France is more than $12, and Australia has the remarkable combination of a minimum wage of nearly $16.50 together with 5 percent unemployment.[9]

Even a large increase in the minimum wage would have very little impact on America’s international competitiveness since almost everyone employed in our surviving manufacturing export sector – whether in unionized Seattle or non-union South Carolina – already earns far above the current minimum wage. The same is also true for government workers, resulting in negligible increased cost to taxpayers.

Leaving aside the obvious gains in financial and personal well-being for the lower strata of America’s working class, there would also be a large economic multiplier effect, boosting general business activity in our weak economy. America’s working poor tend to spend almost every dollar they earn, often even sinking into temporary debt on a monthly basis.[10] Raising the annual income of each such wage-earner couple by eight or ten thousand dollars would immediately send those same dollars flowing into the regular consumer economy, boosting sales and general economic activity. In effect, the proposal represents an enormous government stimulus package, but one targeting the working-poor and funded entirely by the private sector.

Ironically, it is likely that major elements of the private sector would be perfectly happy with this arrangement. For example, despite their low-wage and anti-worker reputation, Wal-Mart’s top executives lobbied Congress in 2005 for an increase in the minimum wage, concerned that their working-class customer base was growing too impoverished to shop at their stores.[11] Wal-Mart might never be willing to raise its wages in isolation, but if a higher minimum wage forces all competitors to do the same, then prices can also be raised to help make up the difference, while the large rise in disposable consumer income would greatly increase sales.

• • •

Although the direct financial benefits to working-class Americans and our economy as a whole are the primary justifications for the proposal, there are a number of subsidiary benefits as well, ranging across both economic and non-economic areas.

First, the net dollar transfers through the labor market in this proposal would generally be from higher to lower income strata, and lower-income individuals tend to pay a much larger fraction of their income in payroll and sales taxes. Thus, a large boost in working-class wages would obviously have a very positive impact on the financial health of Social Security, Medicare and other government programs funded directly from the paycheck. Meanwhile, increased sales tax collections would improve the dismal fiscal picture for state and local governments, and the public school systems they finance.

Furthermore, as large portions of the working-poor became much less poor, the payout of the existing Federal Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) would be sharply reduced. Although popular among politicians, the EITC is a classic example of economic special interests privatizing profits while socializing costs: employers receive the full benefits of their low-wage workforce while a substantial fraction of the wage expense is pushed onto the taxpayers. Private companies should fund their own payrolls rather than rely upon substantial government subsidies, which produce major distortions in market signals.

Even on the highly contentious and seemingly unrelated issue of immigration, a large rise in the minimum wage might have a strongly positive impact. During the last decade or two, American immigration has been running at historically high levels, with the overwhelming majority of these immigrants being drawn here by hopes of employment.[12] This vast influx of eager workers has naturally strengthened the position of Capital at the expense of Labor, and much of the stagnation or decline in working-class wages has probably been a result, since this sector has been in greatest direct competition with lower-skilled immigrants.[13]

Not only would a large rise in the minimum wage reverse many years of this economic “race to the bottom,” but it would impact immigration itself, even without changes in government enforcement policy. One of the few sectors likely to be devastated by a much higher minimum wage would be the sweatshops and other very low wage or marginal businesses which tend to disproportionably employ new immigrants, especially illegal ones. Sweatshops and similar industries have no legitimate place in a developed economy, and their elimination would reduce the sort of lowest-rung job openings continually drawing impoverished new immigrants. Meanwhile, those immigrants who have already been here some time, learned English, and established a solid employment record would be kept on at higher wages, reaping the same major benefits as non-immigrant Americans within the ranks of the working-poor.

• • •

Finally, one of the more unexpected benefits of a large rise in the minimum wage would follow from a total reversal of bipartisan conventional wisdom. Whereas our elites regularly tell us that an increase in higher education might have the benefit of raising American wages, I would instead argue that a sharp rise in ordinary wages would have the benefit of reducing higher education, whose growth increasingly resembles that of an unsustainable bubble.

Between 2000 and 2010, enrollment in postsecondary institutions increased 37 percent, compared to just 11 percent during the previous decade, with the recent increase being almost three times that of the growth of the underlying population of 18- to 24-year-olds. Indeed, relative enrollment growth for older students – 25 and above – was far greater than for students in the younger, more traditional ages. Furthermore, “Business” has overwhelmingly become the most popular undergraduate major, attracting nearly as many students as the combined total of the next three categories – Social Sciences and History, Health Sciences, and Education.[14]

If rapidly growing numbers of individuals, especially those many years past their high school graduation, are now attending college and majoring in Business, they are probably not doing so purely out of love of learning and a desire for broadening their intellectual horizons. Instead, they have presumably accepted the pronouncements of authority figures that higher education will benefit them economically. Put in harsher terms, they may believe that a college degree is their best hope of avoiding a life of permanent poverty trapped in the ranks of the working-poor.

Although there is a clear mismatch between the requirements of America’s projected jobs and the benefits of a college education, this notion of “college or poverty” may not be entirely mistaken. A recent college graduate is almost 20 percentage points more likely to have a job than a person of the same age with only a high school degree.[15] As a competitive signaling device, a 4-year degree may help someone land an office job as an administrative assistant rather than one as a fast-food server. But this is costly to the individual and to society.

Even leaving aside the absurdity of young people spending years of their lives studying business theory or psychology to obtain jobs which traditionally went to high school graduates, the financial cost is enormous. A generation or more ago, expenses at solid state institutions and similar colleges were fairly low, and could mostly be financed by small grants, parental savings, and part-time student jobs. But educational costs have increased 133% above inflation over the last thirty years,[16] and the government-subsidized college-loan industry has grown in parallel. Last year, the total volume of outstanding student-loan debt passed the trillion dollar mark, now exceeding either credit-card or auto loan debt.[17]

Two-thirds of recent college graduates borrowed to finance their education, and their average debt is over $23,000, while the load for those who pursue graduate or professional degrees can easily exceed the hundred thousand dollar mark.[18] These debts are exempt from bankruptcy discharge, and unless graduates quickly find high-paying jobs – not easy in an economy with very high youthful unemployment – the required payments may remain larger than the combined total of their federal, state, and local taxes. This privatized “education tax” may become a permanent, terrible burden, pushing any plans for marriage, family, and home purchase into the distant future. Barely half of 18- to 24-year-olds are currently employed, the lowest level in over sixty years,[19] so we should not be surprised that a quarter of all student-loan payers are currently delinquent.[20] Without the possibility of bankruptcy to clear their load, permanent debt-peonage for a substantial fraction of the next generation seems a very real possibility.

The aggressive marketing tactics of for-profit colleges and the student loan industry have disturbing parallels with the sub-prime lenders who played a destructive role in the Housing Bubble. Our national elites gave strong public support to the goal of universal home-ownership. Families were warned that if they did not stretch their income and their credit to buy a house at the inflated prices being offered, they would be permanently priced out of the market and condemned to second-class economic citizenship. Today, very similar warnings are made about the failure to invest in a college education, and this is backed by the aggressive advertising and sales tactics of the lucrative and well-connected for-profit sectors of the Higher Education-Industrial Complex, such as University of Phoenix and Kaplan Schools.

The lax lending standards and regulatory policies supporting greater homeownership were a major factor in our catastrophic financial collapse, in which the average family has now lost 40% of its net worth and many millions of Americans are on the edge of foreclosure, bankruptcy, and destitution.[21] Nearly everyone lost, while a tiny handful of individuals and companies made vast, unearned fortunes from facilitating the growth of the bubble or later betting upon its collapse. A similar outcome in higher education seems quite likely.

Now consider the impact of a sharp rise in the minimum wage, sufficient to remove the taint of poverty overhanging so many of our lower-tier jobs. Those academically-oriented students who plan to pursue challenging college majors in engineering, computer software, or other STEM fields would be completely unaffected by a rise in pay for home health aides, nor would there be any impact on the college plans of those seeking to broaden their horizons with serious academic study in literature, history, or philosophy.

But for those millions who regard postsecondary education as merely a way of punching their ticket with a “business” degree and thereby gaining a shot at a middle class income, the calculus would be different: four years of academic work, four years of foregone income, and many tens of thousands of dollars in tuition and fees would be weighed against earning a reasonable living straight out of high school or with a form of shorter vocational training like an apprenticeship. Certainly in the past, when well-paid factory jobs were plentiful, a large fraction of students made the latter choice, and seldom regretted it.

Meanwhile, if college enrollments were reduced to those who actually wanted or needed a college education, supply and demand would begin deflating our Higher Education Bubble, forcing a sharp drop in ever-escalating educational costs. Since government loans and subsidies would be targeted at a much smaller pool of students, they could be made more generous, reducing the debt burden on those who do still seek a degree.

• • •

Public policy experts sometimes glorify complexity, proposing intricate, interlocking systems aimed at a desired result. But such structures are only as strong as their weakest link, and a proposal too complex to fully understand is also too complex to fix. Our government has sought to ensure a decent living for American workers through an enormous array of income subsidies, public benefits, training programs, and educational loans; at this point, many of these components have accumulated powerful and parasitic side-beneficiaries while leaving the working class behind.

Since this vast and leaky conglomeration has failed at its intended goal, perhaps we should just try raising wages instead.

(Originally published November 15, 2012 by The New America Foundation – PDF)

References

[1] “United States GDP Growth Rate,” Trading Economics, from Bureau of Economic Analysis (October, 2012), http://www.tradingeconomics.com/united-states/gdp-growth .

[2] Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Employment, Hours, and Earnings from the Current Employment Statistics survey (National),” updated October 5, 2012.

[3] Emmanuel Saez, “Striking it Richer: The Evolution of Top Incomes in the United States,” March 2, 2012, http://elsa.berkeley.edu/~saez/saez-UStopincomes-2010.pdf ; Edward N. Wolff, “The Asset Price Meltdown and the Wealth of the Middle Class,” New York University, August 26, 2012, <a://appam.confex.com/data/extendedabstract/appam/2012/Paper_2134_extendedabstract_151_0.pdf” title=”http://appam.confex.com/data/extendedabstract/appam/2012/Paper_2134_extendedabstract_151_0.pdf” href=”http://appam.confex.com/data/extendedabstract/appam/2012/Paper_2134_extendedabstract_151_0.pdf”>http://appam.confex.com/data/extendedabstract/appam/2012/Paper_2134_exte… .

[4] Jack Metzgar, “Education, Jobs, and Wages,” Working-Class Perspectives: Commentary from the Center for Working-Class Studies, March 5, 2012, <a://workingclassstudies.wordpress.com/2012/03/05/education-jobs-and-wages/;” title=”http://workingclassstudies.wordpress.com/2012/03/05/education-jobs-and-wages/;” href=”http://workingclassstudies.wordpress.com/2012/03/05/education-jobs-and-wages/;”>http://workingclassstudies.wordpress.com/2012/03/05/education-jobs-and-w… Alexander Cockburn, “The Myth of the ‘Knowledge Economy,’” Counterpunch, March 23, 2012, http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/03/23/the-myth-of-the-knowledge-economy/ .

[5] C. Brett Lockard and Michael Wolf, “Occupational employment projections to 2020,” Bureau of Labor Statistics, Table 6, http://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2012/01/art5full.pdf .

[6] Some analysts have criticized the BLS statistics based on their methodology. Anthony Carnevale of the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce claims the BLS significantly underestimates educational requirements and created an alternate methodology to predict future employment educational requirements. Carnevale’s research can be found here: http://www9.georgetown.edu/grad/gppi/hpi/cew/pdfs/FullReport.pdf . Since the main difference between the BLS and the Georgetown numbers are not in the number of bachelor’s or advanced degrees required but rather in how many people need alternate forms of postsecondary training (some college or vocational school), the argument that there is an overemphasis on 4-year degrees can be made with either set of numbers.

[7] Research has not provided a conclusive answer to the question of job loss. While economic theory predicts that some job loss would occur with higher minimum wages, the widely cited research of economists David Card and Alan B. Krueger showed “no evidence for a large negative employment effect of higher minimum wages.” A selection of relevant research can be found here: http://www.swcollege.com/bef/policy_debates/increase_minimum.html .

[8] Ralph Nader, “Minimum Wage: Catching Up with 1968,” Common Dreams, February 29, 2012

[9] Ontario Ministry of Labour; Hugh Carnegy, “French government raises minimum wage,” Financial Times, June 26, 2012; “National minimum wage,” Fair Work Ombudsman, Australian Government, page updated 1 July 2012, http://www.fairwork.gov.au/pay/national-minimum-wage/pages/default.aspx .

[10] Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Income before taxes: Average annual expenditures and characteristics,” Consumer Expenditure Survey, 2011, http://www.bls.gov/cex/2011/Standard/income.pdf .

[11] “Wal-Mart calls for minimum wage hike,” CNN/Money, October 25, 2005, http://money.cnn.com/2005/10/25/news/fortune500/walmart_wage/ .

[12] “2011 Yearbook of Immigration Statistics,” Office of Immigration Statistics, Department of Homeland Security, September 2012, http://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/publications/immigration-statistics/yearbook/2011/ois_yb_2011.pdf .

[13] While most experts agree that unskilled immigration depresses the wages of low-skilled American workers to some degree, they disagree about the extent of the effect.  For a recent overview of the scholarly debate, see Harry J. Holzer, “Immigration Policy and Less-Skilled Workers in the United States,” Migration Policy Institute, January 2011.  http://www.migrationpolicy.org/pubs/Holzer-January2011.pdf or Linda Levine, “Immigration: The Effects on Low-Skilled and High-Skilled Native-Born Workers,” Congressional Research Service, April 2010, http://www.au.af.mil/au/awc/awcgate/crs/95-408.pdf .

[14] Thomas Snyder and Sally Dillow, Digest of Education Statistics 2011, Chapter 3 and Table 286, April 2012, The National Center for Educational Statistics.

[15] Adam Looney and Michael Greenstone, “Regardless of the Cost, College Still Matters,” The Hamilton Project (October 2012), http://www.hamiltonproject.org/papers/regardless_of_the_cost_college_still_matters/ .

[16] Costs have risen from $7,759 in 1980-81 to $18,133 in 2010-2011 in inflation-adjusted 2009-2010 dollars. Thomas Snyder and Sally Dillow,Digest of Education Statistics, 2011, Chapter 3 and Table 349, April 2012, The National Center for Educational Statistics.

[17] “Quarterly Report on Household Debt and Credit,” Federal Reserve Bank of New York (August 2012), http://www.newyorkfed.org/research/national_economy/householdcredit/DistrictReport_Q22012.pdf .

[18] Andrew Martin and Andrew W. Lehren, “Degrees of Debt: A Generation Hobbled by the Soaring Cost of College,” The New York Times, May 12, 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/13/business/student-loans-weighing-down-a-generation-with-heavy-debt.html .

[19] “Young, Underemployed and Optimistic,” Pew Research, February 9, 2012, http://pewresearch.org/pubs/2191/young-adults-workers-labor-market-pay-careers-advancement-recession .

[20] Andrew Martin and Andrew W. Lehren, “Fed Study of Student Debt Outlines a Growing Burden,” The New York Times, March 5, 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/06/business/study-finds-a-growing-student-debt-load.html .

[21] Binjamin Appelbaum, “Family Net Worth Drops to Level of Early ‘90s, Fed Says,” The New York Times, June 11, 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/12/business/economy/family-net-worth-drops-to-level-of-early-90s-fed-says.html

Paying Tuition to a Giant Hedge Fund

Harvard's academic mission is dwarfed by its $30 billion endowment.

The American Conservative • December 4, 2012 • 1,300 Words

From its 1636 foundation Harvard had always ranked as America’s oldest and most prestigious college, even as it gradually grew in size and academic quality during the first three centuries of its existence. The widespread destruction brought about by the Second World War laid low its traditional European rivals, and not long after celebrating its third centennial, Harvard had become the world’s greatest university.

Harvard only improved its standing during the successful American postwar decades, and by its 350th anniversary in 1986 was almost universally recognized as the leader of the world’s academic community. But over the decade or two which followed, it quietly embarked upon a late-life career change, transforming itself into one of the world’s largest hedge funds, with some sort of school or college or something attached off to one side for tax reasons.

The numbers tell the story. Each September, Harvard’s 6,600 undergraduates begin their classes at the Ivy-covered walls of its traditional Cambridge campus owing annual tuition of around $37,000 for the privilege, up from just $13,000 in 1990. Thus, over the last two decades, total tuition income (in current dollars) has increased from about $150 million to almost $250 million, with a substantial fraction of this list-price amount being discounted in the form of the university’s own financial aid to the families of its less wealthy students.

Meanwhile, during most of these years, Harvard’s own endowment has annually grown by five or ten or even twenty times that figure, rendering net tuition from those thousands of students a mere financial bagatelle, having almost no impact on the university’s cash-flow or balance-sheet position. If all the students disappeared tomorrow—or were forced to pay double their current tuition—the impact would be negligible compared to the crucial fluctuations in the mortgage-derivatives market or the international cost-of-funds index.

A very similar conclusion may be drawn by examining the expense side of the university’s financial statement. Harvard’s Division of Arts and Sciences—the central core of academic activity—contains approximately 450 full professors, whose annual salaries tend to average the highest at any university in America. Each year, these hundreds of great scholars and teachers receive aggregate total pay of around $85 million. But in fiscal 2004, just the five top managers of the Harvard endowment fund shared total compensation of $78 million, an amount which was also roughly 100 times the salary of Harvard’s own president. These figures clearly demonstrate the relative importance accorded to the financial and academic sides of Harvard’s activities.

Unlike universities, the business model of large and aggressive hedge funds is notoriously volatile, and during the 2008 Financial Crisis, Harvard lost $11 billion on its net holdings, teetering on the verge of bankruptcy as its highly illiquid assets could not easily be redeployed to cover hundreds of millions of dollars in ongoing capital commitments to various private equity funds. The desperate hedge fund—ahem, academic institution—was forced to borrow $2.5 billion from the credit markets, lay off hundreds of university employees, and completely halt construction work on a huge expansion project, ultimately surviving and later recovering in much the same way as did Goldman Sachs or Citibank.

During all these untoward events, the dollars being paid in by physics majors and being paid out to professors of medieval French literature were of no significance whatsoever, and if institutional investors had balked at the massive bond sales, both groups might have arrived at the classroom one morning only to see a “Closed for Bankruptcy” notice, while Cerberus Capital Management and the Blackstone Group began furiously bidding for the liquidated real estate properties and private equity holdings of what had once been America’s most storied center of learning. Meanwhile, Bill Gates might have swooped in and acquired the unimportant educational properties themselves for a song, afterward renaming the campus itself Microsoft U.-East.

It is commendable that so many former students feel gratitude to their academic alma mater, but personal loyalty to a wealthy hedge fund is somewhat less warranted, and if Harvard’s residual and de minimis educational activities provide it with enormous tax advantages, perhaps those activities should be brought into greater alignment with benefit to our society. The typical private foundation is legally required to spend 5 percent of its assets on charitable activities, and with Harvard’s endowment now back over $30 billion, that sum would come to around $1.5 billion annually. This is many times the total amount of undergraduate tuition, which should obviously be eliminated, thereby removing a substantial financial barrier to enrollment or even application.

One of the major supposed reasons Harvard disproportionately admits the children of the wealthy or those of its alumni is the desperate need to maintain its educational quality by soliciting donations, and the endless irritations of fund-raising drives are an inevitable accompaniment to the reunion process. But the all-time record for a total alumni class contribution was set earlier this year by the Class of 1977 at just $68.7 million, or about 0.2 percent of the existing endowment; and even the aggregate amount of annual alumni donations to support the college is quite trivial compared to the overall income and expenditure statement.

There is also the Internet gossip of an explicit “Harvard Price,” a specific donation dollar amount which would get your son or daughter admitted. The figure is said to be $5 million these days for an applicant who is reasonably competitive and $10 million for one who is not. Daniel Golden’s The Price of Admission provides a specific example which tends to generally confirm this disturbing belief.

But if such claims are true, then Harvard is following an absurd policy, selling off its good name and reputation for just pennies on the dollar, not least because the sums involved represent merely a day or two of its regular endowment income. Harvard surely ranks as the grandest academic name in the world, carrying a weight of prestige that could be leveraged to extract far greater revenue at far lower cost of academic dignity.

Suppose, for example, that instead of such surreptitious and penny-ante wheeling and dealing, Harvard simply auctioned off a single admissions slot each year to the highest blind bidder on the international markets. I suspect that the same sorts of individuals who currently pay $50 million or $100 million for a splotchy painting they can hang on their walls would surely be willing to spend a similar amount to have their son or daughter embossed with the Harvard stamp of approval. The key factor is that such prestige goods are almost entirely positional in value, with most of the benefit derived from the satisfaction of having outbid your rival Internet billionaires, oil sheikhs, or Russian oligarchs, so the higher the price goes, the more valuable the commodity becomes. And since the goal would be to extract as much money as possible from the wealthy bidders, a non-refundable bidding deposit of 2 percent or 5 percent, win or lose, might double or triple the total dollars raised.

Thus, instead of extracting steep net tuition from thousands of undergraduates (and perhaps quietly selling a handful of spots each year for a few million dollars each), Harvard could probably raise just as much revenue by enrolling a single under-qualified student in a process which would publicly establish the gigantic financial value contained in a Harvard diploma. It’s even quite likely that a useful side-benefit of the publicity would be a large rise in Harvard’s total applicants, including those of highest quality, as families all across the country and the world sought to obtain at zero cost the exact same product which a billionaire had just bought for $70 million.

If Harvard wishes to retain its primary existence as a gigantic profit-maximizing hedge fund, that is well and good, but meanwhile perhaps it should be required to provide a free top quality college education to a few thousand deserving students as a minor community service.

Ron Unz is publisher of The American Conservative.

No Immigration Amnesty Without a Minimum Wage Hike

Salon • May 18, 2013 • 700 Words

Congress is currently considering bipartisan legislation providing an amnesty for America’s 11 million illegal immigrants, probably combined with extra visas for skilled workers and an agricultural guestworker program. But principled liberals and conservatives should both demand that any immigration reform proposal also include a sharp rise in the federal minimum wage.

The reason is simple. Any increase in the supply or job mobility of willing workers will tend to benefit Capital at the expense of Labor, stifling any growth in working-class wages, especially given our high unemployment rates. The last 40 years have seen a huge increase in immigration, and it is hardly coincidental that median American wages have been stagnant or declining throughout most of this same period. A large boost in the minimum wage, perhaps to $12 an hour or more, would be the best means of reversing our current economic race to the bottom.

American businesses can certainly afford to provide better pay given that corporate profits have reached an all-time high while wages have fallen to their lowest share of national GDP in history. Furthermore, the overwhelming majority of our lowest paying jobs are in the non-tradeable service sector, rendering them immune from foreign competition. A major factor keeping wages low has been the large annual influx of new immigrant labor, which steadily reduces the bargaining power of existing workers, especially including all previous immigrants. Only the power of the federal government can halt this downward spiral into national impoverishment for most Americans by setting a reasonable floor on wages.

Under the amnesty proposals being discussed, millions of workers at the bottom of the economic ladder would be able to regularize their status and become secure enough to seek better and higher-paying employment. But if nothing is done to improve the wages of their current jobs, these would remain unattractive to legal U.S. residents and act as a magnetic lure for new waves of impoverished border-crossers, eager to gain an initial foothold in the American economy. This exact process occurred following President Ronald Reagan’s amnesty of 3 million illegal immigrants in 1986, and new arrivals might hope to benefit from some future amnesty.

Politicians may promise better border security and tighter employer safeguards, but these same promises were made and broken in 1986. Given powerful economic incentives for both business owner and illegal worker, laws are often circumvented or ignored.

The best means of discouraging employers from hiring illegal workers is to make their jobs sufficiently attractive to draw legal applicants, and this can only be done by raising pay to reasonable levels. So long as federal law requires all competing businesses to raise wages in unison, much of this cost could be covered by a small one-time rise in prices. Since the working-poor would see their annual incomes rise by 30 or 40 percent, they could easily afford to pay an extra dime for a McDonalds hamburger, while such higher prices would be completely negligible to America’s more affluent elements.

Critics of a rise in the minimum wage argue that jobs would be destroyed, and in some cases they are probably correct. But many of those threatened jobs are exactly the ones that should have no place in an affluent, developed society like the United States, which should not attempt to compete with Mexico or India in low-wage industries. The only reason that American sweatshops survive is that they rely upon an undocumented labor force, and eliminating such jobs is a feature not a bug.

Our federal and local governments currently spend vast sums of money subsidizing the social benefits and living standards of our working-poor, including mailing them checks via the refundable Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC). These expenditures constitute an enormous corporate welfare program in which businesses obtain the full value of their low-paid workforce while shifting much of the cost onto the general taxpayer, a classic example of economic special interests privatizing their profits and socializing their costs. Private sector employers should cover the expenses of their own workers rather than force middle-class taxpayers to pay the tab.

The political elites of both the Democratic and Republican parties have united behind immigration reform. Ordinary Americans, Democrat and Republican, immigrant and native-born, should demand that a large rise in the federal minimum wage be included as part of any package deal.

NR on TNR on Unz on Minimum Wage/Immigration

The Unz Review • July 1, 2013 • 1,700 Words

Over the weekend, a leading financial voice at National Review—central ideological pillar of the mainstream American Right—gingerly endorsed my suggestion that a $12.00 per hour minimum wage be required as part of any Congressional immigration legislation. Perhaps miracles do indeed sometimes happen in real life.

My same proposal had also been endorsed a couple of days earlier in The New Republic, and since economic issues have never been my primary focus, perhaps I should recapitulate a little of the history.

Back in 1999 I had published a major cover story for Commentary entitled “California and the End of White America,” analyzing the implications of the massive racial transformation that my own state had recently undergone. During most of the 2000s, I was preoccupied with software projects and did almost no writing, despite having meanwhile become owner and publisher of The American Conservative. But in late 2011 I finally decided to produce a sequel to my Commentary piece, an updated analysis of those same demographic changes, which were now well on their way to transforming American society as a whole.

I had accumulated many additional ideas over the previous dozen years, and as might be expected, my text grew and grew, eventually exceeding 12,000 words. “Immigration, Republicans, and the End of White America” came to cover a great deal of ground, discussing the political, social, and economic aspects of America’s ongoing demographic revolution.

But one major difference was that the American economy of 2011 was far worse than that of the late 1990s, therefore becoming an important part of my analysis. The last portion of my piece presented my proposed solution to many of America’s most serious immigration problems, arguing that a large rise in the federal minimum wage, perhaps to $12.00 per hour, might halt and reverse the downward spiral in American living standards that had partly resulted from the large influx of low-wage labor competition over the previous thirty-odd years. During the early 2000s I had been struck by the obvious connection between minimum wage and immigrant influx, and had been surprised that such an clear relationship had not already become part of the national dialogue.

My lengthy article was very well received, with National Review’s Reihan Salam discussing and analyzing it in a five-part series, though he remained skeptical on the minimum wage hike. On the political margins, the response was even more favorable, with anti-immigrationist blogger Steve Sailer fully endorsing my wage proposal and the late arch-leftist Alexander Cockburn repeatedly hailing it as a matter of overriding importance.

Since I claim no great expertise in economics, I had been cautiously tentative in my wage proposal, and was therefore much relieved when James Galbraith, a leading liberal economist, several months later brought my idea into mainstream respectability by endorsing it in a national column. But did I ever think it might become law? Never in a million years.

The notion of substantially raising the minimum wage then percolated around in Congress, without really going anywhere, and late last year The New America Foundation suggested I produce a piece for them focused solely on that issue. “Raising American Wages by…Raising American Wages” attracted some further attention, including an invitation for me to participate in an Aspen Institute panel.

After President Obama unexpectedly included a minimum wage increase—though just to a paltry figure of $9.00—in his State of the Union Address, the issue gained far greater legitimacy, especially after Nobel Laureates Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz endorsed a minimum wage hike. But none of the $9.00 or $10.50 proposals introduced into Congress seemed to gain any traction, rendering my own suggestion of $12.00 the stuff of utter fantasy. I still thought my idea was a good one, but did it have any chance of becoming law? Never in a million years.

With America’s bipartisan elites now pushing immigration legislation as their top priority, I decided to refocus attention on that aspect of my argument, and last month I published a column in Salon entitled “No Immigration Amnesty Without a Minimum Wage Hike,” reemphasizing the obvious economic connection between those two issues, almost never mentioned by pundits or the media.

In some respects, the political connection may be even more crucial.  America’s bipartisan ruling elites seem almost entirely indifferent to minimum wage issues, but are overwhelmingly united in their massive support for the immigration reform legislation currently moving through Congress. Therefore, I would argue that working-class advocates have an ideal opportunity to “hitch a ride” on that other issue by requiring a $12.00 minimum wage as part of their price for supporting the immigration bill. Given that a high minimum wage would serve to deter future illegal immigration, many conservative immigration restrictionists would probably support such a proposal for their own reasons. And in any event, all polling data indicates that a large rise in the minimum wage is overwhelmingly popular, across all political, ideological, and ethnic lines.

Ironically enough, relatively little opposition might be expected from the ultra-wealthy elites who today almost totally dominate American political life. Unlike a tax hike or restrictions on the accounting treatment of various financial transactions, changes in the minimum wage have almost no impact on America’s plutocratic class, as indicated by last year’s Bloomberg News editorial strongly endorsed a minimum wage increase. After all, Wall Street would much prefer to assuage popular resentment by raising working-class wages a few dollars an hour rather than risk a populist backlash demanding an increase in the capital gains tax rate or restrictions on the carried-interest provisions of hedge-fund managers. But unlike the famously apocryphal quotation of Marie Antoinette, “Let them eat $12.00 per hour” actually sounds like a pretty good deal to me.

Similarly, the ideological libertarians who now dominate much of conservative thought may not like a higher minimum wage any more than they like the existing minimum wage, but probably won’t fight such a proposal tooth and nail. For example, I recently discussed the notion of a large hike in the federal minimum wage with one of America’s most influential conservative opponents of government taxes and regulations, and the issue hardly seemed to register as a leading concern. He said he opposed a higher minimum wage mostly on the grounds that it would hurt American workers by costing them their jobs, a position rather similar to that held until very recently by many liberal economists such as Krugman and Stiglitz.  But he noted that since the workers in question overwhelmingly supported the proposal, it was hardly his top priority to save themselves from their own folly. The analogy he cited was government lotteries, which amount to “a tax on stupidity.”

Proposals that are wildly popular among the masses and viewed largely with indifference by the elites may have a reasonable chance of becoming law, at least if their supporters follow the shrewd strategy of attaching them to the right legislative vehicle.

Given this political landscape, apparent National Review support for a $12.00 minimum wage might have massive, strategic consequences. Large numbers of economic progressives and union supporters have grown rather disgruntled over the last few years with the relatively meager benefits they have gained from an Obama Administration they did so much to elect and reelect: Bush’s Wall Street crowd have merely been replaced by their Democratic opposite numbers. As a presidential candidate, Obama had promised a $9.50 minimum wage and now five years later, he has timorously reduced his promise to a $9.00 figure, while doing little to make even that a reality.

But now these angry advocates of the working class may soon be able to raise the powerful outcry “Even National Review now supports a $12.00 minimum wage!” and perhaps that will finally allow them to attract the necessary backing from their Democratic leaders in  Congress and the White House.  At the very least, it can’t hurt, and the weeks of House debate on the economic aspects of America’s immigration policy may be interesting ones.

A minimum wage raised to a $12.00 level would boost the income of ordinary American workers by hundreds of billions of dollars each year, and probably vie with Obamacare as the most significant change in domestic policy over the last few decades, while certainly being vastly more popular according to all polling data. I wouldn’t give my minimum wage proposal great odds right now, but with endorsements appearing in such mainstream Washington organs as The New Republic and National Review, at least the idea has finally moved into the realm of actual possibility.  So perhaps the fifteen-odd articles and columns I’ve published on this subject over the last two years were not written totally in vain.  Miracles do sometimes happen.

On a completely different matter, I also received a copy of the latest academic journal article by Heiner Rindermann, one of the world’s foremost psychometric researchers. His paper—revealing that despite vast socio-economic differences Vietnamese and Germans had virtually identical tested IQs—was quite interesting and potentially significant. But I was absolutely delighted to discover that Dr. Rindermann had also included a substantial discussion of my own “Chinese Social Darwinism” hypothesis as a possible theoretical explanation for such surprising empirical results. Being a lapsed academic, I am always very gratified by any such scholarly citation, and having my theory respectfully discussed so soon after its publication by so noted a researcher raises hopes that my demographic evolutionary model will gradually become part of the accepted ranged of opinion.

I was also very pleased to see that Harvard’s Niall Ferguson, one of our most prominent public intellectuals, had extensively cited my disturbing Meritocracy findings in his lengthy article entitled “The End of the American Dream.”

Finally, over the last week a very high-brow California blogger published a favorable three-part [Two] [Three] 8,500 word discussion of my Race/IQ analysis from last summer. The writer mentioned her own immigrant background and claimed to have received the highest PSAT in all of New York State a couple of decades ago, a claim that does not seem totally implausible to me.

All in all, this may have been one of my most successful recent weeks, all the more remarkable because none of these important developments involved any effort on my own part. Perhaps if you set things up the right way then political gravity will do the rest.

Open Borders, American Elites, and the Minimum Wage

Views change about massive immigration once both sides of the issue are heard

The Unz Review • November 11, 2013 • 1,700 Words

Last week I took a brief break from two months of concentrated software development effort on my new publication The Unz Review to travel to NYC for a debate on a hypothetical “Open Borders” proposal for private employment, one in a long series of such public events produced by Intelligence Squared. The event was carried on NPR and rebroadcast on some television outlets, but may most easily be watched online at their website, with the organizers also making available a convenient transcript.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PqTQFSh3uxE

Although the debate was a useful discussion of an interesting issue and went well, I believe its greatest value were some of the ancillary aspects, including the important insights it provided into the unchallenged assumptions of America’s insular ruling elites.

Under the regular operating rules, the organizers held before and after votes of the large New York City audience, regarding the winning side as being the team that shifted the margin in their direction. Given my two decades of past writing on immigration issues, I found it quite ironic and amusing that I had been selected for the “anti-immigration” side of the debate, together with Kathleen Newland, co-founder of the eminently pro-immigrant Migration Policy Center. This indicates how yesterday’s fringe ideas have now become the accepted mainstream views of the American elites. The resolution under consideration was certainly as extreme and radical a formulation of the views of economic libertarians as might be imagined: “Let Anyone Take A Job Anywhere.”

Under the literal interpretation of such a proposal, one can easily imagine twenty or thirty million of the world’s desperate poor coming to America within the first few years of enactment, drawn from a global pool numbering in the billions. The resulting social and economic changes would be on a scale unprecedented in human history let alone America’s past, and the potential for an utterly destructive outcome leading to the collapse of our society seems completely obvious.

Nonetheless, at the pre-debate vote the supporters of this proposal outnumbered opponents by a landslide margin of some twenty-five points, 46% to 21%, while one-third of the audience remained undecided. Indeed, during the televised pre-debate discussion between the moderator and the Intelligence Squared chairman, some doubts were expressed that any intelligent person could oppose such a sensible free market policy in labor mobility.

Once the debate began, I focused on the obvious point that the law of supply and demand ensured that a huge increase in the number of willing workers would greatly reduce their economic bargaining power against their employers. Wages for ordinary Americans have been stagnant for forty years and it is probably more than pure coincidence that the last forty years have witnessed one of America’s greatest waves of foreign immigration. Adopt a proposal that immediately increases such immigration levels by a factor of five or ten, and America’s minimum wage would be transformed into its maximum wage, with the natural outcome being economic devastation for most working Americans.

Certainly America’s affluent and highly-educated urban elite—the sort of New Yorkers attending the debate—would benefit in the short run from enacting a policy that drastically cut the share of the national income going to shopkeepers, nannies, construction workers, and probably 90% of all other Americans. But the eventual social reaction to the total impoverishment of the American middle and working classes might lead to the sort of extreme political reaction we sometimes read about in the history books.

Such points might seem totally obvious to me, but many of the audience members had seemingly never encountered them before, and the results were striking. After ninety minutes of hearing both sides of the issue, there was a swing of thirty-two points toward our opposed position, and we won handily. As a point of comparison, at the reception prior to the show we had been told that the largest previous swing at any Intelligence Squared debate had been the shift of eighteen points that occurred during a 2006 debate on the nature of Hamas in the Mid East conflict.

I have little doubt that those many hundreds of earnest New Yorkers who decided to spend their time and money to attend an evening policy debate rather than see a Broadway show or watch Gravity in 3-D, consider themselves well-informed people, who regularly read The New York Times and many of the leading liberal opinion magazines. But such purportedly “liberal” outlets studiously avoid mentioning that a massive influx of foreign workers would be an economic catastrophe for the bulk of the American population. Hence the apparent surprise of so much of the audience at the notion that a huge increase in the supply of workers might produce to a sharp decline in the market value of their labor and the income they receive.

Such blindness is certainly not restricted to mere political bystanders. As I pointed out in a lengthy previous article, both President George W. Bush and Sen. John Kerry joined together in publicly endorsing an “Open Borders” employment proposal very similar to the one we debated during one of their 2004 Presidential Debates. Their complete ideological agreement presumably reflected the near-unanimous consensus of all the wealthy donors they had encountered during their endless series of political fundraisers.

When a country’s ruling elites have become totally insular in their outlook and unwilling to examine the implications their policies would have for the bulk of their citizenry, the future seems rather bleak.

If the conclusions I drew from most of the debate were these rather depressing ones, there was one totally unexpected note of sharp encouragement.

As many may know, the main economic proposal I have advocated over the last few years has been a sharp rise in the national minimum wage, perhaps to $12.00 per hour, a policy whose consequences would extend far across the American social landscape.

An immediate jump of thirty or forty percent in the take-home pay of America’s working-poor would greatly alleviate their financial desperation. The service sector that mostly employs them is almost completely insulated from foreign competition, so job-loss would be probably be minimal, except in a few narrow categories such as the low-wage immigrant sweatshop industry, whose disappearance would be no great loss in a wealthy country. Employers could meet most of these extra costs by a small, one-time rise in prices and also by somewhat reducing their corporate profits, which are currently at record levels.

Meanwhile, our government would save tens of billions of dollars in reduced spending on Food Stamps, housing benefits, the EITC, and other social welfare programs aimed at subsidizing the working-poor, greatly reducing the pernicious tendency of corporations to maximize their profits by transferring many of the economic costs of their low-wage workers to the general taxpayer. And shifting an extra one hundred and fifty billion dollars of annual income into the paychecks of households that spend every dollar they earn would constitute an enormous and permanent economic stimulus program, but one funded entirely by the private sector.

Although such an idea seems likely to produce huge benefit across American society, it has been fiercely resisted by many of the influential theorists who dominate our academic departments and have their ears of our elites. Indeed, the conventional wisdom widely accepted by the latter is exemplified by an Intelligence Squared debate from earlier this year debating whether all existing minimum wage laws should be completely eliminated.

Given this ideological landscape, I was very pleasantly surprised when one of my debate opponents, Prof. Vivek Wadha, a high-profile technologist and free market academic, repeatedly endorsed my suggested minimum wage hike as a crucial component of any proposal for allowing much larger numbers of foreign workers to seek work here. He reasonably argued that measures along those lines would be necessary to protect the American middle class against an economic race to the bottom produced by competition with massive numbers of foreign workers. I readily concurred that a much higher minimum wage would go a long way to reducing the ill effects of heavy immigration levels, and at times the moderator had to intervene to steer the discussion back to the stated topic of the debate.

It is greatly encouraging to see a prominent figure of the free market economic right place logic and common sense above ideological dogma, and such indications are beginning to raise my hopes that a minimum wage hike so widely popular and beneficial might actually be enacted, notwithstanding America’s totally gridlocked and dysfunctional political system.

Admittedly, such ideas remain total anathema to many of our economic theorists. Indeed, Wadha’s debate partner, Bryan Caplan of George Mason University, a far more doctrinaire libertarian economist, took very strong exception to his erstwhile ally’s ideological heresy. Prof. Caplan instead argued that the unlimited influx of foreign workers should be coupled with the elimination of all current minimum wage laws and other employment restrictions, a combination of government policies whose social consequences seem very doubtful to me.

It is hard to imagine a more favorable venue for an “Open Borders” employment debate than the Upper West Side of Manhattan and an audience of elite New Yorkers, and the striking defeat of the proposal demonstrates how easily such fatal flaws may be understood once both sides of the issue are presented. That the proposal began with such strong support proves that our elite media have acted as unthinking cheerleaders for such extreme ideas, while refusing to disclose their drawbacks.

The “Open Borders” defeat—and the sharp disagreements of the two proponents about the minimum wage—inevitably led to some recriminations, which were expressed in several lengthy discussions on various free market or immigration blogsites. Meanwhile, anti-immigration bloggers crowed at the victory.

And by purest coincidence, I’ll be in DC this Tuesday to speak at an economic symposium regarding my Minimum Wage proposal, so perhaps the political momentum on that issue will continue to grow in the weeks ahead.

A $12 Minimum Wage: Transforming Policy Idea into Political Reality

The Unz Review • December 4, 2013 • 2,500 Words

As most readers have no doubt already heard, early last week I filed the text of an initiative that would raise California’s minimum wage to $12.00 per hour, a figure far higher than that of any state or city in America. The heavy resulting coverage in The New York Times and numerous other major media outlets demonstrates the timeliness and public resonance of the issue, which taken to a national level should boost the incomes of America’s lower-wage workers by well over $150 billion each year, a very sizeable amount.

The idea was hardly a new one to me, given that I’d first proposed it in a 12,000 word cover story published during late summer 2011 and subsequently advocated it in a long series of articles and columns, notably including a major 2012 paper published by The New America Foundation.  In February of this year, I’d spoken about the idea at an Aspen Institute panel in DC, and more recently it had repeatedly come up during a televised late October Intelligence Squared debate in NYC while I’d made a presentation advocating a $12 minimum wage two weeks afterward at a DC economics conference organized by Economists for Peace and Security.

But who’d paid attention to all my writings and speeches over the last couple of years? Almost nobody.

Well, that’s not entirely correct. Quite a number of prominent policy experts, opinion journalists, and political activists had been intrigued by my unorthodox arguments, leading to those aforementioned speaking engagements. Economist James Galbraith and the late Alex Cockburn had extensively discussed my lengthy original article, as had blogger Steve Sailer, and National Review’s Reihan Salam actually published a five-part series analyzing my views.  A few months ago, progressive activist T.A. Frank writing in the New Republic had explicitly endorsed the immigration aspects of my proposed $12 per hour minimum wage hike, and—much more remarkably—so had Andrew Stuttaford of National Review. Two weeks ago a Michael Tomasky column in The Daily Beast had explored my counter-intuitive argument that a larger minimum wage hike would actually have much greater political viability than the $9.00 figure advocated by President Obama.

However, all these discussions were restricted to the tiny gilded ghetto of opinion journalism and policy presentations, never reaching the news headlines providing most normal Americans with their knowledge of the world between their devouring focus on the latest antics of the Kardashians and Miley Cyrus. Frankly, I doubt if more than one American in ten thousand had ever encountered my proposal of a $12 minimum wage.

Then, just over a week ago I printed out a one-page sheet of paper with a single operative sentence and took a pleasant Amtrak train ride to the Sacramento office of the California Attorney General, dropping it off there together with my $200 filing fee. And in the twenty-four hours surrounding that insignificant event, the political landscape of America suddenly changed, or at least the media reporting of it did.

Given the potential national importance of the issue and the man-bites-dog aspect of my conservative sponsorship of what was purportedly a liberal cause, I had hoped that The New York Times, our national newspaper of record, might be willing to cover the launch of my campaign.  But I’d never dreamed my filing of the measure would receive the coverage that it did, with the NYT sending around a photographer and giving the story fully half the square inches on its National News page.  Late Monday evening, my shocked friends began emailing me about what they’d suddenly noticed on the NYT homepage and one of them sent me the astonishing screenshot he’d taken. Coverage from numerous print, radio, and cable news outlets followed on Tuesday, notably including a sizable ABC News story and a long interview on the NPR-affiliated California Report.  All this had been produced by a one-page piece of paper with a single operative sentence plus a $200 filing fee.

Policy proposals in our country are endless in number and tremendously variable in quality. Elected officials and activists give speeches every day of the week promising this and that and the Moon and almost never delivering anything at all. This continual buzz of broken and impossible promises constitutes the background noise of the American political system and is therefore routinely ignored by almost everyone, certainly including the media. But when someone proposes a $15 billion annual hike in the incomes of the lower-wage workers in America’s largest state and people realize—Gee, it might actually happen!— that’s another situation entirely. One sentence, one piece of paper, and a $200 filing fee has generated at least a hundred times the total attention that I had previously received for the 30,000 words I’d published on this same subject over the last couple of years.

Strangely enough, I only very recently considered this obvious idea. I had spent the last decade almost totally out of the political arena, mostly involved in software projects, but prior to that I’d organized and run a long series of very high profile initiative campaigns, both in California and around the country, most of which won in huge landslides. Indeed, in 1999 my initiative success led the New Republic to put me on their cover with the headline “This Man Controls California,” a prideful high point that was naturally enough soon followed by the overwhelming defeat of Prop. 25, my Campaign Finance Reform initiative.

During those years I had quickly discovered that one of the most valuable aspects of a major initiative campaign was its role as a focal point for massive public discussion of a crucial issue. For example, my “English” campaigns of the late 1990s/early 2000s generated over 100 articles in The New York Times and over 500 front-page stories in other newspapers, probably producing many times more media scrutiny of the contentious bilingual education issue than had occurred across all of America during the previous thirty years combined.

And yet for the last couple of years I had never considered any of this. My focus had been entirely on the sound policy reasons for raising the federal minimum wage to $12, but I had freely admitted to my friends that the likelihood of anything ever actually happening in our dysfunctional and log-jammed political system was roughly nil. I crafted all sorts of effective arguments, suggested innovative ideological strategies, and gathered important demographic research data. I published all this material in a long series of pieces, which perhaps a few dozen people here and there read and appreciated, and naturally nothing came of it. Never once during this period did I consider doing an initiative on the subject.

The ironies represented by these years of total blindness almost stagger the imagination. In my original 2011 article I had explicitly cited the example of Hilda Solis’s 1996 California Minimum Wage initiative—which won in a huge landslide—as proof of just how popular such an issue would be politically. Late last year, I similarly told all my East Coast friends about the amazing success of that handful of San Jose State college students who qualified and passed a $10 minimum wage hike in one of America’s largest cities against the opposition of nearly the entire local political establishment. My writings regularly mentioned successful initiatives to raise the minimum wage and I continued to pride myself as having spent years as America’s “initiative guy” but my faltering brain cells never once connected these two items. None of us are ever as smart or as insightful as we sometimes pretend to be.

Fortunately, a brief opening eventually appeared in the heavy layers of fog beclouding my mind, and one morning I glanced up from my coffee and newspapers and thought “Wow!” Even more fortunately, the idea came to me while there was still reasonable time to qualify an initiative for the November 2014 ballot, which I am now doing.

One standard roadblock in the preparation of a successful initiative is the lengthy legal drafting process, usually involving many weeks of careful scrutiny to ensure that the measure’s complex language possesses both the political and legal viabilities necessary for survival. This was certainly the case with the many dozens of detailed paragraphs contained in my 1998 “English” initiative. But raising the California minimum wage requires merely a single sentence, an amendment of the existing statute with higher figures substituted.  An initiative of such a highly unusual type allows the operation of a total stealth campaign organized to avoid all media leaks,  the sort of campaign that provides considerable advantages if successfully implemented.

So far, I’ve certainly been extremely pleased with the results, though much of this is clearly due to the general media landscape of the last couple of months, in which the plight of America’s low-wage workers has grown to become a regular headline story, intensifying as the Holiday Season grew near. Stories of Walmart workers being asked to donate food to other Walmart workers went viral even while I was sitting at my computer finalizing my initiative language and the political strategy behind it. Sometimes the wind happens to blow in exactly the right direction.

And how it has blown! According to Topsy, the NYT article breaking the story of my initiative effort generated a remarkable 707 Tweets, ranking in the Top 100 on the Internet. Then a couple of days later, a lengthy and related NYT story on the general plight of low-wage retail workers, which was clearly based on weeks of detailed reporting effort but also mentioned my own California campaign, scored an astonishing 1400 Tweets.

Unsurprisingly, the coverage my effort has received from the liberal media has mostly been very friendly and supportive, though sometimes expressing shock at the notion that a conservative could be backing such a supposedly liberal proposal: “Hell Freezes Over” was the title of a lengthy column in the progressive San Diego Free Press.  Columnists Michael Hiltzik of the Los Angeles Times and Jerry Large of the Seattle Times and Prof. Jeffrey Sommers in The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel have similarly been very pleasantly surprised to see their own views echoed by someone located across the ideological aisle, and numerous other liberal bloggers and pundits have had the same reaction. A certain Michael Pettengill writing on Prof. Mark Thoma’s blogsite was even more direct, wondering why progressives such as “Krugman and Thoma” never framed the economic issue as effectively as I had.

Indeed, a not-uncommon refrain from some disgruntled Democratic activists was been the perspective of Jon Walker writing on the liberal blogsite FireDogLake, who bemoaned the irony of a “lone conservative…pushing the Democratic establishment…to the left on this issue.” This angry reaction was surely reinforced by the initial public statements of a union spokesman in the original Times piece and elsewhere, who argued that the recently passed legislative statute raising the California minimum wage to $10 per hour by 2016 was more than adequate and criticized my own efforts aimed at a much larger figure as an unwelcome “distraction.” In fact, recent academic studies have suggested that California’s cost-of-living is as much as 30% above the national average, implying that even a $10 rate here is closer to our existing federal $7.25 figure, leaving our state with the highest poverty rate in America, and clearly demonstrating the total inadequacy of the California’s $8.00 current minimum wage.

Obviously, not everyone has supported my proposal. Reihan Salam, National Review’s chief policy analyst, quickly published a lengthy profile of my effort, quite respectful but also skeptical that all of my arguments were correct. Doctrinaire libertarian economics professor Bryan Caplan—my erstwhile opponent in the recent televised debate—strongly opposes all minimum wage laws and argued that raising the costs of low-wage service workers to $12 per hour would lead to a do-it-yourself economy, defeating the intended purpose; I tend to doubt that the resulting one percent rise in Walmart’s prices would actually produce such a massive consumer reaction. And Caplan’s close colleague New York Times Economics Columnist Tyler Cowen dismissed such local efforts to raise the minimum wage as “a classic instance of expressive voting at the expense of good economic policy,” leading one of his sharp-eyed commenters to very effectively quote my own past arguments back at him.

But dogmatic conservative or libertarian policy experts—eggheads—are one thing, and the sort of people who actually guide and influence the conservative base are another. So far I’ve been interviewed on three of the West Coast’s largest conservative-talk-radio stations and the responses have been extremely gratifying, with the hosts initially surprised that there could be any “conservative” case whatsoever for a major hike in the minimum wage, but quickly seeing the reasonableness of some of my arguments. As I’ve repeatedly pointed out in the past, our current low-wage economy allows companies to pay their own workers much less than a minimum cost of living, with the large gap being necessarily filled by government social welfare programs. I think it makes much more sense for businesses to pay their own workers rather than shifting the burden to the ordinary taxpayer, though obviously business lobbyists and business-funded thinktankers might disagree.

Another of my arguments about political strategy will also receive a thorough exploration. Over the last couple of years, I’ve often suggested that a much larger hike in the minimum wage has far greater inherent political viability than a smaller boost because its benefits extend far beyond the lowest-wage, overwhelmingly Democratic voters, instead reaching well into the socially-conservative Walmart base of the Republican Party, especially in the South, an argument that columnist Michael Tomasky recently considered. The situation on the ground in California may not be nearly so strong, but should still provide a preliminary test of my hypothesis.

In any event, I do believe that my $200 filing fee for my California Minimum Wage initiative was money well spent, sparking exactly the sort of national media discussion—a public dialogue on American wage policy—that I’d intended, and one that will probably continue on, with ever increasing intensity, until the November polls close on Election Day 2014.

A national rise in the minimum wage to $12 per hour would increase the income of American workers by well over $150 billion each year and—with the exception of the problem-plagued ObamaCare—possibly constitute the most significant domestic policy change since the late 1960s. In 2012, my late friend progressive journalist Alex Cockburn described it as “the most important issue in America today.” During the two-plus years I’ve been pressing this proposal, I always told people it would never happen in a million years.  Now I’m not so sure.

As readers have noticed, this particular minimum wage column focuses almost exclusively on the history and politics of my current campaign, while mostly avoiding the policy issues behind it. I’ve already published around 30,000 words on the latter subject and will probably be publishing another 30,000 during the next twelve months, but his one time I thought I’d make a conscious exception.

And with luck, our campaign website at www.HigherWages.org will be up and running in serviceable fashion within another few days, providing copious background material on this entire topic.

Raise the Minimum Wage to $12 an Hour

The New York Times • December 5, 2013 • 600 Words

From Making Low Wages Livable – A Symposium  in The New York Times

Tens of millions of low-wage workers in the United States are trapped in lives of poverty. Many suggestions have been put forth to improve their difficult situation, ranging from new social welfare programs to enhanced adult education to greater unionization. But I think the easiest solution is also the simplest: just raise their wages.

The current federal minimum wage is $7.25 per hour and hiking it to $12 would solve many of our economic problems at a single stroke.

A $12 minimum wage is hardly extreme or ridiculous. At the 1968 height of our post-war economic prosperity, the American minimum wage was over$10.50 in current dollars, and setting the rate at $12 today would represent a real rise of merely 11 percent over a 45-year period, which seems reasonable since worker productivity has grown by over 115 percent during the same period. The minimum wage in France is almost $13 while Australian workers benefit from an hourly minimum wage of around $15, together withunemployment of just 5.7 percent.

Walmart is America’s largest private employer and 300,000 of its workers have average wages of just $8.75 per hour, forcing many of them to receive food stamps and other government welfare benefits to survive. But if a minimum wage hike boosted their pay to at least $12 per hour, Walmart could cover the costs by a one-time price rise of just 1.1 percent, and the average Walmart shopper would only pay an extra $12.50 per year. Meanwhile, a $12 minimum wage would increase the incomes of America’s lower-wage work force by a total of over $150 billion each year, shifting those huge sums from the pockets of the sort of people who don’t shop at Walmart to those who do. A minimum wage of $12 per hour would be very good for Walmart’s business.

And not just Walmart. America’s low-wage families tend to spend every dollar they earn, so a large minimum wage hike would constitute an enormous, permanent economic stimulus package, but one funded entirely by the private sector. Since wages would be rising nationwide, businesses could raise their prices to cover much or most of the added costs. Low-wage workers tend to be employed in the non-tradeable service sector, making their jobs relatively safe from foreign competition or automation. They’d keep their jobs, but their incomes would rise by 30 or 40 percent.

The impact on U.S. households would be enormous and bipartisan. Some 42 percent of American wage-workers would benefit from a $12 minimum wage and their average annual gain would be $5,000 per worker, $10,000 per couple, which is very serious money for a working-poor family. White Southerners are the base of today’s Republican Party, and 40 percent of them would gain, seeing their annual incomes rise by an average $4,500 per worker. If Rush Limbaugh — who earns over $70 million per year — denounced the proposal, they’d stop listening to him. Hispanics would gain the most, with 55 percent of their wage-workers getting a big raise and the benefits probably touching the vast majority of Latino families.

Ordinary taxpayers would be the other great beneficiaries, saving many tens of billions of dollars each year in payments for Food Stamps, the Earned Income Tax Credit, housing subsidies, and other social welfare programs. Businesses should pay their own employees rather than quietly shifting the burden to government programs and the American taxpayer. Conservatives and free-market supporters should endorse this simple idea.

The best way to help low-wage workers is to raise their wages.

Conservatives for More Welfare

The Unz Review • December 30, 2013 • 1,000 Words

As economic inequality and the plight of the working-poor have suddenly erupted as leading topics in the national debate, the proposed solution of a big minimum wage hike has evoked many varied reactions.

On the Democratic side, the responses have been pretty much what one might expect. In recent decades, liberals had shied away from focusing on the minimum wage as a central economic tool, fearful that there might be widespread job loss among the very workers who were the intended beneficiaries. Just a couple of years ago, prominent liberal pundits denounced proposals to hike the minimum wage hike as evidence of economic ignorance, and even such leading luminaries as Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz had been reluctant to embrace the idea.

But with new research indicating that job losses would be far less severe than previously believed, such positions have naturally evolved, and earlier this year both Krugman and Stiglitz endorsed a much higher minimum wage. Reassured by backers of such intellectual heft, rank-and-file liberals have eagerly signed on to the idea of helping low-wage workers simply by raising their wages.

The huge popularity of the issue certainly hasn’t hurt in this regard. In November a Gallup poll put popular support for a minimum wage hike at 76%, up five points from March and in December, a Reason Foundation poll reported very similar numbers. The Reason Foundation is a libertarian thinktank strongly opposed to minimum wage laws and most other government regulations and if they say that public support for a higher minimum wage is absolutely overwhelming, then it probably is.

Persuading Democrats to back a policy that benefits the underprivileged while also being popular enough to get them victories at the polls isn’t a difficult sell, and the entire Democratic Party apparatus has begun buying into a minimum wage hike as a winning issue for the 2014 elections, especially since it serves as an effective means of deflecting public attention away from the Obamacare debacle. More money for the poor and more votes for Democrats sounds awfully nice to political operatives on the left and the candidates they control, and the fact that the proposal might even make sense as public policy is an added bonus.

But the reaction to this unfolding political issue among conservatives and libertarians has been far more surprising and curious.

The most doctrinaire libertarians, notably Prof. Bryan Caplan of George Mason University, have held fast to their principles and denounced the very notion of a minimum wage as a violation of basic human liberty. If a desperately impoverished Congolese is willing to come to America and work for a dollar a day, then that is his fundamental moral right, at least if he is willing to forego any access to medical care or other normal social benefits as part of the deal.

Such a belief system seems as logical and internally self-consistent as it is unpopular with almost the entire American public.

Among less ideologically rigid conservatives and free market advocates, the general reaction has been far more ironic, especially given the public perception of conservative core-principles. One of their leading figures, Harvard economist and former Reagan Advisor Martin Feldstein recently took to the editorial pages of The Wall Street Journal to explicitly call for the creation of a new economic framework that would fully integrate welfare payments and work into a seamless system of government support aimed at ensuring a basic standard of living for everyone in the country.

In effect, he was calling for a huge expansion of the existing Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), under which the federal government renders impoverished workers slightly less impoverished by sending them annual checks, with the amounts determined by applying their individual household situation to a hideously complex income formula. The EITC is already America’s largest cash welfare program in slight disguise, though whether the actual beneficiaries are the low-wage workers who receive the government checks or the low-wage businesses who employ them may be subject to dispute. Support for an expanded EITC system has become the rallying cry for conservatives threatened by talk of hiking the minimum wage.

Indeed, Feldstein argued that once the eligibility of various welfare programs were widened, the minimum wage could reasonably be cut, allowing American workers to take jobs paying just four, five or six dollars per hour, with the ordinary taxpayer making up the difference. The logical endpoint to such proposals would be for businesses to pay their workers absolutely nothing at all, with all employee living expenses and spending money coming from governmental anti-poverty programs. I suspect this arrangement would prove quite congenial to the corporate interests that fund most conservative thinktanks. And unemployment would certainly decline if businesses don’t have to actually pay anything to the workers they chose to hire.

Where would they find the money for these hugely expanded government welfare programs? Well, unless Feldstein and his conservative allies are quietly planning to cut many tens of billions of additional dollars from the defense budget, the only plausible funding mechanism would be higher taxes, presumably on individuals rather than on corporations. Conservatives spent decades accusing liberals of plotting to raise taxes in order to expand welfare, and won many political victories as a result. But it appears that today’s Washington conservatives have decided that their erstwhile opponents had actually been right all along.

One of the more ironic aspects of this situation is that a large hike in the federal minimum wage would be guaranteed to instantly transform many millions of current tax-recipients into net tax-payers, surely reducing Mitt Romney’s notorious “47 percent” by at least ten or fifteen points. But altering the national political landscape into one far less hostile to future Republican candidates is clearly the last thing desired by today’s GOP.

Hence the political rallying cry of America’s conservative Republican leadership: “Higher Welfare Payments for American Workers.” Sounds like a sure-fire winner to me.

How California Can Raise All Boats

Lifting Our State Above Mississippi and Alabama

The Los Angeles Times • January 5, 2014 • 900 Words

California is home to both Silicon Valley and Hollywood, two of the world’s greatest wealth-producing engines, and much of the state enjoys tremendous affluence. By some estimates, my own town of Palo Alto has the world’s highest per capita concentration of billionaires.

But California also has pockets of enormous poverty. The U.S. Census recently estimated that when both income and living costs are taken into account, 24% of Californians live in poverty, the highest poverty rate of any state. Using similar methods, Stanford University and the Public Policy Institute of California have concluded that Los Angeles County has California’s highest poverty rate, at 27%.

Such extreme contrasts of wealth and poverty are not only morally troubling; they might also eventually lead to the sort of social conflict and political instability that could destroy the state.

A few months ago, the Legislature passed a minimum-wage hike that will raise the rate to $10 an hour by 2016. That’s commendable, but it’s not enough. In 1968, at the height of California’s postwar prosperity, the minimum wage was the equivalent of more than $10.50 in today’s dollars, and worker productivity has doubled since then.

MIT’s Living Wage Project has estimated that an adult in California today must earn one-third more to achieve the same living standard as someone in Mississippi or Alabama. Given these realities, even a boost to $10 an hour will barely raise the incomes of minimum-wage workers in California to the level of their counterparts in the poorest parts of the Deep South. California can do better than Mississippi.

That’s why I’m working to place the “Higher Wages for California Workers” initiative on the November 2014 ballot, a proposal to raise the state’s minimum wage to $12 an hour.

This isn’t an outrageous figure. Many other developed countries around the world, including France and Canada, have national minimum wages far above America’s, and Australians enjoy a minimum wage of about $16 an hour, along with 5.8% unemployment.

A $12 minimum wage would boost the incomes of one-third of California’s wage earners, with the average increase being in the $5,000 range for a single full-time worker, or $10,000 for a couple. These dollar amounts are large enough to lift millions of working families out of poverty.

The primary argument against a higher minimum wage is the risk of substantial job loss in the state, but this seems wildly exaggerated. The vast majority of California’s low-wage workers are employed in the service sector or in agriculture, which means their jobs can’t be sent offshore. And most service jobs also involve the sort of direct personal contact that is very costly and difficult to automate.

Californians don’t have to look far to see what raising the minimum wage will and won’t do. In 1996, California voters overwhelmingly passed Proposition 210, raising the state minimum wage 35%. Critics at the time warned that unemployment would skyrocket and the state’s economy would be devastated. Instead, California unemployment dropped from 7.3% to 4.9% during the four years that followed, and the economy boomed.

Another objection often leveled by critics of raising the minimum wage is that it would cause prices to rise. That’s true. But the consequences wouldn’t be disastrous. In the first place, businesses wouldn’t be threatened because their competitors would be facing the same situation. And most of the resulting price increases would be insignificant.

A study by UC Berkeley’s Labor Research Center found that Wal-Mart, the nation’s largest low-wage employer, could cover the cost of raising wages to a minimum of $12 an hour by raising prices just 1.1%. For the average Wal-Mart shopper, that would mean paying an extra $12.50 a year. McDonald’s could also cover the expense of paying its employees a minimum of $12 an hour by raising prices slightly. The cost of a cheeseburger, for example, would go up by less than a dime.

Mandating a $12 hourly wage for farmworkers would also be inexpensive, with the consumer prices of U.S.-grown agricultural products rising less than 2%.

All of these price increases would be one-time events, eliminating any risk of triggering an inflationary spiral. Affluent Californians would probably not notice the difference, while the 20% or 30% wage gains for most low-income families would allow them to easily cover these small price hikes.

A $12 minimum wage would increase the incomes of working-class Californians by more than $15 billion a year. And because the increased wages would go to households that tend to spend every dollar they earn, the proposal would represent a large and ongoing economic stimulus package, helping to revive the consumer spending that drives the economy, but with the funding coming entirely from the private sector.

Taxpayers would also be huge beneficiaries of this policy. Poor California households currently receive more than $35 billion annually in social welfare spending, and almost two-thirds of that goes to working poor families. Lifting these working families out of poverty would sharply reduce their eligibility for such programs, saving American taxpayers billions of dollars each year.

The current system provides huge hidden subsidies for low-wage businesses, allowing them to transfer much of the ordinary living expenses of their struggling employees to the government and the taxpayer. A decent minimum wage would force these businesses to stand on their own two feet and pay the costs of their own workers.

It’s a simple idea, one that should be endorsed by all principled conservatives and free-market advocates.

Rightwingers for Higher Wages

The Unz Review • January 9, 2014 • 1,800 Words

In my last column I had noted that the national debate over poverty and inequality had drawn a peculiar response from mainstream conservatives. Whereas liberals advocated making work pay by raising the minimum wage, their conservative counterparts proposed raising welfare payments instead.

Sometimes this position was explicit, as when economist Martin Feldstein took to the pages of The Wall Street Journal to argue that American wages and welfare should be merged into a single, seamless system able to provide a decent living for everyone in our country. More often, conservative critics of raising the minimum wage have been far less candid, touting the benefits of the EITC, without admitting that it constitutes America’s largest cash-welfare system in thin disguise, whereby the government renders working-poor households somewhat less poor by sending them annual checks based on a complex formula.

The notion of individuals and businesses carrying their own weight seems just as alien to the sort of present-day Republicans whose perspectives are welcome within the confines of the elite media. For example, a long New York Times column by Prof. Gregory Mankiw, a former top economic advisor to President George W. Bush, suggested that it was unfair and morally wrong to expect businesses to cover the costs of their own employees since the responsibility was obviously that of our society as a whole. Whereas Hillary Clinton famously declared that “It Takes a Village to Raise a Child,” the sort of thinkers who will probably be advising her Republican opponent in 2016 are suggesting that “It Takes an Entire Country to Run a Business” (or at least to pay the business’s employees). Back when I was younger, I think this notion was called “Communism,” but these days it’s considered Mainstream Republicanism.

Under Ronald Reagan, the Republican Party praised the benefits of working for wages and denounced collecting welfare checks, but his lobbyist-ridden epigones have completely reversed that popular message, then wondered why their popularity has sharply declined.

Some of the claims made by the more fervent opponents of the minimum wage are simply bizarre.  On FoxNews, economist Art Laffer suggested that minimum wage laws were a direct attack against black American workers and urged that they be abolished.  Indeed, doctrinaire libertarians have even suggested that minimum wage laws are inherently “racist” and morally repugnant regardless of their actual economic impact.  The vast majority of ordinary Americans might regard these views as bordering on insanity, but they represent a substantial and highly influential element within today’s Republican Party.

Still, there yet remain a few hardcore Reaganites around, who have not yet received the memo that what’s good for low-wage business lobbyists is good for America, and one of them is longtime conservative icon Phyllis Schlafly, who at age 89 is just a bit too old to be persuaded that advocating higher welfare payments is what all good conservatives should be doing. In a forceful column entitled “Minimum Wage and Welfare: The Tradeoff,” the redoubtable Mrs.—never Ms.—Schlafly points out that a big hike in the minimum wage would automatically produce large cuts in existing social welfare programs and hence save ordinary taxpayers huge sums of money. Making work pay while cutting welfare and taxes seems like a pretty effective campaign theme to me, and perhaps Schlafly should consider entering the presidential primaries, naturally on the Democratic side.

But once we move beyond those Republican appartchicks who are endlessly wined-and-dined by business lobbyists or have made their entire careers within the lavishly funded bubble of Conservativism, Inc., the ideological landscape changes quite drastically, along with attitudes towards the minimum wage. After all, when Feldstein and Mankiw argue that “society” should cover the costs of workers rather than the businesses that employ them, independent-minded conservatives know perfectly well who will be taxed to pay for Mr. Society’s generous largesse.

These days the Internet is brimming with neo-reactionary opinionators, whose bitter hatred for establishment conservatives pours forth in every sentence. Being largely unfunded, they mince few words in providing their hardcore views on a whole range of issues, often laced with a sharp racialist tinge, thereby expressing perspectives that would leave a Reagan or a Schlafly looking like a George McGovern. And over the last couple of years this rightwing blogger community has begun expressing strong support—enthusiasm actually—for my proposal of a very large hike in the minimum wage, just as I had suggested they would in my long 2011 article. Rather than being an incongruity, “Rightwingers for Higher Wages” seems a powerful ideological trend.

Almost from the moment in 2011 that I first outlined the widespread benefits of a $12 minimum wage, the proposal was taken up and treated in very respectful, even favorable, fashion by many of the writers grouped around VDare.com, the hardcore anti-immigrationist website, with Steve Sailer writing several columns discussing the idea, and John Derbyshire, James Fulford, and Peter Brimelow also weighing in. But many years of FoxNews attacks on the minimum wage had taken a toll with rank-and-file rightwingers, and the hundreds of anonymous commentators on the resulting discussion threads were overwhelmingly hostile to this notion of a minimum wage hike. Radical changes in worldview require a little time to simmer.

Two years provides plenty of such simmering time and when the media coverage of my $12 per hour California minimum wage initiative moved the topic back to the forefront of the rightwing blogosphere a few weeks ago, the discussion was transformed. Once again, Steve Sailer ran a long blog post on the topic, reprinting my New York Times column, and a follow-up but this time the reaction of his commenters seemed overwhelmingly favorable rather than hostile.

Rightwing libertarian Randall Parker ran a piece on the crucial importance of a big hike in the minimum wage, saying that although he’d much prefer a $15 figure, $12 was still an important step in the right direction. Anthropologist Peter Frost devoted several paragraphs of his year-end science round-up to the minimum wage issue, strongly endorsing a higher figure and accusing conservative opponents of being shills for big business. HalfSigma, now rechristened “Lion of the Blogosphere,” published a couple of posts as well, taking a similar position, as did Audacious Epigone.

Posts by rightwing bloggers generate long threads of angry rightwing commentary, and in all these cases a strong majority of that commentary endorsed the big minimum wage hike, with the discordant voices sometimes being ridiculed as gullible idiots or told to “go back to RedState.com.” One of the highly insulting terms that hardcore rightwingers apply to mainstream conservatives is “Fox-tards” and these days opposing a $12 minimum wage may get you branded with that sort of epithet.

The rightwingers in question have hardly altered their strident ideological framework nor their low opinion of America’s “underprivileged” and I urge liberals of tender sentiments to avoid reading the commentary in question lest their own support for a higher minimum wage be severely shaken. But it seems to me that so long as activists of the Left and the Right can agree on implementing exactly the same policy proposal, even if for different and possibly opposite motives, a useful alliance might exist. As I’ve suggested in the past, if a Jeff Sessions in the Senate were to propose a $12 minimum wage—for whatever reasons— that would certainly provide a great deal of ideological cover for his liberal colleagues to do the same.

Meanwhile, some of the more mainstream conservative critics of a minimum wage hike are certainly living up to their “Fox-tard” reputation. For example, National Review’s Jim Geraghty just ran a column ridiculing the impact of a $10.10 minimum wage by pointing out that only 1.1% of American workers earn the current minimum wage of $7.25. He argued that since such a tiny number of workers likely to benefit from the proposed change, Obama and the Democrats were merely engaging in populist demagoguery on the issue, and his absurdly innumerate reasoning was Tweeted out to a vast audience of fellow “Fox-tards,” probably numbering a million or more.  As it happens, almost 31% of American wage-earners would get a raise under a $10.10 minimum wage, and 31% is considerably larger than 1.1% but statistics do tend to confuse some people.

The careless words or careless thinking of Republicans do sometimes get them into trouble, especially if they follow certain ideas to their logical conclusions.

After all, it is totally obvious that every argument currently advanced against the idea of raising the minimum wage is an equally strong argument for lowering it, but individuals who take that position quickly regret doing so. Just a few days ago, the media reported that a wealthy Republican financier running for governor of Illinois had told an audience that his state needed to cut its minimum wage to regain economic competitiveness, and that “pro-poverty” suggestion seems likely to swamp his candidacy,  notwithstanding his desperate retraction and even his newfound support for a federal $10 minimum wage.

Meanwhile, Democrats running on a higher minimum wage certainly seem to have the wind at their backs, finding an overwhelmingly positive public reaction in contrast to the endless complaints about Obamacare, with its 2,000 pages of totally incomprehensive regulations. My own Los Angeles Times column from a few days has been widely Tweeted out in Democratic Party circles, and I was pleased to see the interim Mayor of San Diego quoting some of my writings from last year in his own piece endorsing a minimum wage hike.

Just a couple of months ago my DC friends working on the minimum wage issue had lamented that their efforts had reached an impasse, with the leading Democrats in Congress having lost all interest in the subject and no longer willing to even return their phone calls. But just a few weeks later, the American political landscape has been transformed, and raising the minimum wage is now front and center on every Democrat’s radar screen.

Consider, for example, the worshipful profile of Ronan Farrow, son of Woody Allen and Mia Farrow, that ran in last Sunday’s New York Times Magazine. Under normal circumstances, 26-year-old graduate students lacking any major accomplishments are not suddenly offered their own daily MSNBC cable news shows to host, but celebrity-princelings follow a different career-track, and young Farrow is now reaching millions of Americans each day with his punditry on politics and public policy. According to the article, the first topic that came to his lips was the blatant unfairness of America’s social and economic inequality, and he argued that raising the federal minimum wage represents a crucial part of any solution. Perhaps I’m a bit too cynical, but I’d suspect that just a few months ago, the minimum wage and the notion of hiking it would never have entered his head, and the causes attracting his outrage would have been the need to combat Global Warming or the sad plight of America’s transgendered teens.

But for the moment at least, the minimum wage has become a very fashionable cause for America’s trendy elites, and I’m grateful for this fortuitous situation.

The Minimum Wage and Illegal Immigration

The Unz Review • January 22, 2014 • 1,600 Words

Although our school textbooks claim we live in a democracy or a representative republic, a more accurate formulation might label our polity a “mediocracy.” Our views and votes as well as those of our elected representatives are largely shaped by the ambient waves of media emanations that wash over us during so many of our waking moments. The media tells us what is real and what is nonsensical.

So if the best way to change the world is by reshaping its media coverage, I am pleased that our campaign to raise the minimum wage for American workers to a much more reasonable figure of $12 per hour is beginning to make some significant headway.

Even just a few years ago, most respectable thinkers, even those on the progressive Left, were quite doubtful about the benefits of a minimum wage hike, let alone a large one. When leading liberal economists Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz endorsed President Obama’s $9.00 per hour minimum wage proposal of twelve months ago, their public declaration was hailed as a dramatic breakthrough by longtime minimum wage advocates. A couple of years earlier, Krugman had been willing to oppose sharp cuts in the minimum wage or its abolition, but little more than that, while his late 1990s views on the subject were not all that different from those of most present-day Republicans, a fact now eagerly emphasized by his current opponents.

Indeed, many prominent liberals used to regard a minimum wage hike as ignorant populist nonsense, but today the tide is flowing  in exactly the opposite direction. Last week, the front-page headlines on the SF Chronicle described the surprising shift of conservative sentiment toward the pro-minimum wage direction, citing my own views and those of Phyllis Schlafly. No sooner had the story run than Bill O’Reilly—one of the biggest conservative voices in America—gave his blessing to the proposed Democratic minimum wage hike, making that statement on his own top-rated FoxNews television show.

So during the past twelve months, public reversals on the minimum wage question have encompassed such names as Joseph Stiglitz, Paul Krugman, Phyllis Schlafly, and Bill O’Reilly.  How’s that for ideological bipartisanship?

Although the O’Reilly Declaration was considered absolutely stunning in mainstream media circles, I strongly suspect that its origins lay in an article that ran a few days earlier in The Daily Caller, one of the most widely read and influential mainstream conservative publications in America. Prominent media figures such as O’Reilly tend to rely upon their research staffs to help formulate and guide their policy positions, and The Caller is high up on the reading lists of those latter individuals. When Neil Munro, The Caller’s White House Correspondent, penned a piece provocatively entitled “$12 an Hour is Conservative Rocket Fuel, Says Ron Unz,” they surely took notice. Indeed, the article constituted a 2,500 word nuclear strike against the entrenched Republican Establishment on that issue, and O’Reilly may merely be the first of many prominent conservatives swayed by that powerful piece of expository journalism, aimed with pitch-perfect effectiveness at its strongly conservative audience.

With President Obama and the Democratic Party having declared their plans to make raising the minimum wage one of their central political themes for the 2014 campaign, liberal media outlets hardly need to convince their troops to support the cause, though rounding up 75 prominent economists, including seven Nobel Laureates, helps give it an academic stamp-of-approval. But in such liberal and mainstream media circles, there exists quite a bit of curiosity regarding my own $12 per hour campaign in California, given that my figure is comfortably higher than that proposed by either state or national Democrats. Slate, oldest of all Internet webzines and these days owned by the Washington Post, filled that void with a very thoughtful discussion of the 2011 origins of my minimum wage effort.  Slate and The Caller together bracket much of the ideological spectrum in the world of Washington politics, and to the extent that they both seem strongly sympathetic to a big minimum wage hike, the likelihood of it actually happening, even on the federal level, is greatly increased.

One additional benefit of the Caller and Slate pieces was they each explored the origins of my own involvement in the minimum wage issue and correctly found it in the contentious national debate over American immigration policy, a topic in which I have been deeply involved for nearly a quarter century.  I had previously paid relatively little attention to economic issues, and although the general economic case for a $12 minimum wage now seems very strong to me, that was not what originally drew me to the issue.

Indeed, as Slate’s David Weigel correctly notes, I “buried the lede” in my original 2011 article, devoting almost 9000 words to a detailed analysis of the political and economic implications of our immigration policy before using the last 3000 words to propose a $12 minimum wage as the surprising solution to the dilemma. Fortunately, a number of other intellectuals and journalists, notably economist James Galbraith and the late Alexander Cockburn, extracted that crucial nugget from my longer work and begin promoting it within left-liberal policy circles, whence the ideas eventually attracted some Democratic interest in Congress. Later, New America Foundation co-founder Michael Lind solicited me to write a narrowly focused minimum wage paper, published as part of his economic policy project, which received much wider attention and soon brought me into contact with Ralph Nader’s efforts in DC.

But the immigration aspects of my proposal were hardly forgotten, and indeed last March I published a Salon piece whose original title was the descriptive “No Immigration Amnesty Without a Minimum Wage Hike.”  A few months afterward, progressive T.A. Frank, a Los Angeles based champion of the working-poor, published a lengthy article in The New Republic endorsing my suggestion, and remarkably enough, conservative financial expert Andrew Stuttaford quickly took to National Review to do the same.

In late October, I debated Prof. Vivek Wadha, a leading free market advocate on the subject of whether to allow totally “Open Borders” in labor, and I was very pleasantly surprised when he repeatedly emphasized my $12 minimum wage proposal as a very necessary component to any loosening of immigration restrictions.

No sooner had I launched my initiative effort, than economist Bruce Bartlett highlighted the immigration aspects of my initiative proposal for the New York Times and reminded readers that several years earlier former Democratic presidential nominee Michael Dukakis had similarly proposed a large hike in the minimum wage as the logical solution to our immigration problems.

The reason a much higher minimum wage would drastically reduce illegal immigration is obvious and simple to state. The overwhelming majority of illegal immigrants come to America for jobs and just as business lobbyists endlessly claim, they are hired “because they take the jobs that Americans just won’t do.” But the reason Americans won’t do those jobs is because the wages are too low. Raise the wages to a more liveable figure of $12 per hour or higher and millions of Americans would eagerly fill the positions, allowing employers to comply with immigration requirements and avoid risking government penalties.

Given the tremendous emotionality of the immigration issue among many conservatives, I strongly suspect that this immigration argument has been a major driving force behind the new minimum wage positions now taken by Schlafly and O’Reilly, and would be the crucial lever that eventually persuades substantial numbers of other hardcore conservative Republicans to take the same position, perhaps under pressure from their vociferous rightwing base.

What conservative Republicans support, some knee-jerk liberal Democrats reflexively oppose, and former South Bay union leader Amy Dean penned a piece for Al Jazeera harshly critical of my immigration views and therefore skeptical of my minimum wage proposal. Still, considering that as early as 1994 I was a top featured speaker at Juan Jose Guttierez’s historic 70,000-strong Los Angeles rally against Prop. 187, the largest political protest in California history to that date, I’m just not sure that my “anti-immigrant” credentials are nearly as strong as Ms. Dean believes them to be.

Meanwhile, our own campaign moves forward, attracting considerable national media coverage, perhaps because of the man-bites-dog aspects of a conservative Republican supporting a higher minimum wage figure than that advocated by the liberal Democrats in Congress. Just a few days ago I was interviewed for a segment on NPR’s Weekend Edition following an earlier appearance on MSNBC.  A lengthy Associated Press feature, mostly prepared in late December, was also released around the same time, running in dozens or hundreds of media outlets around the country. Utah’s leading newspaper ran a major story on the effort, and I’ve been interviewed on a number of national and local radio shows.

Ironically enough, with the notable exception of the San Francisco Chronicle, California’s major newspapers and political columnists have mostly ignored the entire campaign, perhaps because none of our state’s prominent political consultants had been retained to run it. But that tendency to ignore anything not closely tied to generating lucrative fees and commissions for our huge political-industrial complex may be starting to change, with Timm Herdt, a respected Sacramento Bureau Chief, recently publishing a fine column on the campaign, a column that appeared in newspapers up and down the state.

So onwards and upwards and perhaps in less than ten months every couple in California holding full-time jobs will be set to have a minimum household income of $50,000 per year.

Raising the Minimum Wage Isn’t an "Anti-Immigrant" Idea

The Unz Review • February 2, 2014 • 1,600 Words

Simple ideas buoyed by a tidal wave of popular sentiment are difficult to oppose, and subterfuge is one of the favored methods.

National support for raising the minimum wage runs between 70% and 75% in most polls, with close to 90% of Democrats backing the idea. Meanwhile, our initiative to raise the minimum wage in overwhelmingly Democratic California contains just a single operative sentence, providing no target for extraneous political attacks. As a result, some of the most fervent critics of raising the minimum wage been forced to rely on extremely specious arguments.

Doctrinaire libertarians have always opposed minimum wage laws on ideological grounds, and I discovered the extreme nature of their beliefs in late October when I participated in an Intelligence Squared debate, held in New York City and broadcast nationally. The topic was whether America should adopt an “Open Borders” policy and allow anyone to take a job anywhere.

One of my opponents was Bryan Caplan, an economics professor at George Mason University and an adjunct scholar on immigration issues at the Cato Institute. He attacked immigration controls, minimum wage laws, and other restrictions on economic liberty with religious zeal, denouncing such policies as no better than the vile “racism” and “anti-Semitism” that Americans so universally condemn. In his view, if any individual anywhere in the world wanted to come to America and seek employment for a dollar a day, that should be his absolute moral right, so long as he waived any access to medical care or other social welfare benefits as part of the agreement.

An America in which many millions of workers live in hovels and die in the streets if they accidentally injure themselves did not seem desirable to me and the New York City audience overwhelmingly agreed, favoring our position with the widest swing ever recorded in that debate series. Meanwhile, Prof. Vivek Wadha, Caplan’s own debate partner, repeatedly endorsed the idea of raising the minimum wage to $12 per hour, a position that Caplan considered a horrifying betrayal of all free market principles.

With my California minimum wage initiative now getting public attention, I was hardly surprised that I recently drew fire from Alex Nowrasteh, one of Caplan’s closest collaborators. Nowrasteh had studied economics under Caplan at George Mason University and now works alongside him as an immigration policy analyst at Cato. Last Sunday he unleashed a blistering attack on me in the San Jose Mercury News, accusing me of being an “anti-immigrant” zealot and condemning the motives behind my proposed minimum wage hike as “despicable.”

Given that for the last twenty-five years I have been almost universally regarded as one of the most “pro-immigrant” figures in California politics, I found these charges totally bizarre. But they still warranted a rebuttal, and the Mercury News has now published my own response, provided below.

I was particularly intrigued by the supposed evidence that Nowrasteh provided to support his wild charges. Over the years, I have published some 200,000 words related to immigration and all my hundreds of articles and columns are readily available on my website in fully searchable form, surely providing him with a vast quantity of material from which to draw.

Apparently, he managed to find absolutely nothing in those reams of text that could be used against me, and instead was forced to utilize fraud. He took someone else’s words, put quote marks around them, and claimed that they were my own, citing them in his column as proof of my hostility toward immigrants. I believe this sort of behavior is considered a hanging offense in respectable opinion journalism, and I am pleased that he has now apologized to the Mercury News for his violations. I think this underscores the total absurdity of his charges.

Another recent piece, raising some of the same concerns but in a far more honest and responsible manner, was entitled “Capitalists for a Higher Minimum Wage” and ran in In These Times, a democratic-socialist publication. In sharp contrast with Nowrasteh, the author, Michelle Chen, is a sincere supporter of higher minimum wages, but being decidedly on the Left, was naturally suspicious why a “capitalist” would be advocating such a strongly “progressive” policy. I feel confident that once she more fully explores the corpus of my writings, she will see that although the two of us may disagree on a wide range of issues, my support for raising the minimum wage is based on exactly the reasons I have cited in all my writings on the topic over the last few years.

I also discussed many of those same reasons recently in a detailed interview with Steven Rosenfeld, published in AlterNet and also widely distributed across other Left websites.

The tendency to confuse practical realities with ideological absolutes is part of the reason there may exist disagreement over whether an individual should be considered “pro-immigration” or “anti-immigration,” and exactly the same confusion is found in debates on the minimum wage.

For example, many ignorant critics of raising the minimum wage to $10 or $12 per hour often raise the foolish argument “then why not raise it to $50 per hour?” The simple answer is that such a rate is too high and would have hugely negative economic consequences. A desperately thirsty individual might benefit from a glass or two of water, but if you poured ten gallons down his throat, he would surely die.

Similarly, doctrinaire libertarians such as Caplan (and perhaps Nowrasteh) might think it a wonderful thing if twenty million desperately poor foreigners moved to America next year and took jobs paying ten cents an hour. To them, support for such an idea is the definition of being “pro-immigration.” But by such extreme standards, almost everyone in America—including almost all immigrants themselves—fall into the “anti-immigration” camp. Debating social policies based on such ideological extremes is as absurd as it is widespread.

In any event, my new Mercury News piece sketching out the immigration aspects of my minimum wage position is provided below. I leave it to each individual reader to decide whether I should be considered “pro-immigrant” or “anti-immigrant.”

“Higher minimum wage would help immigrants, taxpayers” by Ron Unz

The San Jose Mercury News, Sunday, February 2, 2014

Millions of California immigrants work in low-wage service industries. They would be among the greatest beneficiaries of our ballot initiative to raise the state minimum wage to $12 per hour.

Latinos, many of whom come from a relatively recent immigrant background, would gain the most. The data shows that around half of all Latino wage-earners would get a pay hike, compared with one-third of non-Latinos. The average gain for a full-time Latino worker would be over $5,500 per year, a life-changing amount of money for a working-poor family.

Asian immigrants are more likely to be affluent, often employed at technology companies. But many Asians are also among the working-poor, and 400,000 low-wage Asian workers in California would directly benefit from raising our state’s minimum wage.

Almost a million blacks and non-Hispanic whites in California, both immigrant and native-born, would also get a wage hike, with their incomes rising an average of over $4,000 per year for a full-time worker.

The total economic gains for lower-wage California workers from all ethnic backgrounds would be around $15 billion per year.

Aside from benefiting working-poor families, a much higher minimum wage would help the rest of us by requiring businesses to cover the costs of their own employees rather than shifting the burden to the ordinary taxpayer.

Because some businesses in California pay their workers such low wages, the government is forced to make up the difference, spending over $35 billion each year on social welfare programs funded by everyone else. This is unfair.

Businesses should stand on their own two feet instead of relying upon billions of dollars in hidden government subsidies. All principled conservatives and free market advocates should support this simple idea. Raising the California minimum wage to $12 per hour would save American taxpayers many billions of dollars each year.

With such huge benefits of a much higher minimum wage, I was shocked to read the accusations of Alex Nowrasteh of the Cato Institute in last Sunday’s Mercury News. He claimed my initiative was actually an attack on immigrants and denounced my motives as “despicable.” (Editor’s note: See Nowrasteh’s letter above.)

The charges are absurd. Over the past 25 years I have published 200,000 words on immigration issues, all available on my website. The news media has published hundreds of articles correctly characterizing my views as strongly “pro-immigrant.”

In 1994 I was a top featured speaker at Juan Jose Gutierrez’s historic 70,000-strong Los Angeles rally against Gov. Pete Wilson’s Proposition 187, the largest pro-immigrant political protest in American history to that date. My views have not changed much since then.

The nugget of truth behind Nowrasteh’s calumny is that I have argued that a much higher minimum wage would reduce illegal immigration.

The overwhelming majority of illegal immigrants come for jobs, and they take the jobs that Americans won’t. But the reason Americans won’t take them is that the wages are too low, and the only people willing to work at poverty wages are often recent, desperate border-crossers.

If the minimum wage were $12 per hour, many Americans and legal immigrants would apply for those positions, reducing the pressure on businesses to hire the undocumented. Indeed, former Democratic Presidential Nominee Michael Dukakis suggested several years ago that the best solution to illegal immigration was a big hike in the minimum wage.

The Washington D.C. think tank that employs Nowrasteh has traditionally advocated the abolition of all minimum wage laws and receives considerable funding from various business groups.

I am an advocate for business but also believe businesses should pay their way and not burden taxpayers. They will reap benefits in the long run from raising workers out of poverty.

Higher Minimum Wage Would Help Immigrants, Taxpayers

The San Jose Mercury News • February 2, 2014 • 600 Words

Millions of California immigrants work in low-wage service industries. They would be among the greatest beneficiaries of our ballot initiative to raise the state minimum wage to $12 per hour.

Latinos, many of whom come from a relatively recent immigrant background, would gain the most. The data shows that around half of all Latino wage-earners would get a pay hike, compared with one-third of non-Latinos. The average gain for a full-time Latino worker would be over $5,500 per year, a life-changing amount of money for a working-poor family.

Asian immigrants are more likely to be affluent, often employed at technology companies. But many Asians are also among the working-poor, and 400,000 low-wage Asian workers in California would directly benefit from raising our state’s minimum wage.

Almost a million blacks and non-Hispanic whites in California, both immigrant and native-born, would also get a wage hike, with their incomes rising an average of over $4,000 per year for a full-time worker.

The total economic gains for lower-wage California workers from all ethnic backgrounds would be around $15 billion per year.

Aside from benefiting working-poor families, a much higher minimum wage would help the rest of us by requiring businesses to cover the costs of their own employees rather than shifting the burden to the ordinary taxpayer.

Because some businesses in California pay their workers such low wages, the government is forced to make up the difference, spending over $35 billion each year on social welfare programs funded by everyone else. This is unfair.

Businesses should stand on their own two feet instead of relying upon billions of dollars in hidden government subsidies. All principled conservatives and free market advocates should support this simple idea. Raising the California minimum wage to $12 per hour would save American taxpayers many billions of dollars each year.

With such huge benefits of a much higher minimum wage, I was shocked to read the accusations of Alex Nowrasteh of the Cato Institute in last Sunday’s Mercury News. He claimed my initiative was actually an attack on immigrants and denounced my motives as “despicable.” (Editor’s note: See Nowrasteh’s letter above.)

The charges are absurd. Over the past 25 years I have published 200,000 words on immigration issues, all available on my website. The news media has published hundreds of articles correctly characterizing my views as strongly “pro-immigrant.”

In 1994 I was a top featured speaker at Juan Jose Gutierrez’s historic 70,000-strong Los Angeles rally against Gov. Pete Wilson’s Proposition 187, the largest pro-immigrant political protest in American history to that date. My views have not changed much since then.

The nugget of truth behind Nowrasteh’s calumny is that I have argued that a much higher minimum wage would reduce illegal immigration.

The overwhelming majority of illegal immigrants come for jobs, and they take the jobs that Americans won’t. But the reason Americans won’t take them is that the wages are too low, and the only people willing to work at poverty wages are often recent, desperate border-crossers.

If the minimum wage were $12 per hour, many Americans and legal immigrants would apply for those positions, reducing the pressure on businesses to hire the undocumented. Indeed, former Democratic Presidential Nominee Michael Dukakis suggested several years ago that the best solution to illegal immigration was a big hike in the minimum wage.

The Washington D.C. think tank that employs Nowrasteh has traditionally advocated the abolition of all minimum wage laws and receives considerable funding from various business groups.

I am an advocate for business but also believe businesses should pay their way and not burden taxpayers. They will reap benefits in the long run from raising workers out of poverty.

The Conservative Case for a Higher Minimum Wage

Fox & Hounds Daily • February 3, 2014 • 1,200 Words

Over the last couple of months the minimum wage has moved into the political headlines, but most of the arguments for raising it have come from liberals.  That’s fine, but since I’m not a liberal, I’d rather focus on the conservative reasons for supporting a much higher minimum wage, which are just as compelling.

Cutting Social Welfare Spending and Reducing Hidden Government Subsidies

Each year the American government spends over $250 billion on social welfare programs for the working-poor, individuals who have jobs but can’t survive on their wages.  This funding represents a hidden government subsidy to low-wage businesses, allowing them to shift the burden of their low-wage employees over to the taxpayer.

A much higher minimum wage would force these businesses to stand on their own two feet and cover the costs of their own workers.  Once those workers were no longer so poor, they would automatically lose eligibility for many anti-poverty programs, saving the government huge amounts of money.  For example, establishing a $12 per hour minimum wage in California would save American taxpayers billions of dollars each year.

Increasing the value of work, cutting social welfare spending, eliminating hidden government subsidies, and saving taxpayer dollars have always been important goals of conservatives and free market advocates, and a higher minimum wage achieves these.

Boosting Consumer Spending and Economic Growth

There’s no such thing as a free lunch and if a higher minimum wage dramatically raises the incomes of millions of American workers and saves taxpayers many billions of dollars in social welfare costs, someone somewhere must be paying the bill.

The low-wage jobs impacted are generally in the non-tradeable service sector, so very few of them can be outsourced and they are very difficult and expensive to automate.  The workers would keep their jobs at much higher pay, while their employers would simply pass along most of the increased labor costs to their customers in the form of higher prices.  But the resulting price hikes would be so small that most consumers probably wouldn’t even notice them.

For example, Walmart is America’s largest low-wage employer, and Walmart could accomodate a $12 per hour minimum wage by a one-time price hike of just 1.1%, costing their typical shopper an extra $12.50 per year.  The cost of a McDonalds cheeseburger would increase by only a dime to cover the extra labor costs and the grocery prices of American-grown agricultural products would rise by less than 2%.  Across all goods and services, prices would increase by an average of less than one percent, one time.

Meanwhile, a $12 minimum wage would boost the incomes of low-wage households by around $150 billion per year, and those are the households that spend every dollar they earn.  Their additional dollars would go right back to Walmart, McDonalds, and all our other businesses, providing a huge fiscal stimulus funded entirely by the private sector.  Over the last few years, the consumer spending that drives our economy has lagged, preventing our economic recovery from really taking hold, and a big minimum wage hike would help solve that problem.

I think that raising the American minimum wage to $12 per hour would probably be one of the best things that ever happened to Walmart and many of our other large retailers.

Turning Tax Recipients into Tax Payers

During the 2012 presidential election, Republican Mitt Romney was vilified for pointing out that 47% of voters pay no income taxes and therefore aren’t attracted to the conservative message of making government more efficient and cutting taxes.  He had a point.  But a big minimum wage hike would go a long way toward solving that political problem by turning many millions of net tax recipients into net tax payers.

If the minimum wage were raised to $12 per hour, every full-time worker would be earning at least $25,000 per year, with $50,000 for a couple.  At those income levels, most workers would be paying taxes to the IRS while also losing their eligibility for many government programs.  Once such voters are sending checks to the government rather than receiving them, they would become much more receptive to the political themes of the GOP.

Reducing Illegal Immigration

According to the PewResearchCenter, there are around 11 million illegal immigrants in America and almost all of them came here for jobs.  Business lobbyists and many Republican politicians claim that nothing can be done about illegal immigration because “they take the jobs that Americans won’t.”

They’re right about that, but the reason Americans won’t take those jobs is that the wages are just too low.  Often the only workers willing to accept such poverty-level wages are recent border-crossers, desperate for work at any pay.  If the minimum wage were raised to $12 per hour, many Americans and legal immigrants would apply for those same jobs, reducing the pressure on businesses to violate our immigration laws by hiring workers who shouldn’t be here in the first place.  And once the magnetic lure of jobs disappeared, illegal immigration would be greatly reduced.

Valuing Work over Welfare

These days too many Establishment Republicans have suggested that the solution to America’s poverty problem is more welfare spending.  A few weeks ago former Reagan economic advisor Martin Feldstein took to the op-ed pages of the Wall Street Journal to argue that our government should merge wages and welfare into a single, seamless system aimed at eliminating poverty.  The favored solution of all these Republicans is a large increase in the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), which is just a welfare program, in which the government sends checks to poor families in order to make them somewhat less poor.

Meanwhile, most Democrats are supporting a much higher minimum wage, which would automatically cut EITC welfare spending.

I think America is at a sad point when the political heirs of Ronald Reagan believe the solution to our poverty problem is more welfare spending while the political heirs of the Great Society are supporting efforts to make work pay and to cut welfare.

Conservatives for a Higher Minimum Wage

For years I’ve joked with my friends that the conservative case for raising the minimum wage is so overwhelmingly strong that I’m worried liberals might eventually change their minds on the issue and begin advocating a cut in the minimum wage.

Over the last few weeks prominent conservatives such as Phyllis Schlafly and Bill O’Reilly have endorsed a much higher minimum wage and a leading economic writer at National Review did the same several months ago.  The Daily Caller, one of the most widely read conservative publications, recently ran a 2,500 word article highlighting all the important conservative reasons for supporting a minimum wage hike, and numerous rightwing pundits have been saying the same things on their websites for the last couple of years.  I’m very glad that more and more conservatives are now coming around to supporting the conservative side of this issue, joining liberals who are supporting a wage hike for all sorts of liberal reasons.

In the past, divisive partisan politics has done a great deal of damage to California, and we would all benefit from finding a political cause that could unite all Californians.  I hope that liberals and conservatives, Democrats and Republicans could come together in a bipartisan coalition to support raising our minimum wage to $12 per hour.

What's Good for America is Good for Wal-Mart, and Vice-Versa

Raising the Minimum Wage to $12 an Hour

Forbes • February 11, 2014 • 1,100 Words

During the 1950s peak of America’s post-war prosperity, Detroit was our wealthiest city, General Motors our biggest employer, and GM CEO “Engine Charlie” Wilson delivered the famously misquoted claim that “what was good for our country was good for General Motors, and vice-versa.”

Times have changed. These days retail giant Wal-Mart is our largest corporation, employing 1 percent of all American workers, but rather than being praised for its achievement is routinely vilified by political activists and the media. In its defense, the company has released studies claiming that its low price approach to consumer goods annually saves American shoppers vast sums of money, with much of those savings going to families of lowest income, and although specific figures have been disputed, the general point is conceded. But if Wal-Mart has been such a great business success and saves its customers at least ten or twenty billion dollars each year, why does it continue to attract such widespread hostility?

The main charge leveled against Wal-Mart is that its wages are too low, and critics have a point. Berkeley’s Labor Research Center has estimated that almost a million of Wal-Mart’s American workers earn less than $12 in hourly pay, with 300,000 averaging only $8.75. Surviving on such low incomes is difficult in America, and a few months ago a local store’s campaign to persuade Wal-Mart workers to donate food to other Wal-Mart workers became a national media scandal. Each year Wal-Mart’s struggling employees receive billions of dollars in government social welfare benefits, with the costs borne by the general taxpayer. Just as General Motors was the national symbol of America’s high-wage manufacturing economy, Wal-Mart has come to represent our low-wage service sector, which many Americans equate with the decline of our middle class society.

So why doesn’t Wal-Mart just improve its public image by raising its wages? Those same Berkeley researchers estimated that the company could boost its pay to a minimum of $12 per hour and cover the additional expense by a one-time price hike of just 1.1%, costing the average Wal-Mart shopper only an extra $12.50 per year. Surely if hundreds of thousands of the company’s lowest-wage employees were given immediate raises of one-third or more, they’d sing Wal-Mart’s praises, while performing their jobs with greater diligence and lower turn-over. One hundred years ago, Henry Ford doubled the wages of his assembly-line workers, providing them incomes high enough to buy the cars they themselves produced and helping to create the great American middle class of the twentieth century. Wal-Mart workers are also Wal-Mart shoppers, and many of the extra dollars they might receive would go right back to the company that paid them.

The difference is that while Ford’s industrial breakthroughs had given his company a near-monopoly on mass-market automobiles, Wal-Mart’s absolutely rock-bottom prices represent its chief selling point, allowing even a small markup to be easily exploited by the company’s able competitors. A general increase in wages and prices across the entire retail sector might greatly benefit companies and workers alike, but any attempt at organizing such collective corporate action would obviously run afoul of America’s strict anti-trust laws.

Fortunately, what some government restrictions prohibit, other government regulations might also enable. Consider the consequences of raising the minimum wage to $12 per hour.

Not only would Wal-Mart and its competitors suddenly be able to do what was best for both shareholders and employees, but the same large hike in wages and disposable income would also go to tens of millions of other low-wage American workers. McDonald’s might need to raise the price of its cheeseburgers by a dime and American-grown agricultural products would cost 2% more on the grocery shelves, but some $150 billion of extra income would flow each year to the sort of households that spend every dollar they earn, producing an enormous, ongoing economic stimulus program, a stimulus program funded entirely by the private sector. And a large share of those tens of billions in additional disposable income would go toward boosting the revenues at Wal-Mart, McDonald’s, and the other corporations that employ those same workers.

Corporate executives have sometimes recognized these facts over the years. In 2006, Wal-Mart CEO Lee Scott testified before Congress in favor of a large hike in the minimum wage, arguing that even then Wal-Mart shoppers were becoming too poor to shop at Wal-Mart.

In recent years, the growing impoverishment of non-wealthy Americans has become a major drag on the consumer spending that drives our economy, and a hefty rise in wages and disposable income would be a tonic for our continuing economic stagnation.

Economists have traditionally feared that a much higher minimum wage might cost workers their jobs, but today the vast majority of low-wage Americans are employed in the non-tradeable service sector, usually involving personal contact. These jobs are completely insulated from foreign competition and also very difficult and expensive to automate. Such workers would keep their jobs, but their incomes would rise by 30 or 40 percent, and most companies would cover the higher costs by a one-time price hike averaging much less than 1% across all our goods and services.

The American taxpayer would also be a huge beneficiary. Each year, over $250 billion in social welfare spending goes to working-poor households via government programs such as Food Stamps, EITC checks, and Medicaid. As millions of those workers became much less poor, they would automatically lose their eligibility for anti-poverty assistance, saving taxpayers many tens of billions of dollars each year. Government programs often function as very leaky buckets, with a substantial fraction of the money spent never reaching its supposed beneficiaries. But wages paid by an employer go straight to the recipient, except for the portion withheld in government taxes.

Transforming millions of net tax recipients into net tax payers would also have a salutary impact upon American politics. During the last election campaign, Republican Mitt Romney was vilified for pointing out that 47% of all Americans paid no income taxes and hence were deaf to his message of reducing wasteful government spending and cutting taxes. But a $12 minimum wage might shrink that non-taxpaying total by ten or fifteen percentage points, giving millions of additional voters a direct stake in demanding government efficiency.

Wal-Mart has become a national symbol of the poverty wages paid to millions of ordinary working Americans, who can only survive because of their taxpayer-funded social welfare subsidies. But Wal-Mart is actually a great American success story and those economic problems are merely a consequence of the mistaken government policies of the last forty years, which have allowed a collapse in the real value of the minimum wage despite the simultaneous doubling of American labor productivity.

Boosting the minimum wage to $12 would be good for Wal-Mart workers, Wal-Mart customers, and Wal-Mart shareholders. And what’s good for Wal-Mart is good for America.

Should We Cut the Minimum Wage?

The Unz Review • February 18, 2014 • 1,400 Words

The current debate raging over the role of the minimum wage is usually presented as being fought between two choices. On the one side are those who advocate a large wage hike and on the other are those who oppose any change. But in reality, there is a third alternative, namely cutting the minimum wage, and that is the more principled counterpart to the proposal for raising it.

The reasoning is simple. Given all the very serious problems of poverty and unemployment in our society, with the existing minimum wage playing a significant role, no one with a straight face can assert that our current system is ideal, the best of all possible worlds. So if everyone who places principles over political expediency admits that the existing minimum wage is part of the problem and set at a damaging level, the obvious question is whether it should be raised or lowered.

Certainly this is recognized by the leading ideological opponents of a minimum wage hike, who hail from the libertarian camp and have always questioned the existence of a minimum wage on both moral and practical grounds. Several months ago I debated George Mason economics professor Bryan Caplan, a leading figure in that camp, and he explicitly called for the abolition of the minimum wage. His views are totally representative of the hard-core libertarian movement that so dominates the economic thinking of conservative Republicans.

Although this “abolitionist” position is a little too stark and extreme for most participants in the debate, calls for solving our poverty problems by sharply cutting the minimum wage are fairly common in public policy circles. In December, Reagan economic advisor Martin Feldstein advocated reducing the minimum wage to $4 per hour in a major WSJ piece and just a few days ago former business executive Robert G. Strayton took to those same pages to endorse a similar solution to American poverty, proposing adoption of a $5 minimum wage.

Beliefs so widespread in policy circles inevitably leak into the political world as well, and there was a media flurry several months ago when it was discovered that Illinois Republican Gubernatorial candidate Bruce Rauner had suggested his state should reduce its local minimum wage to the federal floor of $7.25. I suspect these sentiments, whether voiced or unvoiced, are very widespread in conservative circles. To these individuals “everyone knows” that the minimum wage is a bad and damaging idea, although a highly popular one, and they are torn between standing up for their beliefs or taking the side of what they regard as economically-ignorant populism.

Today’s conservatives cannot be solely blamed for such a stance. Back in the late 1980s, The New York Times itself ran a lead editorial bearing the memorable title “The Proper Minimum Wage: $0.00.” In those days, educated and principled liberals and conservatives alike had converged on that position, and at least to the end of the 1990s such notable progressive economists as Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman were characterizing the minimum wage in terms that would fit very comfortably on the op-ed pages of today WSJ, while lesser liberal pundits were ridiculing the notion of a minimum wage hike as late as 2011.

Indeed, every single argument advanced against raising the minimum wage is an equally strong one for cutting it. If a higher minimum wage would eliminate jobs for teenagers and “minorities,” then surely a lower minimum wage would boost such employment. If raising the minimum wage would cause employers to use technology to replace their McDonalds servers, lowering the figure would certainly lead to the replacement of automation with low-skilled human labor. It cannot be denied that the very low cash wages of Victorian Era servants produced an enormous plenitude of such positions, and this is still the case today in much of the Third World, with even many lower middle class families regarding the presence of multiple domestics as a natural perquisite of their status. After all, if wages are cut in half, any business or individual employing low-paid workers can immediately fund two job openings for every previous one.

Why is this obvious counterpart to the “Raise the Wage” position so rarely found outside the confines of the WSJ Op-Ed page and similar ideological venues? The case of the aforementioned front-runner for the Illinois Republican gubernatorial nomination provides an illustrative explanation. Once it was discovered that on several occasions he had called for a minimum wage cut, the resulting media firestorm threatened the total collapse of his heavily-financed candidacy, and in sheer desperation he immediately threw his principles overboard and instead endorsed a large hike in the minimum wage.

So while committed supporters of raising the minimum wage are likely advocating an idea they sincerely espouse, the same cannot be said for most of their stand-pat opponents, whose position is almost entirely disingenuous. But a principled public debate on whether either to raise or to lower the minimum wage would be as one-sided a political battle as can be imagined, which is why it almost never takes place. Dishonest shadow-boxing is its typical substitute.

Indeed, our public discourse would take a more enlightening turn if mainstream journalists began to recognize this situation and sharply probed the views of wage-hike opponents, asking questions such as: “So do you support cutting the minimum wage, and if not, why not?” Not only would this an approach be useful from the policy perspective, but it might regularly generate the sort of major headlines that reporters and their editors find very appealing.

With regard to recent developments, I’ve been quite pleased at the reaction to my Forbes article suggesting that Walmart would enormously benefit from a $12 per hour minimum wage, a suggestion as shocking as it is logically based. According to the publication’s website, the piece has garnered over 20,000 pageviews, 1200 Likes, and 170 Tweets, very solid metrics for this sort of sober policy issue. More importantly, it was brought to the personal attention of at least one Walmart board member, perhaps opening the door for positive developments in that direction. After all, the public endorsement of a big minimum wage hike would cost that huge corporation not a single dollar and surely produce a tidal wage of the sort of favorable national media coverage it has sorely lacked in recent years. Doing well by doing good is an attractive proposition for most executives.

I was also pleased to attend President Obama’s minimum wage announcement at the White House last week, though less pleased that the East Coast storm disrupted my return plans. My appearance on Chris Hayes’ MSNBC show went well, and E.J Dionne of the Washington Post focused his nationally syndicated column on the ironies of the minimum wage debate and my own initiative effort, as partially excerpted below:

There is a magnificent public policy that achieves many of the goals conservative politicians regularly extol. These include promoting work over dependency, reducing the cost of social welfare programs, fostering economic growth and strengthening families.

The policy in question is raising the minimum wage. The only mystery is why so few conservative politicians see the issue this way. Rank-and-file conservatives know better. A December Washington Post/ABC News poll found that 53 percent of self-described conservatives supported a minimum wage increase. Republican politicians who are so solicitous of conservative opinion need to follow the moral and practical intuitions of those they say they represent.

One conservative, at least, is speaking for this majority. Ron Unz, a Silicon Valley millionaire and one-time Republican candidate for governor of California, is championing an initiative to raise his state’s minimum wage to $12 an hour. His reasons are thoroughly in keeping with his ideology.

Unz has argued that a minimum wage hike “would function as a massive stimulus package.” He told ABC News that if the national minimum were increased to $12, “probably between $150 billion and $175 billion a year would go into the pockets of the lower-wage families that spend every dollar they earn. It would cause a tremendous boost in economic demand.”

He also pointed to the fact that government — through wage subsidies in the tax code, Medicaid and food stamps — is now conferring substantial benefits on employers of low-wage labor.

“One of the strange things in our society right now is that we have all these low-wage workers who are getting $7.50, $8 or $9 an hour,” Unz said, “and because they earn such small wages, the government subsidizes them with billions or tens of billions of dollars of social welfare spending that comes from the taxpayer. It’s a classic example of businesses’ privatizing the benefits of their workers while socializing the costs.”

Walmart, Peter Thiel, the Weekly Standard, and Other Dog-Biters

The Unz Review • February 26, 2014 • 1,300 Words

Our media naturally tends to cover stories that are surprising or unexpected far more than boringly routine ones, and this has certainly been a central aspect of my ongoing initiative campaign to raise the California minimum wage to $12 per hour, the highest rate in America.

Labor unions and some prominent liberals have promoted minimum wage hikes for many years with mixed success and often scanty coverage, typically breaking into the headlines only when raucous public protests draw television cameras or print photographers. But given my reputation as a conservative Republican, I needed merely to draft my ballot measure on a single sheet of paper and prepare a $200 filing-fee to generate a major story in The New York Times, followed by considerable secondary coverage. Perhaps that might seem unfair, but I suspect that any prominent liberal who launched an effort to totally abolish all capital gains taxes would draw similar attention. Man bites dog trumps dog bites man.

However, in the ninety days since my initiative was filed, men have begun biting dogs at a truly remarkable rate, drawing wonderment from many outside observers.

Soon after I began my effort, I was interviewed by the hosts of several leading conservative talk-radio stations and their initial shock at my idea quickly turned to surprise at the cogency of my conservative arguments for the proposal. Cutting social welfare spending, saving taxpayer dollars, eliminating hidden subsidies, making work pay—those all sound like longstanding conservative policy goals. What sensible conservative could oppose them?

A few weeks later, Phyllis Schlafly, an iconic conservative sometimes regarded as Pat Buchanan’s female counterpart, publicly declared for a higher minimum wage in her syndicated column, citing the same reasons that I had, thereby providing me with my first big-name public ally on the right.

Soon afterward, The Daily Caller, one of America’s most widely read conservative publications interviewed me on the topic, publishing a blistering 2,500 explication of my position, with tone and title of the piece emphasizing my argument that a $12 minimum wage might constitute the “rocket fuel” conservatives needed to revitalize their movement and broaden their political base.

A few days afterward, almost certainly as a consequence of the Daily Caller article, Bill O’Reilly—the biggest conservative star on television—used his Fox News show to declare his support for big minimum wage hike, endorsing the Democratic Congressional proposal of a $10 figure.

With several dogs now licking their man-bites, the San Francisco Chronicle published a major front-page story and then a quick follow-up on this sudden epidemic of rabid conservatives promoting a minimum wage hike.

Soon afterward, Joel Fox, former longtime president of California’s enormously influential Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association, contacted me and solicited a minimum wage article for his highly-regarded Fox & Hounds webzine, which had previously run several pieces on the other side of the issue. I jumped at the opportunity to present “The Conservative Case for a Higher Minimum Wage” to his readership, and was quite pleased at the reaction. Given his current role as president of the Small Business Action Committee, which during 2012 spent some $42 million to oppose Gov. Brown’s tax hike ballot measure, Fox’s conservative credentials on fiscal and economic matters obviously remain as strong as could possibly be imagined.

A week or two later, I published an article in Forbes arguing that Walmart—America’s largest low-wage employer and often treated as the Great Satan by pro-minimum wage activists—would benefit greatly from policies that would lift the disposable incomes of their struggling customer base, a point I had been making to people for several years.  By fortuitous circumstances, my article was immediately brought to the personal attention of a prominent Walmart board member, and perhaps coincidentally, less than two weeks later, a story on Bloomberg Financial News carried the shocking headline “Wal-Mart Says ‘Looking’ at Support of Minimum Wage Rise”. The breaking Bloomberg story was quickly republished across numerous other major business media outlets and Tweeted out several hundred times,

Within hours, Walmart had denied the Bloomberg account and claimed that its official position on a minimum wage hike remained unchanged as being completely “neutral,” with the remarks of its corporate spokesman having been misinterpreted; but the incident was certainly a very odd one. I find it difficult to believe that Walmart’s official spokesman would be careless in his words and equally unlikely that Bloomberg journalists—who constitute a gold standard for breaking business news—would have totally mischaracterized the position of America’s largest corporation on such a sensitive matter. Slate also found the events very curious, and reported my own speculation that Walmart’s remarks had constituted a trial balloon in support of a minimum wage , with the company quickly caving under massive pressure from the Congressional Republican leadership, who are desperately trying to hold their own ranks firm against a Democratic-sponsored minimum wage hike.

Large corporations try to avoid political crossfire and possible punishment at the hands of a political party that controls the House and half the governorships. But technology multi-billionaires are far less vulnerable and can speak their minds much more freely, if they are so inclined. And one of the most outspoken of such individuals is Peter Thiel, co-founder of Paypal, earliest backer of Facebook, and a legendary figure in Silicon Valley investment circles. Late last week, a San Francisco reporter asked Thiel what he thought about my $12 minimum wage initiative, and he said he suggested that the idea might have considerable merit given the enormous problems inherent in our existing social welfare system.

Now there are exist a multitude of different types of conservatives, with Phyllis Schlafly and Bill O’Reilly being social conservatives who are often populist in their economic sentiments.  So their support for a minimum wage hike was perhaps not nearly as surprising as the media believed. But Thiel is widely regarded as perhaps the staunchest conservative-libertarian in America on economic issues, having been the largest financial backer of Ron Paul in 2012 and considered far harder-core than the Koch brothers. His public sentiments favoring a $12 minimum wage constituted an ideological thunderclap, and was treated as such, generating major articles in ThinkProgress and the Huffington Post, and quickly generating over 700 Tweets, nearly twice the number of the Bloomberg piece on Walmart, perhaps because Thiel’s minimum wage support was twice as astonishing as the pro-hike sentiments of our top corporate retailer.

Around the same time, Debra Saunders, one of California’s most prominent Republican-leading columnists, wrote a piece treating my arguments in favor of my California initiative in very respectful fashion and the Los Angeles Times just this morning released a major Q&A with me on the same subject. Also, an Associated Press feature with the provocative title “5 Tycoons Who Want to Close the Wealth Gap” just ran in a large number of publications; although I was enormously flattered at being included in the august company of Warren Buffett, I must emphasize that my own personal wealth is so microscopic compared to Oracle of Omaha that I found the juxtaposition more humorous and ironic than anything else.

Finally, the latest issue of the Weekly Standard carried a 2,000 word article by Irwin Stelzer, director of economic policy at the neoconservative Hudson Institute, in which he endorses the minimum wage hike proposed by the Democrats in Congress and rebuts the contrary arguments based on the CBO report. My impression is that Stelzer has always been quite close to Rupert Murdoch, which raises the intriguing question of whether public endorsements by the Wall Street Journal and Fox News can be far behind. One might suggest investing in a life-insurance policy on Speaker John Boehner, except that such contracts rarely allow payouts for suicide.

Meanwhile, the growing cries of man-bitten dogs continue to echo across the land. At this rate, the major news media may soon revise its preconceptions and conclude that supporting a minimum wage hike is just another typical conservative position similar to opposing gun control.

Understanding the CBO Analysis of a Minimum Wage Hike

The Unz Review • March 10, 2014 • 1,700 Words

Three weeks ago the powerful political momentum favoring a large minimum wage hike received a major setback as the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) released its report indicating that the Democratic goal of raising the minimum wage to $10.10 might lead to the loss of 500,000 jobs.

The CBO is widely respected as non-partisan in its economic analysis, and indeed Douglas Elmendorf, its current head, has a strongly Democratic-leaning background. Republicans and business lobbyists quickly seized upon the conclusions as proof that their longstanding arguments against a minimum wage hike had been correct all along, and that any proposal that risked a half million jobs in these difficult times would be disastrous, amounting to a cynical political effort driven by populist appeal rather than objective economic sense.  Their biting accusation was that desperate Democrats were willing to kill jobs in hopes of winning votes from the gullible.

The immediate Democratic response to the report hardly put these fears to rest. Jason Furman, President Obama’s chief economic advisor, largely dismissed the CBO estimates, suggesting that few if any jobs might be lost if the national wage-floor were raised, and claiming that the estimates were contradicted by numerous academic research studies providing contrary conclusions.  Such an argument is hardly persuasive. All interested parties in the endless minimum wage debate can always cite numerous academic studies to bolster their case, but the CBO is regarded as relatively neutral and impartial, so merely dismissing those official numbers as “wrong” is not reassuring.

Furthermore, any honest advocate of a minimum wage hike must certainly grant that a large increase would surely produce some level of job loss, and raising America’s national wage floor from $7.25 to $10.10—a jump of 40%—is hardly insignificant. The CBO report suggested that somewhere between zero and one million jobs might be lost as a consequence, with the most likely figure being in the 500,000 range. Now I claim no great economic expertise myself and have certainly not reviewed the underlying calculations, but such figures seem perfectly plausible to me. However, I believe that the contending parties and the media have severely misinterpreted their meaning.

First, how substantial is the potential loss of 500,000 jobs relative to the size of the American workforce? One useful point of comparison is number of workers who would benefit from that same minimum wage hike, and when we include the “spillover effect,” most estimates put that total at roughly 25 million, a figure fifty times greater than the likely job loss. So one way of presenting the numbers is that of the low-wage workers directly impacted, roughly 98% would benefit—in most cases by thousands of dollars per year—and 2% would lose. Major changes in government policy inevitably produce both winners and losers, and I would think that any proposal in which the former constitute 98% of the total should be considered remarkably successful.

America’s population of low-wage workers themselves certainly come to this exact same conclusion, supporting a large minimum wage hike in overwhelming numbers. To the extent that they are the population group directly impacted—for better or for worse—should not their own wishes be considered a determining factor?

Consider also that the growing desperation of this exact low-wage population has made them a leading source of government lottery-ticket sales, vainly hoping that a lucky number will improve their miserable economic plight. For most such workers, the fully capitalized value of the proposed minimum wage hike is close to $100,000 cash-money, and such a hike gives them a 98% chance of winning that amount rather than the 0.0001% chance that buying a scratch-off at 7-Eleven might give them. Is it morally right for the elected officials to deny them the former while encouraging them to squander part of their weekly household-budget on the latter?

And how much would the losers really lose? Economic logic indicates that job-losses would tend to be concentrated at the lowest wage-levels since those are the workers for whom an employer would find the jump to $10.10 most difficult to justify in business terms. But bread-winners currently earning $7.25 or $7.50 already exist at the poverty-level and have high employment turn-over, while also receiving enormous social welfare subsidies from the government. So in many cases neither their personal difficulties nor the amount of their taxpayer benefits would be hugely different if their job suddenly disappeared.

Business lobbyists often disingenuously often cite the problem of teenager unemployment as their primary talking-point against proposals for a reasonable minimum wage, and it is certainly true that many teenagers currently earn at or just above the current minimum wage level, meaning that they might represent a disproportionate fraction of those job-losers, perhaps endangering their early chance for advancement on the economic ladder.

But teenagers are merely a minuscule and easily targeted fraction of those workers directly impacted by a large minimum wage hike, suggesting an obvious solution for those greatly concerned with the particular issue. A large rise in the minimum wage would automatically save the government huge sums in existing social welfare spending, and a small fraction of that could be used to fund a business tax credit subsidizing the hiring of teenagers, perhaps even a figure as high as a couple of dollars an hour. The amount of the subsidy could be adjusted to substantially reduce the teenager unemployment, perhaps even to a level below that existing today. Personally, I am no huge fan of such government interventions in the market, but for those who rank teenage unemployment as an overriding concern, the fix is easily at hand.

The contentious issue of immigration should also be considered, though Democrats are very reluctant to do so. Business lobbyists and doctrinaire libertarians might shed crocodile tears over the 500,000 workers whose jobs are endangered by a minimum wage hike, but these exact same groups endorse our very high current levels of immigration, whose economic impact upon existing workers is vastly more negative. During the last decade, over ten million foreigners immigrated here, most being exactly the same sort of lower-wage workers, thereby either displacing existing job-holders or exerting severe downward pressure on wages; the inexorable Law of Supply and Demand is regularly ignored by pro-immigration economists. Indeed, last year I published a piece in Salon specifically arguing that a large minimum wage hike must be included as part of any immigration amnesty passed by Congress, and economics writers at both The New Republic and National Review explicitly endorsed my $12 per hour minimum wage proposal on exactly those same grounds.

The Pew Research Center has estimated that eight million illegal immigrants currently hold jobs in America, probably constituting over 10% of all our wage-earners, and their most recently arrived cohorts, with no American work history and little English, are probably concentrated at the lowest pay levels, being among the few job-seekers desperate enough to eagerly take employment at $7.25 per hour, with businesses forced to violate the law and hire them for exactly that same competitive reasons.

So when the CBO suggests that 98% of low-wage workers will get a raise and 2% might lose their jobs, we can be sure that a greatly disproportionate share of that 2% will be individuals whose employment the government has allegedly been trying to block for years. Most businessmen would rather obey the law than not, and once a minimum wage of $10.10 allowed them to attract job applicants who spoke English and were here legally, they would be much more likely to do so. My own very rough estimate is that between one-third and one-half of the CBO’s 500,000 estimated job losses would fall among the undocumented, thus transforming a minimum wage hike into exactly the sort of immigration-enforcement measure that former Democratic Presidential Nominee Michael Dukakis had once suggested.

Combine this immigration argument with a business tax-credit for hiring teenagers, and it seems likely that the true figure of net lost jobs shrinks to just a fraction of that suggested by the CBO and just a tiny sliver of the tens of millions of legal workers who would benefit from a wage hike. Instead of undercutting the practical case for much higher minimum wage, when interpreted properly the CBO report strengthens it immensely.

Finally, the CBO conclusions seem to totally demolish one of the central economic dogmas presented by ideological opponents of minimum wage laws.

Rigidly doctrinaire libertarians argue that minimum wage laws serve no valid purpose since our free market in labor ensures that employers must pay all workers their true economic value, no more and no less. Thus, they say that if a worker earns $8.50 per hour, that is the approximate value of the labor he produces and his job would disappear at any higher required wage. By contrast, economists who support a minimum wage suggest that low-wage businesses benefit from their “monopsony” position in the labor market, and regularly use that great market power to pay workers less than their true value, much like a monopolist can unreasonably bid up the price of his products.

This obscure technical dispute is central to the theoretical basis for minimum wage laws, and I would argue that the CBO figures decisively resolves this question. According to the CBO, some 98% of those low-wage workers impacted by a 40% hike in the minimum wage would keep their jobs at a much higher rate of pay, thereby demonstrating that their economic value to their employer was vastly greater than their current rate of pay, which had been artificially reduced due to their lack of effective bargaining power. When 98% of workers are paid below their true economic value, any assumptions of a truly efficient market in labor are absurd, and the rectifying impact of a higher minimum wage becomes absolutely justified.

Thus, on both theoretical and practical grounds, the CBO report demonstrated the exact opposite of what the contending parties in the minimum wage debate seemed to suggest. Perhaps journalists will eventually begin reporting this more correct interpretation of the stated facts.

The Huge Economic Productivity of Divine Monarchs

The Unz Review • April 15, 2014 • 1,600 Words

When I first began investigating the minimum wage a couple of years ago, one of my early surprises was its sharp decline across the decades, having fallen by roughly one-third in real value since its 1968 peak.

This drop was greatly magnified when we considered the economic growth of American society given that our per capita GDP had roughly doubled during that same period, meaning that the minimum wage had declined by almost 70% relative to average income.  A 70% drop in a crucial parameter of our wage structure is quite remarkable and clearly explains why lower wage workers could generally support their families a few decades ago, but today subsist in desperate poverty despite massive government social welfare subsidies.  I emphasized some of these statistics in my December 2013 New York Times piece on the subject, pointing out that even raising the minimum wage to  $12 per hour would merely make up a fraction of this long lost economic ground.

I was hardly the first person to note these remarkable facts, and earlier that same year Sen. Elizabeth Warren had pointed out that if the minimum wage had merely kept pace with the growth in average per capita income, it would have reached a rate close to $22 per hour.  Given such figures, the increases to $9 or $10.10 advocated by the Democratic leadership in Congress stood revealed as the paltry and pusillanimous goals that they were.

The devastating power of this simple economic point is easily apparent to the business lobbyists tasked with blocking an increase, and they have regularly suggested that this argument is totally misleading because it ignores that the gains in national economic output have hardly been uniform across all sectors.  The doubling in real per capita GDP has been driven almost entirely by increases at the high end, in sectors such as computer software, finance, and biotechnology, with little of it due to changes in the value of the work produced by janitors and waitresses.  They argue that wages must follow productivity and if the output of nannies is roughly unchanged from forty years ago, it is absurd to expect their real hourly wages to double or triple.  On the face of it, this rejoinder seems quite telling, and I have never seen an effective rebuttal provided in the numerous articles and columns by liberal wage advocates I have read on the subject.

However, let us step back a little and ask ourselves to consider the definition of “productivity,” especially for a service-sector worker of the sort we are considering.  Now as both I myself and my sharpest libertarian critics have emphasized, I have absolutely no professional expertise in the “dismal science,” but productivity is obviously directly related to the rate at which economic value is generated and economic value is defined in terms of market prices.  So if the hourly wage of a cleaning lady is $9 and the price charged for her service is $11 (including overhead), those figures represent her productivity.

But suppose the minimum wage were raised to $11, boosting her personal wages to $12 per hour and the all-in cost of her services to $14.  Assuming her job remained in existence, which it probably would, the market price and productivity of her work would have grown by one-third, although her scrubbing and washing remained completely unchanged.  And her new, higher wages would remain just as closely aligned with her new, higher personal productivity as had been the case earlier since productivity is defined based on wages and costs for the service involved rather than the other way round.

Moreover, minimum wage critics have endlessly touted the recent CBO report analyzing the impact of a wage hike.  Yet according to that report, some 98% of impacted low-end workers would see dramatic rises in their wages while only about 2% might lose their jobs as a consequence.  So according to this analysis, the proposed minimum wage hike would raise the economic productivity of 98% of America’s low-wage workforce—could any politician ask for a better talking-point?

Perhaps my self-declared economic ignorance is shining through at this point, and my expert critics in the economics professoriate can seize on these naïve suggestions to ridicule and humiliate me.  I urge them to do so.  But it seems to me that much of modern economics is more intended to obfuscate and confuse rather than enlighten, and the disastrous American economic policies of the last decade or so tend to strengthen my suspicion in this regard.

These days, a large fraction of the more vocal and visible economics experts draw much or most of their incomes from the financial subventions of our Oligarch class, and perhaps coincidentally, their claims and the personal interests of their benefactors seem rather closely aligned.

We have been discussing the productivity of low wage workers, but let us now consider the productivity at the other end of the economic spectrum, which has allegedly risen so rapidly over the last few decades and thereby supposedly justifies the massive financial rewards there accrued.

How do we measure the productivity of a hedge-fund manager, a service-sector worker who annually earns $50 million for his management skills and financial manipulations?  Unless I’m missing something, the only metric available is the market price he charges for his services, namely that same figure of $50 million per year.  So just as has been claimed by those pro-market pundits, his income closely corresponds to his productivity, but his is merely a restatement of the relevant definitions.  If the painter of blotchy canvasses can sell them for tens of millions of dollars, his economic productivity is enormous even if his artistic skills are minimal.

This same argument would presumably apply on the international scale as well.  If an African dictator or the current God-Emperor of North Korea’s Kim Dynasty allocates to himself 5% of the entire national income of his impoverished country, the annual dollars involved may reach into the billions, demonstrating that his economic productivity exceeds that of almost any brilliant American business tycoon, even though the likely benefits he provides to his suffering country are hugely negative.  Perhaps the Sultan of Brunei may spend most of his days playing polo or watching TV, but his ongoing productivity—as manifested in the diligent 24-7 gushing of his oil wells—remains far greater than that of any investment banker or elite lawyer.

So when regular columnists in Forbes or other publications cite the fact that over the last generation or two, the economic productivity of our elites has skyrocketed while the productivity of most other Americans has stagnated, I suspect they are simply restating the leftist claim that the rich have gotten richer while no one else has.  But it’s nice to hear those sentiments coming directly from such a contrary source.

Meanwhile, on a more practical matter, I’ve become much more hopeful that a California minimum wage hike along the lines of that contained in the initiative I failed to qualify for the November ballot may soon be achieved via different means.

A few weeks after my $12 minimum wage initiative began receiving considerable media attention, State Sen. Mark Leno of San Francisco introduced a bill in the California legislation topping my proposal by raising the minimum wage to $13 per hour.

I’d assumed the measure had little chance of passage.  Last year the Legislature had been unwilling to consider a figure higher than $10 per hour and leading Democratic constituencies had actually criticized my initiative as unreasonable and unwarranted when it had surfaced.

However, it appears that the huge shift in the political and media momentum on the issue over the last few months, perhaps partly due to my own efforts, may have altered that ideological situation, especially in California.  After recently meeting and talking with Sen. Leno and his staff, I now believe his legislation has a reasonably good chance of being enacted this year at least in some form, which is very heartening.

Obviously, I would have very much preferred that my own initiative be the vehicle for raising the California minimum wage and a successful initiative campaign might have been a powerful means of nationalizing the issue in November.  But with the failure of my attempt to qualify the measure for the ballot, I am glad to endorse Sen. Leno’s effort and will do whatever I can to help it become law.

Although a state-level minimum wage of $13 would be by far the highest in America, the figure is not at all unreasonable.  California’s cost of living is about 30% above the national average, so a $13 rate here is roughly the same as a $10 minimum wage at the federal level, a figure now backed by the Obama Administration and almost all the Democrats in Congress, and even endorsed by conservative Bill O’Reilly on his FoxNews show.

Democrats hold super-majorities in both houses of the California legislature and they only require a simple majority to raise the minimum wage.  So all that is necessary for enactment is that they retain the support of the sizable block of moderate Democrats and Gov. Brown, and this would surely be facilitated by the number of prominent conservative Republicans who have now endorsed a large hike in the minimum wage.  Just within California, influential moderate billionaires such as Eli Broad and Rick Caruso have now also endorsed a minimum wage hike in that range or even higher, as has Peter Thiel, a billionaire who has strongly rightwing views on economic matters.

If my recent initiative drive to substantially raise the California minimum wage helps spur legislation producing a roughly similar result, I’d count my project a considerable success regardless of the particular circumstances under which the result was achieved.

Our Elite Colleges Should Abolish Tuition

Schools like Harvard have become tax-exempt hedge funds with huge returns. Ending tuition would be a form of payback.

The New York Times • March 30, 2015 • 500 Words

Although Harvard is widely known as one of America’s oldest and most prestigious colleges, that public image is outdated. Over the last couple of decades, the university has transformed itself into one of the world’s largest hedge-funds, with the huge profits of its aggressively managed $36 billion portfolio shielded from taxes because of the educational institution it continues to run as a charity off to one side.

The numbers tell the story. These days Harvard’s 6,600 undergraduates are charged annual tuition of $44,000 per year, with substantial reductions for students from less wealthy families. So student tuition probably contributes much less than $200 million to Harvard’s annual revenue. Meanwhile, the hedge-fund side of Harvard’s operations last year generated a $5 billion return, an amount at least 25 times larger. If all of Harvard’s college students disappeared tomorrow, or attended classes without paying a dime, the financial impact on Harvard, Inc. would be completely negligible.

But although those tuition dollars mean almost nothing to Harvard, they are surely a daunting barrier and burden to almost any American family. An admissions process is flawed when a four-year total price tag approaching $250,000 probably deters many students from even applying.

Harvard claims to provide generous assistance, heavily discounting its nominal list price for many students from middle class or impoverished backgrounds. But the intrusive financial disclosures required by Harvard’s financial aid bureaucracy may be a source of confusion or shame to many working-class households. I also wonder how many lower-income families unfamiliar with our elite college system see such huge costs and automatically assume that Harvard is only open to the very rich.

Meanwhile, even some upper-middle-class parents — who are charged closer to full freight — must wonder if they can afford paying close to a quarter million dollars for a Harvard diploma.

Harvard’s enormous hedge-fund operation has avoided billions of dollars in government taxes. In exchange for this continuing tax benefit, Harvard should abolish all tuition for its undergraduates.

The announcement of a free Harvard education would capture the world’s imagination and draw a vastly broader and more diverse applicant pool, including many high-ability students who had previously limited their aim to their local state college.

Furthermore, everything I’ve said about Harvard applies equally well to most of America’s other top universities including Yale, Princeton and Stanford, which have also become huge untaxed hedge-funds that charge exorbitant tuition. They could just as easily provide free college educations to their students at little financial cost and great social benefit.

In recent decades a greater and greater fraction of our financial, media and political elites have been drawn from among the graduates of a small handful of our top colleges, whose enrollments are enormously skewed toward the wealthy and the well-connected. Having these colleges eliminate their tuition would be an important step toward reversing this unhealthy American polarization.

Ron Unz is a software developer and publisher of The Unz Review: An Alternative Media Selection.

See also:

- Paying Tuition to a Giant Hedge Fund, The American Conservative, December 4, 2012

Meritocracy: How Harvard Currently Soaks the Rich...Such as NYC Public Schoolteachers

The Unz Review • February 4, 2016 • 2,300 Words

This last Saturday night I took a red-eye flight to Boston accompanied by an all-important carry-on bag, containing some thirty pounds of signed nomination petitions for our Free Harvard/Fair Harvard campaign for the Harvard Board of Overseers.

With potentially major changes in the structure of American higher education hanging in the balance, I could not possibly trust Fedex or any other service for the safe Monday arrival of our petitions at the 17 Quincy Street Harvard offices, and hand-delivery seemed the only secure option. I’d originally planned my trip when huge winter storms had led to thousands of flight cancellations along the East Coast, so I separately booked both Saturday night and Sunday morning flights, with an eye towards possibly buying a last-minute third ticket to some other city along the Eastern Seaboard just in case snow blocked all incoming flights to Boston’s Logan Airport.

Fortunately, by the time our signature-gathering was complete and I boarded my JetBlue flight out of SFO, the Great Winter Storm of 2016 was merely a fading memory and both I and my precious cargo arrived without delay or incident.

Under normal circumstances I would have been loath to risk turning in our Harvard petitions on the last day available, Monday, February 1st, but our Overseer ballot qualification drive had been far more difficult and challenging than outside observers might expect. The number of signatures each of us required was hardly onerous—just 201 from among the 320,000 holders of Harvard degrees—but only physical signatures on special Harvard-printed nomination petitions were allowed, and for various reasons we had started our signature drive far later than I had originally planned. Excluding the delivery time of the blank petitions from Harvard itself, we had just a couple of weeks to locate our potential supporters, fedex them our nomination petitions, and receive their signed petitions in the Priority Mail return envelopes we provided. Naturally, most of the signatures arrived in the last couple of days, and late Saturday afternoon I was still nervously awaiting the day’s mail delivery just before leaving for the airport.

Despite all our concerns, we easily met our goals, and my heavy satchel on the flight to Boston Saturday night contained around 285 total signatures for most of our individual candidacies, providing a large safety margin over the required number. Virtually all our signers appeared absolutely legitimate, and unless the Harvard administrators choose to disqualify huge numbers of those alumni signatures on unreasonably trivial grounds, our slate will appear on the next Harvard Overseer ballot, with potentially major consequences. So we have now passed the first hurdle, though not without considerable nail-biting along the way.

Because I arrived in Cambridge very early Sunday morning and the Harvard offices did not open until Monday, I decided to spend the day trying to pad our numbers by doing some personal petitioning in Harvard Square and at various places around the university, having brought along some signs, large charts, and hand-outs to support such an effort.

During a full day of energetic petitioning, my success rate ran 100% among those who stopped in curiosity, asked questions, then declared themselves to be holders of Harvard degrees eligible to sign. Unfortunately, that total came to merely two individuals, as a cold New England Sunday deterred the busy and the sensible from dawdling in conversation with some obvious political crackpot sermonizing on Harvard’s vast wealth and absurdly promising to abolition Harvard tuition as a consequence.

A couple of pleasant young Crimson reporters also spent an hour or so reporting on my petitioning efforts and interviewing me, with a picture taken by their staff photographer and displayed on the front-page of their Monday newspaper accurately capturing the somewhat amusing street scene. Frankly, I doubt if even a single passer-by that day actually believed that my remarkably quixotic proposal had the slightest prospect of actual real-world success.

Still, a much larger number of current Harvard students or casual visitors did stop, listen, and take away some of our materials, and of these individuals not one opposed our project, with the great majority being enthusiastic supporters. So the secondary goal of my petitioning—to gauge the political temperature in the Harvard community—proved much more encouraging and successful.

On Monday morning, I waited in my local hotel for the fedex deliveries of those petitions signed too late to reach me on Saturday in California, then took a taxi and lugged my heavy bag of petitions to the Harvard offices for delivery to the friendly staff located there, receiving a signed receipt in return.

I then picked up a couple of copies of the Crimson issue featuring my local petitioning efforts, as well as President Drew Faust’s sharp rebuttal to our proposals, and went to have a cup of coffee with John S. Rosenberg, editor of Harvard Magazine. Just a few days earlier, I had been stunned by the sudden appearance of his remarkably long (9,000 words), thorough, and even-handed article on our Free Harvard/Fair Harvard campaign, and I was very glad to have an opportunity to meet the author himself and explain some of my forthcoming plans for the coming months. Afterwards I took a taxi to WBUR, Boston’s local NPR station, which had invited me to do a long in-studio interview segment on our campaign, which I think went quite well.

The voter base for our Overseer campaign consists of active Harvard alumni, and these individuals receive Harvard Magazine, probably pay quite a bit of attention to stories that run in the Crimson, and are heavily concentrated in the Greater Boston area, often listening to the local NPR station. Taken together, these sorts of media outlets are exactly the ones that help shape the perceptions of our potential voters, and so far I think their coverage of our efforts has been exemplary—probing, sometimes tough, but generally extremely fair. I suspect there will be many, many more stories about our campaign and the issues we are raising before the Overseer election results are finally announced in June.

What, then, of the issues themselves? For me, one considerable surprise has been just how much the Harvard Administration opposition to our campaign has focused on the “Free Harvard” issue, with the university spokesmen and its top officials repeatedly claiming that our proposal to abolish college tuition is completely unnecessary since Harvard already provides very generous financial aid, and also financially impossible or at least very burdensome and difficult.

In the original New York Times article, Harvard Spokesman Jeff Neal had claimed that legal restrictions on Harvard endowment funds made our proposal a non-starter. Former Senior Fellow of the Harvard Corporation Robert Reischauer made a similar point in an NYT letter to the editor. In fact, the Harvard Crimson article featuring President Drew Faust’s response was actually entitled “Faust Condemns Free Tuition Proposal from Outside Overseers Ticket” and my WBUR interviewer cited further statements from Neal along similar lines.

But despite the weighty credentials and elite credibility of these individuals, I believe the facts are very much on the other side.

Let us first consider whether our proposal is even legally and financially possible. As I have repeatedly pointed out, the university’s overall investment income averages some twenty-five times the size of its net college tuition revenue, and none of these Harvard officials have ever disputed my claim. The sheer magnitude of this disparity is effectively illustrated in a simple chart I have widely distributed:

Now it is perfectly true that a large portion of the Harvard endowment is bound by various donor restrictions, and according to the NPR interviewer, Neal claimed the figure was 70%, which does not seem unreasonable to me. However, that still leaves 30% of the endowment income as completely unrestricted, and since an allocation of merely 4% would be sufficient to abolish tuition, I cannot see any resulting difficulty. Furthermore, roughly half of all new Harvard donations each year are completely unrestricted, and this sum alone would easily be enough to swamp the costs now covered by tuition. I simply cannot understand the argument that abolishing tuition is financially or legally difficult, let alone impossible.

Meanwhile, what of Harvard’s other argument, that the current system serves the cause of financial equity by only soaking the wealthy while protecting the less affluent? It is endlessly claimed that today’s exceptionally complex system of financial aid means that only millionaires and such actually pay the stated costs of over $60,000 per year, while less affluent families are completely insulated from any resulting financial hardship.

To some extent this is certainly true. Families with incomes of $65,000 and below may send their children to Harvard completely free of charge, though I personally wonder just how many such American families are actually aware of this, rather than casually hear about a Harvard list-price of $60,000 per year and never even consider applying. But what about families with somewhat higher incomes? Is Harvard’s very complex—and totally secret—financial aid formula really as well-designed and equitable as its top university officials endlessly proclaim?

As it happens, Harvard provides a convenient “Net Price Calculator” on its website, useful for determining the cost of attendance based on one’s financial situation (though an NYT columnist has harshly criticized Harvard for using various software tricks to block any “comparison shopping” against its competitors).

Therefore, let us consider a very simple case, namely that of married couple, both longtime New York City public schoolteachers, having one child who is smart and talented enough to have been accepted at Harvard College.

Now NYC is an extremely expensive place to live, with the local cost-of-living perhaps almost twice the national average. The local teachers unions are strong and ensure a solid income for their members, with a base salary of at least nearly $93,000 for career teachers of 22 years service or longer; that may sound like a lot, but is more like $45,000 or $50,000 per year in a less expensive part of the country. Therefore, a pair of such public school teachers has a combined salary income of roughly $185,000 per year. Let us further suppose that over many years of diligent effort they have managed to accumulate (non-retirement) cash savings and investments of $200,000, which generates annual investment income of an extra $5,000 per year. I would hardly regard such a middle-class couple as being part of America’s wealthy elite.

Harvard apparently disagrees. Plugging these exact numbers into the Harvard Net Price Calculator indicates that those NYC public schoolteachers would be expected to provide a parental contribution of $44,000 per year, or $176,000 over the four years. So they may indeed choose to send their son or daughter to Harvard just so long as they are willing to spend almost their entire life savings for that privilege. Is this financially equitable?

What about a somewhat different case. Suppose over the years that same couple of NYC school teachers had encountered serious financial problems or unexpected expenses, perhaps medical bills beyond their insurance coverage, and as a result had no significant personal savings when their son received his Golden Ticket of an acceptance letter to Harvard. Surely, under such circumstances, Harvard would cover all the costs.

Apparently not. If we plug zero savings and zero investment income into the handy Harvard Calculator, we find the university still requires such parents to contribute $135,000 over four years. Presumably, it expects them to go massively into personal debt or sell their kidneys or (more realistically) take out a second mortgage on their home or apartment. Obviously, the most likely scenario is that they decide that a Harvard education is totally unaffordable to the non-wealthy, and instead send their son or daughter to a local state college. Meanwhile, Harvard remains totally mystified why such a large fraction of its current students come from wealthy families.

Now in the cases we examined, a total four-year parental contribution of $176,000 or even $135,000 surely seems like a huge amount of money to that family of NYC public school teachers. But how much do such sums matter to Harvard itself?

Well, over the last few years, Harvard’s endowment investment income—excluding all new donations—has averaged about $3.2 billion per year. That’s $9 million per day, or $365,000 per hour. So the insurmountable obstacle of $135,000 it would demand from that family of NYC public school teachers in difficult financial circumstances represents roughly 22 minutes of Harvard’s average ordinary investment income. 22 minutes of investment income. “Let them eat cake”…

It’s also important to remember that while those NYC public school teachers pay a huge variety of often heavy taxes—federal income taxes, social security taxes, state taxes, city taxes, sales taxes, property taxes—-Harvard University is totally tax-exempt, which is one reason its annual investment income is so extremely large. Years ago, I wrote an article pointing out that Harvard had actually become one of the world’s largest hedge-funds, with some sort of small school or college or something attached off to one side for tax reasons. Right now, it looks like Harvard and its peers will remain tax-exempt indefinitely. But I really think it’s quite unseemly for a tax-exempt hedge-fund to continue gouging families of public school teachers of their life-savings, while simultaneously denigrating them as members of America’s wealthy elite.

I suspect that in a few months time, the vast majority of the Harvard alumni who vote in the Overseers election will agree with me. And soon thereafter Harvard will indeed become free.

Meritocracy: Harvard PR vs. Factual Reality

The Unz Review • February 15, 2016 • 1,200 Words

As most readers have probably heard, a few days ago we were notified by Harvard University that the alumni signatures on the nomination petitions we had submitted were sufficient in number, and our “Free Harvard/Fair Harvard” slate of candidates would therefore appear on the forthcoming ballot for the Harvard Board of Overseers.

An important public discussion may soon begin, perhaps extending far beyond the narrow confines of a single prestigious college and its alumni: Issues of college tuition and admissions fairness are widely contentious in today’s America. Furthermore, an extended campaign of months allows factual claims to be subjected to far greater scrutiny than the mere he-said-she-said ping-pong-match of a one-off media story, however prominent.

For example, take our original argument that the enormous annual income regularly generated by the Harvard endowment would allow the university to easily abolish undergraduate tuition, a suggestion that surely must have seemed shocking and implausible to many at first mention. Indeed, the initial New York Times story quoted Harvard spokesman Jeff Neal as dismissing that claim as “a common misconception,” one which ignored the fact that endowment funds were “largely restricted” by the contributors. And unsurprisingly, the vast majority of initial media stories deferred to Harvard’s position on such matters, accepting its credibility and treating our position as presumably mistaken; and without a campaign, that would have been the end of the matter.

However, the actual numbers seem decidedly on our side. Over the last few years, the investment income from Harvard’s endowment has averaged some twenty-five times greater than net tuition revenue, meaning that reallocating a mere 4% of that vast ongoing flow of income from mortgage derivative securities and private equity tranches would be sufficient to eliminate tuition. And in subsequent media interviews, Harvard officials specified that roughly 70% of their endowment is currently restricted, which implies that 30% is unrestricted, a figure vastly larger than the 4% in question, even excluding the huge annual total of unrestricted new donations. Thus, it appears that our original claims were entirely correct, and the only lasting impact of Harvard’s initial denial is upon the credibility of the individuals involved.

A somewhat similar situation had developed in late 2012 when I first called attention to Harvard’s transformation into a giant hedge fund and originally suggested that the university should therefore abolish tuition. Harvard quickly huddled with its external strategic communication firm and a top spokesman drafted a letter arguing that my article contained numerous inaccuracies which should be corrected. I immediately responded and I leave it to individual readers to read both sides of the exchange and decide for themselves who seemed to get the better of it.

Most recently, I explored Harvard’s endless claims that its existing system of financial aid is so generous that only the rich are soaked. Plugging a few hypothetical financials into Harvard’s own “Net Price Calculator,” I quickly discovered that a pair of public schoolteachers living in New York City would likely be forced to expend the bulk of their life savings in order to give their son or daughter a Harvard education. So either Harvard considers all NYC public schoolteachers to be “rich” or their statements to the media have been somewhat less than entirely accurate.

These are the facts we should keep in mind as we now consider some of Harvard’s claims regarding its existing admissions policy. Although “Fair Harvard” has always been an equal plank of our Overseer platform, and indeed the primary focus of several of our candidates, Harvard itself has appeared strangely reticent in addressing the issue, seeming to concentrate almost all their public statements on critiquing the “Free Harvard” proposal. Back in late 2012, I had published a piece in the NYT pointing to the strong statistical evidence for “Asian Quotas” at Harvard, and the rather brief and perfunctory Harvard denial contained absolutely no specifics whatsoever.

However, whenever I raised this issue in my conversations with journalists over the last few weeks, they immediately provided Harvard’s stock response that the large rise in Asian-American enrollments over the last twenty-five years clearly demonstrates the total absence of any anti-Asian bias. And indeed, there are far more Asians at Harvard College today than there were in 1990. The entire trajectory of Harvard’s undergraduate population since 1980 can be found in the public data made conveniently available on my own website, along with that of 5000-odd other colleges, drawn from the website of the quasi-governmental National Center for Educational Statistics.

But this glib argument on Harvard’s part completely ignores the dramatic rise of America’s Asian-American population, which has grown nearly 20-fold from a very low base since 1960. Obviously, the relevant statistic to examine at Harvard College is not the total number of Asians, but their per capita enrollment, as measured relative to their college-age population. Since the Current Population Survey of the U.S. Census provides a good estimate of the latter, the calculation is hardly a difficult one, either for Harvard or for any other elite college, and the changes over the last twenty years in the per capita ethnic enrollments of Asians, along with blacks, Hispanics, and non-Hispanic whites can be plotted in a simple chart:

Now obviously some degree of fluctuation in per capita enrollments at Harvard or any other college would be perfectly understandable, and indeed the figures for whites, Hispanics, and blacks all tend to go up and down a bit over time. But the per capita enrollment for Asian-Americans of college-age has shown an almost continuous decline over the last twenty years, now being 60% lower than in 1995. One would think that an apparent drop in enrollment of some 60% would have at least raised questions at Harvard’s admissions office. Has Asian academic performance collapsed during these two decades? Are Asians no longer applying to Harvard in large numbers? I’d hope we can disregard the possibility of any anti-Asian bias in Harvard’s vaunted “holistic admissions methods,” enshrined as exemplary by the U.S. Supreme Court in its landmark Bakke decision.

Yet oddly enough, those dramatic changes at Harvard seem quite similar to what happened at most other elite colleges during that same period. Producing similar charts is just as easy, and nearly all of them show exactly the same pattern, sometimes even exhibiting a drop in Asian enrollment significantly greater than that at Harvard (though with Princeton being one of the very few exceptions). For example, here are the charts for Yale and Stanford:

These charts might help to explain the endless complaints and lawsuits from Asian-American activists and organizations over what they perceive as anti-Asian racial discrimination in elite admissions policy. Whether or not that happens to be correct, I’d be very curious to hear Harvard’s own explanation. Or might it even be possible that America’s most elite college never even noticed that per capita Asian-American enrollment had dropped by such a huge amount in just a couple of decades?

Inquiring minds wish to know. Perhaps journalists will as well.

Postscript:

As I indicated above, Princeton is something of an outlier in this twenty-year trend of very large declines in the per capita enrollment of Asian-Americans at top elite colleges, as may be seen from the corresponding chart:

It may or may not be purely coincidental that a sharp turn-around in declining Asian-American enrollment there began around 2007, just after Daniel Golden of the Wall Street Journal reported the anti-Asian discrimination complaint filed by applicant Jian Li, which led to widespread coverage in the American media.

Solving Silicon Valley's Immigration Problem

The San Jose Mercury News • May 12, 2016 • 600 Words

As a software developer and company co-founder who has lived in Palo Alto since the early 1990s, I understand the extraordinarily important contribution that immigrants have made to our technology industry over the last half century and the crucial role they play in maintaining American competitiveness.

I’ve found it unfortunate that for years top Silicon Valley companies have faced a desperate shortage of H-1B visas, which are intended to allow them to hire foreign workers possessing unique skills. These severe immigration restrictions have led top companies such as Facebook, Google, and Apple to lobby Congress for an immigration reform package that includes a large expansion of this visa program, currently capped at 85,000 per year. However, these efforts by the tech community’s FWD.us and other groups have ended in repeated failure.

One reason for this political failure has been the scandalous nature of the current H-1B visa system. Although originally intended to apply only to unusually skilled individuals, the visa program has been misused as a means of eliminating the jobs or driving down the salaries of ordinary American tech workers.

Over the past year, The New York Times has described how a large fraction of annual H-1B visas are captured by low-end outsourcing companies such as TCS, Cognizant, and Infosys, which are then hired by corporations such as Disney to replace their in-house tech workers with cheaper immigrant labor.

Longtime American employees are forced to train their immigrant replacements, then eliminated in mass layoffs so that these wealthy corporations can boost their profits. Since so many of these H-1B workers are paid less than their American counterparts, this process also exerts continual downward pressure on the incomes of tech workers throughout our economy.

Under such circumstances any significant expansion of H-1B visas is merely a recipe for destroying one of the few remaining well-paying job categories in our society and further impoverishing the American middle class. This is a clear violation of the legislative intent behind the creation of the H-1B visa program.

The obvious solution to this political and economic dilemma is not to expand but instead to reform the H-1B system.

H-1B visas constitute a scarce government resource that is now being provided under an annual first-come, first-serve procedure, with companies allowed to submit an unlimited number of individual applications. This is a totally absurd allocation model, and allows companies to easily game the system. As a result, in 2014 outsourcer TCS received over a dozen times the number of H-1B visas for its low-end immigrant tech workers as did Apple for its elite hires.

The obvious solution is to switch to a market-based alternative, with the government instead auctioning off these visas, thereby providing those crucial immigration slots to the companies to which they provide the greatest value.

Under such a reform proposal, the Googles, Facebooks, and Apples of our country would easily outbid the outsourcing firms, whose only competitive advantage is the low salaries they pay their immigrant workers. And since the former might end up bidding $20,000 or more merely for the right to hire a particular foreign worker, there would be absolutely no downward pressure on the wages of America’s millions of existing technology workers. Meanwhile, any additional costs incurred by these top companies would be negligible compared to the value of the lost business opportunities they currently suffer when they are unable to hire the extremely talented foreign workers they require.

Sometimes the best means of fixing a broken system is simply forcing it to comply with its original intent.

Ron Unz, a former theoretical physicist and software company co-founder, is a Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate in California. He wrote this for the Mercury News.

Far East

The Economist (Letters) • May 3, 1986 • 500 Words

As a long-time subscriber to your newsweekly I wish to bring to your attention an unfortunate skew in your coverage of world events, namely your overemphasis on Europe and your under-reporting of the Far East. Such an observation may seem curious since your newsweekly clearly contains the best and most comprehensive western coverage of the Far East, and was also among the first to alert Americans and Europeans to the growing world importance of East Asia (and the declining importance of Europe). Nonetheless, the facts are plain.

- East Asia contains well over a billion and a half people, and the Indian subcontinent another billion; Europe (excluding the Soviet Union and Britain), little more than 400 million.

- East Asia contributes a GNP of over $2 trillion, and the subcontinent, another couple of hundred billion dollars; Europe (again excluding Russia and Britain), less than $4 trillion. Furthermore, given the current growth rates and economic potential of the Asian states—especially China and India, as your recent minisurvey suggested—the next 15 years should see the Far East overtake Europe in economic significance.

- By any standards, Japan, China and (perhaps) India are three of the half-dozen or so most significant nations in the world, and their importance is steadily rising. By contrast, the importance of leading European nations such as France or West Germany is declining.

All of these above notions are certainly not new to any regular reader of The Economist. Yet you have not followed your own teachings. Consider:

- You publish a regular Europe section, but continue to lump East Asia and the Indian subcontinent under “miscellaneous,” namely your International section. And the eternal troubles of the Middle East, Africa and Latin America generally occupy the bulk of that section.

- The lack of a separate Far Eastern Survey (or East Asian Survey) thus results in a less than sufficient coverage of those areas. An unscientific perusal of your past six issues (March 15th to April 19th) indicates these totals for regular survey pages of coverage: Europe (excluding the Soviet Union and Britain), 30; East Asia, 11; Indian subcontinent, 3.5. Only the most stubborn Eurocentric would claim that these totals accurately reflect the world importance of these three regions.

The obvious reasons for such skewed coverage are your history and the current composition of your readership and editorial board (for example, the continued existence of your Britain section is solely a relic of the former and a requirement of the latter). But your publication is no longer merely a British newsweekly or a European newsweekly, but has become a global newsweekly, and your emphasis should be reapportioned accordingly.

Establishing a regular survey section devoted to the Far East (or to East Asia) would properly focus increased reportage on what may well be the world’s economic and political center-of-gravity 30 or 40 years hence. Even most forward-looking Europeans might prefer more regular coverage of Japan and China to a surfeit of details on minor European states. And if the difficulties attendant upon the return of Hongkong to China lead to a decline in the quality of the Far Eastern Economic Review, your own increased attention to that part of the world will be of even greater importance.

Ron K. Unz

Stanford, California

Why Books Matter

Unpublished • June 1, 2000 • 800 Words

Here’s a paradox.  A reasonably successful non-fiction public policy book may sell 15,000 to 30,000 copies, many, perhaps most of which will end up being unread.  These numbers are absolutely negligible in a nation of almost 300 million, and are even dwarfed by the tens or hundreds of thousands who might read an op-ed in a major national newspaper such as the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal.  Yet such a book, even if itself unread or actually unreadable, can often have an impact on the national debate orders of magnitude greater than that comparable op-ed.  Furthermore, there often seems to be merely a loose relationship between a book’s quality or even its sales and its public impact.  How is this possible?

As was recently pointed out by Eric Alterman in The Nation, books are important not in spite of their being unread but because they are unread.  The book itself may reach only a few thousand individuals, though perhaps significant ones, and strongly shaping the future thoughts of such persons on a subject might indeed have some lasting significance.  But far more immediate impact follows from the secondary media coverage generated by a highly visible book—the dozens of book reviews, opinion pieces, and news quotes, many of which may appear in major publications, and the least of which probably has a readership far greater than that of the book’s entire print-run.

These reviews and op-eds, which effectively distill the basic ideas of the book into a highly-digestible package, are often far superior in writing quality and organization to anything which the book’s author has produced.  For a widely reviewed book, these secondary articles may reach many millions compared with the book’s thousands.  And if the reviewer or op-ed writer strongly agrees with the concepts presented in the book, they can adjust—or even modify—the author’s thoughts and arguments into a far more cogent or coherent form, making arguments which the author should have made but didn’t.   Since so few people will ever read the book itself, this transformation will go largely undetected.

Furthermore, if the author is reasonably personable and telegenic, and especially if the issues raised by the book are exciting and timely, there exists the potential for a vast wave of tertiary, electronic media coverage on radio and television, with the book tour constituting the jumping-off point.  Since relatively few Americans draw their information from newspapers or magazines, but nearly all are touched by electronic communications, the impact of the book’s ideas may thus potentially expand from the millions to the tens of millions.

The simplicity and clarity of a book’s underlying message is important for success.  A book whose theme has emotional appeal and can be summarized in just a short sentence or two has an obvious comparative advantage over a book with a more complex, diffuse message.  But a book whose message is perceived as overly simplistic or crude may be discounted and therefore ignored by the reviewers who determine the book’s ultimate public impact; a respectable book will be reviewed, whereas a “thin” polemical tract may not be.

Good timing is even more critical to a book’s success, and, given the long lead times involved in writing and publication, this constitutes an enormous element of chance.  The Los Angeles Riots of 1992 unexpectedly lifted Andrew Hacker’s Two Nations on black/white relations to the bestseller lists, and the subsequent national battles over immigration and affirmative action caused Peter Brimelow’s alarmist Alien Nation to far exceed all sales expectations.  But over the past few years, racial issues have receded from the national consciousness, and, consequently, more recent and measured books on that topic have failed to generate much public discussion or many sales.

On the other hand, the Clinton impeachment scandals lifted the sales of an endless list of analytical or partisan books on that subject, with the sexual scandals surrounding Monica Lewinsky also driving the unexpected success of books dealing with a reassessment of female relationship issues, such as Wendy Shalit’s Modesty and Danielle Crittenden’s Mothers, with the simple message of the former generating rather more attention than the more pragmatic and nuanced arguments of the latter.  At present, general affluence and the volatile stock market have driven the success of many books dealing with stock prices—ranging from James Glassman’s Dow 36,000 to Robert Shiller’s Irrational Exuberance—as well as David Brook’s Bobos, focusing on the lifestyles of the newly affluent upper-middle-class.  In today’s climate, Alien Nation would have sunk without a trace, just as Bobos would have failed in 1995.

Finally, having published a book, even one not widely read or reviewed, provides the author with perceived credibility on a subject, whether or not it is actually deserved.  The minuscule size ofAmerica’s reading public, and the obvious time and effort involved in putting 75,000 to 150,000 reasonably coherent words into print provides added intellectual heft and standing, much in the same way as does a faculty position at a major university.

Americans may not read books, but they clearly respect those who write them.

The Life and Legacy of Lt. Gen. William Odom

While other top brass played press agents for the administration’s war, William Odom told the truth about Iraq—though few listened.

The American Conservative • September 8, 2008 • 2,500 Words

Much as the capital loves ceremony, Washington won’t pause on Sept. 8 when Lt. Gen. William Odom is laid to rest at Arlington Cemetery. While he is worthy of his laurels, he did not court the favor of the Beltway political class. Instead, he disdained their blindness to history, their partisan fixations, their herd mentality. Brave men often stand alone.

Those with knowledge of military affairs recognize different types of courage. There is combat courage—the resolve to storm a position or hold a trench against heavy odds. There is command courage—the willingness of officers to take decisive action and sustain losses to secure victory. And there is a third variety, crucial at the topmost ranks of America’s officer corps but increasingly rare—political courage, the willingness to speak truth to political power. Bill Odom, whom I greatly admired and respected, exemplified this last, most elusive kind of courage, which is why his death of a heart attack on May 30 leaves such a void in America’s foreign-policy debate.

He passed away too soon, but in some ways Odom had already lived past his time, the era of Cold War liberal internationalism. After graduating from West Point in 1954, he served in Germany and Vietnam and was later posted to the Moscow embassy. Following several years of teaching at West Point, he came to Washington as an aide to Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Carter’s national security adviser. There, he gained a reputation as “Zbig’s superhawk” for his staunch opposition to détente and his prescient speculations about the possible break-up of the Soviet Union before the end of the century. He went on to serve as assistant chief of staff of the Army for Intelligence and director of the National Security Agency under President Reagan.

In the wake of Sept. 11, this retired three-star general, long a pillar of the foreign-policy establishment, seemed uniquely qualified to be heard. Indeed, he was one of the earliest senior military figures to issue public warnings as the hysterical drive to invade Iraq eventually became a calamitous occupation, an outcome that he later described as “the greatest strategic disaster in U.S. history.”

But since Odom first arrived in D.C.—and especially after the fall of the Soviet Union—the town has become more and more an Imperial City, whose Imperial Court rules a global empire, albeit an increasingly beleaguered and bankrupt one. Competence is far less important to advancement than glibness, media intrigue, and the flattery of wealthy patrons. Sober views of military and geopolitical limits have little place in an administration whose courtiers deride their opponents as members of the “reality-based community.” Therefore, after 9/11, America’s most prestigious newspapers—the New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal—virtually closed their pages to Odom’s discordant views.

Reduced to publishing on small websites like NiemanWatchdog.org, he refused to blunt his critique. Odom’s web columns had titles like “Six brutal truths about Iraq,” “Iraq through the prism of Vietnam,” and “What’s wrong with cutting and running?” Other national columnists said similar things —if more cautiously—but most were liberal pundits with negligible military credentials. Odom had served as one of Ronald Reagan’s highest-ranking national security officials, and his words should have carried enormous weight.

Yet who did the mainstream media select to inform the American public? An endless stream of youthful neocons, almost none of whom had ever worn an American uniform, but who had instead chosen to make their careers in the gilded cocoon of “conservative” think tanks and punditry. Ironically, some of the loudest might have had their closest encounter with military service when they took Odom’s courses in strategy at Yale, though they obviously learned nothing.

There lies another telling contrast. Odom was a career military man. His ancestor Col. George Waller had served with George Washington at Yorktown; two of his great-grandfathers fought for the Confederacy. His only son, Mark, led dangerous field operations in Iraq before being injured last year in an insurgent bombing. Odom was also a serious scholar, with a Columbia Ph.D. in political science, a long list of academic books and journal articles, and an adjunct professorship at Yale.

But to the editors of the major dailies, the proper experts were neocon wordmongers, whose only books were shallow diatribes on subjects ranging from abortion to tax policy to defense, all written with equally zestful ignorance. They knew little about the Mideast or the military, but held advanced degrees in networking, doctorates in self-promotion, and had paid their dues by courting every editor on the cocktail-party circuit. After all, if reality doesn’t exist, why not hire your friends to analyze it?

Yet with America at war, pasty-faced, 30-something Heritage alumni writing endless newspaper columns on grand strategy—and gay marriage—would inspire no confidence on television. The public needed to see high-ranking veterans, solemn and stern-faced, validating the actions of the Bush administration.

That’s exactly what they got. From the moment the planes hit the World Trade Center, the networks, and the cable news channels in particular, developed an insatiable hunger for military commentators, graying former generals heavy on brass and ribbons. Their judgments could not easily be dismissed, given their professional expertise and lifetimes of service, and almost invariably, they supported the views of the White House. The public trusted them and followed where they led—into Afghanistan and then Iraq.

We discovered how much their credibility was worth on April 20, when the New York Times—at long last—published an exposé, based on 8,000 pages of Pentagon e-mail and transcripts, about the business activities and financial ties of these supposedly dispassionate experts. CNN paid them as much as $1,000 per appearance, but most were simultaneously receiving vastly greater sums from their military procurement and government contracting work. For example, Gen. James Marks appeared regularly on cable news throughout 2006, even as he was involved in bidding, through his work with McNeil Technologies, for a $4.6 billion contract to provide translators in Iraq.

One might crudely say that the government owned 99 percent of these men while the news channels rented 1 percent—and then asked them their opinion of the government. Their financial futures were in the hands of the administration officials they were evaluating on television.

The White House played this relationship to full advantage. Bush officials routinely organized briefings to provide inside information to these pundits and to tailor their commentary. The New York Times uncovered Pentagon documents describing the talking-head generals as “message force multipliers” or “surrogates,” who could be counted on to propagate the administration’s message “in the form of their opinions.” The Pentagon even hired Omnitec Solutions, a consulting company, to watch the television appearances and grade the performances of these purportedly neutral commentators. The reviews were then passed on to Bush appointees at the Pentagon who controlled the flow of procurement funding.

There are documented examples of retired generals believing that the situation in Iraq was an absolute disaster, but providing only the requested Happy News to millions of Americans seeking their wisdom on television. After returning from a government-sponsored trip to Iraq, Gen. Paul E. Vallely, a Fox News analyst, told Alan Colmes, “You can’t believe the progress,” predicting that the insurgency would be reduced “to a few numbers” within months. But he later told the New York Times, “I saw immediately that things were going south in 2003.”

Many of these former high-ranking American military officers should have every right to request membership in the Screen Actors Guild, and in some cases their theatrical pay might place them near the upper end of the Hollywood wage scale. There is a particular word for military officers who trade away their own country’s national security interests for large financial payments, and it is not a pleasant one.

Bill Odom instead held to the code of traditional military honor. He had not entered the Armed Forces in hopes of acquiring a huge Loudoun County mansion. When he left his home in rural Appalachia to enroll at West Point, his reasons were patriotism and public service—as was almost universally true among members of his generation.

These selfless motives persist in today’s military—but perhaps to a lesser degree. Social and financial corruption frequently start at the top, and when American generals leverage their military careers to become multi-millionaires, many colonels, majors, and captains may begin thinking along similar lines.

Indeed, America’s explicit doctrine of substituting payment for public spirit and personal integrity has reached new levels of absurdity in our Iraq policies. One-fifth—some $100 billion—of our military spending in Iraq has gone to private contractors. This category includes the many tens of thousands of “security contractors”—private mercenaries—who constitute an important fraction of the occupation forces.

Many of these are South Africans, Brazilians, or French, the traditional “wild geese” who have long traveled the world in search of lucrative wars to fight. But a disturbingly high number are American. When experienced soldiers can quit the Army and immediately return to Iraq as hired guns, making five or six times their previous salaries, they might easily conclude that national military service is merely for the gullible. Thus some fraction of today’s bloated Pentagon budget is actually spent to lure America’s best troops into abandoning their military careers, thereby hollowing out our ground forces.

Some adventuresome neocon pundits have even suggested opening the American Armed Forces to any foreigners willing to join. In return for high pay and automatic citizenship, they need only march wherever their officers tell them to march and shoot whomever their officers tell them to shoot. There is a long record of ugly precedents for countries that choose to replace their national militaries with foreign mercenaries, but history experts who have never read a history book might remain unaware of this.

Although such massive corruption is without modern American precedent, the Iraq War’s parallels to Vietnam are obvious. Liberal pundits are reluctant to note the similarities, lest they be denounced as “unpatriotic” by their bellicose conservative colleagues. But Bill Odom suffered no such qualms. When he saw Vietnam recurring, he said so— and dared anyone to contradict him.

As a staff officer in Saigon, he witnessed firsthand the utter futility and disastrous consequences of that war, both for that country and for the cohesion of the American military. Years later, he pointed out that since the strategic rationale had been to contain China, our war with Hanoi made no sense, given that the Vietnamese were traditionally the strongest local adversaries of the Chinese and indeed fought a bloody border war with China almost immediately after America’s departure. Also, Soviet Russia was America’s great antagonist during that period, and containing China was a key Russian objective, so our war was actually fought on behalf of our leading international adversary. The true reason we spent so many years sacrificing vast quantities of American blood, money, and credibility in the jungles of Southeast Asia was that ending the war would be an admission that American leaders had made a horrible mistake in beginning it.

Following 9/11, our Mideast strategy became similarly irrational. Odom noted that Saddam Hussein, a secular Arab nationalist, had for decades been the greatest regional enemy of both the Iranians and radical Islamists such as Osama bin Laden. Therefore, our Iraq War was serving the interests of these hostile, anti-American powers. And for several years now, it has been obvious that the single greatest reason America does not withdraw from Iraq is the fear of acknowledging our blunder.

When I first met Bill Odom in the early 1990s, shortly after the Cold War ended and he had become director of the National Security Program at the Hudson Institute, he was hopeful that America would become more of a “normal country.” His last book, begun at the end of the 1990s with Robert Dujarric, one of my college roommates, was entitled America’s Inadvertent Empire. It analyzed the United States’ enormous military, economic, technological, and cultural power but never considered that those assets might be turned to wars of imperial conquest and occupation.

Of course, Sept. 11 changed everything. Since that date America has begun behaving as an exceptionally abnormal country, and Odom’s disappearance means our leaders’ dangerous course is even less likely to receive honest analysis. Days before his death, Odom had co-authored a Washington Post piece with Brzezinski, urging an immediate strategic rapprochement with Iran as a means of stabilizing Iraq pursuant to an American withdrawal. The Post had finally become willing to publish Odom’s views, but his counsel seemed to fall on deaf ears. The danger of an American attack on Iran may have since faded—presumably being embroiled in two wars makes the Pentagon cautious about starting another —but belligerent rhetoric continues to issue from all major political candidates. America has 200,000 troops occupying Iraq on the other side of the world and has already caused the deaths of over 1 million Iraqi civilians, but American leaders still regularly denounce Iran for its “interference” in its next-door neighbor. Bill Odom smiled at politicians who demonstrate such political blindness.

The most chilling of his public pronouncements has received little attention, though it might be regarded as his last will and testament to the country he loved. In early April, he and a number of other prominent military critics of the Iraq War were called to give Congressional testimony. All criticized the occupation and urged a rapid American withdrawal, but Odom went farther. He said that without prompt action, Baghdad could become America’s Dien Bien Phu, where superior French forces were surrounded, trapped, cut off from supplies, and ultimately destroyed by Vietnamese guerrillas.

The comparison is not as absurd as it might seem. America possesses a powerful force in Iraq, but, as military analyst William Lind has repeatedly emphasized, that force is almost entirely dependent on a long and slender supply line from Kuwait, which runs through territory controlled by Shi’ite forces friendly to Iran. Some 500 tanker trucks of fuel must reach the American Army each day for it to maintain operational mobility. If widespread guerrilla action were to reduce substantially the number or transit speed of those convoys, America’s advantage in advanced hardware—our primary strength—would become increasingly irrelevant.

Under such a scenario, any American president who finally issued a command to withdraw would be forced to abandon vast amounts of military hardware, thereby publicly formalizing the greatest defeat in American history. But any president who did not issue such a humiliating withdrawal order would risk the total loss of America’s huge expeditionary force. That result would rank with the greatest military disasters in all history—enormously worse than Dien Bien Phu, and comparable in scale to the doomed Sicilian Expedition of the Athenians.

As a serious scholar, Bill Odom knew his Thucydides. But the country he leaves behind does not.

Was Rambo Right?

Hundreds of POWs may have been left to die in Vietnam, abandoned by their government—and our media.

The American Conservative • May 25, 2010 • 1,300 Words

In the closing days of the 2008 presidential campaign, I clicked an ambiguous link on an obscure website and stumbled into a parallel universe.

During the previous two years of that long election cycle, the media narrative surrounding Sen. John McCain had been one of unblemished heroism and selfless devotion to his fellow servicemen. Thousands of stories on television and in print had told of his brutal torture at the hands of his North Vietnamese captors, his steely refusal to crack, and his later political career aimed at serving the needs of fellow Vietnam veterans. This storyline had first reached the national stage during his 2000 campaign, then returned with even greater force as he successfully sought the 2008 Republican nomination. Seemingly accepted by all, this history became a centerpiece of his campaign. McCain’s supporters touted his heroism as proof that he possessed the character to be entrusted with America’s highest office, while his detractors merely sought to change the subject.

Once I clicked that link, I encountered a very different John McCain.

I read copious, detailed evidence that hundreds of American POWs had been condemned to death at enemy hands by top American leaders, apparently because their safe return home would have constituted a major political embarrassment. I found documentation that the cover-up of this betrayal had gone on for decades, eventually drawing in a certain Arizona senator. According to this remarkable reconstruction of events, the average teenage moviegoer of the 1980s watching mindless action films such as “Rambo,” “Missing in Action,” and “Uncommon Valor” was seeing reality portrayed on screen, while the policy expert reading sober articles in the pages of The New Republic and The Atlantic was absorbing lies and propaganda. Since I had been believing those very articles, this was a stunning revelation.

But was this alternate description of reality correct? Could this one article be true and all the countless contrary pieces I had read in America’s most prestigious publications be false, merely the presentation of official propaganda endlessly repeated? I cannot say. I am not an expert on the history of the Vietnam War and its aftermath.

Yet consider the source. The author of that remarkable 8,000-word exposé—“McCain and the POW Cover-Up,” published on The Nation Institute’s website—was Sydney Schanberg, one of America’s foremost Vietnam War journalists. His reporting won him a Pulitzer Prize, and his subsequent book on Cambodia was made into “The Killing Fields,” an Oscar-winning movie. Schanberg later served as one of the highest-ranking editors at the New York Times, with a third of the reporters at our national newspaper of record working under him. A case can be made that no living American journalist can write with greater credibility on Vietnam War matters. And he had labored for years researching and exhaustively documenting the story of American POWs abandoned in Indochina—a story that if true might easily represent the single greatest act of national dishonor ever committed by our political leaders.

He presented a mass of evidence with names, dates, and documentary detail. Many of the individuals mentioned are still alive and could be interviewed or called to testify. Sealed government records could be ordered unsealed. If America wishes to determine the truth, it can do so.

Yet what I found most remarkable about Schanberg’s essay were not its explosive historical claims but the absolute silence with which they were received in the mainstream media. In 2008, John McCain’s heroic war record and personal patriotism were central to his quest for supreme power—a goal he came very close to achieving. But when one of America’s most eminent journalists published an exhaustive report that the candidate had instead served as one of the leading figures in a monumental act of national treachery, our media took no notice. McCain’s public critics and the operatives of his Democratic opponent might eagerly seize upon every rumor that the senator had had a private lunch with a disreputable corporate lobbyist, but they ignored documented claims that he had covered up the killing of hundreds of American POWs. These allegations were serious enough and sufficiently documented to warrant national attention—yet they received none.

All of this might seem unimaginable except that it falls into a strong pattern of the press avoiding stories of overwhelming importance. Consider how many of the national disasters of the past few years have been caused by the unwillingness of our major media to question official truths or the widespread beliefs of our elites. The Iraq “cakewalk” to eliminate Saddam’s WMDs, the nationwide housing bubble, and the Madoff swindle might have been prevented or would never have reached such massive proportions if reporters and editors had been willing to investigate and present claims contrary to the soothing blandishments of the powerful. Instead, it has become the norm for press outlets simply to repeat, with a few word substitutions, stories indistinguishable from those previously published by dozens of other press outlets, without ever examining any contrary evidence that might raise doubts about this perceived reality. Truth has come to mean the lies that everyone believes.

A couple of years ago, in one of my last exchanges with my late friend Lt. Gen. Bill Odom, who ran the National Security Agency for President Ronald Reagan, we agreed a case could be made that today’s major American media had become just as dishonest and unreliable as the old Soviet propaganda outlets of the late 1970s. At the time, we were discussing the coverage of our road to the Iraq War, but subsequent events have demonstrated that this national illness is far more advanced than either of us had suspected. Whether or not Schanberg is proven correct, the shameful cowardice of our mainstream media is already proven by the wall of silence surrounding his work.

In an attempt to breach that wall, we present Schanberg’s account of how his remarkable story was buried, as well as his explosive original article. TAC has also convened a symposium of critics drawn from military, political, and journalism backgrounds to explain how this report could have failed to reach a mass audience. A small political magazine does not have the resources to investigate the detailed evidence of Schanberg’s case, but we can hold a mirror up to America’s major media and force them to see what stories they now regard as completely non-newsworthy.

And if Schanberg’s claims are indeed correct, they reveal the lethal consequences of America’s overweening national pride. After all, his history is a simple one. Following the battle of Dien Bien Phu in 1954, the Vietnamese refused to return their French POWs unless Paris agreed to pay financial compensation for the war. The French leaders paid the money and got their men back. Similarly, the Vietnamese refused to return their American POWs unless the U.S. government agreed to pay reparations. Nixon signed a document promising to do exactly that, but the Vietnamese, being cautious, kept many of the POWs back until the money was delivered. Then Congress refused to authorize the funds because “America doesn’t lose wars.” Nixon and later U.S. leaders never acknowledged the fate of these captives lest the American people become outraged. And as the years and decades went by, and various schemes to ransom or rescue the POWs were considered and rejected, their continued existence became a major liability to numerous powerful political figures, whose reputations would have been destroyed if any of the prisoners ever returned and told his story to the American people. So none of them ever came home.

Ron Unz is publisher of The American Conservative.

Chinese Melamine and American Vioxx: A Comparison

The American Conservative • April 17, 2012 • 1,800 Words

In contrasting China and America, pundits often cite our free and independent media as one of our greatest strengths, together with the tremendous importance which our society places upon individual American lives. For us, a single wrongful death can sometimes provoke weeks of massive media coverage and galvanize the nation into corrective action, while life remains cheap in China, a far poorer land of over a billion people, ruled by a ruthless Communist Party eager to bury its mistakes. But an examination of two of the greatest public-health scandals of the last few years casts serious doubt on this widespread belief.

First, consider the details of the Chinese infant formula scandal of 2008. Unscrupulous businessmen had discovered they could save money by greatly diluting their milk products, then adding a plastic chemical compound called melamine to raise the apparent protein content back to normal levels. Nearly 300,000 babies throughout China had suffered urinary problems, with many hundreds requiring lengthy hospitalization for kidney stones. Six died. A wave of popular outrage swept past the controlled media roadblocks and initial government excuses, and soon put enormous pressure on Chinese officials to take forceful action against the wrongdoers.

China’s leaders may not be democratically elected, but they pay close attention to strong popular sentiment. Once pressed, they quickly launched a national police investigation which led to a series of arrests and uncovered evidence that this widespread system of food adulteration had been protected by bribe-taking government officials. Long prison sentences were freely handed out and a couple of the guiltiest culprits were eventually tried and executed for their role, measures that gradually assuaged popular anger. Indeed, the former head of the Chinese FDA had been executed for corruption in late 2007 under similar circumstances.

Throughout these events, American media coverage was extensive, with numerous front-page stories in our leading newspapers. Journalists discovered that similar methods of dangerous chemical adulteration had been used to produce Chinese pet food for export, and many family dogs in America had suffered or died as a result. With heavy coverage on talk radio and cable news shows, phrases such as “Chinese baby formula” or “Chinese pet food” became angry slurs, and there was talk of banning whole categories of imports from a country whose product safety standards were obviously so far below those found in Western societies. The legitimate concerns of ordinary Americans were fanned by local media coverage that sometimes bordered on the hysterical.

However, the American media reaction had been quite different during an earlier health scandal much closer to home.

In September 2004, Merck, one of America’s largest pharmaceutical companies, suddenly announced that it was voluntarily recalling Vioxx, its popular anti-pain medication widely used to treat arthritis-related ailments. This abrupt recall came just days after Merck discovered that a top medical journal was about to publish a massive study by an FDA investigator indicating that the drug in question greatly increased the risk of fatal heart attacks and strokes and had probably been responsible for at least 55,000 American deaths during the five years it had been on the market.

Within weeks of the recall, journalists discovered that Merck had found strong evidence of the potentially fatal side-effects of this drug even before its initial 1999 introduction, but had ignored these worrisome indicators and avoided additional testing, while suppressing the concerns of its own scientists. Boosted by a television advertising budget averaging a hundred million dollars per year, Vioxx soon became one of Merck’s most lucrative products, generating over $2 billion in yearly revenue. Merck had also secretly ghostwritten dozens of the published research studies emphasizing the beneficial aspects of the drug and encouraging doctors to widely prescribe it, thus transforming science into marketing support. Twenty-five million Americans were eventually prescribed Vioxx as an aspirin-substitute thought to produce fewer complications.

Although the Vioxx scandal certainly did generate several days of newspaper headlines and intermittently returned to the front pages as the resulting lawsuits gradually moved through our judicial system, the coverage still seemed scanty relative to the number of estimated fatalities, which matched America’s total losses in the Vietnam War. In fact, the media coverage often seemed considerably less than that later accorded to the Chinese infant food scandal, which had caused just a handful of deaths on the other side of the world.

The circumstances of this case were exceptionally egregious, with many tens of thousands of American deaths due to the sale of a highly lucrative but sometimes fatal drug, whose harmful effects had long been known to its manufacturer. But there is no sign that criminal charges were ever considered.

A massive class-action lawsuit dragged its way through the courts for years, eventually being settled for $4.85 billion in 2007, with almost half the money going to the trial lawyers. Merck shareholders also paid large sums to settle various other lawsuits and government penalties and cover the heavy legal costs of fighting all of these cases. But the loss of continuing Vioxx sales represented the greatest financial penalty of all, which provides a disturbing insight into the cost-benefit calculations behind the company’s original cover-up. When the scandal broke, Merck’s stock price collapsed, and there was a widespread belief that the company could not possibly survive, especially after evidence of a deliberate corporate conspiracy surfaced. Instead, Merck’s stock price eventually reached new heights in 2008 and today is just 15 percent below where it stood just before the disaster.

Furthermore, individuals make decisions rather than corporate entities, and none of the individuals behind Merck’s deadly decisions apparently suffered any serious consequences. The year after the scandal unfolded, Merck’s long-time CEO resigned and was replaced by one of his top lieutenants, but he retained the $50 million in financial compensation he had received over the previous five years, compensation greatly boosted by lucrative Vioxx sales. Senior FDA officials apologized for their lack of effective oversight and promised to do better in the future. American media conglomerates quietly mourned their loss of heavy Vioxx advertising, but continued selling the same airtime to Merck and its rivals for the marketing of other, replacement drugs, while their investigative arms soon focused on the horrors of tainted Chinese infant food and the endemic corruption of Chinese society.

This story of serious corporate malfeasance largely forgiven and forgotten by government and media is depressing enough, but it leaves out a crucial factual detail that seems to have almost totally escaped public notice. The year after Vioxx had been pulled from the market, the New York Times and other major media outlets published a minor news item, generally buried near the bottom of their back pages, which noted that American death rates had suddenly undergone a striking and completely unexpected decline.

The headline of the short article that ran in the April 19, 2005 edition of USA Today was typical: “USA Records Largest Drop in Annual Deaths in at Least 60 Years.” During that one year, American deaths had fallen by 50,000 despite the growth in both the size and the age of the nation’s population. Government health experts were quoted as being greatly “surprised” and “scratching [their] heads” over this strange anomaly, which was led by a sharp drop in fatal heart attacks.

On April 24, 2005, the New York Times ran another of its long stories about the continuing Vioxx controversy, disclosing that Merck officials had knowingly concealed evidence that their drug greatly increased the risk of heart-related fatalities. But the Times journalist made no mention of the seemingly inexplicable drop in national mortality rates that had occurred once the drug was taken off the market, although the news had been reported in his own paper just a few days earlier.

A cursory examination of the most recent 15 years worth of national mortality data provided on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention website offers some intriguing clues to this mystery. We find the largest rise in American mortality rates occurred in 1999, the year Vioxx was introduced, while the largest drop occurred in 2004, the year it was withdrawn. Vioxx was almost entirely marketed to the elderly, and these substantial changes in national death-rate were completely concentrated within the 65-plus population. The FDA studies had proven that use of Vioxx led to deaths from cardiovascular diseases such as heart attacks and strokes, and these were exactly the factors driving the changes in national mortality rates.

The impact of these shifts was not small. After a decade of remaining roughly constant, the overall American death rate began a substantial decline in 2004, soon falling by approximately 5 percent, despite the continued aging of the population. This drop corresponds to roughly 100,000 fewer deaths per year. The age-adjusted decline in death rates was considerably greater.

Patterns of cause and effect cannot easily be proven. But if we hypothesize a direct connection between the recall of a class of very popular drugs proven to cause fatal heart attacks and other deadly illnesses with an immediate drop in the national rate of fatal heart attacks and other deadly illnesses, then the statistical implications are quite serious. Perhaps 500,000 or more premature American deaths may have resulted from Vioxx, a figure substantially larger than the 3,468 deaths of named individuals acknowledged by Merck during the settlement of its lawsuit. And almost no one among our political or media elites seems to know or care about this possibility. A recent Wall Street Journal column even called for relaxing FDA restrictions aimed at avoiding “rare adverse events,” which had been imposed after the discovery of “unanticipated side effects of high-profile drugs like Vioxx.”

There are obvious mitigating differences between these two national responses. The Chinese victims were children, and their sufferings from kidney stones and other ailments were directly linked to the harmful compounds that they had ingested. By contrast, the American victims were almost all elderly, and there was no means of determining whether a particular heart attack had been caused by Vioxx or other factors; the evidence implicating the drug was purely statistical, across millions of patients. Furthermore, since most of the victims were anyway nearing the end of their lives, the result was more an acceleration of the inevitable rather than cutting short an entire young life, and sudden fatal heart attacks are hardly the most unpleasant forms of death.

But against these important factors we must consider the raw numbers involved. American journalists seemed to focus more attention on a half-dozen fatalities in China than they did on the premature deaths of as many as 500,000 of their fellow American citizens.

The inescapable conclusion is that in today’s world and in the opinion of our own media, American lives are quite cheap, unlike those in China.

The Long Decline of The London Economist

The American Conservative • April 27, 2012 • 1,900 Words

Once, long ago, at the very close of the 1970s, I discovered a most remarkable periodical.

Published on newsprint so thin as to almost be translucent, mailed out twice each fortnight tightly folded in a plain brown wrapper, it called itself a “newspaper” rather than a magazine, carried no bylines for its articles or masthead for its issues, and in its style sometimes almost seemed a strange intellectual residue of pre-war Old Europe, often ignoring the many shibboleths and taboos which so infested respectable American journalism. Its great intelligence and its plainspokenness were enormously refreshing, and with a minuscule circulation of around 50,000, few of them Americans, I felt that I had discovered a wondrous secret source of true world knowledge. Such was the old London Economist under Norman Macrae, its longtime Deputy Editor and shaping influence.

For almost twenty years I eagerly read each issue almost cover-to-cover, and was well-rewarded for my invested time. Moreover, in the blue-tinted pages of its companion Economist Intelligence Report newsletter, I read of Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin as rising Soviet figures, years before they ever received any mention in America’s elite media. When The Economist ran its 1985 cover highlighting the doubling of Chinese agricultural production in just seven years, I showed it round to all my friends as proof that I’d been correct during all those years I’d been predicting China’s rapid rise, and they readily conceded the point: the Oracle of London had spoken.

To some very small extent, perhaps I may even have repaid some of the benefits I received. In 1986, their editors published an especially long letter of mine, urging them to establish a regular Asia Section because of the enormously growing importance of that part of the world, and the following year they did exactly that, an important step on their path to becoming a truly global newsweekly, though there is no evidence that my suggestion played any significant role.

Alas, the very quality and uniqueness of the magazine proved its undoing. As years went by, more and more well-educated Americans discovered a periodical revealing ideas and facts largely ignored by our own elite newspapers, let alone Time and Newsweek aimed at ten million or more weekly readers. Whereas as late as the early 1990s, its advertising would still brag that it was *not* read by millions, by 2000 the million circulation mark had been reached, together with the enormous profitability provided by a decidedly upscale and elite readership.

But all these new subscribers were mostly affluent Americans, whose sensibilities and perspectives were quite different from that of the few tens of thousands of British who’d previously constituted the core readership. To these newcomers—and even more importantly to the wealthy advertisers they attracted—reality was bounded by The New York Times on the left and The Wall Street Journal on the right, and anything which pushed too far outside that envelope of respectable opinion was discordant, perhaps even disturbing. So as time went on, more and more of the sharp intellectual features which had once given the magazine such verve and originality were gradually sanded off, not completely, but to a considerable extent. The London Economist became just the plain Economist, rarely willing to violate the boundaries or taboos of the reigning DC/NYC neoconservative/neoliberal American Establishment, merely a smarter, better written, much deeper version of Time or Businessweek.

This sad intellectual decline became obvious to me over the last decade, as America’s post-9/11 policies, both foreign and domestic, swerved into almost total madness, yet continued to receive a mixture of support plus some occasional tut-tutting from a magazine which I had once so greatly respected. Perhaps the top editors recollected the case of their esteemed predecessor Francis Hirst, who had publicly broached the possibility of a negotiated peace to end the useless slaughter of WWI, and been summarily dismissed as editor in 1916 for his obvious lack of patriotism.

And the endless, unimaginable disasters which America suffered due to these absurd policies seem not to have left many editorial marks. A cursory examination of recent covers reveals such stories as: the Iranian nuclear weapons threat; the importance of “freeing Syria”; the looming collapse of Putin’s regime; the over-regulation of the American economy; and the horrific problems faced by America’s rich. Just change a few words here and there and those same covers could have been run five or ten years ago. The Economist has now simply ranks among the most elite media organs of America’s One Party State.

The factor which prompted me to provide this depressing description was a major article in the current issue entitled “China’s Achilles heel,” which several people brought to my attention as a seeming refutation of my own China/America analysis. The claim is that China’s projected demography constitutes a “deadly point of unseen weakness,” in sharp contrast to America’s quite healthy future situation. But while such “happy news” may lighten the hearts of DC pundits and the appartchiks they inform, the analysis advanced doesn’t strike me as very persuasive.

For example, the argument is made that China “will grow old before it grows rich,” and will have a median age considerably higher than America’s in 2050, 40 years hence. That may be true, but if we roll forward the economic growth rates of the last few decades, the average Chinese will have become roughly as wealthy as the average American in just another 20 years, long before that point. Extrapolate those economic trends 20 years beyond that, and Chinese will be enormously wealthier than Americans in 2050.

Obviously such economic trends might not continue, and in fact they almost certainly will not. But the changes might easily be to America’s detriment rather than China’s. It seems quite likely that the dollar’s day as the international reserve currency is rapidly drawing to a close, and once that status is lost, the greenback might easily collapse in value, and take with it the American standard of living. I very much doubt that Chinese will be wealthier than Americans by the end of this current decade, but such a result is not totally impossible.

The Economist seems to regard America’s ongoing “population Ponzi scheme” as a great ace-in-the-hole with regard to our economic growth and social requirements. But while it’s true that Bernie Madoff did very well financially for similar reasons, things didn’t work out for him in the end. Is it really a good thing that the American population is growing more rapidly than that of Mexico or Algeria, or that (as The Economist puts it) “no one knows when America will reach its population peak”?

Meanwhile, The Economist argues that China may find it almost impossible to eventually raise fertility rates back to a stable 2.1 target after decades of much lower numbers, and a vicious spiral of permanently shrinking numbers caused by “ultra-low fertility” may result. But does this make any sense? After all, if the Chinese government eliminated its restrictive one child policy, births would presumably increase. If the centralized Communist government began a mass propaganda campaign about the glories of two or three or four children, births would presumably increase even more. And if worst came to worst, the Chinese government could easily afford to pay a bonus of $5,000 or more for every second or third child, which would surely boost the birth rate enormously for low total cost. I find it difficult to believe that a determined national government commanding vast financial resources could not speedily revive a five thousand year tradition of large families if it somehow felt the need to do so. Perhaps the writer was confusing China with America, whose dysfunctional government can never seem to get anything done.

To the extent that this particular piece is representative, I fear that Economist clear-headedness has been replaced by the sort of wishful thinking that still dominates our DC/NYC ruling elites. Since these very elites presumably constitute the extended social circle of many Economist writers and editors, this is perhaps not surprising.

If we seek a contrasting case to these ideological and establishmentarian trends which have so afflicted The Economist over the last dozen years, an absolutely polar-opposite example comes to mind, in the person of columnist Paul Craig Roberts. As one of the most prominent free-market economists of the 1980s and 1990s, Roberts had served as Associate Editor of The Wall Street Journal and Assistant Treasury Secretary in the Reagan Administration. Until a decade ago, I suspect that his views on a whole range of issues and those of the Economist editors would have been reasonably close.

But whereas the aftermath of 9/11 revealed how completely the once-independent Economist had become absorbed into the DC/NYC elite consensus, Roberts’ reaction was exactly in the opposite direction. Gradually becoming more and more outraged over the irrational and indeed criminal behavior of the Bush Administration and its sycophantic media enablers, Roberts soon became unwelcome within the same conservative establishment circles in which he had once held positions of the highest possible honor. Under the old Soviet Regime, individuals of strong convictions such as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Andrei Sakharov had similarly fallen from the top-most ranks of the ruling literary and scientific elite into becoming total political unpersons, completely barred from any access to the mass media and with their opinions almost unknown to the general public.

Such might also have been Roberts’ own fate twenty or thirty years ago, but the Internet changed all that. As the endless wars and disasters of the 2000s followed each other in rapid sequence, usually to the uniform cheers of all our timorous pundits, liberal and conservative alike, there developed a vast opening for someone who would forthrightly declare that the emperor had no clothes rather than laboriously describing the various colors and textures. Within just a few years, Roberts had become among the most prominent of Internet columnists, with an enormous following cutting across almost all ideological lines, left, right, and libertarian. Based on website traffic and Google searches, I would suspect that Roberts enjoys far greater readership and public influence than that vast majority of the elite columnists who perch on the pages of the NYT or WSJ or WashPost, since these individuals mostly say almost nothing interesting, and do so in a mealy-mouthed style. Does any Russian today remember the names of Pravda’s top columnists of 1985?

A perfect example of Roberts’ style and his reach came in his very generous recent column entitled “Unplugging Americans From The Matrix.” discussing my own China/America article.  The metaphor of Americans trapped in the artificial reality generated by our totally dishonest mainstream media seems a very apt one, as is the frustration of those of us who unsuccessfully attempt to awaken them.

The resonance of Roberts’ words is enormous. Within just a few days of the column’s appearance, Google revealed that it had been reprinted or heavily excerpted on a thousand or more individual websites, been translated into several non-English translations, and accrued a total readership impossible to estimate, but obviously very large given the heavy traffic back to my own article. Today’s Economist might have a subscriber base of 1.5M, but it wouldn’t surprise me if far more individuals actually read a typical Roberts column than one by “Lexington.” And who knows which of these would have been the favored choice of Norman Macrae, if he had lived through the terrible events of the last decade and seen these almost totally ignored or excused by mainstream journalists, even including the close colleagues of his own once-beloved publication.

Buckley's Unlikely Heir

Remembering Alexander Cockburn (1941–2012)

The American Conservative • August 23, 2012 • 1,100 Words

I first encountered the writing of Alexander Cockburn in the early 1990s on the op-ed pages of the Wall Street Journal, where he served as a regular columnist. Given that Alex was one of the premier radical-left journalists of our era, this highlights the unique background of the man.

Being myself then a rather moderate and mainstream conservative, I don’t recall reading any of his particular pieces or holding them in high regard. With the Berlin Wall having already fallen, the Communist regimes of Eastern Europe overthrown, and the Soviet Union itself undergoing dissolution, I had the sense that Cockburn was a bit dismayed by these revolutionary changes which were so welcomed by almost the entire thinking world. So I put him down as something of a stubborn left-contrarian and after glancing at his column usually shifted my attention to the endless discussions of tax policy and free trade that occupied the entire remaining sheet of gray newsprint. Eventually, I noticed that his columns had stopped appearing, which didn’t much surprise me.

His second act in reaching my awareness came just over a decade later, following the September 11 attacks. During the years of public build-up to our ill-fated Iraq War, which my old friend Lt. Gen. Bill Odom later described as “the greatest strategic disaster in United States history,” it was extremely rare to find an opinion in any mainstream media outlet not fatally contaminated with the sort of ignorance or cowardice that was leading America straight over the cliff.

In this parched desert of rational discussion, I somehow in 2002 or 2003 stumbled across a link to one of Alex’s Counterpunch columns, which seemed to provide the sort of remarkably good sense almost totally absent from the pages of the major newspapers and opinion magazines. As I told a few friends at the time, perhaps that Cockburn fellow really isn’t the silly leftist I’d vaguely assumed him to be. And as I gradually began to spend some time reading the collection of well-written commentary he daily provided on his shoestring website operation, its perspective on reality came to seem more and more credible, while that of the New York Times op-ed page sank at an equal speed.

Given my own scientific background in theoretical physics, I tend to follow a simple rule in attempting to discover the reality of the world. When people say things widely denounced by all established opinion but that turn out to be correct, I grant them an extra point. But when allegedly well-informed people backed by massive resources say things that seem absurd to me and these turn out to be totally false, they lose a point. By the time the massive hoax of the Saddam’s WMD had exploded into international ridicule and national disaster, Alex’s Counterpunch and the Sulzbergers’ Gray Lady had largely switched their positions of credibility in my mind, at least across a broad range of issues. In the years that followed, there were many mornings when I would read endless amounts of absurd, dishonest nonsense in the news pages of the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, only to discover a far more plausible and accurate discussion of world events on Counterpunch’s bright pages.

Meanwhile, my own intellectual horizons were steadily broadened by his stable of regular contributors, sometimes in unexpected ways. Alex was very decidedly a man of the left, indeed of the second generation, given that his father Claud had been one of the leading communist journalists of the 1930s. But the severe compression of the allowed ideological landscape in American journalism had established his website as a port in the storm for conservative voices as well.

It was at Counterpunch that I first encountered the pungent military analysis of William Lind. When I once showed one of Lind’s articles to an acquaintance, he denounced Lind as an ignorant leftist, only to be shocked when I explained that Lind had had an illustrious career as a congressional staffer specializing in military reform and was also the longtime closest collaborator of Paul Weyrich, one of D.C.’s most prominent movement-conservative leaders.

I appreciated the thoughtful commentary on our Middle East policy by Kathleen and Bill Christison, former CIA analysts specializing in that region, and later discovered the same last name on articles of the same subject in back issues of National Review from the mid-1980s. NR’s loss was Counterpunch’s gain.

Similarly, Paul Craig Roberts had for decades been one of the leading conservative intellectual figures at the intersection of academics and policy, playing a major role in crafting the economic policies of the Reagan administration and holding a variety of top-ranking appointments in the conservative firmament, while being one of the most widely distributed national columnists. But after he refused to toe the line following 9/11, he was ruthlessly purged, and his important voice might have been lost if Counterpunch and a few other websites had not provided him a venue.

Add the names Ray McGovern, Winslow Wheeler, Franklin Spinney, Pierre Sprey, and a few others to this list, and it sometimes seemed like half the Counterpunch articles I read were by authors with unassailable national-intelligence, military-affairs, or even movement-conservative credentials. Purged, blacklisted, or simply ignored by Conservativism, Inc., they often relied upon Alex’s webzine as the primary distributor of their well-informed writings. Once or twice I joked with Alex that perhaps he was actually Bill Buckley’s truest heir.

Credibility represents a valuable capital asset, one that may easily be invested for further gain or loss, and Alex always had the courage to risk his holdings boldly, including on those issues which greatly infuriated his usual allies on the left.

In the mid-2000s, I was quite surprised to read Alex’s columns unmasking himself as a global-warming “denialist,” making some pretty good arguments for his skepticism, and ridiculing the notorious group-think of America’s lock-step—and scientifically illiterate—punditocracy. Not having investigated the subject myself, I don’t really have a position, but I would say that Alex’s sincere perspective counted more for me than that of a hundred dutiful oil-company hirelings writing for conservative think tanks and could go toe-to-toe with the absolutely universal views found among all their mainstream opponents.

Alex Cockburn was simply a remarkably courageous, honest, and free-thinking journalist, which in these dark days marked him as a very rare figure indeed.

Ron Unz is publisher of TAC and founder of Unz.org.

Two Cheers for Heresy on Global Warming

Climate change is a cycle—of faddish opinions

The American Conservative • September 24, 2012 • 1,200 Words

I first encountered the strong case for global warming in the early 1970s in an Isaac Asimov science column. As an elementary school student, I merely nodded my head, assumed that America’s political leadership would address the danger, and moved on to an explanation of quarks.

Even in those days, the subject was hardly new. The Asimov column had originally run in the late 1950s, before I was even born, and the possibility that burning fossil fuels might raise the Earth’s temperature via the “Greenhouse Effect” had already been around for many decades, going back to the late 19th century. Whether it occurred in the real world was a different matter.

My next encounter with climate change came in the mid-1970s. Suddenly all the magazines and newspapers were filled with stories that scientists had determined that the world was on the brink of a new Ice Age, with global cooling about to devastate our civilization. I still recall Newsweek’s famous cover depicting an American street scene blanketed by an arctic blizzard. Although I wondered at how quickly warming had switched to cooling, I was in junior high and assumed that our scientists—and the media that presented them—knew what they were talking about. Fortunately, no glaciers appeared, and the topic was soon forgotten.

By the late 1970s, I had joined high-school debate, and one year the topic was the environment, with climate-related issues being the biggest sub-topic. So I diligently gathered vast quantities of highly credible evidence from noted scientific experts proclaiming the certainty of global warming, global cooling, both, or neither, and lugged them around in my evidence boxes to all the tournaments. Random lot would determine whether I persuasively argued that CO2 emissions would fry us to a crisp or whether solar blockage from particulate emissions would freeze us to an icicle, or whether perhaps the two effects would perfectly cancel out. Since debate tournaments often had four rounds, I might alternate my claims of glaciers growing and glaciers melting every hour or so, always backing my position with copious evidence from expert sources. I reluctantly concluded that climatology was merely a pseudoscience, at least compared to my own field of theoretical physics, and I was glad when the debate topic switched to foreign policy the following year.

I had almost forgotten about both warming and cooling when the unusually hot summer of 1988 stampeded our media and political elites into suddenly declaring that global warming was a proven reality. As I joked to my friends, going from Ice Age to oven in just a dozen years seemed a bit much, especially since both trends were allegedly decades or centuries long.

But as the years went by and more and more mainstream voices endorsed global warming, I began to assume it must be true because “everyone said so,” or at least everyone not subsidized by Exxon Mobil. For similar reasons, I later assumed that Saddam must have WMDs—at least of the chemical or biological variety—given the absolutely uniform proclamations of our mainstream media commentariat.

In that latter case, I eventually discovered that I—together with the entire American public—had fallen for a massive hoax, and this raised huge doubts about the credibility of the establishment media. But even so, I was quite shocked in 2007 to read a series of major Counterpunch columns by the late Alexander Cockburn denouncing global warming as the same sort of massive hoax, protected and promoted by the establishment media just like the Iraqi WMDs. Obviously Cockburn himself was no scientist, but those he quoted seemed to be, and more importantly, Big Oil probably didn’t own one of America’s foremost radical-left journalists.

So what is one to think? The scientific topic involved is complex and specialized, requiring years of academic study to properly comprehend. The experts seem divided, with nasty accusations of dishonesty and corruption flying in both directions. The mainstream media and our political elites seem overwhelmingly to favor one side, but given their recent track record, that almost constitutes a negative indicator. Tens of billions of dollars are at stake, so the volume of propaganda is enormous, and I would need hundreds of hours just to dip my toe into the topic. Therefore, my considered verdict is: I just don’t know.

But if I were prodded to take some position, I would focus on the simplest, clearest argument, the one least requiring expertise in complex atmospheric modeling or meteorological theories. Alex’s original April 28, 2007 column did just that.

As he explained, the early years of the Great Depression had seen worldwide industrial output drop by about one quarter, along with carbon emissions from coal, oil, and natural gas, requiring most of a decade to return to previous levels. Yet during these same years, there appears no significant change in the trends of rising CO2 or temperature. If enormous changes in human carbon output have negligible impact on the atmospheric trends of the global warming hypothesis, how can there be a causal connection?

This relates to another point made by Alex and also mentioned in the original Asimov column. The oceans contain perhaps 50 times more dissolved CO2 than is found in the atmosphere, and as our planet warms, evaporating seawater releases carbon dioxide. Is the increase of CO2 producing the warming or is it the other way around? He cited claims that over the last million or so years, changes in CO2 had always tended to lag the corresponding changes in temperature by many centuries, implying that CO2 was a consequence rather than a cause of the warming.

Five minutes spent with Google uncovers a vast wealth of articles debunking or supporting these simple claims, with endless data and citations all around. Can I effectively judge these competing arguments? Certainly not, and a dozen or more years ago I would have assumed that establishment opinion was probably correct, with the near-unanimous verdict of elite-media sources outweighing a few scattered figures mostly drawn from the political fringe. But that was before the Iraqi WMDs. And Bernie Madoff. And the housing bubble, and so many other revealed hoaxes and scandals that have so totally undermined the credibility of our official sources in almost everything. Consider that one of the strongest private-sector backers of global warming had been the Enron Corporation, up until the moment that it collapsed in the largest corporate fraud in history.

The tendency to attack dissent as heresy hardly engenders free and open debate. Just a couple of years after I read those Counterpunch columns, the New York Times Magazine ran a cover story on Freeman Dyson, one of the most brilliant physicists of his generation. He was labeled “The Civil Heretic” for his strong public skepticism on global warming theories. Given the recent track record of the Times and its peers, I’m half inclined to automatically favor the heretics.

Ron Unz is publisher of The American Conservative.

Our American Pravda

The major media overlooked Communist spies and Madoff’s fraud. What are they missing today?

The American Conservative • April 29, 2013 • 4,500 Words

In mid-March, the Wall Street Journal carried a long discussion of the origins of the Bretton Woods system, the international financial framework that governed the Western world for decades after World War II. A photo showed the two individuals who negotiated that agreement. Britain was represented by John Maynard Keynes, a towering economic figure of that era. America’s representative was Harry Dexter White, assistant secretary of the Treasury and long a central architect of American economic policy, given that his nominal superior, Secretary Henry Morgenthau Jr., was a gentleman farmer with no background in finance. White was also a Communist agent.

Such a situation was hardly unique in American government during the 1930s and 1940s. For example, when a dying Franklin Roosevelt negotiated the outlines of postwar Europe with Joseph Stalin at the 1945 Yalta summit, one of his important advisors was Alger Hiss, a State Department official whose primary loyalty was to the Soviet side. Over the last 20 years, John Earl Haynes, Harvey Klehr, and other scholars have conclusively established that many dozens or even hundreds of Soviet agents once honeycombed the key policy staffs and nuclear research facilities of our federal government, constituting a total presence perhaps approaching the scale suggested by Sen. Joseph McCarthy, whose often unsubstantiated charges tended to damage the credibility of his position.

The Cold War ended over two decades ago and Communism has been relegated to merely an unpleasant chapter in the history books, so today these facts are hardly much disputed. For example, liberal Washington Post blogger Ezra Klein matter-of-factly referred to White as a “Soviet spy” in the title of his column on our postwar financial system. But during the actual period when America’s government was heavily influenced by Communist agents, such accusations were widely denounced as “Red-baiting” or ridiculed as right-wing conspiracy paranoia by many of our most influential journalists and publications. In 1982 liberal icon Susan Sontag ruefully acknowledged that for decades the subscribers to the lowbrow Readers Digest had received a more realistic view of the world than those who drew their knowledge from the elite liberal publications favored by her fellow intellectuals. I myself came of age near the end of the Cold War and always vaguely assumed that such lurid tales of espionage were wildly exaggerated. I was wrong.

The notion of the American government being infiltrated and substantially controlled by agents of a foreign power has been the stuff of endless Hollywood movies and television shows, but for various reasons such popular channels have never been employed to bring the true-life historical example to wide attention. I doubt if even one American in a hundred today is familiar with the name “Harry Dexter White” or dozens of similar agents.

The realization that the world is often quite different from what is presented in our leading newspapers and magazines is not an easy conclusion for most educated Americans to accept, or at least that was true in my own case. For decades, I have closely read the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and one or two other major newspapers every morning, supplemented by a wide variety of weekly or monthly opinion magazines. Their biases in certain areas had always been apparent to me. But I felt confident that by comparing and contrasting the claims of these different publications and applying some common sense, I could obtain a reasonably accurate version of reality. I was mistaken.

Aside from the evidence of our own senses, almost everything we know about the past or the news of today comes from bits of ink on paper or colored pixels on a screen, and fortunately over the last decade or two the growth of the Internet has vastly widened the range of information available to us in that latter category. Even if the overwhelming majority of the unorthodox claims provided by such non-traditional web-based sources is incorrect, at least there now exists the possibility of extracting vital nuggets of truth from vast mountains of falsehood. Certainly the events of the past dozen years have forced me to completely recalibrate my own reality-detection apparatus.

Thoughtful individuals of all backgrounds have undergone a similar crisis of confidence during this same period. Just a few months after 9/11 New York Times columnist Paul Krugman argued that the sudden financial collapse of the Enron Corporation represented a greater shock to the American system than the terrorist attacks themselves, and although he was widely denounced for making such an “unpatriotic” claim, I believe his case was strong. Although the name “Enron” has largely vanished from our memory, for years it had ranked as one of America’s most successful and admired companies, glowingly profiled on the covers of our leading business magazines, and drawing luminaries such as Krugman himself to its advisory board; Enron Chairman Kenneth Lay had been a top contender for Treasury secretary in President George W. Bush’s administration. Then in the blink of an eye, the entire company was revealed to be an accounting fraud from top to bottom, collapsing into a $63 billion bankruptcy, the largest in American history. Other companies of comparable or even greater size such as WorldCom, Tyco, Adelphia, and Global Crossing soon vanished for similar reasons.

Part of Krugman’s argument was that while the terrorist attacks had been of an entirely unprecedented nature and scale, our entire system of financial regulation, accounting, and business journalism was designed to prevent exactly the sort of frauds that brought down those huge companies. When a system fails so dramatically at its core mission, we must wonder which of our other assumptions are incorrect.

Just a few years later, we saw an even more sweeping near-collapse of our entire financial system, with giant institutions such as Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, Wachovia, and AIG falling into bankruptcy, and all our remaining major banks surviving only due to the trillions of dollars in government bailouts and loan guarantees they received. Once again, all our media and regulatory organs had failed to anticipate this disaster.

Or take the remarkable case of Bernie Madoff. His colossal investment swindle had been growing unchecked for over three decades under the very noses of our leading financial journalists and regulators in New York City, ultimately reaching the sum of $65 billion in mostly fictional assets. His claimed returns had been implausibly steady and consistent year after year, market crashes or not. None of his supposed trading actually occurred. His only auditing was by a tiny storefront firm. Angry competitors had spent years warning the SEC and journalists that his alleged investment strategy was mathematically impossible and that he was obviously running a Ponzi scheme. Yet despite all these indicators, officials did nothing and refused to close down such a transparent swindle, while the media almost entirely failed to report these suspicions.

In many respects, the non-detection of these business frauds is far more alarming than failure to uncover governmental malfeasance. Politics is a partisan team sport, and it is easy to imagine Democrats or Republicans closing ranks and protecting their own, despite damage to society. Furthermore, success or failure in public policies is often ambiguous and subject to propagandistic spin. But investors in a fraudulent company lose their money and therefore have an enormous incentive to detect those risks, with the same being true for business journalists. If the media cannot be trusted to catch and report simple financial misconduct, its reliability on more politically charged matters will surely be lower.

The circumstances surrounding our Iraq War demonstrate this, certainly ranking it among the strangest military conflicts of modern times. The 2001 attacks in America were quickly ascribed to the radical Islamists of al-Qaeda, whose bitterest enemy in the Middle East had always been Saddam Hussein’s secular Baathist regime in Iraq. Yet through misleading public statements, false press leaks, and even forged evidence such as the “yellowcake” documents, the Bush administration and its neoconservative allies utilized the compliant American media to persuade our citizens that Iraq’s nonexistent WMDs posed a deadly national threat and required elimination by war and invasion. Indeed, for several years national polls showed that a large majority of conservatives and Republicans actually believed that Saddam was the mastermind behind 9/11 and the Iraq War was being fought as retribution. Consider how bizarre the history of the 1940s would seem if America had attacked China in retaliation for Pearl Harbor.

True facts were easily available to anyone paying attention in the years after 2001, but most Americans do not bother and simply draw their understanding of the world from what they are told by the major media, which overwhelmingly—almost uniformly—backed the case for war with Iraq; the talking heads on TV created our reality. Prominent journalists across the liberal and conservative spectrum eagerly published the most ridiculous lies and distortions passed on to them by anonymous sources, and stampeded Congress down the path to war.

The result was what my late friend Lt. Gen. Bill Odom rightly called the “greatest strategic disaster in United States history.” American forces suffered tens of thousands of needless deaths and injuries, while our country took a huge step toward national bankruptcy. Economics Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz and others have estimated that with interest the total long-term cost of our two recent wars may reach as high as $5 or $6 trillion, or as much as $50,000 per American household, mostly still unpaid. Meanwhile, economist Edward Wolff has calculated that the Great Recession and its aftermath cut the personal net worth of the median American household to $57,000 in 2010 from a figure nearly twice as high three years earlier. Comparing these assets and liabilities, we see that the American middle class now hovers on the brink of insolvency, with the cost of our foreign wars being a leading cause.

But no one involved in the debacle ultimately suffered any serious consequences, and most of the same prominent politicians and highly paid media figures who were responsible remain just as prominent and highly paid today. For most Americans, reality is whatever our media organs tell us, and since these have largely ignored the facts and adverse consequences of our wars in recent years, the American people have similarly forgotten. Recent polls show that only half the public today believes that the Iraq War was a mistake.

Author James Bovard has described our society as an “attention deficit democracy,” and the speed with which important events are forgotten once the media loses interest might surprise George Orwell.

Consider the story of Vioxx, a highly lucrative anti-pain medication marketed by Merck to the elderly as a substitute for simple aspirin. After years of very profitable Vioxx sales, an FDA researcher published a study demonstrating that the drug greatly increased the risk of fatal strokes and heart attacks and had probably already caused tens of thousands of premature American deaths. Vioxx was immediately pulled from the market, but Merck eventually settled the resulting lawsuits for relatively small penalties, despite direct evidence the company had long been aware of the drug’s deadly nature. Our national media, which had earned hundreds of millions of dollars in advertising revenue from Vioxx marketing, provided no sustained coverage and the scandal was soon forgotten. Furthermore, the press never investigated the dramatic upward and downward shifts in the mortality rates of elderly Americans that so closely tracked the introduction and recall of Vioxx; as I pointed out in a 2012 article, these indicated that the likely death toll had actually been several times greater than the FDA estimate. Vast numbers Americans died, no one was punished, and almost everyone has now forgotten.

Or take the strange case of Bernard Kerik, New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani’s police commissioner during 9/11, later nominated by President Bush to be America’s first director of national intelligence, a newly established position intended to oversee all of our various national-security and intelligence agencies. His appointment seemed likely to sail through the Republican-controlled Senate until derailed by accusations he had employed an undocumented nanny. With his political rise having been blocked, the national media suddenly revealed his long history of association with organized-crime figures, an indictment quickly followed, and he is currently still serving his federal prison sentence for conspiracy and fraud. So America came within a hairbreadth of placing its entire national-security apparatus under the authority of a high-school dropout connected with organized crime, and today almost no Americans seem aware of that fact.

Through most of the 20th century, America led something of a charmed life, at least when compared with the disasters endured by almost every other major country. We became the richest and most powerful nation on earth, partly due to our own achievements and partly due to the mistakes of others. The public interpreted these decades of American power and prosperity as validation of our system of government and national leadership, and the technological effectiveness of our domestic propaganda machinery—our own American Pravda—has heightened this effect. Furthermore, most ordinary Americans are reasonably honest and law-abiding and project that same behavior onto others, including our media and political elites. This differs from the total cynicism found in most other countries around the world.

Credibility is a capital asset, which may take years to accumulate but can be squandered in an instant; and the events of the last dozen years should have bankrupted any faith we have in our government or media. Once we acknowledge this, we should begin to accept the possible reality of important, well-documented events even if they are not announced on the front pages of our major newspapers. When several huge scandals have erupted into the headlines after years or decades of total media silence, we must wonder what other massive stories may currently be ignored by our media elites. I think I can provide a few possibilities.

Consider the almost forgotten anthrax mailing attacks in the weeks after 9/11, which terrified our dominant East Coast elites and spurred passage of the unprecedented Patriot Act, thereby eliminating many traditional civil-libertarian protections. Every morning during that period the New York Times and other leading newspapers carried articles describing the mysterious nature of the deadly attacks and the complete bafflement of the FBI investigators. But evenings on the Internet I would read stories by perfectly respectable journalists such as Salon’s Laura Rozen or the staff of the Hartford Courant providing a wealth of additional detail and pointing to a likely suspect and motive.

Although the letters carrying the anthrax were purportedly written by an Arab terrorist, the FBI quickly determined that the language and style indicated a non-Arab author, while tests pointed to the bioweapons research facility at Ft. Detrick, Md., as the probable source of the material. But just prior to the arrival of those deadly mailings, military police at Quantico, Va., had also received an anonymous letter warning that a former Ft. Detrick employee, Egyptian-born Dr. Ayaad Assaad, might be planning to launch a national campaign of bioterrorism. Investigators quickly cleared Dr. Assaad, but the very detailed nature of the accusations revealed inside knowledge of his employment history and the Ft. Detrick facilities. Given the near-simultaneous posting of anthrax envelopes and false bioterrorism accusations, the mailings almost certainly came from the same source, and solving the latter case would be the easiest means of catching the anthrax killer.

Who would have attempted to frame Dr. Assaad for bioterrorism? A few years earlier he had been involved in a bitter personal feud with a couple of his Ft. Detrick coworkers, including charges of racism, official reprimands, and angry recriminations all around. When an FBI official shared a copy of the accusatory letter with a noted language-forensics expert and allowed him to compare the text with the writings of 40 biowarfare lab employees, he found a perfect match with one of those individuals. For years I told my friends that anyone who spent 30 minutes with Google could probably determine the name and motive of the likely anthrax killer, and most of them successfully met my challenge.

This powerful evidence received almost no attention in the major national media, nor is there any indication that the FBI ever followed up on any of these clues or interrogated the named suspects. Instead, investigators attempted to pin the attacks on a Dr. Steven Hatfill based on negligible evidence, after which he was completely exonerated and won a $5.6 million settlement from the government for its years of severe harassment. Later, similar hounding of researcher Bruce Ivins and his family led to his suicide, after which the FBI declared the case closed, even though former colleagues of Dr. Ivins demonstrated that he had had no motive, means, or opportunity. In 2008, I commissioned a major 3,000-word cover story in my magazine summarizing all of this crucial evidence, and once again almost no one in the mainstream media paid the slightest attention.

An even more egregious case followed a couple of years later, with regard to the stunning revelations of Pulitzer Prize winner Sydney Schanberg, one of America’s foremost Vietnam War reporters and a former top editor at the New York Times. After years of research, Schanberg published massive evidence demonstrating that the endlessly ridiculed claims of America’s Vietnam MIA movement of the 1970s and 1980s were correct: the Nixon administration had indeed deliberately abandoned many hundreds of American POWs in Vietnam at the close of the war, and our government afterward spent decades covering up this shameful crime. Schanberg’s charges were publicly confirmed by two former Republican House members, one of whom had independently co-authored a 500 page book on the subject, exhaustively documenting the POW evidence.

Although a major focus of Schanberg’s account was the central role that Sen. John McCain had played in leading the later cover-up, the national media ignored these detailed charges during McCain’s bitter 2008 presidential campaign against Barack Obama. One of America’s most distinguished living journalists published what was surely “the story of the century” and none of America’s newspapers took notice.

In 2010 Schanberg republished this material in a collection of his other writings, and his work received glowing praise from Joseph Galloway, one of America’s top military correspondents, as well as other leading journalists; his charges are now backed by the weight of four New York Times Pulitzer Prizes. Around that same time, I produced a 15,000-word cover-symposium on the scandal, organized around Schanberg’s path-breaking findings and including contributions from other prominent writers. All of this appeared in the middle of Senator McCain’s difficult reelection campaign in Arizona, and once again the material was totally ignored by the state and national media.

An argument might be made that little harm has been done to the national interest by the media’s continued silence in the two examples described above. The anthrax killings have largely been forgotten and the evidence suggests that the motive was probably one of personal revenge. All the government officials involved in the abandonment of the Vietnam POWs are either dead or quite elderly, and even those involved in the later cover-up, such as John McCain, are in the twilight of their political careers. But an additional example remains completely relevant today, and some of the guilty parties hold high office.

During the mid-2000s I began noticing references on one or two small websites to a woman claiming to be a former FBI employee who was making the most outlandish and ridiculous charges, accusing high government officials of selling our nuclear-weapons secrets to foreign spies. I paid no attention to such unlikely claims and never bothered reading any of the articles.

A couple of years went by, and various website references to that same woman—Sibel Edmonds—kept appearing, although I continued to ignore them, secure that the silence of all my newspapers proved her to be delusional. Then in early 2008, the London Sunday Times, one of the world’s leading newspapers, ran a long, three-part front-page series presenting her charges, which were soon republished in numerous other countries. Daniel Ellsberg described Edmonds’s revelations as “far more explosive than the Pentagon Papers” and castigated the American media for completely ignoring a story that had reached the front pages of newspapers throughout the rest of the world. Such silence struck me as rather odd.

Philip Giraldi, a former CIA official who regularly writes for this magazine, suggested he investigate her charges. He found her highly credible, and his 3,000-word article in TAC presented some astonishing but very detailed claims.

Edmonds had been hired by the FBI to translate wiretapped conversations of a suspected foreign spy ring under surveillance, and she had been disturbed to discover that many of these hundreds of phone calls explicitly discussed the sale of nuclear-weapons secrets to foreign intelligence organizations, including those linked to international terrorism, as well as the placement of agents at key American military research facilities. Most remarkably, some of the individuals involved in these operations were high-ranking government officials; the staffs of several influential members of Congress were also implicated. On one occasion, a senior State Department figure was reportedly recorded making arrangements to pick up a bag containing a large cash bribe from one of his contacts. Very specific details of names, dates, dollar amounts, purchasers, and military secrets were provided.

The investigation had been going on for years with no apparent action, and Edmonds was alarmed to discover that a fellow translator quietly maintained a close relationship with one of the key FBI targets. When she raised these issues, she was personally threatened, and after appealing to her supervisors, eventually fired.

Since that time, she has passed a polygraph test on her claims, testified under oath in a libel lawsuit, expanded her detailed charges in a 2009 TAC cover story also by Giraldi, and most recently published a book recounting her case. Judiciary Committee Senators Chuck Grassley and Patrick Leahy have publicly backed some of her charges, a Department of Justice inspector general’s report has found her allegations “credible” and “serious,” while various FBI officials have vouched for her reliability and privately confirmed many of her claims. But none of her detailed charges has ever appeared in any of America’s newspapers. According to Edmonds, one of the conspirators routinely made payments to various members of the media, and bragged to his fellow plotters that “We just fax to our people at the New York Times. They print it under their names.”

At times, Congressional Democratic staff members became interested in the scandal, and promised an investigation. But once they learned that senior members of their own party were also implicated, their interest faded.

These three stories—the anthrax evidence, the McCain/POW revelations, and the Sibel Edmonds charges—are the sort of major exposés that would surely be dominating the headlines of any country with a properly-functioning media. But almost no American has ever heard of them. Before the Internet broke the chokehold of our centralized flow of information, I would have remained just as ignorant myself, despite all the major newspapers and magazines I regularly read.

Am I absolutely sure that any or all of these stories are true? Certainly not, though I think they probably are, given their overwhelming weight of supporting evidence. But absent any willingness of our government or major media to properly investigate them, I cannot say more.

However, this material does conclusively establish something else, which has even greater significance. These dramatic, well-documented accounts have been ignored by our national media, rather than widely publicized. Whether this silence has been deliberate or is merely due to incompetence remains unclear, but the silence itself is proven fact.

A likely reason for this wall of uninterest on so many important issues is that the disasters involved are often bipartisan in nature, with both Democrats and Republicans being culpable and therefore equally eager to hide their mistakes. Perhaps in the famous words of Benjamin Franklin, they realize that they must all hang together or they will surely all hang separately.

We always ridicule the 98 percent voter support that dictatorships frequently achieve in their elections and plebiscites, yet perhaps those secret-ballot results may sometimes be approximately correct, produced by the sort of overwhelming media control that leads voters to assume there is no possible alternative to the existing regime. Is such an undemocratic situation really so different from that found in our own country, in which our two major parties agree on such a broad range of controversial issues and, being backed by total media dominance, routinely split 98 percent of the vote? A democracy may provide voters with a choice, but that choice is largely determined by the information citizens receive from their media.

Most of the Americans who elected Barack Obama in 2008 intended their vote as a total repudiation of the policies and personnel of the preceding George W. Bush administration. Yet once in office, Obama’s crucial selections—Robert Gates at Defense, Timothy Geither at Treasury, and Ben Bernanke at the Federal Reserve—were all top Bush officials, and they seamlessly continued the unpopular financial bailouts and foreign wars begun by his predecessor, producing what amounted to a third Bush term.

Consider the fascinating perspective of the recently deceased Boris Berezovsky, once the most powerful of the Russian oligarchs and the puppet master behind President Boris Yeltsin during the late 1990s. After looting billions in national wealth and elevating Vladimir Putin to the presidency, he overreached himself and eventually went into exile. According to the New York Times, he had planned to transform Russia into a fake two-party state—one social-democratic and one neoconservative—in which heated public battles would be fought on divisive, symbolic issues, while behind the scenes both parties would actually be controlled by the same ruling elites. With the citizenry thus permanently divided and popular dissatisfaction safely channeled into meaningless dead-ends, Russia’s rulers could maintain unlimited wealth and power for themselves, with little threat to their reign. Given America’s history over the last couple of decades, perhaps we can guess where Berezovsky got his idea for such a clever political scheme.

Major References in The American Conservative:

- Christopher Ketchum: The Anthrax Files, August 25, 2008

- Ron Unz: Was Rambo Right?, July 2010

- Sydney Schanberg: Silent Treatment, July 2010

- Sydney Schanberg: McCain and the POW Cover-Up, July 2010

- Philip Giraldi: Found in Translation, January 28, 2008

- Philip Giraldi: Who’s Afraid of Sibel Edmonds?, November 2009

[Erratum: In my text I mentioned that Bernard Kerik, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani’s New York City police chief during the 9/11 attacks, was a high school dropout with ties to organized crime, who is currently still serving his federal prison sentence on related charges. This was correct. However, President George W. Bush had nominated him to run America’s Department of Homeland Security rather than to be America’s Director of National Intelligence.]

John McCain: When "Tokyo Rose" Ran for President

What Was John McCain's True Wartime Record in Vietnam?

The Unz Review • March 9, 2015 • 4,200 Words

Although the memory has faded in recent years, during much of the second half of the twentieth century the name “Tokyo Rose” ranked very high in our popular consciousness, probably second only to “Benedict Arnold” as a byword for American treachery during wartime. The story of Iva Ikuko Toguri, the young Japanese-American woman who spent her wartime years broadcasting popular music laced with enemy propaganda to our suffering troops in the Pacific Theater was well known to everyone, and her trial for treason after the war, which stripped her of her citizenship and sentenced her to a long prison term, made the national headlines.

The actual historical facts seem to have been somewhat different than the popular myth. Instead of a single “Tokyo Rose” there were actually several such female broadcasters, with Ms. Toguri not even being the earliest, and their identities merged in the minds of the embattled American GIs.  But she was the only one ever brought to trial and punished, although her own radio commentary turned out to have been almost totally innocuous. The plight of a young American-born woman alone on a family visit who became trapped behind enemy lines by the sudden outbreak of war was obviously a difficult one, and desperately taking a job as an English-language music announcer hardly fits the usual notion of treason. Indeed, after her release from federal prison, she avoided deportation and spent the rest of her life quietly running a grocery shop in Chicago. Postwar Japan soon became our closest ally in Asia and once wartime passions had sufficiently cooled she was eventually pardoned by President Gerald Ford and had her U.S. citizenship restored.

Despite these extremely mitigating circumstances in Ms. Toguri’s particular case, we should not be too surprised at America’s harsh treatment of the poor woman upon her return home from Japan. All normal countries ruthlessly punish treason and traitors, and these terms are often expansively defined in the aftermath of a bitter war. Perhaps in a topsy-turvy Monty Python world, wartime traitors would be given medals, feted at the White House, and become national heroes, but any real-life country that allowed such insanity would surely be set on the road to oblivion. If Tokyo Rose’s wartime record had launched her on a successful American political career and nearly gave her the presidency, we would know for a fact that some cruel enemy had spiked our national water supply with LSD.

The political rise of Sen. John McCain leads me to suspect that in the 1970s some cruel enemy had spiked our national water supply with LSD.

My earliest recollections of John McCain are vague.   I think he first came to my attention during the mid-1980s, perhaps after 1982 when he won an open Congressional seat in Arizona or more likely once he was elected in 1986 to the U.S. Senate seat of retiring conservative icon Barry Goldwater. All media accounts about him seemed strongly favorable, describing his steadfastness as a POW during more than five grim years of torture by his Vietnamese jailers, with the extent of his wartime physical suffering indicated by the famous photo showing him still on crutches as he was greeted by President Nixon many months after his return from enemy captivity. I never had the slightest doubts about this story or his war-hero status.

Former POW John McCain on Crutches, Greeting President Richard Nixon

McCain’s public image took a beating at the end of the 1980s when he became one of the senators caught up in the Keating Five financial scandal, but he managed to survive that controversy unlike most of the others.  Soon thereafter he became prominent as a leading national advocate of campaign finance reform, a strong pro-immigrant voice, and also a champion of normalizing our relations with Vietnam, positions that appealed to me as much as they did to the national media. By 2000 my opinion had become sufficiently favorable that I donated to his underdog challenge to Gov. George W. Bush in the Republican primaries of that year, and was thrilled when he did surprisingly well in some of the early contests and suddenly had a serious shot at the nomination. However, he then suffered an unexpected defeat in South Carolina, as the large block of local military voters swung decisively against him. According to widespread media reports, the main cause was an utterly scurrilous whispering campaign by Karl Rove and his henchmen, which even included appalling accusations that the great war-hero candidate had been a “traitor” in Vietnam. My only conclusion was that the filthy lies sometimes found in American politics were even worse than I’d ever imagined.

Although in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, I turned sharply against McCain due to his support for an extremely bellicose foreign policy, I never had any reason to question his background or his integrity, and my strong opposition to his 2008 presidential run was entirely on policy grounds: I feared his notoriously hot temper might easily get us into additional disastrous wars.

Everything suddenly changed in June 2008 when I read a long article by an unfamiliar writer on the leftist Counterpunch website. Shocking claims were made that McCain may never have been tortured and that he instead spent his wartime captivity collaborating with his captors and broadcasting Communist propaganda, a possibility that seemed almost incomprehensible to me given all the thousands of contrary articles that I had absorbed over the decades from the mainstream media. How could this one article on a small website be the truth about McCain’s war record and everything else be total falsehood? The evidence was hardly overwhelming, with the piece being thinly sourced and written in a meandering fashion by an obscure author, but the claims were so astonishing that I made some effort to investigate the matter, though without any real success.

However, those new doubts about McCain were still in my mind a few months later when I stumbled upon Sidney Schanberg’s massively documented expose about McCain’s role in the POW/MIA cover up, a vastly greater scandal. This time I was presented with a mountain of hard evidence gathered by one of America’s greatest wartime journalists, a Pulitzer Prize winning former top editor at The New York Times. In the years since then, other leading journalists have praised Schanberg’s remarkable research, now giving his conclusions the combined backing of four New York Times Pulitzer Prizes, while two former Republican Congressmen who had served on the Intelligence Committee have also strongly corroborated his account.

In 1993 the front page of the New York Times broke the story that a Politburo transcript found in the Kremlin archives fully confirmed the existence of the additional POWs, and when interviewed on the PBS Newshour former National Security Advisors Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski admitted that the document was very likely correct and that hundreds of America’s Vietnam POWs had indeed been left behind. In my opinion, the reality of Schanberg’s POW story is now about as solidly established as anything can be that has not yet received an official blessing from the American mainstream media. And the total dishonesty of that media regarding both the POW story and McCain’s leading role in the later cover up soon made me very suspicious of all those other claims regarding John McCain’s supposedly heroic war record.  Our American Pravda is simply not to be trusted on any “touchy” topics.

I have no personal knowledge of the Vietnam War myself nor do I possess expertise in that area of history. But after encountering Schanberg’s expose in 2008, I soon got in touch with someone having exactly those strengths, a Vietnam veteran who later became a professor at one of our military service academies. At first, he was quite cagey regarding the questions I raised, but once he had read through Schanberg’s lengthy article, he felt he could respond more freely and he largely confirmed the claims, partly based on certain information he personally possessed. He said he found it astonishing that in these days of the Internet the POW scandal had not attracted vastly more attention, and he couldn’t understand why the media was so uniformly unwilling to touch the topic.

He also had some very interesting things to say about John McCain’s wartime record. According to him, it was hardly a secret in veterans’ circles that McCain had spent much of the war producing Communist propaganda broadcasts since these had regularly been played in the prisoner camps as a means of breaking the spirits of those American POWs who resisted collaboration. Indeed, he and some of his friends had speculated about who currently possessed copies of McCain’s damning audio and video tapes and wondered whether they might come out during the course of the presidential campaign.  Over the years, other Vietnam veterans have publicly leveled similar charges, and Schanberg had suggested that McCain’s leading role in the POW cover up might have been connected with the pressure he faced due to his notorious wartime broadcasts.

In late September 2008 another fascinating story appeared in my morning New York Times. An intrepid reporter decided to visit Vietnam and see what McCain’s former jailers thought of the possibility that their onetime captive might soon reach the White House, that the man they had spent years brutally torturing could become the next president of the United States. To the journalist’s apparent amazement, the former jailers seemed enthusiastic about the prospects of a McCain victory, saying that they hoped he would win since they had become such good friends during the war and had worked so closely together; if they lived in America, they would certainly all vote for him. When asked about McCain’s claims of “cruel and sadistic” torture, the head of the guard unit dismissed those stories as being just the sort of total nonsense that politicians, whether in America or in Vietnam, must often spout in order to win popularity. A BBC correspondent reported the same statements.

Let us consider the implications of this story. Throughout his entire life John McCain has been notable for having a very violent temper and also for holding deep grudges. How plausible does it seem that the men who allegedly spent years torturing him would be so eager to see him reach a position of supreme world power?

But what about the famous photo, showing McCain still on crutches even months after his release from captivity? In early September 2008, someone discovered archival footage from a Swedish news crew which had filmed the return of the POWs, and uploaded it to YouTube. We see a healthy-looking John McCain walking off the plane from Vietnam, having a noticeable limp but certainly without any need of crutches. After returning home he had eventually entered Bethesda Naval Hospital for corrective surgery on some of his wartime injuries, and that recent American surgery was what explained his crutches in the photo with Nixon.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PqTQFSh3uxE

It is certainly acknowledged that considerable numbers of American POWs were indeed tortured in Vietnam, but it is far from clear that McCain was ever one of them. As the original Counterpunch article pointed out, throughout almost the entire war McCain was held at a special section for the best-behaving prisoners, which was where he allegedly produced his Communist propaganda broadcasts and perhaps became such good friends with his guards as they later claimed.  Top-ranking former POWs held at the same prison, such as Colonels Ted Guy and Gordon “Swede” Larson, have gone on the record saying they are very skeptical regarding McCain’s claims of torture.

I have taken the trouble to read through John McCain’s earliest claims of his harsh imprisonment, a highly detailed 12,000 word first person account published under his name in U.S. News & World Report in May 1973, just a few weeks after his release from imprisonment.  The editorial introduction notes the “almost total recall” seemingly demonstrated by the young pilot just out of captivity, and portions of the story strike me as doubtful, perhaps drawn from the long history of popular imprisonment fiction stretching back to Dumas’s Count of Monte Cristo.  Would a young navy pilot so easily develop and remember a “tap code” to extensively communicate with others across thick prison walls? And McCain describes himself as having a “philosophical bent,” spending his years of solitary confinement reviewing in his head all the many history books he had read, trying to make sense of human history, a degree of intellectualizing never apparent in his life either before or after.

One factual detail, routinely emphasized by his supporters, is his repeated claim that except for signing a single written statement very early in his captivity and also answering some questions by a visiting French newsman, he had staunchly refused any hint of collaboration with his captors, despite torture, solitary confinement, endless threats and beatings, and offers of rewards. Perhaps. But that original Counterpunch article provided the link to the purported text of one of McCain’s pro-Hanoi propaganda broadcasts as summarized in a 1969 UPI wire service story, and I have confirmed its authenticity by locating the resulting article that ran in Stars & Stripes at the same time. So if crucial portions of McCain’s account of his imprisonment are seemingly revealed to be self-serving fiction, how much of the rest can we believe? If his pro-Communist propaganda broadcasts were so notable that they even reached the news pages of one of America’s leading military publications, it seems quite plausible that they were as numerous, substantial, and frequent as his critics allege

When I later discussed these troubling matters with an eminent political scientist who has something of a military background, he emphasized that McCain’s history can only be understood in the context of his father, a top-ranking admiral who then served as commander of all American forces in the Pacific Theater, including our troops in Vietnam. Indeed, the alleged headline of the UPI wire story had been “PW [Prisoner of War] Songbird Is Pilot Son of Admiral,” highlighting that connection. Obviously, for reasons both of family loyalty and personal standing it would have been imperative for John McCain’s father and namesake to hush up the terrible scandal of having had his son serve as a leading collaborator and Communist propagandist during the war and his exalted rank gave him the power to do so. Furthermore, just a few years earlier the elder McCain had himself performed an extremely valuable service for America’s political elites, organizing the official board of inquiry that whitewashed the potentially devastating “Liberty Incident,” with its more than 200 dead and wounded American servicemen, so he certainly had some powerful political chits he could call in.

Placed in this context, John McCain’s tales of torture make perfect sense. If he had indeed spent almost the entire war eagerly broadcasting Communist propaganda in exchange for favored treatment, there would have been stories about this circulating in private, and fears that these tales might eventually reach the newspaper headlines, perhaps backed by the hard evidence of audio and video tapes. An effective strategy for preempting this danger would be to concoct lurid tales of personal suffering and then promote them in the media, quickly establishing McCain as the highest profile victim of torture among America’s returned POWs, an effort rendered credible by the fact that many American POWs had indeed suffered torture.

Once the public had fully accepted McCain as our foremost Vietnam war-hero and torture-victim, any later release of his propaganda tapes would be dismissed as merely proving that even the bravest of men have their breaking point.  Given that McCain’s father was one of America’s highest-ranking military officers and both the Nixon Administration and the media had soon elevated McCain to a national symbol of American heroism, there would have been enormous pressure on the other returning POWs, many of them dazed and injured after long captivity, not to undercut such an important patriotic narrative.  Similarly, when McCain ran for Congress and the Senate a decade or so later, stories of his torture became a central theme of his campaigns and once again constituted a powerful defense against any possible rumors of his alleged “disloyalty.”

And so the legend grew over the decades until it completely swallowed the man, and he became America’s greatest patriot and war hero, with almost no one even being aware of the Communist propaganda broadcasts that had motivated the story in the first place. I have sometimes noticed this same historical pattern in which fictional accounts originally invented to excuse or mitigate some enormous crime may eventually expand over time until they totally dominate the narrative while the original crime itself is nearly forgotten.  The central theme of McCain’s presidential campaign was his unmatched patriotism and when he went down to defeat at the hands of Barack Obama, the widespread verdict was that even the greatest of war-heroes may still lose an election.

I must reemphasize that I am not an expert on the Vietnam War and my cursory investigation is nothing like the sort of exhaustive research that would be necessary to establish a firm conclusion on this troubling case. I have merely tried to provide a plausible account of McCain’s war record and highlight some of the important pieces of evidence that a more thorough researcher should consider. Unlike the documentation of the POW cover up accumulated by Schanberg and others, which I regard as overwhelmingly conclusive, I think the best that may be said about my reconstruction of McCain’s wartime history is that it seems more likely correct than not. However, I should mention that when I discussed some of these items with Schanberg in 2010 and suggested that John McCain had been the Tokyo Rose of the Vietnam War, he considered it a very apt description.

John McCain is hardly the only prominent political figure whose problematic Vietnam War activities have at times come under harsh scrutiny but afterwards been airbrushed away and forgotten by our subservient corporate media. Just as McCain was widely regarded as the most prominent Republican war-hero of that conflict, his Democratic counterpart was probably Vietnam Medal of Honor winner Bob Kerrey, a former Nebraska governor and senator who had run for president in 1992 and then considered doing so again in the late 1990s.

His seemingly unblemished record of wartime heroism suddenly collapsed in 2001 with the publication of a devastating 8,000 word expose in The New York Times Magazine together with a Sixty Minutes II television segment. Detailed eyewitness testimony and documentary evidence persuasively established that Kerrey had ordered his men to massacre over a dozen innocent Vietnamese civilians—women, children, and infants—for being witnesses to his botched SEAL raid on a tiny Vietnamese hamlet, an action that somewhat recalled the infamous My Lai massacre of the previous year, though certainly on a much smaller scale. Kerrey’s initial response to these horrific accusations—that his memory of the incident was “foggy”—struck me as near-certain proof of his guilt, and others drew similar conclusions.

As a supposed war-hero and a moderate Democrat, Kerrey had always been very popular in political circles, but even the once-friendly New Republic was shocked by the alacrity with which pundits and the media sought to absolve him of his apparent crimes. The revelations also seem to have had no impact on his tenure as president of the prestigious New School in New York, an academic institution with an impeccable liberal reputation, which he held for another decade before leaving to make an unsuccessful attempt to recapture his old Senate seat in Nebraska. Bob Dreyfuss, a principled left-liberal journalist, might still characterize him as a “mass murderer” in a 2012 blog post at The Nation, but for years almost no one in the mainstream media had ever alluded to the incident in any of the articles mentioning Kerrey’s activities, just as the media also totally ignored all of Schanberg’s remarkable revelations.  I suspect that Kerrey’s war crimes have almost totally vanished from public consciousness.

We must always draw an important distinction between the actions of individual journalists and the behavior of the American media taken as a whole. I believe that the overwhelming majority of reporters and editors are honest and sincere, and although their coverage may sometimes be slanted or mistaken, they do seek to inform rather than to mislead. Consider how many of the explosive facts discussed above or in Schanberg’s massive expose were drawn directly from the New York Times and other leading media outlets. But after those crucial stories run, the facts they have established often seem to vanish from subsequent coverage, causing them to be forgotten by most casual readers. Thus, the detailed account of Kerrey’s apparent massacre of civilians received the greatest possible initial coverage—a huge cover story in The New York Times Magazine and a top-rated CBS News television segment—but within a year or so the history had seemingly been flushed down the memory hole by almost all political reporters. The facts are still available for interested readers to uncover, but they must do the work themselves rather than simply relying on the summary narratives produced by mainstream publications.

The realization that many of our political leaders may be harboring such terrible personal secrets, secrets that our media outlets regularly conceal, raises an important policy implication independent of the particular secrets themselves. In recent years I have increasingly begun to suspect that some or even many of our national leaders may occasionally make their seemingly inexplicable policy decisions under the looming threat of personal blackmail, and that this may have also been true in the past.

Consider the intriguing case of J. Edgar Hoover, who spent nearly half a century running our domestic intelligence service, the FBI. Over those many decades he accumulated detailed files on vast numbers of prominent people and most historians agree that he regularly used such highly sensitive material to gain the upper hand in disputes with his nominal political masters and also to bend other public figures to his will. Meanwhile, he himself was hardly immune from similar pressures.  These days it is widely believed that Hoover lived his long life as a deeply closeted homosexual and there are also serious claims that he had some hidden black ancestry, a possibility that seems quite plausible to me given his features. Such deep personal secrets may be connected with Hoover’s long denials that organized crime actually existed in America and his great reluctance to allocate significant FBI resources to combat it.

Today when we consider the major countries of the world we see that in many cases the official leaders are also the leaders in actuality: Vladimir Putin calls the shots in Russia, Xi Jinping and his top Politburo colleagues do the same in China, and so forth. However, in America and in some other Western countries, this seems to be less and less the case, with top national figures merely being attractive front-men selected for their popular appeal and their political malleability, a development that may eventually have dire consequences for the nations they lead. As an extreme example, a drunken Boris Yeltsin freely allowed the looting of Russia’s entire national wealth by the handful of oligarchs who pulled his strings, and the result was the total impoverishment of the Russian people and a demographic collapse almost unprecedented in modern peacetime history.

An obvious problem with installing puppet rulers is the risk that they will attempt to cut their strings, much like Putin soon outmaneuvered and exiled his oligarch patron Boris Berezovsky. One means of minimizing such risk is to select puppets who are so deeply compromised that they can never break free, knowing that the political self-destruct charges buried deep within their pasts could easily be triggered if they sought independence. I have sometimes joked with my friends that perhaps the best career move for an ambitious young politician would be to secretly commit some monstrous crime and then make sure that the hard evidence of his guilt ended up in the hands of certain powerful people, thereby assuring his rapid political rise.

Such notions may seem utterly absurd, but let us step back and consider recent American history. Just a few years ago an individual came very close to reaching the White House almost entirely on the strength of his war record, a war record that considerable evidence suggests was actually the sort that would normally get a military man hanged for treason at the close of hostilities. I have studied many historical eras and many countries and no parallel examples come to mind.

Perhaps the cause of this bizarre situation merely lies in the remarkable incompetence and cowardice of our major media organs, their herd mentality and their insouciant unwillingness to notice evidence that is staring them in the face. But we should also at least consider the possibility of a darker explanation. If Tokyo Rose had nearly been elected president in the 1980s, we would assume that the American political system had taken a very peculiar turn.

Why The American Conservative Purged Its Own Publisher

The Unz Review • May 29, 2018 • 5,800 Words

Some may be aware that when I originally established The Unz Review over four years ago one of my main motives was to have a convenient venue for my own writing, a situation necessitated by my removal as Publisher of The American Conservative. However, other matters intervened, and all but a few months of my time since then have been preoccupied with software development issues and politics, but now at very long last I do hope to return to that original purpose.

Shortly after my departure from TAC in Fall 2013, I had written an article recounting the unfortunate circumstances, and this had attracted some interest from editors at The Atlantic. But they not unreasonably balked at the length, and soon afterward I was drawn into a major campaign to implement my proposal of a huge hike in the American Minimum Wage, an effort that eventually helped establish it as a central economic pillar of the Democratic Party; this was soon followed by other endeavors, mostly on software matters. Over the years, various people have expressed curiosity about my TAC story, which remained unpublished, and with the fifth anniversary of my defenestration now upon us, I’ve decided I might as well release it in its original form, changing scarcely a single word though updating some of the links. Five years represents an eternity in political journalism, and various events and personalities have surely lapsed into obscurity, but such is the price paid for historical authenticity.

Given hindsight, I’d consider myself satisfied with the ultimate outcome. The Review currently operates on an absolute shoestring while the editorial budget of TAC these days is an order-of-magnitude larger, covering the costs of a full-time staff of seven or eight. But according to Alexa.com our readership passed theirs six months ago, and has been substantially higher every week since. Possibly for these sorts of reasons, TAC recently named yet another new top editor, with Benjamin Schwarz becoming the third in eighteen months. And aside from providing some of the background to the creation of The Review and helping to explain its eclectic ideological focus, I think my story also serves as an example of why so many small publications tend to blur their editorial line over time, lured by mainstream respectability and resources, a process that seems to have recently claimed the late Alex Cockburn’s once fiercely-independent Counterpunch.[/preface]

On June 12th, 2013 I was having an unusually lengthy phone conversation with Daniel McCarthy, editor of The American Conservative (TAC). I live in Silicon Valley, three thousand miles away from DC, and despite holding the nominal title of publisher my involvement with TAC business operations had usually been negligible, amounting to just a few minutes a week on the phone. But I had grown alarmed over the lack of any major new donations since January, and had begun urging McCarthy to make the cuts in expenses necessary for the publication's survival, while lobbying the board on the same subject. Web traffic had also been sharply declining for six or seven months, suggesting the need for a change in editorial focus. And several months earlier, TAC had cut its print frequency in half to just six issues a year while doubling the annual subscription rate to $60, thus quadrupling the per issue cost to an unreasonable $10, a pricing decision I'd strongly questioned at the time and now believed we needed to reverse.

Despite my tradition of operational disengagement, I felt comfortable pressing these points. Since late 2006 I had provided some 70% of TAC's total funding, and even after converting the publication into a non-profit in 2010, I had still remained TAC's largest donor during 2012, while also serving as chairman. TAC had come close to shutting down on a couple of previous occasions and I wanted to avoid taking such a risk again, especially since over the last year or two I had begun regularly publishing some of my own articles in the magazine.

Finally, at the end of the call I asked McCarthy whether he'd yet had a chance to prepare a redlined edit copy of the new article I'd submitted a couple of weeks earlier and on which he'd previously suggested one or two minor changes that I had subsequently made. To my enormous surprise, he informed me that he'd decided to flatly reject the entire piece—an analytical study of American urban crime rates—as representing the sort of racially-inflammatory material that had no place in a quality magazine such as TAC. He instead suggested that a more appropriate venue for my article would be one of the webzines categorized as White Nationalist hate-sites by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC).

After a few stunned words on my part, I hung up the phone and almost immediately received an emailing McCarthy had sent out to his undisclosed distribution list, harshly criticizing my behavior while repeating his same charges in more measured terms, describing the subject of my article as “a distraction from TAC's mission” and something that would “fatally detract” from TAC's advocacy of “the case for noninterventionism and restricting executive power.” I soon discovered that my TAC blogging privileges had also been terminated, banning me from the website. Later, my access to TAC's ongoing website traffic information was eliminated. So more than six years after becoming TAC's publisher, I had been summarily purged.

For several weeks I made frustrating attempts to gain support from the other members of TAC's governing board. But they had spent years just as totally disengaged as myself from TAC's operations and had absolutely no desire to involve themselves in what they perceived as some sort of rancorous personal dispute. During this period I did my best to avoid publicizing my situation, partly because I found it so humiliating, but finally in late July National Review learned of this simmering controversy and solicited an interview. Initially I hesitated, but seeing that TAC—after rejecting my article as “a distraction”—had covered its homepage for several days straight with articles about British rock bands, zombies, giant robots, and cartoon characters, I became angry enough to provide my side of the story to the media. Three days after NR ran its short he said-she said item, TAC's board convened in a special Sunday phone session to remove me, formalizing what had already occurred.

Although I regarded the denunciation of my article mostly as a pretext to eliminate my pressure on business matters and also as a means of petty retaliation, one member of the TAC board did see the piece as central to the dispute. In subsequent exchanges, Founding Editor Scott McConnell, with whom I'd previously been on quite friendly terms, strongly opposed publication of my analysis, steadily growing more strident in his opinion that running such an article would severely damage TAC's hard-won reputation; and therein lies a fascinating tale.

The American Conservative had been founded in 2002 as a rightwing alternative to National Review by McConnell, Pat Buchanan, and Taki Theodoracopulos, with Taki providing the financial backing. From its earliest days TAC had always represented “the Buchananite perspective” across both foreign and domestic policy, with McConnell having previously served as a senior advisor to Buchanan's 2000 Presidential campaign, and Buchanan himself playing an early role as a guiding influence for the magazine, although without much day-to-day involvement.

Deep concerns over the dangers of non-European immigration had long been central to McConnell's personal ideology, and the strength of his views had cost him his editorial position at the New York Post and his access to the pages of NR, after which he had joined with Peter Brimelow to co-found VDare, the hard-core anti-immigration website. Especially during its early years, TAC had often appeared as VDare's somewhat more restrained print sibling, sharing many of the same writers, topics, and perspectives.

After various quarrels and disputes between the partners, McConnell was running the magazine by himself in 2006. As partial heir to the Avon fortune, he had invested a few hundred thousand dollars of his own inherited wealth to keep the publication alive, but was unwilling to contribute any additional funds and had decided to shut TAC down at the end of that year. I'd become slightly acquainted with him since 2000, and in late 2006 he desperately sought my financial help in rescuing his magazine.

TAC's opportunity to escape its narrow rightwing niche had come from the reluctance of almost any American opinion magazines to strongly challenge President Bush's foreign policy adventures during the early 2000s, which allowed the publication to draw in distinguished liberal and moderate contributors, eager for a print magazine platform enabling them to express their otherwise silenced views. I fell into that same ideological category and had been greatly impressed by TAC's uniquely vigorous opposition to Bush's foreign wars, which I regarded as totally disastrous for the country.

Thus, when McConnell approached me, I responded favorably, and soon afterward became TAC's owner, eventually covering over $3 million of operating losses during the years that followed. Although McConnell had retained the title of editor, his involvement in the magazine's operations had been rather meager for some time, with most of the work being done by Kara Hopkins, his exceptionally able executive editor. Our arrangement was that the two of them would continue to actually run the magazine, while I merely provided the necessary funding.

To my surprise, McConnell also named me publisher and put my name at the top of his masthead, presumably as a means of more firmly binding my crucial financial support to his publication. So I ended up with titular authority over a small DC opinion journal—almost invariably labelled “Pat Buchanan's Magazine”—despite living on the other side of the country and being totally preoccupied with my own work. I don't think I actually visited the TAC office more than once every year or two, when other matters brought me out to DC, though most weeks I did try to briefly touch base with the editors by phone.

An important aspect of TAC's domestic policy agenda still consisted of the strident criticism of non-white immigrants and their supposed incompatibility with American society, a position I found distasteful or even ridiculous, but a cross I was willing to bear on behalf of my far more crucial foreign policy concerns. During my discussions about becoming TAC's owner, I had pledged to allow the editors a free hand to continue publishing their same domestic policy views, and I believe I kept that promise.

Indeed, just a couple of months after I assumed control, my commitment was tested when one of their junior editors angrily resigned from the magazine over what he regarded as a totally unfair cover story on Barack Obama's personal racial identity, and soon after published a harsh denunciation of TAC's racialist orientation in the pages of the prestigious Washington Monthly. Although my own perspective was actually along similar lines, I never gave the TAC editors any problems over this unanticipated early scandal in the DC media.

In the years that followed, similar sorts of racial absurdities, sometimes backed by doubtful factual claims, would periodically appear in a magazine that bore my name at the top of the masthead, but I never made any complaints. After all, most other conservative political magazines also published such nonsense, though perhaps in less extreme form, while liberal and leftist publications usually maintained their own unrealistic dogmas on all sorts of subjects. TAC's line on foreign policy remained excellent, and the publication therefore continued to attract submissions from numerous outstanding academics and journalists, many of whom probably shared my own feelings. I allowed Kara Hopkins and Scott McConnell to run the magazine as they saw fit, and was always greatly impressed by the general quality of the writing and editing of each issue that I happened to examine

Throughout this period, my own foreign policy and national security views had remained identical to those of my old friend Bill Odom, the three-star general who had run the NSA for Ronald Reagan. Gen. Odom's outspokenness was always an inspiration to me, and after the media revealed the vast scope of illegal post-9/11 NSA eavesdropping in 2005, he publicly declared that the NSA Director responsible for those violations should be court-martialed and President Bush impeached. My first and only article for TAC during this period was a tribute to his exemplary career after his untimely death in 2008.

For various reasons, TAC seemed to gradually soften its focus on immigration and other racial issues during the last three or four years, perhaps with my own early 2010 analysis of Hispanic crime rates causing some rethinking of long-held assumptions. While I welcomed this trend, I never pushed it along, aside from occasionally publishing articles presenting my own views. It is notable that two of DC's most vilified recent figures—Jason Richwine and Jack Hunter—had both remained welcome in the pages of TAC during this period, the former with a lengthy review arguing that genetics explained the low IQ of certain racial groups and the latter as a regular columnist.

Given TAC's long history of transgressing the boundaries of acceptable opinion on racial matters, what could possibly have been so disturbing about my own article? I had produced a careful 7,000 word quantitative analysis of public data that explicitly avoided suggesting causal explanations, while offering a variety of insights cutting across ideological lines. After all, the subject of race and crime soon dominated America's headlines in the wake of the Zimmerman verdict, and several of Harvard University's most eminent social scientists sent me favorable comments once they read my piece.

The topic is certainly a delicate one, but hiding from factual reality is hardly the best means of coping with social problems. Indeed, my introduction had actually cited the notorious case of the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan, noting that the vicious attacks he received for his 1965 report on the grim state of the black American family had hardly been a proud day in American intellectual life. In past decades, I think my article might have found a natural home in the pages of The Public Interest, edited by Irving Kristol and Nathan Glazer.

I suspect that certain of TAC's editors found my piece so alarming precisely because they feared that even a cautious and sober discussion of such racial matters might draw unwelcome attention to more than a decade of previous TAC articles in that same general area, many of them far less cautious and sober. The defensiveness and hostility that comes from having a very guilty conscience on racial issues is something I had previously encountered in American politics.

Consider the bizarre ideological contortions of the California Republican Party during the mid-1990s. For purely political reasons nearly all its prominent figures had wholeheartedly endorsed an appalling 1994 measure to summarily expel 300,000 immigrant children from their state's local public schools, even though the majority of those children were native-born American citizens; the same law also mandated five-year prison sentences for any immigrant mother who attempted to prevent this. But once the inevitable backlash occurred and the Republicans realized they had set their state party on the road to oblivion, they desperately reversed every one of their related ideological positions. When I began my 1997 campaign to require that California not only enroll immigrant children in school but also teach them English, those same Republican leaders opposed my initiative with equal unanimity, sometimes darkly hinting that I was motivated by personal hatred toward immigrants or Hispanics. A few years later I described this ironic national situation in a WSJ piece entitled “The Bilingual Burden of Republican Guilt.”

Similarly, the legacy of having published a decade's worth of mistaken and often inflammatory articles on racial topics had now convinced those same TAC editors that they must avoid the subject of race almost entirely, even when it moved to the absolute center of the national conversation. On the Monday following George Zimmerman's acquittal, almost every media publication in America—left, right, and center—gave the topic wall-to-wall headline coverage. But TAC's lead story that day discussed the Congressional Farm Bill, and it never ran a single major article on the subject, with its most substantial coverage being a later blog post by a recently promoted intern praising President Obama's speech on the controversy. A couple of weeks earlier TAC had also completely ignored the crucial Supreme Court rulings on the Voting Rights Act and on the Fisher case challenging a half-century of affirmative action policies. Perhaps this was what Attorney General Eric Holder had meant when he criticized America for being a “nation of cowards” on the subject of race.

The collision between TAC's editorial skittishness and my own work was inevitable, and sooner or later a conflict would surely have occurred. For the last twenty years, race, ethnicity, and social policy have been the main focus of my writings, and my personal website contains hundreds of articles and columns I have written on immigration, bilingual education, affirmative action, and other racially-charged topics. I have always found these issues both important and interesting, with the advantage that such dangerous minefields draw relatively few researchers, thereby providing me a less-crowded niche for exploration. And for better or for worse, my views have scarcely changed in decades, with articles I wrote long ago probably representing my current position almost as well as something I published last month.

Indeed, my first appearance in the conservative media came in the form of a lengthy letter on American urban crime and violence that run in a 1992 Commentary symposium, and I stand by those same words today. Although Commentary and TAC are usually considered ideological arch-foes, in 1999 I published a lengthy Commentary cover story entitled “California and the End of White America” while in 2011 I followed it up with an even longer TAC sequel bearing the similar title “Immigration, Republicans, and the End of White America.” American society had undergone significant changes across those dozen years and the two pieces differed in their focus, but otherwise their perspectives fit together as well as a matched set of book-ends. My opinions may or may not be correct, but at least they have remained consistent over time.

I believe my positions are based on evidence and solid analysis, and can withstand the criticism of my opponents. When my aforementioned Hispanic Crime article ran, it provoked a vast outpouring of exceptionally hostile responses both on the TAC website and across the Internet, which I later collected together as The Hispanic Crime Debate. Last year, my controversial Race/IQ series was just as strongly condemned by outraged racialists, and I gathered all their numerous attacks together in The Race/IQ Debate. I felt I had nothing to fear by assisting readers in considering all sides of these arguments and drawing their own conclusions. For the same reason I strongly supported TAC's regular tradition of publishing a presidential endorsement symposium, in which a wide range of different perspectives were presented, some of which would surely never be found in mainstream publications.

In fact, I considered this part of TAC's broader mission, namely to provide a congenial home for a wide variety of controversial or unorthodox views located outside the NYT-to-WSJ spectrum that represents permissible political commentary in our society. A magazine calling itself “The American Conservative” would naturally skew its perspectives toward the Right, but TAC could still provide ample room for opinions considered too far Left for DC respectability. In general, I think TAC did a pretty good job of fulfilling this goal during my time as publisher, though in hindsight that openness may have begun fading a couple of years ago.

In early 2011 we were contacted by Wick Allison, who introduced himself as the successful semi-retired publisher of D Magazine, billing itself as Dallas' leading local guide to restaurants and nightlife. Allison had worked at National Review a quarter-century earlier and TAC was brought to his attention by his daughter, a recent college graduate then working as an intern at The New Republic. He told us he was close to TAC's political positions, especially on foreign policy, and offered to become our CEO on a part-time, volunteer basis, providing the publishing expertise and fund-raising skills we needed to expand beyond our existing small-circulation niche.

Six months earlier I had converted TAC into a non-profit in hopes of obtaining outside financial support, and although some had come in, the donations were hardly enough to keep the publication going. Around the same time, we had suffered the severe loss of Editor Kara Hopkins, the shaping force behind each issue, who had been lured away by the U.S. government, thereby elevating her subordinate McCarthy to the top editorial slot. Since neither I nor any of the other board members were in a position to provide the time and effort to fill such an executive role and TAC's tiny surviving staff was agreeable, Allison's offer was readily accepted.

After some initial slow-going, he soon seemed to hit his stride and during a three month period, he raised several times more external funding than TAC's entire total for the previous year, validating our hopes. Part of this support was earmarked to hire Rod Dreher, a popular blogger whose themes often related to Christianity; this represented something of a departure for TAC, which had never previously touched much on religious topics.

With Dreher's personal following providing a major boost to TAC's website traffic and early fundraising having gone so extremely well, Allison emphasized the need to build up TAC operations to the point where we could attract a multi-million-dollar capital infusion. Although a few of us had quiet misgivings about taking on these large additional expenses, months of highly successful fundraising made our doubts seem unreasonable.

Part-time and full-time staff and bloggers were steadily added to the payroll, and some salaries were sharply increased. The compensation of TAC's business manager was tripled. Allison's daughter went straight from an Andrew Sullivan internship to being TAC's second highest paid editorial employee. The salary of one of TAC's longtime bloggers was increased seven-fold, although his readership in mid-2012 was roughly the same as it had been in 2010 or 2011. During the course of about one year, TAC's full-time editorial and business staff grew from two or three to a total of seven, while the number of its regular bloggers rose from one to four. I also later discovered that TAC seemed to be paying most of these bloggers five to ten times the going market rate relative to the traffic they generated. Hiring staff and raising salaries inevitably follows the Ratchet Principle: easy to increase but very painful and difficult to later cut. According to public IRS Form 990s, TAC's operational expenses grew by two-thirds between 2010 and 2012, greatly increasing the burden of meeting every monthly payroll.

And unfortunately that early burst of large donations was never again matched, with top prospect after top prospect either turning Allison down or providing just a small fraction of the support he requested, while a direct mail appeal proved extremely unsuccessful. But TAC now needed to regularly obtain large donations just to survive. On a number of occasions, I had to write a sizable check to keep TAC's lights on, and I became increasingly doubtful about the publication's future, deciding that it had had a good run while it lasted.

In late 2012, Allison urgently sought an immediate $60,000 donation from me to bridge the financial gap until one of his strongest prospects came through. Then two weeks after I had sent my check he left me a phone message saying that TAC was totally out of funds, and therefore would be laying off its entire staff and shutting down. At that point I decided I had done all I could.

But as it happened, my 30,000 word article The Myth of American Meritocracy had just been published in what was scheduled to be TAC's final issue, and the piece began creating quite a stir in the media, with David Brooks ranking it as among America's best magazine articles for the year and The New York Times organizing a symposium on the college admissions questions it raised. On a more practical level, the thirty days that followed brought in as large a total of new donations as had arrived during the preceding nine months, together with an even greater sum in firm future commitments. After reaching the brink of extinction, TAC was now granted a second chance to achieve solid financial footing.

Such mundane financial difficulties experienced by a small business that over-expands are hardly of any interest to the outside world. But during 2012 and 2013 they probably had an increasingly pernicious impact upon the sort of articles TAC published, which constituted the sole reason for its existence.

A single example illustrates the problem. In late August 2012 TAC published “Revolt of the Rich” an outstanding critique of our corrupt economic policies written by a former longtime Republican Congressional staffer, and the piece quickly became the most successful in TAC history, generating enormous readership and attracting a great deal of attention. But when Allison soon afterward sought urgent funds from one of TAC's larger donors, his request was angrily rejected on the grounds that the publication had begun promoting “class warfare.” We never received another dollar from that former contributor.

I learned of this unfortunate incident by chance, and I am sure there were many others as well, with various past or prospective donors complaining about particular TAC articles and writers whose material challenged their comfort zone. Few wealthy individuals do much independent thinking on ideology or policy so they tend to merely echo the views of the prominent Democratic and Republican pundits they follow in the mainstream media. TAC probably came under pressure to achieve greater respectability by doing the same.

For whatever reason, I began noticing over the last year or two that more and more of the bold voices whom I had first encountered at TAC no longer seemed to appear, and their places had been taking by establishmentarian commentary, much of which seemed to come from far down in the slush-pile of ordinary submissions to the op-ed pages of major American newspapers. I had often sharply disagreed with much of TAC's material in the past, but had always found it interesting; now I encountered far fewer such disagreements, but the articles seemed dull and safely mainstream.

The growing desire of TAC to become a political “player” in DC circles was also problematic. Jack Hunter—a.k.a. “the Southern Avenger”—had gone from being a regular TAC columnist to becoming a senior staffer to newly elected Sen. Rand Paul, and with growing talk of Paul considering a possible 2016 presidential bid, Hunter apparently became a powerful influence at TAC, resulting in a great deal of Rand Paul boosterism. I also later learned that TAC had begun regularly rejecting articles critical of Rand Paul or his father Ron Paul, even if the material was original and important and might have gained TAC greater visibility in the larger media landscape.

Another factor that may have led TAC astray was its discovery that adopting “liberal” ideological positions tended to attract enormous temporary traffic. Articles endorsing Gay Marriage or advocating gun control drew huge attention from liberal outlets and pundits, eager to spread the word that “even Pat Buchanan's rightwing magazine” now supported their position. The problem was that the liberal readers who arrived to read those articles gradually realized that TAC wasn't all that liberal a website and soon departed, while much of TAC's conservative readership was permanently driven away by such material. “Man Bites Dog” articles only gain attention a few times before they become passé.

This development also had an unfortunate impact upon the TAC's influence on national security matters. As TAC increasingly rejected or avoided most hot-button conservative issues, fewer and fewer people continued to regard it as “conservative” in any meaningful sense, so TAC's strong stance on American foreign wars or civil liberties concerns became no different from that of so many other liberal, moderate, or libertarian publications. Its unique value as a dissenting conservative voice was lost.

Certainly none of these venal sins were any worse than those regularly committed by so many other media outlets, but the only advantages enjoyed by a tiny publication such as TAC had been its journalistic integrity and its willingness to ignore the boundaries of respectable punditry and establishment media opinion. Former Bush speechwriter David Frum had famously issued a 2003 fatwa excommunicating all the “unpatriotic conservatives” aligned with TAC for their strong opposition to the Iraq War, but by late 2012 he was praising TAC for finally having become a responsible media outlet, which may or may not have been much of a compliment.

For years TAC had occupied an almost vacant media niche, but once so many of its articles began falling safely within the boundaries of mainstream media opinion, it began competing against dozens of other publications offering similar commentary on the Internet, many of them backed by vastly greater resources and featuring far more prominent writers. Dreher's Christianity-tinged punditry remained hugely popular, but between November 2012 and June 2013 the remainder of TAC's content traffic dropped by almost 60%, although no comparable post-election decline seemed to occur at some other political websites. Why would people read TAC if they had already read something similar in their morning newspapers?

As TAC's publisher and largest donor, my own articles had mostly remained immune from these growing restrictions, which is why it took me so long to discover they were being implemented. Although none of my writings had ever neatly fit into TAC's original rightwing Buchananite ideology, I also doubt that most of them could have appeared in a mainstream media outlet in anything like their existing form, and that probably contributed to their considerable success. During the past two years, I had published four TAC cover stories, and these had been ranked #1, #2, #3, and #5 in total readership, averaging more than eight times the traffic of TAC's other cover pieces. Taking risks is the only way a tiny publication can have any impact, but the desperate fear of alienating possible donors forced TAC to move in exactly the opposite direction.

At the end of April, my “American Pravda” article critiquing our dishonest national media was scheduled to run as the cover, with the artwork having already been produced. But just before the issue closed, Allison demanded that it be replaced, arguing that the focus on old news was unlikely to attract much interest and the harsh criticism of The New York Times seemed totally unreasonable; I strongly suspect he actually feared that my controversial claims would scare off timorous donors. After a heated argument, I finally acquiesced, and the piece nonetheless quickly became my second most successful ever, attracting almost twenty-five times the readership of the bland hagiography of Ronald Reagan's foreign policy that replaced it on the cover. That incident was how I discovered that so many other TAC writers had previously encountered similar problems.

It became obvious to me that financial pressures were a leading factor behind this growing reluctance to publish controversial material, and after I received my copy of TAC's 2012 federal tax return, I was struck by the large growth in operating expenses. The existing staffing levels seemed completely disproportionate to TAC's actual output.

Leaving aside the postings of its regular bloggers, TAC usually published just a single main article each day on its website plus a couple of short blog posts, with the material generally provided by outside paid contributors or sometimes even syndicated columnists. It seemed incomprehensible to me how this minimal workload required seven full-time editorial and business employees, or what most of them did each day. This was certainly a larger staff than had been necessary during the years when TAC published a meticulously edited 35-40 page print magazine every two weeks, with all the attendant effort of meeting strict deadlines in article solicitation, editing, layout, and cover design.

TAC's print issue frequency had dropped to just six times per year and the website had become the primary means of its distribution, so it was obvious that staffing levels and costs could be drastically reduced without loss of output or quality, bringing expenses into much closer alignment with likely donations. In mid-May I was alarmed to discover that no significant new contributions had arrived since January. Therefore, I soon began pressing this issue with Allison, McCarthy, and my fellow board members. But people hate to admit that their aggressive growth strategy of the last year or two had ultimately proven unsuccessful.

Ideological organizations and publications often confront this exact dilemma. They can remain small, poor, and fiercely independent or they can take the path of growing in size and expense, hoping for greater impact and influence, but usually forcing them to make their peace with the wealthy sources of establishmentarian funding. My own opinion was that since American political journalism already contained such a vast number of different media outlets in the latter category, TAC should avoid merely becoming another one, but I can understand why others might see things differently.

During this heated dispute over TAC's budgetary problems and strategic direction, I had also been completing my quantitative analysis of urban crime, and I finally submitted my draft at the end of May. If my American Pravda article had made Allison very nervous for its possible impact upon donors, my Race and Crime article must have terrified him, coming as it did soon after the Jason Richwine Affair but several weeks before the George Zimmerman trial eventually pushed that exact same subject to the top of every media outlet in America.

Even more importantly, Allison and my other opponents in the budgetary dispute surely saw denouncing my article as a perfect means of deflecting my financial arguments without addressing them, while undercutting my influence with certain of TAC's board members and major donors. An accusation of “racial insensitivity” has become an extremely powerful political trump card to play against one's adversaries in our society, not merely among liberals but these days among conservatives as well.

And that's the story of why “Pat Buchanan's Magazine” purged its publisher for submitting a Public Interest-style article analyzing urban crime in America.

What Google and Facebook Are Hiding

The American Deep State Strikes Back

The Unz Review • May 24, 2020 • 3,400 Words

After several months of record-breaking traffic our alternative media webzine suffered a sharp blow when it was suddenly purged by Facebook at the end of April. Not only was our rudimentary Facebook page eliminated, but all subsequent attempts by readers to post our articles to the world’s largest social network produced an error message describing the content as “abusive.” Our entire website had been banned.

Facebook publishes a monthly report cataloging its actions to eliminate “improper content,” and although our publication was probably one of the largest and most popular ever so proscribed, the explanation provided was remarkably cursory, with our name mentioned in only two scattered sentences across the 47 page document.

Our investigation linked this network to VDARE, a website known for posting anti-immigration content, and individuals associated with a similar website The Unz Review.

Although the people behind this operation attempted to conceal their coordination, our investigation linked this network to VDARE, a website known for posting anti-immigration content, and to individuals associated with a similar website The Unz Review.

As I’ve previously discussed, characterizing our alternative media publication as an “anti-immigration” website “similar” to VDare seemed utterly bizarre considering that only about 0.2% of our 2020 content was republished from that source and many months had elapsed since we had last featured a piece on immigration. So I strongly suspected that the claim merely served as an excuse.

I don’t use Facebook or other social networks myself, and noticed little reduction in our daily traffic following that purge, which seemed to underscore our lack of reliance upon social media. But a week later, this abruptly changed, and our regular daily readership dropped by a significant 15-20%, hardly a crippling blow but quite distressing, setting us back many months of previous growth.

This puzzled me. Why would the Facebook ban have had such limited initial impact but then suddenly become so much more serious? Eventually I discovered that a second even more powerful Internet giant had also banned us, which explained the sharp drop. Our entire website and all its many millions of pages of serious content had been silently deranked by Google, thus eliminating nearly all our incoming traffic from search results. A few quick checks confirmed this unfortunate situation, best illustrated by a particularly striking example.

Just over a decade ago, I had published an important article entitled The Myth of Hispanic Crime, and for ten years it had always placed extremely high in Google searches, generally being ranked #2 across the 52,000,000 results for “Hispanic crime” and also #2 among the 139,000,000 results for “Latino crime.” The impact of my analysis on the heated public debate had also been quite considerable, and a few years ago a leading academic specialist even asked me to blurb his book on that subject. But my article had now vanished from all such Google searches.

Although Google holds an overwhelming monopoly for web searches across the Western world, comparable products using similar technology such as Bing and DuckDuckGo do exist, and these still list my article near the top of their results, with Bing ranking it at #2 for “Hispanic crime” and “Latino crime,” while DuckDuckGo places it #4 in each. But no one would ever find it using Google.

The other pages of our website have been similarly blacklisted, effectively eliminated from all web searches courtesy of Google’s information monopoly. This even included the periodical content library that I had built during the 2000s, containing the near-complete archives of hundreds of America’s most influential publications of the last 150 years. Millions of these important articles are available nowhere else, and their disappearance represents a tremendous loss to academic scholarship.

Google still does contains all these pages, and if the additional specifier “unz” is added to the search, the results come up, but for anyone not knowing where to look, our entire website and all its content has completely disappeared. This explained our sudden 15-20% reduction in regular traffic.

Internet law is obviously quite murky, but it seems a great shame if Google has decided to use its software monopoly to severely manipulate search results and deliberately hide important information. The notion of Google “disappearing” an entire website and all its material is surely fraught with peril. Should Google’s executives be allowed to “disappear” whichever politicians or candidates they dislike? Should wealthy individuals or powerful groups be able to pay or lobby Google to have their critics removed from all search results?

During 2018 Google employees themselves took a very strong public stance on exactly these issues, protesting their own company’s willingness to produce a “censored” version of their search engine for use in China, a controversy that reached the national headlines, and soon forced executives to abandon the project. But although Google censorship of content within China still remains an inflammatory topic, Google censorship of American content has now apparently become so routine and accepted that it took me more than a week to discover that our entire website had been thrown down the Orwellian “memory hole.”

I’d always taken great pride in having my Hispanic Crime article spend a decade ranked #2 among nearly 200,000,000 Google results for that important topic, and was dismayed that Google “disappeared” it. But in fairness, I’d have to admit that individuals who make themselves disagreeable to ruling political elites sometimes suffer far worse retaliation. For example, my Saturday morning newspapers carried the latest developments in the unfortunate story of Jamal Khashoggi, the dissenting Saudi journalist whose critical writings in the Washington Post so irritated his government that they had him killed and his body dismembered with a bone-saw. Compared to that, having my articles deranked by Google hardly seems a major complaint.

For years our website has published a great deal of extremely controversial material, and many readers are probably much more surprised that Google and Facebook took so long to purge us rather than they finally did so.

Consider, for example, my own American Pravda series, which together with related articles totals 280,000 words and has drawn about 3 million pageviews, while attracting over 25,000 comments containing another 3.5 million words. Many of these articles candidly address some of the most controversial aspects of the JFK Assassination, the 9/11 Attacks, and the history of World War II, topics so touchy that a couple of years ago the redoubtable Israel Shamir described me as the “Kamikazi from California,” and suggested along with numerous other observers that our website might soon be annihilated as a consequence. But aside from a rather lackluster rebuke from the usually ferocious ADL, absolutely nothing untoward happened.

Yet now we have been almost simultaneously banned by both Google and Facebook, America’s leading gatekeepers to the Internet, such concerted action hardly seems likely to have been coincidental, especially coming as it did after years of apparent equanimity. So what had prompted this sudden purge?

I think the obvious answer was my most recent American Pravda installment, which attracted more early readership and social media interest than anything I had previously written, and which appeared just eight days before Facebook’s ban.

My article noted some important facts that are less widely known that they should be, and are quite embarrassing both to our own government and its overly subservient mainstream journalists.

For decades, the American media has regularly denounced the Chinese government for its notorious 1989 slaughter of the student protesters at Tiananmen and shamed its leadership for continuing to flatly deny that historical reality, with China’s demands for censorship of the massacre being a leading source of conflict with Google. However, I pointed out that more than twenty years ago the former Beijing bureau chief of the Washington Post, who had personally covered the events, published a long article in our most prestigious journalism review admitting that the infamous “Tiananmen Square Massacre” had never actually happened, and was just a concoction of incompetent journalists and dishonest propagandists. Yet for decades the promotion of that debunked hoax by our elite media has continued unabated.

As another example, I noted that back in 1999 our warplanes had bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, killing or wounding dozens of Chinese diplomats. At the time, our media uniformly reported the attack as a tragic accident, while ridiculing China’s government for alleging otherwise. However, just a few months later, many of the leading newspapers in Britain and the rest of the world revealed that the bombing had indeed been deliberate, quoting numerous NATO intelligence sources to that effect. But since the American media completely boycotted this major international story, very few Americans have ever discovered that the Chinese had been telling the truth all along and our own government lying.

Although these historical items were noteworthy, they merely set the stage for a far more explosive analysis. The bulk of my 7,400 word article presented the very considerable circumstantial evidence that our current Coronavirus national disaster was entirely self-inflicted, being the unintended blowback from an extremely reckless American biowarfare attack against China (and Iran), presumably organized by the Deep State Neocons or other rogue elements in our national security establishment.

This ongoing disease epidemic has already killed 100,000 Americans and wrecked our economy, so we can easily understand why the guilty parties would do all they could to prevent this information from getting into general circulation, pressuring Google and Facebook to suppress the crucial evidence. Since my long article has now been banned by America’s Internet giants, I’ll repeat some of the most important excerpts:

As the coronavirus gradually began to spread beyond China's own borders, another development occurred that greatly multiplied my suspicions. Most of these early cases had occurred exactly where one might expect, among the East Asian countries bordering China. But by late February Iran had become the second epicenter of the global outbreak. Even more surprisingly, its political elites had been especially hard-hit, with a full 10% of the entire Iranian parliament soon infected and at least a dozen of its officials and politicians dying of the disease, including some who were quite senior. Indeed, Neocon activists on Twitter began gleefully noting that their hatred Iranian enemies were now dropping like flies.

Let us consider the implications of these facts. Across the entire world the only political elites that have yet suffered any significant human losses have been those of Iran, and they died at a very early stage, before significant outbreaks had even occurred almost anywhere else in the world outside China. Thus, we have America assassinating Iran's top military commander on Jan. 2nd and then just a few weeks later large portions of the Iranian ruling elites became infected by a mysterious and deadly new virus, with many of them soon dying as a consequence. Could any rational individual possibly regard this as a mere coincidence?

• • •

For obvious reasons, the Trump Administration has become very eager to emphasize the early missteps and delays in the Chinese reaction to the viral outbreak in Wuhan, and has presumably encouraged our media outlets to direct their focus in that direction.

As an example of this, the Associated Press Investigative Unit recently published a rather detailed analysis of those early events purportedly based upon confidential Chinese documents. Provocatively entitled “China Didn’t Warn Public of Likely Pandemic for 6 Key Days”, the piece was widely distributed, running in abridged form in the NYT and elsewhere. According to this reconstruction, the Chinese government first became aware of the seriousness of this public health crisis on Jan. 14th, but delayed taking any major action until Jan. 20th, a period of time during which the number of infections greatly multiplied.

Last month, a team of five WSJ reporters produced a very detailed and thorough 4,400 word analysis of the same period, and the NYT has published a helpful timeline of those early events as well. Although there may be some differences of emphasis or minor disagreements, all these American media sources agree that Chinese officials first became aware of the serious viral outbreak in Wuhan in early to mid-January, with the first known death occurring on Jan. 11th, and finally implemented major new public health measures later that same month. No one has apparently disputed these basic facts.

But with the horrific consequences of our own later governmental inaction being obvious, elements within our intelligence agencies have sought to demonstrate that they were not the ones asleep at the switch. Earlier this month, an ABC News story cited four separate government sources to reveal that as far back as late November, a special medical intelligence unit within our Defense Intelligence Agency had produced a report warning that an out-of-control disease epidemic was occurring in the Wuhan area of China, and widely distributed that document throughout the top ranks of our government, warning that steps should be taken to protect US forces based in Asia. After the story aired, a Pentagon spokesman officially denied the existence of that November report, while various other top level government and intelligence officials refused to comment. But a few days later, Israeli television mentioned that in November American intelligence had indeed shared such a report on the Wuhan disease outbreak with its NATO and Israeli allies, thus seeming to independently confirm the complete accuracy of the original ABC News story and its several government sources.

It therefore appears that elements of the Defense Intelligence Agency were aware of the deadly viral outbreak in Wuhan more than a month before any officials in the Chinese government itself. Unless our intelligence agencies have pioneered the technology of precognition, I think this may have happened for the same reason that arsonists have the earliest knowledge of future fires.

Although criticism of the mainstream media has been the central theme of my American Pravda series, I always spend at least a couple of hours every morning carefully reading our leading newspapers, which I regard as unmatched sources of important information so long as their articles are treated with proper caution and rigor. Consider that most of the crucial evidence suggesting an American biowarfare attack was hidden in plain sight in such eminently respectable news sources as the NYT, the WSJ, and ABC News.

As our global confrontation with China has grown hotter, my morning New York Times has continued to provide invaluable information for anyone willing to read it carefully.

For example, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo probably ranks as the most prominent Deep State Neocon in the Trump Administration, and is a leading architect of our confrontation with China. Last week he broke quarantine to take a trip to Israel and hold important talks with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, as reported in a 1,600 word NYT article. Although the majority of their discussion concerned American support for the proposed annexation of the Palestinian West Bank, a serious disagreement arose concerning Israel’s growing economic ties with China, with the piece noting that the Jewish State had “antagonized” Washington by allowing Chinese companies to make major infrastructure investments, some of them in sensitive locations. According to the three Times journalists, Netanyahu firmly stood his ground, determined to “push back” against Pompeo’s repeated warnings and refused to reconsider his government’s China policy.

But just a couple of days later, the Times then reported that Du Wei, the Chinese ambassador to Israel, age 57, had been found dead at his home, having suddenly fallen victim to “unspecified health problems.” The piece emphasized that he had become a leading public critic of America’s current policies toward China, and the juxtaposition of these two consecutive NYT articles raised all sorts of obvious questions in my mind.

According to standard mortality tables, an American male age 57 has less than a 1% chance of dying in a particular year, and given the similarity in overall life expectancy, the same must surely true of Chinese males. Recently appointed Chinese ambassadors are likely to be in reasonably good health rather than suffering the last stages of terminal cancer, but such causes together with obvious, visible injuries account for more than half of all fatalities at around that age. Thus, the likelihood that the 57-year-old Chinese diplomat died naturally within that two day window was probably far less than 1 in 50,000. Lightning does sometimes strike under the most unlikely of circumstances, but not very often; and I think that the unexplained deaths of ambassadors during international confrontations probably fall into the same category.

Thus, it seems exceptionally unlikely that the sudden demise of Ambassador Du was not somehow directly connected with the heated dispute between Pompeo and Netanyahu over Israel’s China ties that had occurred just two days earlier. The exact details and circumstances are entirely obscure, and we can merely speculate. But since speculation has not yet been outlawed by government edict, an interesting possibility comes to mind.

In sharp contrast to the elected leaders of America’s vassal-states throughout Europe and Asia, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu hardly regards himself as beholden to the American government. He is a powerful, arrogant individual who remembers the endless standing ovations that he enjoyed when he addressed our own House and Senate, receiving the sort of bipartisan public adulation that would be unimaginable for a Donald Trump, who remains deeply unpopular with half our Congress and nation. So faced with demands by a Trump envoy that he sacrifice his own nation’s interests by cancelling important Chinese economic projects, he apparently disregarded Pompeo’s warnings and told him to get lost.

The classic 1972 film The Godfather ranks #2 in the IMDb Movie Database, and one of its most famous scenes concerns a conflict between a powerful and arrogant Hollywood film mogul and a visiting representative of the Corleone family. When the polite requests of the latter are casually disregarded, the movie tycoon awakens to discover the bloody head of his prized race-horse in his own bed, thereby demonstrating the serious nature of the warning he had received and indicating that it should not be disregarded. Pompeo had recently served as CIA Director, and I suspect he called in a few favors with elements of the Israeli Mossad and had them take lethal steps to convince Netanyahu that our demands that he reassess his ties with China were of a serious nature, not to be treated lightly. I strongly suspect that the controversial Chinese-Israeli economic ventures will soon be curtailed or abandoned.

I had never heard of the unfortunate Chinese ambassador prior to his sudden demise, and under normal circumstances any such notions of American foul play might be dismissed as absurd. But consider that just a few months earlier, we had publicly assassinated a top Iranian leader after he was lured to Baghdad for peace negotiations, an act vastly more weighty than the plausible deniability of a middle-aged diplomat being found dead in his own home of unknown causes.

A few days later, my Wall Street Journal carried an article entitled China’s ‘Wolf Warrior’ Diplomats Are to Fight, beginning on the front page and running 2,200 words, by far the longest piece appearing in that day’s edition. Yet although the late Ambassador Du had been in the forefront of this ongoing Chinese campaign to challenge American influence, both in Israel and during his previous posting to Ukraine, and the sudden death of this particular “wolf warrior diplomat” was surely known to the journalists, his name appeared nowhere in the text, leading me to wonder whether it had been deliberately excised to avoid raising obvious suspicions in the WSJ readership.

For hundreds of years since the Treaty of Westphalia, the lives of diplomats have been almost always treated as sacrosanct, and a typical response to breaking such international conventions might be tit-for-tat retaliation. China’s leadership tends to be remarkably pragmatic, and recognizes that its national strength is rapidly growing even as our own society decays and declines, so perhaps they will forego any such reaction, at least for the time being. But if any American diplomats or other ranking officials begin to suffer strange fatalities, the explanation may be less than mysterious, though Google and Facebook will certainly do their best to keep it so.

Ideological Purges and the Lord Voldemort Effect

The Unz Review • July 14, 2020 • 3,800 Words

Our website traffic easily broke all records for the month of June, and these high levels have now continued into July, suggesting that the huge rise produced by the initial wave of Black Lives Matters protests may be more than temporary. It appears that many new readers first discovered our alternative webzine at that point, and quite a few have stayed on as regular visitors.

This represents a sharp turnaround after May, when our near-simultaneous banning by both Google and Facebook at the beginning of that month caused our previously strong traffic to decline by 15% or more.

A longer-term factor that may be strengthening our position is the unprecedented wave of ideological purges that have swept our country since early June, with prominent figures in the intellectual and media firmaments being especially hard hit. When opinion-leaders become fearful of uttering even slightly controversial words, they either grow silent or only mouth the most saccharine homilies, thereby forcing many of their erstwhile readers to look elsewhere for more candid discussions. And our own webzine is about as “elsewhere” as one could possibly get.

Take, for example, the New York Times, more than ever our national newspaper of record. For the last few years, one of its top figures had been Editorial Page Editor James Bennet, who had previously run The Atlantic, and he was widely considered a leading candidate to assume the same position at the Gray Lady after next year’s scheduled retirement of the current top editor. Indeed, with his brother serving as U.S. Senator from Colorado—and a serious if second-rank presidential candidate—the Lifestyle section of the Washington Post had already hailed the Bennet brothers as the potential saviors of the American establishment.

But then his paper published an op-ed by an influential Republican senator endorsing President Trump’s call for a harsh crackdown on riots and looting, and a Twitter mob of outraged junior Times staffers organized a revolt. The mission of the NYT Opinion Pages is obviously to provide a diversity of opinions, but Bennet was quickly purged.

A similar fate befell the highly-regarded longtime editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer after his paper ran a headline considered insufficiently respectful to black rioters. Michigan State University researchers had raised doubts about the accepted narrative of black deaths at the hands of police, and physicist Stephen Hsu, the Senior Vice President who had supported their work, was forced to resign his administrative position as a consequence.

Numerous other figures of lesser rank have been purged, their careers and livelihoods destroyed for Tweeting out a phrase such as “All Lives Matter,” whose current classification as “hate speech” might have stunned even George Orwell. Or perhaps a spouse or other close relative had denounced the black rioters. The standards of acceptable discourse are changing so rapidly that positions which were completely innocuous just a few weeks ago have suddenly become controversial or even forbidden, with punishments sometimes inflicted on a retroactive basis.

I am hardly alone in viewing this situation with great concern. Just last week, some 150 prominent American writers, academics, and intellectuals published an open letter in Harpers expressing their grave concern over protecting our freedom of speech and thought.

Admittedly, the credentials of some of the names on the list were rather doubtful. After all, David Frum and various hard-core Neocons had themselves led the effort to purge from the media all critics of Bush’s disastrous Iraq War, and more recently they have continued to do with same with regard to our irrational hostility towards Putin’s Russia. But the principled histories of other signers such as Noam Chomsky partially compensated for the inclusion of such unpleasant opportunists.

Although the Harpers statement attracted many stars of our liberal firmament, apparently few people read Harpers these days, with its website traffic being just a tenth of our own. Therefore, the reaction in the media itself was a much more important factor, and this seems to have been decidedly mixed. 150 rather obscure activists soon issued a contrasting statement, which major outlets such as NYT, CNN, and the Los Angeles Times seem to have accorded equal or greater weight, hardly suggesting that the ideological tide has started to turn.

Back a couple of years ago, there was a popular joke going around Chinese social media in which Chairman Mao came back to life with all sorts of questions about the modern world. Among other things, he was informed his disastrous Cultural Revolution had shifted to America, a prescient observation given the events of the last few weeks:

The controversial May 25th death of a black man named George Floyd in Minneapolis police custody soon set off the greatest nationwide wave of protests, riots, and looting in at least two generations, and the once-placid hometown of the Mary Tyler Moore Show alone suffered some five hundred million dollars of damage. Some of the main political reactions have been especially surprising, as the newly elevated activists of the Black Lives Matter movement have received massive media support for their demands that local urban police departments be “defunded,” a proposal so bizarre that it had previously been almost unknown.

Statues, monuments, and other symbolic representations of traditional American history quickly became a leading target. Hubert Humphrey’s Minneapolis has long been an extremely liberal bastion of the heavily Scandinavian Upper Midwest, having no ties to the South or slavery, but Floyd’s death soon launched an unprecedented national effort to eradicate all remaining Confederate memorials and other Southern cultural traces throughout our society. Popular country music groups such as the Dixie Chicks and Lady Antebellum had freely recorded their songs for decades, but they were now suddenly forced to change their names in frantic haste.

And although this revolutionary purge began with Confederacy, it soon extended to include much of our entire national history, with illustrious former occupants of the White House being the most prominent targets. Woodrow Wilson ranked as Princeton University’s most famous alumnus and its former president, but his name was quickly scraped off the renowned public policy school, while the Natural History Museum of New York is similarly removing a statue of Theodore Roosevelt. Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant had together won the Civil War and abolished black slavery, but their statues around the country were vandalized or ordered removed. The same fate befell Andrew Jackson along with the author of the Star Spangled Banner, our national anthem.

The leading heroes of the American Republic from its birth in 1776 face “cancellation” and this sudden tidal wave of attacks has clearly gained considerable elite backing. The New York Times carries enormous weight in such circles, and last Tuesday their lead opinion piece called for the Jefferson Memorial to be replaced by a towering statue of a black woman, while one of their regular columnists has repeatedly demanded that all monuments honoring George Washington suffer a similar fate. Stacy Abrams, often mentioned as one of Joe Biden’s leading Vice Presidential choices, had previously made the destruction of Georgia’s historic Stone Mountain Memorial part of her campaign platform, so we now seem only a step or two away from credible political demands that Mount Rushmore be dynamited Taliban-style.

The original roots of our country were Anglo-Saxon and this heritage remained dominant during its first century or more, but other strands in our national tapestry are suffering similar vilification. Christopher Columbus discovered the New World for Spain, but he has became a hated and despised figure across our country, so perhaps in the near future his only surviving North American monument will be the huge statue honoring him in the heart of Mexico City. Father Junipero Serra founded Hispanic California and a few years ago was canonized as the first and only Latin American saint, but his statues have been toppled and his name already removed from Stanford University buildings. At the time we acquired the sparsely-populated American Southwest, the bulk of our new Hispanic population was concentrated in New Mexico, but the founding father of that region has now had his monument attacked and vandalized. Cervantes, author of Don Quixote, is considered the greatest writer in the Spanish language, and his statue was also vandalized.

Perhaps these trends will abate and the onrushing tide of cultural destruction may begin to recede. But at present there seems a serious possibility that the overwhelming majority of America’s leading historical figures prior to the political revolution of the 1930s may be destined for the scrap heap. A decade ago, President Obama and most prominent Democrats opposed Gay Marriage, but just a few years later, the CEO of Mozilla was forced to resign when his past political contribution to a California initiative taking that same position came to light, and today private individuals might easily lose their jobs at many corporations for expressing such views. Thus, one might easily imagine that within five or ten years, any public expressions of admiration for Washington or Jefferson might be considered by many as bordering on “hate speech,” and carry severe social and employment consequences. Our nation seems to be suffering the sort of fate normally inflicted upon a conquered people, whose new masters seek to break their spirit and stamp out any notions of future resistance.

A good example of this growing climate of fear came a couple of weeks ago when a longtime blogger going under the name “Scott Alexander” deleted his entire website and its millions of words of accumulated archives because the New York Times was about to run an article revealing his true identity. I had only been slightly aware of the SlateStarCodex blogsite and the “rationalist” community it had gradually accumulated, but the development was apparently significant enough to provoke a long article in the New Yorker.

The target of the alleged witch-hunt was hardly any sort of right-winger. He was reportedly a liberal Jewish psychiatrist living in Berkeley, whose most notable piece of writing had been a massive 30,000 word refutation of neo-reactionary thought. But because he was willing to entertain ideas and contributors outside the tight envelope of the politically-correct canon, he believed that his life would be destroyed if his name became known.

Conservative commenter Tucker Carlson has recently attracted the highest ratings in cable history for populist positions, some of which have influenced President Trump. But just a couple of days ago, his top writer, a certain Blake Neff, was forced to resign after CNN revealed his years of pseudonymous remarks on a rightwing forum, even though the most egregious of these seemed no worse than somewhat crude racially-charged humor.

Our own website attracts thousands of commenters, many of whom have left remarks vastly more controversial than anything written by Neff let alone Alexander, and these two incidents naturally inspired several posts by blogger Steve Sailer, which attracted many hundreds of worried comments in the resulting threads. Although I could entirely understood that many members of our community were fearful of being “doxxed” by the media, I explained why I thought the possibility quite unlikely.

Although it’s been a few years since my name last appeared on the front page of the New York Times, I am still at least a bit of a public figure, and I would say that many of the articles I have published under my own name have been at least 100 times as “controversial” as anything written by the unfortunate “Scott Alexander.” The regular monthly traffic to our website is six or seven times as great as that which flowed to SlateStarCodex prior to its sudden disappearance, and I suspect that our influence has also been far greater. Any serious journalist who wanted to get in touch with me could certainly do so, and I have been freely given many interviews in the past, while hundreds of reasonably prominent writers, academics, and other intellectuals have spent years on my regular distribution list.

Tracking down the identity of an anonymous commenter who once or twice made doubtful remarks is extremely hard work, and at the end of the process you will have probably netted yourself a pretty small fish. Surely any eager scalp-hunter in the media would prefer to casually mine the hundreds of thousands of words in my articles, which would provide a veritable cornucopia of exceptionally explosive material, all fully searchable and conveniently organized by particular taboos. Yet for years the entire journalistic community has scrupulously averted their eyes from such mammoth potential scandal. And the likely explanation may provide some important insights into the dynamics of ideological conflict in the media.

Activist organizations often take the lead in locating controversial statements, which they then pass along to their media allies for ritual denunciation, and much of my own material would seem especially provocative to the fearsome ADL. Yet oddly enough, that organization seemed quite reluctant to engage with me, and only after my repeated baiting did they finally issue a rather short and perfunctory critique in 2018, which lacked any named author. But even that lackluster effort afforded me an opening to respond with my own 7,300 word essay highlighting the very unsavory origins and activities of that controversial organization. After that exchange, they went back into hiding and have remained there ever since.

In my lengthy analysis of the true history of World War II, I described what I called “the Lord Voldemort Effect,” explaining why so much of our mainstream source material should be treated with great care:

In the popular Harry Potter series, Lord Voldemort, the great nemesis of the young magicians, is often identified as “He Who Must Not Be Named,” since the mere vocalization of those few particular syllables might bring doom upon the speaker. Jews have long enjoyed enormous power and influence over the media and political life, while fanatic Jewish activists demonstrate hair-trigger eagerness to denounce and vilify all those suspected of being insufficiently friendly towards their ethnic group. The combination of these two factors has therefore induced such a “Lord Voldemort Effect” regarding Jewish activities in most writers and public figures. Once we recognize this reality, we should become very cautious in analyzing controversial historical issues that might possibly contain a Jewish dimension, and also be particularly wary of arguments from silence.

However, even dread Lord Voldemorts may shrink from a terrifying Lord Voldemort of their own, and I think that this website falls into that category. The ADL and various other powerful organizations may have quietly issued an edict that absolutely forbids the media outlets they influence from mentioning our existence. I believe there is strong evidence in favor of this remarkable hypothesis.

Among Trump’s surviving advisors, Stephen Miller provokes some of the most intense hostility, and last November the SPLC and its media allies made a concerted attempt to force his resignation based upon some of his private emails, which had promoted several controversial posts by Steve Sailer. The resulting firestorm was discussed on this website, and I analyzed some of the strange anomalies:

Just as might be expected, the whole SPLC attack is “guilt by association,” and Ctrl-F reveals a full 14 references to VDare, with the website characterized in very harsh terms. Yet although there are several mentions of Steve and his writings, there is absolutely no reference to this webzine, despite being Steve's primary venue.

Offhand, this might seem extremely odd. My own guess is that much of the material we publish is 10x as “controversial” as anything VDare has ever run, and many of my own personal articles, including those that have spent over a year on the Home page, might be up in the 30x or 40x potency range. Moreover, I think our traffic these days is something like 10x that of VDare, seemingly making us an extremely juicy target.

Now admittedly, I don't know that Miller fellow, but the horrifying VDare post that Miller supposedly shared was actually republished by VDare from this website. And that would surely have made it very, very easy for the SPLC to use the connection as a opening to begin cataloguing the unspeakingly horrifying list of transgressions we regularly feature, easily expanding the length of their attack on Miller by adding another 6,000 words. Yet the silence has been totally deafening. Puzzling…

Here's my own hypothesis…

As everyone knows, there are certain “powerful groups” in our society that so terrify members of the media and political worlds that they receive the “Lord Voldemort Treatment,” with mainstream individuals being terrified that merely speaking the name would result in destruction. Indeed, the SPLC is one of the primary enforcers of that edict.

However, my theory is that even those dread Lord Voldemorts greatly fear an even more dreadful Lord Voldemort of their own, namely this webzine. The SPLC writer knew perfectly well that mere mention of The Unz Review might ensure his destruction. I'd guess that the ADL/SPLC/AIPAC has made this prohibition absolutely clear to everyone in the media/political worlds.

Given that Miller’s main transgression was his promotion of posts originally published on this website, the media could have easily associated him with the rest of our material, much of which was sufficiently explosive to have almost certainly forced his resignation. Yet when the journalists and activists weighed the likelihood of destroying Trump’s most hated advisor against the danger of mentioning our existence, the latter factor was still judged the stronger, allowing Miller to survive.

This hypothesis was strongly supported by a second incident later that same month. We had previously published an article by Prof. Eric Rasmusen of Indiana University, and I read in my morning Times that he had suddenly become embroiled in a major Internet controversy, with a chorus of angry critics seeking to have him removed. According to the article, he had apparently promoted the “vile and stupid” views of some anti-feminist website in one of his Tweets, which had come to the attention of an enraged activist. The resulting firestorm of denunciations on Twitter had been viewed 2.5 million times, provoking a major academic controversy in the national media.

Being curious about what had happened, I contacted Rasmusen to see whether he might want to submit a piece regarding the controversy, which he did. But to my utter astonishment, I discovered that the website involved had actually been our own, a fact that I never would never have suspected from the extremely vague and circuitous discussion provided in the newspaper. Apparently, the old-fashioned Who-What-Where provisions of the Times style manual had been quietly amended to prohibit providing any hint of our existence even when we were at the absolute center of one of their 1,000 word news stories.

Highly-controversial ideas backed by strong evidence may prove dangerously contagious, and the political/media strategy pursued by the ADL, the Times, and numerous other organs of the elite establishment seems perfectly rational. Since our Bill of Rights still provides considerable protection for freedom of speech, the next-best alternative is to institute a strict cordon sanitaire, intended to strictly minimize the number of individuals who might become infected.

Our webzine and my own articles are hardly the only victims of this sort of strategy—once dubbed “the Blackout” by eminent historian Harry Elmer Barnes—whose other targets often possess the most respectable of establishmentarian credentials.

Last month marked the 31st anniversary of the notorious 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre, and elite media coverage was especially extensive this year due to our current global confrontation with China. The New York Times devoted most of two full pages to a photo-laden recapitulation while the Wall Street Journal gave it front-page treatment, with just those two publications alone running some six separate articles and columns on those horrifying events from three decades ago.

Yet back in the 1990s, the former Beijing bureau chief of the Washington Post, who had personally covered the events, published a long article in the prestigious Columbia Journalism Review entitled The Myth of Tiananmen, in which he publicly admitted that the supposed “massacre” was merely a fraudulent concoction of careless journalists and dishonest propagandists. At least some of our top editors and journalists must surely be aware of these facts, and feel guilty about promoting a long-debunked hoax of the late 1980s. But any mention of those widely-known historical facts is strictly forbidden in the media, lest American readers become confused and begin to consider an alternative narrative.

Russia possesses a nuclear arsenal at least as powerful as our own, and the total break in our relations began when Congress passed the Magnitsky Act in 2012, targeting important Russian leaders. Yet none of our media outlets have ever been willing to admit that the facts used to justify that very dangerous decision seem to have been entirely fraudulent, as recounted in the article we recently published by Prof. John Ryan.

Similarly, our sudden purge from both Google and Facebook came just days after my own long article presenting the strong evidence that America’s ongoing Covid-19 disaster was the unintentional blowback from our own extremely reckless biowarfare attack against China (and Iran). Over 130,000 of our citizens have already died and our daily life has been wrecked, so the American people might grow outraged if they began to suspect that this huge national disaster was entirely self-inflicted.

And the incident that sparked our current national upheaval includes certain elements that our media has scrupulously avoided mentioning. The knee-neck hold used against George Floyd was standard police procedure in Minneapolis and many other cities, and had apparently been employed thousands of times across our country in recent years with virtually no fatalities. Meanwhile, Floyd’s official autopsy indicated that he had lethal levels of Fentanyl and other illegal drugs in his system at the time of his demise. Perhaps the connection between these two facts is more than purely coincidental, and if they became widely known, popular sentiments might shift.

Finally, our alternative media webzine is pleased to have recently added two additional columnists together with major portions of their archives, which will help to further broaden our perspective.

Larry Romanoff has been a regular contributor to the Global Research website, most recently focusing on the Coronavirus outbreak in China, and earlier this year he published an article pointed to the considerable evidence that the virus had originated in the U.S., which was cited by Chinese officials and soon became a flashpoint in American-Chinese relations. After having been viewed millions of times, that piece and several others seem to have disappeared from their original venue, but along with the rest of his writings, they are now conveniently available on our own website.

For the last quarter-century, Jared Taylor has probably been America’s most prominent White Nationalist writer. Although Black Nationalists such as Al Sharpton have cable television shows and boast of many dozens of visits to the White House, the growing climate of ideological repression has caused Taylor and his American Renaissance organization to be deplatformed from YouTube, Twitter, and numerous other Internet services. One of his main writers is Gregory Hood, whom we have now added as a regular columnist, together with dozens of his pieces over the last few years.

Google and the John McCain Cover-up

The Unz Review • August 6, 2020 • 1,800 Words

Back in early May Google took the remarkable step of deranking our entire website, placing our many thousands of content pages near the absolute bottom of its search results, where almost no one would ever see them. If a user included the keyword “unz” in a search string, our pages would still come up, but otherwise they would be almost totally invisible. So people specifically looking for our website could still find it, but almost no one else.

Google holds a worldwide monopoly in search, having a total market share greater than 90% and therefore functioning as a global gatekeeper to the Internet, so this harsh action had serious consequences. Our regular daily traffic dropped by 15% or more, especially reducing the inflow of casual new visitors who might discover our alternative media webzine in an unrelated search. The national wave of urban turmoil that broke out at the end of that same month soon overwhelmed this decline and lifted our traffic to new heights, but the severe loss of new readers remained. So although our daily pageviews have set new records, the number of unique visitors to our website has remained substantially diminished.

Then a couple of weeks ago, various journalists reported an even more severe manipulation of Google’s search system, with dozens of top Republican-leaning websites, including Breitbart and Drudge, suddenly discovering that all their content had entirely disappeared from Google while liberal-leaning publications remained unaffected. This search engine “glitch” ended within a day and the conservative websites reappeared, but there was widespread speculation that Google had added a “kill switch” that could cleanse the Internet of all right-wing content at a moment’s notice, and someone had inadvertently tested this powerful new media weapon in public, thereby revealing its existence.

A presidential election is less than three months away, and conservatives have long complained that the Silicon Valley tech giants are biased against them. So the very real possibility that Google was road-testing the ability to “disappear” all conservative publications at some crucial moment must surely have raised concerns even among the most level-headed.

Therefore, I naturally assumed that this crucial issue of biased search results would become a central point of questioning during last week’s Congressional testimony of Google CEO Sundar Pichai. Surely the Republican members of the committee would ask him why all the websites in their ideological camp had suddenly disappeared from Google, and whether this suggested deliberate plans by the Monopolist of Mountain View to slant its search results against their side of the aisle. Google displays the results of six billion searches each day, so such bias would probably have a political impact millions of times greater than the alleged “RussiaGate manipulation” that had so dominated our national headlines for many months.

However, I was sorely mistaken. Neither the national newspapers nor other publications reported any such line of questioning. This suggested that the Republican members of the committee were either reluctant to antagonize their powerful witness, or more likely, were just too ignorant of the Internet to realize that if Google suddenly “disappeared” all their media outlets, many of their voters and their own seats in Congress would soon follow. So I was forced to listen to the entire three and a half hour hearing on YouTube, then afterward hunted around in vain for a complete transcript.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8qS7eyUo_uk

Although the Republicans made little attempt to pin down Google’s chief, some of Pichai’s responses certainly seemed to suggest that Google was committed to providing unbiased search results, especially during his questioning by Rep. Steve King (R-IA). He assured his listeners that Google never “put its thumb on the scale” of search results, nor allowed “manual intervention” to corrupt its objective algorithms. Any casual listener would surely assume that Google search results were ranked solely by the number and quality of their links and sources rather than modified for reasons of ideological bias or political expediency. Yet it is quite easy to demonstrate the contrary. I recounted last year:

As the winner of the Pulitzer Prize and two George Polk awards, the late Sydney Schanberg was widely regarded as one of the greatest American war correspondents of the twentieth century. His exploits during our ill-fated Indo-Chinese War had become the basis of the Oscar-winning film The Killing Fields, which probably established him as the most famous journalist in America after Woodward and Bernstein of Watergate fame, and he had also served as a top editor at The New York Times. A decade ago, he published his greatest expose, providing a mountain of evidence that America had deliberately left behind hundreds of POWs in Vietnam and he fingered then-presidential candidate John McCain as the central figure in the later official cover-up of that monstrous betrayal. The Arizona senator had traded on his national reputation as our best-known former POW to bury the story of those abandoned prisoners, permitting America’s political establishment to escape serious embarrassment. As a result, Sen. McCain earned the lush rewards of our generous ruling elites, much like his own father Admiral John S. McCain, Sr., who had led the cover-up of the deliberate 1967 Israeli attack on the U.S.S. Liberty, which killed or wounded over 200 American servicemen.

As publisher of The American Conservative, I ran Schanberg’s remarkable piece as a cover story, and across several websites over the years it has surely been read many hundreds of thousands of times, including a huge spike around the time of McCain’s death. I therefore find it rather difficult to believe that the many journalists investigating McCain’s background might have remained unaware of this material. Yet no hints of these facts were provided in any of the articles appearing in any remotely prominent media outlets as can be seen by searching for web pages containing “McCain and Schanberg” dated around the time of the Senator’s passing.

Schanberg’s journalistic stature had hardly been forgotten by his former colleagues. Upon his death a couple of years ago, the Times ran a very long and glowing obituary, and a few months later I attended the memorial tribute to his life and career held at the New York Times headquarters building, which included more than two hundred prominent journalists mostly from his own generation, including those of the highest rank. Times Publisher Arthur Sulzberger, Jr. gave a speech describing how as a young man he had always so greatly admired Schanberg and had been mortified by the unfortunate circumstances of his departure from the family’s newspaper. Former Executive Editor Joseph Lelyveld recounted the many years he had worked closely with the man he had long considered his closest friend and colleague, someone whom he almost seemed to regard as his older brother. But during the two hours of praise and remembrance scarcely a single word was uttered in public about the gigantic story that had occupied the last two decades of Schanberg’s celebrated career.

- John McCain and the POW Cover-Up

Sydney Schanberg • May 25, 2010 • 8,200 Words

Although Google controls all but a slice of the worldwide search engine market, very similar technologies are employed by its various competitors such as Bing, DuckDuckGo, and Russia’s Yandex, and it is easy to compare their strikingly dissimilar results for the simple string “mccain pows”:

- https://www.google.com/search?q=mccain+pows

- https://www.bing.com/search?q=mccain+pows

- https://duckduckgo.com/?q=mccain+pows

- https://yandex.com/search/?text=mccain+pows

For Bing, Schanberg’s American Conservative cover-story ranks #1. For DuckDuckGo, it ranks #2, just below McCain’s Wikipedia entry. For Yandex, the republication on The Unz Review holds the top spot, with the American Conservative version placing #2. But Schanberg’s remarkable 8,200 word expose has been “disappeared” from Google’s search engine, nowhere to be found across at least the first ten pages of results.

These striking differences seem totally inconsistent with Pichai’s sworn Congressional testimony that Google never uses “manual intervention” to place “its thumb on the scale” of the search results used each day by so many hundreds of millions of individuals.

I have previously expressed by great irritation that Google had “disappeared” my own articles, but suffering the same fate as one of the foremost American journalists of the twentieth century does cushion the blow:

For the last ten years, my article The Myth of Hispanic Crime had regularly ranked #2 among the 180 million search results Google returned for “Latino Crime” and the 60 million for “Hispanic Crime,” an achievement for which I had become inordinately proud. But although comparable search engines such as Bing and DuckDuckGo still rank my piece near the very top, Google has completely “disappeared” it.

I think a reasonable measure of a topic’s importance is the total number of search results it returns. Communism and Communists dominated the entire twentieth century and the political party of that name still holds sway in gigantic China. So a search on “Communism” returns 163 million results, a vast number but still somewhat below the total for “Latino Crime.” Imagine how an academic or journalist might feel if his article analyzing Communism had spent a full decade ranked #2 across the entire Internet, but Google had then suddenly decided to blacklist it for reasons entirely unrelated to its intrinsic or objective quality.

- https://www.google.com/search?q=latino+crime

- https://www.bing.com/search?q=latino+crime

- https://duckduckgo.com/?q=latino+crime

- https://yandex.com/search/?text=latino+crime

- https://www.google.com/search?q=hispanic+crime

- https://www.bing.com/search?q=hispanic+crime

- https://duckduckgo.com/?q=hispanic+crime

- https://yandex.com/search/?text=hispanic+crime

My American Pravda series has also vanished from Google, while still ranking at or near the top of all its competitors.

- https://www.google.com/search?q=american+pravda

- https://www.bing.com/search?q=american+pravda

- https://duckduckgo.com/?q=american+pravda

- https://yandex.com/search/?text=american+pravda

Naturally, my far harsher critiques of John McCain’s long career have entirely vanished as well:

- John McCain: When “Tokyo Rose” Ran for President

Ron Unz • March 9, 2015 • 4,200 Words

- American Pravda: John McCain, Jeffrey Epstein, and Pizzagate

Our Reigning Political Puppets, Dancing to Invisible Strings

Ron Unz • July 29, 2019 • 6,400 Words

Google is obviously a private corporation, holding an unregulated monopoly over our sources of Internet information, and I cannot say whether or not its manipulation of search results for political reasons violates American law.

But lying under oath to members of Congress during sworn public testimony is a serious felony, and I think Mr. Pichai would be well-advised to immediately investigate whether his own subordinates have been misleading him on important aspects of his own company’s search operations.

Half a Pulitzer Prize to the Wall Street Journal

The Unz Review • August 23, 2020 • 1,800 Words

For forty years I carefully read the New York Times in hard copy each and every morning, eager to discover what had transpired since the previous day. But just in the last few months, my commitment has begun to flag, and my eyes often only lightly glance at half or more of the articles and their columnar headlines.

I’d never thought much of Donald Trump, but can’t seem to work up the enthusiasm to read yet another article headlining the “lies” of our Great Satan or his coterie of lesser Satans. The endless villainies of his Luciferian ally Vladimir Putin have grown dull to my mental tongue. The diabolical wickedness of China, whom Trump had supposedly so recently courted, elicits little interest. Closer to home, my eyes skip over another “social distancing” advice column about Covid-19, or further explanations of how “peaceful protesters” had recently set a government building on fire in Portland, Oregon, or destroyed Chicago’s wealthiest downtown shopping district.

The Business Section reports that the worst disease outbreak in a century, the worst unemployment since the Great Depression, and the worst national rioting in two generations has produced unprecedented gains in share prices on Wall Street, but the staff writers have apparently forgotten the word “bubble.” Many days the Arts Section seems to have become almost monochromatically black. So my daily regular morning ritual now takes much less time than it did in the past.

I can’t exactly plot the trajectory of this sharp drop in my recent interest. But I certainly noticed the change not longer after a Twitter-mob forced the Times to summarily purge for insufficient “wokeness” its highly-regarded Editorial Page Editor, widely considered a leading contender to run the paper, perhaps suggesting that the journalists changed their coverage and writing style to avoid a similar fate. I had always read my morning newspapers at a local coffee-shop, but the Coronavirus outbreak ended that possibility, thereby disrupting my routine. And my years of denouncing the dishonesty of “Our American Pravda” in my own articles may have finally begun to register in my own mind.

There are occasional exceptions to this pattern. Earlier this month the Times carefully tabulated our national mortality figures and determined that our “excess deaths” from early March to the end of July had already exceeded 200,000, indicating that the American body-count from our Covid-19 epidemic was considerably larger than generally assumed, and might even reach the half million mark by the end of the year. But examples of such solid reporting seem few and far between these days.

The obvious decline of the Times is especially apparent to me each morning when I compare it with the rival Wall Street Journal, which I read immediately afterward. After Rupert Murdoch acquired the Journal in 2007, most observers predicted a sad fate at the hands of the proprietor whose early Fleet Street media empire had been built upon on the frontal nudity of the Page Three Girls of his tabloid Sun. But Murdoch totally confounded those skeptics, providing his new flagship broadsheet with huge financial backing and a hands-off editorial policy, thereby elevating it from a business-focused publication to a near-peer rival to the Gray Lady at a time when so many other papers were about to begin shriveling from massive loss of advertising. Within a couple of years, even such inveterate Murdoch-haters as The Nation acknowledged this surprising reality.

Superb journalist resources unshackled by extreme “political correctness” allow an outstanding product, and this has certainly been demonstrated by the Journal‘s regular front-page investigative reports. A few days ago, our continuing Covid-19 disaster prompted yet another of these, which I think lacked only a few crucial elements to be worthy of a Pulitzer Prize.

Numerous publications have documented America’s severe mistakes in combating the disease, but this 4,500 word WSJ report focused upon the serious mishandling of the original outbreak by Chinese authorities.

The article revealed that top public health officials at China’s Center for Disease Control only became aware of the situation on December 30th, when they learned that at least 25 suspected cases of a mysterious illness had already occurred in Wuhan during that month. But as the writers noted, the outbreak had certainly begun somewhat earlier:

Even a fully empowered China CDC would likely have missed the very first cases of the coronavirus, which probably began spreading around Wuhan in October or November, most likely in people who never showed symptoms, or did but never saw a doctor, researchers say.

All of this new information seems quite consistent with what had previously been discovered by America’s leading media outlets. But the Journal writers seem to have missed one additional fact that could have elevated this important story from a mundane investigation to a sensational expose. Although they documented that the Chinese government only learned of the Wuhan outbreak at the end of December, they seemed unaware that more than a month earlier American intelligence officials had distributed a secret report to our military allies describing the “cataclysmic” disease outbreak then underway in Wuhan.

A few months ago, I had noted the clear implications of this bizarre discrepancy in timing:

For obvious reasons, the Trump Administration has become very eager to emphasize the early missteps and delays in the Chinese reaction to the viral outbreak in Wuhan, and has presumably encouraged our media outlets to direct their focus in that direction.

As an example of this, the Associated Press Investigative Unit recently published a rather detailed analysis of those early events purportedly based upon confidential Chinese documents. Provocatively entitled “China Didn’t Warn Public of Likely Pandemic for 6 Key Days”, the piece was widely distributed, running in abridged form in the NYT and elsewhere. According to this reconstruction, the Chinese government first became aware of the seriousness of this public health crisis on Jan. 14th, but delayed taking any major action until Jan. 20th, a period of time during which the number of infections greatly multiplied.

Last month, a team of five WSJ reporters produced a very detailed and thorough 4,400 word analysis of the same period, and the NYT has published a helpful timeline of those early events as well. Although there may be some differences of emphasis or minor disagreements, all these American media sources agree that Chinese officials first became aware of the serious viral outbreak in Wuhan in early to mid-January, with the first known death occurring on Jan. 11th, and finally implemented major new public health measures later that same month. No one has apparently disputed these basic facts.

But with the horrific consequences of our own later governmental inaction being obvious, elements within our intelligence agencies have sought to demonstrate that they were not the ones asleep at the switch. Earlier this month, an ABC News story cited four separate government sources to reveal that as far back as late November, a special medical intelligence unit within our Defense Intelligence Agency had produced a report warning that an out-of-control disease epidemic was occurring in the Wuhan area of China, and widely distributed that document throughout the top ranks of our government, warning that steps should be taken to protect US forces based in Asia. After the story aired, a Pentagon spokesman officially denied the existence of that November report, while various other top level government and intelligence officials refused to comment. But a few days later, Israeli television mentioned that in November American intelligence had indeed shared such a report on the Wuhan disease outbreak with its NATO and Israeli allies, thus seeming to independently confirm the complete accuracy of the original ABC News story and its several government sources.

It therefore appears that elements of the Defense Intelligence Agency were aware of the deadly viral outbreak in Wuhan more than a month before any officials in the Chinese government itself. Unless our intelligence agencies have pioneered the technology of precognition, I think this may have happened for the same reason that arsonists have the earliest knowledge of future fires.

An entirely new disease that spreads in silent, asymptomatic fashion can easily escape initial detection, and we should not be surprised that no one in China noticed the Wuhan outbreak when it first began in October or November. But America’s intelligence operatives were entirely aware of what was happening from the very beginning, and began informing all our allies. This seems about as close to a “smoking gun” as we can ever likely to encounter in the annals of the murky world of intelligence operations.

Moreover, I have also noted the very unusual international pattern the deadly disease immediately began to follow:

As the coronavirus gradually began to spread beyond China's own borders, another development occurred that greatly multiplied my suspicions. Most of these early cases had occurred exactly where one might expect, among the East Asian countries bordering China. But by late February Iran had become the second epicenter of the global outbreak. Even more surprisingly, its political elites had been especially hard-hit, with a full 10% of the entire Iranian parliament soon infected and at least a dozen of its officials and politicians dying of the disease, including some who were quite senior. Indeed, Neocon activists on Twitter began gleefully noting that their hatred Iranian enemies were now dropping like flies.

Let us consider the implications of these facts. Across the entire world the only political elites that have yet suffered any significant human losses have been those of Iran, and they died at a very early stage, before significant outbreaks had even occurred almost anywhere else in the world outside China. Thus, we have America assassinating Iran's top military commander on Jan. 2nd and then just a few weeks later large portions of the Iranian ruling elites became infected by a mysterious and deadly new virus, with many of them soon dying as a consequence. Could any rational individual possibly regard this as a mere coincidence?

So if the journalists at the WSJ had merely taken note of what had previously been reported by ABC News and confirmed by Israeli television, they would surely have earned themselves a Pulitzer Prize. But earning and receiving are two separate matters, and they might easily have instead been purged for treading upon such touchy national security matters. After all, our own webzine was banned by both Facebook and Google just days after we raised these same matters.

Such retaliation helps explain why our American mainstream media has long since concluded that discretion is the better part of valor.

31,000 Words Missing from The Atlantic and The New York Times Sunday Magazine

The Unz Review • September 9, 2020 • 2,900 Words

For many years I had predicted to my friends that the increasingly bizarre and incompetent behavior of America’s ruling elites might soon result in a major “negative discontinuity” for our unfortunate country, the sort of massive event that future authors would use to divide one section of a thick history textbook from the next.

I couldn’t quite say what form that “discontinuity” might take, but I suggested possibilities along the lines of another Great Depression or some huge social upheaval or perhaps even a world war. The notion of an uncontrolled disease epidemic never crossed my mind, but our Covid-19 outbreak—together with the totally incompetent governmental response and the resulting social and economic disaster—seems to fit the bill quite nicely, even producing a triple-header of national calamities.

Or perhaps a quadruple-header. Although a world war still seems distant, the recent demonization of China, a bipartisan project of Democrats and Republicans alike, has already been labeled a new Cold War by leading journalistic observers, and cold wars can easily turn hot. Just a couple of weeks ago, American provocations in the vicinity of Chinese military exercises led the Chinese to respond by test-firing several of their vaunted “carrier-killer” missiles, weapons widely believed capable of immediately sending any of our primary power-projection platforms to the bottom of the ocean.

For three generations, the US has carefully avoided any military conflict with a near-peer, but that traditional forbearance may now have been replaced by extreme recklessness. Many of our cities have been set aflame in urban rioting, we have seen a huge spike in violent crime, and massive unemployment continues. So if the incumbent’s poll numbers look bleak as Election Day nears, a political October Surprise of major sabre-rattling and brinksmanship seems quite possible, and a sudden misstep might then put us at war in the South China Sea.

Chinese anti-carrier ballistic missiles have been developed to prevent an American blockade of their vital offshore waters, and many analysts doubt we have any effective defense. The loss of a carrier would mean thousands of American deaths and the possible collapse of our perceived control of the world’s sea lanes, perhaps ending the dollar’s long reign as the world’s reserve currency and thereby massively impoverishing our citizenry. A frantic American government might react by escalating to nuclear weapons, with horrific and unforeseeable consequences.

Greatly increasing this risk of war has been the very dangerous public game played for months by the Trump Administration and its political allies. The response of America’s national government to the Covid-19 outbreak was among the worst and most incompetent in the world, with only India and Brazil challenging our place at the bottom of the charts, and it is difficult to imagine a worse political nightmare for an incumbent during a presidential election year. The widespread national lockdowns produced an unprecedented spike in business failures and unemployment, which have only temporarily been mitigated by raising our national debt to levels last seen at the close of the Second World War.

Under such difficult circumstances, even the most sober and cautious of political leaders would naturally seek some desperate means of diverting blame elsewhere, and no one has ever accused our current president of such sobriety. So it was hardly surprising that for weeks during the peak of the New York outbreak and the early national lockdowns, Trump and his top officials explicitly suggested that the deadly virus had come from a Wuhan lab, thus accusing the Chinese government of being responsible for our deaths and economic disaster, with such charges being widely echoed in the media.

Although that public war of words has now subsided, the impact still remains. According to a poll taken at the end of April, a remarkable 45% of Americans believed that the deadly virus had “probably” or “definitely” originated in such a laboratory, with 74% of Republicans having that belief. Consider that nearly 200,000 Americans have already died and our business economy has suffered trillions of dollars in losses. Most great wars have been launched on merely a sliver of such justification.

This is an exceptionally dangerous situation, and we would naturally expect that our leading national publications would devote enormous resources to carefully investigating such dramatic charges and perhaps refuting them, especially given that their editorial staffs so greatly loathe the current occupant of the White House.

It sometimes seems like every edition of my morning New York Times includes one or more headlines screaming the phrase “Trump lied”, generally with reference to some casually insulting Tweet about a leading Democrat. But the Great Satan’s public accusation that the Chinese government has been directly responsible for the deaths of nearly 200,000 American deaths seems to have received far less scrutiny. Both the Wall Street Journal and the Times have published investigative reports on some of these issues, but these have been extremely deferential in their coverage, and anyway lacked the depth and detail that is so clearly warranted.

A natural venue for serious investigative journalism would be the prestigious national magazines that have traditionally provided long-form reporting, with The Atlantic and The New York Times Sunday Magazine being the most obvious possibilities. But these publications have increasingly shifted their focus to “wokeness” and seem to believe that the investigative research necessary to help deflect a world war with China has far less importance than a soulful piece on the emotional plight of transgendered black rappers.

Fortunately, the ease of Internet publishing has allowed the creation of a multitude of new webzine outlets, able to fill the gaps created by the increased frivolity and irrelevance of their established predecessors. The emerging landscape of alternative media is a broad one, with individual publications possessing different strengths and weaknesses. For example, our own webzine has very high traffic but is among the most controversial and therefore one of the least likely to be mentioned in mainstream outlets.

Situated at the opposite end of this spectrum is Quillette. Launched in 2015 by former mainstream journalist Claire Lehmann, this webzine is sufficiently respectable that few journalists or academics would fear any association. Establishing such respectability is merely a means toward an end, and Quillette has now justified that effort many times over by publishing a remarkable four-part series analyzing the wider Covid-19 accusations against China. The author, Philippe Lemoine is a Cornell graduate student originally from France and his exhaustive 31,000 word opus might once have appeared as the cover-story of one of our leading national publications prior to their lapse into decadence. I have seen nothing else so comprehensive on that subject, and I would strongly recommend that the articles be read by everyone interested in this important topic.

- The China Syndrome Part I: Outbreak

- The China Syndrome Part II: Transmission and Response

- The China Syndrome Part III: Wet Markets and BioLabs

- The China Syndrome Part IV: Did China Fudge its Data?

Attempting to summarize over 30,000 words in just a couple of paragraphs is a hopeless undertaking that I will not attempt. But the author seems to follow proper scholarly methods, carefully evaluating the often conflicting sources and applying a good deal of logic and common sense. In some cases he draws clear conclusions, but more often he properly settles for reasonable likelihoods rather than anything stronger.

In reading this analysis I was repeatedly struck by the extremely flimsy nature of the evidence being used to indict China. One of the most widely cited theories implicating the Wuhan lab was apparently based upon nothing more than unsubstantiated social media rumors, while a major article in National Review doctored its central quotes by leaving out sentences that completely changed their meaning. In recent years our media has fiercely ridiculed those lunatic conspiracy-mongers who claim that most of our mass-shootings have been media hoaxes perpetrated by “crisis actors” or that “nobody died at Sandy Hook.” But much of the main evidence pointing to Chinese culpability for the worldwide Covid-19 disaster appears just as vacuous.

Lemoine seems a very cautious writer and he carefully avoids contaminating his important analysis by suggesting any bad faith or fraud in the work he is examining, but given the history of the last couple of decades we can hardly ignore that possibility. Our disastrous Iraq War was promoted by the knowingly-false claims of Saddam’s WMDs, and the equally farcical Russiagate Hoax has roiled American politics for more than three years. Governmental intelligence agencies have great resources and expertise in fabricating evidence and then effectively promoting their concoctions through their network of friendly journalists. We should hardly be surprised if such means had been employed to redirect the political blame for a multi-trillion-dollar global catastrophe.

Lemoine handles even more delicate matters extremely well. The WSJ had already established that the national health authorities in China only learned of the growing Wuhan disease outbreak at the very end of December, and he persuasively argues that their local counterparts in that city had only become aware a few days earlier. But in Part I of his series, he also includes a discordant early paragraph mentioning that multiple US Intelligence sources had disclosed to ABC News that in late November a unit of our own Defense Intelligence Agency had distributed a secret report describing a “cataclysmic” disease outbreak taking place in Wuhan, warning our military forces stationed in East Asia to take appropriate health precautions. Lemoine correctly notes that the claims “made no sense” since “there is simply no way US intelligence could have known that an epidemic was underway at the time.” Therefore, he concludes that the report never existed and that the leaks were false information provided by enemies of Donald Trump in an effort to embarrass the president.

But as an extremely diligent researcher he surely must be aware that Israeli TV had independently confirmed the existence of that secret DIA report, disclosing that it had been widely distributed both to their own government and to our NATO allies. However, if Lemoine had acknowledged the reality that our intelligence agencies were fully aware of the Wuhan outbreak more than a month before anyone in China, the obvious implications would be too explosive to avoid considering. And any such discussion would have ensured that his very important 31,000 word series never appeared in any respectable venue. But by including that crucial paragraph, he may at least have begun to raise questions in the minds of his establishmentarian readers.

An effective media strategy may often require a division of labor, with different horses for different courses. Given that my own writings and webzine lack the “mainstream respectability” of Quillette, I can be much more candid in my analyses, and will once again repeat a few of the crucial paragraphs I had first published back in April:

But with the horrific consequences of our own later governmental inaction being obvious, elements within our intelligence agencies have sought to demonstrate that they were not the ones asleep at the switch. Earlier this month, an ABC News story cited four separate government sources to reveal that as far back as late November, a special medical intelligence unit within our Defense Intelligence Agency had produced a report warning that an out-of-control disease epidemic was occurring in the Wuhan area of China, and widely distributed that document throughout the top ranks of our government, warning that steps should be taken to protect US forces based in Asia. After the story aired, a Pentagon spokesman officially denied the existence of that November report, while various other top level government and intelligence officials refused to comment. But a few days later, Israeli television mentioned that in November American intelligence had indeed shared such a report on the Wuhan disease outbreak with its NATO and Israeli allies, thus seeming to independently confirm the complete accuracy of the original ABC News story and its several government sources.

It therefore appears that elements of the Defense Intelligence Agency were aware of the deadly viral outbreak in Wuhan more than a month before any officials in the Chinese government itself. Unless our intelligence agencies have pioneered the technology of precognition, I think this may have happened for the same reason that arsonists have the earliest knowledge of future fires.

As the coronavirus gradually began to spread beyond China's own borders, another development occurred that greatly multiplied my suspicions. Most of these early cases had occurred exactly where one might expect, among the East Asian countries bordering China. But by late February Iran had become the second epicenter of the global outbreak. Even more surprisingly, its political elites had been especially hard-hit, with a full 10% of the entire Iranian parliament soon infected and at least a dozen of its officials and politicians dying of the disease, including some who were quite senior. Indeed, Neocon activists on Twitter began gleefully noting that their hatred Iranian enemies were now dropping like flies.

Let us consider the implications of these facts. Across the entire world the only political elites that have yet suffered any significant human losses have been those of Iran, and they died at a very early stage, before significant outbreaks had even occurred almost anywhere else in the world outside China. Thus, we have America assassinating Iran's top military commander on Jan. 2nd and then just a few weeks later large portions of the Iranian ruling elites became infected by a mysterious and deadly new virus, with many of them soon dying as a consequence. Could any rational individual possibly regard this as a mere coincidence?

Addendum: The Hypothetical Scenario of the Covid-19 Outbreak:

Since various commenters have posed questions regarding my reconstruction of the Covid-19 outbreak, it’s probably best for me to provide a summary of my own theory, already included in a lengthy comment a couple of weeks ago, but sufficiently important to be made part of the main text. Obviously, this reconstruction is quite speculative, but I think it best fits all the available evidence. Individual components can be changed or replaced without necessarily damaging the overall hypothesis.

(1) Rogue elements within our large national security apparatus probably affiliated with the Deep State Neocons decided to inflict severe damage upon the huge Chinese economy using biowarfare. The plan was to infect the key transport hub of Wuhan with Covid-19 so that the disease would invisibly spread throughout the entire country during the annual Lunar New Year travels, using the cover of the Wuhan International Military Games to slip a couple of operatives into the city to release the contagion. My guess is that only a relatively small number of individuals were involved in this plot.

(2) The biological agent they released was designed primarily as an anti-economy rather than an anti-personnel weapon. Although Covid-19 has rather low fatality rates, it is extremely contagious, has a long pre-symptomatic infectious period, and can even spread by asymptomatic carriers, making it ideally suited for that purpose. Thus, once it established itself throughout most of China, it would be extremely difficult to eradicate and the resulting efforts to control it would inflict enormous damage upon China's economy and society.

(3) As a secondary operation, they decided to target Iran's political elites, possibly deploying a somewhat more deadly variant of the virus. Since political elites generally tend to be elderly, they would anyway suffer far greater fatalities.

(4) The deadly SARS and MERS outbreaks in East Asia and the Near East had never significantly spread back to America (or Europe), so the plotters wrongly assumed that the same would be the case with Covid-19. Anyway, since international organizations always ranked the US and Europe as having the best and most effective public health systems for combating any disease epidemic, they believed that any possible blowback damage would be very minor.

(5) Only a small number of individuals were directly involved in this plot, and soon after the disease was successfully released in Wuhan, they decided to further safeguard America's own interests by alerting the appropriate units with the Defense Intelligence Agency, probably by fabricating some sort of supposed “intelligence leak.” Basically, they arranged for the DIA to hear that Wuhan was apparently suffering a “cataclysmic” disease outbreak, thereby leading the DIA to prepare and distribute a secret report warning our own forces and allies to take appropriate precautions.

(6) Unfortunately for these plans, the Chinese government reacted with astonishing determination and effectiveness, and soon stamped out the disease. Meanwhile, the lackadaisical and incompetent American government largely ignored the problem, only reacting after the massive outbreak in Northern Italy had gotten their attention. Since the CDC had botched production of a testing kit, we had no means of recognizing that the disease was already spreading in our country, and the result was massive damage to America's economy and society. In effect, America suffered exactly the fate that had originally been intended for its Chinese rival.

(7) Again, this is my own hypothetical reconstruction, and people are free to dispute individual elements. But I think it best fits with the very limited amount of solid evidence. My long article from April fleshes out the China/America background in much greater detail.

Glenn Greenwald Escapes His $100 Million Webzine

The Unz Review • November 1, 2020 • 2,700 Words

Several years ago during the height of the Edward Snowden/NSA spying scandal, Glenn Greenwald was sometimes described as the world’s most famous journalist. I think that characterization was probably correct, at least if we exclude Julian Assange from consideration.

The American government has emphatically denied that Assange was ever a journalist, now working to prosecute him for espionage and sentence him to life in a maximum security prison. Meanwhile, it did grudgingly concede that protective status to Greenwald. So the fates of the two most famous figures who revealed American crimes to the world sharply diverged, and the year after Assange was forced to desperately seek asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy in London and begin his long period of miserable confinement to a single room, Greenwald made worldwide headlines as founding editor of a lavishly-funded new journalistic enterprise that captured the imagination of the world.

That venture was First Look Media, established by Tech billionaire Pierre Omidyar, who pledged $250 million in financial support. Its first and only visible project has been The Intercept, an outlet intended to provide a home for fearless investigative journalism, free from the pressures and dishonest compromises so often found in traditional media outlets. Greenwald’s two fellow founding editors were Laura Poitras, an award-winning documentarian who had collaborated on the Snowden project, and Jeremy Scahill, whose best-selling books had lacerated the American crimes committed during our disastrous Iraq War, focusing especially upon the huge growth of international mercenary outfits, now euphemistically styled as “military contractors.”

Numerous other veteran journalists also soon eagerly came on board at a time when so many of American’s traditional media outlets were losing their advertising revenue to the Internet, resulting in crippling waves of layoffs and cut-backs. Backed by such enormous and apparently disinterested financial support, The Intercept seemed poised for an extremely bright future.

Unfortunately, the reality has been quite different. Creating a successful media outlet is a far more difficult and complex undertaking than merely hiring experienced journalists and providing them with heavy funding. Late last week Greenwald announced his resignation from The Intercept, explaining that the top editorial staff had repeatedly blocked him from publishing his lengthy article analyzing the huge corruption-scandal now swirling around Democratic Presidential candidate Joe Biden.

Greenwald was thus forced to abandon the high-profile publication that he himself had co-founded in order to regain his journalistic freedom, and that irony was hardly lost upon many other independent Internet voices, including his former colleague Matt Taibbi, Yves Smith of the Naked Capitalism blog, and the Moon of Alabama blogger.

Greenwald himself explained the situation in his scathing letter of resignation. According to him, in recent years The Intercept had increasingly abandoned its original stated mission and instead become more and more indistinguishable from all the other left-leaning publications on the Internet, adopting a fiercely partisan party-line and demonstrating Procrustean tendencies to shape its journalistic output in support of its ideological goals and favored candidates. The large crew of New York editors eventually brought on board tended to measure their success by the accolades they attracted from mainstream outlets while they lived in fear of Twitter denunciations. As a result, they soon came to closely resemble the establishmentarian media that their publication had originally been created to challenge. They and most of their mainstream media peers regarded the defeat of Donald Trump as an overriding goal and therefore seem to have somehow persuaded themselves that any temporary sacrifice of honest journalistic standards was a price well worth paying.

Julian Assange may soon be spending the rest of his life in a small prison cell, and compared to that outcome Greenwald’s humiliating treatment is a mere bagatelle, but both figures fell from ideological grace for similar reasons. As an anti-secrecy campaigner, Assange had become the toast of our liberal elite by exposing the crimes of the Bush era American military, but when he evenhandedly released DNC emails deeply embarrassing to Hillary Clinton and the Democrats, he was reviled as a traitor and a Russian stooge. Although Greenwald remains left-liberal in his personal views, his staunch refusal to avert his eyes from the flagrant political and media corruption on his side of the aisle has provoked deep resentments among his one-time ideological admirers.

Many details of Greenwald’s resignation can be found in the following articles, and he also explained the circumstances in an interview on Tucker Carlson Tonight:

- My Resignation From The Intercept

- Emails With Intercept Editors Showing Censorship of My Joe Biden Article

- Article on Joe and Hunter Biden Censored By The Intercept

- Matt Taibbi: Glenn Greenwald On His Resignation From The Intercept

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l8pkCZBjgrk

Although I’d mostly lost track of both Greenwald and The Intercept over the last few years, the story of his sudden resignation didn’t particularly surprise me.

Donald Trump had always struck me as an ignorant buffoon and most of his proposed policies were ridiculous, but I felt that his establishmentarian political critics had almost been driven insane by their loathing for him. Since I regarded both Trump and Biden as such exceptionally awful candidates, I’d paid relatively little attention to the many months of heated presidential campaigning. However, the recent charges of massive financial corruption against the Biden family seemed pretty credible to me, and the unified media efforts to drag the Democratic ticket across the finish line by hiding the scandal from the American voters was utterly outrageous.

The New York Post is America’s oldest newspaper and after it broke the Biden corruption story a couple of weeks ago, both Facebook and Twitter took the unprecedented step of banning all links to the published account of that potentially massive political scandal. Compared to such absurd censorship, the unwillingness of The Intercept‘s Trump-hating editors to publish Greenwald’s article was shameful but hardly surprising. However once I looked into the background, other surprises did appear.

Every now and then I had read a story mentioning The Intercept in my morning newspapers, but few of the details stuck in my mind, so I browsed around a little, and found a Columbia Journalism Review article from last year describing some of the difficulties at that publication. Apparently, Omidyar had been fulfilling his financial commitments, donating nearly $90 million to First Look Media between 2013 and 2017, and apparently almost all of that massive funding had gone to The Intercept, whose staff compensation alone reached $9.3 million by 2017. The CJR article noted that the salaries paid “dwarf those at other center-left, nonprofit outlets.” My casual browsing didn’t uncover any detailed financial information for the last three years, but the webzine must surely have absorbed well over $100 million by now, perhaps even closer to $150 million.

With such enormous financial inputs, I wondered why I had heard so little about the publication in recent years, just an occasional story here and there in my newspapers, so I decided to take a look. Their website seemed no different in design or content than that found on dozens of other left-liberal webzines. Almost none of the writers were familiar to me while the topics they presented were all too familiar. So it wasn’t clear to me why anyone would read their publication.

I soon discovered that most of the world apparently had the same reaction. I had naturally assumed that such a lavishly-funded publication captained by highly-paid all-stars and having a large writing staff would possess a readership vastly larger than that of our own website, with traffic perhaps twenty or thirty times greater. Instead, I found to my utter astonishment that their Alexa Traffic Rank of 11,542 was less than 50% larger than that of our own small opinion webzine. Indeed, if not for our having been banned by Facebook and Google earlier this year, we might have even caught up with them by now. And according to SimilarWeb, although their website does get almost three times as many monthly visits as ours, the total time spent on our website is actually slightly higher, with most of their visitors quickly departing. This brought to mind the old story about the dog-food that dogs just won’t eat.

Although a few natural Internet monopolies such as Google, Facebook and Amazon seem impervious to easy challenge, the web has become a great leveler for opinion journalism, with the interest and quality of content material far outweighing many millions of dollars in bloated expenditures. The dilemma encountered by the decision-makers at The Intercept is that if you mostly publish articles that are exactly the same as found everywhere else on the Internet, you provide people few reasons to favor your website over so many others.

Moreover, it’s quite possible that very heavy staff funding can itself become counter-productive. For example, an outraged Max Blumenthal revealed in a Tweet that The Intercept‘s top editor Betsy Reed is paid well over $400,000 per year, an extremely sizable sum in the world of non-profit journalism:

The Intercept's Betsy Reed, who earns $427,419 a year & produces zero journalism of her own, mocks independent journalists who rely on Substack & Patreon to get by. Not everyone has a reclusive billionaire to pay them huge sums to edit stuff no one reads. https://t.co/TdnjrDdinw pic.twitter.com/83FMDhpRgQ

— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) October 30, 2020

Any self-respecting individual drawing such a salary must justify her existence and earn her keep. While it would have been the easiest thing in the world to quickly approve at Greenwald’s important article and then publish it on the website, any unpaid intern could have done as much, while someone whose annual salary is approaching the half-million dollar range must necessarily devote time and thought to all the deeper political implications, conferring at length with her staff and other top advisors before rendering her Solomonic judgment. Hence Greenwald’s angry departure.

Indeed, some of these existing problems seem to have appeared at the very beginning of the project, as recounted by Ken Silverstein, a left-liberal journalist with a long career at prestigious publications. As an early hire who soon resigned. he explained his reasons in a stinging 2015 Politico Magazine article entitled “Where Journalism Goes to Die,” describing the mixture of extreme editorial bureaucracy and severe ideological-correctness that led him to depart in disgust after just one year.

The contrast with our own webzine could not be greater. Although my title is Editor-in-Chief, I have neither salary nor staff, and since I’m so heavily preoccupied with my own reading and research, I doubt I spend more than a couple of hours a day on the publication, instead relying upon the highly-automated software I built to do almost all the work.

Since I have made it very clear that I do not personally stand behind the articles I publish, I allow my writers to write whatever they want, even if much of their output might seem like nonsense to me. By providing such a large array of often-conflicting alternative perspectives, we therefore fulfill our alternative-media mission statement. And as far as I know, there are few if any other websites that regularly publish such a wide and varied array of highly-controversial material, thereby drawing readership roughly comparable to that produced by Omidyar’s $100 million-plus expenditure.

With comments on our website being very lightly moderated, we usually accrue a million additional words each week, thereby providing a public forum for regular discussion of all sorts of controversial topics banned almost everywhere else. Much of this material may be ignorant or insane, but those willing to mine the low-grade ore will discover a considerable sprinkling of gems. This process is facilitated by the commenting-software I have designed, which I think is far superior in many respects to what I have seen elsewhere.

The combination of Greenwald’s necessary departure from his own publication and the near-total censorship of the New York Post articles on the Biden corruption scandal may together mark a watershed in mainstream American journalism, as suggested by former New York Times journalist Chris Hedges and Matt Taibbi in a half-hour discussion on RT America:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KONeb8mRPYI

But although these mainstream journalists seemed shocked that the entire media would now censor and ignore important stories merely because they were unpalatable, I had discovered much the same thing ten or fifteen years ago, which eventually led me to establish this webzine. A couple of months ago I noted a particularly egregious example:

As the winner of the Pulitzer Prize and two George Polk awards, the late Sydney Schanberg was widely regarded as one of the greatest American war correspondents of the twentieth century. His exploits during our ill-fated Indo-Chinese War had become the basis of the Oscar-winning film The Killing Fields, which probably established him as the most famous journalist in America after Woodward and Bernstein of Watergate fame, and he had also served as a top editor at The New York Times. A decade ago, he published his greatest expose, providing a mountain of evidence that America had deliberately left behind hundreds of POWs in Vietnam and he fingered then-presidential candidate John McCain as the central figure in the later official cover-up of that monstrous betrayal. The Arizona senator had traded on his national reputation as our best-known former POW to bury the story of those abandoned prisoners, permitting America’s political establishment to escape serious embarrassment. As a result, Sen. McCain earned the lush rewards of our generous ruling elites, much like his own father Admiral John S. McCain, Sr., who had led the cover-up of the deliberate 1967 Israeli attack on the U.S.S. Liberty, which killed or wounded over 200 American servicemen.

As publisher of The American Conservative, I ran Schanberg’s remarkable piece as a cover story, and across several websites over the years it has surely been read many hundreds of thousands of times, including a huge spike around the time of McCain’s death. I therefore find it rather difficult to believe that the many journalists investigating McCain’s background might have remained unaware of this material. Yet no hints of these facts were provided in any of the articles appearing in any remotely prominent media outlets as can be seen by searching for web pages containing “McCain and Schanberg” dated around the time of the Senator’s passing.

Schanberg’s journalistic stature had hardly been forgotten by his former colleagues. Upon his death a couple of years ago, the Times ran a very long and glowing obituary, and a few months later I attended the memorial tribute to his life and career held at the New York Times headquarters building, which included more than two hundred prominent journalists mostly from his own generation, including those of the highest rank. Times Publisher Arthur Sulzberger, Jr. gave a speech describing how as a young man he had always so greatly admired Schanberg and had been mortified by the unfortunate circumstances of his departure from the family’s newspaper. Former Executive Editor Joseph Lelyveld recounted the many years he had worked closely with the man he had long considered his closest friend and colleague, someone whom he almost seemed to regard as his older brother. But during the two hours of praise and remembrance scarcely a single word was uttered in public about the gigantic story that had occupied the last two decades of Schanberg’s celebrated career.

- John McCain and the POW Cover-Up

Sydney Schanberg • May 25, 2010 • 8,200 Words

Although Google controls all but a slice of the worldwide search engine market, very similar technologies are employed by its various competitors such as Bing, DuckDuckGo, and Russia’s Yandex, and it is easy to compare their strikingly dissimilar results for the simple string “mccain pows”:

- https://www.google.com/search?q=mccain+pows

- https://www.bing.com/search?q=mccain+pows

- https://duckduckgo.com/?q=mccain+pows

- https://yandex.com/search/?text=mccain+pows

For Bing, Schanberg’s American Conservative cover-story ranks #1. For DuckDuckGo, it ranks #2, just below McCain’s Wikipedia entry. For Yandex, the republication on The Unz Review holds the top spot, with the American Conservative version placing #2. But Schanberg’s remarkable 8,200 word expose has been “disappeared” from Google’s search engine, nowhere to be found across at least the first ten pages of results.

Indeed, I would argue that much of my entire American Pravda series falls into this same category. And if our mainsteam media and Internet gatekeepers can so easily censor and ignore an important New York Post article in the heat of a presidential campaign, sensible people must surely recognize that many other important things may also have been censored and ignored in the past

The Goldwater Papers

California Political Review • May 1993 • 1,400 Words

The following correspondence was found in the personal papers of a retired U.S. Senator from Arizona after his death in 1998.

Dearest H.,

Almost 30 years have gone by, and nobody suspects a thing!  The strength of your determination still astonishes me. I never dreamed that the fiery “Goldwater” girl who visited me in my Chicago hotel room a couple of weeks after my landslide defeat in 1964 was serious. After all, when a teenage girl swears to go underground and dedicate the rest of her life to destroying American Liberalism and the Democratic Party, but from within, a crusty old politician like me assumes it’s a passing phase.. I’d certainly forgotten our conversation within a few weeks, though I was charmed by your spirited support.

How wrong I was. When I got your letter shortly after your husband was elected Attorney General of Arkansas in ’76, your name meant absolutely nothing to me. As an old male chauvinist, how could I reject a lunch request from a lady, even one who mentioned she was visiting Arizona to attend an ACLU conference. When we sat down, and you explained who you were and what you’d been doing over the previous 10 years, I thought you’d escaped from the loony bin. But then you showed it all to me, your pages of notes, your secret diary, your strategy outline, all perfectly authentic. The boldness of your plan floored me. If even just a few of our intelligence agents had been of your caliber, those damn commies in ‘Nam would never have stood a chance.

Imagine, “converting” to the Left at Wellesley, having your consciousness raised, learning to dress Left, act Left, talk Left, even think Left, all as a cover. Learning your lessons so well, you not only became a solid member of those college pinkos, but one of the leaders, student body president and a key figure at college conferences. With the contacts you made at those conferences you were able to evaluate which of those college leftists had the greatest political potential. You even slept with bums you personally and politically detested ever searching for the man to be your future instrument. Mata Hari has nothing on you.

And then you finally found him. As you’ve told me so many times since, he was a complete boob, an empty windbag, a politician to the core, with no goals except fame, women, and the good graces of his trendy-leftist social set. He was perfect: a Rhodes Scholar, but not a very smart guy, and he came from the tiny state of Arkansas, where it would be easy to launch a political career. He was an anti-war activist – but not an extreme one – a soft compliant fellow, who would always recognize that you were far more intelligent and knowledgeable, and who would willingly let himself be molded like putty in your hands. Even before you were married, while he was at Oxford, you persuaded him to “maintain his future political viability” by risking the draft lottery. You always emphasized to him his great political potential, and how important it would be for him to make the “right” friends among the other Rhodes Scholars.

Then later, after marriage and Yale Law School (where you diligently helped the blockhead in his coursework), the efforts you had to make to get him to move back to Arkansas, and re-establish his country-boy roots, so necessary for the political future you were planning. He’d have been perfectly content to spend the rest of his life seducing co-eds as a second-rate law lecturer at the lower rungs of the Ivy League. And the media thinks that you followed him back to Arkansas!

After that it was all like clockwork.  Local boy who made good in the Big City gets interested in local politics, then becomes state Attorney General, then became one of the youngest governors in American history, and finally begins to build a national following. And all that time, you turned a blind-eye to his heavy womanizing, though you kept those photos around just in case he ever tried to slip the leash. Not that he would try – he knew you were aiming at the White House, though he never dreamed of your true motives.

I do remember, though, back at one of our annual private dinners, in ’86 I think, you almost decided to call it quits on the whole game, dump the draft-dodging adulterous airhead you so much detested, and find a man you could truly love and respect before you became too old to have another child. Reagan was riding high then, and it looked like all your efforts hadn’t really been necessary after all. You told me that if the Republicans managed to keep the Senate in the fall, and Reagan got one more solid seat on the Supreme Court, you’d finally be able to come in out of the cold, but until that time you’d hold yourself in reserve, just in case. Then came the Democratic Senate victories in November, Reagan’s crippling by Iran-Contra, and Bork’s defeat at the hands of Norman Lear. With each furtive phone call, I could hear you choke back your tears as you realized that you had only one choice.

Afterward came the darkest days, as that imbecile Bush did his bumbling best to undo Reagan’s conservative legacy. You’d already primed your boob for a presidential run by pulling Hollywood strings to get him the Democratic convention keynote speech in 1988 – an opportunity he typically flubbed. Then you cultivated every Party interest group to clear his way for 1992. I remember your hysteria when the draft-dodging and Genifer Flowers stories leaked out before his election (rather than afterward as you’d planned). It looked like decades of your life had been spent in vain. But the Media and the Hollywood money crowd saved you as you’d always hoped they would, and on November 3rd, your life’s plans entered their final phase.

If only your Hollywood left-liberal friends could have understood the irony of it. They’d given their all to elect a man whose apparent status as a Southern moderate actually masked a hard-left liberal agenda as they well knew. But they never dreamed that the left-liberal agenda, in turn, had been carefully crafted over three decades by one of the most subtle and brilliant women in American history, whose own true views had never strayed one inch left of their youthful Goldwaterism. None of the screenwriters would have dared write a script based on such an idea; no one would have believed it.

And still they don’t suspect you! After the election, when all the pundits agreed the incoming administration had to nail down its support among blue-collar “God and Country” Reagan Democrats, the first issues you emphasized were filling your cabinet by racial quota and putting gays in the military, eliminating any chance of Reagan Democrat support. Later on, you announced the possibility of a massive new national sales tax on April 15th. You arranged for Christophe of Beverly Hills to give your vain boob a $200 haircut while tying up one of America’s busiest airports. From the beginning, you did everything you could to alienate and anger the national media which had been so helpful during the campaign, and you’ve made the worst elements of the sybaritic Hollywood Left virtual members of the White House staff. And all along the way, you continually worked to make yourself the most hated figure in American public life, so that when the Democratic Party is annihilated at the polls in 1994, the people will be voting against you through them. Your knowledge of history and human psychology is flawless: Marie Antoinette of France, the Empress Alexandra of Russia, the Dowager Empress, and Jiang Ching in China, and most recently Edith Cresson in Mitterand’s government – a hated female consort is the ideal triggering mechanism for a populist revolt.

In five months, you had done more damage to the Democratic Party than Reagan did in eight years, and no one even connects this pattern of events to your youth on the Right, working on my campaign.  When the truth eventually comes out, you will be recognized as the greatest Goldwaterite in history, including me, and I’m the man himself.

And they say that one individual can’t change history.

Yours in Deepest Admiration,

G.

The Horcher Affair

Unpublished • December 1994 • 800 Words

If Californians had not already grown completely cynical and disgusted with their elected officials, the current battle for Assembly Speaker should achieve that result. But if cynicism and disgust lead to necessary political reform, California may yet benefit from such affairs.

The facts are quite simple. On Nov. 8th, the California’s local version of the nationwide Republican political tide swept 41 Republicans into the 80 member State Assembly, apparently ending the 14 year reign of Speaker Willie Brown, the state’s most powerful and longest-serving Democratic politician. Although Brown refused to admit defeat, a 41-39 vote to elect Republican Assembly leader Jim Brulte as Speaker seemed inevitable. After nearly three decades in the wilderness, Assembly Republicans eagerly awaited the fruits of political victory, such as nicer offices, larger staffs, control over lucrative patronage jobs, the lion’s share of PAC funding, and perhaps even an occasional opportunity to influence public policy.

But on Dec. 5th, the unexpected occurred. Assemblyman Paul Horcher, a moderate Republican from Diamond Bar, cast his vote for Democrat Brown rather than Republican Brulte, resulting in a 40-40 deadlocked vote. Immediately thereafter, a clever parliamentary maneuver by Brown to challenge the credentials of one of the other Republicans and thereby reelect himself Speaker on a 40-39 vote narrowly missed success.

Asked to justify his surprise vote for Brown, Horcher explained that the Republican Party caucus had been captured by the “extreme” right wing, and that his vote was motivated by his willingness to place the interests of ordinary Californians and of his own constituents over party loyalty. Although much of the press gave respectful attention to this yarn, the only constituents Horcher might have truthfully claimed to represent was a constituency of one, namely himself. Many members of the Assembly have similar “constituencies.”

Let us be candid. Except for the press and a few political junkies and party hacks, very few Californians have anything more than the vaguest notion of the character or policies of their local State Assemblyman or State Senator. Aside from voting for or against their incumbent, or voting along party lines, Californians cast their ballots based on campaign literature of various types, which is read and then quickly forgotten. Therefore, when Horcher’s recent campaign mailed out large quantities of such literature describing Willie Brown as “the worst thing to happen to California” and trumpeting the fact that “Paul Horcher has never voted to make Willie Brown speaker,” the voters in this heavily Republican district might have reasonably believed they were voting for a candidate who would oppose Brown’s reelection as Speaker. Horcher’s willingness to enlist Brulte’s fund-raising assistance, and his subsequent vote to reelect Brulte as leader of the Republican caucus hardly corroborates his alleged reasons for opposing Brulte’s speakership.

The real reasons are probably far more mundane. Willie Brown is one of California’s premier political fund-raisers, and provides generous financial aid to the campaigns of those who support him. Horcher had a large campaign debt of nearly $300,000, and most of this money was owed to himself, in the form of a personal campaign loan. Thus, any campaign contribution which Horcher receives may legally go into his own pocket, an aspect of current campaign law which would surely outrage ordinary citizens if only they were aware of it. It will be interesting to see whether Horcher’s personal loan to himself is soon paid off in this manner.

Also, since Horcher stands a reasonable chance of being recalled by his angry constituents (backed by the Republican Party), he may lose his well-paid job in the state legislature. Perhaps he will then be appointed by the Democrats to one of California’s many notorious $80,000 or $100,000 part-time patronage positions on a board or commission, thereby cushioning his reentry into the private sector.

The real issue raised by this incident is not a matter of Democrat versus Republican. Under other circumstances, the Republicans would have been just as eager to provide the PAC money to allow Horcher to rebuild his personal finances, or to have our bankrupt state foot the bill for his well-paid patronage retirement. With thirty years experience in the State Assembly, Willie Brown is simply the more skilled at this game. The question is whether a state with so many real problems, financial and social, should allow the continuation of a system in which elected officials may be legally bought for cash, and this, rather than elections, can determine the control of state government.

During the 1994 Democratic gubernatorial primary, Tom Hayden ran on a platform of political reform, accusing corrupt special interests of dominating Sacramento and the state legislature. It is ironic that the desperate efforts of his own party to retain control of the Assembly have now proven him right.

Educational Nonsense and Vouchers

The Sacramento Bee • January 3, 1999 • 1,700 Words

As the hot-button political issue of the 1998 election, educational reform has inspired a host of political proposals, ranging from the foolish to the ridiculous. Unfortunately, political sloganeering makes doubtful public policy, and if incoming California Gov. Gray Davis and his weakened Republican opposition actually hope to do something about our poorly performing school system, they must first separate the nonsense from the reality.

First, the liberal nonsense. Despite endless amounts of campaign rhetoric claiming that California’s public school system has been woefully under-funded for decades by the taxophobic legacy of Prop. 13 and other budgetary constraints, the facts are very, very different.

Over the 30 years from 1960 to 1990, per capita student spending in California’s public schools actually rose almost 150 percent after adjusting for inflation ($ 2,170 in 1960 vs. $ 5,202 in 1990, both in 1995 dollars). Although spending leveled off during the severe recession of the early 1990s, it has recently gone up sharply again. There are very few other governmental sectors where huge per capita growth over many decades is routinely characterized as fiscal starvation. The problem is that during this period large increases in input (dollars) have been matched by large drops in output (academic achievement as indicated by standardized test scores).

A central reason for this paradox has been that much of the extra funding has been poorly spent or has been allocated to costly categorical programs such as special education and bilingual education whose results have been dismal at best. A huge and hungry public school bureaucracy has regularly devoured much of the other money. Amazingly enough, only about half of public school employees in California are teachers, with the remainder being a wide variety of other “staff,” many of whom are very well paid. By contrast, 87 percent of the employees of California private schools are actually teachers.

Another crippling burden for California’s public schools has been a huge emphasis on doubtful educational fads and other gimmicks rather than traditional academics. Our schools are only just now starting to recover from the decade-long disaster of “whole language” reading instruction (pushed by the very same academic theorists who advocated bilingual education!). Current battles are still being fought over equally dangerous curricula such as “fuzzy” math, constructivist science, inventive spelling, and other harmful pedagogical experiments regularly inflicted upon millions of innocent California schoolchildren. Add to this educational innovations like “team learning” and a widespread emphasis on fostering student self-esteem at all costs, and it is a wonder that schools have any minutes in the day free for old- fashioned academics.

Aside from transforming American public schools into international laughingstocks—schools in nearly every other developed nation have a curriculum and structure strangely reminiscent of what ours were during the 1950s—we have built educational machinery which, according to a 12-nation study, produces students with the highest self-esteem but among the lowest academic test scores of any of their global peers. About half of entering California State University students must take remedial classes in English and math, forcing our universities to teach the academic subject matter that our secondary schools did not. It is also hardly surprising that such a huge fraction of the places in our top science and engineering college and graduate programs are regularly filled by foreigners or recent immigrants, whose education has been traditional rather than faddish.

If we want to solve our educational problems, we don’t so much need to add—whether more money, more teachers, more programs, or more days of schooling— but to subtract: by eliminating as much of the burdensome nonsense in public schools as is possible. If a traditional academic curriculum seems to work reasonably well in nearly every other major nation, the burden of proof is on those on the Left who say it can’t possibly be tried in America’s unique society.

As for the political Right, in recent years “educational reform” has become almost a synonym there for “school choice,” whether through vouchers, charter schools, or some other variation. Press accounts indicate that California will once again see a voucher initiative of some sort on the 2000 ballot, perhaps with massive campaign spending on both sides, generating much heat but little light.

Partly, this emphasis on vouchers may flow from the deep political pessimism of conservatives: If their years of effort have failed to dislodge the liberal nonsense from the public schools, perhaps the task is simply impossible, and our public education system should be “blown up,” or at least enough holes be knocked in it to allow conservative parents to flee with their children to private or charter schools. Partly, vouchers are popular because they have strong ideological appeal to disparate but powerful elements of the conservative movement, ranging from libertarians (who often seem to worship the free market and competition as being axiomatically beneficial in any policy area) to religious conservatives (who eagerly seek public funding for their religious and parochial schools).

Perhaps vouchers (or their attenuated cousins, such as charters) will someday turn out to be an educational “magic bullet, as their proponents claim; small-scale experiments in a variety of locales should and are being tried. But there are major questions, both theoretical and practical, about vouchers, questions that voucher proponents must answer before any large- scale—let alone statewide—experiment should be undertaken.

First, most of our international economic competitors– -including those nations whose academic performance so humbles that of our own schools— rely upon exactly the sort of government school system that is allegedly responsible for our own educational failings. In fact, public education in most other countries is far more centralized and government-controlled, with less local flexibility and free choice, than our own. If traditional government schools seem to work well everywhere else, perhaps they can be made to work here; on the other hand, vouchers would constitute a radical leap into the complete unknown.

Although voucher advocates argue that school competition would inevitably lead to the competitive triumph of good schools over bad because of the “magic of the marketplace,” this seems far from obvious. Objectively measuring the success or failure of a given public school program is not easy, especially when students have been enrolled just a few months or a year. How much does student achievement in a particular school reflect the performance of the school and how much the home background, aptitude and parental support students bring with them to school? Most working parents cannot devote endless time to researching the matter.

In fact, it is easy to imagine in a voucher system that schools might better succeed in winning parent dollars by investing more heavily in advertising and public relations than in the quality of their product, as is often the case in the vaunted private sector. The actual physical content of most colas or sneakers is almost indistinguishable, but the Coke and Nike brands reign supreme because of massive spending on public image-making and celebrity endorsements. Although fine for the soft drink industry, this is not a desirable model for our public education system under market competition.

There are actually some indications that such an disastrous outcome would be quite likely. Consider America’s technical and trade school sector.

These adult training programs have long been fully “voucherized” (through government-backed student loans) , and are awash in entrepreneurship and the free enterprise culture. Market competition in this sector has several major advantages over such a system in the public schools. The educational recipients are adults, far better able to directly judge the quality of the instruction which they are receiving; measuring success is rapid and highly objective (if you got a good job, it worked); and the pressure of loan- repayment would seem to discourage educational frivolity. Yet this system is generally reckoned a monumental disaster, with endless scandals and no clear pattern of success, except for some of the fly- by-night entrepreneurs who feed off it. We can’t risk such a fate for America’s public education system.

Finally, the gravest danger for widespread school choice is rarely explicitly raised by either side of the debate. Today, America’s society is highly fragmented along ethnic lines, perhaps more so than it has ever been before. Unlike most other nations around the world, which are relatively homogenous in culture and race, we have just a few social institutions that bind our diversity together, and one of the most important has been a unified public school system. Under vouchers, there is a very real possibility that substantial portions of our most vulnerable populations will be drawn into Louis Farrakhan schools, or a variety of others preaching a range of ethnic- nationalist ideologies, which could have a lethal effect upon our already fraying social cohesion.

This is not mere speculation. It is an underreported fact that Polly Williams of Milwaukee, poster-girl for the conservative voucher movement, until recently served as a colonel in the local Black Panther militia, whose leader, Michael Mcgee, pledged his support to Saddam Hussein around the time of the Gulf War and threatened a campaign of terrorism against white America, with snipers and bombings, unless hundreds of millions of dollars of “compensation” were immediately paid to Milwaukee blacks (he was bluffing). Just last year, the leadership of the Marcus Garvey charter school in Washington, D.C., founded along ethnic nationalist lines, physically attacked a visiting reporter and camera crew, along with the police officers escorting them, a shocking incident which both Left and Right sought to downplay, although for different reasons. Our society already has enough social division without paying schools to generate more.

For these reasons, perhaps it is finally time to call a truce in the ideological wars over education. If the Left will agree to scour the public schools clean of much failed liberal nonsense (most of which has no real connection to liberal ideology in any obvious way) , the Right might agree to stop its dogged efforts to turn our public schools over to Saddam Hussein’s American allies or the marketing division from Nike. And for a change, children could actually begin to get a decent education in California.

Ron K. Unz, a Silicon Valley software entrepreneur, was co-author of Proposition 227, the anti-bilingual education initiative passed by voters last June.

Voucher Veto

The Nation • May 3, 1999 • 1,100 Words

In an effort to find common political ground on the vexing issue of public school reform, The Nation passes on to its readers a set of provocative proposals from Ron K. Unz. A conservative Republican who ran in the 1994 primary against California Governor Pete Wilson, Unz campaigned strongly against that year’s anti-immigrant Prop 187. Last year he sponsored the controversial Prop 227, which abolished bilingual education in California, and recently he wrote a new initiative aimed at moderate campaign finance reform. Now he’s calling for a negotiated right/left truce on education, one in which both sides would have to relinquish parts of their historic agendas. We hope this editorial, which reflects Unz’s personal views, will generate a healthy and vigorous debate.

—The Editors

According to many polls, education reform tops voter concerns. Our public schools do have serious problems, and improving them should be a bipartisan effort. Unfortunately, among conservatives “educational reform” has lately become almost a synonym for “school choice,” whether through vouchers, charter schools or some other variation. And a significant cohort of liberals and reform Democrats is beginning to move toward such ideas.

Partly, this consideration of vouchers may result from the deep pessimism of reformers: If years of effort have failed to improve public education substantially, perhaps the task is simply impossible, and the system should be “blown up” or at least have enough holes knocked in it to allow frustrated parents to flee with their children to private or charter schools. Vouchers are popular among the right because they have strong ideological appeal to disparate but powerful elements of the conservative movement, ranging from libertarians (who often seem to worship the free market and competition as being axiomatically beneficial in any policy area) to religious conservatives (who eagerly seek public funding for their religious and parochial schools). But an objective examination of “school choice” raises serious doubts about the entire concept.

Our worldwide educational rivals almost universally rely upon the sort of government school system that is allegedly responsible for our own educational failings. In fact, public education in most other countries is far more centralized and government controlled, with less local flexibility and free choice than our own. If traditional government schools seem to work well everywhere else, perhaps they can be made to work here; on the other hand, vouchers would constitute a radical leap into the unknown.

Moreover, though voucher advocates argue that competition would inevitably lead to the triumph of good schools over bad because of the “magic of the marketplace,” this seems far from obvious. The success or failure of a given public school program is very difficult to quantify objectively, and most working parents cannot devote endless time to researching the matter.

In fact, it is easy to imagine that the schools that would win the competitive struggle for parental dollars would be those that invested most heavily in advertising and public relations and least heavily in academic content, as is often the case in the vaunted private sector. The actual physical content of most colas or sneakers is almost indistinguishable, but the Coke and Nike brands reign supreme because of massive spending on public image-making and celebrity endorsements. Although fine for the soft drink industry, this is not a desirable model for our public education system under market competition.

Finally, the gravest danger for widespread school choice is rarely explicitly raised by either side of the debate. Unlike most other nations around the world, which are relatively homogenous in culture and race, we have just a few social institutions that bind our diversity together, and one of the most important has been a unified public school system. Under vouchers, there is a very real possibility that substantial portions of our most vulnerable populations will be drawn into Nation of Islam schools or a variety of ethnic-nationalist ideologies, which could have a lethal effect upon our already fraying social cohesion. This is not mere speculation. It is an underreported fact that Polly Williams of Milwaukee, hero of the conservative voucher movement, until recently served as a “colonel” in a local black militia that around the time of the Gulf War threatened to become a violent fifth column on behalf of Saddam Hussein.

As a conservative who is deeply skeptical of vouchers, I regret seeing all too many members of the left play into the hands of public education’s foes by stubbornly defending the indefensible in our current schools.

For example, liberals claim that lack of money is responsible for education problems, despite the fact that school spending has risen enormously, even as our schools have deteriorated. Over the thirty years between 1960 and 1990, per capita student spending in California rose almost 150 percent above inflation even as its schools went from being among America’s best to among its worst. Today, the District of Columbia has nearly the highest per student spending in the country and nearly the lowest test scores, while states that spend the least, like North Dakota, achieve very good results. Most private schools spend only a small fraction of what public ones do but achieve fine results, often with those very “at risk” students–urban poor, minorities, immigrants–used to explain away public school failure.

The problem isn’t what schools lack but what they possess in abundance, namely half-baked educational fads produced by elite educational theorists. The list is quite long: whole language, bilingual education, inventive spelling, “fuzzy” math, constructivist science, endless self-esteem programs and other wrongheaded pedagogical experiments. According to numerous studies, this educational machinery produces students with the highest self-esteem but the lowest academic test scores of any of their global peers.

Thus, likely solutions to our educational problems reside more in subtracting than in adding. Instead of more money, more teachers, more programs or more days of schooling, we should be reducing as much of the burdensome nonsense in public schools as possible. If a straightforward academic curriculum seems to work reasonably well in nearly every other major nation, the burden of proof is on those who say it can’t possibly be tried in America’s unique society.

For these reasons, I might suggest the outlines of a bipartisan truce in the ideological wars over education: If the left will agree to scour the public schools clean of many failed educational programs (which for the most part have no obvious connection to any left tradition), the right might agree to stop its dogged efforts to turn our public schools over to ideological zealots or the marketing division from Nike. And for a change, children could actually begin to get a decent education in America.

Federalism vs. Roe vs. Wade

The Wall Street Journal • June 16, 1999 • 800 Words

Republican presidential front-runner George W. Bush has now announced that he will not impose an abortion litmus test on his Supreme Court nominees. Such views may also be shared by most of Mr. Bush’s leading rivals, thus transforming abortion into a word whose pronunciation is silence.

The wide consensus of reporters, pollsters, consultants and major donors is that the abortion issue helped drag Republicans down in 1996 and 1998. Today, most major Republican leaders seem resigned to treat abortion as the cross they must bear, too important to party activists and primary voters to be completely abandoned, but too unpopular among the general public to be honestly embraced. Ambitious Republicans are encouraged to adopt an agonized and compassionate mien, while saying as little about the subject as they can.

There is, however, another way for the Republican Party, and indeed for the nation as a whole, to deal with the vexing question of abortion. But the solution does not lie with the president or the Supreme Court — even if, for the time being, the problem does.

A few years ago, when renewed debate over the right to abortion was emerging as a national issue, pro-choice neoliberal Mickey Kaus, writing in the pro- choice, neoliberal magazine The New Republic, explained how after years of supporting Roe v. Wade he finally decided to read the decision for himself. As a Harvard Law graduate, he concluded that those conservatives who argued that any supporter of Roe should be denied a place on the high court were understating the case; rather, any supporter of Roe should probably have been flunked out of law school. Justice Harry Blackmun’s ability to find a constitutional mandate for a national policy of abortion-on-demand in the “emanations of the penumbra” of the Constitution simply ranked as the most arrogant and absurd example imaginable of judicial overreaching.

The point is not merely a legalistic one. Much of the reason for the especially virulent nature of the abortion debate in the U.S. is that our current national policy is rooted neither in legal precedent nor in the give- and-take of the political process, but was instead created from whole cloth by a handful of elderly judges. Americans are far more opposed than Europeans to abortion, yet under Roe our abortion laws are among the loosest anywhere.

Such a mismatch between public policy and the public mind is poisonous to a democracy. Abortion foes have no viable political outlet to change the law. Instead, they are forced either into supporting purely symbolic efforts such as banning all abortion through passage of a Human Life Amendment to the Constitution, or else nibbling at the edges of the issue through laws on parental consent or partial-birth abortions. After decades of such frustration, the most extreme activists have begun to turn to violence.

The tragedy of this situation is that of all countries the U.S. is best equipped to manage apparently irreconcilable ideological differences. Thanks to our federalist political structure, the country has been able to accommodate a level of ethnic, cultural and religious diversity that under different institutions would have almost certainly led to Balkan-style violence.

Thus in libertine Nevada gambling is the mainstay industry and prostitution is legal, but both are unlawful abominations next door in Mormon Utah. The notion that the laws on an issue as emotionally charged as abortion must be rendered identical across all cultural communities from Greenwich Village to rural Mississippi is a recipe for endless conflict. Consider the political consequences that would result if our Supreme Court suddenly discovered an absolute constitutional right to prostitution throughout America.

The pragmatic solution to the abortion question is a healthy dose of federalism. Overturning Roe v. Wade would not mean the end of legal abortion in America; rather, it would allow each state or even each local community to reach its own equilibrium on the issue. In the process, we would not only be reaffirming that the words of our Constitution actually mean what they say, but invigorating the democratic process throughout the entire country. A recent public statement by 22 Republican members of the California legislature — including those most ardently pro-life — supporting a federalist solution gives hope that this approach may be gaining political momentum, at least on the right.

For years, critics of current abortion laws have pinned their hopes on the Constitution, expecting either a Supreme Court decision or a constitutional amendment to settle the issue irrevocably in their favor. After years of fruitless effort, it’s high time to try a better approach. Those Republicans who wish to find a moderate way of speaking about the abortion issue without being buried by it should take heed.

Mr. Unz, a Silicon Valley software entrepreneur, is author of Proposition 227, the successful California initiative to limit bilingual education.

California Republicans as the Party of the Poor

The Sacramento Bee • August 22, 1999 • 1,000 Words

The recent release of campaign finance reports for the first half of 1999 has revealed a surprising fact: unlike its national counterpart, the California Republican Party has suddenly become the party of the poor.

Early press accounts mostly emphasized the astonishing pace of Democratic Gov. Gray Davis’s post-election fund-raising, in which he racked up nearly $6.4 million in contributions—over five times the previous record for this period—beginning just weeks after entering office and almost four years before his next general election. Longtime Sacramento observers found Davis’s fund-raising zeal surprising only in degree rather than kind, given his general reputation as a politician whose only ideology is raising money and running for office.

But other prominent Democrats also demonstrated extraordinary levels of early fundraising. Attorney General Bill Lockyer and Treasurer Phil Angelides raised over $500,000 and $700,000 respectively, Senate President Pro-Tem John Burton raised over $2 million, and Assembly Speaker Antonio Villaraigosa brought in almost $1.4 million.

These totals completely dwarf the dollars gathered by state Republicans during this same period. For example, the combined fundraising of all the top Senate and Assembly Republicans—Ross Johnson, Jim Brulte, Scott Baugh, and Rod Pacheco—was substantially less than that of Villaraigosa alone. California’s statewide Democratic officeholders outraised their Republican counter-parts by more than a factor of twenty.

The imbalance between Democratic and Republican bank accounts is even more extreme. Secretary of State Bill Jones and Insurance Commissioner Chuck Quackenbush have just $30,000 in their combined warchests, with debts of over $200,000, while California’s top two statewide Democrats—Davis and Lockyer—have almost $10 million, with negligible debt.

Villaraigosa has over $2.5 million in cash net of debt, while his Republican Assembly leader Scott Baugh has just $230,000 in cash and an even larger outstanding debt.

The reason for Democratic wealth and Republican poverty is clear. In California’s political system, money flows to power, and the Democrats have that in abundance. The huge potential impact which state spending and state regulation can have on the bottom lines of business special interests mean that every such competing corporate group—health insurance companies and trial lawyers, Indian casinos and rival non-Indian card-clubs—believes it must “pay to play.”

Since the Democrats control the executive branch and have huge majorities in the legislature, they represent the “house” in these games, taking heavy contributions from both sides of these special interest battles. Without significant power or the prospect of soon acquiring some, California Republicans have a difficult time shaking the corporate money tree. As reporters have noted, much of the Democratic funding has come from traditionally Republican-leaning corporations and business interests.

Obviously this situation presents serious problems to Republican political hopes, since as former Assembly Speaker Jesse Unruh once observed “money is the mother’s milk of politics.” But the flip side of every danger is an opportunity.

Americans of all ideologies—left, right, and center—are increasingly disturbed at the notion that their government is for sale to the highest bidder, and calls for reform of the system are gaining widespread support. Since California Republicans have less to sell, they have greater freedom to support ending this corrupt auction process.

An opportunity may be approaching. As a Republican, I and my co-proponent Tony Miller, a reform Democrat and former Secretary of State, have drafted the “Voters Rights 2000” initiative, a sweeping and comprehensive political and campaign reform measure aimed at the March 2000 ballot. Besides requiring immediate 24-hour Internet disclosure of all campaign contributions of $1000 or more and all television, radio, or mail advertising and other reform, the measure also helps to level the playing field between candidates by providing for voluntary spending limits, and limited state matching funds and bulk mailings for candidates who agree to spending limits. These long overdue proposals are widely popular among rank-and-file Republicans, Democrats, and Independents, and are core issues among third-party voters from the Reform and Green Parties.

Traditionally, Democratic leaders have paid lip service to campaign finance reform, while Republicans have rejected it, partly on ideological grounds. But with the Clinton-Gore fund-raising scandals demonstrating the dangers of the current system, and with California Democrats from Gray Davis on down vacuuming up nearly all the special interest money, Republicans should begin reconsidering their position.

Besides winning support from the media, the reform community, and independent voters, Republicans who support campaign reform would be able to call the bluff of the Democratic Party leadership, whose support for reform probably vanished the day they gained complete control of the levers of power. Our initiative would force California’s Democratic establishment to choose between their money and their alleged principles, always an uncomfortable choice for a politician.

Although money is an important factor in political success, it is not always decisive. Gov. Jesse “the Body” Ventura was outspent some 20 to 1 by his Democratic and Republican gubernatorial opponents in Minnesota, but triumphed nonetheless.

During 1994, the Congressional Democrats enjoyed a massive spending advantage over the Republicans, but lost control of the both the House and the Senate in an unprecedented Republican sweep. In 1998, Proposition 227, the “English for the Children” initiative, was outspent by about 25 to 1 in advertising, but still won a 22 point landslide. Al Checchi’s $40 million bought him just a 12% slice of the primary vote.

In recent years, many California Republicans have fallen into the trap of emphasizing money over message. Since the money now seems to have dried up, perhaps the party will consider returning to the message-oriented campaigns which worked so well for Ronald Reagan and other past leaders during its period of success. If campaign reform becomes an important part of that message, all Californians will benefit.

Ron Unz, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, is an author of the proposed “Voters Rights 2000” campaign reform initiative.

Politics is Up for Sale in California

The flow of money to candidates and causes calls the idea of the people's best interests into question

The Los Angeles Times • August 26, 1999 • 800 Words

There are many areas of the world where ordinary citizens suspect that their elections are for sale. But California is one of the few places where these purchases are publicly disclosed.

Consider last November’s Proposition 9, an initiative sponsored by consumer activists that would have slashed utility rates in the state. The utility companies spent about $ 40 million to crush the measure, and some of their most effective television ads featured crusading consumer affairs reporter David Horowitz, star of the “Fight Back” TV series. Horowitz’s impassioned claims that Proposition 9 would be a disaster for consumers swayed many voters. Most never realized that he had been paid more than $100,000 by the utility companies to make those claims.

During that same election, Proposition 10, the tobacco tax initiative, was denounced as “doing nothing for schools” in a series of TV ads by former state Supt. of Public Instruction Wilson Riles Jr., leading his past political allies to wonder why. Post-election filings answered that question: He’d been paid $90,000 by the tobacco industry.

Despite strongly opposing both Proposition 9 and Proposition 10 on policy grounds, I was outraged by this growing role of purchased endorsements in elections and consequently drafted the California Voters Bill of Rights initiative aimed at the March 2000 ballot. Among other things, it would force endorsers to disclose in ads if they were being paid by the campaign or its major donors.

Such a requirement would have proved very helpful in our Proposition 227 initiative to dismantle California’s system of “bilingual education.” During that campaign, we had been surprised that a measure so obviously necessary and so overwhelmingly popular among the voters was nonetheless so strongly opposed by the leading candidates for governor, Democrat and Republican alike. Days before the election, they jointly starred in a multimillion-dollar series of television ads urging “No on 227.”

Campaign reports later revealed that a huge portion of the opposition advertising campaign was funded by one individual, Republican billionaire A. Jerrold Perenchio, owner of the Univision Spanish-language television network, perhaps with an interest in preventing Latino children from learning English. Contribution reports also revealed that Perenchio, in last year’s gubernatorial race, was the single largest individual contributor, writing checks that totaled nearly $500,000 to the leading candidates, including Republican Dan Lungren, Democrat Gray Davis and Jane Harman, a Davis opponent in the primary.

But for all these questionable campaign practices, the most obvious problem with our current election system is the unlimited and gigantic flow of money from special interests, corporations and unions into the campaign accounts of our political leaders. California is one of the few states that places no restrictions on the size or source of contributions, and huge cash payments from doubtful interests have become the norm. During last November’s election, Bill Lockyer, the winning candidate for state attorney general, and his chief rival, Dave Stirling, each received hundreds of thousands of dollars from the very gambling casino interests that, as California’s chief law enforcement officer, he would be required to regulate or perhaps close down. In fact, gambling casinos have become the largest political donors in California, last year pouring about $100 million into our elections, including millions to Democratic and Republican candidates alike.

While most politicians probably can’t be bought for $1,000 or $5,000 contributions, allowing donors to write checks for $ 500,000 creates a dangerous temptation for money-hungry political hopefuls. The reform initiative addresses this problem by imposing contribution limits–$5,000 for statewide candidates and $3,000 for others–that are low enough to reduce corruption but high enough to avoid being struck down by the courts, the fate of California’s previous contribution limit laws. Also, all contributions of $1,000 or more would have to be disclosed within 24 hours over the Internet, with the largest donors to campaigns listed in the sample ballot and in media ads.

Finally, candidates would be prohibited from soliciting political contributions more than 12 months before an election. Without this, we see the current sordid spectacle of Gov. Davis, who had no sooner entered office than he began a massive new fund-raising drive for his race in 2002, raising more than $6 million in just six months from the very special interests whose legislative fate he now all but controls.

The problem with California elections today is not that political campaigns regularly violate or even skirt the law but that the laws themselves have become so weak and ineffective that obviously corrupt practices are absolutely lawful. Elected offices–from national to local ones–are regularly bought and sold for cash payments, but with all those payments duly reported and the contracts underlying them drafted by respectable attorneys.

The harm to public confidence and democracy from such legalized corruption is enormous. In March 2000, a ballot measure will allow California voters to end the abuses and restore our democratic institutions.

Software entrepreneur Ron K. Unz led the successful campaign to, dismantle bilingual education in California’s public schools last year

Too Many Guns and Too Many Gun Laws

Unpublished • September 1, 1999 • 800 Words

The reaction to last week’s shooting massacre in Hawaii—among the worst in American history—indicates that our national gun control debate is driven less by reasoned analysis and more by political demagoguery.  Gun control supporters who regularly urge tougher laws after each such shooting were forced into a quandary: Hawaii already has America’s strictest gun laws and being surrounded by thousands of miles of ocean, is as good a test case for the effectiveness of gun control as could be imagined. Yet the massacre still occurred.

The truth is that America’s dreadful rate of violent crime and murder—highest in the developed world—may serve as a source of horror to foreign observers but is a source of inspiration to domestic politicians.

Candidates of a liberal bent regularly identify the root cause of our killings as the widespread ownership of guns, and annually propose new gun laws as the solution. But while our domestic stock of firearms is indeed gigantic—some 240 million guns or nearly one for every man, woman, and child in America—the volume of our anti-gun laws is just as great—some 20,000 by last count.  Indeed, since the early 1960s, the number of guns and the number of anti-gun laws have both grown many-fold, as has our violent crime rate, raising serious doubts as to whether passing new gun laws will diminish either gun ownership or crime. Polling consistently proves that proposed gun law control legislation is very good politics; but it may just be poor policy.

International comparisons raise additional doubts regarding any obvious relationship between guns and violent crime.  For example, private ownership of firearms is almost non-existent in peaceful Japan, which has a tiny murder rate; but Switzerland’s murder rate is equally small, though nearly every Swiss family is legally required to own a fully-automatic “assault weapon.” An ordinary street crowd of window-shoppers in downtown Tel Aviv or Haifa packs a frightening arsenal of concealed pistols and automatic weapons; yet even including terrorist incidents, the Israeli murder rate is as low as Japan’s.  Cultural and social factors seem far more important in determining murder rates than the prevalence or lethality of the firearms owned by the population.

This is just as obvious within our own country. Rural America has the loosest gun laws and the highest rate of gun ownership and use, but generates a far smaller murder rate than major cities such as Washington, D.C. and Detroit, which possess among the strictest gun laws.  Both widespread gun ownership and widespread gun restrictions seem more the symptoms of our national disease of violence rather than the cause or the cure.

Other proposed solutions to social violence are just as rhetorically effective but factually doubtful. In recent years, many liberals and conservatives have joined together to denounce the violent content of Hollywood’s entertainment products as a major contributing factor to the violence of our streets. It certainly seems plausible to suggest that the endless shootings and stabbings in movies and television provoke similar behavior among our impressionable youth.

Unfortunately, there is little supporting evidence for this hypothesis. The violence of Japanese movies and television shows is far greater than our own, with numerous beheadings and vicious rapes to complement the more mundane shootings and stabbings; but Japanese children and adults seem almost completely immune from the expected ill effects. European countries import our violent entertainment products, and produce plenty of their own, but little of that violence seems to leak out from the imaginary world of the screen to the real world of the streets.

Closer to home, some of the larger Canadian and American cities—Toronto, Montreal, and Detroit—are located close to the national border, and thereby receive the same range of television shows. But they exhibit extreme differences in rates of personal violence and killings

Given such scanty evidence for either guns or movies as the cause of our violent society, why are such factors the targets of such a volume of defamatory rhetoric? Politicians must offer solutions as part of their periodic job re-applications, and the simpler the solutions the better the sound bite. Heavy governmental regulation of guns or television is politically extremely popular—though constitutionally dubious under the First and Second Amendments to our constitution—and whether or not it works, winning votes along the way represents the actual definition of success.  There are few better ways for a politician to get a beneficial appearance on the local evening news than holding up a deadly-looking assault weapon and promising to outlaw such things.

By contrast, the true underlying causes of our high rate of civil violence are complex and do not offer simple or obvious answers. The endless quagmire of our thirty-year-old War on Drugs, our failed educational system, the social breakdown of the American family, and our national tradition of both individualism and personal violence are deeply-rooted factors resistant to easy change.

Sometimes the bravest statement a politician can make is the very unsatisfying “some problems don’t have obvious solutions.” Most stunned residents of Hawaii would probably agree.

Gay Marriages Today, Polygamy Tomorrow?

The San Francisco Chronicle • October 8, 1999 • 700 Words

WITH THE DEFENSE of Marriage Act on California’s March ballot, the subject of gay rights is likely to move to the forefront of the political debate. Already, many Democratic candidates are said to be desperate to avoid taking a position on this controversial measure while many Republicans wish that the issue would simply disappear.

The initiative, placed on the ballot by religious conservatives, defines a legally valid marriage as being one between a man and a woman, thereby closing the door on the growing effort through courts and legislation to legalize gay marriages. The debate surrounding the hot-button proposition will inevitably broaden to social attitudes toward homosexuality.

Given the extremely controversial nature of the topic, it is useful to examine the historical record.

Human civilizations have demonstrated an enormous diversity of attitudes toward homosexual behavior. In ancient Greece and Rome, a root of Western civilization, homosexuality was widespread and tolerated and, at times, even exalted as a higher form of love. By contrast, the other root of Western civilization, the Jewish Old Testament, regarded homosexuality as a crime against nature and God, drawing the death penalty.

Non-Western civilizations exhibit much the same wide range of attitudes. Under some Chinese dynasties, homosexual activity was tolerated or encouraged among the elite, while puritanical Maoist China regarded it as a vile Western perversion and reportedly underscored this attitude through summary executions.

Similarly, the question of what constitutes a legally valid marriage has generated an amazing variety of answers in different times and places. As heirs to the Judeo-Christian tradition, we unthinkingly consider a marriage as involving one man and one woman, although such strict monogamy is a relatively recent and rare social attitude.

Some form of polygamy has been recognized in the vast majority of human societies, and even today is probably accepted in more countries than not.

This diverse tradition provides a historical context for the forthcoming ballot initiative. One fact immediately stands out: views of homosexuality have varied, views of marriage have varied, but there has never been a human society, past or present, which authorized homosexual marriages. For the United States to legalize gay marriages would be an act unprecedented in all recorded history.

The reason is simple.

Marriage has generally served the role of providing a stable home environment for the young biological children of the married couple, and this implies a man and a woman. Other relationships, from the traditional European mistress to modern American cohabitation, simply do not require as strong a legal bond. And while homosexual couples today are not prevented from living together or informally acting as “man and wife,” even up to the point of undergoing unofficial marriage ceremonies, it is unreasonable to require society to provide formal legal sanction to such a relationship.

Consider the implications. Since homosexual marriages are unprecedented, while polygamy is commonplace throughout all history, it is morally inconsistent for U.S. law to begin allowing the former without legalizing the latter as well. And the basic libertarian argument in favor of gay marriage, namely that no other individual is harmed by allowing a man and a man to marry, can be taken much, much farther as well.

For example, how can one then deny the right of two men and three women to achieve personal fulfillment by entering into a legally valid group marriage — again, no other individual is directly harmed. Either the official nature of marriage should be kept as currently restricted, or it must be amended to the point where the entire institution becomes almost unrecognizable.

Today’s America is an extremely diverse land, with an amazing array of different social traditions and subcultures. If our common legal structures were to be bent or stretched to accommodate one, they must be made to accommodate others as well. Legalizing gay marriages today means legalizing polygamy or group marriages tomorrow.

Ron Unz, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, is chairman of the “Voter Rights 2000” campaign reform initiative and a candidate for the U.S. Senate.

McCain-Feingold Loses; There Is an Alternative

The Wall Street Journal • October 20, 1999 • 800 Words

Everyone agrees that the current campaign-finance system is dreadfully flawed, consisting as it does of a mishmash of contribution limits unadjusted for 25 years of inflation and a gigantic “soft money” loophole that has grown large enough to devour any and all financial restrictions. But the virtual defeat yesterday of the McCain-Feingold bill marks an end — at least for this legislative season — of any meaningful prospect for change.

There is, however, an America beyond Washington where not everything is at a stalemate. In California, citizens will soon be voting on a sweeping and comprehensive reform package known as Voters Rights 2000. With minor adjustments, this ballot measure could serve as a model for federal campaign- finance legislation.

A core element of the California plan is massively enhanced and expanded financial disclosure, made possible by modern technology. Under the plan, all contributions of $1,000 or more would have to be disclosed within 24 hours on a government Web site searchable and sortable by donor name, business affiliation, location, contribution date and amount. Nearly all sides in the debate over reform advocate such disclosure and George W. Bush’s presidential campaign is already providing this information voluntarily. Under the California plan it would become a requirement for all candidates.

The plan would also apply a 24-hour disclosure rule to information on campaign expenditures and advertisements, thus allowing the press, citizens and rival candidates to police the honesty and consistency of a candidate’s political message. Today, campaigns regularly engage in dishonest “narrow casting,” for example, sending a pro-life message to pro-life voters, and a pro-choice message to pro-choice voters. This would remain legal under the California plan, but it would become largely self-defeating.

All of these disclosure requirements would apply to initiative and independent-expenditure campaigns as well as those of candidates.

Much of the current pressure to exploit soft money and other loopholes derives from today’s low $1,000 federal contribution limit, which forces candidates to spend the bulk of their time raising money in small increments. The California plan would set strict but realistic limits of $5,000 for statewide candidates and $3,000 for other candidates, roughly on a par with the original value of the federal limit. By making fund-raising a lot easier, the plan would allow candidates to devote more of their efforts to raising and debating issues of importance to the public.

The California plan would combine these contribution limits with voluntary spending limits of up to $16 million in statewide elections and $1.3 million in district races (in both cases including primaries). Statewide candidates who agreed to these limits and gathered sufficient qualifying signatures would receive up to $2 million of free broadcast airtime and heavily subsidized bundled mailings to all voters; district candidates who do the same will receive the latter benefit. Campaigns that refused the voluntary spending limits could still participate in the bundled mailings, but would have to pay a proportionate share of the total cost.

Since the spending levels are reasonable and the benefits of compliance substantial, nearly all candidates would likely accept the limits, stigmatizing those few who do not. Candidates who exceed the limits would have to disclose the growing total of their spending on all advertisements, which would represent a formidable deterrent to overspending campaigns. Although the U.S. Supreme Court has prevented any restrictions from being placed on self-financed candidates, the combined impact should help deter future Al Checchis from spending $40 million of their own money on losing races.

The plan’s cost to the taxpayer would be minuscule, just $1 a year in California. A similar system applied to all federal races would probably cost much less.

Our proposal would restrict the use of “soft money” to the actual party- building purposes for which it was originally intended and prevent parties from using such funds to buy airtime or fund advertisements for or against specific candidates. Contributions could still be used for voter registration, absentee ballots, get-out-the-vote efforts and administrative expenses. Much of the stigma surrounding soft money has resulted from its increasing use for “hard money” purposes such as television commercials. Once soft money is restricted in use, the pressure to raise huge quantities of it from doubtful sources is sure to diminish.

Already the California plan has been endorsed by leading campaign reformers including Mr. McCain and California Common Cause. Even Sen. Mitch McConnell, the most prominent opponent of campaign-finance reform, has said he would support severe restrictions on soft money in exchange for an increase in the federal $1,000 limit to $3,000 or more, exactly the proposed package. Perhaps the California plan is a workable compromise acceptable to both sides.

If so, California voters may once again shape national policy through the impact of a popular initiative.

Mr. Unz is chairman of the Voters Rights 2000 initiative campaign and a Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate from California.

Democrats' Double Standard on Campaign Reform

The New York Times • March 10, 2000 • 600 Words

PALO ALTO, Calif. — Tuesday’s crushing defeat of a sweeping campaign finance measure in California thwarted reform in a state much in need of it. It also put the lie to the conventional wisdom that the Democratic Party is less opposed to campaign reform than the Republicans are.

With absolutely no limits on the size or source of political contributions to restrain them, corporations, unions and wealthy individuals regularly write California politicians in state and local races checks for $100,000 or more — and are allowed to keep the gifts secret for up to six months. The press has documented political decisions favoring the businesses or interests of these large campaign donors.

The system is also tailor-made for a prodigious fund-raiser like Gov. Gray Davis, a Democrat who, three years before he must run for re-election, had amassed a war chest of $14.5 million by Dec. 31 and continues to raise funds.

Proposition 25, a moderate and reasonable reform measure, would have banned corporate contributions and capped other gifts at $5,000 for statewide candidates, while requiring all contributions of $1,000 or more to be immediately disclosed on the Internet. Campaigns that agreed to generous voluntary spending limits would have been given vouchers redeemable for free air time. The use of soft money from the political parties in advertising was to be prohibited.

Though some reform groups scorned Proposition 25 as not going far enough, a surprisingly broad range of reformers backed it, including Common Cause, Senator John McCain and Ralph Nader. The organized opposition included politically active corporations, large unions, the Democratic and Republican Parties and most prominent California elected officials, from Governor Davis on down.

The Republican Party’s opposition was pro forma, consisting mostly of denunciations.

But the Democratic Party and its allied groups financed an active campaign to stop the measure. Unions contributed more than $1.5 million, two Democratic committees provided an additional $600,000, and most of the remaining $1 million or so was obtained through the efforts of Governor Davis. California unions also made the defeat of the measure a primary focus of their phone-bank operations.

Although Democrats have traditionally supported public financing of campaigns, the opposition’s advertising attacked the public-financing provision of Proposition 25 as likely to cause a huge tax increase. (The actual costs would have been less than $2 per Californian.)

The opponents also contended that because Supreme Court decisions have prevented restrictions on millionaires paying for their own political campaigns, it was unfair to impose any contribution limits on other candidates — the very same argument used by many conservative Republicans who favor repealing the $1,000 contribution limit in federal races and allowing unlimited donations.

The endless national debate over campaign finance reform has allowed the Democratic Party to keep its own pipeline of soft money while ostensibly backing reform. Democrats in the House and Senate can vote almost unanimously for the McCain-Feingold ban on soft money, knowing full well that the Republicans will kill it.

The election in California unmasked the party’s opposition to reform.

Rank-and-file California Democrats who want reform are not likely to forget this lesson. The day before the election, several longtime Democratic stalwarts, led by Max Palevsky, a computer executive who had donated $1 million to the Proposition 25 campaign, held a news conference to denounce the cynicism and hypocrisy of their party’s leaders.

Federal campaign reform has been blocked for 25 years, while control of Congress has shifted between the parties.

The sooner we recognize that the establishment wings of both parties are hopelessly addicted to the same financing system, the greater the likelihood that some reform will finally become a reality.

Ron Unz, a Silicon Valley software entrepreneur, was the chairman of the Proposition 25 campaign.

High Noon for Vouchers

In November, a turning point for U.S. education

National Review • June 20, 2000 • 1,600 Words

Originally proposed by Economics Nobel Laureate Milton Friedman in 1955, educational vouchers and related types of school choice have increasingly become the main focus of conservative education- reformers, as attractive to parochial-school Christian conservatives as to free-market libertarians. In the past year, some prominent liberal journalists, such as Matt Miller writing in The Atlantic and John Judis in The New Republic, have moved to consider or even embrace them. Now, suddenly, a chain of unconnected events will decide the triumph or collapse of the voucher movement — by the end of this year.

Although school vouchers have generated an inordinate amount of attention in policy and media circles — both pro and con — and have regularly stirred the juices of political activists of the left and the right, they still scarcely exist in America on a significant scale. Every attempt to enact vouchers through ballot initiatives at the state or local level has gone down to defeat at the hands of the teachers unions, often by a very wide margin, and those few voucher proposals enacted through the legislative process are regularly challenged in court. Today, public and private school-voucher programs combined include just 70,000 students, only one-tenth of one percent of our school-age population, and a minute fraction of (say) the estimated two million children in home-schooling programs, which attract much less media attention.

Furthermore, most of the heavy media coverage surrounding vouchers or charter-school proposals seems to have been almost totally ignored by the general public. A major research study by the non-partisan Public Agenda organization indicates that the vast majority of the public — parents of school-age children included — know almost nothing about vouchers, sometimes confusing them with government credits to buy school uniforms. Remarkably enough, even 75% of parents in those trailblazing cities that have had government- voucher programs for years — Milwaukee and Cleveland — feel they know too little about the concept to have formed either a positive or a negative opinion.

All this is about to change, with school vouchers on the verge of becoming a centerpiece of the 2000 election cycle. Within just a few months, vouchers will either have become the law of the land in one or more of America’s largest states — or will be dead politically.

In the past few years, wealthy school-choice activists such as Ted Forstmann and John Walton have poured hundreds of millions of dollars into private programs aimed at “priming the pump” for vouchers, but expanding such programs to include even one percent of America’s students would require billions of dollars annually, sums of money which only the taxpaying public as a whole can readily afford. This year, three of America’s largest states will — or will not — decide to spend such billions on vouchers, and this political triple-header probably represents an “up or out” scenario for voucher advocates and foes.

In California, billionaire venture-capitalist Tim Draper has placed a sweeping voucher measure on the November ballot, arguing that only the free- market principles of competition that built Silicon Valley can revive California’s decrepit school system. A previous California voucher initiative went down to a titanic 40 point defeat in 1993; but that measure was outspent nearly 10- 1 in advertising by the teachers unions, and this time round, Draper reportedly plans to back the measure with $20-40 million from his vast Internet fortune, probably enough funding to match the unions dollar-for-dollar. Under such circumstances, the Draper initiative will be the best-funded voucher initiative ever, and probably a fair test of the underlying popularity of the concept. Draper has already assembled a team of veteran political consultants, architects of Newt Gingrich’s 1994 Congressional landslide.

The state of Michigan is witnessing a very similar effort, a statewide voucher initiative financially backed by the DeVos family of Amway fame and other Catholic conservatives; they plan to spend $5 million or more in support. Although the DeVos measure is far more limited than the Draper initiative, its passage would certainly provide educational vouchers to tens of thousands of students.

Finally, a limited Florida voucher law will have its constitutionality decided by that state’s supreme court, probably by the end of this year. The proposal was signed into law by Gov. Jeb Bush in 1999, and restricts the distribution of vouchers to students at public schools with dismal and stagnant educational performance. Although just a negligible 56 students statewide were eligible the first year, estimates are that those numbers could grow into the tens of thousands over the next few years, if the law is upheld.

Despite the strong forces backing these state efforts, even proponents admit that they face a series of uphill battles.

The Draper initiative — the most sweeping and important of the three — is already under harsh attack by some prominent voucher advocates for being universal rather than means-tested, although this approach is backed by Prof. Friedman and supported by considerable polling; activist resentment of Draper’s intrusion on their political “turf” is probably the dominant factor. Opponents, led by the teachers unions, will probably unite the entire political establishment of the state against the measure, and run a very-well-funded and sophisticated media campaign, supplemented by a massive union get-out-the-vote effort not seen since a California initiative battle over union dues in June 1998. If conservatives and school-choice supporters remain publicly divided on the proposal, and continue to provide numerous negative comments to the press, the opposing paid media will be supplemented by massive and unremittingly negative free media, and the measure — regardless of the depth of Draper’s pockets — is doomed.

Recent polling indicates that California Republicans could lose 3-4 Congressional seats in any case, and see challenger Rep. Tom Campbell suffer a landslide defeat against incumbent Sen. Dianne Feinstein; George W. Bush also trails Al Gore in that state by a considerable margin. Even if Republicans do no worse than these early polls indicate — but if the Draper initiative loses decisively — Republican leaders will naturally (if unfairly) seek to shift the blame to vouchers, and probably succeed to a considerable extent, causing the national party to distance itself from the issue.

The results from Michigan would probably confirm this political judgment. There, the Republican establishment has done its best to prevent the DeVos initiative from reaching the ballot, fearing it will provoke a large turnout of blacks (in support of vouchers) and union members (in opposition), all of whom will then vote Democratic up-and-down the rest of the ticket. Since Michigan is a key battleground state between Bush and Gore, and incumbent Republican Sen. Spencer Abraham is fighting for survival, a huge turnout by blacks and union members might doom the Republicans in these races and probably also shift control of the lower house of the state legislature to the Democrats, costing the Republicans their chance at Congressional redistricting following the 2000 Census.

Sen. Abraham and Republican Gov. John Engler have already publicly come out against the voucher proposal, but this merely provides further ammunition to the anti-voucher campaign, while angering pro-voucher conservatives. A measure that unites Democrats and divides Republicans faces a very difficult challenge, and, if unsuccessful, would be heavily blamed for other Republican defeats.

Finally, the legal case against the Florida voucher proposal seems far more likely to succeed than other recent constitutional challenges to vouchers, since it is based on state rather than federal constitutional grounds. It would be difficult for the U.S. Supreme Court to strike down voucher proposals allowing parochial-school participation on First Amendment grounds — after all, the post-World War II GI Bill allowed veterans to use their college-tuition “vouchers” at religious as well as secular universities. By contrast, the Florida state constitution requires the state to fund a “public school” education for all students, and a district judge has already ruled that this prohibits public-education dollars from being shifted to private schools.

Florida court rulings aside, it is quite possible that all sides in these California and Michigan campaigns will have spent a combined total of close to a hundred million dollars by election day, sums of money comparable to the budget of a Presidential campaign, and enough of an advertising budget to push vouchers to the forefront of public consciousness. If the issue does consequently become a major focus of the battle between Bush and Gore, it will attract even more visibility and public debate.

As a conservative skeptical of voucher proposals, I have no direct stake in this battle. But both national voucher advocates and opponents should realize that over the next five months the voters of California and Michigan will determine whether the voucher movement triumphs at last or fades into obscurity. Fifty years of policy theory now hang on five months of campaigning.

National leaders of the voucher movement may not have chosen the timing of these battles, and they may not agree with all the specific details of the Draper and DeVos measures; but the national media and the Republican party will interpret these votes as a near-national referendum on vouchers and school choice. Decisive defeats — and simultaneous Republican-party political losses — will permanently cripple the voucher movement and probably eliminate any momentum for charter schools and other less-drastic forms of school choice as well. Voucher victories in any of these states will immediately transform the program from a small-scale laboratory experiment into a huge, measurable reality.

For better or for worse, High Noon for vouchers is now at hand.

Dishonest Campaign Reform is Worse Than None

The Los Angeles Times • October 1, 2000 • 800 Words

For the first time in living memory, California’s entire diverse galaxy of campaign finance reform groups has united behind a single ballot measure campaign. Surprisingly, this reform grand alliance is actually aimed at defeating a campaign finance reform proposal–namely, Proposition 34, a measure placed on the November ballot by Gov. Gray Davis and the Democrats.

Over the past 25 years, not a single major campaign reform proposal both has passed and survived legal challenge either in California or on the federal level. These decades of unbroken failure have had a perverse political effect: Practical reformers have become discouraged and left the movement to pursue other, more attainable objectives, while a core of rigid ideologues has remained behind. Such individuals share the same near-mystical goal of expelling all money from politics but indulge in fratricidal disputes over arcane doctrine and political strategy. Although sensible reformers recognize that the perfect must never become the enemy of the good, such ideas are blasphemy to all too many campaign reformers.

Under these circumstances, I would very much like to support Proposition 34. Unfortunately, the utter dishonesty of both that measure and the campaign behind it outweigh even the unrealistic views of its opponents.

Many of the provisions of Proposition 34 are practical and reasonable. Legislative and statewide non-gubernatorial candidates would have their donations capped at $ 3,000 and $ 5,000 respectively, amounts high enough to survive legal challenge but low enough to end California’s current system of legalized near-bribery, in which contribution checks for $100,000 or $200,000 are becoming the dominant political force.

The real intent of Proposition 34, however, is not to enact reasonable campaign finance laws but instead to repeal existing campaign finance laws.

Back in 1996, a coalition of reform groups led by Common Cause, the American Assn. of Retired Persons and the League of Women Voters passed a very strict campaign reform measure, Proposition 208, in a 61% landslide, despite being outspent about 20-1 by opponents. These well-funded adversaries–including the Democratic and Republican parties, major unions and corporations–then resorted to legal challenges, eventually tying the measure up in federal court on 1st Amendment grounds. With the U.S. Supreme Court having recently approved similar measures in other states, most observers give Proposition 208 an excellent chance of being revived. So the bipartisan special interests that dominate our state government quickly wrote Proposition 34 and placed it on the ballot, allowing no public comment and drafting the measure in such a way that a 51% vote in favor of Proposition 34 would overturn the previous 61% popular vote in favor of Proposition 208.

The entire campaign in favor of Proposition 34 is based on political trickery and doubtful legal maneuvers. Not having the necessary support to place the measure on the regular November ballot, Senate President Pro Tem John Burton (D-San Francisco) called a “special” election for Proposition 34–on the same date as the regular November vote. The sponsors of Proposition 34 themselves picked the authors of the “no” side in the official California voter pamphlet, selecting individuals opposed to any contribution limits, thereby reinforcing their own “yes” arguments. The official title and summary produced by Atty. Gen. Bill Lockyer describes Proposition 34 as establishing contribution limits, never hinting that the measure would repeal much lower limits already passed by the voters.

Furthermore, the actual substance of Proposition 34 sharply tilts the political playing field toward the Democratic Party lawyers who drafted the measure. Although Proposition 34 purports to cap legislative contributions at $ 3,000 per election, it permits each union local to separately contribute twice this amount, allowing a candidate backed by, say, the powerful California Teachers Assn. to receive a coordinated $ 300,000 within a 24-hour period if the money is simply funneled through 50 local chapters. Unions already are a powerful political force in California; Proposition 34 would render them the only donors with no effective contribution limits.

Similarly, the “soft money”–unlimited party contributions used to promote or attack candidates–so regularly denounced by national Democrats remains unrestricted by Proposition 34. Powerful California Democrats know they can raise oceans of soft money.

<P>Given these biases, the Republican Party support for Proposition 34 might seem surprising, but only if we consider political interests rather than financial interests. The highly paid consultants who control their elected Republican clients like puppet masters–as demonstrated in the huge recent scandal surrounding former Insurance Commissioner Chuck Quackenbush–derive most of their income from the commissions surrounding political campaigns. A reinstatement of Proposition 208’s strict limits would sharply reduce this gravy train. They are willing to sacrifice political principle and even political power to keep their money rolling in.

Most voters view campaign finance reform as a vague good. Proposition 34 will be sold to the voters in this packaging, although it actually repeals existing campaign finance reform. We’ll see whether the voters smell this rat by election day.

Ron Unz, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, led the campaign for, Proposition 25, a campaign finance reform initiative defeated by the Democratic and Republican parties in March

Darwinian Evolution

The American Spectator (Letters) • February 2001 • 300 Words

I was absolutely appalled by your current cover story attacking the Darwinian theory of evolution.

I am a conservative. I support traditional social values and maintaining the crucial role of organized religion in our society. On most issues, I would probably be characterized as a strong social conservative. But I am a scientist first and a conservative second.

Although I am a conservative, I would rather support an ultra-liberal political leader who believed that the world was round than a conservative political leader who believed that it was flat, because the latter belief is clear proof either of appalling ignorance or complete insanity. Disbelief in the modern theory of evolution falls into much the same category.

Today, even the most extremist and backward Islamic fundamentalists have accepted modern evolutionary theory. The Roman Catholic Church, which unlike most of the American enemies of evolution, is led by men who have real theological and philosophical training, accepts evolution. If America’s conservative movement turns against evolution it will totally discredit itself, and become a complete laughingstock.

Modern evolutionary theory is the thoroughly documented foundation of half of all modern science. Although I am a theoretical physicist by training, I would admit that Darwinian evolution is far more important and solidly established a scientific doctrine than Einsteinian relativity, Newtonian mechanics, or Heisenberg’s quantum physics. Darwinian evolution is (arguably) the single most important scientific discovery in all human history.

If conservatives reject Darwinian evolution, they will lose the support of nearly every scientist, every technology entrepreneur, every practical businessman, and the bulk of America’s college- educated population. They will transform themselves into a fanatic cult drawing its primary support from the most ignorant elements of the population.

I urge conservatives not to follow that path.

Sincerely,

Ron Unz

Chairman, English for the Children

Chairman, Wall Street Analytics, Inc.

Ballots for Dollars

Go ahead, spend lots of cash. You’ll still lose.

National Review • February 27, 2001 • 600 Words

Yesterday, the National Association of Bilingual Educators concluded its 2001 annual national convention in Phoenix on a desperate note. According to a front-page story in the Arizona Republic, the 7,000 participants were beseeched to pony up millions of dollars to fight the forthcoming state-wide “English for the Children” campaigns in Colorado, Massachusetts, New York, and elsewhere. The resounding defeat, just four months earlier, of a plan for Spanish-almost-only instruction in the state hosting the NABE convention, heightened the urgency of the appeal.

In principle, such fundraising pleas should enjoy an excellent chance of success. I expect that America’s current multi-billion-dollar “bilingual education industry” covered the expenses of nearly all the attendees; registration fees, airfare, and five nights of hotel accommodations and incidentals must have pushed the total bill to more than $10 million.

Presumably an industry willing to spend an eight-digit sum on annual self-celebration also would be willing to shell out at least a comparable amount to defend its continued existence.

Whether such money will make much of a difference is quite another story. Our 1998 Prop. 227 initiative campaign in California was outspent some 25 to 1 in advertising, yet we managed to crush the No side by a 22-point margin. Our 2000 campaign for Prop. 203 in Arizona was also outspent nearly 10 to 1 in advertising, but we wound up pummeling the opposition by a margin of 26 points. Political advertising follows the same basic rules as consumer advertising, and maintaining Spanish-almost-only “bilingual education” in our public schools seems a perfect example of the dog-food that dogs just won’t eat.

Although, in recent years, perceptions have grown that money and paid political advertising dominate or even determine election results, actual evidence for this thesis is mixed. Many of the quiet advocates for the all-powerful role of money belong to that elite class of paid media consultants and political fundraisers whose personal income derives from a fixed percentage of the campaign money raised and spent. Candidates have been encouraged to transform themselves into empty fund-raising vessels, mindless pipelines that passively transmit cash between donor and consultant bank accounts.

Today, a “successful candidate” is not an individual who articulates important policy issues, nor someone who wins on Election Day, but someone who succeeds in vacuuming up the most cash for his consultant puppet-masters. Come again? When an Internet multimillionaire parted with nearly $30 million of his personal fortune just to achieve a 3 to 1 drubbing at the polls on his bid for school vouchers, he may have lost at the ballot box, but his handlers went home happy. Similarly, Al Checchi’s 1998 California gubernatorial campaign proved remarkably disastrous for the $40-million candidate but remarkably beneficial to his raft of profiteers, who earned millions in commissions for just a few months of very part-time work.

Rick Lazio raised no substantive issues during his recent Senate bid, but enough cash — over $35 million — to massively outspend his victorious opponent, Hillary Clinton; in the end, Hillary got a Senate seat, Lazio’s consultant got a mansion, while Lazio dug himself into debt. Such is the nature of modern political warfare. The world of dot-com stock pitchmen is honest by comparison.

Given these new political realities, I hope that the leaders of our bilingual-education industry follow the path trodden by the likes of Al Checchi and Rick Lazio. If so, they will drive themselves toward expensive and humiliating political oblivion. The poetic justice of seeing one corrupt and profiteering industry ruthlessly devoured by another just as corrupt and profiteering is heartening.

The Conservative Monkey Wars Revisited

Unpublished • March 1, 2001 • 1,200 Words

In late December, the cover of the conservative American Spectator featured the caricature of a confused-looking monkey.  Perhaps to the surprise of many subscribers, the focus of the entire issue was a fierce denunciation of the Darwinian theory of evolution.  The fundamental kinship of hamsters and Hammurabi—a settled part of the high school science curriculum since the celebrated Scopes trial of the 1920s—was denounced as false, fraudulent, and even perhaps communistic.

With the battles inside the Kansas Board of Education and the ongoing decipherment of the human genome, evolution is beginning to rear its head as a political issue, and doubting Darwin has leapt from the traditional hillbillies of rural Tennessee to glossy conservative magazines of the Washington Beltway.  The “Monkey Wars” have reappeared to divide conservatives.

Although the American Spectator articles provoked a flood of critical mail—including a long published letter of my own in the next issue—and the anti-Darwinist editor was immediately replaced, the controversy persists.  For while opponents of Darwin are nominally opposed to any common ancestry for squirrels and chipmunks, the actual driving force behind their hostility is the suggestion that man is an animal among animals, and in particular that many human social or psychological traits have more than a superficial similarity to those of other primates.  The intellectual battles are being waged over men and monkeys, not slime-molds.

Thus the importance of the March 19th cover story in the conservative Weekly Standard, critiquing the controversial subject of evolutionary psychology than evolution proper, and featuring an enraged rather than a puzzled monkey.  Senior Editor Andrew Ferguson devotes over 6,000 words to criticizing the growing pro-evolutionary drift of some of some of conservativism brightest intellectual stars such as James Q. Wilson, Francis Fukuyama, and Charles Murray, all of whom have found in evolutionary theory a powerful organizing principle for understanding the roots of human behavior.

Since Ferguson himself has no scientific background, he is forced to rely upon critiques of evolutionary psychology by explicit Marxists such as Stephen Jay Gould and Steve Rose, men whose strict economic determinism leaves them hostile to different paradigms of human behavior, genetic or otherwise.  That a Christian conservative would cite atheistic Marxists to buttress his case against evolutionary conservatives is one of the many ironies regularly found in Darwinist debates.

The entire position of the Left on Darwinism and its human extensions is rather involved and conflicted.  Today, Marxists may sniff at Darwinist analysis, but the founder of their movement himself regarded the Honorable Charles Darwin—bourgeois waistcoat and all—as one of the titanic figures of human intellectual history, and hoped to dedicate his Das Kapital to the man.  The writings of close collaborator Friedrich Engels were often even more explicitly Darwinian, with his analysis of the evolution of the family reading like an archaic strain of sociobiology.  Although today, Social Darwinism and eugenics are routinely vilified as pseudo-scientific doctrines on the racialist fringe, during their heyday a century ago, many of their leading advocates in Europe and America were activists of the Left, and their leading opponents Christian conservatives.

Probably much of today’s perceived Left/Right intellectual split on human Darwinism stretches back to the contrasting positions of Hitler and Stalin.  The former made an extreme application of Darwinism to human society the basis of his Nazi regime, and slaughtered millions in its name.  The latter completely rejected Darwinism, sent its scientific advocates to their deaths in the Gulag, and slaughtered even more millions.  But while the body count seems to produce a rough balance in guilt by association, human Darwinism was central to the ideas of Hitler, whereas anti-Darwinism was merely peripheral to Stalin, thus leaving a far greater stain on Darwin’s intellectual heirs and extenders.  It is perhaps not purely coincidental that a disproportionate fraction of the leading intellectual opponents of human Darwinism—from anthropologist Franz Boas in the 1930s to biologist Stephen Jay Gould in the 1970s and 1980s—are of Jewish ancestry.

But Hitler’s bones have now rested for over half a century, and elements of what is generally considered as the Left seem to be reassessing their position on the applicability of genes and evolution to humanity.  Today, gay activists uniformly claim that homosexuality is innate and thus genetically determined, while it is their conservative opponents who argue for an environmentalist or socially-constructed cause.  Peter Singer, a prominent Princeton philosopher, whose controversial writing on abortion, euthanasia, and animal rights have subjected him to almost unprecedented vilification by social conservatives, explicitly seeks to reclaim Darwin for his side in his recent book A Darwinian Left.  And in any event, Darwinism seems rarely to surface as an internal flash point of dissention for liberal or leftist organizations.

By contrast, conservatives appear sharply and publicly divided.  Academic conservatives—like the vast majority of the college-educated, let alone those with advanced degrees—regard Darwinism as completely settled scientific fact, and the hostility of their religious political allies is a source of enormous intellectual embarrassment, comparable to being linked to Flat-Earthers or UFO worshippers.  Furthermore, many conservative intellectuals believe with some justification that the evolutionary paradigm provides a powerful scientific weapon in the ongoing Culture Wars, casting as it does severe doubt on the plausibility of many dogmas of the multiculturalist Left, most obviously in the area of gender issues.  Christian conservatives dislike and doubt Darwinism for much the same reasons that their predessors have since the 1880s.

Polling numbers confirm this general analysis, along with most expected stereotypes.  In early March, Zogby International polled 1,049 likely voters on the following neutrally-phrased question:

“Currently, science classes in our public schools teach that mankind and other creatures evolved from lower forms of life through the process of Natural Selection, which scientists call the Darwinian Theory of Evolution.  Some religious groups oppose teaching evolutionary theory in schools.  Do you support or oppose teaching Darwinian Evolution to all students in our public schools?”

Likely voters supported Darwinism in the schools by a strong margin of 59-33%, with landslide 70% support among college graduates and over 68% support among those with family incomes of $75,000 or more; by contrast, those earning $25,000 or less were almost evenly divided, and high school dropouts were strongly opposed to teaching evolution.  Furthermore, Born Again Christians, a powerful conservative block, opposed evolution by almost 2-to-1.  As a consequence, while Democrats supported evolution by better than 2-to-1, and Independents were in favor by an even wider margin, Republicans were sharply split 49-44, with somewhat higher intensity on the No side.

Conservative leaders and elected officials, caring little about the issue and seeing their intellentsia and establishment donors on one side and so many of their activists on the other, simply hope that the problem will go away or can be papered over.

But as we saw in the Kansas School Board battles, these divisions provide a field day for the media, which is seldom friendly to conservatives under the best of circumstances, and are hardly likely to disappear.  Furthermore, conservatives are often faced with a no-win dilemma: those who too strongly embrace Darwinism risk being identified with elements of the racialist Right and eugenicists, while those who reject Darwinism open themselves to charges of religious fanaticism and anti-scientific ignorance.

Almost eighty years after a rural Tennessee school teacher becameAmerica’s most famous Darwinist advocate, new Monkey Wars may be approaching.

How I Made Mitt

Romney owes his only win to English for the Children.

The American Conservative • June 26, 2012 • 1,000 Words

With Mitt Romney now the de facto Republican presidential nominee, I sometimes recall how I inadvertently launched his political career a decade ago, which is less implausible than it might sound.

Unlike the vast majority of previous major-party presidential candidates, Romney has a remarkably slender record of election victories, having previously won just a single race, his 2002 election as governor of Massachusetts.

In 1994, he had taken a break from his long and highly successful career in private equity to challenge Sen. Edward Kennedy’s reelection. Although he then positioned himself as a very liberal Republican and even attempted to outflank Kennedy to the left on some issues, Massachusetts was a heavily Democratic state and Kennedy was its leading political icon. Romney suffered a landslide defeat, losing by 17 points to his famous opponent despite a huge national Republican tide.

After this drubbing, Romney eventually recouped his political fortunes by serving as appointed president of the organizing committee for the 2002 Olympic Games in Salt Lake City. He was widely credited with having provided the organizational skills that rescued the event from looming calamity.

This prestigious success led Romney to make another stab at winning political office, and he entered the 2002 Republican primary for Massachusetts governor. Since I was then running an “English for the Children of Massachusetts” ballot-initiative campaign to dismantle bilingual education, I closely followed the political developments of that year.

Romney’s initial opponent was Acting Governor Jane Swift, a very moderate Republican who had been elected lieutenant governor in 1998 and succeeded to her office upon the resignation of Governor Paul Cellucci, whom President Bill Clinton had appointed U.S. ambassador to Canada. Governor Swift was widely viewed as weak and ineffectual, and Romney, buoyed by his Olympic success and his vast personal fortune, soon attracted such overwhelming support among local Republican leaders that Swift dropped out of the race.

Under Massachusetts law, candidates for governor and lieutenant governor run as a single ticket but are each chosen separately in their party primaries. Therefore, since Romney had pushed a female Republican incumbent governor out of his race, and his general-election opponent seemed likely to be another woman, popular State Treasurer Shannon O’Brien, he sought to gender-balance his ticket by selecting a female running mate. Only 15 percent of registered Massachusetts voters were Republican, so the party’s talent pool was minuscule, and he selected Kerry Healey—a somewhat obscure local GOP activist who had never held political office—persuading her to enter the primary for the second slot.

She was quickly challenged by Jim Rappaport, a wealthy Republican leader who hoped to win the primary by running sharply to her right. Thus, although Romney was unopposed for the Republican nomination, there ensued a bitter battle for the second slot between the Rappaport forces and the Romney forces, backing Healey.

At this point, my own campaign entered the equation. I had successfully qualified our measure as Question Two for the November ballot, and its requirement that all immigrant children be taught English as soon as they started school had begun attracting heavy coverage in the local media, proving to be wildly popular among more conservative voters. Nonetheless, the vast majority of the state’s Democratic political establishment declared their opposition to the measure. Since Romney was positioning himself for the general election, he soon did the same.

Romney’s opposition concerned me, since unified Democratic and Republican attacks on our initiative might endanger its passage in November. Therefore, I quickly reached out to Rappaport, and with “English” having perhaps 90 percent support among Republicans, he immediately endorsed our Question Two, hoping to use the issue as a weapon against Healey in the primary.

Just as I had hoped, Romney soon decided that Healey needed to protect herself by also endorsing the measure, which forced him to avoid an embarrassing split in the ranks by reversing his previous position and doing the same. Partly as a result, Healey soon won an overwhelming victory in her primary race, and the political lines were set for November.

As it turned out, Romney’s decision was a fateful one. The Boston Globe and other media outlets soon noted that on almost every other major issue, his positions were identical to those of his Democratic opponent, O’Brien. Only support for English in the schools separated the two candidates.

When rival candidates have identical positions, campaigns often become unappealing slugfests, and that was the case throughout most of the 2002 gubernatorial race in Massachusetts. Romney bludgeoned O’Brien as a lifelong career politician who was part of a corrupt party machine, while O’Brien denounced Romney as a greedy, carpet-bagging Wall Street takeover artist—both charges being backed by millions of dollars of television attack ads.

As the election grew near, however, the hot-button question of whether or not all public schools should teach their students English exploded into public awareness, becoming far and away the biggest issue of the election, without a single dollar of advertising having been spent on its behalf. When reporters from the Globe and other newspapers went out and interviewed ordinary voters, many of them didn’t much know or care about the candidates running for any office, including governor, but almost everyone was talking about “English” and most were overwhelmingly enthusiastic. Finally, Romney’s people noticed this and decided to hitch a ride on the issue, so for the last few weeks of the campaign his advertising focused on the fact that he supported “English” while his Democratic rival opposed it.

Then, on Election Day, our measure won by over 32 points, perhaps the largest landslide of any contested initiative in modern Massachusetts history, while Romney scraped across the finish line with 49.8 percent of the vote. And that’s how Romney won his first and only election victory.

Ron Unz, publisher of The American Conservative, served as chairman of English for the Children, the nationwide campaign to dismantle bilingual education.

The Government Employee Who May Have Saved a Million American Lives

The Unz Review • March 30, 2020 • 1,800 Words

Dr. Sarah Cody. That’s the name of a local government employee probably unknown to almost everyone reading this. Yet I think there’s a good chance that a million or more Americans will owe her their lives. And therein lies a tale…

Last Tuesday President Donald Trump announced that he expected to lift most health restrictions recently imposed due to the Coronavirus epidemic and send the country back to work by Easter, a possibility that shocked and horrified nearly all mainstream health professionals.

No need to worry, I said. I predicted that the exponentially-growing Coronavirus death toll in his home city of New York would have reached such horrifying levels by Easter that his Wall Street friends would persuade him to “pivot” away from such a foolhardy proposal.

At the time I made that prediction, Coronavirus deaths in New York were running at around 50 per day, and they soon jumped to 140 per day, then reached 209 in a 24-hour period by Saturday. Wall Street Wizards are quite familiar with exponential growth, the fundamental basis of compound-interest, and presumably they began to notice what was happening outside their own windows. So on Saturday, Trump announced that rather than any relaxation, he was instead considering an unprecedented federal quarantine of the entire State of New York as well as adjoining parts of of New Jersey and Connecticut, though he later backed down under fierce pressure. Just five days had made all the difference in the world.

The unimaginable human disaster now facing our country has several obvious roots. Our oceans had protected our home front from any attack during the two world wars while modern medicine had rendered disease epidemics a fading memory for three generations. Our arrogant and incompetent national leadership simply could not comprehend the possibility that their missteps might actually kill hundreds of thousands or millions of Americans. Moreover, our mainstream media was equally oblivious, and even if they had sounded the alarm, they had hysterically cried wolf so many times about so many ridiculous things that nobody would have taken them seriously.

But an important contributing factor is surely the inability of most individuals to grasp the unusual dynamics of an exponentially-growing process. In such a situation, seemingly insignificant delays can have enormous consequences.

Let us consider a very simple example in which two similar cities each happen to have 1,000 Coronavirus infections, with a doubling-period of 3 days.

Suppose that the first city immediately implements a complete lock-down, thereby drastically reducing the spread of the disease, and then uses that window of opportunity to track down and temporarily quarantine all the infected. Assuming a 1% death rate, 10 total fatalities will result.

Now suppose the second city takes exactly the same approach, but merely delays implementing the policy for a single week. During that lost week, the number of infected will grow to 5,000, and the resulting five-fold increase in cases requiring hospitalization may overwhelm the local health care system, thereby increasing the death rate to 5%. The result is 250 fatalities. So the delay of a single week has increased the death toll by a factor of 25.

I live in Palo Alto, and every now and then I see a squirrel wander into the middle of a street, then remain frozen in fear as an approaching car bears down upon him. Almost invariably, the squirrel leaps away to the nearby pavement at the last moment, saving its life. But occasionally I have noticed the remains of a youthful squirrel who did not react in time.

For a month or two, our national government and its top health officials seemed similarly paralyzed with horror as they began to recognize the oncoming locomotive of a deadly disease rapidly approaching them. But during this crucial period, they did little or nothing and vast numbers of Americans may die as a consequence.

The Coronavirus is extremely contagious and once it has significantly established itself within a community, the only effective means of halting the rapid spread is through a full social lock-down. This approach had been especially necessary in America, given our woeful lack of adequate testing capabilities.

China completely locked down and quarantined the city of Wuhan at a point when only 300 detected infections and 17 deaths had occurred, thereby strictly confining all 11 million residents to their homes. Not long afterward, similar measures were applied to the 60 million residents of the surrounding province of Hubei, and later extended to include some 700 million Chinese across the country, a medical quarantine perhaps a thousand times larger than any such previous effort in human history.

These remarkable Chinese actions shocked and astonished many observers around the world, certainly including myself. But they succeeded brilliantly, and China seems to have almost entirely stamped out the deadly disease at the final cost of just a few thousand deaths. Millions perhaps even tens of millions of Chinese owe their lives to the decisiveness of their bold and courageous national leadership.

China and America have different political systems, each with its own strengths and weaknesses. The ruling Chinese Communist Party can impose by immediate fiat national policies that are almost unimaginable under America’s Constitutional system, and order these implemented at speeds that seem impossible to us.

I was aware of no precedent in modern American history for locking down a major city for health reasons, an action that appeared completely contrary to our widespread notions of civil liberties and constitutional rights. Moreover, during January and February various anti-China pundits had had a field day attacking and vilifying “totalitarian China” for shutting down its entire economy and confining so many hundreds of millions of its citizens to their own homes, thus rendering it seemingly impossible for any American political leader to propose similar measures.

With so little testing and a three week lag-time between infection and death, only the tiniest sliver of the gigantic Coronavirus iceberg bearing down on the U.S.S. America was visible to the public, and our insouciant mainstream media paid almost no attention to this terrible oncoming danger. Therefore, I regarded it as almost inconceivable that America’s dysfunctional government would take such difficult steps quickly enough to halt the spread of the disease before it became fully endemic and uncontrollable.

My own Santa Clara County was then the national epicenter of the Coronavirus outbreak, and the local morning newspapers carried more and more indications of its rapid, almost invisible spread, with a couple of firefighters testing positive one day and a few TSA workers found infected the next. I assumed this pattern of reports would continue and grow exponentially until California was entirely submerged by the rapidly approaching tsunami wave of disease.

But then on Monday, March 16th a miracle occurred. With no prior warning or public discussion, Santa Clara County Public Health Officer Dr. Sarah Cody and her counterparts from five other SF Bay Area counties announced that they had issued a “Shelter in Place” order, their somewhat euphemistic term for a full regional lock-down. Effective at midnight and lasting three weeks all non-essential businesses would be closed, all large public gatherings prohibited, and all residents required to spend their time at home, with certain reasonable exceptions. This directive covered seven million California residents. If anything similar had ever happened in American history, I’m certainly unaware of it.

My own sense of relief was enormous and I suspect very widely shared since I did not hear a single word of criticism from any source. Instead, a day or two later huge Los Angeles County adopted a similar policy, and a couple of days afterward, Gov. Gavin Newsom extended the order to the entire state. Health officials had warned him that without such prompt action, more than 25 million Californians could become infected over the following couple of months, probably producing a million deaths. So 40 million Californians joined the lock-down.

New York, Illinois, and numerous other states soon implemented similar policies, so that well over 200 million Americans are now following the trail blazed by Dr. Cody and her colleagues, “sheltering-in-place” to block the spread of the Coronavirus.

But in any exponential process of disease propagation, timing makes all the difference in the world. Last month, my own Santa Clara County was the American center of the epidemic, while the first New York death did not even occur until March 14th. But our lock-down came several days before that of New York, and as demonstrated above, a week’s delay can easily raise the relative death toll by a factor of 25, or perhaps far more if a local outbreak becomes uncontrollable. Based upon the data I’ve seen, I hope that Santa Clara County can escape with just a few hundred fatalities, while I fear that the death toll in New York may be in the many tens of thousands or even higher.

At this stage, no one can easily predict how many Americans may die from the Coronavirus by early summer, and perhaps some miracle drug will come along quickly enough to change the situation. But otherwise I think the epidemic may eventually produce the greatest death toll of any event in our entire national history. Yet whatever the final figure, that total would have been vastly greater without the wave of rolling lock-downs launched by the SF Bay Area counties two weeks ago.

Politicians are a timorous lot, rarely willing to take the lead on highly controversial decisions. Once Santa Clara County and its neighbors had locked down their populations with absolutely no political backlash, the rest of California and America felt confident enough to quickly follow. But if Dr. Cody had not taken that decision, any national lock-downs might have been delayed for week or two, while every week’s delay might have raised the death-toll by a considerable factor. I think there’s a good likelihood that Santa Clara County Public Health Officer Dr. Sarah Cody may have saved a million or more American lives, probably more than anyone else in our entire national history.

My own impression of this historic event is probably not unique. Even as I was finalizing this piece on Sunday, I discovered that half the front page of my local San Jose Mercury News was devoted to the story of Dr. Cody and her crucial decision, with the story appropriately entitled “The Doctor Who Shut It All Down.”

Under a decaying and decadent political system, there is often a dangerous tendency to select public officials based upon ideological factionalism or the blandishments of self-interested lobbies. During normal times, this may lead to the sort of inefficiency and corruption that saps the strength of a society, but during a severe crisis, survival itself may be at risk. Until a couple of weeks ago, I had never even heard of Dr. Sarah Cody, but I am greatly relieved that my local officials are still appointed based upon the highest standards of meritocratic competence. The contrast with America’s national government could not be greater.

Our Disputed Election

The Unz Review • January 14, 2021 • 2,000 Words

Although hardly suggested by our mainstream media, the officially-reported results demonstrated that our 2020 presidential election was extraordinarily close.

All the regular pre-election polls had shown the Democratic candidate with a comfortable lead, but just as had been the case four years earlier, the actual votes tabulated revealed an entirely contrary outcome. According to the official vote-count, the Biden/Harris ticket ended up millions of votes ahead, having racked up huge leads in overwhelmingly Democratic states such as my own California, and also won by a very comfortable 306 to 232 margin in Electoral Votes. But control of the White House depends upon the state-by-state tallies, and these told a very different story.

Incumbent Donald Trump lost Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin by such extremely narrow margins that a swing of less than 22,000 votes in those crucial states would have gotten him reelected. With a record 158 million votes cast, this amounted to a victory margin of around 0.01%. So if just one American voter in 7,000 had changed his mind, Trump might have received another four years in office. One American voter in 7,000.

Such an exceptionally narrow victory is extremely unusual in modern American history. For decades, the very tight Kennedy-Nixon race of 1960 had been a byword for close races, but Biden’s margin of victory was much smaller. More recently, George W. Bush won a narrow reelection over Sen. John F. Kerry in 2004, but Kerry would have required a voter swing nearly five times greater than Trump’s in order to claim victory. Indeed, with the sole exception of the notorious “dangling chads” Florida decision of the 2000 Bush-Gore election, no American presidential candidate in over 100 years had lost by so narrow a voter margin as Donald J. Trump.

If our incompetent or dishonest media had correctly reported these simple facts, perhaps Democratic partisans would have been somewhat more understanding of the outrage expressed by so many of their Republican counterparts, who believed they had been cheated of their election victory. Admittedly, Trump backers seem equally unaware of the historically slender margin of their candidate’s defeat.

The emotions on both sides of the Trump reelection campaign were among the strongest in modern American history, and the outcome was determined by the tiniest sliver of voters in a few states. So under these circumstances, last week’s controversial events in DC were perhaps not so entirely unexpected. Indeed, during the weeks before the election, I’d half-predicted such a scenario, speculating about possible claims of a stolen election and the resulting civil unrest. For example, the following was my response to a question from a longtime commenter:

Many Trump supporters are alleging that there could be massive voting fraud in the 2020 election. Some believe that if Trump is ahead on election night, Democratic machines will manufacture ballots to give a victory to Biden. Do you think this is possible or do you see this as improbable?

Well, I suppose it's possible…

Frankly, both sides are so totally agitated and extreme, the Trumpists would be saying and believing it, even if it were entirely false and impossible. It's hard to figure out what's happening when everyone involved is so dishonest and corrupt. Trump has always seemed like an ignorant buffoon to me, but I think the Democrats and liberals have almost gone insane in their opposition to him.

As I've been telling people for weeks, the whole political situation certainly seems very bizarre and I've seen some pretty plausible arguments that we might end up with a “disputed” election if the numbers are fairly close in key states. Apparently, the Republicans are overwhelmingly going to be voting in person, while the Democrats will be voting by mail, meaning their ballots will be much slower to come in and be counted.

So Trump could be ahead by wide margins on Election Night and declare victory to the cheers of his partisans. And then as the mail ballots come in, the numbers turn against him, but he and his die-hard supporters cry “Fraud!” and refuse to recognize the result. Hard to say what would happen, but I'm glad I live in California which is generally quiet and peaceful these days.

Obviously, Bush/Gore was “disputed” in 2000, but only party loyalists much cared at the time, while today the country is filled with Trumpists and Trump-haters, both very suspicious and angry.

Although I think my speculative scenario turned out to be reasonably correct, the actual post-election developments were far greater in magnitude than I had expected, and may have dire consequences for maintaining American civil liberties.

I haven’t investigated the matter, but there does seem to be considerable circumstantial evidence of widespread ballot fraud by Democratic Party forces, hardly surprising given the apocalyptic manner in which so many of their leaders had characterized the threat of a Trump reelection. After all, if they sincerely believed that a Trump victory would be catastrophic for America why would they not use every possible means, fair and foul alike, to save our country from that dire fate?

In particular, several of the major swing-states contain large cities—Detroit, Milwaukee, Philadelphia, and Atlanta—that are both totally controlled by the Democratic Party and also notoriously corrupt, and various eye-witnesses have suggested that the huge anti-Trump margins they provided may have been heavily “padded” to ensure the candidate’s defeat.

Even leaving aside some of these plausible claims, the case for a stolen election seems almost airtight. I don’t know or care anything about Dominion voting machines, whether they are controlled by Venezuelan Marxists, Chinese Communists, or Martians. But the most blatant election-theft was accomplished in absolutely plain sight.

Not long before the election, the hard drive of an abandoned laptop owned by Joe Biden’s son Hunter revealed a gigantic international corruption scheme, quite possibility involving the candidate himself. But the facts of this enormous political scandal were entirely ignored and boycotted by virtually every mainstream media outlet. And once they story was finally published in the pages of the New York Post, America’s oldest newspaper, all links to the Post article and its website were suddenly banned by Twitter, Facebook, and other social media outlets to ensure that the voters remained ignorant until after they had cast their ballots.

Renowned international journalist Glenn Greenwald was hardly a Trump partisan, but he became outraged that the editors of the Intercept, the $100 million publication he himself had co-founded, refused to allow him to cover that massive media scandal, and he angrily resigned in protest. In effect, America’s media and tech giants formed a united front to steal the election and somehow drag the crippled Biden/Harris ticket across the finish line.

The Hunter Biden corruption scandal seemed about as serious as any in modern presidential election history and Biden’s official victory margin was just 0.01%. So if the American voters had been allowed to learn the truth, Trump almost certainly would have won the election, quite possibly in an Electoral College landslide. Given these facts, anyone who continues to deny that the election was stolen from Trump is simply being ridiculous.

Heated election campaigns have consequences, and this is especially true when all of America’s most powerful corporations and ruling elites unite to essentially steal a reelection from a populist incumbent, hero-worshiped by many tens of millions of Americans. And when despite all that blatant unfairness and theft, the final margin of defeat is just one vote in 7,000, an explosion of popular outrage should only be expected.

Solid estimates appear unavailable, but it seems that hundreds of thousands of grass-roots Trump supporters traveled to our nation’s capital to protest against what they regarded as a stolen election, and then peacefully assembled to listen to their hero’s speech.

Afterwards, a tiny sliver of this vast multitude of angry individuals—perhaps less than one in a thousand—barged their way into the strangely-undefended Capitol building of Congress, took souvenir selfies, livesteamed their antics, and generally played the role of tourist-protesters while the lawmakers they so despised as corrupt mostly fled or hid. These Trumpists and some of their colorful costumes brought to mind the radical Yippies of the late 1960s.

The previous year had seen an unprecedented wave of violent riots, arson, and looting across some 200 American cities, which our entirely corrupt and dishonest media had generally characterized as “mostly peaceful protests.” In previous years, angry mobs of organized Democratic activists had repeatedly invaded and occupied the Wisconsin Legislature, sometimes winning praise from the media. But when unarmed Trump supporters now did something similar for a few hours in Washington, they were quickly branded “domestic terrorists” seeking to overthrow our democracy.

A video shows Ashli Babbitt, an unarmed female protester, being shot dead by a security guard as she tried to climb through a window, an incident not dissimilar to the famous Kent State shootings of a 1960s campus protest, but hardly treated by the media in a similar manner.

https://twitter.com/dancohen3000/status/1347076676342185984

A couple of other Trump protesters, probably elderly, overweight, or in poor health, died of strokes or heart-attacks during all the excitement, and one Capitol police officer later died as well, allegedly struck in the head with a fire-extinguisher although there has been no solid account of the incident. Yet this confused tableau of chaos and popular anger, which recalls scenes from the 1968 Chicago Democratic Convention protests, has been portrayed as a “coup attempt” incited by President Trump, and therefore justifying his second impeachment.

Even more importantly, the incoming Biden/Harris Administration may be considering the most sweeping domestic crackdown upon traditional American civil liberties since the Patriot Act was passed in the hurried aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks twenty years ago. This has been justified by the need to suppress “domestic extremism.”

Even without any new governmental legislation, a remarkable Internet crackdown has already begun. In an absolutely unprecedented development, the sitting president of the United States—who had just lost his reelection by 0.01% of the vote—has been summarily banned by Twitter, Facebook, and all other major social media outlets, preventing him from communicating with his followers, and with many of his leading supporters suffering the same fate. Famed libertarian Ron Paul criticized Twitter for banning Trump, and he was immediately locked out of his own Facebook page. Parler, a young but rapidly growing Twitter competitor, refused to ban Trump, and was immediately driven off the Internet by a combined attack from Apple, Google, and Amazon, possibly never to return. Our Information Age has entered a truly Orwellian period.

These Tech giants have often justified their extreme censorship by expressing the need to combat the spread of the dangerous “conspiracy theories” so widespread among Trump partisans. Particularly demonized by the media is the wildly popular “QAnon” theory, which numbered the unfortunate Ms. Babbitt among its committed followers. Although I’m only very slightly familiar with QAnon, it appears to be a bizarre mishmash of many strange ideas, notably including the belief that our ruling elites heavily consist of exceptionally corrupt and criminal individuals, sometimes even being Satanic pedophiles.

Although much of that doctrine seems like total nonsense to me, we should note the massive suppression this movement has experienced and bear in mind that “the wicked flee when no man pursueth.” And indeed, my own articles over the years have solidly established that many of the seemingly ridiculous elements of QAnon probably contain a very large nugget of truth:

- American Pravda: John McCain, Jeffrey Epstein, and Pizzagate

- John McCain: When “Tokyo Rose” Ran for President

- Our American Pravda

- American Pravda: How the CIA Invented “Conspiracy Theories”

Avoiding a New Cold War with China

AsianWeek • June 24, 1999 • 700 Words

With the release of the Cox Commission report, the growing national hysteria regarding relations with China has reached troubling, even alarming, proportions. Growing international hostility between America and China rather than apparent Chinese spying in America is the far greater threat to our national security.

The basic conclusions of the Cox Report are certainly correct: China has undoubtedly engaged for decades in a systematic campaign of legal and illegal intelligence gathering activities in the U.S. But the implication that such activities are an indication of Chinese hostility or that they seriously endanger American security are far less obvious. And there is a real risk that such implications will feed the popular and populist temptation to demonize China as the new “Evil Empire” and the proper target of a new Cold War.

All major nations gather intelligence, and for China not to be targeting America—the world’s overwhelmingly dominant military and technological superpower—would be the remarkable news. Just a few years ago, Israel—one of America’s closest allies and the recipient of billions in annual aid—was revealed to have for years been using American Jews such as Jonathan Pollard as CIA moles, resulting in what has often been described as perhaps the gravest security breach in American history. By contrast, most of China’s actions seem to have involved the collection and analysis of legally available data from public sources. Even the one case of alleged espionage reported in the press, that of Taiwanese-born Wen Ho Lee, seems largely circumstantial, and no criminal charges have yet even been filed. There does seem to have been considerable laxness in the security of America’s nuclear laboratories, but that is America’s fault not China’s, and would be a cause for concern even if no other nation had tried to exploit the weakness.

Furthermore, the report’s loose talk of “up to” 3000 Chinese-owned companies in America having “possible” links to Chinese intelligence (when intelligence sources say that the actual number of Chinese “front companies” is probably just a dozen or two) may engender a very harmful wave of ethnic McCarthyism, unjustly casting clouds of suspicion on hundreds of thousands of Chinese, Taiwanese, and Chinese-Americans working and studying in America. Since so many of these individuals are among our finest and most productive research scientists and technology workers, making their lives uncomfortable would be the real disaster for America’s future. Our nation has only just begun to recover from the bitterly divisive immigration wars of the mid-1990s, and we should ensure that those sentiments are not now revived under the new guise of national security.

During our long Cold War, America faced an enormous military power governed by a expansionist, totalitarian ideology, which aimed thousands of nuclear intercontinental ballistic missiles at American cities. China, today, while hardly a democracy, is even so less a totalitarian regime, and the actual freedoms of ordinary Chinese in their economic, social, and religious activities have grown almost exponentially over the past 30 years. Chinese are freer and more prosperous today than they have ever been before, and tens of thousands of them have exercised that freedom to live and study in the United States, benefiting both our nations tremendously. A huge and growing share of our foreign trade is directly or indirectly dependent on China, and that, too is of mutual benefit. As for the military balance, China possesses just 20 nuclear missiles capable of striking the U.S. compared to our 5,000 or more, and China’s government has seemed in no real rush to alter this balance, hardly the actions of a threatening power.

China does face very real problems—the economic inefficiency of its shrinking state sector and its inability to root out endemic corruption—but regardless it will certainly be one of the two world superpowers of the 21st Century, and has no obvious reason for hostility toward America. In recent weeks, an unfortunate sequence of independent events have suddenly threatened to undermine decades of growing friendship with China: Clinton’s craven refusal to support Chinese membership in the World Trade Organization, our accidental bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, the resultant anti-American demonstrations in Beijing, and now the Cox Commission Report.

We must all do whatever we can to weather this storm, and avoid a permanent breach, one which both of our nations and both of our peoples will long regret.

Patriotism and Idiocy

The New Republic (Letters) • November 26, 2001 • 300 Words

Given the all-encompassing focus of TNR and every other major media outlet on the very real Terrorism War, I suppose I should be grateful that a recent column of mine on our initiative campaign to dismantle bilingual education in Massachusetts at least drew mention in your “Idiocy Watch” section.

My piece, entitled “Rocks Falling Upward,” recounted a recent debate at Harvard University, during which I faced an audience of many hundreds of quite fanatic advocates of that program, who packed the large auditorium to bursting. My slightly tongue-in-cheek account described me as the personal “bin Laden” of those individuals, and characterized them in turn as “educational terrorists,” whose fervent devotion to that disastrous program had completely blocked change for over 30 years. Perhaps such levity was in poor taste.

Still, the unfolding evidence from California as presented in the New York Times and elsewhere seems to indicate that eliminating such Spanish-almost- only programs is rapidly doubling the academic performance of over one million young immigrant students. My opponent in the Harvard Debate, Prof. Catherine Snow, repeatedly stressed that bilingual education was based on her bizarre theory that the older you are the easier it is to learn another language. Over recent decades, millions of students throughout America have had their educations and lives likely destroyed because of such absurd doctrine, and the extraordinarily committed followers it has inspired. These are big, big numbers, and perhaps “educational terrorism” is not too strong a word after all.

Sincerely,

Ron Unz, Chairman

English for the Children

Idiocy Watch, Cont’d

Rounding Up Arabs, Blacks, and Jews

Salon • December 6, 2001 • 1,100 Words

Dec. 6, 2001—In the wake of the Sept. 11th attacks, Americans are debating whether we should adopt ethnic profiling policies that may ensnare thousands of innocent people—Arabs and Muslims—in the government’s net, in order to ferret out a relative handful of guilty individuals.

All of America’s long legal tradition argues to the contrary, but in the shadow of the death and destruction inflicted upon our greatest city by a small group of Muslim terrorists, more and more Americans are supporting ethnic profiling whether it involves greater scrutiny for Arabs and Muslims at airports, or interviewing 5,000 Muslim men who have entered the country recently, as the FBI has just begun to do.

Prominent conservative commentators, including Ann Coulter, Peggy Noonan and Mona Charen, have endorsed such proposals; some have even suggested mass deportation of individuals from certain Arab countries. American blacks, previously most hostile to ethnic profiling, have become the group most in favor of using Arab ethnicity to screen for potential terrorists.

But is there really a case to be made for subjecting this one group to racial, ethnic and religious profiling, if we oppose such policies when applied to other groups?

Let’s consider the numbers. Not even the most alarmist elements of our national security establishment believe that our country contains as many as 1,000 potential Muslim terrorists, and the actual number is likely just a tiny fraction of such a total, probably representing far less than one-tenth of one percent of the adult males of that American population group. Thus, encouraging or allowing airport security officers to scrutinize or investigate passengers of that ethnicity accepts the likelihood that 99.9% of the persons thereby embarrassed or inconvenienced are completely innocent of any crime. In times of national crisis, we must all make sacrifices, and perhaps this policy is temporarily warranted, but it should not be undertaken lightly.

Fairness in policy making, however, would seem to require that we at least consider applying the same kind of racial and ethnic cost-benefit analysis to other situations — and other more politically powerful groups. While blacks abhor racial profiling, at least as applied to them, and have won over other Americans to support their cause, racial profiling of blacks would likely prevent much more crime than profiling Arabs and Muslims.

Today, over a quarter of adult black males in America have been convicted of some kind of crime, so encouraging police to randomly stop and search young black men walking or driving at night is probably many hundreds of times more likely to catch the guilty than similar scrutiny of young Arab men boarding planes. Similarly, an enormous fraction of the young Hispanic men waiting for day-labor work on city street corners are probably undocumented. So INS sweeps of such individuals would seem just as reasonable as singling out Arab passengers at airports, if our goal is to prevent illegal immigration.

One might correctly point out that Muslim terrorism has the potential to claim many more lives than illegal immigration or street crime. Obviously, policies that allow a few illegal immigrants, muggers or drug dealers to avoid arrest, in the name of fairness to an entire racial or ethnic group, are far less worrisome than ethnicity-blind policies that could lead to the destruction of American cities and the mass murder of thousands. But even using such narrow criteria to defend racial profiling, a close and controversial historical analogy easily comes to mind, from the early decades of our half-century long Cold War with Soviet Russia. Then the suspicious and possibly dangerous characters were Jews, not Muslims or Arabs.

It’s an undeniable historical fact that Jews made up an extraordinarily high fraction of America’s leading Communist Party members and Communist spies even though the overwhelming majority of Jewish Americans were loyal and law-abiding patriotic Americans, just like the vast majority of today’s Arab and Muslim Americans. But if the presence of perhaps dozens or even hundreds of terrorists in our midst today leads us to condone official ethnic profiling of all Arabs and Muslims by our government, then we should be equally ready to argue that the government should have officially regarded all American Jews, including my own parents and grandparents, as potential Communist spies during that earlier period, and targeted them for heightened surveillance.

Of course, in the current example, extreme measures to prevent another Sept. 11th can be defended because they could save thousands of American lives. But since the nuclear weapons obtained by Soviet leader Josef Stalin — one of history’s greatest mass-murderers, and America’s deadliest enemy — put millions of American lives and our very nation at risk, any measure taken today would certainly have been equally justified then.

Yet though tiny fringe groups did indeed question the loyalty of America’s Jews during the Cold War, no figure of authority even on the extreme right ever did so publicly. Sen. Joseph McCarthy, whose name is synonymous with extreme anti-Communism, actually appointed a young Jewish aide, Roy Cohn, as his most prominent lieutenant. Similarly, American leaders ensured that both the prosecutors and the judge who sent Julius and Ethel Rosenberg to their deaths for spying were themselves Jewish.

Treating American Jews as loyal until otherwise indicated was probably based on a mixture of decency and common sense. If merely one in a thousand or fewer American Jews were Communist traitors, targeting all Jews for government investigation might have created far more new security risks than have caught existing ones. This very same argument should apply to our millions of loyal Arab- and Muslim-Americans.

In fact, since Muslims were one of the few ethnic minorities in America to lean Republican during this last election, surely it would not be difficult for Homeland Security czar Tom Ridge or Attorney General John Ashcroft to find members of that minority to serve prominently in their ongoing efforts to combat domestic terrorism. Their participation could make all Americans feel better about whatever measures are needed in that fight.

But in the meantime, intellectual honesty requires that anyone calling for the ethnic profiling of Arabs and Muslims as possible terrorists today should retrospectively endorse the ethnic profiling of all American Jews as possible traitors 50 years ago. And if such a statement chokes in his throat, perhaps he should reconsider its present-day analogue. – –

About the writer: Ron Unz, a theoretical physicist by training, is the founder and chairman of Wall Street Analytics, Inc. and English for the Children

Israel's Future: Kachism or Nothing

Commentary (Letters, Abridged) • January 2002 • 600 Words

As someone whose grandparents helped to found the modern State of Israel, I experienced a feeling of immense sadness after reading Norman Podhoretz’s powerful analysis of the current post-Oslo fighting in Israel (Commentary, October 2001).

As the endless cycle of killings, assassinations, and suicide-bombings gradually infects Israel’s Arab citizens and becomes part of daily life in Israel proper, our wishes and hopes must be replaced by hard realities. The hardest reality of all is that absolutely none of the proposed solutions presented by Israeli’s legitimate political parties has any likelihood of future success, whether the “war” proposals found on the near or far Right or the “peace” proposals found on the near or far Left. Whether or not historically inevitable, the continuing close proximity of Jews and Arabs will today lead to endless bloodshed.

There appear to be only two possible outcomes to this conflict. Israel may eventually choose to follow the path of the outlawed Kach Movement, and exterminate or expel virtually all Palestinians from both Israel proper and the West Bank, whether or not they are long-time Israeli citizens. Or the endless fighting, with its social and economic consequences, will produce an increasing and self-accelerating exodus of Israeli Jews to America and other places that allow a more peaceful, affluent, and stress-free way of life, eventually leading to the collapse of the Jewish state within another generation or so.

I doubt that even the harshest possible crackdown on Palestinians short of complete elimination would today do anything other than simply increase the remaining pool of suicide-bombers and random knifers. Similarly, I fear that even the most extraordinarily generous two-state peace proposal wouldn’t today do more than temporarily mollify even most of Israel’s own Arab citizens. There are simply no plausible solutions anywhere within the full spectrum of what is currently regarded as legitimate Israeli political opinion.

I doubt that democratic Israel will ever develop a Kach consensus for achieving ethnic cleansing by killing or expelling all the millions of Palestinian men, women, and children. Therefore, I expect Israel’s trajectory to follow that of the temporary Crusader kingdoms, surviving for seventy or eighty years following its 1948 establishment, then collapsing under continual Muslim pressure and flagging ideological commitment.

Centuries of Jewish oppression throughout Europe and the atrocities of Czarist pogroms had provided the original ideological motivation for the Zionist movement, and Hitler’s genocidal Holocaust directly led to the creation of the Jewish state. But today, half a century or more of very good circumstances for Jews in America and other Western nations has largely dissipated the practical pressure for Israel’s existence. Younger generations of Jews, both American and Israeli, experience virtually no sense of alienation or fear from living in overwhelmingly non-Jewish societies. Therefore, in recent years, the flow of Jews from Israel into the West has probably substantially exceeded that in the reverse direction, in reality if not necessarily in official statistics. I suspect that this trend has greatly accelerated since the beginning of Intifada II, and will continue to do so.

For most Jews around the world, Israel just is not the essential life raft it seemed immediately following the Second World War. Although we should certainly continue to hope for Israel’s permanent existence, hopes and expectations are two entirely different things.

Ron Unz

Palo Alto, CA

Sharonism vs. Building a Wall

The Sacramento Bee • April 28, 2002 • 1,600 Words

Any attempt to resolve the crisis in the Middle East forces us — the American people and American Jewry — to appraise the motives and the ultimate goals of the leaders involved.

Endless disputes have raged over whether Yasser Arafat and the other Arab leaders merely seek a Palestinian state living peacefully alongside Israel or whether they continue to harbor the ultimate goal of exterminating what they once derided as the “Zionist entity.”

But just as important, perhaps even more so, is reaching an understanding of the true goals of Israel’s current Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and his close associates. They—even more than their Arab opponents—hold the fate of the Israeli people in their hands.

Consider the facts. Over the past 18 months, Israel has suffered over 400 civilian dead and thousands more wounded, primarily from the suicide-bombings that have so horrified the world. These losses are the per capita equivalent of over 100,000 American civilian casualties.

During nearly all previous wars, danger in Israel had been largely confined to those in the military or civilians living on the border. Now all patrons of a pizza parlor or disco are suddenly on the front lines. This change is inflicting terrible damage to Israeli morale. By any reasonable standard, Israel now faces the gravest threat to its survival since 1967, perhaps even since 1948.

Israel’s leaders have certainly recognized this threat by their rhetoric and by their actions, launching punishing military strikes against the Palestinian organizations and towns whence the suicide-bombers have issued. Faced with resulting criticism from various world quarters, the Sharonists have defended themselves as the security-conscious guardians of a small, embattled nation, unwilling to take risks with their people’s very survival. They have reasonably asked how America itself would have responded to waves of attacks that together completely dwarf those of Sept. 11 in relative terms.

But perhaps this is the exact question that we ourselves should be asking. Suppose that over the past year and a half, over 100,000 American civilians had been killed or grievously injured by Mexican terrorists who crossed our border and filled our cities from Los Angeles to New York with daily explosions.

Certainly, we would have taken punitive military actions against the terrorist organizations claiming responsibility and also against any Mexican government that we judged complicit in these massacres. But surely the first and most obvious response on our part would have been — NAFTA or no — to completely fortify our Mexican border with the best possible safeguards, perhaps an electrified security fence studded with machine-gun turrets.<P>

Israel has not. Today, America’s long border with Mexico is far better defended against the dire threat of Mexican nannies and gardeners than Israel’s own border is secured against suicide bombers. An unknown number of these recent attackers, perhaps even including the bomber who killed over two dozen at their Passover seder, simply walked across an unguarded frontier into Israel or else drove to their targets using well-known but unpatrolled back roads. This is madness, pure and simple.

Why have the Sharonists suffered through 18 months of terrorist incursions without building a simple fence? Such a fence would have provided much greater security than endless attacks on Ramallah and Nablus.

By all accounts, the Palestinians of Gaza are considerably more militant in their anti-Israel Islamic fervor than those of the West Bank, yet Gaza’s simple existing fence has prevented the infiltration of even a single suicide-bomber and also kept ordinary terrorist attacks to a negligible level. If a border fence has worked so well in Gaza, why have the Sharonists not considered one for the West Bank as well?

Consider the above analogy. Perhaps an American president would have similarly done nothing if he and his close political allies firmly believed that God had granted them the land of Mexico, and that any American fence along that border would be a dangerous concession to the border’s legal validity.

Israel’s ruling Likud coalition contains a powerful political strain of individuals who fervently believe that the Palestinian territories of the West Bank — Judea and Samaria to them — are incontestable portions of the once and future homeland of the Jews, granted them by the One Himself. A fence would be a huge step backwards from achieving that dream of a Greater Israel.

In support of this dream, Israeli governments have for decades encouraged some 200,000 Jewish settlers to make their homes in these Palestinian territories, and the ultimate disposition of these settlers is regularly cited as the most nettlesome part of any future peace agreement.

Most of these settlers are peaceable Israeli suburbanites, lured to the West Bank environs of Jerusalem by heavy government housing subsidies, many of which were established by Ariel Sharon in his past role as housing minister of the Begin government, and whose costs are ultimately paid by the American taxpayer.

But a hard core of these settlers, perhaps up to 50,000, are messianic and militant Jews, often from around the world, who are absolutely convinced that God has commanded them to settle and thus control this portion of Eretz Yisrael, whether or not Palestinians have lived there for hundreds or even thousands of years. Although less than 1 percent of Israel’s population, these determined individuals are a powerful force within the Sharonist coalition, many of whose leaders publicly or privately share their views.

And these Jewish militants in their hundreds of small settlements do not merely restrict themselves to lobbying. A few years ago, Israeli Prime Minister and Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Yitzhak Rabin became the first Middle Eastern leader in years to fall to an assassin’s bullet, killed by a Jewish militant for his impious desire to make peace with the Palestinians.

A year earlier, a Brooklynite settler named Baruch Goldstein massacred dozens of peaceful Muslim worshippers kneeling at prayer in their mosque, before he himself was overpowered and killed. Random acts of senseless violence occur throughout the world, but Goldstein’s grave is still venerated as the tomb of a holy martyr by thousands of other Jewish settlers, who treat it as a pilgrimage site.

Some of these Jewish militants possess beliefs that would strike most Americans as strange and extreme even by the standards of the Middle East.

For example, over the years Israeli security forces have discovered and thwarted various militant plots to destroy by explosives the Muslim world’s holiest mosques in Jerusalem, an action intended to help ensure the outbreak of the biblical battle of Armageddon and thereby the ultimate restoration of the Kingdom of David. And just recently, the birth of a red heifer has been widely heralded by some of these militant leaders as a divine portent instructing them to redouble their efforts to cleanse Jerusalem of its defiling Muslim religious presence.

By any reasonable criteria, many of these 50,000 militant settlers — and they include at least some of my own relatives — are best understood as being bearded, Jewish Taliban, as uncompromising and difficult as their Islamic counterparts in Afghanistan.

Yet they are also the heart and soul of the Sharonist movement, and while an Israeli border fence might effectively protect close to 99 percent of Israel’s population from terrorism, it would also leave these militant settlers on what was obviously the wrong side of the eventual border. This terrible dilemma between protecting Israeli lives and preserving messianic Greater Israel ideology has so far been resolved entirely in favor of the latter.

And this ideology represents an almost complete abandonment of traditional Zionism. The modern state of Israel was founded by secular socialists from Eastern Europe, men whose own attitude toward Judaism ranged from mild distaste to deepest hostility.

Israel was intended to be a national homeland for a long-persecuted people, a place of refuge and safety for Jews threatened everywhere else. Yet today, in part because of the policies of men like Sharon, Jews enjoy less physical security in their own country than perhaps anywhere else in the world, certainly far less than in our own America. The founders of the Jewish national movement would surely regard a successor who sacrificed Jewish lives and safety to his dreams of a Greater Israel as an absolute traitor to Zionist principles.

They would not be the only ones. For decades, numerous rabbinical scholars, of the deepest Talmudic learning, have regularly denounced the supporters of Greater Israel as individuals who have disgustingly perverted their Jewish faith into a nationalist Golden Calf that they worship in place of the Almighty. For centuries, such false Jewish prophets have periodically arisen and invariably led their misguided followers into disaster.

If the current leaders of Israel are indeed willing to continue sacrificing the lives of their own people — including those of young, innocent children — to their imperial dreams of expansion and glory, then according to these learned Jews they are committing sins on a truly biblical scale.

How would Americans view a president who regarded over 100,000 dead and injured American civilians merely as unavoidable collateral damage toward his ultimate goal of annexing Mexico? We would view him as a madman.

If Ariel Sharon continues to wantonly sacrifice the lives of his people for messianic expansionism, then his arms are the ones elbow-deep in the blood of innocent Jews. He faces the world not as a David Ben Gurion or as our own Washington or Lincoln, but instead as someone whose extremism leads his own followers to their doom.

Ron Unz, a software developer and a 1994 Republican candidate for governor, led the 1998 initiative campaign to dismantle bilingual education in California. He can be reached at rkunz@earthlink.net .

30,000 American Dead in Iraq....Noooo Problem!!!

LewRockwell • April 13, 2004 • 500 Words

Lawrence Kaplan, a prominent neocon hawk, published a rather interesting op-ed recently in the Washington Post.

The central claim of the piece is Kaplan’s somewhat counter-intuitive conclusion that our citizenry would gladly accept losing 30,000 American dead in Iraq if such losses were required to achieve neocon strategic objectives. Kaplan denounces those arguing otherwise – in particular, American military officers – as constituting the ranks of the weak-kneed.

Now this Kaplan is hardly a marginal figure, being a Senior Editor of the New Republic, former top editor at Irving Kristol’s National Interest, current op-ed columnist at the Post, and – most significantly – co-author with William Kristol of that definitive neocon text, THE WAR OVER IRAQ. Surely, he is one of the more prominent neocon voices on the subject. We may therefore safely assume that his views are generally in line with those of his ideological confederates.

Furthermore, it is important to note that the supposedly “massive” polling data Kaplan cites to support his controversial contention actually derives from the year 1999. Thus, while I and most other naïve observers at the tail end of the 1990s foolishly believed that the American public was focused mostly on the Internet Bubble and the embarrassing residuals from the Monica Lewinsky scandal, instead, America’s voters actually thirsted with the desire to send their youth off to conquer and occupy Iraq, even if up to 30,000 of said youth subsequently returned home in body-bags. Presumably, the lack of reporting on this crucial popular sentiment may best be explained by the traditional liberal bias of America’s elite media.

When we consider the huge rise of American patriotism and military commitment in the aftermath of September 11th, it seems likely that this convincing data from 1999 must surely understate the current mood to an enormous extent. Thus, I have little doubt that a similar study conducted today by Kaplan and his friends would discover Americans gladly willing to accept 300,000 or even 3,000,000 flag-draped coffins in order to achieve the neocon objective of implanting a Jeffersonian Democracy in Baghdad.

On the other hand, those of us among the “weak-kneed” who stubbornly doubt the reality of Kaplan’s conclusions are faced with the puzzle of explaining his argument. The notorious brilliance of neocon policy thinkers and military strategists rules out the obvious explanation, namely one of sheer stupidity.

But perhaps a useful clue to an alternate hypothesis is that the piece appeared in print just as our Iraq Adventure seemed to be turning decidedly sour. Kaplan is probably a shrewd and rather cautious individual, and might be beginning to grow somewhat nervous that he and his fellows may soon face trial and execution for their promotion of this war.

And after all, it’s never too soon to begin laying the groundwork for a reasonably plausible insanity defense.

The Torricelli Precedent

LewRockwell • April 15, 2004 • 600 Words

I must grudgingly concede that even those liberal, pinko wimps over at Paul Weyrich’s Free Congress Foundation occasionally propose interesting notions, such as in the latest column by William S. Lind.

Lind raises a fascinating, though extremely speculative point, namely that if the current trajectory in Iraq continues in linear fashion, political certainties may suddenly become considerably less certain.

By the time of the major party conventions this summer, the current presumptive Presidential candidate, today strong in the polls, having many tens of millions in the bank and the locked-down endorsement of pretty much every party member in the country may find it necessary to step aside, just as in the case of Lyndon Johnson in 1968.

Yes, if “Iraq” becomes a true curse word to the voters over the next few months, then Iraq-hawk John F. Kerry may simply be unelectable as President.

Who might the Democratic Party elders replace him with? That would be a deep and complex question, but one slight hint could be that under that scenario the American voters – not to mention Democratic Party activists and delegates – might be in the mood for a very loud and very angry “scream.”

The Republicans would face a different and rather more challenging quandry. Under White House pressure, pretty much every prominent elected Republican in America had already endorsed what might become known as the “Iraq Disaster,” forcing the G.O.P. to dip far, far deeper into its political talent-pool in order to locate someone untainted – perhaps some obscure State Senator or City Councilman from Wisconsin or Alaska – to lead the national ticket.

Another Republican problem is that Bush’s early success in raising hundreds of millions of dollars in funding has allowed the party to already pre-spend much of that money on Bush reelection materials, now stockpiled in warehouses just waiting to be used. Organizing tens of thousands of party volunteers to diligently cross-out the “George Bush” on each and every bumper sticker and instead write in the name “Jeff Gormley” would be a considerable embarrassment.

Fortunately, an obvious and easy Republican solution presents itself. With the “New George Bush” having failed in the political marketplace – despite a massive advertising campaign – what could be easier than to bring back the “Classic George Bush,” a man of unvarnished patriotism and heroic military service, who along with his chief advisors had not only been a strong opponent of the conquest and occupation of Iraq this time but the previous time as well, having so cogently spelled out the clear reasons with short and sure precision in his 1996 book. No need to expensively reprint buttons or direct mail pieces: “Re-Elect George Bush” is a one-size-fits-all slogan that really works.

Even more Republican dollars could be saved if Dan Quayle were drafted from retirement and added to the ticket, allowing any leftover materials from the 1992 race to be completely reused. And these days, the prospect of laying the groundwork for a potential Quayle Presidency would surely thrill Republican intellectuals, currently thirsting for brilliant thoughtfulness in the Oval Office.

Anyway, by some accounts a significant fraction of America’s generally apolitical voters had never even realized that there were actually two different George Bushes in the first place, so would be none the wiser at the quiet late substitution.

Bananas and Republics

LewRockwell • May 14, 2004 • 400 Words

I must grudgingly admit that our Iraqi Adventure seems to have become in some respects a fascinating and invaluable educational experience, nearly on a daily basis.

For example, today’s morning papers revealed that one or more of the prison images being shown to our august Senators and Congressmen depicted scenes of Iraqi POWs sodomizing themselves with bananas, a fact which led one Republican lawmaker to darkly suspect that the action taken was not entirely voluntary, and “was probably coerced somehow.”

This suggestion seems quite speculative to me. From what I’ve vaguely heard, sodomizing one’s own self with a banana for the video cameras is something of a national pastime, not merely among Iraqis but for Muslims in general. In fact, one might even suspect that the Iraqis thus shown were actually being rewarded for their especially helpful cooperation with American interrogators.

Still, if I am wrong and the shrewd Congressman correct in his suggestion that the acts shown were somehow connected with the interrogation process, it seems to indicate the increasingly multiculturalist influences operating upon our neocon masters. After all, from what I have read in the history books, although both the Stalinist and Trotskyite factions of the international Communist movement were notoriously prone to torture, the techniques they followed tended to be rather simple and even somewhat puritanical, and I’ve never heard of a single Communist regime anywhere that ever used bananas for self-sodomy. Just as David Brooks has similarly suggested, perhaps we are seeing a sign of the emergence of the BoCos, namely Bohemian Communists, otherwise known as neocons.

Admittedly, another possible explanation is simply that Soviet-style agricultural policies left it absolutely impossible to procure even a single banana for interrogation purposes.

On a practical note, I would caution visitors to this website that useful techniques and inventions once discovered tend to rapidly propagate throughout the world. Any of you who fear that you might someday be subjected to interrogation on suspicion of “anti-government agitation” or even that most fearsome charge of “hate thought” should therefore consider immediately obtaining a good supply of bananas and commencing your practice sessions forthwith, since although I have heard that the experience is quite enjoyable, it is also said to be rather something of an acquired taste.

If You Can't Trust Chalabi-the-Thief, Whom Can You Trust?

LewRockwell • May 24, 2004 • 700 Words

In that classic compendium of American national security strategy “Get Smart,” one of the more amusing episodes concerns the doings of a certain Freddie-the-Forger. Our shrewd espionage agent from CONTROL was at first reluctant to trust the good gentleman in question, given the latter’s very long list of criminal convictions. But Agent Smart is finally persuaded of the man’s bona fides when the latter provides numerous extremely persuasive letters of recommendation and moral commendation, signed by such unimpeachable judges of good character as Albert Einstein, Mahatma Gandhi, and the Pope.

After all, if Freddie-the-Forger has a personal Thank You note signed by the Vicar of Christ himself, how can he really be dishonest?

Similarly, I am shocked – absolutely shocked – that the ultimate source of most of the pre-war Iraq intelligence cited by both our esteemed President Bush and also by those intrepid journalists of the august New York Times, namely our good friend Ahmed Chalabi-the-Thief, is now under strong suspicions of dishonesty. That the gentleman previously convicted of the largest bank fraud in the history of the modern Middle East – whereby he acquired both tens of millions in ready cash as well the highly descriptive epithet by which he is universally known in that region of the world – would actually be less than scrupulously candid with his American partners is simply too much to accept.

No, just as his continued defenders – such as Richard Perle and the other neocons – maintain, President Bush has surely lapsed into naïve liberal error by questioning the honesty of Chalabi-the-Thief, that prospective George Washington of his native and benighted land.

Still, the rumors swirling in the aftermath of the American raid on Chalabi-the-Thief’s palatial villa are highly disturbing. For example, our own Defense Intelligence Agency now claims to possess hard evidence that the target of their probe passed our American military secrets – which he had somehow mysteriously acquired – straight into the hands of his Iranian allies, perhaps causing the deaths of American servicemen as a consequence. Furthermore, they claim to have proof that Chalabi-the-Thief’s own chief intelligence aide is actually a paid agent of the Iranian Secret Service, and speculate that perhaps our entire Iraq War originated as a plot by Tehran’s hard-line mullahs to finally rid themselves of their arch-enemy, Saddam Hussein.

There are also more mundane charges, namely that the close relatives of Chalabi-the-Thief, who by purest coincidence ended up controlling Iraq’s Finance Ministry, embezzled some tens of millions of American dollars over the last few months; but in this case, the money probably constituted a legitimate, if perhaps somewhat unauthorized, performance bonus, considering the rather meager tens of millions of American dollars we had been officially paying Chalabi-the-Thief and his associates since President Bush’s inauguration.

And if indeed, the Iranian mullahs were the actual architects of our Iraq War, we must not judge them too harshly when we consider the enormous provocation they had endured. After all, our esteemed President’s justly-famous “Axis of Evil” speech had granted them but a grudging third-place standing among the most Evil enemies of America in the world, surely a terrible humiliation, made absolutely unendurable considering that their hated rival Saddam was placed a full two Levels of Evil higher. The gnashing of teeth following Friday prayers that week in the Holy City of Qom must have been quite fearsome, surely loud enough to be heard all the way to Baghdad or perhaps even Washington.

Similarly, we must also not automatically condemn all of Chalabi-the-Thief’s American cheer-leaders as irredeemably gullible. If, as I strongly suspect, the secret Swiss bank accounts of Richard Perle and his friends have seen additions of enormously large size over the past few years, they should be commended as the shrewd and highly entrepreneurial small-businessmen they are, true exemplars of exactly that spirit of Democratic Capitalism so lovingly praised in the stirring rhetoric of Jack Kemp. And in more practical terms, the taxable portion of all those Swiss millions received – whose ultimate source was presumably Iranian oil revenues – might perhaps put a very noticeable dent in our sadly burgeoning national budget deficit.

And once the dust settles, perhaps we should even erect a statue to the crucial historical figure who made all this American success possible, our most loyal friend and ally Chalabi-the-Thief. After all, just as our esteemed President had so eloquently explained in January’s State-of-the-Union Address: “If I can’t trust my good buddy Chalabi-the-Thief, who can I trust?”

Averting World Conflict with China

The PRC Should Retaliate by Targeting Sheldon Adelson's Chinese Casinos

The American Conservative • December 13, 2018 • 1,800 Words

As most readers know, I’m not a casual political blogger and I prefer producing lengthy research articles rather than chasing the headlines of current events. But there are exceptions to every rule, and the looming danger of a direct worldwide clash with China is one of them.

Consider the arrest last week of Meng Wanzhou, the CFO of Huawei, the world’s largest telecom equipment manufacturer. While flying from Hong Kong to Mexico, Ms. Meng was changing planes in the Vancouver International Airport when she was suddenly detained by the Canadian government on an August US warrant. Although now released on $10 million bail, she still faces extradition to a New York City courtroom, where she could receive up to thirty years in federal prison for allegedly having conspired in 2010 to violate America’s unilateral economic trade sanctions against Iran.

Although our mainstream media outlets have certainly covered this important story, including front page articles in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, I doubt most American readers fully recognize the extraordinary gravity of this international incident and its potential for altering the course of world history. As one scholar noted, no event since America’s deliberate 1999 bombing of China’s embassy in Belgrade, which killed several Chinese diplomats, has so outraged both the Chinese government and its population. Columbia’s Jeffrey Sachs correctly described it as “almost a US declaration of war on China’s business community.”

Such a reaction is hardly surprising. With annual revenue of $100 billion, Huawei ranks as the world’s largest and most advanced telecommunications equipment manufacturer as well as China’s most internationally successful and prestigious company. Ms. Meng is not only a longtime top executive there, but also the daughter of the company’s founder, Ren Zhengfei, whose enormous entrepreneurial success has established him as a Chinese national hero.

Her seizure on obscure American sanction violation charges while changing planes in a Canadian airport almost amounts to a kidnapping. One journalist asked how Americans would react if China had seized Sheryl Sandberg of Facebook for violating Chinese law…especially if Sandberg were also the daughter of Steve Jobs.

Indeed, the closest analogy that comes to my mind is when Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia kidnapped the Prime Minister of Lebanon earlier this year and held him hostage. Later he more successfully did the same with hundreds of his wealthiest Saudi subjects, extorting something like $100 billion in ransom from their families before finally releasing them. Then he may have finally over-reached himself when Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi dissident, was killed and dismembered by a bone-saw at the Saudi embassy in Turkey.

We should actually be a bit grateful to Prince Mohammed since without him America would clearly have the most insane government anywhere in the world. As it stands, we're merely tied for first.

Since the end of the Cold War, the American government has become increasingly delusional, regarding itself as the Supreme World Hegemon. As a result, local American courts have begun enforcing gigantic financial penalties against foreign countries and their leading corporations, and I suspect that the rest of the world is tiring of this misbehavior. Perhaps such actions can still be taken against the subservient vassal states of Europe, but by most objective measures, the size of China’s real economy surpassed that of the US several years ago and is now substantially larger, while also still having a far higher rate of growth. Our totally dishonest mainstream media regularly obscures this reality, but it remains true nonetheless.

Provoking a disastrous worldwide confrontation with mighty China by seizing and imprisoning one of its leading technology executives reminds me of a comment I made several years ago about America’s behavior under the rule of its current political elites:

Or to apply a far harsher biological metaphor, consider a poor canine infected with the rabies virus. The virus may have no brain and its body-weight is probably less than one-millionth that of the host, but once it has seized control of the central nervous system, the animal, big brain and all, becomes a helpless puppet.

Once friendly Fido runs around foaming at the mouth, barking at the sky, and trying to bite all the other animals it can reach. Its friends and relatives are saddened by its plight but stay well clear, hoping to avoid infection before the inevitable happens, and poor Fido finally collapses dead in a heap.

Normal countries like China naturally assume that other countries like the US will also behave in normal ways, and their dumbfounded shock at Ms. Meng’s seizure has surely delayed their effective response. In 1959, Vice President Richard Nixon visited Moscow and famously engaged in a heated “kitchen debate” with Premier Nikita Khrushchev over the relative merits of Communism and Capitalism. What would have been the American reaction if Nixon had been immediately arrested and given a ten year Gulag sentence for “anti-Soviet agitation”?

Since a natural reaction to international hostage-taking is retaliatory international hostage-taking, the newspapers have reported that top American executives have decided to forego visits to China until the crisis is resolved. These days, General Motors sells more cars in China than in the US, and China is also the manufacturing source of nearly all our iPhones, but Tim Cook, Mary Barra, and their higher-ranking subordinates are unlikely to visit that country in the immediate future, nor would the top executives of Google, Facebook, Goldman Sachs, and the leading Hollywood studios be willing to risk indefinite imprisonment.

Canada had arrested Ms. Meng on American orders, and this morning’s newspapers reported that a former Canadian diplomat had suddenly been detained in China, presumably as a small bargaining-chip to encourage Ms. Meng’s release. But I very much doubt such measures will have much effect. Once we forgo traditional international practices and adopt the Law of the Jungle, it becomes very important to recognize the true lines of power and control, and Canada is merely acting as an American political puppet in this matter. Would threatening the puppet rather than the puppet-master be likely to have much effect?

Similarly, nearly all of America’s leading technology executives are already quite hostile to the Trump Administration, and even if it were possible, seizing one of them would hardly be likely to sway our political leadership. To a lesser extent, the same thing is true about the overwhelming majority of America’s top corporate leaders. They are not the individuals who call the shots in the current White House.

Indeed, is President Trump himself anything more than a higher-level puppet in this very dangerous affair? World peace and American national security interests are being sacrificed in order to harshly enforce the Israel Lobby’s international sanctions campaign against Iran, and we should hardly be surprised that the National Security Adviser John Bolton, one of America’s most extreme pro-Israel zealots, had personally given the green light for the arrest. Meanwhile, there are credible reports that Trump himself remained entirely unaware of these plans, and Ms. Meng was seized on the same day that he was personally meeting on trade issues with Chinese President Xi. Some have even suggested that the incident was a deliberate slap in Trump’s face.

But Bolton’s apparent involvement underscores the central role of his longtime patron, multi-billionaire casino-magnate Sheldon Adelson, whose enormous financial influence within Republican political circles has been overwhelmingly focused on pro-Israel policy and hostility towards Iran, Israel’s regional rival.

Although it is far from clear whether the very elderly Adelson played any direct personal role in Ms. Meng’s arrest, he surely must be viewed as the central figure in fostering the political climate that produced the current situation. Perhaps he should not be described as the ultimate puppet-master behind our current clash with China, but any such political puppet-masters who do exist are certainly operating at his immediate beck and call. In very literal terms, I suspect that if Adelson placed a single phone call to the White House, the Trump Administration would order Canada to release Ms. Meng that same day.

Adelson’s fortune of $33 billion ranks him as the 15th wealthiest man in America, and the bulk of his fortune is based on his ownership of extremely lucrative gambling casinos in Macau, China. In effect, the Chinese government currently has its hands around the financial windpipe of the man ultimately responsible for Ms. Meng’s arrest and whose pro-Israel minions largely control American foreign policy. I very much doubt that they are fully aware of this enormous, untapped source of political leverage.

Over the years, Adelson’s Chinese Macau casinos have been involved in all sorts of political bribery scandals, and I suspect it would be very easy for the Chinese government to find reasonable grounds for immediately shutting them down, at least on a temporary basis, with such an action having almost no negative repercussions to Chinese society or the bulk of the Chinese population. How could the international community possibly complain about the Chinese government shutting down some of their own local gambling casinos with a long public record of official bribery and other criminal activity? At worst, other gambling casino magnates would become reluctant to invest future sums in establishing additional Chinese casinos, hardly a desperate threat to President Xi’s anti-corruption government.

I don’t have a background in finance and I haven’t bothered trying to guess the precise impact of a temporary shutdown of Adelson’s Chinese casinos, but it wouldn’t surprise me if the resulting drop in the stock price of Las Vegas Sands Corp would reduce Adelson’s personal net worth were by $5-10 billion within 24 hours, surely enough to get his immediate personal attention. Meanwhile, threats of a permanent shutdown, perhaps extending to Chinese-influenced Singapore, might lead to the near-total destruction of Adelson’s personal fortune, and similar measures could also be applied as well to the casinos of all the other fanatically pro-Israel American billionaires, who dominate the remainder of gambling in Chinese Macau.

The chain of political puppets responsible for Ms. Meng’s sudden detention is certainly a complex and murky one. But the Chinese government already possesses the absolute power of financial life-or-death over Sheldon Adelson, the man located at the very top of that chain. If the Chinese leadership recognizes that power and takes effective steps, Ms. Meng will immediately be put on a plane back home, carrying the deepest sort of international political apology. And future attacks against Huawei, ZTE, and other Chinese technology companies would not be repeated.

China actually holds a Royal Flush in this international political poker game. The only question is whether they will recognize the value of their hand. I hope they do for the sake of America and the entire world.

The Surplus of the Athenian Phoros

Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies • Spring 1985 • 10,400 Words

In their attempts to understand the tribute income of the First Athenian Empire, historians have found that an unimpeachable contemporary source is challenged by undeniable physical evidence: explicit statements of Thucydides are directly contradicted by the epigraphical record of the quotas paid to Athena on the tribute collected by Athens.  This paper proposes a new theory aimed at resolving this long-standing dilemma.

I

Thucydides 1.96 states that when the Delian League was established (in 478/7) the allies were assessed a total of 460 talents in tribute; at 2.13 he reports that by the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War (431/0) the tribute income had reached an average of 600T.  Yet according to the figures of the tribute quota lists, Athens’ revenue was at most some 390T in 431/0 and probably between 200T and 250T when the League was founded.[1]  The disprepancy, over 200T in each case, is considerable.

How likely is it that Thucydides knew the correct amount of the Athenian tribute?[2]  Such financial statistics were matters of public record, with tribute quotas and assessments since 454/3 inscribed on marble stelae set up on the Acropolis.[3]  By 431 Thucydides had begun the research for his history and was probably deeply involved in Athenian public life (we know that he served as strategos in 424).[4]  It is implausible that a close observer who went to such great pains to uncover all available information about the war from every source, and who recognized the great significance of Athens’ financial status for her military strength (cf. 1.42, 1.84, 2.13), would make a patent error in reporting publicly-posted tribute income.  Thucydides very likely had access to the 478/7 total as well, stipulated in the widely famous ‘Assessment of Aristeides’, whose figures were sufficiently well-known to be cited simply by name in diplomatic treaties;[5] presumably a written copy was kept in the Athenian archives, as well as in the archives of the other principal founders of the Delian League.  The possibility of textual corruption in Thucydides—a highly unlikely ‘double corruption’, involving both the 478/7 and 431/0 figures—can virtually be ruled out: Plutarch (Arist. 24) quotes the 460T and 600T totals as Thucydides gives them.

If Thucydides’ numbers are correct, then perhaps it is our understanding of them that is in error.  Indeed, this has been the view of ‘orthodox’ revisionism: it is argued by the authors of ATL and others that Thucydides’ figure of 460T includes both cash tribute income (perhaps 260T) and the equivalent cash value of the ships supplied by the remaining allies.[6]  But this interpretation violates the direct wording of Thucydides 1.96, where the term phoros is used explicitly for monetary contributions as distinguished from the ships, with the phoros of the first assessement put at 460T:

παραλαβόντες δὲ οἱ Ἀθηναῖοι τὴν ἡγεμονίαν τούτῳ τῷ τρόπῳ ἑκόντων τῶν ξυμμάχων διὰ τὸ Παυσανίου μῖσος, ἔταξαν ἅς τε ἔδει παρέχειν τῶν πόλεων χρήματα πρὸς τὸν βάρβαρον καὶ ἅς ναῦς …. καὶ Ἑλληνοταμίαι τότε πρῶτον Ἀθηναίοις κατέστη ἀρχή, οἵ ἐδέχοντο τὸν φόρον. οὕτω γὰρ ὠνομάσθη τῶν χρημάτων ἡ φορά. ἦν δ᾽ὁ πρῶτος φόρος ταχθεὶς τετρακόσια τάλαντα καὶ ἑξήκοντα….[7]

If we attempt to salvage Thucydides’ accuracy by ‘reinterpreting’ his statement to mean that the 460T in phoros included both cash and ships, we are in effect emending the text—an approach that should be taken only as a last resort.

Again, Thucydides reports a tribute figure of 600T for 431/0:

θαρσεῖν τε ἐκέλευε προσιόντων μὲν ἑξακοσίων ταλάντων ὡς ἐπὶ τὸ πολὺ φόρου κατ᾽ἐνιαθτὸν ἀπὸ τῶν ξυμμάχων τῇ πόλει ἄνευ τῆς ἄλλης προσόδου, ὑπαρχόντων δὲ ἐν τῇ ἀκροπόλει ἔτι τότε ἀργυρίου ἐπισήμου ἑξακισχιλίων ταλάντων (τὰ γὰρ πλεῖστα τριακοσίων ἀποδέοντα μύρια ἐγένετο, ἀφ᾽ὧν ἔς τε τὰ προπύλαια τῆς ἀκροπόλεως καὶ τἆλλα οἰκδομήματα καὶ ἐς Ποτείδαιαν ἀπανηλώθη) (2.13.3)[8]

Since the quota list allows a tribute total of no more than 390T for this period, it is argued by ATL, Gomme, Eddy, and others that the figure of 600T comprises the cash tribute, the value of the ships of Chios and Lesbos, the Samian indemnity (strictly speaking, not tribute at all), the port revenue of Amphipolis, and the foreign income of the Goddess Athena—in other words, all Athens’ overseas revenue.[9]  Related attempts to assign specific amounts for these sources are purely conjectural and must, once again, do violence to the words of Thucydides describing the 600T as φόρος ἀπὸ τῶν ξυμμάχων τῇ πόλει.

Such freedom does not, in the main, characterize ancient authorities.  Plutarch, as we have pointed out, uses Thucydides’ figures without comment, which suggests that they were in agreement with the numbers from his other sources.[10]  According to Xenophon, total Athenian income was 1,000T at the beginning of the Peloponnesian War, a figure consistent with Thucydides’ 600T in tribute alone.[11]  Nepos (Arist. 3.1) repeats the figure of 460T for Athens’ first tribute collection.  Only Diodorus dissents from this harmony of sources, putting Athenian tribute revenue at 560T in 478/7 and 460T in 431/0 (Diod. 11.47.1, 12.40.2); but these figures contradict simple logic and evidence that tribute actually increased during this period.

In weighing the plausibility of the figures from literary evidence against those from the quota lists, it is helpful to consider the external evidence for the size of accumulated tribute surplus.  In 450/49, after the Peace of Callias, the accumulated tribute reserve, then apparently 5,000T, was liquidated by Pericles in order to pay for the construction of the Parthenon and other public works.[12]  It is likely that sailors’ pay was 3 obols per day in this period; if we use the standard figure of 200 men per trireme, we find that naval expenses for a ship came to roughly 100 drachmas per day, or half a talent per month.[13]  Between the foundation of the Delian League and the Peace of Callias, League fleets were involved in a number of costly campaigns: 200 ships under Cimon destroyed a large Persian fleet at the Eurymedon (Thuc. 1.100; Plut. Cim. 12); later 200 ships were involved in a lengthy operation in Egypt (Thuc. 1.104, 109f); perhaps 100 or more Athenian and allied ships served in a war against Aegina.[14]  A further 200 ships were later led by Cimon against Cyprus (Thuc. 1.112)  Although we do not know the exact length of any of these campaigns (the war in Egypt lasted a full six years, but some of the league ships may have been transferred before the end),  the total cost of these operations must have been considerable, perhaps 5,500T.[15]  This period also saw wars against various rebellious members of the Delian League, such as Thasos and Naxos: the total cost here must have been 1,500T-2,500T.[16]  Some of these expenses may have been defrayed through the sale of captured slaves or booty–though many actions, notably the last stages of the catastrophe in Egypt, did not lend themselves to profitable looting.[17]  When we add the cost of maintaining peacetime patrols, constructing new ships, and fighting such minor campaigns as those at Eion, Scyros, Sestus, Byzantium, and Carystus (Thus. 1.98), we are left with a likely net expenditure to the League of at least 10,000T in the 29 years from 478/7 to 450/49.[18]

If we use Thucydides’ figure of 460T for the first tribute assessment, and if we take the rise in tribute between 478/7 and 450/49 (due to new members joining the League and old members shifting from the ship-contributing class to the cash-contributing class) to be about 100T,[19] then tribute in 450/49 was roughly 560T.  If we use 510T as the approximate average tribute for the 29 years [= 0.5 x (460T + 560T)], we get a total tribute income for the period of about 14,790T.  Subtracting the 10,000T in League expenditures yields a reserve of just under 5,000T in 450/49, the figure for the actual reserve at the time.  That our estimates yield an answer so close to the correct 5,000T is simple coincidence and has no significance; what is important is that a 5,000T reserve in 450/49 is compatible with the tribute income figures of Thucydides.

On the other hand, if we use the tribute quota records we get nonsense.  Tribute was under 390T in 450/49, and probably averaged 300-350T o less from 478/7 to 450/49, yielding a total tribute income of well under 10,000T: less than the League’s probable expenditures during these years.  The Delian League must have been on the verge of bankruptcy throughout this period; an accumulated surplus of 5,000T is impossible.[20]

Fluctuations in the new tribute surplus generated between 449/8 and 431/0 tend to support this verdict.  Thucydides tells us that the Athenian cash reverse reached a maximum of 9,700T sometime before 433/2.[21]  It is clear that Athens made little or no distinction between her own funds and those of the League after the reorganization following the Peace of Callias in 450/49.[22]  Since all or nearly all previous cash was used in the building projects at Athens, and since no tribute was collected for the reserve in 449/8, we may assume that the later accumulation began in 448/7, drawing upon each year’s surplus of tribute and non-tribute cash income.  Between 448/7 and 433/2, Athenian forces were involved in heavy fighting preceding the Thirty Years Truce, and in suppressing rebellions in Euboea, Samos, and Byzantium.  The Samos/Byzantium campaign alone cost at least 1,400T, though much of the expense may have been repaid by 433/2 through the Samian indemnity.[23]

The total cost of these efforts, together with peacetime patrols and the construction of new ships, could hardly have been less than 3,000T.[24]  Thucydides’ tribute figures of 600T in 431/0 and (perhaps) 560T in 448/7, combined with about 400T in other Athenian revenue,[25] would yield a gross income of about 15,680T by 433/2 [= 0.5 x (60T + 1,000T) x 16 years].  When we subtract jurors’ pay, the cost of festivals, building maintenance, and other regular expenditures of the Athenian state, together with the military expense of 3,000T or more described above, a balance of 9,700T in the reserve seems likely.

In contrast, the tribute lists report a gross annual income of at most 390T from 448/7 to 433/2, generally averaging quite a bit less.  If we use the figure of 400T in other Athenian revenue,[26] then the maximum possible total Athenian income during this period would have been about 12,640T [= (390T + 400T) x 16 years], which seems only remotely possible.  It would require that total Athenian expenditures in this 16-year period were less than 3,000T—very low, considering that our rough estimate of military costs alone came to more than that.  By 422, Athenian juries were absorbing 150T each year (Ar. Vesp. 662f), and even if the yearly costs of earlier juries were only half that, the subsequent sixteen years would have involved a total cost of 1,200T.  Our ignorance of the magnitude of other Athenian civil expenditures[27] makes it difficult to reach a defensible total, but the 390T tribute figure seems to be ruled out by a reserve of 9,700T.  The size of Athens’ accumulated surplus thus strongly supports Thucydides’ tribute figures; it all but excludes those of the tribute quota lists.

II

It seems evidence that Thucydides’ cash tribute totals are just what they are represented to be, and are probably correct.  The nature and function of the tribute quota lists remain a problem.[28]  Even casual examination reveals anomalies.  According to Thucydides, the Athenians were severe in exacting tribute, “insisting on obligations being met exactly,” with failure to produce the agreed amount of tribute being tantamount to revolt.[29]  Yet the quota lists are disturbingly variable, with tributary states producing their assessments only about half(!) the time.[30]  Athens may have been willing to tolerate non-payment occasionally under special circumstances,[31] but it is difficult to believe that she remained content to rule an empire of incorrigible dead-beats.  During the Peloponnesian War, Athenian armies were sent into the hills of inland Lycia and Caria to exact tribute measured in minai from villages which, as often as not, fought and killed the tribute collectors (Thuc. 2.69, 3.19).  Would Athens have tolerated regular default by wealthy islands defenseless before the Athenian navy?[32]

Even more puzzling are those great cities subject to Athens that seem to have paid little or no tribute.  Many of Athens’ proudest possessions fall into this category: Naupactus, captured in (perhaps) 461 and made an important naval base,[33] paid no tribute; Sestus, one of the strongest and richest cities on the Hellespont, paid only 500 or 1,000 drachma per year and often nothing;[34] Thasos, a large and powerful city used as a base for Athenian ships, paid only 3T in tribute until 443, when the figure rose to a more reasonable 30T;[35] and Samos, largest and strongest of Athens’ subjects, and Amphipolis, Athens’ most important possession in Thrace—described by Thucydides (4.108) as an important source of revenue—paid no tribute at all, if we are to trust the evidence of the tribute lists.[36]

Clearly, we cannot rely upon the epigraphical evidence as a complete record of Athens’ tribute income.  As to what the lists actually represent, a simple answer suggests itself: they record the quota paid to Athena on the surplus of each year’s tribute, the aparche on the phoros that was sent to Athens rather than spent in the field by shipyards, squadrons stationed at naval bases, or garrisons.[37]  This explanation has much to recommend it.  It would have been much more efficient for Athenian squadrons based at major cities to draw some or all of their pay from the tribute of that city, rather than for the phoros to be transported to Athens each year and then returned for local use, with the risk of theft or loss in either direction.[38]  It seems more than pure coincidence, for example, that the seven-ship Athenian squadron based at Thasos in 424 (Thuc. 4.105) would have consumed roughly 28T in tribute during an eight-month campaigning season—almost exactly the difference between Thasos’ ‘correct’ payment of 30T and the 3T or less it pays for a number of years.  The transfer of this squadron from Thasos to another city and back again would explain irregularities in the amount of tribute reaching Athens.  The same reasoning would apply to payment for garrisons or ship-building at allied shipyards.  In fact, Plutarch explicitly tells us that the Athenians accepted empty ships from their tributary allies in place of cash payment.[39]

The religious question is more difficult to analyze: few matters are as difficult to reconstruct as the unwritten obligations of piety.  It can, of course, be argued that the Athenians would have felt a religious obligation to pay to Athena an aparche on tribute expended in the field as well as on tribute brought back to Athens.  It seems equally plausible that a quota was generally paid only on the surplus tribute, since it was only this sum that, after being brought to Athens, would have been placed under the Goddess’ protection.[40]  A number of tribute rubrics have been invoked as evidence against this latter hypothesis.  The heading ἅιδε πόλεις καταδηλοῦσι τὸν φόρον (“these cities present a voucher for tribute”) has been restored in Lists 25 and 26 (for 430/29 and 429/8);[41] with the aid of further restoration the cities of Myrina, Imbros, and Sestus appear under this heading in both years, along with Alopoconnesus in the latter only.[42]  This is usually understood to mean that these cities contributed their phoros to local Athenian forces and were given vouchers so certifying, but paid their quotas to Athena nonetheless.  This reconstruction is plausible, but far from certain.  Another rubric, μισθὸν ἐτέλεσσαν αἵδε ἀπὸ τοῦ φόρου τῇ στρατιᾷ (“these cities furnished pay for a military force out of their tribute”) is much clearer.[43]  The syntely centered on Erythrae is restored under this heading for 430/29, Lampsacus and Byzantium for 428/7, and the cities of Lemnos and Imbros for 421/0.[44]  The rubric μισθὸν ἐτέλεσσαν αἵδε ἀπὸ τοῦ Ἑλλησποντίου (“these cities furnished pay out of the Hellespontine tribute”) is restored over a long list of important Hellespontine cities (Chalcedon, Cyzicus, Lampsacus, Elaeus, Abydus, Byzantium, Parium, Madytus, and Dardanus) for 430/29 and 429/8 (Alopoconnesus is added in the former year).[45]

Taken together, this rubric evidence might seem to indicate that piety would compel Athenians to pay a quota to the Goddess on all tribute, whether spent in the field or brought to Athens; if so, then the lists of aparchai paid would be equivalent to any record of tribute collected.  However, this argument is far from conclusive.  One might equally well suppose that the payment of quotas on tribute expended in the field represents an exception to standard procedure.  In all but one instance the entries in question occur in the first few years of the Peloponnesian War, and none earlier.  Except for Erythrae, all the cities involved are in or around the Hellespont.  The lack of standardized working in the rubrics may indicate the uncommon nature of the situation.[46]

The explanation of these unusual payments may be a very simple one: the extreme piety of some individual.  Perhaps the Athenian commander in the area during these years—the man who would have collected and spent the tribute mentioned by the rubrics—considered it impious to deny the Goddess her usual share and so reserved a sixtieth part of the money for this purpose.[47]  Similarly, pious individuals or local authorities might occasionally have paid their city’s tribute quota themselves or reserved some of the tribute for this use, persuading the local Athenian officials to agree.

More serious difficulty has been seen in the poor correlation between irregular tribute payments and the presence of large Athenian military forces in the vicinity.[48]  For example, during the years that saw large Athenian fleets besieging Samos and Byzantium (440/39?) and Potidaea (432-429), irregularities in tribute quota payments from neighboring cities (including partial payment and actual default) are no more severe than those for the same cities in more normal years.  This suggests that Athenian forces either did not regularly draw on the tribute income of nearby cities, or that they did so but still sent the tribute quota to Athens.  However, we need not assume that a large Athenian task force would always find it worthwhile to ‘scour clean’ the surplus tribute of nearby cities.  In the sieges of Samos and Potidaea, the Athenian forces were enormous, consuming a hundred or more talents each month;[49] their size and importance would have required that they were well and regularly supplied with funds from the central Athenian reserve, and not expected to subsist on the paltry tribute available from nearby cities.  In this situation, an Athenian commander would have had little reason to detach several ships to ply the coast in order to supplement his hundreds of talents in silver by four or five talents more.[50]  In any case, spontaneous exactions by local commanders would have tended to increase confusion, hindering tribute collection and making verification of proper payment difficult.  For the sake of orderly bookkeeping, the hellenotamiai would have frowned on such haphazard and piecemeal exactions, in contrast to the regular expenditure of local tribute money on locally-based squadrons, garrisons, and shipyard work in amounts previously decided at Athens.

Finally, it should be emphasized that surplus tribute collected from subject cities and sent to Athens (perhaps 300-350T per year, according to the tribute quota lists) was merely a local surplus and did not necessarily represent a net annual increment to the accumulated reserve.  Fleets based at the Piraeus would have drawn their pay from central funds at Athens, and especially large expeditionary forces would have done the same.  For this reason the surplus phoros could have held constant at 350T or so during the early years of the Peloponnesian War, while the Athenian reserve shrank by hundreds of talents a year.

III

It is appropriate at this point to turn to predictions based on the theory we are presenting, to determine who well (or how poorly) they are borne out by the evidence available.  Unfortunately, only a small number of tribute assessment figures survive.  In the ninth assessment (425/4), we have individual records for most of the islands and perhaps two dozen other cities, along with a number of area totals; we have records of about twenty cities from the tenth assessment (421) and a handful of figures and fragments from various other assessments.[51]  For many of the subject cities the assessments show implausibly high increases over the tribute payments implied by the tribute quota lists, precisely as we would expect if in many cases the quota payments correspond to only a portion of the tribute paid.  In the ninth assessment, Abdera rises from 10T to 75T; Maronea, from 3T to 21+T; Samothrace, from 2T to 15T; Aenus, from 4T or total absence to 20T; Caunus, from 3,000 dr. to 10T; Eretria, from 3T to 15T; Chalcis, from 3T to 10T; Ceos and Coresia, from 3T to 10T; Tenos, from 2T to 10T.[52]  Given the forceful language of this particular decree,[53] we would expect a substantial increase between the payments of 429/8 and 425/4.  Indeed, total assessments rose just over 100% between 432/1 and 425/4 (if we assume that Thucydides’ figure of 600T for annual phoros was close to the actual assessment of the time);[54] but a tribute increase for an individual city of 400% or 500% is highly suspicious.

The assessment subtotals seem to confirm these doubts.  The distribution of tribute payment among the regional groupings differs radically between the quota records and assessment records.  The subtotals for the ninth assessment are: Hellespontine district, 250T-300T; Thraceward district, 310-350T; Island district, close to 150T; Actaean and Euxine cities, perhaps 100-150T; Ionian-Carian district, roughly 550-580T.[55]  The latest tribute quota figures prior to this assessment (mostly based on 429/8 and earlier) show the distribution: Hellespontine district, 85T; Thraceward district, 120T; Island district, 63T; Ionian-Carian district, 110T (with Ionia contributing about 50T and Caria about 60T).[56]  Leaving out the Actaean and Euxine cities, which appear not to have paid tribute before the 425/4 assessment, the distribution of tribute may be tabulated as follows (for 430/29 the apparent assessment, based on that of 429/8) to show the apparent increase:

Region

430/29

425/4

Increase

Ion.-Car.

110T (29%)

ca 565T (43%)

414%

120T (32%)

ca 330T (25%)

175%

85T (22%)

ca 275T (21%)

224%

Island

63T (17%)

ca 150T (11%)

138%

Total

378T

ca 1320T

250% (avg.)

The startling rise in the relative contribution of Ionia-Caria is especially difficult to accept at face value.  The surplus tribute hypothesis provides a reasonable solution: the quota lists ignore much of Ionia’s tribute because many of the great Ionian cities, such as Samos, Miletus, and Erythrae, were being heavily utilized as naval bases or shipyards,[57] and hence sent little or none of their tribute to Athens.  The strength of this proposition is best demonstrated through a case-by-case review of the evidence.[58]

Miletus was the greatest of the Greek cities on the Anatolian coast, and had contributed 80 ships to the Greek fleet at Lade, a contingent larger than that of Samos (60 ships) or Lesbos (70) and exceeded only by the Chian force (100).[59]  Miletus’ resources would have been considerably reduced by the destruction inflicted by the Persians following Lade, but we would still expect to see Miletus paying 25-30T as a member of the League.[60]  Instead, we find payment of 3T by a Milesian suburb in 454/3; Miletus pays 10T in 450/49, then 5T fairly regularly from 443/2 to 439/8; a payment of some sort is made by the same Milesian suburb in 427/6; and payments of 10T by Miletus more or less regularly from 421/0 to 418/7.  These improbably low figures are most often explained politically: it is argued that Miletus revolted ca 454/3, was subdued after hard fighting that damaged the city’s economic health (hence the low 10T figure), revolted again in the 440’s, was again suppressed with further damage—reducing her viability to such an extent that Athens subsequently demanded only 5T in annual phoros.[61]  The revolts may have occurred (though the evidence for the second is thin), but the tribute reductions seem unlikely.  History is not replete with examples of imperial powers magnanimously reducing their tribute demands of a province damaged in an unsuccessful revolt.  Payment of a large Athenian garrison out of Miletus’ own tribute offers a much better explanation of the statistics.[62]  Use of Miletus as a shipyard or naval base may also have been a contributing factor.

Similarly, Priene had sent 12 ships to Lade, yet it apparently paid only 1T in phoros, and even that sum far from regularly.  Teos had 17 ships at Lade, but seems to have paid only 6T in phoros.  In both these cases, the balance was probably used for ship construction or as pay for garrison troops.

We have less solid evidence concerning Erythrae, but here again the tribute paid seems suspiciously low.  Its syntely (including Sidousa, Pteleon, Boutheia, and Polichna, along with Elaeusa) controlled an area larger than Samos, yet paid an irregular figure ranging from just under 8T to just over 10T.  To be sure, Erythrae had provided only 8 ships at Lade, but we have no reason to believe that this was anything but a token effort.

Phocaea had sent just 3 ships to Lade, but this too was probably just a mere gesture.  Before the Persian conquest, the territory of Phocaea had been large enough to allow it to maintain a fleet of some 120 penteconters; even with a sizable reduction in its holdings and population, 3 triremes would represent a relatively minor effort.[63]  After the Persians had been defeated and Phocaea had become a member of the Delian League, its payments were surprisingly low, ranging from 1T 5,250 dr. to 3T.  Again, contributions in ship-building may be the explanation.

In view of all these cases—along with rich Ephesus, which, together with its suburbs, paid only 7T down to 433/2—it is difficult to make sense of this 50T tribute total for Ionia.  Conversely, it is easy to imagine an Ionian contribution of perhaps 350T (about one-quarter of all the tribute) in the only surviving assessment.[64]

Further support for the surplus tribute hypothesis may be found in the surviving evidence of Athens’ accounting procedure for tribute payments.  The decree of Cleinias (generally dated 448/7) required the allied cities to send an account book to Athens, to be read in the boule as the tribute was being counted.[65]  Under orthodox theory, this makes little sense.  If virtually all phoros was to be sent to Athens, it would be easy for the boule to determine whether a city’s payment was correct or not: each city’s assessment was publicly posted on the Acropolis, and the boule undoubtedly had a written copy.  At most a single figure might be sent with each payment of phoros, attesting to the amount; this, together with the seals on the chest containing the tribute, would have been sufficient to distinguish cases of partial payment from cases of embezzlement by the couriers.  An account book seems superfluous.

On the other hand, such a record would be an obvious necessity within the framework of the surplus tribute hypothesis.  A particular city might have provided pay for garrison troops, supported a small naval squadron based in the area, built a few new ships at Athens’ request—then sent the balance of the tribute to Athens around the time of the Greater Dionysia, the closing point of the League’s financial year.[66]  An account book would be essential in order to keep track of these various contributions and to distinguish honest tributaries from any claiming fictitious expenses.  Even with such a system, there would be a strong temptation to cheat, as the Cleinias degree suggests (58-66):

All those who have brought (payment)  [to Athens and who on the notice board] are listed as owing [- – -18- – -] publish to the people [- – -20- – – If] any of the cities [raises any dispute about the tribute] payment, claiming to have paid it [- – -16- – -] the government of the [city – – -20- – -] the cities and [- – -20- – -] not be permitted [- – -25- – -] let the liability be the [accuser’s].

The text is fragmentary, but seems to describe a dispute over a city’s claim to have paid part of its tribute for local military expenses.

Considerations of efficiency and the need to prevent false claims by subject cities would, in most cases, have caused Athens to regularize such local expenditures.  It seems likely that individual cities were assigned a specific number of ships to build each year for a specific number of years.  Similarly, the size of the squadron stationed at each naval base would have tended to remain constant, as would the size of any garrison.  This would account for whatever consistency we find in the surplus tribte payment of many cities in the tribute quota lists.[67]  During a period in which squadron movements and transfers were irregular and dictated by unplanned opportunities (as in the initial stages of a war), we would expect increased irregularities in the surplus tribute payments, and indeed this prediction seems to be confirmed in the first few years of the Peloponnesian War.[68]

Perhaps the most striking support for the surplus tribute hypothesis comes from Isocrates’ criticism of the arrogance of the Athenians towards their allies in the First Athenian Emprie (8.82):[69]

οὕτω γὰρ ἀκριβῶς εὕρισκον ἐξ ὧν ἄνθρωποι μάλιστ᾽ἄν μισηθεῖεν, ὥστ᾽ἐψηφίσαντο τὸ περιγιγνόμενον ἐκ τῶν φόρων ἀργύριον, διελόντες κατὰ τάλαντον, εἰς τὴν ὀρχήστραν τοῖς Διονυσίους, εἰσφέρειν ἐπειδὰν πλῆρες ᾗ τὸ θέατρον. Καὶ τοῦτ᾽ἐποίουν, καὶ παρεισῆγον τοὺς παῖδας τῶν ἐν τῷ πολέμῳ τετελευτηκότων, ἀμφοτέροις ἐπιδεικνύοντες τοῖς μὲν συμμάχοις τὰς τιμὰς τῆς οὐσίας αὐτῶν ὑπὸ μισθωτῶν εἰσφερομένης, τοῖς δ᾽ἄλλοις Ἕλλησι τὸ πλῆθος τῶν ὀρφανῶν καὶ τὰς συμφορὰς τὰς διὰ τὴν πλεονεξίαν ταύτην γιγνομένας.

According to the decree referred to here, Athens used hired porters to carry “the surplus of the money from the tribute” (or “the surplus money from the tribute”) into the orchestra, talent by talent, during the City Dionysia—undoubtedly as a demonstration to the allies of Athens’ greatness and the wealth of her empire.

According to the orthodox theory of Athens’ methods of collecting tribute, the phrase “the surplus money from the tribute” is difficult to explain: for Athens spent far more than she received in tribute during the early years of the Archidamian War, when the decree was probably passed.[70]  It is also unlikely that the phrase refers to the total accumulated surplus tribute, i.e., to the reserve: for the size of the total reserve would have required many thousands of porters, each carrying the fifty pounds of silver making up a talent.  Moreover, the swiftly-waning size of the reserve during the years of the Archidamian War would have resulted in a markedly reduced display each year, giving the allied representations an embarrassing impression not of strength, but of progressive enfeeblement.  As Meiggs shrewdly observes, a display of 2,000T would not have reassured those allied representatives who remembered the 6,000T reserve of 431.

These problems could be resolved by unnaturally interpreting the phrase τὸ περιγιγνόμενον ἐκ τῶν φόρων άργύριον as “the annually incoming tribute money.”[71]  Or we can grant to Isocrates’ words their plain meaning consistent with the surplus tribute hypothesis, allowing them to acquire the comfortably unexceptionable character of a well-worn cobblestone on a familiar path.

Appendix: Severe Variations in the Tribute Lists

Of the following list (see supra n.30) it should be emphasized that most of the city and tribute restorations are uncertain, and were generally arrived at by assuming maximum regularity in tribute payment; therefore, the actual records almost certainly showed substantially more irregularity than those given here (absent = absent from full panel; * = tribute restored; ? = city name restored).

ABDERA: 12T 5,120 dr. in 454/3; 15T in 452/1 and 450/49; 14T in 448/7; 1T + 15T*? in 447/6 (the 1T is presumably an arrears payment from the previous year); 15T in 445/4; absent in 443/2; 15T* in 442/1; 15T* in 436/5; 15T in 435/4 and 433/2; 10T in 432/1 and 430/29; 10T* in 429/8; assessed at 75T? in 425/4 (this assessment included the towns around Abdera, which usually paid 3,000 dr.).

ARGILUS: 10T 3,000 dr. in 454/3; 1T in 446/5 to 443/2; 1T* in 442/1 to 440/39; 1T in 438/7; absent in 435/4; 1,000 dr. in 433/2; absent in 432/1; 1,000 dr. in 430/29 and 429/8.

BYZANTIUM: 15T in 450/49; an irregular payment of some size in 448/7; 4T 4,800 dr. + 3T 5,840 dr. + (–)*? in 447/6; 15T 4,300 dr. in 443/2 and 442/1; 15T 469 dr.? in 441/0; 18T 1,800 dr. in 433/2; 21T 4,740 dr. + 8T 900dr.? in 430/29; 15T 90dr. in 429/8; 20T 1,170+ dr.? in 428/7.

CHALCEDON: 7T 3,010 dr. in 452/1; 3T in 450/49; 9T in 448/7, 447/6, and 445/4; 9T* in 444/3 and 443/2; 9T in 442/1 to 440/39; 9T? in 439/8; 6T* in 434/3; 6T in 433/2; 6T* in 432/1; 5T 5,100 dr. + 900 dr. in 430/29; 5T 5,100 dr. + 900 dr.? in 429/8.

MARONEA: 1T 3,000 dr. more or less regularly until 437/6; 10T from 436/5 to 433/2; absent in 432/1; 3T in 430/29 and 3T* in 429/8; assessed at 21+T in 425/4.

SELYMBRIA: 6T from 451/0 to 447/6 more or less; 5T from about 443/2 to 439/8; 900 dr. from about 435/4 to 432/1; 9T in 430/29.

SERMYLIA: 7T 4,320 dr. in 454/3; two restored payments, one of which was over 4T, in 453/2; 5T 5,500 dr. in 451/0; 3T in 448/7 and 447/6; 5T from about 446/5 to 440/39; 4T 3,000 dr. in 435/4 and 434/3; absent in 432/1 and 430/29.

TENEDOS: 4T 3,000 dr. in 452/1; 2T 5,280 dr. + 1T 3,720 dr. in 450/49; an irregular payment in 448/7; 2T 5,280 dr. + 3,240 dr. + 2,160 dr. in 447/6; 4T 3,000 dr. in 445/4 and 4T 3,000 dr.* in 444/3; 2T 5,280 dr.* in 443/2 and 2T 5,280 dr. in 442/1 and 441/0; 2T 5,020 dr.? in 440/39; 2T 5,280 dr. from about 435/4 to 429/8.

THASOS: 3T from about 454/3 to 451/0; 2T 2,760 dr.* in 448/7; 3,240 dr. + two other payments, one of which may be 3T, in 447/6; 30T in 444/3; absent in 443/2; 30T from about 440/39 to 429/8; assessed 60T? in 425/4.[72]

References

[1] Surviving records of the aparchai paid to Athena on the incoming phoros are woefully incomplete.  However, by combining the accounts of several years, we can obtain a reasonable maximum estimate of about 390T for the total tribute paid in 454/3 and thereafter.  B.D. Meritt, H.T. Wade-Gery, and M.F. McGregor, The Athenian Tribute Lists (Cambridge [Mass.]/Princeton 1939-1953) I 241, estimate the increase in tribute due from new states joing the League between 478/7 and 454/3 at 122T or so (cf. n.19 infra); the increase resulting from states shifting from the ship-contributing category to the cash-contributing category (e.g. Naxos and Thasos) is subject to much doubt, but probably ranged from 15T to 65T, with the larger figure more likely.  Based on this reasoning, the total rise in monetary contributions would have been 140-190T between 478/7 and 454/3, yielding a cash total of some 200-250T in 478/7. Cf. ATL III 239-43 and A.W. Gomme, A Historical Commentary on Thucydides I (Oxford 1945) 273-80.

[2] Cf. S.K. Eddy, “460 Talents Once More,” CP 63 (1968) 187f, for many of the following arguments.

[3] Cf. ATL III 12-16.

[4] Thuc. 4.104. He mentions that he was of an age to understand what was happening throughout the years of war (5.26) and began writing his history at the very beginning of conflict (1.1).

[5] For example, in the treaty of Nicias (Thuc. 5.18).

[6] Cf. ATL III 236-43; Gomme (supra n.1) 284-86; Eddy (supra n.2) 184-95.

[7] The distinction made here appears elsewhere: at 7.57.4 Thucydides describes certain Athenian allies as being “subject to phoros,” but says of the Chians that they were “not subject to phoros, but brought ships in as independent allies.” For a thorough discussion of the linguistic problems at issue, cf. M.H. Chambers, “Four Hundred Sixty Talents,” CP 53 (1958) 26-32, esp. 27f.

[8] Tr. Crawley: “Here [the Athenians] had no reason to despond.  Apart from other sources of income, an average revenue of six hundred talents of silver was drawn from the tribute of the allies; and there were still six thousand talents of coined silver in the Acropolis, out of nine thousand seven hundred that had once been there, from which the money had been taken for the porch of the Acropolis, the other public buildings, and for Potidaea.”

[9] ATL III 334-41 contains the following estimates: 388T in tribute; 50T from the Samian indemnity; 25-30T in other sacred revenues of the gods; 70-75T from the port revenue of Amphipolis; and the remaining 60T or so from unknown other imperial revenue sources and the 10% tax.  Aside from the 388T in tribute (the maximum possible figure suggested by the quota lists), all these amounts are essentially simple guesses chosen to fit the 600T total.  Eddy (supra n.2) 195 borrows these figures for the tribute, the Samian indemnity, the sacred revenue, and the port revenue of Amphipolis, for a total of 533-543T.  To this he adds the capital value of the ships contributed by Chios and Lesbos, which he estimates to have been 65T, yielding a combined total of 598-608T.   He remarks that the close correspondence of this figure to the desired 600T total given by Thucydides may seem “rather too neat”—an understatement, since the calculation is based mostly upon pure guesswork.

[10] Plutarch generally mentions any disagreement among his sources: Ages. 32; Alex. 15, 18, 27, 31, 38, 46; Them. 32; Per. 9, 10, 24; Arist. 1.

[11] Anab. 7.1.27.  The emphasis Thucydides places on the tribute portion of Athens’ total income would seem rather odd if it generally amounted to little more than a third of the total (somewhat less than 390T—a maximum estimate—out of more than 1,000T); it would be natural if it comprised nearly 60% (600T out of over 1,000T).

[12] Plut. Per. 12; for discussion of further evidence in the Strasbourg Papyrus (cf. ATL III 281; H.T. Wade-Gery and B.D. Meritt, Hesperia 26 [1957] 163-88) see R. Meiggs, The Athenian Empire (Oxford 1972) 515-18, and C.W. Fornara, Archaic Times to the End of the Peloponnesian War (Cambridge 1983) 95-97 no. 94.  It is possible that the 5,000T expended did not represent the total amount of the accumulated reserve.

[13] Thuc. 8.45.  With the sharp bidding competition for sailors, pay seems to have risen to 1 drachma per day by the time of the Peloponnesian War: Thuc. 1.21, 3.17.4, 6.8.1.  The figure of 200 men per trireme is implied by Thucydides; cf. Meiggs (supra n.12) 259, 427.  These estimates seem fully consistent with the record of expenditures for the Samian revolt: cf. A. French, “The Tribute of the Allies,” Historia 21 (1972) 1-20, esp. 5.

[14] Thuc. 1.105 reports that the Athenians captured 70 Aeginetan ships in a major naval battle; since the Aeginetans were renowned for their naval excellence (cf. Htd. 8.93), it seems likely that more than 100 Athenian and allied ships were involved.  However, it must be admitted that we cannot be sure that the Delian League was officially involved.

[15] Very rough estimates:  in the Eurymedon campaign, 200 ships x 0.5T/month x 8 month campaigning season = 800T; in the Aegina campaign, 100 ships x 0.5T/month x 8(?) months = 400T; in Egypt, 100 ships (a conjectural average strength) x 0.5T per month x 70 months (=  6 full years, since crews would have to be paid during winters, or equivalently fed) = 3,500T or more; Cyprus campaign, 200 ships x 0.5T per month x 8 months = 800T: a total of 5,500T.  Our estimate could be substantially changed by many unknowns, e.g. if the Athenian-Aeginetan war were not an affair of the League, our total would be reduced by 400T; if 200 ships had remained in Egypt during the full six years, our total would be raised by 3,500T; but overall it is probably conservative, especially since we are assuming that sailors were paid only half a drachma per day, which may be low.  It is important to note that allied ships participating in League operations would almost certainly have drawn their pay from League funds just as Athenian ships did.  The majr ship-contributing states (such as Samos, Chios, and Lesbos) would have demanded equality with Athens on this point at the foundation of the League, and would have taken concerted action against any change in the terms.

[16] Over two years of siege at Thasos—a strong state—probably came to at least 1,500-2,000T, since a nine month siege of Samos cost 1,200T, and the more than two years of siege at Potidaea cost 2,000T.  The cost of the Naxos revolt is unclear, thought we do know that there was a naval blockade and siege (Thuc. 1.137).

[17] In one celebrated incident, Cimon obtained a huge sum of money by ransoming the high-ranking Persian nobles whom he had captured at Eion and Byzantium (Plut. Cim. 9); the money was enough to maintain his fleet for four months.  Assuming that Cimon’s force included 50 ships (since there was no Persian naval opposition at this time, a large fleet would have been unnecessary), he raised over 100T.

[18] We might also consider the cost of the operations in the First Peloponnesian War during this period, though it is difficult to determine whether League funds were drawn upon.  The overall figure of 10,000T is subject to much uncertainty, but is probably conservative; cf. supra n.n.15 and 16.

[19]  This is rather more conservative than the figure of 135+T estimated in ATL III 239-43, and widely accepted.  The ATL figure is based on the assumption that Persian power in Thrace did not collapse so rapidly as to allow inclusion of Aenos and Abdera in the first assessment of 478/7; but Htd. 7.106.2 seems to imply that it did, as does the absence of any recorded campaign against these wealthy and important cities.  Their presence in the first assessment would reduce the later increases by 27T.  Furthermore, forty of the cities that probably joined between 478/7 and 450/49 were small inland Carian towns, often sporadic in their payment and apparently removed from the rolls around 441 (presumably because they were not worth the effort of collection); if we subtract the defaulting portion of their total assessment of about 26T, the net increase in tribute comes to some 100T.

[20] This discrepancy between the figures of the tribute quota lists and the size of the accumulated reserve is fully noted by ATL III 238.  The authors resort to the hypothesis that during the first three decades of the League’s existence, “little, if any” of the incoming phoros was actually spent on campaigning expenses, but stored away, instead, to produce the remarkably large 5,000T reserve total mentioned.

[21] Thuc. 2.13.  Probably a few years earlier: the building of the Propylaea, which eventually cost 2,012T, was begun in 437/6; it was probably around this date that the 9,700T maximum was reached and the reserve began to decline.  433/2 is the latest possible date: cf. Fornara (supra n.12) 132f no. 118.

[22] Pericles essentially admitted as much, according to Plut. Per. 12.  The permanent transfer of the treasury to Athens, the Peace with Persia (which removed the purpose of the Delian League), and the uses to which Athens put League funds all make this clear.

[23] Thuc. 1.112-17.  It is generally agreed that the Samian revolt cost Athens about 1,200T, while concurrent operations against Byzantium brought the total to 1,400T (though the latter figure may actually correspond to the costs of Samos alone); the evidence is summarized and discussed by Meiggs (supra n.12) 192; Fornara (supra n.12) 112 no. 113, and “On the Chronology of the Samian War,” JHS 99 (1979) 7-19.  ATL III 334f suggested that the Samian indemnity came to 50T per year, but this is pure speculation: since Samos appears to be paying as late as 414/3, the rate cannot have been greater than some 50T per year, and may have been much less.

[24] At most, some 350T of the Samian indemnity could have been paid by 433/2; the net cost of the Samos-Byzantium revolt would have been at least 1,100T at this point.  The expense of the other Athenian operations prior to the Thirty Years Pace can have been no less than 1,000T if we add the cost of Pericles’ Black Sea expedition, ca 436 (Plut. Per. 20).  There is, moreover, the disputed issue of the peacetime patrols of at least sixty triremes that Pericles is said to have manned for eight months of every year in order to provide employment for Athenian citizens (Per. 11).  Even allowing for public holidays, this would come to 150-200T each year.  Although we are not told just when Pericles began this policy, and since military actions would have filled many of the years from 448/7 to 433/2 (when the sixty triremes would have made up part of the Athenian battle fleet without creating any additional burden), the total extra cost of these patrols must have approached 1,000T; cf. Meiggs (supra n.12) 427.  When we add the cost of constructing new ships and maintaining old ones during this sixteen-year period, a total of 3,000T for military expenses seems conservative.

[25] Cf. Thuc. 2.13; Xen. Anab. 7.1.27.

[26] The figure of 400T in non-tribute Athenian revenue is admittedly questionable, since it is derived by subtracting the 600T tribute figure of Thuc. 2.13 from the 1,000T total income figure of Xen. Anab. 7.1.27: i.e., we are assuming that Xenophon’s figure was based on knowledge consistent with Thucydides’.  However, it seems inherently unlikely that Athens’ non-tribute income was much greater than 400T in any event (cf. supra n.11).  Furthermore, Aristophanes’ Wasps, produced in 422, puts the total Athenian income at that time at between 1,500 and 2,000T (Vesp. 656-64; probably closer to the high figure); if we combine this with the 1,460T tribute total in the Assessment of 425 (which, as we will argue below, was probably close to the true income), we obtain results fully consistent with an approximately constant 400T in non-tribute revenue.

[27] Ath. Pol. provides some figures (e.g. 42.3, 49.4, 50.1, 52.2), but they are incomplete and often dubious.

[28] Many of the arguments made in this section are directly parallel to those of Gomme (supra n.1) 275ff and French (supra n.13).  Cf. n.35 infra.

[29] Thuc. 1.99.1:  αἰτίαι δὲ ἄλλαι τε ἦσαν τῶν ἀποστάσεων.  καὶ μέγισται αἱ τῶν φόρων καὶ νεῶν ἔκδειαι καὶ λιποστράτιον εἴ τῳ ἐγένετο.  οἱ γὰρ Ἀθηναῖοι ἀκριβῶς ἔπρασσον καὶ λυπηροὶ ἦσαν οὐκ εἰωθόσιν οὐδὲ βουλομένοις ταλαιπωρεῖν προσάγοντες τὰς ἀνάγκας. The exact meaning of Thucydides’ words is analyzed in Gomme (supra n.1) 283.

[30] Cf. ATL III 265-74 and Meiggs (supra n.12) 524-30 (both make unconvincing attempts to minimize the degree of tribute payment variability).  Of the more than 200 members of the League in the period 453-439, the number apparently paying any tribute at all in a given year ranged from 140 to 173, averaging about 160.  Worse still, a large number of these paid only a fraction of their assessed tribute.  The authors of ATL speculate that some cities may have continued to furnish ships instead of cash early in this period, others may have been included in the payments of a larger city nearby, and some (mostly in upland Caria) may simply have defaulted.  But even the most generous estimates of the numbers in each of these categories fails to bring the number of cities paying or otherwise accounted for into line with the number of cities assessed.  And in each full panel, many cities we would expect to see present are missing.  See the Appendix for a brief listing of cities exhibiting severe irregularity in payment.

[31] Thus in 430 Methone, an Athenian subject city that Perdiccas of Macedonia claimed within his sphere of influence, had its tribute remitted except for the token payment of the quota due the Goddess.  The Methone decrees make reference to the delicate political situation between Athens and Macedonia, and this is undoubtedly the cause of Athens’ unusual decision.  Cf. ATL III 133-37; Thuc. 2.29.6, 2.80.7.

[32] The writers of ATL incline to believe so. Aegina, for example, is said to have “made a partial payment in 449 and probably none at all in 477 [sic: read 447]  and 446″ (ATL III 303): this about a rich island without walls or ships and within sight of Attica (cf. Thuc. 1.108).  In fact, it is not certain that Aegina was absent from the 447 and 446 assessments; but the statement exemplifies the weak position ATL is forced to take regarding cities missing from the quota lists.

[33] A squadron of twenty ships under Phormio was stationed there at the start of the Peloponnesian War (Thuc. 2.80).  Later, Demosthenes based his expedition into Aetolia from Naupactus (Thuc. 3.94).

[34] Sestus’ greatness is described at Hdt. 9.114-117; it was the Persian grandees from Sestus and Byzantium for whom Cimon received the large cash ransom mentioned in Plut. Cim. 9: cf. supra n.17.

[35] Thasos’ enormous wealth is detailed in Hdt. 6.46f.  The authors of ATL (III 258f) argue that after stripping Thasos of its mines and other mainland possessions, Athens demanded only 3T per year from the island itself, but this seems unlikely.  Plut. Cim. 14 states that the gold mines seized by Athens were those on the mainland, along with the other Thasian possessions there; yet according to Herodotus, perhaps a third of Thasos’ wealth was derived from mines on the island itself.  Thus, Thasian public revenue (excluding taxes of any sort) must have remained at well over 50T in an average year, rising to perhaps 100T during peak years.  Athens would have drawn more than 3T from a state with a financial base this large.  Furthermore, Thasos was a large island, close to Samos in size; even without its gold-mining revenue, we would expect it to contribute more than the 3T paid by small islands such as Cythnos.  The sudden increase in Thasian tribute from 3T to 30T is commonly ascribed to an Athenian return of the mainland mines to Thasos, but this seems highly implausible.  Athens would have been improbably generous to forego 80T or more in mine income in return for 27T in extra tribute.  Return of the mines would have done little more than double Thasos’ public revenue; this would hardly explain a tribute rise of 900%.

[36] Samos had manned some 70 ships on short notice during her revolt (Thuc. 1.116); after defeat, she was forced into what was clearly the standard tributary relationship (cf. Thuc. 7.57.4), yet no tribute seems ever to have been paid.  Samos was forced to make good the cost of the revolt as indemnity, leading to the common belief among modern historians that Athens was content to receive only this money, without demanding actual tribute from Samos.  This seems implausible: repayment of war expenses would have been meaningless as a mere replacement for regular tribute.  The revolt in 440/39 had cost Athens over 1,200T, and it seems that Samos was still paying installments at least as late at 414/3: this translates into indemnity payments of less than 50T per year—possibly much less, since we have no means of determining the closing date of the payments.  This amount is not unduly high for a city of Samos’ wealth and size, probably no more than we would have expected Samos’s ordinary tribute to have been, and perhaps on the low side following a hard and bitter campaign and siege in which the Samians branded captured Athenians and Athens returned the mutilation in kind (Plut. Per. 26).

[37] Gomme (supra n.1) 273-80 and French (supra n.13) 7-20 arrive independently at much the same conclusion, that the quota lists cannot be considered a complete accounting of the tribute paid.  Each argues that cash or supplies provided to locally-based Athenian forces often went unmatched by payment of aparchai to Athena; French goes so far as to suggest that “the [tribute displayed at the Dionysia] was treated more like the surplus on last year’s operations than as the income for the following year” (19).  But neither extends this simple idea to its logical conclusion: namely, that the tribute lists serve as a reasonably accurate record of the surplus tribute brought to Athens each year.

[38] So French (supra n.13) 11.

[39] Cim. 11; cf. n.57 infra.

[40] Admittedly, the base of Methone, which was required to pay only the quota on the tribute, is unusual.  Given the questions of international protocol involved (supra n.31), Athens may have wished to use the quota payment as a face-saving device, allowing her to claim nominal in not de facto control.

[41] ATL I 449f.

[42] Supra n.41.

[43] ATL I 454.

[44] Supra n.43.

[45] ATL I 453f.

[46] It seems likely that the three distinct rubric headings refer to essentially the same situation.  Cf. ATL III 88.

[47] The story of Nicias, whose superstition concerning an eclipse of the moon led to the annihilation of the large Athenian army in Sicily (Thuc. 7.54), is well known.  It is not difficult to imagine such a man sending aparche to Athena on tribute he had spent in the field, even if this was not customary.  This need not imply that Nicias himself was connected with any of the anomalous quota payments.

[48] Cf. French (supra n.13) 13-16.  It is this difficulty that convinces French to abandon his tentative steps toward affirming the surplus tribute hypothesis.

[49] Cf. supra n.16.

[50] In the case of the Samian revolt, the thirty-two “nearby” cities listed by French (supra n.13) 13f should probably be reduced to the fifteen or so on the coast or within a fifty miles’ sail of Samos; for these, the maximum yearly surplus tribute was apparently just over twenty talents.  In any given year, only part of this would have been available, and this sum would not have been collected in full until the time of the Dionysia.  During most of the year, a fund-raising detachment would have been forced to sail hundreds of miles to over a dozen cities along the coast in return for a half-dozen talents of silver at most.  These figures for the number of nearby towns and the maximum amount of total surplus tribute available are roughly the same in the case of Potidaea: cf. French 16, but note that he lists several cities a hundred miles or more distant.  Finally, in the case of Byzantium, Thuc. 1.116f gives little indication that any serious fighting took place; and in view of the considerable force Athens had concentrated  against Samos (over 215 ships from Athens, Chios, and Lesbos), few remaining triremes would have been available for use against Byzantium—probably no more than those normally stationed in the Hellespontine area.  Once mighty Samos had been defeated, Byzantium probably submitted peacefully (cf. Thuc. 1.117).

[51] Much of the following material is derived from ATL I (register of tribute quotas and assessments); II 79-83 (additions and corrections to the register), 122-24 (index to the amounts of tribute), 442-60 (supplements to the register, including name variations, fragments, syntely lists, and rubrics); and Meiggs (supra n.12) 324-50, 538-61.

[52] In each case the first figure is based upon the latest surviving quota payment prior to 425/4 (generally from 429/8).  I have not included here the numerous increases of 200% or less.

[53] “[As to the tribute, since] it has become too little…[The] tribute is not [to be assessed] for any [city for less] than [the amount it previously happened to pay] unless there appears to be [impoverishment so that] its area is unable [to pay more.]”  Penalties for malfeasance are threatened at every turn.  The translation is that of Fornara (supra n.12) 154 no. 136; cf. Meiggs (supra n.12) 325-32.

[54] This is not to imply that assessed figures corresponded exactly to tribute actually received; this point seems obvious, but helps to remove one apparent inconsistency from the surplus tribute hypothesis.  As argued above, the phoros in the first assessment came to 460T.  If we add to this sum the roughly 70T in phoros from cities probably not included in the first assessment but known to have been tributary by the end of the Peloponnesian War, together with the 39T from Naxos and Thasos (which had moved into the phoros-contributing category) we obtain a total assessment for these states of some 570T in 432.  This figure might seem to conflict with Thucydides’ 600T in total phoros income after we have added the large additional tribute payments by Samos, Naupactus, and Amphipolis for which we have argued above.  However, Thuc. 2.13 refers to the 600T as the average amount of incoming phoros, not the official assessment, and if we assume (say) a 90% collection rate, the assessed tribute in 432 may have been as high as 667T.  It is also conceivable that the first assessment of 478/7 included cities (perhaps in Cyprus) which were no longer paying phoros in 432; cf. Meiggs (supra n.12) 56-58.

[55] Owing to difficulties of restoration, the subtotals for the Hellespontine and Thraceward regions are uncertain.  Although we lack the Island subtotal, it can be obtained by adding the individual assessments, nearly all of which survive (omitting Melos, which Athens apparently tried but failed to coerce into League membership at this time).  The subtotal for the Actaean and Euxine cities is an estimate based on surviving assessments and fragments; cf. Meiggs (supra n.12) 328f.  Subtracting all these subtotals (and Melos’ 15T) from the surviving grand total of 1,460T yields the approximate subtotal for Ionia-Caria.  (This figure might have to be reduced if other cities, such as Naupactus, not in any of the previously-mentioned subtotals, paid tribute.)

[56] It has not escaped the notice and curiosity of scholars that the great and powerful cities of Ionia, so vividly described by Herodotus, paid a total tribute of only 50T, seemingly proving Ionia to be the poorest by far of the League’s tribute districts.  A theory postulating the economic decline of Ionia has been the result: cf. Meiggs (supra n.12) 270f.  This view may contain some truth, but it must be emphasized that in the only actual assessment we possess (the ninth), Ionia exhibits no sign of economic decline whatever, producing together with Caria the lion’s share of tribute.  Admittedly, tribute assessed does not always correspond to tribute paid, as in the case of Melos; but Athenian assessors certainly had a much better idea of Ionia’s economic health than we do, and if they chose to set Ionia’s assessment as roughly the same as those of, e.g. the Thraceward district, it was because they believed that the cities of Ionia could pay as much.

[57] It seems unlikely that Athens would have failed to make use of the valuable shipyards in Ionia and elsewhere; and in fact, according to Plutarch, “As time went on, the allies continued to pay their contributions to the war against Persia, but they did not provide men or ships on the scale that had been laid down for them.  They soon tired of foreign expeditions, for they felt they no longer needed to fight, and only wanted to live in peace and till their lands.  The barbarians had gone away and no longer troubled them and so they neither provided crews for their warships nor sent out troops…[Cimon] did not bring force to bear upon any of the Greeks and he accepted money or empty ships from all those who were unwilling to serve abroad” (Cim. 11, tr. Scott-Kilvert).  If Plutarch had a valid source for this substitution of “empty ships” for tribute payment, then a large sum of missing tribute is accounted for.  In 483 a trireme cost 1T (Ath. Pol. 22.7).  If ship-building expenses rose along with most other prices (e.g. jurors’ pay, soldiers’ pay) in the general inflation of the next fifty years (cf. Meiggs [supra n.12] 331), a trireme may have cost close to 2T by the beginning of the Peloponnesian War.  Since Athens maintained about 300 ships, and the average lifetime of a trireme seems to have been about 20 years (cf. Eddy [supra n.2] 189), some 15 new ships would have been needed each year.  This figure should probably be raised to 30-40 when damage from fighting and loss in battle are taken into account (perhaps 80% of the years from 478/7 to 405/4 saw Athenian ships involved in significant naval combat).  Therefore, 70T worth of new ships would have been produced on the average; if allied shipyards received half the business, a sizable portion of the ‘missing’ tribute is accounted for.

[58] Cf. Eddy (supra n.2) 189-94, who argues on strong empirical grounds that paying 1T in tribute was considered equivalent to providing one trireme to a League fleet; aside from several of the Ionian mainland cities whose tribute quota payments appear anomalously low and weaken Eddy’s case, his evidence seems fairly conclusive.  In any event, there must have been some recognized conversion factor between cash and ships in order to have made the original assessment process as objective and fair as possible; and from the examples we have, the ratio seems to have been on the order of 1.0—say between 0.7 and 1.3.  Esthetics, which have always played a role in such matters, would probably have ensured that a ratio of exactly 1.0 was chosen.  It is important to emphasize, contra Eddy, that contributing a ship almost certainly did not mean contributing its operating costs; these would have come to the considerable 4-8T per campaigning season, and were presumably paid out of League funds (cf. Plut. Cim. 11; Thuc. 1.99)

[59] Hdt. 6.7f. Miletus was admittedly the driving force behind the Ionian Revolt and probably made a greater relative effort than either Samos or Lesbos, whose contingents proved treacherous or faint-hearted in the battle (Hdt. 6.13f). Still, Miletus must at this time have been close in strength to these great island states.

[60] Ancient cities were notoriously resilient, and often quickly regained their former strength after the alleged annihilation of the bulk of their population.  The location of most cities was largely determined by geographical resources; major cities remained major cities.  And since population was usually limited by available land and by warfare, a generation of peace was generally sufficient to make good even the most crippling manpower losses.  Argos, which was said to have lost the overwhelming majority of its men in a war with Cleomanes of Sparta, was within a few decades again challenging Sparta for dominance in the Peloponnese (Hdt. 6.76-83).  In the case of Miletus, the forty years between Lade and 454 should have been time enough to repair the devastation vividly recorded by Hdt. 8.18-22.  My figure for 25-30T is as low as it is only because the 80 ships at Lade represented Miletus’ maximum strength, and its assessed strength would probably have been less than half that.

[61] Cf. Eddy (supra n.2) 190f; Meiggs (supra n.12) 112-18, 562-65.

[62] There is mention of a garrison in the Miletus decree (ATL II D11; tr. Fornara [supra. n.12] 92-94 no.92), generally ascribed to 450/49 or so.  After the alleged unrest or revolt in the 440’s, the garrison may have been augmented; this would explain the drop in surplus tribute sent to Athens.  Assuming pay of 4 obols per day (attested in the decree and quite reasonable for garrison troops), 1T would fund 25 men for a year; the 5T reduction in Miletus’ surplus tribute would correspond to 125 additional men in garrison.

[63] Hdt. 1.163-68 tells us that the Phocaeans, under siege by the Persians, despaired of retaining their independence and planned to sail en masse to Corsica.  In the event, less than half the Phocaean fleet carried through with the plan, and reached Corsica with 60 fifty-oared galleys.  This would make the Phocaean fleet of this period greater than 120 penteconters, equivalent to perhaps 30 triremes.

[64] As analyzed above, the ninth assessment apparently includes an Ionian-Carian subtotal of some 565T.  The cases discussed here (Samos, Miletus, Priene, Teos, Erythrae, and Phocaea) suggest that most of this, perhaps 350T, came from Ionia.  The only surviving Ionian city assessment, that of Elaeusa in the Eryrthrae syntely, supports this conclusion.  The entire syntely nomally paid some 8T to 10T, of which Elaeusa was responsible for only 100 dr.; but in the assessment her payment jumps an astonishing 60-fold to 1T.

[65] ATL II 50f and pl. II; tr. Fornara (supra n.12) 107-09 no. 98; cf. Meiggs (supra n.12) 212f.

[66] None of this implies that most cities did anything but send all their tribute to Athens; in the overwhelming majority of cases, involving small cities producing trivial amounts of phoros, the quota probably corresponds exactly to the tribute paid.  Generally, only the larger cities would have been utilized as land or naval bases or as shipyards: clearly, it would not have been worth the effort for a stategos with ten ships to dock at a town assessed 1,000 dr. in order to collect half a day’s pay for his sailors.  One may also speculate that Athenian field commanders needed special authorization from the Athenian government before making unplanned exactions of phoros from allied cities.  It is well known that the Athenian demos scrutinized the behavior of its military officials carefully, and, except in extreme situations, would have viewed with the utmost distrust any independent authority to collect and spend revenue.

[67] For example, Thasos pays 3T fairly regularly until after 448/7, and then generally pays 30T after 445/4. Cf supra n.35.

[68] Too little of the 431/0 list is extant for analysis; but in the 430/29 quotas, of 85 cities whose payments survive 22 made irregular payments.  In 429/8, there appear 6 irregular payments in a total of 37, though far fewer records remain of the Thraceward and Hellespontine states, where most of the irregularities of 430/29 occurred.  By contrast, a typical list (such as that for 442/1) had 3 irregular payments in a total of 165 cities.

[69] I am indebted to the discussion of this passage in ATL III 16f and Meiggs (supra n.12) 433-44.

[70] The text refers to wartime, and Ar. Eq. 313 (with schol.) indicates that Cleon was the author of the decree and that it was passed shortly after the death of Pericles.

[71] As does A.E. Raubitschek, “Two Notes on Isocrates,” TAPA 72 (1941) 356-62. esp. 360.

[72] I wish to thank Harvard University, the Westinghouse Corporation, and the Winston Churchill Foundation for financial support during the preparation of this paper.  I thank also John Barron, Paul Cartledge, and several anonymous referees for their helpful comments on an earlier draft.  Most of all I express my sincere gratitude to Mortimer Chambers, without whose advice and encouragement this paper would not have been written.

The Brothers of Alexander the Great?

The Journal of Hellenic Studies • November 1985 • 2,700 Words

Our knowledge of the early life of Alexander the Great is based upon very slender literary evidence.[*]  Arrian devotes only a few sentences to the years prior to Alexander’s campaigns.  Plutarch’s coverage of Alexander’s youth is also very condensed, and both he and Arrian rely almost exclusively upon pro-Alexander sources such as Ptolemy and Aristoboulos.  The books of Curtius which deal with the early years of Alexander have been lost, and Diodorus’ coverage is as usual very scanty.  Justin’s epitome of Trogus is among our longest and most comprehensive accounts, but it is often rhetorically unreliable and careless with details.  Yet apart from the occasional flashbacks and allusions in these sources and a few fragments of other historians, this evidence—heavily biased, meager, and unreliable as it is—comprises all we know concerning the first twenty years of Alexander’s life.

Naturally facts are difficult to establish when all our extant sources are so unsatisfactory, and grotesque distortions are relatively easy to produce.  Earlier this century, W.W. Tarn managed to create a pristine-pure Alexander the Just by explaining away all contrary evidence as hostile propaganda fabricated by Alexander’s enemies to blacken his name.[1]

Arguments from silence are also particularly questionable in view of the sources’ character.  Amyntas Perdikkou was a leading figure at the court of Alexander’s father Philip, being the son of Philip’s brother and predecessor; Amyntas may even have reigned for a few years of his infancy before Philip his guardian usurped the throne.[2]  Several casual allusions in our sources make it clear that upon his succession, Alexander murdered Amyntas, accusing him of conspiracy;[3] yet only Justin explicitly mentions the killing,[4] and Plutarch’s Alexander (for example) never even hints at Amyntas’ existence.

We must bear these facts in mind as we consider the evidence concerning Alexander’s brothers.  Although a fragment of Satyros lists among Philip’s various children only two sons, Alexander and his feeble-minded half-brother Arridaios,[5] Justin mentions one or more other sons.  In describing the circumstances of Philip’s assassination, Justin states that Alexander ‘feared his brother begot of a step-mother as his rival for the kingdom; and had been thereby moved to quarrel at an entertainment, first with Attalos, and presently with his father’ (‘Alexandrum quoque regni aemulum fratrem ex noverca suspectum timuisse; eoque factum ut in convivio antea primum cum Attalo mox cum ipso patre iurgaret’).[6]  The purpose of the first half of the sentence is to set the scene for Alexander’s dispute with Attalos at the wedding of Philip and Attalos’ niece Kleopatra.  Hence it has been generally supposed that the ‘brother’ is a hypothetical unborn son of Kleopatra and that Alexander feared the loss of his position as heir to such a future son.[7]  However, a closer examination of Justin renders this view implausible.  Justin later tells how Alexander, during the aftermath of Philip’s assassination, ‘took care likewise to have Karanos, his brother begot of a step-mother, his rival for the kingdom, slain’ (‘aemulum quoque imperii Caranum fratrem ex noverca suspectum interfici curavit’).[8]    There can be little doubt that the two sentences are parallel and refer to the same brother: aemulum imperii matches aemulum regni, fratrem ex noverca suspectum is exactly duplicated, and the structure of the two sentences is quite similar.[9]  On the other hand, it is very unlikely that Justin is describing Karanos as an infant son of Kleopatra: he specifically states that Kleopatra’s child was a daughter, and describes her death at the hands of Olympias (without Alexander’s apparent complicity).[10]

Satyros’ fragment lists Kleopatra’s child as a daughter named Europe.[11]  According to Diodorus, Kleopatra had borne a child (παιδίον) to Philip a few days before his death.[12]  Only Pausanias claims that the infant was a son: ‘And when Philip died, Olympias took his baby son (παῖδα νήπιον), the child of Attalos’s niece Kleopatra, and murdered the child and the mother together by dragging them onto a bronze oven filled with fire.[13]  It has been suggested[14] that these accounts may be reconciled by the hypothesis that Kleopatra bore two children to Philip, first a daughter named Europe, then a son named Karanos, but this is unlikely.  Justin never claimed that Karanos was Kleopatra’s son.  More significantly, none of our sources imply that Kleopatra had two children; in each account, only a single child is mentioned.  Then too, Kleopatra’s marriage to Philip seems far too short to have permitted the births of two children.[15]  Finally, the statement of Pausanias—the only tangible evidence that Kleopatra bore a son—is very weak, and probably represents an embellishment of the indeterminently-sexed ‘child’ (παιδίον) of an earlier source.[16]  Taken together, the testimony of our sources makes it clear that Kleopatra had only one child, a daughter.

Alexander’s quarrel with Attalos at the marriage feast is not difficult to understand within this framework.  With his mother Olympias having been displaced by Kleopatra, Alexander probably viewed Attalos’s taunts as a sign that his own position as heir was in jeopardy.  He did not fear a hypothetical unborn (and unconceived!) son of Kleopatra, but his younger brother Karanos, who was obviously much more of a threat.  Similarly, he was later to fear (momentarily) even feeble-minded Arridaios as a rival (an absurd possibility, which demonstrates the irrational nature of Alexander’s suspicion).[17]

Justin gives further evidence concerning the existence of Alexander’s brothers.  Following his account of the assassination of Philip, he states:[18] ‘Philippus genuit ex Larissaea saltatrice filium Aridaeum qui post Alexandrum regnavit.  habuit et alios multos ex variis matrimoniis regio more susceptos qui partim fato partim ferro periere.’  The phrase alios multos almost certainly refers to sons (cf. filium in the previous sentence) rather than to children in general, since otherwise Justin presumably would have added a word such as liberos; and partim ferro periere can hardly refer to brothers of Alexander who died naturally in infancy or childhood.

What became of these brothers?  The answer is plain: Alexander killed them.  The practice of eliminating rival half-brothers was virtually universal among polygamous monarchies.  Philip killed his own three half-brothers;[19] Persian rulers often slaughtered dozens.[20]  As seen above, Justin explicitly states that Alexander killed his rival half-brother Karanos.  A later passage in Justin mentions that Alexander, before embarking on the Persian War, slew all his step-mother’s relatives (omnes novercae suae cognatos),[21] as well as all of his own ‘who seemed fit for kingship’ (suis qui apti regno videbantur) in order to prevent any chance of sedition while he was far away.[22]  Clearly suos cognatos includes Amyntas, who was killed around this time,[23] but aside from half-brothers, it is difficult to imagine what other names would explain the plural (and the sole survivor, Arridaios, who was emphatically not ‘fit for the kingship’, is the exception which supports the rule).  An additional passage in Justin raises this implication of general fratricide to an explicit statement of fact.  Following his murder of Kleitos, Alexander laments and recounts his various murders:[24] ‘tunc Parmenion et Philotas, tunc Amyntas consobrinus, tunc noverca fratresque interfecti; tunc Attalos, Eurylochus, Pausanias aliique Macedoniae extincti principes occurrebant.’  Fratres is explicitly plural.

Our evidence for the existence of Alexander’s brothers has come from Justin, and as mentioned, Justin is not always reliable as an epitomizer of Trogus’ history.  However, while it is plausible that Justin occasionally garbled or rhetorically distorted sections of Trogus (e.g. apparently having Alexander blame himself in the passage above for the murder of his step-mother Kleopatra, who was actually Olympias’ victim), it seems highly unlikely that Justin simply invented all these widely separated references to Karanos and to Alexander’s other brothers.  It seems undeniable that Trogus repeatedly mentioned these brothers.

Therefore, the issue comes down to weighing the statements of Justin-Trogus against the silence of our other sources.  The fragment of Satyros is concerned with Philip’s marriages rather than with his children and mentions only those children who played a significant role in history; the sole exception, Kleopatra’s daughter Europe, is listed apart from the others, almost as an afterthought.  The very brief nature of our other sources has already been discussed, and it must be remembered that pro-Alexander sources such as Ptolemy and Aristoboulos would have balked at portraying their hero as a fratricide.  In any event, if we are willing to accept the existence of Karanos (as some scholars do),[25] then the argument from silence immediately becomes invalid: if one brother slipped through the cracks of Satyros and our other sources, other brothers may have done the same, especially since they were much less important than Karanos, whom Alexander feared as his chief rival.  The explicit evidence of Justin-Trogus—who is perhaps our earliest main Alexander source—should outweigh the silence of our other sources.  Alexander had brothers, whom he murdered when he came to the throne.[26]

If we accept this idea, our picture of Macedon under Philip II must be redrawn.  There was Alexander, Philip’s (probably) eldest son and likely successor; there was Arridaios, roughly of Alexander’s age (or perhaps even a little older), whose mental inability left him a cipher in succession intrigues; there were Alexander’s various sisters, possibly more than just those significant ones mentioned by Satyros; and there were Alexander’s younger brothers and their mothers, each (undoubtedly) continually intriguing on behalf of her sons.  Since Karanos is singled out by Justin as being Alexander’s rival, it is likely that he was the eldest of these brothers, perhaps in his late teens at the time of Philip’s death (unfortunately we have no clue as to the identity of his mother).[27]

It might be argued that strong-willed Olympias would never have permitted Philip to keep his other wives at court or even to continue to consort with them, but this is clearly false.  Satyros explicitly tells us that Philip ‘brought home’ Thracian Meda as another wife besides Olympias (around 342),[28] just as he later did with Kleopatra.[29]  Once Alexander was the well-established crown prince, say by about 339, Olympias’ influence may have risen considerably; perhaps Philip sent his other wives to live away from court around this time (also partly to enhance his image as a Hellene by removing the stigma of an ‘oriental harem’).  But during the first decade of Philip’s reign, Olympias cannot have had overwhelming influence over her husband: she was not Philip’s first wife, nor his only high-born one, nor (as yet) the mother of the certain successor.  And it was probably during these years that Karanos and most of Alexander’s other rival half-brothers were born.

References

[*] I wish to thank E. Badian and A.B. Bosworth for many valuable discussions and helpful suggestions made during the preparation of this paper; I also wish to thank several anonymous referees for their useful comments.  Obviously, none of these persons should be held responsible for those errors which still remain, nor for the arguments presented.  I am grateful to Harvard University, the Westinghouse Corporation, and the Winston Churchill Foundation for their financial support during the preparation of this paper.

[1] The extreme nature of Tarn’s views is well-demonstrated by a passage relating to the topic of this paper.  In his Alexander the Great: sources and studies ii (Cambridge 1948) 260-2, he acquits Alexander of the murder of his brother Karanos by ‘debunking’ Karanos’ existence, and closes his account with the words ‘Alexander did commit two [sic!] murders in his day; there is no need to invent a third which he could not have committed.’  A naive reader is liable to exhaust Tarn’s quota of killings in a single sentence of our Alexander sources; and E. Badian forcefully depicts the bloody character of Alexander’s later reign of terror in JHS lxxxi (1961) 16-43 and Studies in Greek and Roman history (Oxford 1964) 192-205.

[2] See J.R. Ellis, Philip II and Macedonian imperialism (London 1976) 15-22 for the sources and a good discussion of the evidence.

[3] References to Amyntas’ alleged conspiracy are in Plut. de fort. Alex. 1.3, Curt. vi 9.17, 10.24; while in Arr. An. i 5.4, Alexander offers a foreign king the hand of Kynna, his half-sister and the erstwhile wife (and current widow?) of Amyntas.

[4] Justin xii 6.14-15.

[5] Satyros in Ath. xiii 557, on which see A.D. Tronson, JHS civ (1984) 116-26.

[6] Justin ix 7.3.

[7] Tarn (n. 1) 260 also argues this interpretation of the passage, and the same view is held either explicitly or implicitly by N.G.L. Hammond and G.T. Griffith, A history of Macedonia ii (Oxford 1979) 681 n. 1; Ellis (n. 3) 214; and R. Lane Fox, Alexander the Great (London 1973) 503.  W. Heckel, RFIC cvii (1979) 386-7 considers the alternative possibility simply to dismiss it.  H. Berve, Das Alexanderreich auf prosopographischer Grundlage (Munich 1926) s.v. ‘Karanos’ argued that Karanos was Phila’s son, but his reasoning was very weak (see n. 27 below

[8] Justin xi 2.3.

[9] On this point I am in complete agreement with Tarn (n. 1) 260 and Heckel (n. 7) 387.

[10] Justin xi 7.12.

[11] Satyros (n. 5)

[12] Diod. xvii 2.

[13] Paus. viii 7.7.

[14] Lane Fox (n. 7) 503-5.

[15] With the political aftermath of Chaironeiea occupying his attention, it is unlikely that Philip returned to Macedonia to marry Kleopatra until after the meeting at Korinth; this would place the marriage in spring or summer 337.  Diod. xvii 2.3 says that Kleopatra’s child was born a few days before Philip’s death in summer 336.  This would fit well, and two births are impossible.  Lane Fox (n. 14) is driven to the wildly implausible conclusion that Kleopatra was already many months pregnant at the time of her marriage to Philip.  The general case against two births is well-argued by Heckel (n. 7) 389-93 and the issue of the date of the marriage is discussed by Ellis (n. 2) 301 n. 1, 302 n. 4.

[16] Pausanias full account is: ἐπι δὲ Φιλίππῳ τελευτήσαντι Φιλίππου παῖδα νήπιον, γεγονότα δὲ ἐκ Κλεοπάτρας ἀδελφιδῆς Ἀττάλου, τοῦτον τὸν παῖδα ὀμου τῇ μητρὶ Ὀλυμπιὰς ἐπὶ σκεύους Χαλκοῦ πυρὸς ὑποβεβλημένου διέφθειρεν ἕλκουσα.  Nowhere does the actual word ‘son’ (υἱός) appear.  Only two phrases specify the sex of the child: παῖδα νήπιον γεγονόταand τοῦτον τὸν παῖδα.  Both of these imply a masculine child, but the impression they give is that Pausanias’ own confidence in the certainty of his information (or his memory) was not firm.  The absence of the word ‘son’ makes it easy to imagine that Pausanias embellished the indeterminantly-sexed παιδίον of Diodorus or some other source into a masculine παῖδα νήπιον or τὸν παῖδα.  An anonymous referee was kind enough to point out that a parallel embellishment may have occurred in the case of Julia’s baby born in 54 BC, apparently a daughter (Plut. Pomp. 53.5; Dio XXXIX 64) but sometimes called a son (Vell. ii 47.2, nepos at Suet. Caes. 26.1 and Lucan ix 1049).

[17] Plut. Alex. 10.

[18] Justin ix 8.2-4.

[19] Justin viii 3.10-12.

[20] E.g. Justin x 1-2.

[21] The murder of Attalos, Kleopatra’s uncle is well-known (Diod. xvii 2.5).  Probably Kleopatra’s brother Hippostratos and various other relatives also fell in the purge.

[22] Justin xi 5.1-3.

[23] See n. 3 above.

[24] Justin xii 6.14-15.

[25] E.g. Lane Fox (n. 7) 503, Ellis (n. 2) 306 n. 54, and S. Hornblower, The Greek world, 479-323 (London 1983) 262 to name a few recent authors.  Various other references to the supporters of the existence of Karanos (whether as a son of Kleopatra or some other wife) are collected by Heckel (n. 7).

[26] The existence of other brothers (and sisters) besides those mentioned in the fragment of Satyros may help to resolve another puzzle: Philip’s fecundity.  As it stands, for Philip to have had only six surviving children after twenty-five years of marriage to a total of seven wives seems implausible.  Philip’s fertility must have been high, for at the age of forty-seven he obtained a child from his last wife Kleopatra after only about one year of marriage.

[27] The suggestion that Karanos was the son of Phila, Philip’s second wife, was accepted by Berve (n. 7) and followed by half-a-dozen other (mostly German) scholars in the last hundred years; see Heckel (n. 7) 386 n. 1 for the list.  The main argument is that Satyros lists no children for Phila though he does list children for five of Philip’s other seven wives; this is so thin as to be non-existent.  Strangely enough, Berve also claims that Phila (a sister of Derdas and Machatas of Illyria) was the only ‘social peer’ of Olympias, and hence only a son of hers could be a rival to Alexander.  This is completely untrue (as far as we can judge such things): Audata came from the royal Illyrian house, Meda was a daughter of the Thracian king, Kleopatra was the niece of a leading Macedonian noble, and even Philinna and Nikesipolis (about whose social background we know nothing) are usually assumed to have come from aristocratic Thessalian families.

[28] See Ellis (n. 2) 166-7.

[29] Satyros (n. 5). The same verb έπεισάγω is used in each case.

The Chronology of the Elean War

Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies • Spring 1986 • 6,200 Words

Regarding the chronology and events of the Elean War, fought between Sparta and Elis ca 400 B.C., our sources are in notorious disagreement.[1]  Xenophon’s account (and that of Pausanias, which ultimately derives from it) appears to differ irreconcilably from that of Diodorus.[2]  A resolution of this crux is desirable for its own sake, but even more important are the substantive issues involved: reconstruction of the actual course of the war should help us gain a better understanding of Spartan foreign policy during the aftermath of the Peloponnesian War, allow us to learn the circumstances and date of the accession of King Agesilaus, and, perhaps most significantly, provide further insight into the reliability and methods of our two principal sources for the events of the period.

I

There is little dispute about the origins of the war.  In 420 the Eleans barred Spartans from the Olympic Games because of an alleged truce violation and flogged Lichas, a prominent Spartiate who attempted to participate; some time later the Eleans refused King Agis permission to sacrifice at Olympia for victory in the war against Athens (Xen. Hell. 3.2.21f, Diod. 14.17.4, Paus. 3.8.3).  Underlying these specific charges was Sparta’s general hostility towards Elis for the latter’s military adherence to the anti-Spartan coalition of Argos, Mantinea, and Athens formed during the course of the Peloponnesian War; and this, among the causes he offers for the outbreak of war, Xenophon chose to list first (Hell. 3.2.21).

Sparta opened the conflict by demanding that Elis grant independence to the outlying towns of the polis—a gesture aimed at fragmenting Elean strength, identical to Sparta’s later strategy for destroying Mantinean power (Xen. 5.2.1-7).  When the Eleans refused to break up their state, the Spartans declared war and invaded Elis with an army led by one of their kings.

It is at this point that our accounts of the war diverge completely.  According to Xenophon (3.2.23-31) King Agis led the first invasion, entering Elis from Achaea in the northeast, along the river Larissus; but an earthquake suddenly convinced him to break off his invasion, return to Sparta, and disband his army.  We are told that Agis’ retreat emboldened the Eleans to send embassies to all Greek states hostile to Sparta, presumably in the hope of forming a general alliance.  But in the following year[3] the ephors again called out the ban; Agis led an army that included troops from all the allies except Corinth and Boeotia in a second invasion of Elis, now by way of Aulon in the south.  Agis was more successful this time: after winning over a number of the outlying towns, he offered sacrifice at Olympia (thus fulfilling one of the Spartan objectives) and began to ravage Elean territory and the outskirts of the city.  We are told that the Spartans believed that Agis could have captured the unwalled city[4] but chose not to; if this is true, he may have expected a pro-Spartan coup within Elis, for one did in fact occur soon after and narrowly missed succeeding.  With the failure of the coup, Agis departed leaving behind a garrison under Lysippus at Epitalium near the Alpheus.   These men ravaged Elis for the rest of the summer and the following winter, and at last forced the Eleans to sue for peace the next summer.  At first the Eleans balked at accepting the Spartans’ demand that Epeum be freed, but were forced to comply with even this condition and peace was finally arranged.  Such is Xenophon’s account, with which Pausanias (3.3.3-5) is in complete agreement.

In Diodorus’ version (14.17.4-12) it is King Pausanias who led the first invasion with an army of 4,000 men, as well as many soldiers from nearly all the allies except, again, Corinth and Boeotia.  His route was west from Arcadia across the mountainous Acrorea region; after capturing several small towns he reached Elis and began to invest the city.  But the siege was carelessly conducted and the Eleans, backed by 1,000 recently hired elite Aetolian troops, managed a sortie to defeat the Spartan army in a decisive skirmish.  This set-back convinced Pausanias that the city would be difficult to capture by siege; after further ravaging nearby territory and establishing fortified outposts in Elis, he took the bulk of his army to winter at Dyme.  Diodorus’ narrative of the war breaks off at this point and resumes at 14.32.1 with a one-sentence account of Elis’ surrender.

The two accounts have almost nothing in common.  Each is a highly detailed description of the war, containing the route of the Spartan invasion, the names of the Elean towns captured, and the specific course of the campaign; but in each case the details are utterly different.  It is implausible to argue, as many have done,[5] that Diodorus’ account is a ‘distorted’ version of Xenophon’s account: our two basic sources are in complete disagreement.

Ordinarily this might not greatly concern us.  Xenophon is always well-informed about Spartan affairs,[6] while Diodorus’ errors are notorious.  However, this passage of Diodorus concerns years covered by the Hellenica Oxyrhynchia; the precise details that Diodorus includes—the names of captured towns, troop strengths, the positions of opposing forces, the number of casualties, as well as the unrhetorical, even-handed tone—leave little doubt that the Oxyrhynchus historian is his ultimate source.[7]

We are thus left with the problem of two good sources that provide detailed but totally different accounts of a single war.  We can choose to accept one account as true and reject the other as fantasy, but this places us in the uncomfortable position of arguing that a reputable source, for no apparent reason, simply invented the vivid details of an imaginary campaign.  Or we may begin with the working hypothesis that both accounts of the war are essentially correct but incomplete; on this simple assumption, the versions of Xenophon and Diodorus can be shown to mesh remarkably well.

If both Agis and Pausanias led invasions of Elis, the first issue to consider is the order in which these occurred.  At the outset, it might seem more natural to place Pausanias’ invasion first:[8] Diodorus, after all, never hints that Pausanias’ campaign was responsible for ending the war, while Xenophon strongly implies that it was Agis who led Sparta to victory, even though he places the end of the war more than a year after Agis’ second campaign and death.  Moreover, the long gap between Diodorus 14.17.12 (which describes Pausanias’ campaign) and 14.34.1 (which describes Elis’ surrender) might seem admirably suited for the insertion of an extra campaign or two.  Finally, Epitalium, which Agis garrisoned, was captured by Pausanias (Xen. Hell. 3.2.29, Diod. 14.17.80).

While these arguments have merit, the weight of the evidence strongly supports the alternate view that Agis’ campaign preceded Pausanias’.  The main arguments are these:

(a) The walls of Elis.  Xenophon (3.2.27) informs us that during Agis’ invasion the Spartans believed that the city would be easy to capture because it had no walls;[9] according to Diodorus (14.17.10f) Pausanias had found Elis too strong to capture by siege, implying the existence of walls.  Presumably these were erected by the Eleans during the year or so that separated the two campaigns.  Although the Spartan forces remaining in Elis would have done their best to hinder this effort, they would have been no match for the full Elean army; and Greeks of this period could, under the pressure of necessity, construct fortifications with remarkable speed.[10]

(b) The Aetolian mercenaries.  According to Diodorus (14.17.9f), Pausanias’ attack on the city was defeated by 1,000 elite Aetolian troops whom the Eleans had recently hired.  It is doubtful that the Eleans would have taken such an expensive step[11] merely as a precaution against a potential Spartan threat, before their lands had been ravaged for some time.  Xenophon’s account makes no mention of this significant military force, and we have no reason to suppose that the Eleans would have sent them away after the war began.

(c) Agis’ abortive first invasion.  That Agis discontinued his first campaign after an earthquake suggests that the invasion was intended more as a warning or show of force than as a serious attempt to bring Elis to its knees.  Such action would make little sense coming on the heels of a major invasion by Pausanias during the previous year, which had seen the Spartans establish fortified posts for a sort of Decelean War strategy after having been beaten in an initial encounter.  On the other hand, a show of force is plausible for a first campaign, especially if the Spartans were still too exhausted by the long Peloponnesian War to relish a full scale struggle with a first-class hoplite power such as Elis, and hoped that a threat would be sufficient to achieve their ends.[12]  War in earnest seems more likely after Elis’ attempt to organize an anti-Spartan coalition.

(d) The participation of the Spartan allies.  Xenophon’s specific emphasis on the participation of all Sparta’s allies (except Corinth and Boeotia) in Agis’ second campaign (3.2.35) implies their absence in the first campaign.  If, however, Pausanias had brought in allies and had nonetheless been defeated the previous year (Diod. 14.17), Agis would have been unlikely to leave them behind.  But if Agis’ first campaign opened the war and constituted more a show of force than an actual attack, the inclusion of large allied contingents would not have been vital.

(e) Elean diplomacy.  According to Xenophon (3.2.24) the Eleans attempted to organize an anti-Spartan coalition after Agis’ abortive first invasion.  This would be very strange timing if Pausanias had already invaded the previous year, ravaged the country thoroughly, been defeated outside the city walls, and then established fortified bases for a protracted war: why would the Eleans have waited another year and a half to send out their ambassadors?  As we have pointed out, it is much more plausible that Agis’ ‘warning campaign’ began the war; when Elis called Sparta’s bluff by raising the diplomatic stakes, Sparta was forced to go to war in earnest.

(f) The choice of Spartan commander.  The Eleans’ insult of Agis had provided one of the main pretexts for the war (Xen. 3.2.22, Diod. 14.17.4), and he avenged this insult during his first full invasion (Xen. 3.2.26).  Agis, rather than Pausanias, would have been the natural choice to command the first invasion of Elis, and it was probably only his death soon after the second invasion that caused Pausanias to lead the third.

(g) The attempted pro-Spartan coup.  If the Eleans had, more or less, the better of the first year of the war (against Pausanias) and had ‘frightened off the Spartans’ during the second year (as any Elean would have viewed Agis’ abortive first invasion), it seems implausible that they would have nearly fallen victim to a poorly-organized pro-Spartan coup at the beginning of the third year (Xen. 3.2.27-29), especially if the 1,000 Aetolian mercenaries were still at their disposal.

Even if we accept these arguments and assume that Pausanias’ campaign followed that of Agis, we still need to place Pausanias’ invasion within the context of Xenophon’s narrative.  A likely possibility is not difficult to find.  According to Xenophon, Elis sought peace in the summer following Agis’ second invasion, but Sparta found the Elean terms unacceptable and “compelled” (ἠνάγκασεν, 3.2.31). Elis to make peace on Sparta’s own terms instead.  We might ordinarily assume that such compulsion referred merely to further threats, but we are required to place a campaign by Pausanias around this time; and the notion that Xenophon chose to mask with euphemism a full invasion of Elis led by a Spartan king under the vague term “compelled” is not at all at odds with what we know of Xenophon’s often obscure style.[13]  Xenophon is guilty either of a severe distortion of the facts or of the graver offense of omitting all reference to the third Spartan invasion of Elis.

The likely reason for Xenophon’s apparent reticence is not difficult to guess: a full account of this year of the war might have shown Xenophon’s beloved Sparta to be both oppressive and incompetent.  According to Xenophon, Sparta’s ‘compulsion’ of Elis followed rejection of an Elean offer of surrender that met virtually all Sparta’s demands.  But Sparta exacted the last ounce of flesh by requiring that Elis surrender Epeum, a strip of territory that she had bought honestly for a price of thirty talents (Xen. 3.2.30f).  When Pausanias invaded Elis to enforce Sparta’s demands, his army of 4,000 Lacedaemonians and many allies was surprised and defeated outside the city walls by the Eleans and their 1,000 newly-hired Aetolian mercenaries (Diod. 14.17.6-10).  Xenophon may have feared that a complete account might leave the reader to conclude that Agis’ two invasions and Sparta’s harsh negotiating tactics had achieved little beyond giving the Eleans time to build up their walls and hire mercenaries; the eventual (and inevitable) Elean surrender would not have offset this impression.  Xenophon’s other omissions and distortions in service of his pro-Spartan sentiments are similar in nature.[14]  There is no doubt that Xenophon’s version of the Elean War is much kinder to Sparta than Diodorus’ or any melding of the two.

Diodorus’ omission of the first two years of the war is even easier to understand, for his history generally retains only a portion of the historical material presumably contained in his sources.  He includes the downfall of the Thirty at Athens (14.33.5f) but not the final reannexation of Eleusis (Xen. 2.4.43).  He fails to mention the trial and exile of King Pausanias after the death of Lysander at Haliartus (Diod. 14.81.3; cf. Xen. 3.5.25).  He completely omits any discussion of the disputed succession of Agesilaus or the conspiracy of Cinadon, though it is possible that his source (not being privy to Xenophon’s Spartan information) was equally ignorant of these last events.  It therefore seems not at all surprising that Diodorus would have left out the first two Spartan campaigns of the Elean War, which were marked by no battles and failed to accomplish much of note.

In fact the only improbability in our hypothesis is that Xenophon and Diodorus merely chanced to produce partial accounts of the war that contain virtually no overlap, lending a peculiar patchwork quality to our reconstruction.  Normally this might be a significant argument against the case presented, but an exactly parallel situation exists in the way Xenophon and Diodorus describe Sparta’s campaigns in Asia during this same period.  Xenophon fails to mention either Tissaphernes’ attack on Cyme (which precipitated Spartan intervention in Asia) or Thibron’s first campaign, both of which are described in detail by Diodorus (14.35.6-36.3).[15]  Diodorus then proceeds to omit Thibron’s second campaign, which Xenophon discusses at 3.1.6f.  Both include Dercyllidas’ campaigns, although Diodorus omits his eight-month siege of Atarneus (Xen. 3.1.8-3.2.20; Diod. 14.38.2f, 6f, 39.5f).

The Asian campaigns of Agesilaus are even more poorly recorded: here Xenophon’s omissions are underlined by the survival of large sections of the Hellenica Oxyrhynchia for these years.  While Diodorus passes over Agesilaus’ initial negotiations with Tissaphernes and the three-month truce he arranged (Xen. 3.4.5f), Xenophon matches this by leaving out all mention of Agesilaus’ post-Sardian campaign, as well as his campaign in Mysia (Hell. Oxy. 12f, 21f; Diod. 14.80). Diodorus, for his part, proceeds to omit Agesilaus’ campaigns in Phrygia and Paphlagonia and his negotiations with Pharnabazus (Xen. 4.1). On Agesilaus’ return march to Sparta, Diodorus describes his battle against the Thracians but not his skirmishes against the Thessalians, while Xenophon does exactly the reverse (Xen. 4.3.1-9, Diod. 14.83.3; Plut. Ages. 16 lists both).

As these examples indicate, the selective method of both Xenophon and Diodorus entails the omission of important material, and often, as it happens, results in accounts that complement each other exactly.  This is very likely the cause of our disparate versions of the Elean War.

According to our reconstruction, therefore, the Elean War probably lasted three campaigning seasons, with Agis’ invasions coming in the first two summers and Pausanias’ in the third.  Elis’ surrender probably came during the third winter: although she had held her own military, the Spartans seemed determined to ravage her territory indefinitely; exhaustion and the costs of the war steadily mounted, and the complete hopelessness of her long-term strategic position became apparent.  By the time of the Elean surrender, Agis had probably been dead for over a year and had been succeeded by Agesilaus.  Xenophon tells us that Agis died shortly after dedicating a share of his booty at Delphi; although he mentions this after describing the end of the war, he is probably referring to the booty that Agis himself had captured during the second invasion, and is therefore violating strict chronological sequence in order to maintain the continuity of his topical narrative.[16]  As suggested above, Agis’ death was presumably the reason that King Pausanias was chosen to lead the third invasion.

II

Assuming that our reconstruction of the events of the Elean War is correct, we must still attempt to place the war within the overall chronology of the period.  Diodorus lists the war under the years 402/1, but this is undoubtedly due to his notoriously muddled attempt to fit the topical histories of his sources into the Procrustean bed of his own chronological scheme, and counts for little.[17]  Fortunately there are more reliable indications of the date of the war.  Xenophon (3.2.1) tells us that the Elean War took place at the same time as the campaigns of Dercyllidas in Asia.  Although the value of this synchronism has been sharply attacked,[18] and obviously ought not to be taken to mean that the two wars began and ended simultaneously, we should nonetheless understand Xenophon to mean that there was a sizable amount of overlap between the two; and we should assume, without contrary evidence, that he is correct.  Xenophon was himself serving as a commander in Dercyllidas’ Spartan-led expeditionary force and cannot have remained wholly ignorant of Sparta’s military doings at home, either during this time or later, when he composed his history while residing in the Peloponnese.  Since Dercyllidas arrived in Asia during summer 399 and campaigned there until ca summer 397,[19] the synchronism narrows the possibilities considerably: the three-year Elean War probably began in summer 401, 400, 399, or 398.

This range of possibility can be limited further by applying our information on the regnal dates of King Agesilaus.  If Agis died soon after this campaign in the second summer of the war, this will determine the official date of Agesilaus’ accession.  According to Plutarch (Ages. 40.2) Agesilaus reigned for 41 years.  Now, from Plutarch and from Xenophon’s Agesilaus we learn that Agesilaus went out to Egypt as a mercenary commander in 361 and died there either during winter 359/8 or, more likely, 360/359, depending on how much time we assign to the various Egyptian campaigns and how seriously we regard the various analyses of the Babylonian records.[20]  Plutarch further informs us that Agesilaus reigned for more than thirty years before the battle of Leuctra (summer 371).  Since Plutarch’s information is probably derived from an annalistic source, we may assume that all his figures refer to political years.  Still, we have no means of determining whether Agesilaus’ official accession occurred before or after the turn of the Spartan political year, nor do we know whether Leuctra itself occurred in 372/1 or 371/0.  Given this uncertainty, the best we can conclude (if we credit Plutarch’s figures) is that Agis may have died as late as early summer 400.  This narrows the possible starting date of the war to summer 401, with summer 400 remaining a possibility if we regard Plutarch’s phrase “more than thirty years” as rhetorical exaggeration.[21]

In fact the choice of 401-399/8 for the Elean War accords well with the known date of the Athenian annexation of Eleusis, which fell in the Athenian political year 401/0 (Arist. Ath. Pol. 40.4).  Sparta’s strength was committed to the Peloponnese in summer 400, during Agis’ second Elean campaign, and Athens might have viewed this as an opportune time to move against Eleusis.  Sparta’s lack of response to the overthrow of her Athenian settlement of 403 is puzzling unless we posit some such Spartan military preoccupation.  Further, the absence from Athens of a sizable number of the conservative members of her hoplite and cavalry classes (serving with Agis’ army in the Peloponnese) might have tipped the political balance in the ekklesia, just as Cimon’s expedition to the Peloponnese seems to have made the reforms of Ephialtes possible a half-century earlier.[22]

By contrast, the alternative of 400-398/7 for the war would accord poorly with the events of Eleusis: Sparta would not have been fully committed to conflict with Elis by summer 400, nor would a large number of Athenian hoplites have been absent from the city then.  Hence we are left with 401-399/8 as the only plausible date for the war.[23]

III

While the resolution of such bothersome and venerable puzzles is of some interest for its own sake, our ultimate aim is historical analysis; it is time to ask what of substance we can learn from the reconstruction offered above.

First, we should note that, according to Xenophon, Spartan hostility and anger towards Elis was long-standing and severe; given Elis’ behavior, we have no reason to doubt this.[24]  Yet it seems that Sparta waited until summer 401 to translate her feelings into military action.  And even as late as the outbreak of the war, King Agis’ first campaign probably amounted only to a show of force, perhaps aimed at securing Spartan readmission to the approaching Olympic games of 400, and was not intended to escalate into full-scale war.  This is a strong indication of Sparta’s own war-weariness following decades of brutal struggle with Athens, and of her reluctance to commit herself to a war with a first-class hoplite power.  Sparta may have had few qualms about sending a Spartiate commander or two to lead a few thousand freed helots and Arcadian mercenaries to victory or death in distant Ionia,[25] but a war against a tough Peloponnesian state, requiring the lengthy deployment of significant Lacedaemonian forces, was another matter entirely.  The pattern of the Elean War and its starting date are a testament to Spartan caution.

The aftermath of the war may also provide us a glimpse of internal Spartan policy: in particular, the policies of Sparta’s kings.  A certain school of modern scholarship sees the Sparta of this era as dominated by the struggles of two (or three) contending Spartan political ‘parties’ centering on the kings and divided along ‘imperialist’ and ‘anti-imperialist’ lines.[26]  Pausanias is viewed as the leader of the ‘anti-imperialist’ faction, while the Spartan war with Elis (as well as the Spartan expulsion of the Messenians settled at Naupactus immediately after the war) are seen as clear moves by the ‘imperialist’ faction.[27]  Yet, as we have seen, it was actually Pausanias who led the final and decisive campaign of the Elean War—the only campaign that involved direct fighting.  Furthermore, there is every reason to believe that it was again King Pausanias who actually captured Naupactus and expelled the Messenians.[28]  Such points should cause us to question an over-simplified imperialist/anti-imperialist paradigm of Spartan policy-making.

Our reconstruction may also clear up one issue in the disputed succession following the death of King Agis, whose son Leotychides was declared illegitimate and displaced in his claim by Agis’ younger brother Agesilaus (Xen. 3.3.1-4; Plut. Ages. 3.1-4, Alc. 23.7f, Lys. 22.3-6). The story is an interesting one and naturally attracts the attention of our sources, who emphasize the important role played by Lysander in ensuring Agesilaus’ succession.  But there is no sign at all that King Pausanias was involved in the dispute.  Such a lack of involvement would be surprising, for Pausanias clearly had a strong interest in influencing the choice of his co-regent, and as a king of a long and generally successful reign, he would have possessed considerable auctoritas and might have had a dominant influence on the decision.  Obviously such an argument from silence is far from conclusive—especially when Xenophon is our key source—but it is tempting to suggest that Pausanias had already departed with his army before the official period of mourning for Agis ended and the issue of the disputed succession arose.  Perhaps this may explain how Lysander managed to obtain the kingship for his protégé Agesilaus over the express wishes of the dying Agis, and may further explain why Cinadon chose to organize his conspiracy to destroy the homoioi when he did: a large portion of the Spartiate manpower was in Elis with Pausanias, separated from Sparta by almost a hundred miles of rugged terrain.

There is, finally, a certain negative significance in our reconstruction of a plausible chronology that incorporates the accounts of both Xenophon and Diodorus: failing this result, we should have been forced to admit that one (or both) of our leading sources for this period was guilty of fabricating a convincing and detailed account of an important crisis for no obvious reason whatever; all credibility in that source would be greatly compromised.[29]  But in our analysis we have merely found further examples of the sins of omission characteristic of both Xenophon and Diodorus; our view of the reliability of each is scarcely altered.  This is a negative conclusion, but an important one.

Appendix: Suggested Chronology for the Elean War

Summer 401: Spartans under Agis launch ‘warning invasion’ of Elis, aimed at coercing her into admitting Spartans to the Olympic games of 400 and fulfilling other Spartan demands (Xen. 3.2.23f)

Winter 401/0: Elis reacts by calling Sparta’s bluff and attempting to create a united front of anti-Spartan states (Xen. 3.2.24)

Early summer 400: Agis leads a second, much more determined, invasion of Elis, this time including contingents from Athens and all the other Spartan allies except Corinth and Boeotia; Elean territory is ravaged, including the outskirts of the city, and a pro-Spartan coup narrowly misses succeeding; Agis withdraws his army, leaving a garrison under Lysippus (Xen. 3.2.25-29).

Early summer 400 (in Athenian archon year 401/0): Democratic forces at Athens use the opportunity of Sparta’s preoccupation in the Peloponnese and the absence of large numbers of the conservative members of the Athenian hoplite and cavalry classes (serving in Elis with Agis) to overturn Pausanias’ Athenian settlement of 403 and reincorporate Eleusis (Arist. Ath. Pol. 40.4, Xen. 2.4.43).

Summer 400: Olympic games held.  After returning to Sparta and disbanding his army, Agis travels to Delphi to donate the spoils of his second campaign, then falls ill and dies soon after (Xen. 3.3.1).

Late summer 400 to early summer 399: Spartans under Lysippus continue ravaging Elean territory (Xen. 3.2.30); meanwhile the Eleans fortify their city against a future Spartan assault.

Early summer 399: Elis seeks peace, but refuse to accept Sparta’s harsh terms (Xen. 3.2.30f); fearful of a new Spartan invasion, Elis hires 1,000 elite Aetolian mercenaries (Diod. 14.17.9)

Summer 399: Pausanias leads a third invasion to compel Elis to accede to Sparta’s harsh demands; after ravaging Elean territory, he is defeated in a skirmish outside the city walls, but maintains Spartan pressure and winters with his army at Dyme, on Elean soil (Diod. 14.17.4-12).

Summer 399: After the official Spartan period of mourning for Agis, Agesilaus comes to the throne in a disputed succession; soon afterward he discovers and crushes the conspiracy of Cinadon (Xen. 3.3.1-11).

Early 398: Recognizing that Sparta will not compromise and abandon the war, Elis surrenders (Xen. 3.2.31, Diod. 14.34.1f); Pausanias leads his Spartan forces from Dyme to Naupactus and expels the Messenians settled there (Diod. 14.34.1-3).

References

[1] Cf. W. Judeich, Kleinasiatische Studien (Marburg 1892) 182f; G.E. Underhill, “The Chronology of the Elean War,” CR 7 (1893) 156-58; E. Meyer, Theopomps Hellenika (Halle 1909) 114-16; J. Hatzfeld, “Notes sur la chronologie des Helleniques,” REA 35 (1933) 395-409; and D.H. Kelly, Sources and Interpretations of Spartan History in the Reigns of Agesilaus II, Archidamus III and Agis III (diss. Cambridge 1975 [hereafter ‘Kelly’]) 21-41.  The inveterate notoriety and difficulty of the issue is summed up in Underhill’s opening sentence: “A complete solution of all the difficulties involved in his problem, which has occupied the attention of commentators and historians for more than a century, is almost out of the question: we have to content ourselves with weighing one set of probabilities against the other.”

[2] Xen. Hell. 3.2.21-3.3.1, Paus. 3.8.3-5; Diod. 14.17.4-12, 34.1.  Though condensed, Pausanias’ account of the war is virtually identical with Xenophon’s both in material and in order of presentation, the only major difference being his statement that the war lasted three years, whereas many modern scholars interpret Xenophon’s phrase περιιόντι τῷ ἐνιαυτῷ to imply that the war lasted only two years (cf. n.3 infra).  Pausanias’ other differences from Xenophon involve minor details, and are probably best explained as errors due to Pausanias’ faulty memory or his intermediate source, although Kelly (21) sees in them the traces of an additional tradition.

[3] Xenophon’s actual phrase is “as the year was coming round” (περιιόντι τῷ ἐνιαυτῷ).  Whether this should be interpreted to mean that Agis’ second campaign took place in the same season as the first had been an important point of contention: Judeich (supra n.1) argues that it should, and G.L. Cawkwell, ed., Xenophon: A History of My Times (Harmondsworth/New York 1979) 155, appears to concur, letting stand Warner’s translation of the phrase “in the same year.” The Loeb version by G.L. Brown (London/Cambridge [Mass.] 1961) has “in the course of the year.” The most natural meaning of the Greek would seem to be “as the year was changing” or “at the start of the new year,” as argued by Underhill (supra n.1) 157 and Kelly 25 n.40; and this is clearly the sense in which Pausanias or his intermediate source took it (thus his figure of three years for the war; cf. supra n.2).  In fact the main reason for confining Xenophon’s account of the war to two years is to reconcile it with Diodorus, who chose to distribute the war into two political years; but in view of Diodorus’ almost random chronological reckoning, this is a dubious advantage.

The pattern of events themselves also strongly supports giving Agis two summers of campaigning.  It is possible to squeeze a Spartan mobilization, a short campaign in Elis, a Spartan demobilization, the dispatch of Elean embassies to various anti-Spartan states, a second Spartan mobilization (this time including nearly all of Sparta’s allies, notably the Athenians), and a second Elean campaign of some length into a single campaigning season, and still leave “the rest of the summer” for the ravages of Lysippus (Xen. 3.2.23-30); but such a reconstruction is forced and implausible.  It is far more natural to attribute the two campaigns to separate summers, with diplomatic exchanges occurring during the intervening winter.

[4] G.L. Cawkwell, “Agesilaos and Sparta,” CG N.S. 26 (1976) 75 n.48, argues that Xenophon actually means that only the acropolis was unwalled, rather than the city as a whole; this is primarily an unnatural attempt to reconcile Xenophon with Diodorus and Pausanias (see text infra), and its motive disappears if a simpler hypothesis will serve.  Moreover, the logic of the argument seems flawed: Xenophon is using the absence of walls to prove that Elis was vulnerable to capture, and if the city walls had been as strong as Diodorus implies, an unwalled acropolis would not have been cited as proof of vulnerability.

[5] Cf., among others, Judeich 182 and Meyer (both supra n.1); Cawkwell (supra n.4) 76 n.51.

[6] It is not surprising that Xenophon’s Hellenica demonstrates a wealth of inside information about Spartan society and politics, for he had many Spartan friends, notably King Agesilaus, and spent the latter half of his life in the Spartan-controlled Peloponnese.  Cf. Cawkwell (supra n.3) 12-15.

[7] So Kelly 29; cf. I.A.F. Bruce, An Historical Commentary on the Hellenica Oxyrhynchia (Cambridge 1967) 20-22.

[8] Assumed by Kelly (30), without elaboration.

[9] Even if we leave aside the question whether Xenophon is referring to the city or to the acropolis (cf. supra n.4), the statement remains that the Spartans believed that the city would be easy to capture.  This would seem absurd if a full Spartan army under Pausanias had battered its head against the city a year or two before and finally given up because Elis was too strong to besiege.

[10] Cf., for example, the rapid Athenian fortification of Pylos (Thuc. 4.4f).

[11] The pay for 1,000 mercenaries at 3 obols per day (perhaps more for elite troops) would have come to at least 2.5T of silver per month, a considerable expense for a largely agrarian Peloponnesian state.

[12] We should note that Archidamus had adopted a similar strategy at the beginning of the Peloponnesian War (Thuc. 2.18).

[13] Cf. Cawkwell (supra n.3) 15ff, esp. 33f.

[14] Cf. Cawkwell (supra n.3) 17, 20, 35-38, 40-43.

[15] Xen. 3.1.5 does contain a vague sentence that could be taken to summarize these events; if so, this would parallel the manner in which his vague reference to Spartan ‘compulsion’ may summarize Pausanias’ invasion of Elis (supra 34f).

[16] Xenophon often digresses in just this way to describe the eventual outcome of an event before returning to chronological sequence: cf. the death of the exiled Pausanias (3.5.25).  On our hypothesis Xenophon here digresses to sum up the end of the Elean War before returning to Agis’ activities following the end of the second Elean campaign.  Otherwise, we would expect Agis to have dedicated his booty from the invasion immediately, rather than wait a year or ore until the end of the war.  As I argue elsewhere, similar digressions on the part of Thucydides have been responsible for much confusion in the chronology of the Pentecontaetia: cf. R.K. Unz, “The Chronology of the Pentekontaetia,” CQ (forthcoming).

[17] For example, Diod. 14.32 places the overthrow of the Thirty at Athens (403) just after the return of the Ten Thousand (399), and both under the political year 401/0.  His numerous other chronological blunders are almost as severe.

[18] For example, by Cawkwell (supra n.3) 154 and Kelly 24-26, whose efforts at chronological reconstruction are hindered by their refusal to consider the possibility that Agis may have died before the end of the Elean War, and that Xenophon’s account of the end of the war may represent a chronological digression (supra n.16).

[19] The year of Dercyllidas’ arrival in Asia is solidly based and is accepted by nearly all the scholarly literature.  For discussion cf. K.J. Beloch, Griechische Geschichte III.2 (Berlin 1922) 211f.

[20] Cf. Kelly 33-35.

[21] Note that Plutarch’s full claim is that Agesilaus “had been regarded as the king and leader of almost the whole of Hellas” down to Leuctra, which is clearly false.  Kelly (32 n.62) speculates that Plutarch’s error may follow from his own uncertainty as to the exact date of Leuctra.

[22] Cf. J.R. Cole, “Cimon’s Dismissal, Ephialtes’ Revolution and the Peloponnesian War,” GRBS 15 (1974) 369-85.

[23] Admittedly these dates would require that the Elean War was interrupted by the Olympic games of 400, and that this interruption escaped the interest of our sources, despite the fact that Sparta’s disqualification from the games was a principle cause for the conflict.  Underhill (supra n.1) 156 and Hatzfeld (supra n.1) 397 both doubt the likelihood of this.  But arguments from silence are extremely weak when Diodorus or Xenophon are in question, and the interruption of wars or campaigns by regularly scheduled truces for athletic competitions are almost enver mentioned by even our most thorough sources.  Indeed, in view of the reconstruction offered above, one might speculate that it was the approaching Olympic truce of summer 400 that persuaded Agis to depart Elis despite the military successes that had placed victory within his grasp.

[24] Kelly (22f) argues that Elis had reverted to the Spartan alliance “at the eleventh hour before the final defeat of Athens” in the Peloponnesian War.  A priori this does not seem implausible, but the evidence Kelly cites does not counter the implication in Xenophon of unbroken Spartan-Elean hostility going back to 420.  Furthermore, if Elis had returned to the Spartan fold in hope of assuaging Spartan anger, she would presumably have readmitted Sparta to the Olympic games at the same time for the same reason; yet all our sources agree that this was not the case at the start of the war.

[25] Xen. 3.1.4, 4.2; the “allied troops” are presumably de facto mercenaries.  Spartans obviously would have considered helots with military training as expendable an expeditionary force as could be imagined.  It should be noted that Lysander persuaded Agesilaus to lead an expedition to Asia Minor in summer 396, a date firmly established.  Lysander had long been hoping to find a way to regain his old command in Asia, and Agesilaus was heavily indebted to him politically for the succession (Xen. 3.31-3, 4.3); allowing Agesilaus several years to establish his personal power and influence, we would expect Lysander to have been able to obtain an Asian command for himself within a very few years of Agesilaus’ accession.  An expedition prepared in winter 397/6 would somewhat strengthen the case for an accession in summer 400 (proposed above) as compared with an earlier year.

[26] Cf. C.D. Hamilton, “Spartan Politics and Policy, 405-401 B.C.,” AJP 91 (1970) 294-314, and Sparta‘s Bitter Victories (Ithaca 1979).

[27] Cf. Hamilton (supra n.26) 120f.

[28] In Diodorus’ account (14.17.4-12) we are told that Pausanias wintered at Dyme, just across the gulf from Naupactus, after his Elean campaign.  When the narrative resumes (14.34.1-3) we are told of the Elean surrender and the Spartan attack on Naupactus that directly followed.  The conclusion seems inescapable that it was Pausanias and his army who led that attack.

[29] Oddly, scholars who accept the truth of the antecedent fail to recognize the gravity of the consequent.  Yet if (for example) Diodorus’ account of the Elean War were complete fiction, despite its precise detail, lack of rhetorical inflation, and even tone (all of which strongly point to the Oxyrhynchus historian as the ultimate source), then Diodorus’ factual statements must be assigned as little weight as his chronological pretensions.  The implications of this conclusion would affect much of our picture of this entire era.

The Chronology of the Pentekontaetia

Classical Quarterly • May 1986 • 10,800 Words

The true chronology of the Pentekontaetia is difficult, perhaps impossible, to establish conclusively.  The events between 477 and 432 were of the greatest possible importance: these years saw the creation of the Athenian empire and a precipitious decline in Spartiate manpower,[1] drastic political realignments involving nearly every state in Hellas, and military activity often rising to a crescendo scarcely matched at the peak of the Peloponnesian War.  Indeed, one might strongly argue that the fifty-odd years prior to 432 had a substantially greater historical significance that the three decades of war which followed, as well as a greater degree of political and military drama.  But the Pentekontaetia lacks the unifying historical narrative of a Herodotus, let alone a Thucydides, and this one deficiency has caused events of the utmost significance  to fade into near obscurity.  There is scarcely a single political or military occurrence during the Fifty Years which can be dated to closer than a year or two, and in some cases, proposed dates have ranged over the better part of a decade.  With no firm chronological framework, historical analysis degenerates into guesswork and speculation, especially if even the relative order of events is in dispute.  In cognizance of this need, this paper seeks to present portions of a new chronology of the Pentekontaetia, one differing in several very significant features from those previously suggested.[2]  The severely limited nature of the available evidence precludes any hope of firmly establishing the validity of any one dating scheme over its rivals; the best we can hope for is plausibility.

Weighing relative plausibility becomes particularly significant when analysing and comparing our sources.  Thucydides’ account of the Pentekontaetia is very brief and sketchy, but it is the best which we possess none the less, having been written by a sober, critical, and near contemporaneous historian.  Therefore, we will begin with the working hypothesis that its content (as distinct from our own overlaid interpretation) is essentially correct, with the existence of errors and fortuitous textual corruptions to be accepted only as a last resort.  Our subsidiary sources will be judged on a case-by-case and category-by-category basis; for example, Diodorus’ accounts of events will be held to carry weight, the particular archon year which he chose to place them under, virtually none at all.[3]

I. Naxos

The first major difficulty faced by most chronologies is the dating of the Naxian revolt.  Thucydides tells us of Naxos’ revolt and subjugation (and follows this by a long digression into Athens’ increasingly harsh treatment of her allies).  Next we are told of Kimon’s great victory over a powerful Persian fleet at the Eurymedon.  Some time later come the Thasian revolt and the Athenian disaster at Drabeskos, during an attempt to colonise Ennea Hodoi, near Amphipolis.  Next, we learn that the besieged Thasians appealed for and were secretly promised Spartan support, but that this support was prevented by the occurrence of a great earthquake and helot revolt at Sparta, leaving Thasos to surrender in the third year of its siege.  Finally, Thucydides tells us that the Spartans requested and received an Athenian contingent under Kimon to assist them in their war against the resisting helots, but soon dismissed it out of fear, causing the angry Athenians to break off their Spartan alliance and form an anti-Spartan coalition with Argos and Thessaly.[4]  All major modern chronologies accept this sequence of events.[5]

Our problems arise from a later reference in Thucydides.  At 1.137 we are told that Themistokles, while fleeing to Persia, passed the Athenian fleet besieging Naxos.  Then, upon his arrival at Ephesos (and once he had received money from his friends in Greece with which to reward his obliging sea-captain), he travelled inland and sent a letter to King Artaxerxes, ‘who had just come to the throne’ (νεωστὶ βασιλεύοντα); and Babylonian records prove that Artaxerxes succeeded his father Xerxes in late December 465.[6]  Thucydides’ account implies only a very short interval between Themistokles’ arrival in Ephesos and his attempt to contact Artaxerxes, and such a conclusion is strongly supported by the circumstances: Themistokles was fleeing an Athenian death-sentence, and every week he delayed in Athenian-controlled Ephesos increased the likelihood of his detection and capture.  The sea-captain, too, would not have been content to remain with his fugitive passenger for any great length of time, thereby putting his own neck in the noose; his desire would have been to receive his gold and clear out as soon as possible, just like Themistokles.  A priori, we would believe that Themistokles’ stay in Ephesos lasted no more than a month or two at most; five or six months seems highly unlikely, and the ten or twenty months (or longer) demanded by some chronologies, downright impossible.[7]  Now if we assume that Themistokles sent his letter as early as January 464 (and allow several weeks for his prior journey inland, his meetings with the local Persian officials, etc.), he still cannot have passed Naxos on his voyage much earlier than September or October 465 (with this time of year possibly accounting for the serious storm encountered en route).  Unless we are willing to convict Thucydides of a factual error (or such a gross—and illogical—misrepresentation of the facts that it amounts to the same thing), this conclusively proves that the Naxos revolt occurred in (or at any rate extended into) late summer 465.

But a date of 465 for the Naxian revolt creates severe strains for the remainder of the chronological sequence outlined above.  First, although the dating of the earthquake and helot rebellion at Sparta is not completely certain, the task of reconciling the available possibilities with a Naxian revolt in 465 ranges from the implausible to the impossible.  Pausanias dates the earthquake and uprising to the year of the 79th Olympiad, when Archimedes was Archon at Athens, namely 464/3; and Diodorus (for what it is worth) dates the closely associated Thasian revolt to that same year, although he spells the name of the Athenian Archon as Archedemides.[8]  Plutarch seems to oppose this date, saying that the earthquake occurred in the fourth year of the reign of King Archidamos, which would seemingly place it in 466/5 since Archidamos probably came to the throne in 469/8; but this latter date is far from certain, and even if we accept it, the ambiguity of ancient dating practices allows us to reconcile Plutarch’s statement with the unambiguous date given by Pausanias.[9]

If we accept this 464/3 dating of the earthquake (let alone the less likely earlier dates), the events of the preceding two years are forced into implausible compression.  As mentioned above, Thucydides’ account of these years seemingly places the battle of the Eurymedon after the Naxian revolt, the Thasian revolt some time after Eurymedon, and the earthquake at Sparta after the first few battles of the Thasian revolt. If (as argued above) the Naxian revolt was still in full swing during Autumn 465, then the Eurymedon campaign could not have taken place during that year; to believe otherwise would force us to conclude either that it occurred as a lightning ‘end run’ to Pisidia during the last few weeks of good sailing weather in 465 (which seems highly unlikely),[10] or that Kimon sailed out to the Eurymedon while powerful Naxos was still holding out in his rear (which seems equally unlikely, especially since such a reconstruction seemingly contradicts Thucydides).[11]  But if we place the Eurymedon in 464, then we are forced to believe that the battle and the campaign which preceded it, along with the Thasian revolt and the earthquake at Sparta, all took place within the thirteen or fourteen months between the beginning of good sailing weather in 464 and the end of the 464/3 Athenian political year.  This is possible, but rather unpalatable.

These difficulties are compounded when we consider the personal exploits of Kimon.  Kimon is known to have been the Athenian commander both at the Eurymedon and at Thasos.  Furthermore, we are also told by Thucydides that the siege of Thasos lasted into its third year, and according to Plutarch, Kimon remained the commander until the end, being the one who captured the city.[12]  Plutarch also tells us that upon returning to Athens Kimon was put on trial for his refusal to invade Macedonia in the aftermath of the Thasian victory, and managed only with difficulty to secure his acquittal.[13]  Now unless we assume that the Eurymedon campaign and the outbreak of the Thasian revolt occurred during the same summer (which seems very unlikely, and is suggested by no major chronology), Thasos’ surrender cannot have come any earlier than 461.  Since the political reforms of Ephialtes at Athens are dated to the archon year 462/1,[14] and were close in time to Kimon’s return from assisting Sparta at Mount Ithome,[15] we are again forced to accept an almost impossible compression of events, namely that the capitulation of Thasos, Kimon’s return to Athens and trial, Sparta’s request for Athenian aid, Kimon’s expedition to Sparta, the political reforms of Ephialtes, and the Spartan dismissal of the Athenian force all took place within the first six or seven months of 461.[16]

But the third and most compelling indication that something is wrong, very seriously wrong, with the interpretative framework of Thucydides’ Pentekontaetia which we have built up above comes from the dating of the Athenian disaster at Drabeskos.  Thucydides says that Drabeskos took place twenty-eight years before the successful founding of Amphipolis near the same site, and it seems clear that he has exact archon years in mind.[17]  A scholiast to Aeschines, apparently following the Atthis, places the foundation of Amphipolis in the archonship of Euthymenes, namely 437/6, and (for what it is worth) this is supported by Diodorus;[18] this dating places Drabeskos in the archon year 465/4, and indeed this date (or one in the two preceding archon years) is supported by the scholion.[19]  But Thucydides places Drabeskos at around the same time as the initial Athenian victories over the rebellious Thasians and the investment of the city of Thasos (which makes excellent sense).[20]  This seemingly forces us into the impossible position of believing that a sequence of events including the Eurymedon campaign, the Athenian-Thasian dispute over Thrakian markets, the Thasian revolt, and the first few battles of the Thasian war all fell within the three or four months of good sailing weather preceding the mid-June end of the 465/4 Athenian political year.  Our desperate attempts to construct a plausible chronology seem to have been crushed between the rock of a Naxian revolt still continuing in Autumn 465 and the hard place of a Drabeskian disaster falling during the 465/4 Athenian political year;[21] the time required for the Eurymedon campaign appears to have been squeezed out of existence.

Yet perhaps this very difficulty may serve as a signpost to the truth.  Perhaps the battle of the Eurymedon preceded rather than followed the revolt of Naxos, and so should not be jammed into the few short months between Naxos and Drabeskos.  At first sight, this suggestion might seem outrageous, for it apparently violates the chronology presented by Thucydides, our basic source; but upon re-examination, and using a slightly different understanding of Thucydides’ meaning, this may not be the case.

Thucydides mentions the revolt of Naxos in the context of a passage describing a series of increasingly harsh and oppressive Athenian actions towards the individual cities under her power.[22]  First the Athenians take Eion, occupied by the Persians.  After that, Skyros is attacked, an island notorious for its piracy.  The next victim is Karystos, apparently despised by the other Greeks for its Medising during Xerxes’ invasion.  Finally, the Athenians attack Naxos, an ally, simply because it wishes to leave the alliance.  Thucydides is describing an evolution in Athenian policy as much as he is describing a year-by-year sequence of campaigns.  At first, the Athenians attack only cities held by the Persians; next, they extend their attacks to cities which are lawless and troublesome, such as Skyros; later, they turn on cities such as Karystos, which simply have bad reputations, forcing them to join the League; finally, in a watershed act, they violate the spirit of the Delian charter and subjugate one of their own allies, Naxos, for seeking to leave the League.  Thucydides follows his mention of Naxos by saying that its subjugation was followed by that of all the remaining allies, in the order which circumstances dictated.  He expands on this general statement, devoting a full paragraph to the reasons for these later revolts and the corresponding Athenian victories, which, following inevitably, step by step transformed a Delian League of free equals into an Athenian empire of cowed subordinates.  This lengthy and general digression into the later decades of the Fifty Years should serve to emphasize the topical rather than strictly chronological nature of this segment of Thucydides’ Pentekontaetia, and suggests the very real possibility that Thucydides may be ‘anticipating’ the Naxian revolt as well, violating the strict sequence of events in order to emphasize a continuous process of League evolution.[23]  (In fact, if Thucydides had chanced to mention by name any of the later revolts which he vaguely alludes to, modern scholars might have fruitlessly worked to place a Samian or Mytilenean revolt in the early 460s).

If we tentatively accept the possibility that the Eurymedon may have preceded Naxos, then our entire picture of the period becomes clear; not only are the aforementioned chronological inconsistencies removed, but the sequence of events becomes much more plausible and easier to understand.  The Eurymedon campaign was fought against a very powerful Persian fleet numbering hundreds of ships,[24] probably the strongest naval effort of the Great King since Salamis and Mykale; it may have represented a long-prepared Persian counteroffensive aimed at reversing the results of the Persian Wars.  If so, then it would be very badly out of place during 464 or 463, the first few years of Artaxerxes’ reign, when Diodorus tells us (as we might expect) Artaxerxes was devoting all his efforts to reorganizing his empire and suppressing the unrest and minor revolts which had broken out after the murder of his father.  On the other hand, if we place it earlier, possibly at the beginning of the 465 campaigning season, we may speculate that its disastrous failure (over 200 ships lost) contributed to the political climate which led to Xerxes’ murder by Artabanes, one of his highest court officials.[25]

Similarly, Naxos’ decision to terminate its membership in the Delian League has been almost universally ascribed by modern scholars to its belief that the League was no longer necessary, that its burdensome naval contribution was no longer justified by the benefits of League protection against an ebbing Persian threat (this is clearly Thucydides’ implication).  Yet such a view makes absolutely no sense if Naxos’ secession came a few short months before the strongest Persian naval thrust in a decade and a half.  It would have taken the Persians considerable time to mobilize a fleet of several hundred Phoenician ships, and bring the force to Pisidia, together with a large land army—witness the years of preparation required for Xerxes’ invasion—and almost certainly during this time word of the massive preparations would have reached Greece.[26]  It would have been very strange indeed for Naxos to have chosen this moment of heightening tension to forfeit the powerful protection of a League fleet probably totaling 300 or more triremes.[27]  But on the other hand, once Kimon’s pre-emptive thrust to the Eurymedon had achieved brilliant success, and 200 Phoenician ships were captured or sunk, the Persian threat might have appeared destroyed for a generation.  In this context, a Naxian decision to forgo the now unnecessary protestion of the League makes perfect sense, and indeed might be expected.  This further strengthens the case for placing the Eurymedon soon before Naxos, in either 466, or (more likely) early 465.

II. Mount Ithome

The next important historical crux—the question of the length of the siege of Mount Ithome—is not really within the province of this paper; no new ideas will be presented.  But since the nature of the crux and the most likely means of its resolution are closely connected to the ideas of this paper, a short summary of the issues involved is warranted.

In 1.102, Thucydides mentions Kimon’s ill-fated expedition to assist the Spartans against the rebels at Mount Ithome, and the Spartan dismissal of the Athenian force.  We are told that this leads to a rupture of the alliance, and the formation of an opposing Athenian alliance with Argos and Thessaly, both hostile to Sparta.  In the following chapter, Thucydides tells us that the Messenians at Mount Ithome, unable to prolong their resistance, finally surrendered under terms in the tenth year of the rebellion and were promptly relocated by the Athenians to Naupaktos, which Athens had recently captured from the Ozolian Lokrians.  After this, we are told of the Megarian-Korinthian border dispute, and Megara’s consequent adherence to the Delian League, and in the next few chapters, the beginning of the League expedition to Egypt and the fighting of the First Peloponnesian War.  The long-debated question is whether Thucydides’ mention of the end of the helot revolt is in exact chronological order, i.e. whether the Megarian alliance came after the end of the revolt (and hence seemingly ten years after the earthquake), or whether Thucydides is violating strict chronology and ‘anticipating’ the end of the revolt in order to maintain the flow of his topical treatment.[28]

Put in such terms, the choice is forced, with the first possibility ruled out: we know that the beginning of the Egyptian expedition cannot have come as late as 454 (which is what a ten-year helot revolt beginning in 464/3—or equivalently, soon after the Thasian revolt—would force us to conclude).  However, there are two fall-back versions of this first possibility.  We can suppose that Thucydides is simply mistaken, either in his figure for the length of the war, in his suggestion that the start of the war followed the Thasian revolt, or somewhere else in his chronology of these years:[29] this is obviously possible, but as mentioned earlier, we should accept such an argument—which involves impugning the basic accuracy of our main source—only as a last resort.  A second, more brutally simple approach is to argue away the figure of ten years as being a corruption of the text, and to replace the number by whatever other number suits one’s chronological framework, emending dekatoi to tetartoi, hektoi or even pemptoi as the fancy strikes us;[30] this is the favoured approach among those scholars who wish to preserve a belief in Thucydides’ exactly sequentially chronological approach to the Pentekontaetia.  The only difficulty with such an emendation is that it has no justification, aside from the dubious benefit of allowing us to stamp as ‘solved’ one of the long list of Pentekontaetian chronological puzzles, the others of which are not so vulnerable to solution by eraser.  And in some sense, it has less than none, since Diodorous (almost certainly based on Ephorus)[31] also states that the helot revolt lasted ten years, proving that any ‘corruption’ in Thucydides’ manuscript must have entered in Classical times, an improbably early stage.[32]

The alternative possibility, that Thucydides simply jumped ahead chronologically in order to tell us the eventual outcome of the helot revolt before returning to his sequential narrative, seems much less far-fetched.[33]  More decisively, it accords much better with the general pattern of events.  Sparta’s striking lack of participation in the First Peloponnesian War is explained by her continuing preoccupation with the siege of the still-resisting Messenians on Mount Ithome and the smouldering embers of helot rebellions which such a defiant stronghold might kindle.  Even more obviously, an Athenian capture of Naupaktos—which Thucydides places just prior to the fall of Mount Ithome—would seem very implausible before Tanagra, when the hinterland of the city would have remained completely outside Athens’ influence or control; while after Oinophyta—and the Athenian conquest of Boiotia, Phokis, and Lokris—it would follow naturally.  In fact, Diodorus explicitly states that Tolmides captured Naupaktos and settled the defenders of Mount Ithome in it during his voyage around the Peloponnese, which both he and Thucydides place soon after Myronides’ victory at Oinophyta.[34]

III. The Ostracism of Kimon

The final historical crux to be discussed relates to the story of Kimon’s early return from ostracism.  The ancient evidence that Kimon was recalled from exile before the end of his ten-year term is overwhelming, yet to accept this fact leads to fatal difficulties with all existing chronologies.  First, let us review the evidence relating to Kimon’s exile and return.

According to Plutarch, Kimon was ostracized in the aftermath of Sparta’s dismissal of the Athenian force at Ithome, and the Athenian break with Sparta which resulted;[35] this makes excellent sense, accords well with the complete political ascendancy of the Ephialtes-Perikles faction, and has been accepted by all modern scholars.  Plutarch follows this description by stating that just before the battle of Tanagra, Kimon attempted to return in order to support Athens in her hour of danger and demonstrate that his philolaconism did not diminish his patriotic loyalty; but his request was denied by the Boule, under the influence of Perikles’ friends, and he was sent away.  However, we are next told that some time after the battle the Athenians became fearful of a Peloponnesian invasion, and recalled Kimon, hoping that he would be able to arrange a peace with Sparta—Perikles himself proposed the special motion.  Plutarch places this remarkable occurrence in the immediate aftermath of the battle, and motivates it by the Athenian defeat and fears of a Spartan invasion the following spring; but this is totally out of character with Athens’ spirit and behavior at this time,[36] and probably represents Plutarch’s own rationalization.  In any event, we are told that as soon as Kimon returned he arranged a peace treaty between Athens and Sparta, and took a fleet of 200 ships to Cyprus to fight the Persians.  Plutarch adds that some writers claim that Perikles did not agree to support Kimon’s recall until Kimon had promised to sail to Cyprus immediately upon his return, rather than to remain in Athens (and constitute a political threat to Perikles).

The other evidence for Kimon’s recall is also very strong, but much less detailed.  A fragment of Theopompus quoted by a scholiast to Aristides says that Kimon was recalled in the fifth year of his ostracism in order to arrange a quick peace between Athens and Sparta, and did so:[37] Aristides say that Kimon was recalled before the end of his ostracism, but is unspecific about the date.[38]  Nepos writes that Kimon was recalled in the fifth year of his ostracism, and arranged a peace between Athens and Sparta.[39]  Andocides says that Kimon was recalled from exile in order to make peace with Sparta and did so (though nearly all of Andocides historical details are—as usual—confused).[40]

Given such an overwhelming weight of evidence, it seems certain that there must be some truth to such an unusual story.  The detail that it was Perikles himself who proposed the special motion necessary for the recall of his arch-rival is especially supportive: such an unlikely fact is not easily invented.  However the problems which arise if we accept the story are very considerable.

First, according to all accounts, Kimon made peace with Sparta very soon after he returned, according to Diodorus, a five-year peace treaty.[41]  Yet the only peace mentioned by Thucydides in this period is the Five Years’ Truce, which all major chronologies date to around 451 (though Gomme[1945], 325 permits himself a whiff of doubt).  Since Kimon was ostracized around 461, this would anyway have been the last year of his exile; recalling him at this late date makes little sense, and conflicts with the strong tradition that he was recalled in the fifth year of his ostracism.

Furthermore, Plutarch makes it very clear that his sources say Kimon sailed to Cyprus against the Persians directly upon his recall, yet again we interpret Thucydides to mean that the Cyprus expedition took place around 451 also, just after the signing of the Five Years’ Truce.  The same difficulties apply.

But our greatest problem lies in understanding the motivation of Perikles, Kimon’s arch-rival, yet the man who moved his recall.  Plutarch tells us that Perikles’ associates had blocked Kimon’s attempt to return during Tanagra, at a moment of great national danger.  Yet during the period from the battle of Tanagra down to Kimon’s expedition to Cyprus, the only possible event which could have occasioned the extraordinary return of an ostracized leader such as Kimon was the Egyptian disaster.  The aftermath of Tanagra would not have forced his return: Tanagra was a tactical draw, and a strategic victory for Athens.  Oinophyta, coming sixty-two days later, could not have been responsible, for it was a great victory.  And in the aftermath of these two battles, Athenian success and confidence reached unprecedented heights, as Boiotia, Phokis, and Lokris were conquered, Aigina forced into surrender, and the Spartan homeland itself raided by Tolmides.  Thucydides would have been certain to mention any great catastrophe during these years, yet except for Egypt he is silent.  None of our other sources reveals any significant Athenian defeat during this period, except for Egypt.  Yet Kimon’s recall constitutes one of the only two known cases in Athenian history when a man ostracized was recalled before his ten years of exile had ended, and the other case occurred during the Persian invasion of Greece itself.  Only a danger to Athens of the greatest possible magnitude could have prompted such an action.  The complete destruction of the enormous Athenian expeditionary force to Egypt is the perfect candidate.

Egypt is the perfect candidate in all ways except one.  As currently interpreted, Thucydides’ chronology seems to rule out any possibility that Kimon’s recall followed the Egyptian disaster: Thucydides seems to place the Five Years’ Truce with Sparta and Kimon’s expedition to Cyprus three or more years after Egypt, while our sources for Kimon’s recall all agree that these events took place immediately after Kimon’s return (though only Plutarch’s detailed account mentions Cyprus).

The only means of resolving this dilemma is an extreme one.  We must conclude that, just as in the case of the Naxian revolt and in the case of the fall of Mount Ithome, Thucydides is anticipating the final defeat in Egypt, causing confusion for later historians by once again breaking strict chronological sequencing in his rough, unfinished sketch of the Pentekontaetia.[42]

This suggestion is actually not so outrageous as it might seem.  Thucydides opens the key passage dealing with the Egyptian disaster by describing Artaxerxes’ attempt to draw off the Athenians from Egypt by sending Megabazus to Greece with gold intended to buy a Peloponnesian invasion of Attica; after some time had gone by and this strategy had achieved no results, Megabazus was recalled.  Next, we are told that the Great King sent a different Megabazus to Egypt with a very large army; the Egyptians and their Greek allies were defeated in battle and shut up on the island of Prosopitis, which was then besieged for eighteen months and finally captured, leading to the destruction of the Athenian expeditionary force.  It is obvious that the events being described—Megabazus’ dispatch, his long, unsuccessful attempts at bribery, his recall, the preparation of a large army of invasion (which probably occurred simultaneously with Megabazus’ activities), a campaign which defeated the Egyptians and bottled up the Greeks on Prosopitis, and the eighteen months of siege which followed—must have taken a considerable length of time, probably three years at least.  Yet if we cling to the notion that every word and phrase of Thucydides is in strict chronological order, we are forced to conclude that nothing of political or military significance took place in Greece during the three or four campaigning seasons overlapped by these Egyptian developments—a highly implausible conclusion given the density of battles and campaigns both before and afterwards.[43]  More plausibly, we should consider the possibility that the first part of the summary of Egyptian events (chapters 109-110) is a recapitulation with respect to the events of the previous chapters on Greece (so French[1971], 58 n. 99), that the last part is an anticipation with respect to the following chapters on Greece (as was suggested above), or (very likely) that both are the case.

A final nugget of support for the possibility of a chronological digression may be gleaned from Ctesias.  His account provides many additional details of the Egyptian campaign (though some of his naval strengths seem not to tally with those of Thucydides), and according to him, the execution of the rebels’ leader Inaros—which Thucydides mentions (but does not explicitly date) just after the fall of Prosopitas—took place five years after the end of the rebellion and under somewhat different circumstances.[44]  Given Thucydides’ extreme brevity, and his failure to put a chronological context to Inaros’ betrayal and execution, we have no reason to doubt Ctesias’ version (especially considering his access to Persian sources); and yet to accept Ctesias is to admit that Thucydides, for no apparent reason (other than the convenience of finishing off the story of Inaros), jumped five years past the end of the revolt in one sentence, before returning to the destruction of the Athenian relief squadron a few short days or weeks after the end of the revolt in the next.[45]  Such lapses into chronological ambiguity are not in the least surprising in a brief historical sketch, let alone a rough, unfinished one; Thucydides has nothing to answer for.  But this example should serve as a potent rejoinder to those who argue that Thucydides managed to achieve the superhuman task of keeping every phrase of his Pentekontaetia sketch in strict chronological order, a task that he never even claimed to be attempting.[46]  And if Thucydides might for convenience’ sake violate strict chronology to describe Inaros’ end, there is little reason to believe that he could not have ‘anticipated’ the end of the Egyptian expedition as well.

If we accept this hypothesis, nearly all the difficulties with our existing chronological framework are eliminated.  Upon the destruction of the Egyptian expedition, Kimon was recalled from ostracism, both because of his outstanding military record and because of the hope that he could arrange a truce with Sparta and the Peloponnesians which would allow Athens to concentrate all her resources and effort against Persia.[47]  Returning in 454,[48] Kimon quickly arranged a five-year ‘non-aggression pact’ with the Spartans,[49] and sailed for Cyprus with a hastily organized Athenian and allied force in order to forestall a feared Persian advance into the Aegean.  Aside from the difficulty with the standard interpretation of the text of Thucydides, this pattern of events is reasonable and realistic, and several additional pieces of evidence may be adduced to support it.

First, the truce arranged between Athens and Sparta was of remarkably short duration—five years—and hence makes much more sense as a ‘breathing space’ after the Egyptian disaster than as anything else.

Second, Diodorus’ account of the Cyprus campaign—one of the fullest in detail—closely connects the campaign with the Egyptian disaster.  Furthermore, the Persian commanders identified are the same as those in Egypt, and this would be natural if (as the Athenians may have feared) they were preparing an offensive into Greek waters after their great victory in Egypt.[50]

Third, after describing the enormous Athenian disaster in Egypt, Thucydides follows with the accounts of minor Athenian operations in Thessaly and Sikyon.[51]  It seems very unlikely that the Athenians would have undertaken these in the wake of Egypt.[52] (i.e. if these operations did chronologically follow the final defeat in Egypt), while they fit in perfectly with the pattern of widespread Athenian thrusts prior to the disaster.

Fourth, the evidence of Argos’ thirty-year peace treaty with Sparta actually supports rather than weakens the case for an earlier date for the Five Years’ Truce.  A reference in Thucydides allows us to date the Argive pact to 451/0, and this has often been used to argue that the Athenian treaty must have been made around this same time; but this seems unlikely.  A long-term peace treaty extending for thirty years seems a far from natural partner to a brief five-year ‘intermission’ agreement.  Moreover, Argos’ notoriously deep hostility to Sparta makes it very unlikely that she would have accepted a thirty-year peace in the absence of a catastrophic defeat;[53] and if Athens had been forced to sign a separate peace with Sparta around 454/3 and had withdrawn from the struggle, Sparta might have used the opportunity to deal Argos such a defeat (one might speculate that this was Sparta’s main benefit from the truce).

Fifth, if Kimon’s campaign in Cyprus had occurred earlier than current chronologies suggest, beginning say in summer 454 or spring 453 rather than summer 450, then the Peace of Kallias which followed should also be placed earlier than is now believed, perhaps in 452 or 451 rather than in 449.  This would place Perikles’ citizenship decree of 451/0 shortly after the Peace rather than a year or two before it.[54]  Such an ordering is more plausible, since Perikles and the other Athenian leaders must certainly have realized that the decree would have a very negative long-term impact on Athens’ citizen population (and hence her manpower resources), and it would have been a very strange (almost suicidal) measure to take before Kimon’s victories in Cyprus and the signing of the Peace with Persia had removed the Persian military threat.  Under exactly the same reasoning, the enormous expenditures on the Parthenon and Propylaia—amounting to the bulk of the Delian League (i.e. Athenian) reserve fund—must obviously have followed rather than preceded peace with Persia.  Yet these extraordinary expenditures are usually dated to 450/49,[55] and this is almost impossible to reconcile with a Cyprus campaign beginning in 450 (or even worse 450/49) as in most current chronologies.[56] We are forced to believe that a Cyprian campaign of considerable length, the (undoubtedly) long negotiations resulting in the first Hellenic-Persian peace (in which Kallias’ travel time to and from Susa alone must have come to six or seven months), Perikles’ diplomatic maneuvering relating to the abortive Pan-Hellenic Congress, and the subsequent unilateral Athenian decision to spend her (and her allies’) military reserve fund on public works—that all of this can be fitted into the fourteen or fifteen months between the between the beginning of the 450 sailing season and the end of the 450/49 political year.[57]  This is totally implausible, even if for no other reason than that a leader of Perikles’ ability would never have spent his military reserve fund while the ink on a permanent peace treaty with Persia was only three or four months dry, and its security completely untested.  A Peace of Kallias signed in 452 is far easier to accept.[58]

Sixth, Kimon had half-foreign ancestry (his mother was a Thrakian princess).[59]  This fact makes it extremely unlikely that Perikles’ citizenship decree of 451/0 was passed before Kimon’s death in the middle of the Cyprus campaign.  Removing Athens’ greatest living military hero from the citizenship roster would have been going too far even for an enraged demos, and Kimon’s friends would have fought the maneuver to the bitter end.  The citizenship decree would stand out in all later sources as the final culmination of the political struggle between Kimon and Perikles.  Even if a special exception to the decree had been made for a hero of Kimon’s stature, this fact would have been noted by some source (perhaps as the first stage of the reconciliation with Perikles which led to Kimon’s return from ostracism), just as the special exception made for Perikles’ own illegitimate son Perikles was noted.[60]  Yet according to existing chronologies, Kimon was leading the Athenian grand battlefleet to Cyprus just as (or after!) the Athentian Assembly was blithely abolishing his citizenship.  Such an absurdity can be safely ruled out, if only because of the grist this remarkable story would have provided for the moralistic mills of Plutarch and other writers (Carthage’s treatment of Hannibal would seem saintly by comparison).

Finally, Diodorus actually lists the Five Years’ Truce under 454/3, and as Schreiner notes, this is probably one of the few times when a Diodorean date carries significant weight.[61]  The Truce is mentioned in a single short sentence directly following Diodorus’ naming of the year’s Athenian archon and Roman consuls; it is completely unconnected with the year’s ‘events’—a long hodge-podge of Sicilian history—or those of the year before, and is very likely taken directly from Diodorus’ good chronological source.[62]

For these reasons, the case for placing the recall of Kimon and the signing of the Five Years’ Truce in the direct aftermath of Egypt seems compelling.

In all of these chronological puzzles—Naxos, Mount Ithome, and Kimon’s ostracism—the simple assumption that Thucydides’ narrative is not universally strict in its chronology is sufficient to allow resolution.  Such a hypothesis seems not implausible, and leads to a far more realistic pattern of events than that produced by orthodox chronological reconstructions, which furthermore require us to postulate one or more unlikely textual ‘corruptions’ in order to avoid outright contradiction.  Thucydides, though an outstanding historian, was merely human, and it seems rather contrived to expect absolute and unambiguous chronological rectitude out of his Pentekontaetia, an unfinished historical sketch so manifestly rough and incomplete that it makes no mention whatsoever of the Peace of Kallias, (arguably) the single most significant event during the Fifty Years, and an evolutionary watershed in the development of the Athenian Empire.[63]

Appendix A

Outline of Suggested Chronological Scheme, 466-449

The following chronological chart may help to summarize the ideas of this paper, and conveniently display the suggested pattern of interlocking events.  Not all the dates listed are defended in the text; some, followed by question marks, are more or less crude guesses.  But the chart is meant to demonstrate that the dates suggested by this paper are consistent with each other, and can be made to accord with virtually all the other established dates of this period  Appendix B summarizes the suggested dates of the three main existing chronologies for purposes of comparison.

Suggested Chronology, 466-449[64]

Date

Historical Event

466 or E 465

Battle of the Eurymedon

465

Revolt of Naxos

L Dec. 465

Artaxerxes comes to throne

s? 464

Thasos revolts

E 464

Colony at Ennea Hodoi founded

464

Disaster at Drabeskos in 464/3

464

Thasos appeals to Sparta

464/3

Earthquake at Sparta; beginning of the great helot rebellion

E? 462

Thasos capitulates in third year of revolt

462?

Kimon returns to Athens and is put on trial; acquitted

Es? 461

Kimon leads expedition to assist Sparta at Mount Ithome

ES? 461

Reforms of Ephialtes in 462/1

LA or W? 461

Kimon returns from Sparta (effectively too late for 6th prytany ostracism vote)

460

Kimon unsuccessfully tries to reverse the reforms of Ephialtes and regain political dominance at Athens

460

Athens breaks political alliance with Sparta, allies with Argos and Thessaly

460

Megara joins the Athenian alliance

s 459

Large Athenian expedition voted to Cyprus

s 459

Ostracism of Kimon after 2nd-stage vote in 8th prytany

S 459

Athenian expedition to Cyprus sails to Egypt, assists revolt

S 459

Athens attacks Peloponnesians at Halieis and Kekryphaleia

459/8

First (full) year of Kimon’s ostracism

LS 459

War with Aigina breaks out

LS 459

Korinth attempts to take advantage of Athens’ military over-extension, attacks in Megarid but is defeated; some casualties occur in same summer as Cyprus/Egypt and Aigina

L 459?

Phokians attack Doris

Es 458

Spartans march to Phokis, quickly overawe Phokians

S 458

Tanagra; attempted return of Kimon blocked by Perikles

ES 458

Oinophyta

458

Athenian conquest of Boiotia, Phokis, and Lokris under Myronides

ES 458

Surrender of Aigina after nine months of siege

457?

Periplous of Tolmides

456

Megabazus invades Egypt with large army, defeats rebels and Athenians in the field

A 456

Siege of Prosopitis begins

456?

Athenian expeditions to Thessaly, attack on Sikyon

456/5??

Other naval raids by Tolmides, conflated with periplous by Diod.

S 454?

Helot revolt ends in tenth year; Messenians are settled at Naupaktos by Tolmides

s 454

Draining of waters around Prosopitis (probably a few weeks before the low water point of the Nile in June); destruction of League expeditionary force in sixth year and after eighteen months of siege

s 454

Destruction of the Athenian relief squadron; a few ships escape, carrying word of the disaster to Athens

s 454

Kimon recalled in fifth (full) year of exile

s 454

League treasury transferred from Delos to Athens because of Persian naval threat (move comes after 455/4 tribute collection)

S 454

Kimon arranges Five Years’ Truce (in 454/3), sails to Cyprus (three years after Athens’ expeditions to Thessaly and Sikyon)

L 454

Cyprus campaign; Athens defeats Persian forces coming from victory in Egypt, re-establishes military balance with Persia

March 453

First tribute quota paid to Athena

E 453??

Negotiations leading to Peace of Kallis begin (e.g. Kallias leaves for Susa)

L 453 or 452??

Peace of Kallias ratified by Athenians

451??

Perikles launches Pan-Hellenic Congress proposal

451/0

Athenian citizenship restricted

450/49

Athens authorises liquidation of League reserve fund to pay for construction of Parthenon, Propylaia

449/8

Missing tribute quota list; no surplus tribute stored that year under Goddess’s protection (hence no quota payment) since it was all spent on public works

APPENDIX B

Comparison with Detailed Existing Chronologies[65]

Historical Event

Deane

Gomme

ATL

Unz

Naxos

465

?

470

465

Eurymedon

465

?

469

466

Thasos rebels

464

ES/LS 465

MS 465

s? 464

Athenian riposte

464

–

LS 465

464

Colony at Ennea Hodoi

s 464

–

A 465

E 464

Drabeskos

464

LS 465

EW 465/4

464

Thasos appeals to Sparta

464

–

W 465/4

464

Earthquake at Sparta, helots rise

464

465/4

464

464/3

Thasos capitulates

462/1

463/2

463/2

E? 462

Sparta requests Athenian aid

462/1

462?

462

Es? 461

Athenians dismissed at Ithome

462/1

462/1

462

A or W? 461

Athenian alliance with Argos, Thessaly

462/1

462/1

462/1

460

Megara leaves Sparta, joins Athens

461?

–

s 460

460

Athenian fleet to Cyprus and Phoinike

460

?

461/0

s 459

Egyptian expedition begins

461/0

?

s 460

S 459

Megabazus in Sparta

457/6

457/6

457/6

458?

Haleis and Kekryphaleia

456?

?

s 460

S 459

War with Aigina begins

456?

?

s 460

LS 459

Korinthians invade Megarid; defeated

Jul. 456

?

A 460

LS 459

Long walls begun

456?

?

W 460/59

–

Siege of Prosopitis begins

Jan. 455

?

A 456

A 456

Helots’ revolt ends

455/4

460/59?

461?

S 454?

Phokians attack Doris

455/4?

458/7?

S 459

L 459?

Spartans attack Phokians

454

–

459/8

Es 458

Tanagra

454

ES 457?

June 458?

S 458

Oinophyta

454

ES 457?

Aug. 458?

S 458

Long Walls completed

454

LS 457?

W 458/7

–

Aigina surrenders

454

457/6

s 457

ES 458

Oinoe

454

457/6?

s 457

–

Tolmides’ raids around the Peloponnese

454

456/5

S 457

457?

Siege of Prosopitis ends

June 454

?

S 454

s 454

Athenian relief squadron destroyed

454

?

S 454

s 454

Athenian expedition to Thessaly

454

?

454

456?

Perikles’ Korinthian Gulf expedition

454

?

S 454

456??

Three years free of hostilities begin

454

–

–

–

Five Years’ Truce

A/W 451

?

451

S 454

Kimon’s expedition to Cyprus

450

450/49?

s 450

S 454

Kimon’s death

450

–

S 450

L 454

(Restriction of Athenian citizenship)

451/0

451/0

451/0

451/0

(Reserve fund spent on public works)

450/49

N.A.

450/49

450/49

(Peace of Kallias signed)

E 449

449

E 449

453?

(Perikles’ Pan-Hellenic Congress)

s/S 449

?

s/S 449

451??

(Missing tribute quota list; no tributedemanded by Athens because of Peace)

449/8

449/8

449/8

449/8

References

[1] There were over 5000 Spartiates of military age at the time of the battle of Plataia in 479 (Herod. 9.28), while in the life-or-death struggle at Mantinea sixty-one years later, there were only about 4200 Lakedaimonian troops present (Thuc. 5.68), of whom at most perhaps half—or 2000-2500—were Spartiates (Thuc. 4.38 gives us a rough indication that typically less than half of a Lakedaimonian force in this era was Spartiate).

[2] The major modern chronologies which this paper will make reference to are those of The Athenian Tribute Lists, Vol. I by B.D. Merritt, H.T. Wade-Gery, and M.F. McGregor (Cambridge, Mass., 1939); A Historical Commentary on Thucydides, Vol. I by A.W. Gomme (Oxford, 1945); and P. Deane, Thucydides’ Dates, 465-431 (Ontario, 1972).  In addition, less comprehensive chronological analyses of the Pentekontaetia have recently been presented in A. French, The Athenian Half-Century (Sydney, 1972); M.P. Milton, Historia 28 (1979), 257-75; and J.H. Schreiner, Symbolae Osloenses 51 (1976), 19-63 and 52 (1977), 19-38.

[3] Diodorus’ chronological blunders—arising from his ill-considered (and very lazy) attempt to fit the topical narrative of his sources into the annalistic framework of his own history—are so notorious that we will illustrate them by a single example from that period.  The single archon year of 471/0 is given over wholly to the narrative of the latter years of Themistokles, from the origins of his downfall because of association with Pausanias, through his travels around Greece and Molossia and his eventual flight to Persia, to his eventual death (which Plutarch, Them. 31 plausibly places in the late 450s)—a span of perhaps twenty years! (Diod. 11.54-9).

[4] Thuc. 1.98-102.

[5] Schreiner (1976) and (1977) is the only dissenter, but his highly unusual (and rather erratic) analysis is based on a fundamental disbelief in Thucydides’ veracity (e.g. [1976], 27), which consequently forces him into a heavy reliance on Diodorus and other secondary sources, supplemented by his own guesswork.  As might be expected, this leads to the creation of an almost unrecognizable chronology for the events of the Fifty Years.

[6] A Babylonian legal text is dated to the months of Kislimu of the 21st year of Xerxes (465), which began on December 17, while news of Artaxerxes’ accession had reached Egypt by 2 January 464.  Cf. M.E. White, ‘Some Agiad dates,’ JHS 84 (1964), 140-52, especially p. 142 n. 13.

[7] Deane (1972), 10-11 convincingly argues the case for a short stay at Ephesos.  Of our other chronologies, ATL iii.160 dates Naxos to 470, implying a stay of five years in Ephesos, while Gomme makes no attempt to date Naxos, saying that Artaxerxes’ accession date ‘creates great difficulties.’  In the most recent discussion of the problem, Milton (1979), 261-2 argues that a delay of three or four months is reasonable (while Themistokles’ friends were sending him the cash), and, if interrupted by winter, eight or nine months; this is marginally possible.  But when Milton attempts to salvage his own chronology by using this to argue that (Thucydides believed) the siege of Naxos ended as early as Autumn 466, his argument begins to break down completely.  Xerxes died in December 465, and even if Themistokles had passed Naxos near the end of the 466 sailing season, this would still imply a stay of at least fifteen or sixteen months at Ephesos, violating Milton’s own plausibility argument.

[8] Paus. 4.24.5; Diod. 11.70.

[9] First, it is possible that the Spartan political year in which Archidamos came to the throne would have been considered as the last year of the reign of his predecessor Leotychidas; and the slight displacement between the Spartan political year and the Athenian archon year might possibly account for another year of the discrepancy, if the succession took place during the overlap.  However, it seems rather more likely that the 469/8 succession date—which is based on several questionable arguments—is in error.

[10] Deane (1972), 11-12 is forced into this conclusion in order to accommodate Eurymedon in his chronology; all of the other main chronologies consider this possibility highly unlikely.

[11] Thucydides mentions the battle of the Eurymedon after he describes the surrender of Naxos; by the orthodox ‘strict chronology’ view, this corresponds to absolute chronological sequence, and even such an opponent of the orthodox case as Deane (1972), 12 accepts this argument without question.

[12] Plut. Kimon 12-14; Thuc. 1.100-101.

[13] Plut. Kimon 14-15.

[14] Aristotle, Ath. Const. 25 dates them to the archonship of Konon, namely 462/1, and since we would expect accurate dates for constitutional reforms from a constitutional history, this is almost universally accepted, even though the account involves Themistokles (long since ostracized by 462/1) as a leading participant.

[15] I will temporarily beg the chicken-and-egg question of whether it was Ephialtes’ reforms which forced Kimon to return from Sparta or Kimon’s humiliating return which created the political climate leading to the reforms.  Cf. J.R. Cole, GRBS (1974), 369-85 for a good recent (though partisan) discussion of the issue.

[16] Even to place all of these events within a single year—as Deane is forced to do in his chronology—seems very improbable.

[17] So Gomme (1945), i.390, seconded by Milton (1979), 258.

[18] Sch. to Aesch. 2.31; Diod. 32.3.  Actually, since Diodorus’ account of the foundation of Amphipolis is contained in a single short sentence unconnected to the other events included in the year, it is probably based on his good chronological source and correct.  Cf. Meiggs (1972), 453.

[19] The scholiast lists a disaster which befell an Athenian attempt at colonisation (undoubtedly Drabeskos) in the Archonship of Lysikrates; this is apparently an error either for Lysistratos (467/6), Lysanias (466/5), or Lysitheos (465/4).

[20] Thuc. 1.100.

[21] Milton (1979) attempts to evade this trap by arguing that (Thucydides believed) Themistokles passed Naxos in Autumn 466, but as discussed above in n. 7, this would imply a sojourn of fifteen or twenty months in Ephesos, which violates Milton’s own standards of plausibility.

[22] Thuc. 1.98-9.

[23] Under this interpretation, the μετὰ ταῦτα introducing the Eurymedon campaign would (ambiguously) be in reference to any of the Athenian actions described in 1.97—perhaps the subjugation of Karystos—rather than the last events described in 1.97-8, namely the surrender of Naxos and the later subjugation of all Athens’ remaining allies.

[24] Thuc. 1.100 claims that the Athenians captured or destroyed the entire Phoenician fleet of 200 ships.  Ephorus somewhat more plausibly puts the total Persian fleet at 350 and the ships lost at 200, and along with several other secondary sources contains a much more detailed account of the campaign than Thucydides’ single sentence; for these reasons, Thucydides’ figures should not automatically be preferred.  These accounts of the Eurymedon are contained in Plutarch, Kimon 12-13 and Diod. 11.60-62, though the latter conflates the Eurymedon campaign with Kimon’s much later campaign in Cyprus, just prior to the Peace of Kallias.

[25] Diod. 11.69.

[26] Just as happened in 397 (Xen. Hell. 3.4.1).

[27] During the first year of the Egyptian expedition, there were 200 League ships in Egypt, and probably at least 100 or more deployed against Aigina (the Aiginetan fleet, renowned for its naval excellence, was heavily defeated in a great sea-battle, and over seventy Aiginetan vessels were captured): Thuc. 1.104-5.  During the Samos revolt a decade or two later, Athens, Samos, Chios, and Lesbos deployed a total of 265 warships in the area (Thuc. 1.115-17).

[28] Cf. Deane (1972), 22-30 for a long discussion of the arguments involved, which strongly affirms the second possibility; Gomme (1945), 1.401-11 and ATL (1949), iii.162-8 present the contrary, more orthodox view.

[29] For example, French (1971), 46 n. 63 mentions the suggestion that the helot uprising began several years before the Thasian revolt and was merely intensified by the earthquake at Sparta.  Gomme (1945), 407-8 lists several other versions contradicting Thucydides.

[30] Gomme (1945), i.404 argues for six years, ATL (1949), iii.163-4 supports four years, and D.M. Lewis, Historia 2 (1954), 415-16 holds out for five.  Some of these suggestions as to how a corruption might have occurred are ingenious, but the very number of different suggestions weakens the strength of the argument, and the thorough refutation of Deane (1972), 22-30 is very convincing.

[31] Diod. 11.64.4.  According to him, the rebellion lasted ten years, while Thucydides says it lasted into its tenth year; but this is a very natural mistake for a third-hand source such as Diodorus to make, even if his number does ultimately derive from Thucydides.

[32] Gomme (1945), i.403 very properly grasps this nettle, admitting that ‘all our other authorities, beginning with Ephorus, say that the war lasted nine years (or ten, as a round number)’.

It is important to realise that although accidental corruptions, numerical or otherwise, could occur at any time in history, they are much less likely to have occurred in classical times.  This is because the chances of a textual corruption surviving uncorrected and propagating are inversely related to the number of independent copies of the manuscript in existence and circulating.  Soon after Thucydides’ history was ‘published’ (i.e. copied out in large numbers and generally circulated), every significant public or private library would have had its own copy of such an important and influential work.  After this (unless the original scribe had made an error in all his copies), textual corruptions could not have widely entered the tradition again until the Middle Ages or later, when the destruction of the great library at Alexandria and most other major repositories of classical manuscripts had drastically reduced the number of surviving copies.  For Ephorus’ figure to be based on a corruption in Thucydides would compound improbabilities: we must both assume that Ephorus chanced to use a corrupt text and that this same text also became the basis for all our surviving manuscripts of Thucydides.  This is extremely unlikely.

[33] The orthodox view, that Thucydides maintained strict chronological sequencing throughout the Pentekontaetia, is stated canonically (and provided with some justification) by Gomme (1945), 391-2, one of its strongest advocates: ‘we must see how far our other evidence…is reconcilable with Thucydides’ narrative, keeping as our guide one fact, namely that he gives his events in strict chronological sequence as he conceives it’. Yet in the footnote to this very sentence, Gomme admits that ‘On the other hand, the fact (or the probability) that the excursus is an unfinished essay, allows a possible disruption of the chronological order, which Thucydides would later have put right.  That is, we may admit a greater likelihood of error here than in his main narrative’.  It is difficult to understand why Gomme’s belief in an increased chance of chronological error is matched by his absolute disbelief in the possibility of chronological ambiguity (which, after all, one would naturally expect in an unfinished draft of an essay describing an interwoven pattern of events).  Later, when Thucydides’ account of the Five Years’ Truce seems to violate Gomme’s (sound) historical common sense, Gomme chooses again to postulate a fortuitous corruption of the text, rather than simple chronological ambiguity (p. 325).

[34] Diod. 11.84; Thuc. 1.108. Gomme (1945), 304 argues that since Thucydides’ account of the periplous of Tolmides fails to mention Naupaktos, Diodorus’ account ‘deserves no credence’.  But Thucydides’ many very significant omissions in his unfinished Pentekontaetia—which Gomme (1945), 365-70 himself lists at length and discusses—should make such an argument from silence a very weak one, especially about a town whose capture Thucydides had already referred to earlier.  Furthermore, a scholiast to Pausanias 1.27.5 and Aeschines 2.75 adds the names of other towns captured, and Gomme apparently believes them (p. 320).

[35] For this and the following, cf. Plut. Kimon 15-18, Per. 9.3-10.5.

[36] The losses at Tanagra were heavy on both sides, and afterwards the outnumbered Peloponnesians retreated home.  Sixty-two days later, the Athenians invaded Boiotia, were victorious at Oinophyta, and conquered Boiotia, Phokis, and Lokris; soon afterwards Aigina surrendered to Athens, and Tolmides raided the Peloponnese, burning the Spartan dockyards: Thuc. 1.108.

[37] Scholiast to Aristides 46.158.13.

[38] Aristides 46.158.13.

[39] Nepos, Cimon 3.3.

[40] Andocides 3.3.

[41] Diod. 11.86.1.

[42] Cf. Gomme’s admission, quoted in n. 33 above.

[43] Thuc. 1.108.111.

[44] Ctesias, 36.

[45]French (1971), 60 n. 107 believes Ctesias’ account on this point, and views Thucycides’ five-year digression as an ‘understandable lapse from strict chronological reporting’, but he seems not to realise the extreme significance of this conclusion: a single demonstrated exception to an alleged absolute principle proves that the principle is not absolute, and greatly increases the likelihood that other exceptions may be found.  Yet French equivocates on the Mount Ithome crux, weighing the unlikely possibility that Thucydides’ dekatoi (confirmed by Diodorus) is a corruption against the ‘difficult assumption’ that Thucydides violated an ‘established…principle of narration’ by a chronological digression; and French does so without even referring to the execution of Inaros, which is almost an exact parallel, even in length of time.

Although Gomme (1945), i.321-2 discusses the discrepancies between Thucydides’ account of the disaster in Egypt and that of Ctesias (which in many ways he prefers), he (uncharacteristically) never makes explicit the chronological divergences, and the strong implication of the Thucydidean digression.

[46] Thucydides’ criticism of Hellanicus’ earlier history of the Pentekontaetia (1.97.2) as being ‘not accurate’ (οὐκ ἀκριβῶς)—in contrast to his own—is often used to argue (even cited as unargued proof) that the Pentekontaetia will follow absolutely strict chronology (e.g. cf. Gomme [1945], i.361-2), but this is merely an implication; and even if it were true, Thucydides would presumably be contrasting the excursus as he intended it to be (when complete and polished) with Hellenicus’ poor existing version.

[47] I follow Meiggs (1972), 103-8 and others in believing Thucydides when he repeatedly implies that virtually the entire Delian League expeditionary force of 200 ships remained in Egypt until the end, and was lost.  If 200 or more ships—some Athenian and some allied—were lost, then it is likely that most ordinary Athenians, upon learning of the disaster, expected any week to see an enormous and victorious Persian fleet approach the Piraeus, just as they were later to feel after Sicily (Thuc 8.1).  These fears were unwarranted: the Athenian forces had been defeated by Persian engineering and land attack in one case and by surprise in the other; but the ‘paper tiger’ nature of Persian naval power would not have become apparent for some time—the bare fact was that a huge fraction of the standing Delian League fleet had been annihilated at a stroke.

The above reasoning is merely weakened, not destroyed, if losses in Egypt came to no more than 100 ships (as many scholars believe).  Moreover, the foundations of this more orthodox reconstruction are rather implausible.  Under it, we must assume that the Athenians kept no more than fifty or sixty ships (or less) in Egypt after the first year or so of the expedition (e.g. Gomme [1945] i.321-3).  Greek naval excellence was high, and the Athenians were notoriously reckless, but even they would have balked at the notion of leaving such a small fleet to maintain continual control of the seas—an absolute necessity—so far from home and so close to Phoenicia, Persia’s principal naval centre.  Callisthenes (Plut. Kimon 13.4-5) viewed Perikles’ short sail to the south-western coast of Asia Minor with a mere fifty ships as an act of notable daring; how would he have viewed the idea of keeping such a small expeditionary force within a few days’ sail of Phoenicia for five or six years, winter and summer?

[48] The eight years between the apparent date of the reforms of Ephialtes (462/1) and the date of the Five Years’ Truce (454/3) do present some difficulty if we are to believe that Kimon returned in the fifth year of his ostracism; however, they can be accommodated.  If Kimon had departed for Sparta in early Spring 461, and his absence (along with several thousand members of the more conservative Athenian hoplite class) allowed Ephialtes quickly to gain political ascendancy, then the reforms could have occurred near the end of the 462/1 Athenian political year.  Kimon may have remained in Sparta for seven or eight months, hoping to achieve a victory and return in triumph to Athens (with a consequently greater chance of reversing Ephialties’ constitutional changes); the accounts of our sources are vague enough to leave open the possibility that he remained in Sparta over the first winter.  Therefore, his ‘dismissal’ (whatever the circumstances) and return to Athens may well have come too late for the first round of the ostracism vote of 461/0, coming in the sixth prytany (some time in December or January), leaving him to spend the next twelve months carrying the burden of his failure at Ithome and unsuccessfully attempting to overturn Ephialtes’ reforms (Plut. Kimon 15).   His ostracism might have come the next year, with the preliminary vote in the sixth prytany and the final decision (Kimon or Ephialtes) in the eighth (Arist. Ath. Const. 43.5; Philochorus, FGrHist 328 F 30).  The second vote would have forced Kimon to leave Attica within ten days, putting his departure within a few weeks of the end of the 460/59 Athenian political year; for this reason, 459/8 might have been traditionally recorded as the first (full) year of his ostracism.  This would place his recall in the political year 455/4, the fifth of his exile; if he had returned in early summer 454, it might have taken him a month or two to arrange the Five Years’ Truce with Sparta, placing it in the next political year 454/3 as required.  A number of assumptions are required to produce the above chain of reasoning, but all are rather plausible.  This reconstruction would also explain how Kimon returned from Mount Ithome apparently some time before the beginning of the Egyptian expedition, yet returned to Athens in the fifth year of his exile but some time after the end of that six-year expedition.

[49] A cynic might argue that Sparta’s leaders would never have granted Athens such a respite, despite their friendship with Kimon and their public commitments to pan-Hellenic solidarity against the barbarian; and such suspicion is very warranted.  But in the above chronology, the long helot rebellion would have come to an end in its tenth year—455/4—perhaps only five or six months before, and exhausted Sparta could herself use a breathing space free from major military threat.  It is also possible that Sparta hoped to use the five years to deal a crushing blow to Argive power, and this may have resulted in the thirty-year peace treaty which Argos signed in 451/0 (see text below).

[50] Cf. n. 47 above.

[51] Thuc. 1.111.

[52] Meiggs (1972), 110-11 and n. 1 understandably finds these adventuristic enterprises highly peculiar in the aftermath of Egypt and he even ventures to speculate that they ‘may even have come a little earlier than the capitulation on Prosopitis’, adding in a footnote that ‘Thucydides seems not to have been rigorously chronological in his account of the Egyptian expedition'(!); but this extremely important idea is never carried to its logical conclusion or extended to other chronological cruxes.

[53] The only previous time that Argos had considered such a lengthy peace treaty with Sparta was after her manpower had been massacred by Kleomanes (Herod. 6.79-83, 7.149-50).

[54] Arist. Ath. Const. 26.3 dates the decree to the archonship of Antidotos, namely 451/0.

[55] For discussions of the dating and nature of the Strasbourg Papyrus (which contains a scholiast’s commentary on Demosthenes 22.13f, mentioning the expenditures), cf. ATL (1949), iii.281 and Meiggs (1972), 515-18, both of which support the 450/49 dating, and Gomme (1956), ii.28-33, who questions these arguments.  The main restorations of the decree are conveniently collected and translated in C.W. Fornara, Archaic Times to the End of the Peloponnesian War (Cambridge, 1983), 95-7.

[56] ATL (1949), iii.281 places the beginning of Kimon’s campaign in Spring 450, and the Peace of Kallias a year later in the first half of 449; Deane (1972), 61-3 and French (1971), 64 n. 119 and 65 n. 123 both support this, the former discussing the various other ideas proposed.  Gomme (1945), i.409-10 displaces both dates by a year, putting the Cyprus campaign in Summer 449 and the Peace in Spring 448 (as is noted in the preceding footnote, Gomme refuses to credit the usual date of the Strasbourg Papyrus). Meiggs (1972), 124-8 recognizes the ‘crowding’ which such chronologies would require, and much more consistently places the Cyprus campaign in 451 and the Peace of Kallias in 449.

[57] So Meiggs (1972), 124-8.

[58] Under my reconstruction, the missing tribute quota list of 449/8 should not be explained by any (rather improbable) remission of tribute in the year following the Peace, but as a consequence of the Periklean building programme begun a couple of years later and paid for by the allied tribute.  Since all incoming tribute of that year was directly used to finance building construction, there was no surplus phoros to be stored with the Goddess, and hence no tribute quota was paid.  For my arguments on the ‘surplus’ nature of the tribute, cf. R.K. Unz, ‘The surplus of the Athenian phoros’ (to appear in GRBS).

[59] Plut. Kimon 4.1. The context makes it clear that the claim is not simply a standard political slander.

[60] Plut. Per. 37.

[61] Schreiner (1976), 26 and n. 17.

[62] Diodorus’ evidence appeals to Gomme(1945), i.325-6, and he considers suggesting another textual corruption in Thucydides to reconcile it, but eventually decides to follow the bulk of the scholarship and reject the date.  Meiggs (1972), 453 points to this date of Diodorus as one of a number of such dates which Diodorus probably obtained from a chronological handbook; in each case, the dating is brief—usually just a short sentence—and stands outside the flow (or rather the whirlpool) of Diodorus’ main narrative (though naturally it is sometimes difficult to judge whether some borderline cases fall into this category or not).  Meiggs says that dates such as these ‘are more likely to be right than wrong’ (which is something of an understatement, since each of the three or four clear-cut cases which we can independently check turns out to be exactly correct); however, Meiggs asserts that we should flatly reject the 454/3 date for the Five Years’ Truce (where the signs of Diodorus’ having used a chronological source are perhaps the strongest of all).  Meiggs’ obvious reason for this inconsistency is to safeguard his own chronological framework.

[63] Cf. Meiggs (1972), 129-51 for a lengthy and thorough discussion of the likelihood and terms of the Peace of Kallias, which firmly concludes that the Peace did in fact exist.  Thucydides’ silence is seen as strange and embarrassing, and one of the strongest arguments in the hands of doubters of the Peace.  Meiggs bravely admits that ‘no convincing explanation has been given’ for Thucydides’ omission of the Peace and that ‘the best that can be offered…is a palliative’ (p. 140): the unfinished nature of the Pentekontaetia (and indeed the entire history) is the principal one cited.  Gomme (1945), 331-5, 364-70 had roughly the same opinion.

I wish to acknowledge the helpful comments of E. Badian, John Barron, and an anonymous referee on an earlier draft of this paper, though naturally none of them should be held responsible for such errors as remain, nor for the views presented.  I also wish to thank Harvard University, the Winston Churchill Foundation, and the National Science Foundation for their financial support during the preparation of this paper.

[64] Key: E = Early; M = Mid; L = Late; s = Spring; S = Summer; A = Autumn; W = Winter; Boldface type = Attested.

[65] Deane [1972], 136-7.

Unorthodox curvature interactions, black holes, and inflation

Physical Review D • December 15, 1984 • 5,800 Words

Unorthodox curvature interactions, black holes, and inflation (PDF) by Ron K. Unz

Physical Review D, December 15, 1984, pp. 2521-2527

The coupling of other fields to gravity is not uniquely determined if one removes the requirement that such interactions maintain gauge invariance. This paper discusses the possible consequences of such non-gauge-invariant couplings to gravity, and some of the possible implications for black holes and inflation.

Appendix A: Current and Historical Estimates of American Jewish Population

Much of the our analysis is based on the per capita performance or representation of different groups, now and in the past, and such calculations obviously depend upon the population sizes of the groups in question.  For some racial or ethnic groups such as Asians, Hispanics, or non-Hispanic whites, these population figures are relatively easy to obtain from the official Census data, which also provides good numbers for various ethnic subpopulations such as Chinese, Koreans, and Vietnamese. However, such official data does not exist in the case of America’s Jewish population, forcing us to rely upon the estimates produced by independent researchers, mostly employed at Jewish universities or thinktanks, and these inevitably contain a significant degree of uncertainty. Three of the research reports which I have used as my main sources have been:

“Jewish Population in the United States, 2011,”  Ira Sheshkin and Arnold Dashefsky, Current Jewish Population Reports, Number 4 – 2011, published by the North American Jewish Data Bank of the Berman Institute of the University of Connecticut. “Estimating the Jewish Population of the United States: 2000-2010,”  Elizabeth Tighe et al., December 2011, published by the Steinhardt Social Research Institute of Brandeis University. “The National Jewish Population Survey 2000-01”, United Jewish Communities Report, September 2003.

These figures tend to be somewhat larger than the “Core Jewish Population” sometimes cited in other sources, which refers to individuals of Jewish ancestry who self-identify as Jewish. For example, the total figure of 6.59 million is a million or more higher than various other estimates. For historical values, I am relying on the numbers for each decade provided by the Jewish Virtual Library, and based on the research provided by the American Jewish Historical Society, the American Jewish Committee, and various other Jewish organizations. For those decades in which a range is provided, I am using the midpoint of that range, and also applying linear interpolations between the specified years. As the research reports I have consulted indicate and the stated ranges imply, the size of the American Jewish population is usually uncertain to within five or ten percent. http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/US-Israel/usjewpop1.html

Estimated Historical Jewish Population of the United States

Year

Jewish Estimate (1000s)

US Total (1000s)

Midpoint Jewish Percentages

1900

938-1,058

76,094

1.3%

1910

1,508-2,350

92,407

2.1%

1920

3,300-3,605

106,461

3.2%

1927

4,228

119,035

3.6%

1937

4,641-4,831

128,825

3.7%

1940

4,770-4,975

132,122

3.7%

1950

4,500-5,000

152,271

3.1%

1960

5,367-5,532

180,671

3.0%

1970

5,370-6,000

205,052

2.8%

1980

5,500-5,921

227,225

2.5%

1992

5,828

255,030

2.3%

2009

6,544

306,772

2.1%

2011

6,588

311,592

2.1%

Given the small and uncertain size of America’s Jewish population during most of the last half-century, more precise demographic details are unlikely to exist, including estimates of the 18-21 college-age cohort. However, according to these midpoint national range estimates, the Jewish population between 1970 and 2011 ranged between about 3.05% and 3.35% of the total non-Hispanic white population. Therefore, since the median age of the Jewish population has been reasonably close to that of non-Hispanic whites in general, for the purposes of Appendix B I have approximated the Jewish college-age cohorts during these decades as a fixed 3.20% of their non-Hispanic white counterparts nationally. Prior to 1970, such relationships seem less certain, so I assumed the college-age fractions of Jews and whites in general were proportional to the sizes of their total populations. Similarly, since Jews are today roughly 8% of the total non-Hispanic white population in California, I have assumed that they represented that fixed share of that same total population over the last few decades, though it appears that the Jewish fraction of whites in California has actually risen substantially during this period. A crucial demographic factor among American Jews has been rapid growth of the ultra-Orthodox segment, driven by their very high fertility, and the contrasting trends within the general Jewish population. For example, demographic estimates by Prof. Joshua Comenetz of the University of Florida indicate that the population of ultra-orthodox Jews is doubling every twenty years, and would have easily exceeded 10% of the American total by 2010. This is driven by both early marriages and an extremely high total fertility rate, running at 6.6 children for Haredi ultra-Orthodox families to 7.9 children for Hassidic ultra-Orthodox. Meanwhile, the overall Jewish fertility rate is well below replacement, being around 1.86. Given the relative size of the ultra-Orthodox community, this implies that the non-ultra-Orthodox fertility rate (including modern Orthodox) is not much above one child. In fact, the New York City population figures for 2011 indicate that the average Orthodox Jewish family (including both modern Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox) has almost five times as many children as the average non-Orthodox Jewish family. The demographic and socio-economic contrast between ordinary and ultra-Orthodox Jews and the associated projections are discussed in the following sources: Jack Wertheimer, “Jews and the Jewish Birthrate,” Commentary, October 2005 Joseph Berger, “Aided by Orthodox, City’s Jewish Population Is Growing Again,” The New York Times, June 11, 2012 Josh Nathan-Kazis, “N.Y. Jewish Population Grows to 1.5M: Study,” Jewish Daily Forward, June 12, 2012 “Majority of Jews will be Ultra-Orthodox by 2050,” University of Manchester, July 23, 2007

Appendix B: Estimated Age and State Distribution of American Racial and Ethnic Groups

When considering the per capita performance or representation of various racial or ethnic groups, we must be careful to calculate these values with respect to the appropriate underlying population. In particular, different groups frequently have substantially dissimilar age-distributions, so the relative sizes of their college-age cohorts may be quite different from the sizes of their overall populations, impacting both college enrollments and late high school achievements. Such differences are indicated by non-Hispanic whites having a median age of 42, while the figure for Hispanics is 27. For that reason, I have used the totals of the 18-21 age-cohorts from the Community Population Survey (CPS) of the U.S. Census to provide these racial percentages for the last forty years, both nationwide and for the state of California. Since the CPS results are based on sampling, the yearly figures may display considerable random statistical fluctuations, especially for small groups such as Asians, but over longer periods they are probably accurate. In addition, prior to 1987, the figures for Asians were not separately provided, but were included in the “Other” category, and based on the 1986 and 1987 figures, I have assumed that 80% of the pre-1987 “Other” totals were actually Asians. “Whites” represent non-Hispanic whites. The national Jewish figures are estimated as described in Appendix A, while the California figures assume a constant ratio to non-Hispanic whites, hence are probably an overestimate for prior decades. For the late high school cohort of ages 16-17, the racial distributions are very close to those of the 18-21 cohort for all racial groups, but have much higher yearly statistical fluctuations because the total samples are half as large; therefore, I have elected to use the distributions derived from the 18-21 cohort for high school populations as well.

Historical National and California College-Age Population Percentages

National Percentages, Age 18-21

California Percentages, Age 18-21

Year

W

H

B

A

J

NJW

W

H

B

A

J

NJW

1972

82.0

4.5

12.4

0.9

2.6

79.3

74.2

14.2

9.1

2.1

5.9

68.3

1973

81.1

5.1

12.4

1.1

2.6

78.5

71.2

14.3

9.8

3.8

5.7

65.5

1974

80.7

5.5

12.4

1.1

2.6

78.1

68.8

16.6

9.8

3.8

5.5

63.3

1975

80.3

5.7

12.4

1.2

2.6

77.8

67.6

18.9

8.4

4.1

5.4

62.2

1976

80.3

5.4

12.7

1.3

2.6

77.7

69.4

16.5

8.9

4.2

5.6

63.9

1977

79.7

5.8

12.8

1.4

2.6

77.2

68.2

18.7

8.8

3.4

5.5

62.8

1978

79.4

5.9

12.8

1.5

2.5

76.9

65.9

18.2

10.3

4.4

5.3

60.6

1979

79.1

6.2

12.8

1.5

2.5

76.5

65.3

19.1

9.6

4.8

5.2

60.1

1980

78.3

6.9

12.9

1.6

2.5

75.8

63.4

21.2

9.1

5.0

5.1

58.4

1981

76.6

7.3

13.4

2.2

2.5

74.2

60.8

22.3

8.0

7.1

4.9

56.0

1982

76.8

7.1

13.6

2.0

2.5

74.3

62.8

20.5

9.1

6.1

5.0

57.8

1983

76.5

7.0

13.8

2.2

2.4

74.0

59.1

22.7

11.2

5.6

4.7

54.3

1984

75.7

7.2

14.2

2.3

2.4

73.2

59.1

21.6

10.0

7.4

4.7

54.4

1985

74.3

8.5

14.2

2.4

2.4

71.9

56.3

25.2

8.2

8.3

4.5

51.8

1986

73.3

9.5

14.3

2.3

2.3

71.0

54.2

28.7

8.9

6.6

4.3

49.9

1987

72.3

10.0

14.4

2.7

2.3

70.0

51.5

30.0

7.5

8.8

4.1

47.4

1988

72.6

9.7

14.2

2.9

2.3

70.2

51.8

30.4

7.2

9.9

4.1

47.6

1989

72.8

9.7

13.9

2.8

2.3

70.5

50.3

31.6

5.7

11.4

4.0

46.3

1990

70.8

10.9

14.3

3.0

2.3

68.5

49.1

33.4

5.1

10.1

3.9

45.2

1991

70.5

10.8

14.7

3.2

2.3

68.3

47.7

33.9

6.5

10.9

3.8

43.9

1992

69.6

11.4

14.9

3.1

2.2

67.4

41.5

38.0

9.3

9.6

3.3

38.2

1993

68.4

12.2

15.0

3.0

2.2

66.2

39.4

41.9

6.5

10.4

3.2

36.3

1994

66.5

13.5

15.1

3.0

2.1

64.4

39.0

40.6

6.2

10.5

3.1

35.8

1995

66.0

14.0

15.3

2.5

2.1

63.9

35.3

45.1

5.1

8.9

2.8

32.4

1996

65.2

14.1

15.4

4.2

2.1

63.2

37.5

40.3

7.6

13.4

3.0

34.5

1997

65.1

14.1

15.7

3.9

2.1

63.0

35.5

41.3

7.3

14.7

2.8

32.7

1998

65.6

14.8

15.0

3.7

2.1

63.5

45.4

36.7

5.4

11.1

3.6

41.8

1999

65.3

14.7

15.2

3.9

2.1

63.2

42.5

38.4

6.6

11.4

3.4

39.1

2000

64.8

14.4

15.2

4.4

2.1

62.8

42.9

36.5

6.3

13.5

3.4

39.5

2001

61.8

17.8

14.7

4.5

2.0

59.8

36.5

43.9

6.6

12.4

2.9

33.6

2002

61.6

17.6

14.6

4.8

2.0

59.7

36.2

42.7

5.6

14.3

2.9

33.3

2003

61.2

17.2

14.0

4.7

2.0

59.2

39.1

38.0

5.7

13.1

3.1

35.9

2004

62.3

17.1

13.3

4.4

2.0

60.3

38.9

38.7

6.0

13.6

3.1

35.8

2005

60.5

17.3

14.8

4.5

1.9

58.6

36.9

41.7

6.6

11.0

3.0

34.0

2006

60.6

17.0

15.4

4.4

1.9

58.7

37.2

40.5

6.7

13.3

3.0

34.2

2007

59.3

17.9

15.3

4.7

1.9

57.4

34.8

40.8

7.8

13.4

2.8

32.0

2008

59.4

17.9

15.0

4.6

1.9

57.5

36.5

41.6

7.8

11.0

2.9

33.6

2009

60.2

17.3

15.1

4.6

1.9

58.2

38.2

41.6

7.3

11.3

3.1

35.1

2010

58.5

18.9

15.1

4.6

1.9

56.6

33.3

46.1

6.8

10.8

2.7

30.7

2011

56.9

19.6

15.4

5.1

1.8

55.1

30.1

48.8

6.1

11.1

2.4

27.7

Estimated 2010/2011 State Percentages of non-Jewish whites, Asians, and Jews

State

N/J White

Asian

Jewish

State

N/J White

Asian

Jewish

Alabama

66.8

1.1

0.2

Montana

87.7

0.6

0.1

Alaska

63.2

5.4

0.9

Nebraska

81.8

1.8

0.3

Arizona

56.1

2.8

1.7

Nevada

51.3

7.2

2.8

Arkansas

74.4

1.2

0.1

New Hampshire

91.5

2.2

0.8

California

36.8

13.0

3.3

New Jersey

53.6

8.3

5.7

Colorado

68.2

2.8

1.8

New Mexico

39.9

1.4

0.6

Connecticut

68.0

3.8

3.2

New York

49.9

7.3

8.4

Delaware

63.6

3.2

1.7

North Carolina

65.0

2.2

0.3

District of Columbia

30.1

3.5

4.7

North Dakota

88.8

1.0

0.1

Florida

54.5

2.4

3.4

Ohio

79.8

1.7

1.3

Georgia

54.6

3.2

1.3

Oklahoma

68.6

1.7

0.1

Hawaii

22.2

38.6

0.5

Oregon

77.4

3.7

1.1

Idaho

83.9

1.2

0.1

Pennsylvania

77.2

2.7

2.3

Illinois

61.4

4.6

2.3

Rhode Island

74.6

2.9

1.8

Indiana

81.2

1.6

0.3

South Carolina

63.8

1.3

0.3

Iowa

88.5

1.7

0.2

South Dakota

84.7

0.9

0.0

Kansas

77.6

2.4

0.6

Tennessee

75.3

1.4

0.3

Kentucky

86.0

1.1

0.3

Texas

44.7

3.8

0.6

Louisiana

60.1

1.5

0.2

Utah

80.2

2.0

0.2

Maine

93.4

1.0

1.0

Vermont

93.4

1.3

0.9

Maryland

50.6

5.5

4.1

Virginia

63.6

5.5

1.2

Massachusetts

71.9

5.3

4.2

Washington

71.8

7.2

0.7

Michigan

75.8

2.4

0.8

West Virginia

93.1

0.7

0.1

Minnesota

82.2

4.0

0.9

Wisconsin

82.8

2.3

0.5

Mississippi

57.9

0.9

0.1

Wyoming

85.7

0.8

0.2

Missouri

80.0

1.6

1.0

Puerto Rico

1.0

0.2

0.1

Northeast

63.5

5.5

5.2

South

58.8

2.8

1.2

Midwest

76.8

2.6

1.1

West

50.6

9.3

2.2

National Total

61.6

4.8

2.1

Source: The Asian and Non-Jewish white figures are derived from the 2010 Census, while the Jewish estimates appear in Sheskin (2011) and should be almost unchanged from the 2010 figures.

Appendix C: Racial and Ethnic Enrollments at Elite Universities

The following tables summarize the 1980-2011 officially reported racial enrollment percentages for full-time undergraduates at the Ivy League and several comparably elite universities, and were derived from the total enrollment figures obtained from the website of National Center for Educational Statistics (NCES). The listed categories are White (W), Black (B), Hispanic (H), Asian (A), Unknown Race (U), and International (I). Prior to 2009, the “Unknown Race” category also included mixed race individuals.

Harvard

Yale

Princeton

Year

W

B

H

A

U

I

W

B

H

A

U

I

W

B

H

A

U

I

1980

81.3

5.2

3.5

4.1

0.0

5.7

80.2

5.9

3.7

5.6

0.0

4.3

79.8

7.5

4.6

3.2

0.0

4.5

1984

77.4

4.3

3.8

6.9

0.0

7.5

80.8

6.5

2.9

6.8

0.0

2.8

76.4

6.6

3.9

4.8

0.0

8.0

1986

74.2

5.9

4.2

9.0

0.0

6.3

79.7

6.5

3.4

7.8

0.0

2.5

78.2

6.2

4.1

7.1

0.0

4.2

1988

70.9

6.9

4.6

10.8

0.0

6.3

76.2

6.9

4.3

9.7

0.0

2.9

75.8

6.0

3.9

7.6

0.0

6.4

1990

69.9

7.1

5.8

10.9

1.4

5.8

67.8

8.4

5.7

14.1

12.3

3.6

73.2

6.7

4.9

9.6

0.0

5.2

1991

64.2

7.4

5.9

16.1

3.1

5.9

67.0

7.7

5.2

15.6

10.1

4.3

72.0

6.6

5.4

10.1

0.0

5.6

1992

58.0

7.5

8.5

19.1

4.8

6.3

65.7

7.8

6.0

16.1

8.3

4.0

72.2

6.4

5.9

9.4

0.0

5.9

1993

56.5

8.4

7.5

20.6

10.9

6.4

63.2

9.2

6.1

16.8

8.2

4.3

71.7

6.2

6.0

9.9

0.0

5.8

1994

46.1

7.4

7.1

18.3

14.0

6.5

56.6

8.4

6.4

15.6

7.9

4.4

71.1

6.3

6.0

10.5

0.0

5.6

1995

45.1

7.3

7.3

18.4

15.1

6.2

55.4

8.7

6.5

16.1

7.7

5.0

69.7

6.8

6.2

11.3

0.0

5.4

1996

44.6

8.0

7.2

17.5

15.8

6.1

54.9

8.2

6.0

16.8

7.5

5.9

68.2

7.0

6.4

12.1

0.0

5.6

1997

43.4

8.2

7.4

17.4

16.4

6.4

55.5

7.5

5.9

16.5

7.8

6.1

67.9

7.1

6.4

12.8

0.0

5.1

1998

44.1

8.1

7.7

17.0

15.8

6.7

53.8

7.2

5.8

16.1

10.0

6.4

67.8

7.2

6.3

12.9

0.0

5.2

1999

43.5

7.9

7.5

17.2

16.7

6.5

52.7

7.0

6.0

14.6

12.1

6.7

68.4

7.2

6.3

12.3

0.0

5.1

2000

44.3

7.9

7.6

17.1

15.9

6.5

53.9

7.6

5.8

14.5

12.3

5.1

68.0

7.2

6.0

12.3

0.0

6.0

2001

45.6

7.5

7.6

16.4

15.1

6.9

52.4

7.6

6.0

13.8

12.1

7.4

66.2

7.9

6.4

12.1

0.0

6.9

2002

47.4

7.2

7.7

16.3

13.5

7.2

52.0

8.0

6.0

13.5

11.8

7.9

65.2

8.2

6.2

12.2

0.0

7.5

2003

48.6

7.3

7.4

16.2

12.2

7.5

51.6

7.6

6.0

13.4

11.9

8.8

63.6

8.2

6.3

12.9

0.0

8.3

2004

48.9

7.6

7.7

17.1

9.3

8.5

51.3

7.8

7.1

13.6

10.8

8.6

62.9

8.2

6.8

13.0

0.0

8.4

2005

49.0

8.3

7.5

17.6

8.5

8.4

51.0

8.1

7.2

13.6

11.1

8.2

62.0

8.5

6.8

13.1

0.0

8.9

2006

47.6

7.9

6.5

14.3

14.3

8.9

50.1

8.2

7.6

13.5

11.4

8.3

57.5

8.7

7.2

13.6

2.9

9.2

2007

45.9

7.8

7.0

15.4

14.0

9.1

48.7

8.8

8.1

13.7

11.2

8.4

52.3

8.6

7.5

14.1

7.2

9.6

2008

44.6

7.8

6.7

16.7

14.0

9.5

45.1

8.7

8.6

13.8

14.4

8.6

51.2

8.5

7.6

15.0

7.1

10.0

2009

42.4

7.9

7.5

17.0

13.9

10.3

41.7

8.5

8.5

14.3

16.8

8.9

48.3

7.8

7.5

15.7

4.6

10.4

2010

44.1

6.9

8.1

15.6

11.9

9.8

46.6

6.0

9.1

14.2

8.6

9.8

48.8

7.5

7.7

16.9

3.3

10.5

2011

45.0

6.6

9.2

17.2

6.2

10.7

47.2

6.0

10.0

15.2

5.2

10.0

49.0

7.0

8.0

17.6

2.7

11.0

Columbia

Brown

Cornell

Year

W

B

H

A

U

I

W

B

H

A

U

I

W

B

H

A

U

I

1980

73.4

5.8

6.3

9.7

4.9

4.9

86.1

6.2

1.4

3.8

0.0

2.3

81.4

5.0

3.3

6.4

0.0

3.7

1984

74.2

6.2

5.1

12.5

1.9

1.9

82.9

6.9

2.6

5.9

0.0

1.6

75.7

5.4

4.6

10.1

0.0

3.9

1986

73.3

6.1

5.0

12.8

2.6

2.6

81.1

7.4

2.4

7.2

0.0

1.8

75.0

4.6

4.1

11.5

0.0

4.0

1988

70.5

6.7

5.3

14.1

3.2

3.2

78.9

7.3

2.9

8.6

0.0

2.2

73.8

4.3

4.2

13.6

0.0

3.8

1990

63.4

7.4

7.5

16.2

5.2

5.2

71.5

6.9

4.2

10.9

0.0

6.4

70.9

4.6

4.8

15.0

0.0

4.4

1991

60.7

7.8

7.7

18.4

5.2

5.2

69.0

6.7

4.8

12.7

0.0

6.7

67.5

4.6

5.6

16.6

0.0

5.4

1992

58.6

7.6

7.6

19.9

6.1

6.1

66.6

6.8

5.4

14.0

0.0

7.0

65.1

4.6

6.1

17.7

0.0

6.2

1993

55.8

8.5

6.4

22.7

6.3

6.3

66.6

6.4

5.0

14.8

0.0

7.0

63.4

4.0

5.8

19.2

0.0

7.3

1994

46.3

7.4

5.4

19.5

6.2

6.2

66.4

6.3

5.0

15.2

0.0

6.8

61.9

4.0

6.1

20.1

0.0

7.6

1995

45.8

7.3

5.0

18.4

6.7

6.7

66.2

6.6

4.9

15.3

0.0

6.7

60.7

3.7

6.2

20.9

0.0

8.0

1996

46.3

7.3

4.6

16.3

6.9

6.9

66.2

6.3

5.1

15.6

0.0

6.5

55.3

4.1

6.3

20.4

5.4

8.0

1997

46.2

7.7

4.6

14.7

7.1

7.1

65.8

6.4

5.6

15.3

0.0

6.7

56.0

4.3

6.1

20.6

3.0

9.4

1998

45.6

7.5

4.2

13.9

7.3

7.3

65.2

6.4

5.8

15.2

0.0

7.1

55.9

4.3

6.1

19.7

3.7

9.8

1999

46.1

7.9

3.9

12.6

7.0

7.0

61.8

6.2

6.0

14.7

4.1

6.9

55.6

4.2

6.0

19.9

3.6

10.1

2000

45.6

7.3

6.6

13.5

14.5

14.5

55.7

6.3

6.3

14.9

9.5

6.9

55.8

4.2

5.9

19.8

3.6

10.1

2001

46.3

7.2

6.8

13.6

13.5

13.5

51.9

6.1

6.6

14.5

14.1

6.3

55.9

4.5

5.6

19.7

3.9

10.1

2002

47.6

7.1

6.8

14.2

11.4

11.4

49.9

6.1

6.4

13.7

17.4

5.9

55.8

4.7

5.3

19.8

4.3

9.7

2003

47.5

6.9

7.3

16.3

8.3

8.3

49.6

6.5

6.7

13.6

16.8

6.3

59.4

4.6

5.2

16.4

6.6

7.2

2004

47.1

7.2

7.3

16.4

7.4

7.4

51.2

6.5

7.0

13.5

14.9

6.3

57.9

4.6

5.2

16.3

8.5

7.1

2005

46.0

7.4

7.9

16.7

7.9

7.9

51.4

6.8

7.3

13.7

14.1

6.2

56.0

4.8

5.4

15.9

10.0

7.4

2006

43.2

7.7

9.3

17.2

8.4

8.4

50.1

6.9

8.1

13.9

14.1

6.4

53.2

5.0

5.5

16.1

11.8

7.9

2007

42.0

8.4

9.5

17.2

9.5

9.5

48.4

6.8

8.4

15.3

13.4

7.2

49.7

5.3

5.5

16.2

14.8

8.0

2008

39.6

9.0

10.6

16.9

10.4

10.4

45.2

6.8

8.7

15.9

14.5

8.3

48.8

5.1

5.6

16.5

14.9

8.7

2009

37.3

9.9

11.9

16.3

11.2

11.2

46.9

5.5

9.2

15.4

11.2

8.9

45.6

5.4

5.9

16.6

17.4

8.7

2010

40.2

8.5

13.6

15.7

12.2

12.2

45.8

5.9

9.2

14.6

11.0

9.7

46.1

5.3

8.4

16.1

12.0

9.0

2011

40.2

8.0

13.0

15.6

11.0

11.0

44.7

6.0

9.0

13.5

11.2

11.0

45.5

6.0

9.0

16.4

9.9

9.0

Dartmouth

Penn

Caltech

Year

W

B

H

A

U

I

W

B

H

A

U

I

W

B

H

A

U

I

1980

86.3

7.7

0.4

1.6

0.0

2.7

85.3

5.4

1.9

3.8

0.0

3.5

74.4

1.9

3.6

12.0

0.0

8.0

1984

86.5

6.1

1.0

1.9

0.0

3.2

82.3

5.2

2.4

5.7

0.0

4.3

67.8

1.5

3.4

18.7

0.0

8.1

1986

84.2

5.6

1.4

3.6

0.0

3.4

79.9

5.4

2.9

7.3

0.0

4.4

64.6

1.6

2.9

21.4

0.0

9.4

1988

77.5

6.7

2.3

5.6

0.0

5.8

74.9

6.1

3.1

9.3

0.0

6.5

63.8

0.9

2.8

22.4

0.0

9.8

1990

74.9

6.0

3.4

6.3

5.7

6.8

70.7

6.2

3.3

12.6

0.0

7.1

62.1

1.7

3.3

22.1

0.5

10.2

1991

73.2

6.6

3.9

6.4

7.3

7.1

68.3

5.8

3.5

14.5

0.0

7.7

59.6

2.2

4.6

22.7

0.3

10.3

1992

71.7

6.5

4.6

7.1

9.1

7.2

65.6

5.6

3.8

15.9

0.0

8.9

56.3

1.9

5.9

25.2

0.1

10.3

1993

70.7

6.0

4.5

8.3

9.7

7.5

64.1

5.4

3.8

17.1

0.0

9.4

56.3

1.8

5.7

26.9

0.6

8.7

1994

63.6

5.6

4.7

8.5

7.2

7.8

64.1

5.3

3.8

17.8

0.0

8.8

54.0

1.6

5.7

29.8

0.2

8.3

1995

59.3

5.8

4.1

8.7

11.4

8.5

64.1

5.5

4.0

18.1

0.0

8.0

55.6

0.5

5.0

29.1

0.1

9.5

1996

58.4

5.4

4.2

8.7

12.9

8.4

64.9

5.3

4.2

17.9

0.0

7.7

57.5

0.6

4.9

27.6

0.1

9.3

1997

58.0

5.5

4.0

9.1

13.1

8.3

64.1

5.6

4.3

17.9

0.0

7.9

58.0

0.6

4.2

27.4

0.3

9.3

1998

59.1

5.6

4.4

10.2

14.7

4.1

63.6

5.4

4.0

18.5

0.0

8.4

59.5

1.4

4.9

24.1

0.3

9.4

1999

60.4

5.3

5.0

9.8

13.3

4.0

62.2

5.3

4.3

19.2

0.0

8.8

60.0

1.1

5.3

24.3

0.3

8.8

2000

59.8

5.5

5.7

10.2

12.1

4.4

53.1

5.6

4.8

19.0

8.8

8.6

58.1

1.4

5.9

24.9

0.3

9.1

2001

60.9

5.6

5.8

10.5

9.9

4.6

51.2

5.4

5.2

19.5

10.1

8.4

55.9

1.9

6.9

24.5

0.6

9.8

2002

59.4

6.2

6.5

11.6

8.5

4.8

50.6

5.7

5.7

18.4

10.5

8.8

56.0

1.3

6.5

27.2

0.9

7.7

2003

58.2

6.3

6.4

12.2

8.6

5.3

50.1

5.9

5.4

16.8

11.0

10.5

51.4

1.3

7.3

31.1

0.8

7.5

2004

57.2

6.8

6.4

13.4

7.3

5.4

48.7

6.1

5.3

17.6

12.0

10.0

51.8

1.1

6.9

31.1

1.5

6.9

2005

57.6

6.9

6.1

13.5

7.2

5.4

48.2

6.5

5.3

17.2

12.3

10.1

49.5

0.8

6.7

33.0

2.6

7.0

2006

58.0

7.2

5.9

13.4

6.0

5.6

46.4

6.9

5.6

17.6

12.5

10.6

45.7

0.6

5.6

37.4

2.7

8.0

2007

57.2

7.3

6.3

13.6

5.3

6.7

44.7

7.1

5.7

16.8

14.0

11.4

43.5

0.8

5.4

38.1

2.7

9.4

2008

55.8

8.0

6.8

13.6

5.1

7.0

42.2

7.6

5.9

17.3

15.4

11.1

40.4

0.8

5.5

39.8

2.2

11.3

2009

53.2

8.4

7.0

14.5

5.5

7.6

39.3

7.5

6.2

17.8

17.1

11.6

38.7

1.2

6.8

39.9

1.8

11.7

2010

50.1

7.9

8.3

14.5

6.1

7.8

45.4

7.1

6.6

17.9

9.3

12.1

37.3

1.1

6.4

39.4

1.9

11.7

2011

47.4

7.0

9.0

14.0

8.4

7.0

45.5

7.0

7.0

18.3

6.8

11.0

35.1

1.0

8.0

38.8

0.5

12.0

MIT

Stanford

Berkeley

Year

W

B

H

A

U

I

W

B

H

A

U

I

W

B

H

A

U

I

1980

76.3

5.5

2.4

5.3

0.0

10.1

78.3

6.1

6.5

6.3

0.0

2.2

68.4

3.2

3.8

21.7

0.0

2.4

1984

64.3

5.4

3.8

13.5

0.0

12.7

70.9

7.6

8.7

7.4

0.0

4.8

62.1

4.3

5.9

24.6

0.0

2.6

1986

67.1

4.6

4.8

15.8

0.0

7.3

68.0

7.8

9.5

9.8

0.0

4.3

53.5

5.1

7.3

25.5

0.0

2.6

1988

60.5

5.8

6.6

17.9

0.0

8.6

64.3

8.4

9.5

13.7

0.0

3.2

49.5

7.0

11.0

27.8

0.0

3.6

1990

55.0

6.4

8.3

21.2

0.0

8.7

59.3

8.3

9.8

18.4

0.2

3.2

42.8

7.3

14.9

30.4

6.1

3.4

1991

53.1

6.2

8.2

23.0

0.0

8.7

57.0

8.0

10.0

20.2

0.2

3.5

41.0

7.3

15.2

31.7

6.0

3.5

1992

51.3

5.6

8.3

25.5

0.0

8.5

54.2

7.8

10.6

22.2

0.1

4.0

37.5

6.2

15.4

35.9

7.6

3.8

1993

49.3

5.6

8.7

27.3

0.0

8.3

51.8

7.8

11.1

23.6

0.2

4.3

35.6

5.6

14.7

39.1

7.4

3.8

1994

48.3

5.8

8.9

28.0

0.0

8.1

50.2

7.9

11.0

24.6

0.2

4.8

30.5

5.2

13.3

38.9

7.3

3.8

1995

47.6

5.6

8.7

29.1

0.7

7.6

50.0

8.0

11.7

23.8

0.2

4.8

29.7

5.6

13.6

39.4

6.7

3.7

1996

43.6

6.5

9.6

28.5

3.3

7.8

50.5

7.9

11.3

23.9

0.1

4.8

29.8

5.5

13.3

39.9

6.7

3.7

1997

40.8

6.2

9.9

28.3

5.9

7.7

50.7

8.1

10.9

24.1

0.1

4.8

30.0

5.8

12.8

39.7

6.9

3.7

1998

37.7

6.1

10.1

28.4

8.3

7.9

51.3

8.2

11.0

23.5

0.1

4.8

29.7

5.1

11.3

39.8

9.4

3.7

1999

34.1

6.3

10.6

27.7

11.0

8.3

50.7

8.5

10.7

24.0

0.1

4.8

29.8

4.6

10.4

39.9

10.6

3.8

2000

34.0

6.2

11.2

27.5

10.8

8.5

49.7

8.8

10.4

24.5

0.1

5.0

30.0

4.2

9.5

40.9

11.0

3.8

2001

34.5

6.1

11.3

27.8

10.1

8.2

48.0

8.6

10.6

24.7

1.2

5.2

30.3

3.6

9.2

41.3

11.6

3.4

2002

34.5

6.1

11.8

27.4

10.0

8.3

45.6

9.6

11.1

24.5

2.1

5.3

29.8

3.5

9.8

42.3

11.0

3.0

2003

34.7

6.1

11.8

28.2

9.5

8.1

41.4

10.4

12.0

25.2

3.3

5.8

29.7

3.8

10.5

41.7

10.6

3.1

2004

35.4

5.9

11.5

27.8

10.4

7.5

40.9

10.7

11.7

24.3

4.4

5.9

30.2

3.6

10.5

41.5

10.4

3.3

2005

35.9

5.8

11.3

26.6

11.3

7.6

40.6

10.5

11.3

24.2

5.1

6.2

30.9

3.4

10.5

41.9

9.5

3.3

2006

36.7

6.3

11.5

26.5

9.9

7.9

40.3

10.3

11.3

24.2

5.3

6.1

31.4

3.4

10.9

41.8

8.7

3.3

2007

37.2

7.1

11.8

25.9

8.4

8.4

41.1

9.5

11.5

24.2

5.0

6.3

31.4

3.2

11.4

42.2

8.1

3.2

2008

36.5

8.0

12.4

25.4

7.2

9.4

38.2

9.9

12.2

23.0

7.0

6.9

30.7

3.4

11.5

42.0

7.6

4.3

2009

36.3

8.1

13.2

25.0

5.8

9.3

35.9

10.0

13.4

23.1

7.7

7.2

30.2

3.5

11.9

40.8

7.5

5.6

2010

36.9

7.7

13.4

23.9

5.2

9.6

38.9

7.0

15.7

17.9

1.3

7.2

30.2

3.0

11.9

38.7

7.1

7.3

2011

36.0

7.0

15.0

24.0

4.0

10.0

36.4

7.0

16.0

18.2

0.9

8.0

30.3

3.0

12.0

37.1

5.2

9.0

The figures do not sum to 100 because the small racial categories of American Indian and post-2009 mixed race are excluded, while prior to 1994 the “Unknown Race” category was parallel to the actual racial reporting.

Appendix D: Recent and Historical Jewish Enrollments at Elite Universities

Recent Jewish Enrollments

Estimates of current Jewish enrollments at most major American universities may be found at the website of the Jewish Hillel student organization. For most universities with large Jewish enrollments, the most recent seven years of these Jewish enrollment estimates by Hillel were published as lists in issues of Reform Judaism Magazine, and are available on their website at:

Date/PDF

URL

Fall 2006

http://reformjudaismmag.org/_kd/Items/actions.cfm?action=Show&item_id=1192

Fall 2007

http://reformjudaismmag.org/_kd/Items/actions.cfm?action=Show&item_id=1278

Fall 2008

http://reformjudaismmag.org/_kd/Items/actions.cfm?action=Show&item_id=1380

Fall 2009

http://reformjudaismmag.org/_kd/Items/actions.cfm?action=Show&item_id=1518

Fall 2010

http://reformjudaismmag.org/_kd/Items/actions.cfm?action=Show&item_id=1647

Fall 2011

http://reformjudaismmag.org/_kd/Items/actions.cfm?action=Show&item_id=2888

Fall 2012

http://reformjudaismmag.org/_kd/Items/actions.cfm?action=Show&item_id=3074

A summary of these recent Jewish enrollment figures for available Ivy League and other elite universities are as follows:

Year

Harvard

Yale

Princeton

Brown

Columbia

Cornell

Penn

Dartmouth

All Ivies

2006

25

23

20

22

22

25

21

2007

30

22.6

14*

25

25

21.7

30.8

11*

24

2008

25.5

30

25

25

25

28

24

2009

25

23

25

25

22

25

22

2010

25

27

25

25

23

25

23

2011

25

27

22

25

23

25

22

2012

25

27

13

22

30

23

25

11

23

Year

MIT

Caltech

Stanford

Berkeley

UCLA

Irvine

San Diego

Davis

Chicago

2006

11

10

2007

9*

6*

10*

10*

12.1

5*

7*

10

14*

2008

10.3

2009

12

2010

12

2011

9

16

2012

9.5

5.5

9.5

10

8.7

4

8

10

16

The average enrollment across the Ivies is weighted by the 2011 total enrollments. The Hillel estimates for universities with relatively small Jewish enrollments are not provided in the past Reform Judaism listings. However, a commenter to the College Confidential discussion forum claims to have provided the Hillel listings in 2007, and since his figures exactly match those of the listings, they are probably accurate, and are the source for the 2007 figures marked with an asterisk: http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/3739728-post7.html . Historical Jewish Enrollments: Historical levels of Jewish enrollment may be found in Synnott (1979/2010), Oren (1985), and Karabel (2005), as well as a few other sources. Jewish Portion of Freshmen at Princeton, 1925-1940: Synnott (1979/2010) p. 195, 224

Class

Jewish Percentage

1925

3.9%

1926

3.9%

1927

3.3%

1928

2.1%

1929

1.7%

1930

2.8%

1931

3.0%

1932

2.8%

1933

2.8%

1934

1.7%

1935

0.8%

1936

1.6%

1937

1.8%

1938

3.1%

1939

1.0%

1940

2.7%

1970

13.5%

Jewish Portion of Freshmen at Harvard, 1900-1922: Synnott (1979/2010) p. 96; the figures are significantly higher if we also include transfer students.

Year

Jewish Percentage

1900

7%

1903

7.1%

1906

7.5%

1909

9.8%

1912

12.6%

1913

14.6%

1914

15.1%

1915

14.0%

1916

14.8%

1917

13.1%

1918

19.8%

1919

17.9%

1920

17.8%

1921

19.7%

1922

21.5%

Also, according to Synnott (1979/2010) p. xxvi, In the mid-1990s, undergraduate Jewish enrollments was about 10-12% at Princeton and ranged between 25% and 36% at Harvard, Yale, and all of the other Ivy League schools.

Jewish Enrollment at Yale College, 1902-1969: Oren (1985) pp. 320-321

Period

Average Jewish Enrollment

1902-04

2.1%

1905-10

3.4%

1911-19

6.0%

1920-26

9.7%

1927-33

11.6%

1934-45

9.8%

1945W-51

9.2%

1952-61

11.3%

1962-65

11.8%

1966-69

16.1%

And according to Oren (1985) p. 196, Ivy Enrollment in 1961 was as follows: Columbia=45%, Cornell=26%, Penn=25%, Harvard=21%, Brown=18%, Princeton=15%, Dartmouth=15%, Yale=12%. Historical Jewish Enrollments figures for Ivy League Universities, 1900-2000 drawn from Karabel (2005), in some cases drawn from Synnott (1979/2010) or Oren (1985)

Year

Source

Enrollment

1900

p. 96

Harvard=7%

1908

p. 23

Harvard=9%F

1909

p. 51

Harvard=9.8%

1914

p. 51

Harvard=15.1%

1915

p. 96

Harvard=15%

1917

p. 75

Yale=9F%

1918

p. 75

Harvard=20%F,Princeton=4%F,Cornell=9.1%,Penn=15.7%

1919

pp. 86-7

Brown=20%,Penn=25%,Columbia=40%

1921

pp. 86-7

Columbia=22%

1922

p. 89

Harvard=21.5%

1923

p. 105

Yale=13.3%, Princeton=3.6%

1924

p. 105

Harvard=25%,Princeton=2%

1925

p. 105,207

Harvard=27.6%F+3.6?%, Yale=13.3%

1926

p. 126

Harvard=15%F

1927

p. 207

Yale=13.3%

1933

p. 172

Harvard=15%F

1937

p. 225

Yale=11.2%F

1936-41

p. 230

Princeton=2.3%F

1930s

p. 245

Harvard=10-15%,Yale=10.7%, Princeton=2%

1942

p. 243

Princeton=2.6%F

1943

p. 243

Princeton=4.8%F

1944

p. 243

Princeton=8.1%F

1946

p. 243

Princeton=4.7%F

1947

p. 597n160

Yale=9.4%F

1948

p. 243

Princeton=6.8%F

1949

p. 597n160

Yale=12.3%F,Princeton=5.6%F

1946-50

p. 211

Yale=10.2%

1950

p. 212

Yale=7.2%F

1952

p. 196

Harvard=25%, Cornell=23%F

1953

p. 363, 607n120

Yale=11%, Princeton=12-13%

1958

p. 246

Princeton=14%

1959

p. 323

Yale=12%,Princeton=14%

1960

p. 319

Princeton=15%

1962-65

p. 331

Yale=16%

1966

p. 364

Yale=30%F,Princeton=12%

1967

p. 365

Penn=40%,Columbia=40%

1960s-70s

p. 626n66

Harvard=25-30%

1972

p. 459

Yale=30%

1973

p. 365

Yale=33%

1976

p. 478-9

Yale=33%,Princeton=19%

1979

p. 529

Princeton=20%

1985

Princeton=16%

1986-88

p. 529

Princeton=13-14%

1990

p. 529-530

Harvard=21%,Yale=29%,Princeton=10%

1999

p. 669n2

Harvard=21%

2000

p. 536

Harvard=21%

F=Entering freshman class figures   In addition, the Harvard Crimson in 1992 claimed that “one in four” (or 25%) of the students at the college was then Jewish: http://www.thecrimson.com/article/1992/11/16/harvard-is-a-home-for-jewish/ I have applied linear interpolation methods to estimate the Jewish enrollment percentages for years between these specified figures.   Bibliographical Sources: The Chosen (2005) Jerome Karabel Joining the Club: A History of Jews and Yale (1985) Dan A. Oren The Half-Opened Door (1979/2010) Marcia Graham Synnott

Appendix E: Estimating the National Distribution of High-Ability Students from the NMS Semifinalists

Each year since 1956 the quasi-official National Merit Scholarship (NMS) Corporation has distributed millions of dollars in financial awards to American high school students based on academic aptitude and performance. In recent years, the competition has attracted roughly one-half of all high school juniors, probably including nearly all the higher-performing ones hoping to attend selective universities. The first stage of the process involves the identification of some 16,000 NMS semifinalists based on their Preliminary Scholastic Aptitude Test (PSAT) scores, with state totals apportioned according to the numbers of high school seniors. Since the PSAT is almost identical in nature to the much better-known SAT, these rosters effectively provide the names of the 16,000 or so American high school juniors who perform best on SAT-type academic aptitude tests, placing them in the top one-half percent of their age group in academic ability. Although some statistics exist on the racial or ethnic distribution of SAT scores, the annual rosters of PSAT semifinalists seem a far superior dataset for estimating the distribution of highest-performing students. First, there is a wide divergence in the rates at which different groups take the SAT, which obviously would impact mean scores, along with the problem that many students in certain parts of the country tend to substitute the somewhat similar ACT. By contrast, the PSAT is universal and national. Also, wealthier or more determined students frequently take the SAT multiple times, often following test-prep courses, and afterward report only their best scores, while the PSAT is only administered once. Since the only use of the PSAT is as an initial filter for the few thousand National Merit Scholarships, it constitutes a relatively “low stakes” test compared with the SAT or ACT, which are usually taken by high school seniors the following year and heavily determine college admissions; thus, the PSAT results are less likely to be distorted by cramming, prepping, or even outright cheating. Finally, estimating the distribution of high performing students from the means or other statistics of the individual subpopulations requires us to assume that the results are normally distributed, which may not be correct, while the lists of NMS semifinalists represent the explicit set of high-ability students we are seeking, allowing us to stratify the data in whatever way we choose. Each June, the individual state lists of NMS semifinalists are released to thousands of media outlets for publicity purposes. Sometimes these releases are then posted on the Internet in PDF form or otherwise made permanently available, and I have managed to locate a total of forty-three such lists from the years 2008-2013, containing the names and schools of over 23,000 individual students. These lists are drawn from twenty-five different states, including all eight of the most populous, together representing almost 75 percent of America’s total population. In analyzing this large dataset, I first grouped the NMS lists by state, and after performing the analyses discussed below on an individual list basis, then averaged all the percentages for each state, thereby producing individual state figures. The results for each state are thus based on tens or even hundreds of thousands of tested students and hundreds or thousands of resulting NMS semifinalists; therefore, in most cases the results for different years are usually reasonably similar, with aggregation across multiple years obviously tending to further reduce the random error. Since East Asian and Hispanic names are extremely distinctive, and the same is true to a somewhat lesser extend for South Asians and Jews, these state lists were individually inspected, and estimated totals for each of these different groups determined, with somewhat ambiguous names assigned a partial weight. Because East Asians were discovered to be an enormously over-represented group, a few particularly ambiguous names such as “Lee” were generally assumed to be of that background. Although this process was necessarily somewhat subjective, I consider it unlikely that any other careful examiner would produce totals greatly different from my own, and I am providing links to all the lists, allowing other interested parties to examine those lists and verify my own estimates. The findings of this direct-inspection approach may be extended and confirmed by using a name-frequency analysis similar to that pioneered by Nathaniel Weyl, in which the prevalence of names of uniquely distinctive ethnicity is compared with their prevalence in the general population. For example, the surname “Nguyen” is uniquely Vietnamese and “Kim” uniquely Korean. The relative prevalence of these particular names among those groups in America can be found by considering the number of such names in the public Census data with the sizes of the two ethnic groups in question. The 2000 Census lists 310,125 Nguyens, or about 1 in 3.6 of the total Vietnamese population of 1,122,528. Meanwhile, there were 194,067 Kims, representing 1 in 5.5 of the 1,076,872 Koreans. Therefore, determining the number of Nguyens and Kims in a state’s NMS semifinalist lists allows us to roughly estimate the total number of Vietnamese and Koreans, though obviously the size of the random error would be much larger than for most of our other calculations. Similarly, we can perform the same population estimate using distinctly Jewish last names, such as the small set of Cohen, Kaplan, Levy, and “Gold—“ (J1) which were suggested by blogger Steve Sailer and his Jewish correspondent, or else extended to include the full set of such names (J2) utilized by Weyl by adding Berman, Bernstein, Epstein, Friedman, Greenberg, Katz, Levine, Rosenberg, and Stern. Based on the 2000 Census estimates, the first group includes approximately 1 in 20 American Jews, while the larger set raises the fraction to 1 in 12. The prevalence of these names allows us to semi-independently confirm the estimated Jewish name-by-name counts obtained by direct inspection, though once again we might expect a significant random error since the numbers are extremely small for most individual states, so use of the results produced by this method should probably be restricted to the aggregate total across all the available states.

Estimated NMS Semifinalists for Available States, 2008-2013

State

2011 Total

N/J White

Asian

Korean

Viet.

Jewish

J1

J2

Alabama/2008,2010

208

83%

14%

2%

1%

2%

Arizona/2013

342

68%

26%

4%

4%

5%

California/2010,2012

1,999

37%

58%

10%

2%

4%

Colorado/2012-2013

256

78%

14%

6%

--

7%

Florida/2008-2013

867

74%

13%

1%

1%

8%

Illinois/2011-2013

693

71%

21%

3%

0.5%

8%

Indiana/2010,2012-13

327

75%

18%

2%

--

5%

Iowa/2011

191

80%

15%

--

--

4%

Kansas/2011

159

87%

9%

--

--

4%

Louisiana/2013

190

76%

19%

3%

--

5%

Maryland/2010

327

57%

32%

3%

--

11%

Michigan/2012,2013

570

68%

30%

2%

--

2%

Minnesota/2010,2011

318

81%

13%

2%

--

6%

Missouri/2011

344

87%

11%

--

--

2%

Nevada/2010,2011

85

67%

20%

3%

--

9%

New Mexico/2011

99

76%

11%

5%

--

6%

New York/2011,2012

957

45%

34%

8%

--

21%

Ohio/2012-2013

642

76%

20%

--

0.5%

4%

Oklahoma/2008

187

83%

14%

--

4%

3%

Pennsylvania/2012

700

72%

20%

2%

--

9%

Tennessee/2010

279

80%

17%

--

--

2%

Texas/2010

1,344

68%

28%

0.5%

2%

3%

Virginia/2008-2009

411

74%

19%

6%

2%

6%

Washington/2013

344

64%

31%

8%

--

5%

Wisconsin/2012

324

87%

11%

2%

--

3%

Eight Largest States

7,772

59%

33%

4%

1%

7%

8%

8%

25 State Aggregate

12,163

65%

28%

4%

1%

6%

6%

7%

National Estimate

16,317

67%

26%

4%

1%

6%

6%

6%

The individual figures for the National Estimate are derived by extrapolating the racial or ethnic totals for the twenty-five available states. All values above 1% are rounded to the nearest 1%, while those below are rounded to the nearest 0.5%. Consider the total sum of the estimated number of Jewish names across the 25 state lists produced by direct inspection. If we compare this figure with the estimates produced by the J1 and J2 processes, the results are within 1% and 3% respectively, remarkably consistent given the significant expected random error, which therefore tends to confirm the validity of the separate methodologies employed. In the American context, non-Hispanic “whites” are defined as those individuals who are not black, Asian, Hispanic, or American Indian. As mentioned, Hispanic names are quite distinctive, and their numbers can easily be determined by direct inspection. These vary considerably by state, and an extrapolated national total may be estimated. Neither black nor American Indians names are highly distinctive, but the combined total size of these groups is considerably smaller than the Hispanic total, and their weighted-average academic performance also considerably lower; therefore, we would expect their aggregate numbers to be much smaller than the Hispanic total, allowing us to easily assign an upper bound to the combined total of these three groups, and provide a good estimate of the net white numbers. Finally, the Jewish totals can be subtracted from this figure to yield the estimates for non-Jewish whites. Major Sources of Likely Error Our primary interest is estimating the overall national percentages of the high performing students in each of these various racial and ethnic groups, and we must extrapolate these results from the limited available subset of NMS semifinalist lists for twenty-five states. Fortunately, these states include the eight largest in population, and also the overwhelming majority of the national totals for the Jewish, Asian, and Hispanic populations. These percentages, based on the 2010 Census figures, are shown in the table below:

Percentage of Particular Groups Included in Our Available States

Aggregate Group

Overall

Jewish

Asian

Hispanic

Chinese

Korean

Viet.

Eight Largest States

47%

68%

61%

69%

66%

56%

63%

Total of 25 States

75%

81%

80%

87%

81%

79%

85%

Using these population ratios, we can easily extrapolate the total number of national NMS semifinalists for each of these groups, and thereby obtain national percentage estimates. However, in performing this analysis, we should bear in mind the possible sources of substantial error, above and beyond the sort of statistical errors due to sample size. First, we are lacking the NMS semifinalist lists for several sizable East Coast states, including New Jersey, Massachusetts, and Connecticut, which together with California and Maryland regularly represent the five highest performing PSAT states, based on NMS qualification threshold. These three states also contain over one-eighth of all American Jews, as well as large numbers of American Chinese, Koreans, and Asians in general. If the relative performance of ethnic groups in these states differed substantially from the pattern in the states whose lists we possess, our national extrapolations might be somewhat distorted. Such regional variations are quite possible, since Asians tend to outperform Jews by a factor of three in California, but by less than a factor of two in New York or Florida, while Jews actually do much better in Virginia. However, since the states whose data we do have already account for roughly 80% of both the Jewish and Asian populations, such adjustments would probably not be large. A much more significant issue is the widely different semifinalist selection criteria across the states, with huge differences in qualification thresholds between states such as California and Massachusetts, with very high cut-off scores of 220, and states such as Mississippi, Oklahoma, and West Virginia, whose qualification scores of around 200 are near the bottom. The crucial point is that we are merely using these NMS semifinalist lists as a proxy to estimate the distribution of America’s highest-performing students on academic ability tests, and if only a small fraction of the semifinalists from the bottom half of the states would have qualified in California, our national estimates may be significantly distorted. In particular, California is America’s most heavily Asian mainland state, containing one-third of our entire Asian population, and partly as a consequence has an extremely high qualification threshold. Thus, although California provides nearly 1,200 Asian semifinalists, that figure would surely be much higher if there were a uniform national qualification threshold, so our national estimates of the Asian percentage of high-ability students probably represent a significant underestimate of the true figure. This impact of these varied thresholds may be seen when we consider the relative performance of other groups. For example, New York and California are the two states with the largest number of Jews, but New York Jews are almost twice as likely to achieve semifinalist status as their California cousins. Similarly, California and Texas contain the two largest populations of Hispanics, both overwhelmingly Mexican-American, but Texas Hispanics are almost three times as likely to be NMS semifinalists. These large discrepancies are probably less due California Jews or Hispanics being much dimmer or lazier, than that California’s required qualification scores are so much higher. As a partial counter-weight to this, Hawaii is half or more Asian, and its unimpressive semifinalist threshold of 211 would tend to imply that the academic performance of its Asian population is far below the norms of other states; but since less than 5% of Asians live on those islands, the national impact would not be large. Finally, there is the much broader question of the possible intrinsic bias of the NMS semifinalist qualification criteria as a true measure of academic aptitude. After 1997 the NMS Corporation began double-weighting the Verbal component of the PSAT exam in selecting NMS semifinalists, a decision which obviously much advantaged those groups which are particularly strong in Verbal and disadvantaged those with weaker Verbal performance. And like the SAT itself but unlike a regular IQ test, the PSAT has never included a Visuospatial component, with such absence obviously benefiting those groups whose Visuospatial skills are weak and hindering those with strong ability in that area. Indeed, an intriguing thought-experiment is to consider the likely distribution of NMS semifinalists if these seemingly arbitrary decisions had been reversed, and semifinalist qualification were based on a double-weighted Visuospatial score but excluding any Verbal one.   PRIMARY BIBLIOGRAPHY: The Creative Elite in America (1966) Nathaniel Weyl The Geography of American Achievement (1989) Nathaniel Weyl

Links to 43 State NMS Semifinalist Rosters, 2008-2013:

State

Year

Link

Alabama

2008

http://tinyurl.com/bz7lnwt

2010

http://tinyurl.com/a8spy5w

Arizona

2013

http://tinyurl.com/b7e3kou

California

2010

http://tinyurl.com/2foy2b7

2012

http://tinyurl.com/ajtpanp

Colorado

2012

http://tinyurl.com/bzxal3e

2013

http://tinyurl.com/batzrht

Florida

2008

http://tinyurl.com/acaplhe

2009

http://tinyurl.com/apak264

2010

http://tinyurl.com/azg9lbo

2011

http://tinyurl.com/a7wwcfy

2012

http://tinyurl.com/bhy8unj

2013

http://tinyurl.com/agbb38z

Illinois

2011

http://tinyurl.com/afwd6cl

2012

http://tinyurl.com/b7z6j2e

2013

http://tinyurl.com/au3c2wk

Indiana

2010

http://tinyurl.com/cmjd2ho

2012

http://tinyurl.com/bh6m6a5

2013

http://tinyurl.com/bgjb32f

Iowa

2011

http://tinyurl.com/bctaykq

Kansas

2011

http://tinyurl.com/b8mnr99

Ohio

2012

http://tinyurl.com/akjsjve

2013

http://tinyurl.com/akoo2q3

Oklahoma

2008

http://tinyurl.com/a9a6x55

Louisiana

2013

http://tinyurl.com/awvc34h

Maryland

2010

http://tinyurl.com/ah4stmv

Michigan

2012

http://tinyurl.com/3eso9ve

2013

http://tinyurl.com/beucyy8

Minnesota

2010

http://tinyurl.com/a8xmf3j

2011

http://tinyurl.com/azc3gnr

Missouri

2011

http://tinyurl.com/azmdk9h

Nevada

2010

http://tinyurl.com/at82rt4

2011

http://tinyurl.com/am7jkvx

New Mexico

2011

http://tinyurl.com/bbz4yo8

New York

2011

http://tinyurl.com/au99m9k

2012

http://tinyurl.com/93xd6qx

Pennsylvania

2012

http://tinyurl.com/b5gg5z6

Tennessee

2010

http://tinyurl.com/ay9cjo2

Texas

2010

http://tinyurl.com/a7kur78

Virginia

2008

http://tinyurl.com/a74z3s7

2009

http://tinyurl.com/2b5za88

Wisconsin

2012

http://tinyurl.com/ajenrnp

Washington

2013

http://tinyurl.com/ayvyf9a

Addendum: After publication of this article, the hundreds of energetic Internet commenters who analyzed and critiqued my findings managed to locate one additional state NMS semifinalist list, supplementing the 43 that I had used.  The list contains the 2009 semifinalists from Massachusetts, and may be found at  http://tinyurl.com/cbtp4ph . My estimate of the ethnic distribution of that list is approximately 24% Asian, 19% Jewish, and 57% non-Jewish white, while the 2011 NMS semifinalist total for Massachusetts was 355.  Incorporating this additional list produces no significant change in my overall results.

Appendix F: Winners of Leading Academic Competitions

Complete or partial rosters of the American winners of various academic competitions are available on various Internet websites and may be examined to estimate the distribution of ethnicities. The tables estimating the ethnic distribution are provided immediately afterward. These include:

The U.S. Mathematics Olympiad, 1974-2012:

http://www.imo-official.org/country_individual_r.aspx?code=USA

Period

N/J White

Asian

Jewish

1970s

56%

0%

44%

1980s

54%

9%

37%

1990s

45%

27%

28%

2000s

43%

53%

3%

2010s

28%

72%

0%

The Putnam College Math Competition, 1938-2011:

http://www.maa.org/awards/putnam.html

Period

N/J White

Asian

Jewish

1938-49

59%

0%

41%

1950s

66%

3%

31%

1960s

76%

2%

22%

1970s

69%

0%

31%

1980s

75%

2%

24%

1990s

44%

24%

31%

2000s

52%

37%

12%

2010s

50%

50%

0%

The U.S. Physics Olympiad winners, 1986-2012:

http://www.aapt.org/

Period

N/J White

Asian

Jewish

1980s

49%

23%

28%

1990s

55%

25%

20%

2000s

46%

46%

9%

2010s

14%

81%

5%

The U.S. Computing Olympiad, 1992-2012:

http://www.usaco.org/index.php?page=history

The U.S. Biology Olympiad, 2003-2012:

http://www.ibo-info.org/ibo-results-and-awards

The U.S. Chemistry Olympiad, 2011-2012:

http://portal.acs.org/portal/acs/corg/content

Competition

N/J White

Asian

Jewish

Computing, 1992-2012

62%

27%

11%

Biology, 2003-2012

25%

68%

8%

Chemistry, 2011-2012

10%

90%

0%

The Intel/Westinghouse Science Talent Search, 1942-2012:

http://www.societyforscience.org/sts/history

STS Finalists

Period

N/J White

Asian

Jewish

1940s

83%

0%

17%

1950s

78%

1%

22%

1960s

76%

1%

23%

1970s

70%

8%

22%

1980s

55%

22%

23%

1990s

54%

29%

17%

2000s

49%

36%

15%

2010s

29%

64%

7%

Top STS Winners

Period

N/J White

Asian

Jewish

1940s

71%

0%

29%

1950s

85%

0%

15%

1960s

82%

3%

15%

1970s

62%

11%

27%

1980s

45%

26%

30%

1990s

55%

25%

20%

2000s

58%

21%

21%

2010s

47%

50%

3%

The Siemens AP Awards, 2002-2011: http://www.siemens-foundation.org/en/advanced_placement.htm

N/J White

Asian

Jewish

2002-2011

31%

61%

8%

Appendix G:  Roster of Harvard College Phi Beta Kappa Inductees, 1966-2012

Approximately 10% of each graduating class at Harvard College receives the academic distinction of being inducted into the local chapter of Phi Beta Kappa, the national honor society, and the Harvard rosters of the last fifty-odd years, containing the names of over 7200 top performing Harvard undergraduates, are all available on the Internet: http://isites.harvard.edu/icb/icb.do?keyword=k19082&pageid=icb.page189954 The selection process is not entirely objective and the requirement that the distribution of inductees match the distribution of student concentrations may somewhat distort the results. Nonetheless, these lists probably constitute one of the few publicly available datasets of top performing Harvard undergraduates for the last half-century. In addition, roughly the top 1.5% of each class receives the special distinction of being elected to PBK in their junior year, and the rosters indicate these highest-performing PBK members for the years 1966-1982 and 2000-2012. The same sort of surname analysis used for other high-performance datasets may be applied to these rosters, and compared to Harvard’s contemporaneous underlying ethnic percentages to gain insight into the relative performance of different groups, and the results are presented below. However, utilizing this type of analysis at the college level, especially in the last two decades presents greater difficulties and challenges than in the various high school cases we have also considered. First, the percentage of foreign students enrolled at Harvard College rose from approximately 5-6% of each class during 1980-2001 to an average of about 8-10% since then. An unknown but very substantial fraction of these foreign students have been of East or South Asian ancestry, hence their names would often be indistinguishable from those of Asian-American students on the rosters, and would tend to augment the apparent contribution of the latter, while another substantial fraction would be of non-Jewish European ancestry, having a similar impact. Furthermore, any of the sort of Eastern European or Germanic surnames which in America often imply Jewish origins are quite common among Gentiles in many parts of Europe, and might easily be misidentified as being Jewish. For these reasons, the estimates I have made are probably much less reliable than when a similar process was employed in analyzing the rosters of Appendices E and F, and others who examine the raw data would surely produce somewhat different findings. However, the results and the broad trends which they indicate are still worth considering.

Total PBK Selections

Period

N/J White

Asian

Jewish

1960s

68%

1%

31%

1970s

55%

3%

41%

1980s

63%

10%

26%

1990s

57%

23%

19%

2000s

60%

23%

16%

2010s

54%

34%

11%

[* = Based on years 1980-1982]

Junior Year PBK Selections

Period

N/J White

Asian

Jewish

1960s

41%

0%

59%

1970s

41%

3%

56%

1980s

59%*

6%*

35%*

1990s

--

--

--

2000s

54%

25%

21%

2010s

39%

49%

13%

As already mentioned, these results may be somewhat contaminated, especially in the last decade, by the presence of foreign students. To some extent, first names might be used as a filter to attempt to exclude these, but in many cases those of first generation immigrants would be indistinguishable, rendering such a process ineffective. Therefore, let us simply analyze these results, recognizing a significant level of likely inaccuracy. First, during most of the 1960s and early 1970s Harvard was roughly 25-30% Jewish, declining to about 20% Jewish by 1979. Meanwhile, the Jewish PBK numbers were far above this level, generally running at 40% during the 1970s, and close to 60% of the most academically elite Junior Year PBKs throughout the 1960s and 1970s, as much as three times their share of Harvard undergraduates. Clearly, Harvard Jews were extremely successful academically, far superior to the much larger number of their non-Jewish white classmates. Although Jewish enrollment seemed to decline to about 20% of Harvard students during the 1980s, their relative academic performance remained quite strong, accounting for much more than their share of the PBK selections and for the years 1980-1982 nearly twice the expected number of Junior Year PBKs. However, during this decade, the relative performance of both Asians and non-Jewish whites had become roughly comparable, at least with regard to regular PBK selections, and in fact the Jewish numbers began noticeably falling off toward the end of the decade, even though Jewish enrollment did not. During the 1990s, this Jewish academic decline continued, with Jews remaining as 20-25% of the students, but a lower fraction of the PBKs, with the results for the second half of the decade being far below that of the first half. Asians (including foreign students) were perhaps about 20% of enrollment during these years, but they gained a larger share of PBKs, while non-Jewish whites (including foreigners) showed by far the best performance, being only about 30-35% of the undergraduates, but gaining nearly twice as many PBK selections. During the 2000s, these trends continued, with Jewish enrollment rising from 21% to 25%, while Jewish PBKs fell to just 16%, once again higher at the beginning of the decade than at the end; thus, Jewish PBKs dropped even as Jewish numbers increased. Asians continued to gain more than their share of PBKs, while non-Jews greatly strengthened their lead in PBKs and Junior Year PBKs, even as their numbers continued to fall, becoming nearly three times as likely to gain the PBK distinction as their Jewish classmates, a total reversal of the superiority which Jewish students had once enjoyed. By the late 2000s and early 2010s, Jewish students had become one of the academically weakest groups at Harvard, constituting 25% or more of all students, but just 11-13% of PBKs selections. Meanwhile, during the 2010s the average Asian student was nearly 300% more likely to make PBK, with their proportion of Junior Year PBKs running even higher. And white Gentiles seemed to perform best of all, being about 400% more likely to gain PBK honors than their Jewish classmates. Put another way, the reported number of Jewish and non-Jewish white undergraduates at Harvard is approximately equal, but five times as many of the latter appear to be ranked in the top 10% of their class academically. Once again, these estimates of academic performance at Harvard strongly support the consistent hypothesis that over the last couple of decades, Jewish students have been admitted to Harvard out of all reasonable proportions to their academic performance or intellectual potential. This historical pattern also helps to explain the confusion exhibited by a researcher such as Karabel. When he was named to Phi Beta Kappa as a member of the Harvard Class of 1972, probably 40% or more of his fellow PBK inductees were also Jewish, while the same was true for half of the students who had received that distinction in their Junior year; both these figures were twice or more the relative performance of his non-Jewish white classmates. He earned his Harvard Ph.D. in sociology during the mid-1970s, a period which probably represented the absolute peak of Jewish academic performance on campus. And Individuals have a natural tendency to assume that the world of their formative years remains forever unchanged.

Appendix H: Relative Enrollment Figures at Ivy League and Other Universities

The estimated size of America’s college-age populations for racial and ethnic groups are provided in Appendix B, the racial and ethnic enrollment figures for various universities are provided in Appendices C and D, and the high-ability (top 0.5%) percentages of the college-age population are estimated in Appendix E based on the NMS semifinalist lists. By combining these figures, we may produce estimates of the relative enrollment ratios for different racial and ethnic groups, both with respect to the size of the total college-age populations and the high ability college-age populations.

Enrollment Ratios 2007-11, Relative to Age 18-21 National Population

University

N/J White

Asian

Jewish

Hispanic

Black

Harvard

32%

348%

1,386%

42%

49%

Yale

35%

301%

1,376%

48%

50%

Princeton

64%

336%

701%

42%

52%

Brown

38%

317%

1,295%

49%

41%

Columbia

26%

346%

1,327%

64%

58%

Cornell

42%

347%

1,218%

38%

36%

Dartmouth

73%

298%

584%

41%

51%

Penn

29%

373%

1,421%

34%

48%

All Ivies

40%

340%

1,214%

43%

46%

MIT

48%

527%

499%

72%

50%

Stanford

49%

451%

531%

75%

57%

Caltech

59%

831%

297%

35%

6%

Berkeley

36%

851%

531%

64%

21%

UCLA

42%

784%

478%

85%

23%

Enrollment Ratios 2007-11, Relative to High Ability Age 18-21 National Population

University

N/J White

Asian

Jewish

NJW+Asian

Harvard

28%

63%

435%

51%

Yale

30%

55%

432%

49%

Princeton

55%

61%

220%

62%

Brown

33%

57%

407%

53%

Columbia

22%

63%

417%

44%

Cornell

36%

63%

382%

59%

Dartmouth

63%

54%

183%

67%

Penn

25%

68%

446%

51%

All Ivies

35%

62%

381%

54%

MIT

41%

96%

157%

63%

Stanford

42%

82%

167%

58%

Caltech

50%

151%

93%

80%

Berkeley

31%

154%

167%

73%

UCLA

36%

142%

150%

70%

California University Enrollment Ratios 2007-11, Relative to High Ability Age 18-21 California Population

University

N/J White

Asian

Jewish

NJW+Asian

California Students

Stanford

76%

37%

222%

57%

38%

Caltech

90%

68%

124%

78%

31%

Berkeley

56%

69%

222%

71%

73%

UCLA

65%

64%

200%

69%

87%

Note that the four elite California universities of Stanford, Caltech, Berkeley, and UCLA draw very substantial fractions of their students from within the state. Therefore, the underlying population of high ability students against which their enrollment parity ratios should be calculated would be intermediate between the national and the California totals, and this is exactly what we find. For example, at Caltech, Berkeley, and UCLA, Asians are enrolled at roughly 142-154% of parity with respect to their national population of high ability college-age students, but just 64-69% of parity with respect to the California totals. Similarly, the non-Jewish white enrollments are very low relative to the national totals, but roughly similar to the Asian ratios with regard to the California figures.